NYPL RESEARCH LIBRARIES 3 3433 08254063 8 Vol. XVI JANUARY, 1905 No. 1 tttle Co Homes of threat 6 f By ELBERT HUBBJtRD COPERNICUS Single Copies 25 cents By the Year, $3. 00 A Missionary Move F your subscription reaches us within two weeks after you receive this offer, we will present you GRATIS a silk- lined leather-bound book, the regular price of which is Two Dollars & & & This is the offer: Remit us Two Dollars and we will send you "The Philistine" Magazine for one year, " Little Journeys " for 1905, beginning with the January number, also one $2.00 Roy croft Book — all for $2.00, if you send your subscription at once. LITTLE JOURNEYS BY ELBERT HUBBARD, FOR 1905 WILL BE TO THE HOMES OF GREAT SCIEN- TISTS, AND THE SUBJECTS ARE AS FOLLOWS: Copernicus Ernst Haeckel Galileo Carl von Linnaeus Sir Isaac Newton Thomas H. Huxley Humboldt John Tyndall Sir Wm. H. Herschel Alfred Russel Wallace Charles R. Darwin John Fiske % Address THE ROYCROFTERS at their Shop, which is at East Aurora, Erie County, New York Entered at the postoffice at East Aurora, New York, for transmission as second-class mail matter. Copyright, 1905, by Elbert Hubbard Copern/cu TJTE NEW YO: PUBLIC LIBRARY APTOR, LENOX TILDEN FOUNDATION Jr, vfl^ LITTLE JOURNEYS TO HOMES OF G R E A T _ SCIENTISTS Q Copernicus WRITTEN BY ELBERT HUBBARD AND DONE INTO BOOK FORM BY - 1 ^^— THE ROYCROFTERSAT ^ly/^Q\ THEIR SHOP, WHICH /^ Xf/VV~±*j^J IS IN EAST AURORA, NEW YORK, A.D. MCMV THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY 519089 A ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS 1931 L COPERNICUS know the mighty works of God ; to comprehend His wisdom and majesty and power; to appreciate, in degree, the wonder- ful working of His Laws, surely all this must be a pleasing and acceptable mode of worship to the Most High, to whom ignorance cannot be more grateful than knowledge. COPERNICUS. COPERNICUS HEN a prominent member of Congress, of slightly convivial turn, went to sleep on the floor of the House of Represen- tatives, and suddenly awakening, con- vulsed the assemblage by loudly de- manding, "Where am I at?" he pro- pounded an inquiry that is indisputably a classic. With the very first glimmering of intel- ligence, and as far back as history goes, man has always asked that question, also three others : Where am I ? Who am I ? What am I here for ? Where am I going ? A question implies a reply, and so, co- eval with the questioner, we find a class of Volunteers springing into being, who have taken upon themselves the busi- ness of answering the interrogations. And as partial payment for answering these questions, the man who answered has exacted a living from the man who asked, also titles, honors, gauds, jewels and obsequies. Further than this, the Volunteer who answered has declared himself exempt from all useful labor. Q Walt Whitman has said: LITTLE JOURNEYS I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd. I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God. Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of own- ing things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. But we should note this : Whitman merely wanted to live with animals, he did not desire to become one. He was n't willing to forfeit knowledge ; and a part of that knowledge was that man has some things yet to learn from the patient brute. Much of man's misery has come from his persistent questioning. The book of Genesis is certainly right when it tells us that man's troubles came from a desire to know. The fruit of the tree of knowledge is bitter, and man's di- gestive apparatus has been ill-conditioned to digest it. But still we are grateful, and good men never forget that it was woman who gave the fruit to man — men learn nothing alone. In the Garden of Eden, with every- thing supplied, man was an animal, but when he was turned out and had to work, strive, struggle and suffer, he began to grow. The Volunteers of the Far East have told us that man's deliverance from the evils of life must come through killing desire ; we will reach Nirvana — rest — through 2 nothingness. But within a decade it has been borne LITTLE in upon a vast number of the thinking men of the world JOURNEYS that deliverance from discontent and sorrow was to be had not through ceasing to ask questions, but by ask- ing one question more. The question is this, " What can I do?" When man went to work, action removed the doubt that theory could not solve. The rushing winds purify the air ; only running water is pure; and the holy man, if there be such, is the one who loses himself in persistent, useful effort. By work- ing for all, we secure the best results for self, and when we truly work for self, we work for all. In that thoughtful essay by Brooks Adams, " The Law of Civilization and Decay," the author says : " Thought is one of the manifestations of human energy, and among the earlier and simpler phases of thought, two stand conspicuous — Fear and Greed. Fear, which, by stimulating the imagination, creates a belief in an in- visible world, and ultimately develops a priesthood." <£The priestly class evolves naturally into being every- where as man awakens and asks questions. Only the •unknown is terrible, says Victor Hugo. We can cope •with the known, and at the worst we can overcome the unknown by accepting it. Verestchagin, the great painter who knew the psychology of war as few have known, and went down to his death gloriously, as he should, on a sinking battle-ship, once said: " In mod- ern warfare, when man does not see his enemy, the poetry of the battle is gone, and man is rendered by 3 LITTLE the Unknown into a quaking co-ward." Q But envel- JOURNEYS oped in the fog of ignorance every phenomenon of na- ture causes man to quake and tremble — he wants to know ! Fear prompts him to ask, and Greed — greed for power, place and pelf — answers. To succeed beyond the average, is to realize a -weak- ness in humanity and then bank on it. The priest -who pacifies is as natural as the fear he seeks to assuage — as natural as man himself. So first, man is in bondage to his fear, and this bond- age he exchanges for bondage to a priest. First, he fears the unknown; second, he fears the priest who has power -with the unknown. Soon the priest becomes a slave to the answers he has conjured forth. He grows to believe what he at first pretended to know. The punishment of every liar is that he eventually believes his lies. The mind of man becomes tinted and subdued to what he works in, like the dyer's hand. So we have the formula — Man in bondage to fear. Man in bondage to a priest. , The priest in bondage to a creed. Then the priest and his institution become an integral part and parcel of the state, mixed in all of its affairs. The success of the state seems to lie in holding belief intact and stilling all further questions of the people, transferring all doubts to this Volunteer Class that answers for a consideration. Naturally, the man who does not accept the answers is regarded as the enemy of the state — that is, the 4 enemy of mankind. Q To keep this questioner down has been the problem of every religion. And the prob- lem of progress has been to smuggle the newly-dis- covered truth past Cerberus, the priest, by preparing a sop that was to him palatable. From every branch of Science the priest has been routed, save in Sociology alone. Here he has stubbornly made his last stand, and is saving himself alive by slowly accepting the situation and transforming him- self into the Promoter of a Social Club. LITTLE JOURNEYS 'HE attempt to ascertain the truths of phys- ical science outside of theology, in the early ages was very seldom ventured. When men wanted to know anything about anything, they asked the priest. 1 &3^D^ZZJ> Q Questions that the priest could not an- swer he declared were forbidden of man to know ; and when men attempted to find out for themselves they were looked upon as heretics. The early Church regarded the earth as a flat surface with four corners. And in proof of their position they quoted St. Paul, who wanted the gospel carried to the ends of the earth. In fact, the universe was a house. The upper story was heaven, the lower story was the earth and the cellar was hell. God, the angels and the "saved ' lived in heaven, man lived on earth, and the devils and the damned had hell to themselves. "And there shall be no night there," and this was 5 LITTLE JOURNEYS proven by the stars which -were regarded as peep- holes through which mortals could catch glimpses of the wondrous light of heaven beyond. Hell was below, as was clearly shown by volcanoes, when the fierce fires occasionally forced themselves up through. Dark- ness to children is always terrible, and the night is regarded by them as the time of evil. Later, churchmen came to believe that the stars were jewels hung in the sky every night by angels whose business it was to look after them. The word "firmament" means a solid dome or roof. This firmament, the sky, was supposed to be the floor of heaven. The firmament had four corners and rested on the mountains, as the eye could plainly see. When God's car was rolled across the floor we heard thun- der, and His movements were always accompanied by lightnings, winds, black clouds and rain — all this so He could not be too plainly seen. Heaven was only a little way off — a few miles at the most. So there were attempts made at times by bad men to reach it. The Greeks had a story about the Aloidae who piled mountain upon mountain ; the Bi- ble story of the Tower of Babel is the same, where the masons called, " More mort," and those below sent up bricks. There is also an ancient Mexican legend of giants who built the Pyramid of Cholula, and they would have been successful in their attempts if fire had not been thrown down upon them from heaven. In all "Holy Writ" we find accounts of " ascensions," "translations," "annunciations," and mortals caught 6 up into clouds. Many people had actually seen angels LITTLE ascending and descending. JOURNEYS *' Messengers from on high ' and God's secretaries were constantly coming down on delicate errands. Everything that man did was noted and written down. We were watched all the time by unseen beings. The Bible tells of how the earth was eventually to be des- troyed, and then there would only be heaven and hell. God, His Son and the angels were going to come down, and for ages men watched the heavens to see them appear. All sensitive children, born of orthodox Chris- tian parents, who heard the Bible read aloud, looked fearfully into the sky for "signs and wonders." The Bible tells in several places of devils breaking out of hell and roaming over the earth. Dante fully believed in this three-story-house idea, and pictures with awful exactness the details, which he gained from the preach- ing of the priests. Dante was never honored by having his books placed on the " Index." On the contrary he got his vogue largely through the recommendation of the priests. To them he was a true scientist for he cor- roborated their statements. The Christian Fathers ridiculed the idea of the earth being round, because, if this were so, how could the people on the other side see the Son of Man when He came in the sky? Besides that, if the earth were round and turned on its axis, we should all fall off into space jfi jfc The idea that there was an ocean above the earth, in the heavens, was brought forward to show the 7 LITTLE JOURNEYS goodness and wisdom of God. Without this there would be no rain and hence no vegetation, and man would soon perish. In Genesis we read that God said, "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.' ' And in Psalms, " Praise Him, ye heavens of heavens and ye waters that be above the heavens." Then we hear, " The windows of heaven were opened." So this thought of the waters above the earth was fully proved, accepted and fixed, and to pray for rain was quite a natural thing. The English Prayer Book contained such prayers up to within a very few years ago, and in 1883 the Governor of Kansas set apart a day upon which the people were to pray that God would open the windows of heaven and send them rain. They also prayed to be delivered from grasshoppers. Just as in Queen Elizabeth's time the Prayer Book had this, " From the Turk and the Comet, good Lord deliver us." In the Sixth Century, Cosmos, one of the Saints, wrote a full and complete explanation of the phenomena of the heavens. To account for the movement of the sun, he said God had His angels push it across the firma- ment and put it behind a mountain each night, and the next morning it was brought out on the other side. He met every objection by citations from Genesis, Job, Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes and the New Testament, and wound up with an anathema upon any or all who doubted or questioned in this matter of astronomy. The whole Christian idea of the Universe was simple, plain and plausible. The child-mind could easily accept 8 it, and when backed up by the Holy Book, written by God's dictation, word for word, infallible and absolutely true in every part, one does not wonder that progress was practically blocked for fourteen hundred years, but the real miracle is that it was not blocked forever. LITTLE JOURNEYS 'HOUSANDS of years before Christ, the Chinese had mapped the heavens and knew the movements of the planets so well that they correctly prophesied the positions of the constellations years in ad- vance. Twenty-five hundred years before our Christian era a Chinese Governor put to death the astronomers Hi and Ho because they had failed to fore- tell an eclipse, quite according to the excellent Celestial plan of killing the doctor when his patient dies. Sir Wil- liam Hamilton points out the fact that the Chinese, five thousand years ago, knew astronomy nearly as well as we do today, and that Christian astrology grew out of Chinese astronomy, in an effort to foretell the fortunes of men. Fear wants to know the future, and astrology and priesthood are synonymous terms, since the busi- ness of the priest has always been to prophesy what was going to happen, a profession he has not even yet discarded. Their prophecies are at present innocuous and lightly heeded. They preach that perfect faith will move a mountain, but energetic railroad builders of today find it quicker and cheaper to tunnel. 9 LITTLE £^^&^^3 CERTAIN type of man accepts a certain JOURNEYS ®)H) theory. The Christian view of creation was prac- tically the conception of the Greeks before Thales. This wise man in the Sixth Cen- tury before Christ, taught that the earth was round, and that certain stars were also worlds. He showed that the earth was round and proved it by the disappearance of the ship as it sailed away. He located the earth, moon and sun so perfectly that he prophesied an eclipse, and when it took place it so terrified the Medes and Lydians, who were in battle against each other, that they threw down their arms and made peace. Thales explained that Atlas carried the world on his shoulder, but he did n't explain what Atlas stood upon. Pythagoras, one of the pupils of Thales, following the idea still further, showed that the moon derived its light from the sun, that the earth was a globe and turned daily on its axis. He held that the sun was the cen- ter of the universe and that the planets revolved around it. Anaxagoras followed a few years after Pythagoras, and became convinced that the sun was merely a ball of fire and therefore should not be worshiped ; that it follows a natural law, that nothing happens by chance and that to pray for rain is absurd. For his sterling honesty in expressing what he thought was truth, the priests of Athens had Anaxagoras and his family exiled to perpetual banishment from Athens and all of his books were burned. 10 Plato touched on astronomy, for he touches on every- LITTLE thing, and fully believed that the earth was round. JOURNEYS His pupil, Aristotle, taught all that Anaxagoras taught, and if he had not also been exiled, but had been free to study, investigate and express himself, he would have come very close to the truth. Hipparchus, a hundred years after Aristotle, calculated the length of the year to within six minutes, discovered the precession of the equinoxes and counted all the stars he could see, making a map of them. Seventy years after Christ, Ptolemy, a Graeco-Egyp- tian, but not of the royal line of Ptolemys, published his great book, " The Almagest." For fourteen cen- turies it was the text-book for the best astronomers. It taught that the earth was the center of the universe, and that the sun and the planets revolve around it. There were many absurdities, however, that had to be explained, and the priests practically rejected the whole book as "pagan" and taught an astronomy of their own, founded on the Bible. What they wanted was an explanation that would be accepted by the common people. This astronomy was not designed to be scientific, exact, or truthful — all they asked was, "Is it plausible?" Expediency, to theology, has al- ways been much more important than truth. "Besides," said St. Basil, " what boots it concerning all this conjecture about the stars, since the earth is soon to come to an end, as shown by our Holy Scrip- tures, and man's business is to prepare his soul for eternity ? ' 11 LITTLE This was the general attitude of the Church — exact JOURNEYS truth was a matter of indifference. And if science tended to unseat men's faith in the Bible, and in God's holy religion, then so much worse for the science. It will thus plainly be seen why the Church felt compelled to fight science — the very life of the Church was at stake. The Church was the vital thing — not truth. If truth could be taught without unseating faith, why, all right, but anything that made men doubt must be rooted out at any cost. And that is why priests have opposed Science, not that they hate Science less, but that they love the Church more. From the time of Ptolemy to that of Copernicus — fourteen hundred years — theology practically dictated the learning of the world. And to Copernicus must be given the credit of having awakened the science of astronomy from her long sleep. fHE little land that we know as Poland has produced some of the finest and most acute intellects the world has ever known. Tragic and blood-stained is her history, and this tragedy, perhaps, has been a prime factor in the evolution of her men of worth. Poland has been stamped upon and pushed apart ; and a persecuted people always produce a pride of race that has its outcrop in occasional genius. Recently we have heard of Paderewski playing be- , fore the Czar, and His Majesty, in a speech meant to 12 be complimentary, congratulated the company that so LITTLE great a genius 'was a citizen of Russia. JOURNEYS "Your Majesty, I am not a Russian — I am a Pole!' -was the proud reply. The Czar answered, with a smile, "There is no such country as Poland — now there is only Russia ! ' And Paderewski replied, "Pardon my hasty remark — you speak but truth." And then he played Chopin's Funeral March, a dirge not only to the great men of Poland gone, but to Poland herself. Nicholas Copernicus was born of Polish parents in the quaint old town of Thorn, February 19, 1473. The fam- ily name was Koppernig, but Nicholas Latinized it "when he became of age, and seemingly separated from his immediate kinsmen forever. His father was a merchant, fairly prosperous, and ambitious only in the line of money-making. In the Koppernigs ran a goodly strain of Jewish blood, but a ge'neration before, pressure and expediency seemed to combine, so that the family, as we first find them, were Christians. No soil can grow genius, no seed can produce it — it springs into being in spite of all laws and rules and regulations. " No hovel is safe from it," says Whistler. The portraits of Copernicus reveal a man of most marked personality — proud, handsome, self-contained, intellectual. The head is massive, eyes full, luminous, wide apart, nose large and bold, chin strong, the • mouth alone revealing a trace of the feminine — as though the man were the child of his mother. This 13 LITTLE JOURNEYS mother had a brother who was a bishop, and the mother's ambition for her boy was that he should eventually walk in the footsteps of this illustrious brother who was known for a hundred miles as a preacher of marked ability. So we hear of the young man being sent to the Uni- versity of Cracow, as preliminary to a great career. The father opposed the idea of taking the son out of the practical world of business, and this evidently led to the breach ^that caused young Nicholas to discard the family name. That Nicholas did not fully enter into his mother's plans is shown that while at Cracow he devoted him- self mostly to medicine. He was so proficient in this that he secured a physician's degree; and having been given leave to practice he revealed his humanity by declining to do so, turning to mathematics with a fine frenzy. This disposition to drop on a thing — turn loose on it — concentrate, and reduce it to chaos, is the true dis- tinguishing mark of genius. The difference in men does not lie in the size of their heads, nor the perfection of their bodies, but in this one sublime ability of con- centration — to throw the weight with the blow, live an eternity in an hour — "This one thing I do ! ' Copernicus at twenty-one was teaching mathematics at Cracow, and by his extraordinary ability in this di- rection had attracted the attention of various learned men. In fact the authorities at the college had grown a bit boastful of their star student, and when visiting 14 dignitaries arrived, young Copernicus was given chalk LITTLE and blackboard and put through his paces. Problems JOURNEYS involving a dozen figures and many fractions were worked out by him with a directness and precision that made him the wonder of that particular part of the world. Copernicus invented the science of trigonometry, and we see that early in his twenties he was well on the heels of it, for he had arranged a quadrant to measure V the "height of standing trees, steeples, buildings or mountains. For rest and recreation he painted pictures. Q A college professor from Bologna traveling through Cracow, met Copernicus, and greatly impressed with his powers, invited him to return -with him to Bologna and there give a course of lectures on mathematics. Q Copernicus accepted, and at Bologna met the astronomer, Novarra. Copernicus was then twenty- three years of age, but in intellect he was a man. He had vowed a year before that he would indulge in no trivial conversation about either persons or things, only great and noble themes should interest him or occupy his attention. With ignorant or commonplace people he held no converse. He had remarkable beauty of person and great dignity, and his presence at Bo- logna won for him immediate respect. Men accept other men at the estimate they place upon themselves. In listening to lectures by Novarra, he perceived at once how mathematics could be made valuable in cal- culating the movements of the stars. 15 LITTLE Novarra taught the Ptolemaic theory of astronomy JOURNEYS for the esoteric few. The Church is made up of men, and while priests for the most part are quite content to believe what the Church teaches, yet it has ever been recognized that there was one doctrine for the Few, and another for the Many; — the esoteric and the exoteric. The esoteric is an edged tool, and only a very few are fit to handle it. The charge of heresy is only for those who are so foolish as to give out these edged tools to the people. You may talk about anything you want, provided you do not do it, and you may do any- thing you want, provided you do not talk about it. ' The proposition that the earth was flat, had four cor- ners, and the stars were jewels hung in the sky as " signs," and were moved about by angels, was all right for the many, but now and then there were priests who were not content with these child-stories — they wanted truth — and these usually accepted the theories of Ptolemy. Novarra believed that the earth was a globe ; that this globe was the center of the universe, and that around the earth the sun, moon and certain stars revolved. The " fixed ' stars he still regarded as being hung against the firmament, and that this firmament was turned in some mysterious way, en masse. Copernicus listened silently, but his heart beat fast. He had found something upon which he could exer- cise his mathematics. He and Novarra sat up all night in the belfry of the cathedral and watched the stars. They saw that they moved steadily, surely and with- 16 out caprice. It was all natural, and could be reduced, LITTLE Copernicus thought, to a mathematical system. JOURNEYS Astronomy and astrology were not then divorced. It was astrology that gave us astronomy. The angel that watched over a star looked after all persons who were born under that star's influence, or else ap- pointed some other angel for the purpose. Every per- son had a guardian angel to protect him from the evil spirits that occasionally broke out of hell and came up to'earth to tempt men. / Mathematics knows nothing of angels — it only knows what it can prove. Copernicus believed that if certain f * stars moved, they moved by some unalterable law of their own. In riding on a boat he observed that the shores seemed to be moving past, and he concluded that a part, at least, of the seeming movements of the planets might possibly be caused by the moving of the earth & <£ In talking with astrologers he perceived that very seldom did they know anything of mathematics. And this ignorance on their part caused him to doubt them entirely. His faith was in mathematics — the thing that could be proved, and he came to the con- clusion that astronomy and mathematics were one thing, and astrology and child-stories another. He remained at Bologna long enough to turn the astrologers out of the society of astronomers. Novarra's lectures on astronomy were given in Latin, and in truth all learning was locked up in this tongue. But astrology and the theological fairy tales of the 17 LITTLE people floated free. They were a part of the vagrant JOURNEYS hagiology of the roadside preachers, who with lurid imaginations said the things they thought -would help carry conviction home and make "believers." •» From Bologna Copernicus moved on to Padua, where N he remained two years, teaching and giving lectures. Here he devoted considerable time to chemistry, and on leaving he was honored by being given a degree by the University. Next we find him at Rome filling a professor's chair of mathematics and also giving lec- tures on chemistry. His lectures were not for the pop- ulace— they were for the learned few. But they at- tracted the attention of the best, and were commented upon and quoted by various other teachers, preachers and lecturers. A daring thinker who expresses himself without reservation, states the things that various others know and would like to state if they dared. It is often very convenient when you want a thing said to enclose the matter in quotation marks. It relieves one from the responsibility of standing sponsor for it, if the hypothesis does not prove popular. Copernicus was nineteen years old when Columbus discovered America, but it seems he did not hear of Columbus until he reached Bologna in 1495. At Rome he made various references to Columbus in his lec- tures, dwelt upon the truth that the earth was a globe ; mentioned the obvious fact that in sailing westward Columbus did not sail his ship over the edge of the earth into hell, as had been prophesied he would. He also explained that the red sky at sunset was not 18 caused by the reflections from hell, nor was the sun LITTLE moved behind a mountain by giant angels at night. JOURNEYS Copernicus was a Catholic, as all teachers were, but he had been deceived by the esoteVic and the exoteric, apd had really thought that the priests and so-called educated men actually desired, for themselves, to know the truth. At Padua he had learned to read Greek, and had be- come more or less familiar with Pythagoras, Hip- pafchus, Plato and Aristotle. He quoted these authors and, showed how in some ways they were beyond the present. This was all done in the exuberance of youth, with never a doubt as to the value and the beauty of the Church. But he was thinking more of truth than of the Church, and when a cardinal from the Vatican came to him, and in all kindness cautioned him, and in love explained it was all right for a man to believe what he •wished, but to teach others the things that were not authorized, was a mistake. Copernicus was abashed, depressed. He saw then that Jiis lectures had really been for himself — he was en- deavoring to make things plain to Copernicus, and the •welfare of tne Church had been forgotten. He ceased lecturing for a time, but private pupils came to him and among them were astrologers in disguise, and these went away and told broadcast that Coper- nicus was teaching that the movements of the stars were not caused by angels, and that " God -was being dethroned by a tape measure and a yardstick." Alchemy had a strong hold upon the popular mind,_ 19 LITTLE and these alchemists and astrologers were fortune- JOURNEYS tellers and derived a goodly income from the people. They had their stands in front of all the churches and turned in a goodly tithe "for the benefit of the poor." C[ When the astrologers attacked Copernicus he tried to explain that the heavens were under the reign of nat- ural law, and that so far as he knew there was no di- rect relationship between the stars and the men upon earth. The answer was, "You yourself foretell the eclipse and you assume to know when a star will be in a certain place a hundred years in advance, now if you can prophesy about stars why can't we foretell a man's future ? ' Copernicus proudly declined to answer such ignorance, but went on to say alchemy was a violence to chem- istry as much as astrology was to astronomy. In chemistry there were exact results that could be com- puted by mathematics and foretold — it was likewise so in astronomy. Copernicus was philosopher enough to perceive that astrology led to astronomy, and al- chemy led to chemistry, but he said all he wished to do was to eliminate error and find the truth, and when we have ascertained the laws of God in reference to these things we should discard the use of black cats, goggles, peaked hats, red fire and incantations — these things were sacrilege. And the enemy declared that Copernicus was guilty of heresy in saying they were guilty of sacrilege. Moreover, black cats were not as bad as blackboards. The Pope certainly had no idea of treating Copernicus 20 harshly — in fact, he greatly admired him, but [peace LITTLE was the thing desired. Copernicus was creating a JOURNEYS schism, and there was danger that the revenues would be affected. The Pope sent for Copernicus, received him with honors, blessed him, and suggested that he return at once to his native town of Thorn and there await good news that 'would come to him soon. The young man was overwhelmed -with gratitude — he was in difficulties. Certain priests had publicly de- nounced him ; others had urged him on to unseemli- ness in debate; he had stated things he could not prove, even though he knew they were true — but the Pope was his friend ! He loved the Church — he felt how necessary it was to the people, and at the last, the desire of his heart was to bless and benefit the world. He fell on his knees and attempted to kiss the Pope's foot, but instead the Holy Father offered him his hand, smiled on him, stroked his head, and an attendant was ordered to place about his neck a chain of gold with a crucifix that would pro- tect him from all harm. A purse was placed in his hand, and he -was sent upon .his way relieved, happy — wondering, wondering ! 21 LITTLE ^^SJ^^HEN Copernicus reached his native town JOURNEYS j&tfJEo($& of Thorn the local clergy turned out to greet him in a procession, and a solemn service of thanksgiving was held for his safe return. Copernicus was only twenty-seven years of age, and what he had done was not quite clear to his uncle, the bishop, and the other dignitaries, but word had come from the secretary of the Pope that he should be honored, and it was all so done, in faith, love and en- thusiasm Jt> <£ Very shortly after this, Copernicus was made Canon of the Cathedral at Frauenburg. The town of Frauen- burg has now only about twenty-five hundred people, and it certainly was no larger then. The place is slow, sleepy, and quite off the beaten track of travel. When Canon Copernicus preached now it was to a dear, stupid lot of old market-women, and overworked men and mischievous children. Oratory is a collaboration — let him wax eloquent about the precession of the equinoxes, and prate of Plato and Pythagoras if he wished — no one could understand him ! Rome is wise — the crystallized experience of centuries is hers. Responsibility tames a man — marriage, politi- cal office, churchly preferment — read history and note how these things have dulled the bright blade of revo- lution and turned the radical into a Presbyterian pro- fessor at Princeton, a staunch upholder of the Estab- lished Order ! Plato said that Solar Energy found one of its forms of 22 expression in man. Some men are much more highly LITTLE charged with it than others ; your genius is a man who JOURNEYS does things. Do not think to dam up the red current of his life — he may die. Copernicus set to work practicing medicine, and gave his services gratis to the poor, who came from many miles to consult him. He went from house to house and ordered his people to clean up their back yards, to ventilate their houses — to bathe and be decent and orderly. He devised a system of sewerage, and utilized the belfry of his church as a water-tower, to get a water pressure from the little stream that ran near the town. The remains of this invention are to be seen there in the church steeple even unto this day. King Sigismund of Poland had heard of the attacks made by Copernicus upon the alchemists, and sent for him that he might profit by his advice, for it seems that the King, too, had been having experience with alchemists. In their seeking after a way to make gold out of the baser metals they had actually succeeded — yes ! At least they said so, and had made the King be- lieve it. They had shown the King how he could cheapen his coinage one-half, and "it was just as good!' The King could not tell the difference when the coins 'were new, but alas ! when they went beyond the borders of Po- land they could only be passed at half their face value ; travelers refused to accept them; and even the mer- chants at home were getting afraid. Copernicus analyzed some of this money made for the 23 LITTLE King by his alchemist friends and found a large alloy JOURNEYS of tin, copper and zinc. He explained to the King that by mixing the metals they did not change their nature nor value. Gold was gold, and copper was copper — God had made these things and hid them in the earth and men might deceive some men — a part of the time — but there was always a retribution. Debase your cur- rency, and soon it will cease to pass current. No law can long uphold a factitious value. The King urged Copernicus to write a book on the sub- ject of coinage. The permission of the Pope was se- cured, and the book written. The work is valuable yet, and reveals a deep insight into the heart of things. The man knew political economy, and foretold that a peo- ple who debased their currency debased themselves. "Money is character," he said, "and if you pretend it is one thing, and it turns out to be another, you lose your reputation and your own self-respect. No govern- ment can afford to deceive the governed. If the people lose confidence in their rulers, a new government will spring into being, built upon the ruins of the old. Gov- ernment and commerce are built on confidence." Then he went on to show that German gold was val- uable everywhere, because it was pure, but Polish gold and Russian gold were below par because the money had been tampered with, and as no secrets could be kept long, the result was, the matter exactly equalized it- self, save that Russians and Polanders had in a degree lost their characters through belief in miracles. Copernicus advocated a universal coinage, to be 24 adopted by all civilized nations, and the amount of al- loy should be known and plainly stated, and this alloy should simply be the seigniorage, or what was taken out to cover the cost of mintage. King Sigismund circulated this book by Copernicus among all the courts of Europe, and it need not be stated that the suggestions made by Copernicus have been adopted by all civilized nations. LITTLE JOURNEYS JHE humdrum duties of a country clergy- man did not still the longing of Coperni- cus to know and understand the truth. He visited the sick, closed the eyes of the dying, kept his parish register, but his heart was in mathematics, and so there is shown at Thorn an old church register kept by Co- pernicus, where, in the back, are great rows of figures put down by the Master as he worked at some astro- nomical problem. In the upper floor of the barn, back of the old dilapidated farmhouse where he lived for forty years, he cut holes in the roof, and also apertures in the sides of the building through which he watched the movements of the stars. He lived in practical isolation and exile, for the Church had forbidden him to speak in public excepting upon themes that the Holy Fathers in their wisdom had authorized. None were to invite him to speak, read his writings or hold converse with him, excepting on strictly church matters. Copernicus knew the situation — he was a watched 25 LITTLE man. For him there was no preferment — he knew too JOURNEYS much! As long as he kept near home and did his priestly work all was 'well, but a trace of ambition or heresy, and he would be dealt with. The Universities and all prominent churchmen were secretly ordered to leave Copernicus and his vagaries severely alone. Q But the stars were his companions — they came out for him nightly and moved in majesty across the sky. "They do me great honor," he said. " I am forbidden to converse with great men, but God has ordered for me a procession." When the whole town slept Co- pernicus -watched the heavens, and made minute rec- ords of his observations. He had brought with him from Rome copies made by himself from the works of the prominent Greek astronomers, and the "Almagest" of Ptolemy he knew by heart. He digested all that had been written on the subject of astronomy ; slowly and patiently he tested every hypothesis with his rude and improvised instruments. " Surely God will not damn me for wanting to know the truth about His glorious works," he used to say. Q Emerson once wrote this, "If the stars came out but once in a thousand years, how men -would adore ! ' But before he had written this, Copernicus had said, "To look up at the sky, and behold the wondrous works of God, must make a man bow his head and heart in silence. I have thought, and studied, and worked for years, and I know so little — all I can do is to adore when I behold this unfailing regularity, this miraculous balance and perfect adaptation. The majesty 26 of it all humbles me into the dust." ctetttteits • c _ ^^^ By ELBERT H U B E Jt R D GALILEO Single Copies 25 cents By the Year, $3~. 00 •I A Missionary Move F your subscription reaches us within two weeks after you receive this offer, we will present you GRATIS a silk- lined leather-bound book, the regular price of which is Two Dollars & ^ «^ This is the offer: Remit us Two Dollars and we will send you -"The Philistine" Magazine for one year, " Little Journeys " for 1905, beginning with the January number, also one $2.00 Roy croft Book — all for $2.00, if you send your subscription at once. LITTLE JOURNEYS BY ELBERT HUBBARD, FOR 1905 WILL BE TO THE HOMES OF GREAT SCIEN- TISTS, AND THE SUBJECTS ARE AS FOLLOWS: Copernicus Galileo Sir Isaac Newton Humboldt Sir Wm. H. Herschel Charles R. Darwin Ernst Haeckel Carl von Linnaeus Thomas H. Huxley John Tyndall Alfred Russel Wallace John Fiske Address THE ROYCROFTERS at their Shop, which is at East Aurora, Erie County, New York Entered at the postoffice at East Aurora, New York, for transmission as second-class mail matter. Copyright, 1905, by Elbert Hubbard msi&mffi&M xud^giMnNiii^iS''* ^M jfr Bribery, persuasion, threat and torture were tried in turn, but all in vain, for Bruno would not swerve. Unlike Savonarola his quivering flesh could not wring from his heart an apology. He scorned the rack and thumbscrew, declaring they could not reach his soul. He knew that death would be the end — he prayed for it, and even thought to hasten it by an aggravating manner and harshness of speech toward his captors, seemingly quite unnecessary. For seven years he was in prison. He was burned alive on February 7, 1600, aged fifty-two. When bound to the stake he turned his face from the crucifix that was held before him, and sought to kiss the fagots. His ashes were thrown to the four winds. 'N the year 1564 Galileo Galilei was born, consequently he was thirty-six years old when Bruno was executed. He had known Bruno, attended many of his lectures, and had followed his career with interest ; and while he agreed with him as to the Coper- nican theory of the earth's revolution, he took excep- tions to Bruno's arbitrary way of presenting the mat- ter, and to his scathing criticisms of Theology. At this time Galileo could not see that the extravagant words 38 of Bruno were largely forced from him by the violence LITTLE of the opposition he had encountered. Galileo fully be- JOURNEYS lieved that Bruno had been put to death for treason to the Church, and not on account of his astronomical teachings & & These men had come up from totally different stations in life. Bruno was a man of the people — a self-made man — "who bore upon his person the marks of the ham- mer. Galileo was of noble blood, and traced an ances- try to a Gonfalonier of Florence. From early infancy he had enjoyed association with polite persons, and had sat on the knees of greatness. When eighteen he graduated from the University of Pisa ; and at that early age his family and friends were comparing him, not without reason, to a Genius who had come out of Tuscany some years before, Leonardo da Vinci jfc js> Parents either exaggerate the talents of their children or else belittle them. The woman who bore George Gordon called him "that lame brat; " but we call him "The Poet Byron." Benjamin Franklin ran away from home, and his family thought themselves disgraced by his printed utterances. The mother of George Wash- ington, on being told that her son had been made Com- mander in Chief, laughed knowingly, and said, "They don't know him as well as I do!' Voltaire's father posted his son as irresponsible, tied up a legacy so "the scapegrace could not waste it," invested good money in daily prayers to be said for the scapegrace's salvation, and then died of a broken heart, just as play- 39 LITTLE JOURNEYS actors do on the stage, only this man died sure enough. Alfred Tennyson at thirteen wrote a poem addressed to his grandfather ; the old gentleman gave him a guinea for it, and then wrote these words : " This is the first and last penny you will ever receive for wri- ting poetry." The father of Shelley misquoted Job, and said, "Oh, to be brought down to the grave in grief through the follies of an ungrateful child ! ' ' And La- bouchere says that one of the four brothers of Shake- speare used to explain that he was n't the play-actor who wrote " Hamlet " and " Othello " lest, mayhap, his name should be smirched. Galileo's mother had that beautiful dream which I be- lieve all good mothers have — that her son might be the Savior of the world. As he grew to manhood, her faith in him did not relax. Even in childhood Galileo showed great skill in in- vention. He made curious toys with cogs and wheels and eccentrics ; whittled out violins, and transformed simple reeds into lutes, upon which he played music of his own composition. In fact, so great was his skill in music that at twenty they wished to make him of- ficial organist and choir-master of the Cathedral. His personal taste, however, ran more to painting, and for some months he worked at his canvases with an ardor too great to last long. If ever a man was touched by the Spirit of the Renaissance, it was young Galileo. " Upon him has fallen the mantle of Michael Angelo," the Archbishop of Pisa said. He gave lectures on Art, and taught Painting by actual example. One of his 40 pupils, a great artist, Lodovico Cigoli, always main- LITTLE tained that it was to the inspiration and counsel of JOURNEYS Galileo that he owed his success. There are really only two things to see at Pisa; one is the Leaning Tower, from which Galileo with line and plummet made some of his most interesting experi- ments ; and the other is the Cathedral where the vis- itor beholds the great bronze lamp that is suspended from the vaulted ceiling. When he was twenty-one, sitting in the silence of this beautiful church (which the passing years have only made more beautiful), he noticed that there was a slight swinging motion to this lamp: it was never still. Galileo set to work timing and measuring these oscillations, and found that they were always done in exact measure and in perfect rhythm. This led, some years later, to the perfecting of an astronomical clock for measuring the movements of the stars. And from this we got the pendulum clock, where before we had depended on sun-dials. The endeavor of Galileo's parents had been to keep him ignorant of mathematics and practical life, that he might blossom forth as a saint who would sing and play and make pictures like those of Leonardo, and carve statues like Michael Angelo, only better. But parents plan, and fate disposes. In 1583, the famous mathematician Ostilio Ricci chanced to be in Pisa, on his way from Rome to Milan, and gave a lec- ture at the Court, on Geometry. Galileo was not in- terested in the theme, but he was in the speaker, and so he attended the lecture. 41 LITTLE JOURNEYS This action proved to be a pivotal point in his life. C(" Whether other people really teach us anything, is a question," says Stanley Hall, "but they do sometimes give us impulses, and make us find out for ourselves." QRicci made Galileo find out for himself. From Plato, he turned to Archimedes. Geometry became a passion, and a wise man has told us that we never accomplish anything, either good or bad, without passion. Passion means one hundred pounds of steam on the boiler, with love sitting on the safety-valve, when the blow- off is set for fifty. It surely is risky business, I will admit; accidents occasionally occur and explosions sometimes happen, but everything is risky, even life, since few get out of it alive. And so, to drop back to the original proposition, nothing great and sublime is ever done without passion. Galileo had had his mechanical whooping-cough, mu- sical mumps, artistic measles, and now the hectic flush of mathematics burned on his cheeks. He talked and dreamed mathematics. Euclid was in the saddle. QRicci became interested in the talented young scholar, and remained longer at Pisa than he had intended, that they might sit up all night and surprise the rising sun, discussing the beauties of dimensions and the wonders of dynamics. Together they went to Florence, where Ricci intro- duced his pupil as a pedagogic sample of the goods, just as Booker Washington usually takes with him on his travels a few ebony homo bricks as specimens from Tuskegee Jt> & 42 The beauty and grace of Galileo's speech and presence quite put the abstract Ricci in the shadow. The right man can make anything interesting, just as Dean Swift could write an entrancing essay with the broomstick as a central theme. The man's the thing, Hamlet to the contrary, notwithstanding. Galileo knew the Florentine heart and so he gave lec- tures on a Florentine — one Dante, who loved a girl named Beatrice. The young Pisan drew diagrams of Dante's Inferno — and surely it was nobody else's. He gave its size, height, weight, and told how to reach it. He gave lectures on the Hydrostatic Balance and the Centers of Gravity, and published them as serials. The Florentines crowned him with bay and proclaimed him ''The Modern Archimedes." -V. US A now put forth efforts to have her gifted son come home. There was always rivalry between Pisa and Florence. Pisa could not afford to supply Florence her men of genius, let her depend upon home pro- duction, or go without. Galileo became Professor of Mathematics in the Uni- versity of Pisa, a life position, or at least one he could hold during good behavior. One of the time-honored dictums of the day was that falling bodies fell with a velocity proportioned to their weight. The question was first thrashed out in the class-room ; and after Galileo had somewhat slyly got- 43 LITTLE JOURNEYS LITTLE ten all of these scientific -wiseacres to commit them- JOURNEYS selves, he invited them, with all their students, to the Leaning Tower. Then he proved by ocular demon- strations that they were positively wrong. It is very beautiful to teach Truth, but error should not be corrected with too much eclat. If the love of Truth, alone, was the guiding impulse of Galileo, he might have secretly explained his theory to one of the wiseacres, and this wiseacre could have casually de- monstrated it, so all the rest could have said, "That is what we always knew and taught." Instead of this, Galileo compelled the entire faculty to back water and dine on fricasseed crow. They got even by calling him "a scientifico bastardino," and at his next lecture, he was roundly hissed. Soon after he was bluntly informed that his office was to teach the young, and not undo the old. And that is the way the troubles of Galileo began. He might then have apologized, and slipped back into peace and obscurity, and later been tucked in by kind oblivion. But he had tasted blood, and the rabies of setting the scientific world straight, for its own good, was upon him. That he was wrong in correcting his elders, he would not for a moment admit ; and he was even guilty of say- ing, "Antiquity cannot sanctify that which is wrong in reason and false in principle." Soon after he committed another forepaugh by showing that a wonderful boat invented by Giovanni de Medici for fighting hostile ships, would not work, since there 44 were no men on board to guide it, and its automatic LITTLE steering apparatus would quite as likely run its nose JOURNEYS into land, as into the hull of the enemy. He also dec- orated his argument with a few subtle touches as to the beauty of fighting battles without going to war and risking life and limb. Men who are not kind to the faults of royalty can hope for small favor in a monarchy, even though the mon- archy be a republic. Galileo was cut off the Standard Oil payroll, and forced to apply to a teachers' agency, that he might find em- ployment. He did not wait long; the rival University of Padua tendered him a position on a silver platter; and the Paduans made much dole about how unfortunate it was that men could not teach Truth in Italy, save at Padua — alas ! The Governing Board of Padua made a great stroke in securing Galileo, and Pisa fell back on her Leaning Tower as her chief attraction. From a position of mediocrity, the University: of Padua gradually rose to one of world-wide celebrity. Galileo remained at Padua from 1592 to 1610, which years are famous not alone through the wonderful inventions of Galileo, but because in that same interval of tirrfe, at least thirty of Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays were written. Surely, God was smiling on the planet Earth! Q Galileo's salary was raised yearly, starting at two hundred florins, until it reached over one thousand florins, not to mention the numerous gifts from grate- ful pupils, old and young. Students came to Padua 45 LITTLE JOURNEYS from all over the world to hear Galileo's lectures. Starting with a common class-room, the audience in- creased so that a special auditorium was required that would seat two thousand persons. It was during this time that Galileo invented the proportional compasses, an instrument now everywhere in use, without the slightest change having been made in it. He also invented the thermometer; but greatest, best and most "wonderful of all, he produced an instrument through which he could view the stars, and see them much magnified. With this instrument, he saw heav- enly bodies that had never been seen before ; he be- held that Jupiter had satellites which moved in orbits, and that Venus revolved, showing different sides at different times, thus proving that which Copernicus declared was true, but which, for, lack of apparatus, he could not prove. Galileo Galilei was getting to be something more than a professor of mathematics — he was becoming a world- power. The lever of his mind was finding a fulcrum. 'HE year 1609 is forever fixed in history, through the fact that in that year Galileo invented the telescope. Every good thing is an evolution. " Specil- lum," or helps to read, had been made, and sold privately and mysteriously, as early as the year 1400. These first magnifying glasses were associated with magic, or wonder-working; the 46 words magnify and magic having a common source and LITTLE a similar meaning. Magicians wore big square glasses, JOURNEYS and by their aid, some of them claimed to see things at great distance ; and also to perceive things stolen, hidden, or lost. Occasionally, the magician would per- suade his customer to try on the glasses, and then even common men could see for themselves that there was something in the scheme — goodness me ! The use of spectacles were at first confined entirely to these wonder-workers — or men who magnified things for- ever. During the Fifteenth Century, public readers and the priests occasionally wore spectacles. To read was a miracle to most people, and a book was a mys- terious and sacred thing — or else a diabolical thing. The populace would watch the man put on his " specil- lum," and the idea was everywhere abroad that the magic glasses gave an ability to read ; and that anybody who was inspired by angels, or devils, who could get hold of spectacles, could at once read from a book. QWe hear of one magician, who, about the year 1500, made a box with a glass cover that magnified the con- tents. This great man would catch a flea and show it to the people. Then he would place the flea in the box and show it to them, and they would see that it had grown enormously in an instant. The man could make it big or little, by just taking off and putting on the cover of the box! This individual worked wonders for a consideration, but fate overtook him and he was smothered under a feather-bed for having too much wizard in his cosmos. A wizard, be it known, is a male 47 LITTLE witch, and the Bible says, " Thou shalt not suffer a JOURNEYS witch to live," although it does not say anything about wizards. QBut please note this: the wizard who had that magic box and flea, had really tfte first microscope. Q About the year 1607, Galileo bought a pair of "magic glasses," or spectacles; and his action, in so doing, was freely criticized. On a visit to Venice, where glass had been manufac- tured since long before the Flood, Galileo was looking through one of the glass factories, just as visitors do mow, and one of the workmen showed him a peculiar piece of glass which magnified the hairs on the back of his hand many times. In a very few days after this, Galileo heard that a Dutch spectacle-maker had placed certain queer shaped pieces of glass in a tube, and offered to sell this tube to the Government, so by its use, soldiers could per- ceive the movements of an enemy many miles away. QThat night Galileo did not close his eyes in sleep. He thought out a plan by which he could place pieces of glass in a tube, and bring the stars close to earth. Q By daylight the whole plan was clear in his mind, and he hastened to the shop of the glass-makers. Two lenses were made, one plano-convex, and the other plano-concave, and these were placed in a tube made of sheet copper. It was tested on distant objects; and behold ! they were magnified by three. Would this tube show the stars magnified ? Galileo knew of no rea- son why k should not, but he paced his room in hot impatience, waiting for the night to come with its twink- 48 ling wonders, that he might verify his convictions. LITTLE When the first yellow star appeared in the west, Gali- JOURNEYS leo turned his tube upon it, and behold ! instead of twink- ling points of light, he saw a round mass — a world — moving through space, and not a scintillating object with five points. The twinkling spikes, or points, were merely an optical illusion of the unaided senses. Galileo made no secret of his invention. It was called "Galileo's Tube," but some of the priests called it Galileo's "Magic Tube." Yet it marked an era in the scientific world. Galileo endeavored constantly to improve his instrument; and from a threefold magnifying power, he finally made one that magnified thirty-two times. Galileo made hundreds of telescopes, and sold them at moderate prices to any one who would buy. He ex- plained minutely the construction of the instrument, showing how it was made in accordance with the nat- ural laws of optics. His desire was to dissipate the superstition that there was something diabolical, or supernatural about the "Magic Tube" — that in fact, it was not magic, and the operator had no peculiar powers ; you had simply to comply with the laws of nature, and any one could see for himself. It is hard for us, at this day, to understand the opposi- tion that sprang up against the telescope. We must remember that at this time the belief in witchcraft, fairies, sprites, ghosts, hobgoblins, magic and super- natural powers was common. Men who believe in mir- acles make poor scientists. There were books about 49 LITTLE JOURNEYS "Magic," written by so-called scientific men, whose standing in the world was quite as high as that of Galileo jfc & In 1610 Galileo published his book entitled, " Sidera Medicea," wherein he described the wonders that could be seen in the heavens by the aid of the telescope. Among other things he told how the Milky Way was not a great streak of light, but was comprised of a mul- titude of stars ; and he made a map of stars that could not be seen, excepting by the aid of the telescope. At this time there resided in Venice a scientific man, much more popular than Galileo, by the name of Porta. He was a priest, whose piety and learning was un- impeached. The year after Galileo issued his book, Porta put out a work much more pretentious, called "Natural Magic." In this book Porta does not claim that magicians all have supernatural powers ; but he goes on to prove how they deceive the world by the use of their peculiar apparatus, and intimates that they sometimes sell their souls to the devil, and then are positively dangerous. He dives deep into science, his- tory, and his own imagination to prove things. The man was no fool — he constructed a kaleidoscope that showed an absolute, geometrical symmetry, where in fact there was only confusion. He showed how, by the use of mirrors, things could be made big, small, tall, short, wide, crooked, or distorted. He told of how magicians, by the use of Galileo's tube, could show seven stars where there was only one ; and he even made such a tube of his own and called the priests to- 50 gather to look through it. He painted stars on the glass, LITTLE and had men look at the heavens. He even stuck a JOURNEYS louse on the lens and located the beast in the heavens, for the benefit of a doubting Cardinal. It was all a joke, but at the time, no sober si ncereman of Sci- ence could argue him down. He owned " bum ' tel- escopes that proved all kinds of things, to the great amusement of the enemies of Galileo. The intent of Porta was to expose the frauds and fallacies of Galileo. Porta also claimed that he had seen telescopes by which you could look over a hill and around a corner, but he did not recommend them, since by their use things were often perceived that were not there. And so we see why the priests positively refused to look through Galileo's tube, or to believe anything he said. Porta, and a few others like him, showed a deal more than Galileo could and offered to locate stars any- where on order. Galileo had much offended these priests by his state- ments that the Bible did not contain the final facts of Science, and now they were getting even with a ven- geance. It was all very much like the theological guf- faw that swept over Christendom when Darwin issued his "Origin of Species," and Talmage and Spurgeon set their congregations in a roar by gentle references to monkey ancestry. 51 LITTLE £?^$^^3MID the Seneral popping of theological JOURNEYS ^8/yWQjyy small-arms, Galileo moved steadily for- ward. If he had many enemies he surely had a few friends. As he once had proved more than Pisa could digest, so now he was bringing to the surface of things more truth than Padua could assimilate. Venice too was get- ting uncomfortable. Even the Doge once said, in reply to an enthusiastic admirer of Galileo, " Your master is not famous — he is merely notorious." It was discovered that Galileo had been living with a woman by the name of Marina Gamba, at Venice, even while he held the professorship at Padua ; and that they had a son, Vincenzo Gamba, & two daughters. One of the enemy drew a map of the heavens, show- ing Galileo as the sun, Marina Gamba as the moon, and around them circulated numerous little satellites, which were supposed to be their children. The picture had so great a vogue that the Doge issued an order that all copies of it be destroyed. Of Marina Gamba we know very little ; but the fact that she made entries in Galileo's journal and kept his accounts, proves that she was a person of con- siderable intelligence; and this was at a time when semi-oriental ideas prevailed and education was sup- posedly beyond the feminine grasp. Galileo did not marry for the reason that he was prac- tically a priest — a teacher in a religious school, living with and looking after the pupils — and the custom was that one engaged in such an occupation should not wed. 52 HE stormy opposition to Galileo was not without its advantages. We are adver- tised no less by our rabid enemies than by our loving friends. Cosimo II., Grand- Duke of Tuscany, had intimated that Flor- ence would welcome the great astronomer. Galileo moved to Florence under the protection of Cosimo, intending to devote all of his time to Science. Qln quitting school-teaching and popular lecturing, he really made a virtue of necessity. No orthodox ly- ceum course would tolerate him ; he was neither an impersonator nor an entertainer; the stereopticon, and the melodramatic were out of his line and his passion for truth made him impossible to the many. He was treading the path of Bruno : the accusations, the taurits and jeers, the denials and denunciations, were urging him on to an unseemly earnestness. Father Clavius said that Galileo never saw the satel- lites of Jupiter until he made an instrument that would create them ; and if God had intended that men should see strange things in the heavens, He would have sup- plied them sufficient eyesight. The telescope was really a devil'-s instrument. Still another man declared that if the earth moved, acorns falling from a high tree would all fall behind the tree and not directly under it. Father Brini said that if the earth revolved, we would all fall off of it into the air when it was upside down ; moreover, its whirling through space would create a wind that would sweep it bald. 53 LITTLE JOURNEYS LITTLE JOURNEYS Father Caccini preached a sermon from the text, "Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven ? ' Only he changed the word "Galilee" to "Galileo," claiming that it was the same thing, only different; and as reward for his wit he was made a bishop. Cardinal Bellarmine, a man of great energy: earnest, zealous, sincere and learned — the Dr. Buckley of his day — showed how that, "If the Copernican Theory should prevail, it would be the absolute undoing of the Bible, and the destruction of the Church, rendering the death of Christ futile. If the earth is only one of many planets, and not the center of the universe, and the other planets are inhabited, the whole plan of sal- vation fails, since the inhabitants of the other spheres are without the Bible, and Christ did not die for them." This was the argument of Father Lecazre, and many others who took their cue from him. Galileo was denounced as "atheist' and "infidel" — epithets that do not frighten us much now, since they have been applied to most of the really great and good men who have ever lived. But then such words set fire to masses of inflammable prejudices, and there were conflagrations of wrath and hate against which it were vain to argue. The Archbishop of Pisa especially felt it incumbent upon him "to bring Galileo to justice." Galileo was born at Pisa, educated there, taught in the University ; and now he had disgraced the place and brought it into disrepute & & Galileo was still in communication with teachers at 54 Pisa, and the Archbishop made it his business to have LITTLE letters written to Galileo asking certain specific ques- JOURNEYS tions. One man, Castelli, declined to be used for the purpose of entrapping Galileo, but others there were •who loaned themselves to the plan. In 1616, Galileo received a formal summons from Pope Paul V. to come to Rome and purge himself of here- sies that he had expressed in letters which were then in the hands of the Inquisition. Galileo appealed to his friends at Florence, but they were powerless. 'When the Pope issued an order, it could not be waived. The greatest thinker of his time journeyed to Rome and faced the greatest theologian of his day, Cardinal Bellarmine. The Cardinal firmly and clearly showed Galileo the error of his way. Galileo offered to prove for the Cardinal by astronom- ical observations that the Copernican Theory was true. Q Cardinal Bellarmine said that there was only one truth and that was spiritual truth. That the Bible was true, or it was not. If not, then was religion a fallacy and our hope of heaven a delusion. Galileo contended that the death of Christ had nothing to do with the truth, so Science and these things should not be shuffled and confused. This attitude of mind greatly shocked the Inquisitors, and they made haste to inform the Pope, who at once issued an order that the astronomer should be placed in a dungeon until he saw fit to disavow that the sun was the center of the universe, and the earth moves. 55 LITTLE JOURNEYS > Q A sort of compromise, it seems, was here effected by Galileo's promise not to further teach that the earth revolves ^fc & He was kept at Rome under surveillance for some months, but was finally allowed to return to Florence, and cautioned that he must cease all public teaching, speaking and writing on the subject of astronomy. On March 5, 1616, the consulting theologians of the Holy Office, reiterated that the two propositions of Galileo, that the sun is the center of the universe, and that the earth has a rotary motion, were " absurd in philosophy, heretical and contrary to Scripture." QThe works of Copernicus were then placed upon the Index, and Pope Paul issued a special decree, warn- ing all Churchmen to " abjure, shun and forever ab- stain from giving encouragement, support, succor or friendship to any one who believed or taught that the earth revolves." The name of Copernicus was not removed from the Index until the year 1818. [ALILEO made his way back to Florence, a defeated and disappointed man. He had not been tortured excepting mentally, but he had heard the dungeon key turned in the lock and felt the humiliation of being a captive. The instruments of torture had been shown him and he had heard the cries of the con- demned j& Jt> 56 The cell that Bruno had occupied was his and he was also taken to the spot where Bruno was burned — the place was there, but where was Bruno ! He realized how utterly impossible it was to teach truth to those who did not desire truth, and the vanity of replying to men for whom a pun answered the pur- poses of fact. As he could neither teach nor lecture at Florence, his services to the court were valueless. He was a dis- graced and silenced man. He retired to a village a few miles from the city, and in secret continued his studies and observations. The Grand-Duke supplied him a small pension and suggested that it would be increased if Galileo would give lectures on Poetry and Rhetoric, which were not forbidden themes, and try to make himself either com- monplace or amusing. We can imagine the reply — Galileo had but one theme, the wonders of the heavens. LITTLE JOURNEYS 'O the years went by, and Galileo was sixty- seven years old, impoverished & forgotten, yet in his proud heart burned the embers of ambition. He believed in himself; he be- lieved in the sacredness of his mission. Pope Paul had gone on his long journey, for even infallible popes die. Cardinal Barberini had become Pope Urban VIII. Years before Galileo and Barberini had taught together at Padua, and when 57 LITTLE Galileo was silenced, a long letter of sympathy had JOURNEYS come from his old colleague and occasionally since they had exchanged friendly letters. Galileo thought that Urban was his friend and he knew that Urban, in his heart, believed in the Copernican Theory jfc <£ Galileo emerged from his seclusion and began teach- ing and speaking in Florence. He also fitted up an ob- servatory and invited scholars to make use of his tele- scope ^ <£ Father Melchior here put forth a general denunciation, aimed especially at Galileo, without mentioning his name, to this effect: "The opinion of the earth's mo- tion is, of all heresies, the most abominable, the most pernicious, the most scandalous : the immovability of the earth is thrice sacred. An argument against the ex- istence of God and the immortality of the soul would be sooner tolerated than the idea that the earth moves." Qln reply to this fusillade, in 1632, Galileo put forth his book entitled," The Dialogue," which was intended to place the ideas of Copernicus in popular form. Galileo had endeavored to communicate with Urban, but the Pope had chosen to ignore him — to consider him as one dead. Galileo misconstrued the silence, thinking it meant that he could do and say what he wished and that there would be no interference. A copy of Galileo's book reaching the Pope, his silence was broken. The book was condemned and all copies found were ordered to be burned by the hangman in the public streets. But the book had met with a 'wide 58 sale and many copies had been carried to Germany, LITTLE England and France, and in these countries the work JOURNEYS was reprinted and sent back to Italy. Urban ordered Galileo to present himself at Rome forthwith. A score of years had passed since Galileo's former visit — he had not forgotten it. He wrote to the Pope apologizing for having broken the silence imposed upon him by Pope Paul ; he of- fered to again go into retirement ; stated that he was old, infirm, without funds, and excused himself from obeying the order to go to Rome. It was in vain that a preventory order was now issued and sent to the Papal Nuncio at Florence. This was equivalent to an arrest. Galileo must go to Rome and answer for having broken the promises he had made to the Inquisition. If he would not go willingly, he should go in chains. Arriving at Rome, he had several audiences with the Pope who argued that nothing but an implicit recan- tation would now answer. What Barberini had believed was one thing, what the Pope must do was another. Galileo should recant in order to keep the people from thinking that Pope Urban 'would allow what his predecessors would not. The matter had become a public scandal. Galileo tried to argue the question and asked for time to consider it. An order was issued that he should be imprisoned. It was done. Galileo asked for pens and paper that he might prepare his defense. These were refused and an order of tor- 59 LITTLE JOURNEYS ture was issued. It was not a trial, defense was useless. Again he was asked to recant — the matter was all writ- ten out — he had but to sign his name. He refused. He was brought to the torture chamber. Here legend and fact separate. There are denials from Churchmen that Galileo was so much as imprisoned. One writer even has tried to show that Galileo was a guest of the Pope and dined daily at his table. The other side has told us that Galileo was thrust into a dungeon, his eyes put out and his broken-down old form tortured on the wheel. Recent careful researches reveal that neither side told the truth. We have official record of the case written out at the time for the Vatican archives. Galileo was imprisoned and the order of torture issued, but it was never enforced. Perhaps it was not the intention to en- force it — it may have been only a "war measure." Galileo was alternately taken from dungeon to palace that he might realize which course was best for him to pursue : oppose the Church or uphold it. Thus we see that there was some truth in the statement that "he dined daily with the Pope." That the man was subjected to much indignity, all the world now knows. The official records are in the Vat- ican and the attempt to conceal them longer is out of the question. Wise Churchmen no longer deny the blunders of the past, but they say with Cardinal Satolli, "The enemies of the Church have been o'er-zealous Churchmen." On his bended knees, Galileo, a man of three-score 60 and ten, broken in health, with spirit crushed, repeated LITTLE after a priest these words: "I, Galileo Galilei, being JOURNEYS in my seventieth year, a prisoner and now on my knees before your Eminences, the Cardinals of the Holy See, having before mine eyes the Holy Bible, which I touch with my hands and kiss with my lips, do abjure, curse and detest the error and heresy of the movement of the earth." He also was made to sign the recantation. On arising from his knees, legend declares that he said, " Yet the earth does move ! ' It is hardly probable that the words reached his lips, although they may have been in his mind. But we must remember the man's heart was broken and he was in a mental condition where nothing really mattered. To complete his dishonor all of his writings were placed on the Index, and he was made to swear that he would inform the Inquisition of any man whom he should hear or discover supporting the heresy of the motion of the earth. The old man was then released, a prisoner on parole, and allowed to make his way home to Florence, which he did by easy stages, helped along the way by friendly monks who discussed with him all questions but those of astronomy. Galileo's eldest daughter, a nun, whose home was near his, was so affected by the humiliation of her father that she fell into a nervous decline and died very soon after he reached home. Between these two there had been a close bond of love and tender sym- 61 LITTLE pathy and her death seemed almost the crowning JOURNEYS calamity jt & But once back to his village home at Arcetri, Galileo again went to 'work with his telescope, mapping the heavens. A goodly degree of health and animation came back to him, but his eyesight, so long misused, now failed him and he became blind. Thus Milton found him in 1638. Castelli, his lifelong friend, wrote to another, " The noblest eye that God ever made is dark- ened: the eye so privileged that it may in truth be said to have seen more wonderful things and made others to see more wonderful things, than were ever seen before." But blindness could not subdue him any more than it could John Milton. He had others look through the telescope and tell him what they saw and then he would foretell what they would see next. The policy of the Pope was that Galileo should not be disturbed so long as he kept to his village home and taught merely the few scholars or "servants," as they called themselves, who came to him, but these were to be taught mathematics and not astronomy. That he was even at the last under suspicion is shown that concealed in the mattress of the bed upon which he died were records of his latest discoveries concerning the revolution of the planets. Legal opposition was made as to his right to make a will, the claim being that he was a prisoner of the Inquisition at his death. For the same reason his body 'was not allowed to be buried in consecrated ground. The Pope overruled the objection and he was buried in an obscure corner of 62 the little cemetery of St. Croce, the grave unmarked. Q So the last few years of Galileo's life were years of comparative peace and quiet. He needed but little and this little his few faithful, loving friends supplied. His death came painlessly and his last moments were sus- tained by the faith that he would soon be free from the trammels of the flesh and visit some of the worlds his telescope had brought so near. Galileo was born the day that Michael Angelo died ; the year of his death was the year that Sir Isaac Newton, discoverer of the law of gravity, was born. LITTLE JOURNEYS 63 HERE ENDETH THE LITTLE JOURNEY TO THE HOME OF GALILEO, AS WRITTEN BY ELBERT HUBBARD. THE BORDERS, INITIALS AND ORNAMENTS DESIGNED BY ROYCROFT ARTISTS, THE PRESSWORK BY LOUIS SCHELL, & THE WHOLE DONE INTO A BOOK BY THE ROYCROFTERS AT THEIR SHOP WHICH IS IN EAST AURORA, NEW YORK, IN FEBRUARY OF THE YEAR MCMV Vol. XVI MARCH, 1905 No. 3 fttle Co Homes of <&reat Scientists By ELBERT H U B 8 Jl R D NEWTON Single Copies 25 cents By the Year, $3. 00 A Missionary Move F your subscription reaches us within two weeks after you receive this offer, we will present you GRATIS a silk- lined leather-bound book, the regular price of which is Two Dollars <£<£<& This is the offer: Remit us Two Dollars and we will send you "The Philistine" Magazine for one year, " Little Journeys " for 1905, beginning with the January number, also one $2.00 Roy croft Book — all for $2.00, if you send your subscription at once. LITTLE JOURNEYS BY ELBERT HUBBARD, FOR 1905 WILL BE TO THE HOMES OF GREAT SCIEN- TISTS, AND THE SUBJECTS ARE AS FOLLOWS: Copernicus Ernst Haeckel Galileo Carl von Linnaeus Sir Isaac Newton Thomas H. Huxley Humboldt John Tyndall Sir Wm. H. Herschel Alfred Russel Wallace Charles R. Darwin John Fiske Address THE ROYCROFTERS at their Shop, which is at East Aurora, Erie County, New York Entered at the postoffice at East Aurora, New York, for transmission as second-class mail matter. Copyright, 1905, by Elbert Hubbard w L fKt- Ms LITTLE JOURNEYS TO HOMES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS so WRITTEN BY ELBERT HUBBARD AND DONE INTO BOOK FORM BY THE ROYCROFTERS AT THEIR SHOP, WHICH IS IN EAST AURORA, NEW YORK, A.D 9? SIR ISAAC NEWTON Sir Isaac Newton HEN you come into any fresh company, observe their hu- mours. Suit your own carriage thereto, by which insinu- ation you will make their converse more free and open. Let your discours be more in querys and doublings than peremp- tory assertions or disputings, it being the designe of travelers to learne, not to teach. Besides, it will persuade your acquaintance that you have the greater esteem of them, and soe make them more ready to communicate what they know to you ; whereas nothing sooner occasions disrespect and quarrels than peremptorinesse. You will find little or no advantage in seeming wiser, or much more ignorant than your company. Seldom discommend any thing though never so bad, or doe it but moderately, lest you bee unexpectedly forced to an unhansom retraction. It is safer to commend any thing more than is due, than to discommend a thing soe much as it de- serves ; for commendations meet not soe often with oppositions, or, at least, are not usually soe ill resented by men that think otherwise, as discommendations; and you will insinuate into 'men's favour by nothing sooner than seeming to approve and commend what they like ; but beware of doing it by a comparison. SIR ISAAC NEWTON to one of his pupils. SIR ISAAC NEWTON Qi -V9, Ck N honest farmer, neither rich nor poor, was Isaac Newton. He was married to Harriet Ayscough in February, 1642. Both were strong, intelligent and full of hope. Neither had any education to speak of -they belonged to England's middle class — that oft despised and much ridi- culed middle class which is the hope of the world. Accounts still in existence show that their income was thirty pounds a year. It was for them to toil all the r/^\ week, go to church on Sunday, and twice jS\ or thrice in a year attend the village fairs JJ or indulge in a holiday where hard cider played an important part. Isaac had served his two years in the army, taken a turn at the sea, and got his discharge papers. Now he had married the lass of his choice, and settled down in the little house on an estate in Lincoln- shire where his father was born and died. Q Spring came, and the roses clambered over the stone walls ; bobolinks played hide and seek in the waving grass of the meadows ; the skylarks sang and poised and soared; the hedge-rows grew white with hawthorne blossoms and musical with the chirp of sparrows ; the cattle LITTLE ranged through the fragrant clover ' ' knee deep in June." JOURNEYS Q Oftentimes the young wife worked with her husband in the fields, or went with him to market. Great plans were laid as to what they would do next year, and the year after, and how they would provide for coming age and grow old together, here among the oaks and the peace and plenty of Lincolnshire. In such a country, with such a climate, it seems as if one could almost make repair equal waste, and thus keep death indefinitely at bay. But all men, even the strongest, are living under a death sentence with but an indefinite reprieve. And even yet, with all of our science and health we cannot fully account for those diseases which seemingly pick the very best flower of sinew and strength. Isaac Newton, the strong and rugged farmer sickened and died in a week. " The result of a cold caught when sweaty and standing in a draft," the surgeon explained. "The act of God to warn us all of the vanity of life." Acute pneumonia, perhaps is what we would call it — a fever that burned out the bellows in a week. In such cases the very strength of the man seems to supply fuel for the flames. And so just as the autumn came with changing leaves, the young wife was left to fight the battle of life alone ; alone save for the old, old miracle that her life sup- ported another. A wife, a widow, a mother — all within a year ! On Christmas day the babe was born— born -where most men die : in obscurity. He was so weak and frail 66 that none but the mother believed he would live. The doctor quoted a line from Richard III., " Sent before my time into this breathing world scarce half made up," and gave the infant into the keeping of an old nurse with an ominous shake of the head, and went his way, absolved. His time was too valuable to waste on such a useless human mite. The persistent words of the mother that the child should not — must not die — possibly had something to do with keeping the breath of life in the puny man- child. The fond mother had given him the name of his father, even before birth ! He was to live to do the work that the man now dead had hoped to do, that is, live a long and honest life, and leave the fair acres more valuable than he found them. And such was the inauspicious beginning of what Herbert Spencer declared was the greatest life since, three hundred years before Christ, Aristotle studied the stars and made wise guesses into the secrets of nature. LITTLE JOURNEYS UTSIDE of India the lot of widowhood is not especially to be pitied. A widow has beautiful dreams, while the married woman copes with a stern reality. Then, no phase of life is really difficult when you accept it ; and the memory of a great love lost is always a blessing and a benediction to the one who endures the first cruel shock. 67 LITTLE JOURNEYS The young widow looked after her little estate, and with perhaps some small assistance from her parents, lived comfortably and as happily as one has right to in this vale of tears. Her baby boy had grown strong and well : by the time he was two years old he was quite the equal of most babies, and his mother thought, beyond them. It is often stoutly declared by callow folks that mother- love is the strongest and most enduring love in the world, but the wise waste no words on such an idle proposition. Mother-love retires into the shadow when the other kind appears. When the Rev. Barnabas Smith began, unconsciously, to make eyes at the Widow Newton over his prayer- book, the good old dames whose business it is to look after these things, and perform them vicariously, made prophecies on the way home from church as to how soon the wedding would occur. People go to church to watch and pray, but a man I know says that women go to church to watch. Young clergymen fall an easy prey to designing widows, he avers. I can discover no proof, however, that the Widow Newton made any original designs — she was below the clergyman in so- cial standing, and when the good man began to pay special attentions to her baby boy she never imagined that the sundry pats and caresses were meant for her. Q Little Isaac Newton was just three years old when the wedding occurred, and was not troubled about it. The bride went to live with her husband at the rectory, a mile away, and the little boy in dresses, with long 68 yellow curls, was taken to the home of his grand- LITTLE mother. The Rev. Barnabas Smith didn't like babies JOURNEYS as well as he at first thought. Grandparents are inclined to be lax in their discipline. And anyway it is no particular difference if they are — a' scarcity of discipline is better than too much. More boys have been ruined by the rod than saved by it — love is a good substitute for a cat-o' -nine-tails. There were several children born to the Rev. Barnabas Smith and his wife and all were disciplined for their own good. Isaac, a few miles away, snuggled in the arms of his ol' grandmother when he was bad and went scot free. Many years after, Sir Isaac Newton in an address on education at Cambridge playfully referred to the fact that in his boyhood he did not have to prevaricate to escape punishment, his grandmother being always will- ing to lie for him. His grandmother was his first teacher « and his best friend as long as she lived. "When he was twelve years old he "was sent to the vil- lage school at Grantham, eight miles away. There he boarded with a family by the name of Clark, and at odd times helped in the apothecary shop of Mr. Clark, cleaning bottles and making pills. He himself has told us that the working with mortar and pestle, cutting the pills in exact cubes, and then rolling one in each hand between thumb and finger, did him a lot of good whether the patients were benefited or not. The genial apothecary also explained that pills were for those who made and sold them, and that if they did no harm to 69 LITTLE those who swallowed them, the whole transaction JOURNEYS was then one of benefit. All of which proves to us that men had the essence of wisdom two hundred years ago quite as much as now. The master of the school at Grantham was one Mr. Stokes, a man of genuine insight and tact — two things rather rare in the pedagogic equipment at that time. The Newton boy was small and stood low in his class, perhaps because book-learning had not been the bent of his grandmother. The fact that Isaac was neither strong nor smart nor even smartly dressed, caused him to serve in the capacity of a butt for the bullies. One big boy in particular made it his business to punch, kick and cuff him on all occasions in class or out. This continued for a month, when one day the little boy in- vited the big one out into the church-yard and there fell upon him tooth and claw. The big boy had strength, but the little one had right on his side. The schoolmaster looked over the wall and shouted, "Thrice armed is he who knows his cause is just! ' In two minutes the bully was beaten, but the school- master's son who stood by as master of ceremonies, suggested that the big boy have his nose rubbed against the wall of the church for luck. This was accordingly done, not o'er gently, and when Isaac returned to the schoolroom, the master, who was supposed to know nothing officially of the fighting, prophesied, "Young Mr. Newton will yet beat any boy in this school in his studies." It has been suggested that this prophecy was made 70 after its fulfillment, but even so, we know that Mr. -. Stokes lived long enough to take great pride in the Newton boy, and to grow reminiscent concerning his achievement. Our hearts go out to the late Mr. Stokes, schoolmaster at Grantham. LITTLE JOURNEYS 'HERE is surely something in that old idea of Indians that when they killed an enemy the strength of the fallen adversary en- tered into themselves. This encounter of little Isaac with the school bully was a pivotal point in his ca- reer. He had vanquished the rogue physically and he now set to work to do as much mentally for the whole school. He had it in him — it was just a matter of application. Once in after life in speaking of those who had bene- fited him most, he placed this unnamed chucklehead first, and added with a smile, " Our enemies are quite as necessary to us as our friends." In a few months Isaac stood at the head of the class. In mathematics he especially excelled, and the Master, who prided himself on being able to give problems no one could solve but himself, found he was put to the strait of giving a problem nobody could solve. He was somewhat taken aback when little Isaac declined to work on it, and coolly pointed out the fallacy involved. The only thing then for the teacher to do was to say 71 LITTLE he had purposely given the proposition to see if any JOURNEYS one would detect the fallacy. This he gracefully did, and again made a prophecy to the effect that Isaac Newton would some day take his own place and be the master of Grantham School. In the year 1656 the school-days of Isaac Newton were cut short by the death of his stepfather. His mother, twice a widow, moved back to " Wools- thorpe," a big name for a very small estate. Isaac was made the man of the house. The ambition of his mother was that he should become a farmer and a stock-raiser. Q It seems that the boy entered upon his farm duties with an alacrity that was not to last. His heart was not in the work, but the desire to please his mother spurred him forward. On one occasion, being sent to Grantham with a load of produce, he stopped in to visit his old school, and during his call struck a bargain with one of the boys for a copy of Descartes' Geometry. The purchase so exhausted his finances that he was unable to buy the articles his mother had sent him for, but when he got home he explained that one might get along without such luxuries as clothing but a good Geometry was a family necessity. About this time he made a water clock, and also that sun-dial which can be seen today, carved into the stone on the corner of the house. He continued his making of kites which had been begun at Grantham ; and gave the superstitious neighbors a thrill by flying kites at night with lighted lanterns made from paper, attached 72 to the tails. He made water-wheels and windmills, LITTLE and once constructed a miniature mill that he ran by JOURNEYS placing a mouse on a treadmill inside. In the meantime the cows got into the corn, and the weeds in the garden improved each shining hour. The fond mother was sorely disappointed in her boy, and made remarks to the effect that if she had looked after his bringing up instead of entrusting him to an indul- gent grandmother, affairs -would not be in their present state. Parents are apt to be fussy — they cannot wait. Q Matters reached a climax when the sheep, that Isaac had been set to watch, overran the garden and demol- ished everything but the purslane & ragweed, while all the time the young man was under the hedge work- ing out mathematical problems from his Descartes. Cf At this stage the good mother called in her brother, the Rev. Mr. Ayscough, and he advised that a boy who was so bound to study should be allowed to study. And the good rector offered to pay the wages of a man to take Isaac's place on the farm. So, greatly to the surprise and pleasure of Mr. Stokes of Grantham, Isaac one fine day returned with his books, just as if he had only been gone a day instead of a year. At the home of the apothecary the lad was thrice wel- come. He had endeared himself to the women of the household especially. He did not play with other boys — their games and sports were absolutely outside of his orbit. He was silent and so self-contained that he won from his school-fellows the sobriquet of " Old 73 LITTLE Cold-feet." Nothing surprised him ; he never lost his JOURNEYS temper; he laughed so seldom that the incident was noted and told to the neighbors ; his attitude was one of abstraction, and when he spoke it was like a judge charging a jury with soda-water. All of his spare time was given up to whittling, sawing, pounding and making mathematical calculations. Not all of his inventions were toys, for among other things he constructed a horseless carriage which was run by a crank and pumping device, by the occupants. The idea of the horseless carriage is a matter that has long been in the minds of inventors. Several men, su- premely great, have tried their hands and head at it. Leibnitz worked at it ; S wedenborg prophesied the auto- mobile, and made a carriage, placing the horse inside, and did not give up the scheme until the horse ran away with himself and demolished the result of a year's work. The government here interfered and placed an injunction against "the making of any more such di- abolical contrivances for the disturbance of the public peace." All of which makes us believe that if Edison and Marconi had lived two hundred years ago, the bailiffs would have looked after them with the butt end of the law for the regulation of wizards & witches ; wizards at Menlo Park being quite as bad as witches at Salem. Isaac Newton's horseless carriage came to grief in a similar way to Swedenborg's invention — it worked so well and so fast that it turned a complete somersault into a ditch, and its manipulation was declared a pas- 74 time more dangerous than football. Gf Not all the things produced by Isaac about this time were failures. For instance, among other things he made a table, a chair and a cupboard for a young woman who was a fellow- boarder at the apothecary's. The excellence of young Newton's work was shown in that the articles just mentioned outlasted both the owner and maker. LITTLE JOURNEYS • UCH of the reminiscence concerning the Grantham days of Sir Isaac N ewton comes to us from the fortunate owner of that his- toric table, chair and cupboard. This was Mary Story, afterward Mrs. Vincent. Miss Story was the same age as Isaac. She was eighteen when the furniture was made roycroftie — she was a young lady, grown, and wore a dress with a train; moreover, she had been to London and had been courted by a widower, while Isaac Newton was only a lad in round-abouts. Age counts for little — it is experience and temperament that weigh in the scale. Isaac was only a little boy, and Mary Story treated him like one. And here seems a good place to quote Dr. Charcot who said, " In ar- ranging the formula for a great man, make sure you de- lay adolescence — rare-ripes rot early." Isaac and Mary became very good chums, and used to ramble the woods together hand in hand, in a way that must have frightened them both had they been on the same psychic plane. Isaac had about the same re- 75 LITTLE gard for her that he might have had for a dear maiden JOURNEYS aunt who would mend his socks and listen patiently, pretending to be interested when he talked of parallelo- grams and prismatic spectra. But evidently Mary Story thought of him with a thrill for she stoutly resented the boys calling him " Cold-feet." In due time Isaac gravitated on to Cambridge. Mary mooed a wee, but soon consoled herself with a sure-enough lover, and was married to Mr. Vincent, a worthy man and true, but one who had not sufficient soul-caloric to make her forget her Isaac. This friendship with Mary Story is often spoken of as the one love affair in the life of Sir Isaac Newton. It was all prosily platonic on his part, but as Mary lived out her life at Grantham, and Sir Isaac Newton used to go there occasionally, and when he did, always called upon her, the relationship was certainly note- worthy & ^t> The only break in that lifelong friendship occurred when each was past fifty. Sir Isaac was paying his little yearly call at Grantham ; and was seated in a rus- tic arbor by the side of Mrs. Vincent, now grown gray, and the mother of a goodly brood, well grown up. As they thus sat talking of days agone, his thoughts ran off upon quadratic equations, and to aid his mind in following the thread, he absent-mindedly lighted his pipe, and smoked in silence. As the tobacco died low, he gazed about for a convenient utensil to use in push- ing the ashes down in the bowl of his pipe. Looking down he saw the lady's hand resting upon his knee, 76 and straightway utilized the forefinger of his vis-a-vis. LITTLE A suppressed feminine screech followed, but the fires JOURNEYS of friendship were not quenched by so slight an inci- dent, which Mrs. Vincent well knew grew out of tem- perament and not from wrong intent. She lived to be eighty-five, and to the day of her death caressed the scar — the cicatrice of a love wound. All of which seems to prove that old women can be quite as absurd as young ones — goodness me ! HEN Isaac was eighteen, Master Stokes was so impressed by his star scholar that he called in the Rev. Mr. Ayscough and insisted that the boy be sent to Cambridge. The uncle being a Cambridge man him- self, thought this the proper thing to do. On June 5th, 1661, Isaac presented his credentials from his uncle and Mr. Stokes, and was duly entered to Trinity College as a subsizar, which means that he was admitted on suspicion. A part of the duties of a subsizar was to clean boots, scrub floors and perform various other delightful tasks which everybody else evaded & *& To be at Trinity College in any capacity was paradise for this boy. He thirsted for knowledge — to know, to do, to perform — these things were his desire. He had been brought up to work, anyway, and to a country boy toil is no punishment. " I knew that if worse came to worst I could get employment in the town making fur- 77 LITTLE niture and earn a man's wage," he said. Q In a month JOURNEYS he had passed his first examinations and was made a sizar. Before this he had been fag to everybody, but now he was fag to the seniors only. He not only made their beds and cleaned their rooms, but worked their examples in mathematics, and thus commanded their respect & & Once in class, being called upon to recite from Euclid, he declined and shocked the professor by saying, " It is a trifling book — I have mastered it and thrown it aside." And it was no idle boast — he knew the book as the professor did not. When he arrived at Cambridge, he carried in his box a copy of Sanderson's Logic pre- sented to him by his uncle — the uncle having no use for it. It happened to be one of the text-books in use at Trinity. When Isaac heard lectures on Sanderson he found he knew the book a deal better than the tutor, a thing the tutor shortly acknowledged before the class. QThis caused young Mr. Newton to stand out as a prodigy. Usually students have to rap for admittance to the higher classes, but now the teachers came and sought him out. One professor told him he was about to take up Kepler's Optics, with some post-graduate students — would young Mr. Newton come in? Isaac begged to be excused until he could examine the book. The volume was loaned to him. He tore the vitals out of it and digested them. When the lectures began he declined to go because he had mastered the subject as far as Kepler carried it. Genius seems to consist in the ability to concentrate 78 your rays and focus them on one point. Isaac Newton LITTLE could do it. " On a winter day I took a small glass and JOURNEYS so centered the sun's rays that I burned a hole in my coat," he wrote in his subsizar journal. The youth possessed an imperturbable coolness — he talked little, but when he spoke it was very frankly and honestly. From any other his words would have had a presumptuous and boastful sound. As it was he was respected and beloved. At Cambridge his face and features commended him — he looked like another Cam- bridge man, one Milton — John Milton — only his face was a little more stern in its expression than that of the author of " Paradise Lost." In two years' time Isaac Newton was a scholar whom all Cambridge knew. He had prepared able essays on the squaring of curved and crooked lines, on errors in grinding lenses and the methods of rectifying them, and in the extraction of roots where the cubes were imperfect : he had done things never before attempted by his teachers. When they called upon him to recite, it was only for the purpose of explaining truths which they had not mastered. In 1664, being in his twenty-second year, Isaac Newton was voted a free scholarship, which provided for board, books and tuition. On this occasion he was examined in Euclid by Dr. Barrow, the head Master of Trinity. C{ Newton could solve every problem, but could not explain why or how. His methods were empirical — those of his own. Many men with a modicum of math- ematical genius work in this way and in practical life 79 LITTLE the plan may serve all right. QBut now it was shown JOURNEYS to Newton that a school-man must not only know how to work great problems, but know why he goes at it in a certain way : otherwise colleges are vain — we must be able to pass our knowledge along. The really great man is one who knows the rules and then forgets them, just as the painter of supreme merit must be a realist before he evolves into an impressionist. CJ Newton now acknowledged his mistake in reference to Euclid, and set to work to master the rules. This graciousness in accepting advice, and the willingness to admit his lapse, if he had been hasty, won for him not only the scholarship, but the love of his superiors. Milton was a radical who made enemies, but Newton 'was a radical who made friends. He avoided icono- clasm, left all matters of theology to the specialists, and accepted the Church as a necessary part of society. His care not to offend fixed his place in Cambridge for life. It was Cambridge that fostered and encouraged his first budding experiments ; it was there he was sus- tained in his mightiest hazards ; and it was within her walls that the ripe fruit of his genius was garnered and gathered. When his fame had become national and he was called to higher offices than Cambridge supplied, Cambridge watched his career with the loving interest of a mother, and the debt of love he fully paid, for it was through his name and fame that Cambridge first took her place as one of the great schools of the world. EWTON took his degree of Bachelor of LITTLE Arts at Cambridge in January, 1665. The JOURNEYS faculty of Trinity would not even consider his leaving the college : he was as valu- able to them as he would be now if he were a famous football player. Beside the scholarship, there were ways provided so he could earn money by private tutoring and giving lectures in the absence of professors. He had written his essay on fluxions, described their application to fluents and tangents, and devised a plan for finding the radius of curvity in crooked lines. In August of the same year that Newton was given his degree, the college was dismissed on account of an epi- demic, and Newton went home to Woolsthorpe to kill time. In September, 1665, he then being twenty-three, while seated in his mother's garden, he saw that sto- ried apple fall. What pulled it down ? Some force tugging at it, surely ! Q Galileo had experimented with falling bodies, and had proved that the weight and size of a falling body had nothing to do with its velocity, save as its size and shape might be affected by the friction of the atmos- phere. The first person to put in print the story of the falling apple was Voltaire, whose sketch of Newton is a little classic which the world could ill afford to lose. Adam, William Tell and Isaac Newton each had his little affair with an apple, but with different results. QThe falling apple suggested to Newton that there was some power in the ground that was constantly 81 LITTLE JOURNEYS pulling things toward the center of the earth. This power extended straight down into the earth — he knew it — he had dropped a stone into a mine, and had also dropped things from steeples. He dropped apples from kites by an ingenious device of two strings, and he concluded that an apple taken a hundred miles up in the air would return to earth. He then began to spec- ulate as to what a body would do a thousand or ten thousand miles from the earth. So as high as we could go, or as deep as we could dig, this drawing power was always present. The Law of Gravitation ! If a cannon-ball was fired in a straight line at a distant target, the gunner had to elevate the aim, if he would hit the target, for the ball described a curve and would keep dropping to the earth until it actually struck the ground. Something was pulling it down — what was it? Q The Law of Gravitation ! The moon was attracted toward us and would surely fall into us, but for the fact that there were other at- tractions drawing her toward them. The movements of the planets were owing to the fact that they were obeying attractions. They were moving in curves, just like cannon-balls in motion. They had two movements, also, like the cannon-ball. Newton had noticed that the stars within a certain ter- ritory all moved in similar directions, and so must be acted upon by the same influences. The Law of Gravitation ! It is held by many people in East Aurora and elsewhere that Newton's invention 82 is a devilish device originated for the benefit of sur- LITTLE geons and crockery dealers. But this is not wholly true. JOURNEYS Q Without this Law of Gravitation the Earth could not retain her spherical shape — only through this constant drawing in toward the center could she exist. The other planets, too, must be round or they could not exist, and so they also had this same quality of gravity in common with the Earth — a drawing in of everything toward the center. Here was a positive dis- covery— this similarity of the heavenly bodies ! Every one of the heavenly bodies was exerting a con- stant attraction toward all other heavenly bodies, and this attractive power must be in proportion to the dis- tance they were from the object acted upon. Thus were their movements and orbits accounted for. At this time Newton was perfectly familiar with Kep- ler's Law, that the squares of the periodic times of a planet were as the cubes of its distance from the sun. And from this, he inferred that the attraction varied as the square of the planet's distance from the sun. Here he was working on territory that had never been surveyed. At first, in his exuberance, he thought to quickly figure out the size and weight of each planet by measuring its attractive power. He did not realize that he had cut out for himself work that would re- quire many men and several centuries to cover, but surely he was on the right scent — a finite man keen upon the secrets of the Infinite! He was still at his mother's old home in the country, without scientific apparatus or the stimulus of col- 83 LITTLE leagues, when we find by a record in his journal that JOURNEYS antique groan because there "were only twenty-four hours in a day, and that eight were required for sleep and eight more for recreation ! A subject a little nearer home than planetary attraction had now switched him off from measuring and weigh- ing the stars. He was hard at work in his mother's little sitting-room, with the windows darkened, much to that good woman's perplexity. By shutting out all light from the windows and allow- ing the sun's rays to enter by a single little circular aperture, he had gotten the sunlight captured and tamed where he could study it. This ray of light he exam- ined by a small hand-glass that he himself had made. In looking at the ray, quite accidentally, he found it could be deflected and sent off at will in various direc- tions. When thrown on the wall, instead of being sim- ply white light it had seven distinct colors beginning with violet & running down to red. So white light was not a single element, it was made up of various rays which had to be united in order to give us sunlight. Q Eureka ! He had found the secret of the rainbow — the sun's rays broken up and separated by the refract- ing agency of clouds ! Well does Darwin declare that the separation of sun- light into its component parts, and the invention of the spectrum, mark an advance in man's achievement such as the world had not seen since the time of Archimedes. 'HE University at Cambridge was closed LITTLE until October, 1667. Most of the interven- JOURNEYS ing time Newton spent at the home of his mother, but from his accounts we see that the College people kept their eagle-eye upon him, for they sent him remittances regularly for " commons." When he returned to Cambridge he was assigned to the "spiritual chamber," which was a room next to the chapel, that had formerly been reserved as a guest room for visiting dignitaries. In March, 1668, he was given the degree of Master of Arts. His studies now were of a very varied kind. He was required to give one lecture a week on any subject of his own choosing. Needless to say his themes were mathematical or scientific. Just what they were can best be inferred by consulting his cash-book, since the lectures themselves were not written out and all mem- oranda concerning them has disappeared. This account- book shows expenditures for Gunter's Book (he who invented the Gunter's Chain) a magnet, compass, glue, bulbs, putty, antimony, vinegar, white lead, salts of tartar, and lenses. In addition there are a few interesting items such as one sees in the Diary of George Washington — " Lost at cards, five shillings." " Treating at tavern, ten shil- lings." "Binding my Bible, three shillings." "Spent on my cousin, one pound, two." " Expenses for wetting my degree, sixteen shillings." This last item shows that times have changed but little : v 85 LITTLE this scientist and philosopher par excellence had to JOURNEYS moisten his diploma at the tavern for the benefit of good fellows who little guessed with whom they drank. He also had " poor relation " come to visit him ; and it is significant that while there are various items show- ing where he lost money at cards, there are no refer- ences to any money won at the same business, from which we infer that while there was no one at Cam- bridge who could follow him in his studies, there yet were those who could deal themselves better hands when it came to the pasteboards. Evidently he got discouraged at playing cards, for after the year 1668, there are no more items of "treating at the tavern" or "lost at cards." The boys had tried to educate him, but had not succeeded. In card exploi- tation he fell a victim of arrested development. I suppose it -will not cause any one a shock to be told that " the greatest original thinker of all time ' was not exactly a perfect man. So let the truth be known that throughout his life, Newton had a well-defined strain of superstition running through his character. He never quite relinquished the idea of transmutation of metals, and at times astrology was quite as interest- ing to him as astronomy. In writing to a friend who was about to pay a visit to the mines of Hungary he says: " Examine most carefully and ascertain just how and under what conditions na- ture transforms iron into copper and copper into silver and gold." In his laboratory he had specimens of iron ore that 86 contained copper, and also samples of copper ore that LITTLE contained gold, and from this he argued that these JOURNEYS metals were transmutable, and really in the act of transmutation when the process was interfered with by the miner's pick. He had transformed a liquid into a mass of solid crys- tals instantly, and all of the changes possible in light, which he had discovered, had enlarged. his faith to a point where he declared, "Nothing is impossible." Q It is somewhat curious that Newton, who had no soft sex-sentiment in his nature, quite unlike Galileo, still believed in alchemy and astrology, while Galileo's cold intellect at once perceived the fallacy of these things. Galileo also saw at once that for the sun to stand still at Joshua's command, would really mean that the Earth must cease her motion, since the object desired was to prolong the day. Sir Isaac Newton, who dis- covered the Law of Gravitation, yet believed that at the command of a barbaric chieftain, this Law was ar- rested, and all planetary attraction was made to cease while he fought the Philistines for the possession of pasture land to which he had no title. Galileo did not know as much as Newton about plan- etary attraction, but very early in his career he per- ceived that the Bible was not a book that could be technically relied upon. With Newton the Bible presented no difficulties. He regularly attended church and took part in the ritual. Religion was one thing and his daily work another. He kept his religion as completely separate from his life as 87 LITTLE JOURNEYS did Gladstone, who believed the Mosaic account of creation was literally true, and yet had a clear, cool, calculating head for facts. The greatest financial exploiter in America today is an Orthodox Christian, taking an active part in mis- sionary work and the spread of the Gospel. In his fam- ily he is gentle, kind and tender; a good neighbor a punctilious church-goer, a leader in Sunday-school, a considerate teacher of little children. In business relations he is as conscienceless as Tam- erlane, who built a mountain of skulls as a monument to himself. He is cold, calculating, and if opposed, vin- dictive. On occasion he is absolutely without heart: compassion, mercy or generosity are not then in his make-up. The best lawyers procurable are paid princely sums to study for him the penal code, and legislatures have even revised it for his benefit. Eviction, destruc- tion, suicide and insanity have trod in his train. A pic- ture of him makes you think of that dark and gloomy canvas where Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon ride slowly side by side through a sea of stiffened corpses. Bribery, coercion, violence and even murder have been this man's weapons. He is the richest man in America. And yet, as I said in the beginning, all this represents only one side of his nature : he reads his chapter in the Bible each evening by his family fireside, and tenderly kisses his grandchildren good night. The individual who imagines that embezzlers are all riotous in nature, and by habit spendthrifts, does not know humanity. The embezzler is one man ; the model citizen another, and yet both souls reside in the one LITTLE body j» j» JOURNEYS Nero had a passion for pet pigeons, and the birds used to come at his call, perch on his shoulder and take dainty crumbs from his lips. The natures of some men are divided up into water- tight compartments. Sir Isaac Newton kept his relig- ion in one compartment, and his science in another — they never got together. Voltaire says, " When Sir Isaac Newton discovered the Law of Gravitation he excited the envy of the learned men of the world; but they got even with him when he wrote a book on the prophecies of the Bible." |HEN Newton was only twenty-seven years old he was elected Lucasian Professor of Mathematics of Trinity, an office that car- ried with it a goodly salary and also much honor. Never before had so young a man held this chair. Newton was a pioneer in announcing the physical prop- erties of light. Every village photographer now fully understands this, but when Newton proclaimed it he created a whirlwind of disapproval. When a man at that time put forth an unusual thought it was regarded as a challenge. Teachers and professors all over Great Britain, and also in Germany and France, set about to show the fallacy of Newton's conclusions. Newton had issued a pamphlet with diagrams show- 89 LITTLE ing how to study light, and the apparatus was so simple JOURNEYS and cheap that the " Newton experiments " were tried everywhere in schoolrooms. People always combat a new idea when first presented, and so Newton found himself overwhelmed with cor- respondence. Cheap arguments were fired into Cam- bridge in volleys. These were backed up by quibbling men — Pro Bono Publico, Veritasand Old Subscriber — men incapable of following Newton's scientific mind. In his great good-nature and patience Newton replied to his opponents at length. His explanations were construed into proof that he was not sure of his ground. One man challenged him to publicly debate the matter, and we hear of his going up to London, king that he was, to argue with a com- moner Jt> <£> Such terms as "pretender," "upstart," "falsifier," were freely used, and poor Newton for a time was al- most in despair. He had thought that the world was anxious for truth ! Some of his fellow-professors now touched their foreheads and shook their heads omi- nously as he passed. He had gone so far beyond them that their cries of " whoa ! " were unnoticed. , It is here worth noting that the universal fame of Sir Isaac Newton was brought about by his rancorous enemies and not by his loving friends. Gentle, honest, simple and direct as was his nature, he experienced notoriety before he knew fame. To the world at large he was a "wizard" and a "juggler' before he was acknowledged a teacher of truth — a man of science. 90 Q When the dust of conflict concerning Newton's an- LITTLE nouncement of the qualities of light had somewhat JOURNEYS subsided, he turned to his former discovery, the Law of Gravitation, and bent his mighty mind upon it. The influence of the moon upon the Earth, the tilt of the Earth, the flattening at the poles, the recurring tides, the size, weight and distance of the planets now occu- pied Newton's attention. And to properly study these phenomena he had to construct special and peculiar apparatus jfi & In 1687 the results of his discoveries were brought to- gether in one great book, the " Principia." Newton was then forty-five years old. He was still the Cambridge professor, but was well known in political circles in London on account of having been sent there at vari- ous times to represent the University in a legal way. QHis diplomatic success led to his being elected a member of Parliament. Among other great men whom he met in London was Samuel Pepys who kept a diary and therein recorded various important nothings about " Mr. Isaac Newtown of Cambridge — a school-teacher of degree, with a great dignity of manner and pleasing % Countenance." It seems Newton thought so well of Pepys that he wrote him several letters, from which Samuel gives us quotations. Pepys really claimed the honor of introducing Newton into good society. Among others with whom Newton made friends in Parliament was Mr. Montague, who shortly after be- came Secretary of the Exchequer. Montague made his friend Newton a Warden of the Mint, with pay about 91 LITTLE double that which he had received while at Cambridge. JOURNEYS Qln this public work Newton brought such talent and diligence to bear that in 1697 he was made Master of the Mint, at a salary of fifteen hundred pounds a year — a princely sum in those days. There is no doubt but that the fact that Newton was a devout Churchman and an upholder of the Established Order, was a great although perhaps unconscious dip- lomatic move. His delightful personality — gracious, suave, dignified and silent — won for him admiration wherever he went. In argument his fine reserve and excellent temper were most convincing. Had he turned his attention to the law he would have become Chief Justice of England. In 1703 he -was elected President of the Royal Society, an office he held continuously for twenty-five years, and which tenure was only terminated by his death. Q In 1705 the Queen paid a visit to Cambridge, and there with much pageantry the honor of Knighthood was bestowed that changed Professor Newton into Sir Isaac Newton. But the man himself was still the simple, modest gen- tleman. The title did not spoil him — he was a noble man from boyhood. His duties as Master of the Mint did not interfere with his studies and scientific investigations. He revised and rewrote his " Principia," and in 1713 the new edition was issued. One copy was most sump- tuously bound, and Sir Isaac, who was a special favor- ite at court, presented it to the Queen in person. Those 92 who are interested in such things, by applying to the Curator of the British Museum may see and turn the leaves of this book, reading the gracious inscription of the author, while a solemn man in brass buttons stands behind Jt, & Newton died March 20, 1727, aged eighty-five, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. The verdict of humanity concerning Sir Isaac Newton has been summed up by Laplace thus : HIS WORK WAS PRE-EMINENT ABOVE ALL OTHER PRODUCTS OF THE HUMAN INTELLECT. LITTLE JOURNEYS 93 HEHE ENDETH THE LITTLE JOURNEY TO THE HOME OF SIR ISAAC NEWTON, WRITTEN BY ELBERT HUBBARD. THE BORDERS, INITIALS AND ORNAMENTS DESIGNED BY ROYCROFT ARTISTS, THE PRESSWORK BY LOUIS SCHELL, & THE WHOLE DONE INTO A BOOK BY THE ROYCROFTERS AT THEIR SHOP WHICH IS IN EAST AURORA, NEW YORK, IN MARCH OF THE YEAR MCMV Vol. XVI APRIL, 1905 No. 4 tttle Co flomes of <§reat Scientists By EL BERT HUB8ARD HUMBOLDT Single Copies 25 cents By the Year, $3. 00 A Missionary Move F your subscription reaches us within two weeks after you receive this offer, we will present you GRATIS a silk- lined leather-bound book, the regular price of which is Two Dollars jfi jfr This is the offer: Remit us Two Dollars and we will send you "The Philistine " Magazine for one year, " Little Journeys " for 1905, beginning with the January number, also one $2.00 Roycroft Book — all for $2.00, if you send your subscription at once. LITTLE JOURNEYS BY ELBERT HUBBARD, FOR 1905 WILL BE TO THE HOMES OF GREAT SCIEN- TISTS, AND THE SUBJECTS ARE AS FOLLOWS: Copernicus Galileo Sir Isaac Newton Humboldt Sir Wm. H. Herschel Charles R. Darwin Ernst Haeckel Carl von Linnaeus Thomas H. Huxley John Tyndall Alfred Russel Wallace John Fiske Address THE ROYCROFTERS at their Shop, which is at East Aurora, Erie County, New York Entered at the postoffice at East Aurora, New York, for transmission as second-class mail matter. Copyright, 1905, by Elbert Hubbard Humboldt I TJTE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY ASTOR, T F TILDE KT Fr » -TION L I T T L E JOURNEYS T O HOMES OF GREAT SCIENTISTSCe WRITTEN BY ELEERT HUBBARD AND DONE" INTO BOOK FORM BY THE ROYCROFTERSAT THEIR SHOP, WHICH IS IN EAST AURORA, NEW YORK, A.D. MCMV •5? HUMBOLDT CHE actual miracle of the Universe is the invanableness of Law. Under like conditions a like result must follow, and upon this rock is the faith of the Scientist built. — THE COSMOS H U O L D T HE Baron and Baroness von Hollwede were not happily married. The Baroness had intellect, spirit, aspiration, with an appreciation of all that was best in art, music and the world of thought. As to the Baron, he had drunk life's wine to the lees and pronounced the draught bit- ter. He was a heavy dragoon with a soul for foxhounds. Later, when gout got to twinging him, he contented himself with cards and cronies. QAnd then Destiny, like a novelist who does not know what to do with a character, sent him on an excursion across the River Styx. This was a good move all 'round, and the only accommodating action in which the Baron ever had a part. He left a large estate, not being able to take it with him. Q There are two kinds of widows, the be- reaved and relieved. In India no widow is allowed to re- marry. The canons of the Episcopal Church forbid any widow or widower to remarry whose former partner is living. A member of the Catholic Church who makes a marital mistake is not al- lowed to rectify it. Yet Nature, sometimes, as if to prove the 95 LITTLE foolishness of fearsome little man, justifies that of JOURNEYS which man hotly disapproves. To be a widow of thirty-six, fair of face and comely in form, to own a beautiful home and have an income greater than you can spend, and still not enough to burden you — what nobler ambition ! The Baroness had a little encumbrance — a son aged ten. I would like to tell of his career, but alas, of him history is silent, save that he was heir to some of his father's proclivities, grew up, became an army officer and passed into obscurity in middle life, dishonored and unswung. Such a widow as the Baroness von Hollwede is not apt to mourn for long. She was dourted by many, but it 'was Major Humboldt who found favor in her heart. I assume that all of my gentle readers have in them some of the saltness of time, so details can safely be omitted — let imagination bridge the interesting gap. QThe Major was a few years younger than the lady, but like the gallant gentleman that he was, he swore i' faith before the notary that they were of the same age, just as Robert Browning did when officially in- terrogated as to the age of Elizabeth Barrett. Thomas Brackett Reed avowed that no gentleman ever 'weighed over two hundred pounds, and I also maintain no gentleman ever married a 'woman older than himself. CJThe marriage of Major Humboldt and the Baroness von Hollwede was a most happy mating that fully iustified the venture. The Major had done his work bravely in the Seven Years' War, and was now an at- 96 tache ot the King's Court — a man of means, of intellect LITTLE and many strong and beautiful virtues. After the mar- JOURNEYS riage he became known as Baron von Humboldt, and as to just how he succeeded to the noble title let us not be curious — undoubtedly his wife bestowed it on him, good and generous woman that she was. They lived in the romantic Castle Tegel, near Berlin, and separated from the city by a park, where the dark pines still tower aloft and murmur their secrets to the night breeze. Tegel is a most beautiful place; it was first a hunting-lodge occupied by Frederick the Great. It is shut out from the world by its high stone walls, and in its dim, dense woods, one might easily imagine he was far indeed from the madding crowd. Here there were two sons born to the Baron and Baroness — two years apart. One of these sons sleeps now beneath the turret where he first saw the light, and from which he made others see the light as long as he lived. In Goethe's "Faust" is an allusion to a mysterious legend that had its rise in storied Tegel. On May 18th, 1778, Goethe came here, walking over from Berlin, dined, and walked on to Potsdam. But before he left he saw two beautiful boys, aged eight and ten, playing beneath the spreading Tegel trees. The boys remem- bered the event and wrote of it in their journal, men- tioning the kindly pats on their heads and the prophecy that they would grow up and be great men. Goethe was always patting boys on the head and say- ing graceful things, and it is doubtful -whether his 97 LITTLE JOURNEYS prophecy was more than a commonplace. But Goethe always claimed it was divine prophecy. These boys were 'William and Alexander von Hum- boldt ^fc jt History does not supply another instance of two brothers attaining the intellectual height reached by Alexander and "William von Humboldt. This being so, it seems meet that we should tarry a little to inspect the method adopted in their education — a thing which the educated world for the most part has not done. HIS world of ours, round like an orange and slightly flattened at the poles, has produced only five educated men. Of course all education is comparative ; but these five are so beyond the rest of man- kind that they form a class by themselves. ^ educated man means a developed man — a man * rounded on every side of his nature. We are aware of no limit to which the mind of man may evolve ; other men may appear who will surpass the Immortal Five, but this fact remains : none that we know have. Great men, so-called, are usually specialists — clever actors, individuals with a knack, talented comedians — who preach, carve, paint, orate, fight, manipulate, manage, teach, write, perform, coerce, bribe, hypno- tize, accomplish, and get results. There are great mathematicians, financiers, sea-captains, foot-ball 98 players, engineers, bishops, wrestlers, runners, boxers, LITTLE and players on sweet zithern strings. But these are JOURNEYS not necessarily great men any more than poets, painters, and pianists with wonderful hirsute effects and strange haberdashery are great men. It is intellect and emotion expanded in every direction that gives the true title to greatness. Judged in this way, how rare is the educated man — five in six thou- sand years ! And yet one of these five educated men had a brother nearly as great as he. Alexander von Humboldt was past fifty before the world of thinking men realized that he had outstripped his brother William — and Alexander would never admit he had. Q These two men, handsome in face, form and feature — strong in body and poised in mind, with souls athirst to realize and know — happy men, living long 'lives of useful effort — surely should be classed as educated persons. And in passing, let us note that all education is prepar- atory— it is life that gives the finals, not college. The education of the Von Humboldt boys was the Natural Method — the method advocated by Rousseau — the education by play and work so combined that study could never become irksome nor work repulsive. Rousseau said " Make a task repugnant and the worker will forever quit it as soon as the pressure that holds him to it is removed.' The parents of William and Alexander von Humboldt carefully studied the new plan of education that was at that time being advocated by some of the best pro- 99 519089A LITTLE fessors at Berlin. " A child must have a teacher," said JOURNEYS Jean Jacques, " but a professional teacher is apt to be- come the slave of his profession, and when this occurs he has separated himself from life, and therefore to that degree is unfitted to teach." A school should not be a preparation for life — a school should be life. The Kindergarten Idea, among other things, suggests that a child should never know he is in school. The discipline is kept out of sight, and the youngster finds himself a part of the busy life. He blends in with the others, and works, plays and sings under the wise and loving care of his " other mother," the teacher. He is living, not simply preparing to live. QA11 life should be joyous, spontaneous, natural. The Rousseau Idea, modified and refined by Froebel, is the utilization of the propensity to play. Major von Humboldt found a man who was saturated with the true Froebel spirit, although this was before Froebel was born. The man's name was Heinrich Campe. He was hired to superintend the education ot the Humboldt boys. That is to say, he was to be- come their comrade, friend, counsellor, fellow-scholar, playmate and teacher. Play needs direction as well as work. Campe played with the boys. They lived with Nature — made lists of all the trees at Tegel, drew sketches of the leaves and fruit, calculated the height of trees, measured them at the base, and occasionally cut dowri trees, first sitting in judgment on the case and deciding why a certain tree should be removed, thus getting a 100 lesson in scientific forestry. They became acquainted LITTLE with the bugs, beetles, birds and squirrels. They cared JOURNEYS for the horses, cattle and fowls, and best of all they learned to wait on themselves. Campe told them tales of history — of Achilles, Peri- cles and Caesar. Then they studied Greek that they might read of Athens in the language of the men who made Athens great. They translated " Robinson Cru- soe" into German, and Campe's translation of " Rob- inson Crusoe" is today a German classic. It was all natural — easy, interesting. The day was filled with work and play, and joyous tales of what had been said by others in days agone. " Teach only that which you know and never that which you merely believe," said Rousseau. There is still a cry that religion should be taught in the public schools. If we ask "What religion? ' the answer is, " Ours, of course ! ' Religious dogma, being a matter of belief, was taught to the Humboldts as a part of history. So these boys very early became acquainted with the dogmas of Confucianism, Mohammedism and Christianity. They separated, compared and analyzed, and saw for them- selves that dogmatic religions were all much alike. To know all religions is to escape slavery to any. In study- ing the development of races these boys saw that a certain type of religion fits a certain man in a certain strge of his evolution, and so to that degree religion is necessary. An ethnologist is never a Corner Grocery Infidel. 101 LITTLE The C. G. I. is very apt to be converted at the first re- JOURNEYS vival, outrivaling all other " seekers," and when warm weather comes, falling from grace and dropping eas- ily into scofferdom. The Humboldts, like Thoreau, never had any quarrel with God, and they were never tempted to go forward to the Mourners' Bench. Origin and destiny did not trouble them ; predestination and justification by faith were not in their curriculum ; foreordination and baptism were to them problems not to be taken seriously. By studying religions in groups and incidentally, they learned to distinguish the fetich in each. They read iGreek mythology side by side with Judean mythology , and noted the similarities. The intent of Tutor Campe was to give these boys 'a scientific education. Science is only classified com- mon sense. To be scientific is to know differences — to distinguish between this and that. Every successful farmer has traveled a long way into science, for sci- ence deals "with the maintenance of life. To know soils, animals and vegetation is to be scientific. But when the average farmer learns to transmute compost into grass and grain, and these into beef, he usually stops, content. To be a scientist in the true sense, one must love knowledge for its own sake, and not merely for what it will bring on market-day, and so the Humboldts were led on through the stage of wanting to make money, to the stage of wanting to know the why and "wherefore. <( It will be seen that the education of the Humboldts 102 was what the Boylston Professor of English at Harvard LITTLE calls "fadism, or the successful effort at flabbiness." JOURNEYS Our Harvard friend thinks that education should be a discipline — that it should be difficult and vexatious, and that happiness, spontaneity and exuberance are the antitheses and the foes of learning. To him grim earnestness, silence, sweat andUamp smoke are pref- erable to sunshine, and joyous, useful work so wisely directed that the pupil thinks it play. He believes that to be sincere we must be serious. In these latter-day objections there is nothing new. Socrates met them all ; Rousseau heard the cry of "fad;' Heyne, Pestalozzi, Campe, Knuth and Froe- bel met the carpist and answered him reason for rea- son, just as Copernicus, Bruno and Galileo told why the earth revolved. The professional teacher who can do nothing but teach — the college professor who is a college professor and nothing else — hates the Natural Method man as the __ person who wears a paste diamond hates a lapidary. fEINRICH CAMPE was the tutor of the Humboldts for two years, when he entered the employ of the King as Commissioner of Education. After this, however, he con- tinued to spend one day a week at Tegel for some time. He loved the boys as his own and his hope for their future never relaxed. Pos- sibly his interest was not wholly disinterested — with 103 LITTLE JOURNEYS the help of these lads he was working out and proving his pedagogic theories. "When Campe resigned his immediate tutorship he was allowed to select his successor, and he chose a young man by the name of Christian Knuth. The mother was a member of this little university of four persons ; Knuth, of course, was a member, for he always considered himself more of a student than teacher. When Campe resigned in favor of Knuth his action was in degree prompted by his love and con- sideration for the boys. Knuth was only a little past twenty, and was able to enter into the out-of-door sports and work of the youngsters better than the older man. Knuth was their hero — together they rode horse- back, climbed mountains, excavated tunnels, mined for ore, built miniature houses. " Knuth made every good thing in Berlin available to us," wrote William years afterward — " -we visited stores, factories, barracks and schools, and became familiar with a thousand com- monplace things never taught in schools and colleges." Q When Alexander was twelve years old, the father died. This would have been a severe blow to the boys were it not for Knuth, who seemed to stand to them more as the real parent than did Major von Humboldt. Q Knuth was a business man of no mean ability. The Baroness now trusted him with all of her financial af- fairs. He called on the boys to help him in the details of business, so the keeping of accounts and the eco- nomical handling of money were lessons they learned early in life. 104 When Alexander was seventeen and William nine- LITTLE teen, the mother and Knuth decided that the boys JOURNEYS should have the advantages of university life. Ac- cordingly they were duly entered at the University of Frankfort as " special students." Knuth also entered as a student in the class with them. Special students, be it known, are usually those who have failed to pass the required examinations. In this instance, William and Alexander were beyond many of their classmates in some things, but in others they were deficient. Especially had their education in the dead languages been " neglected," so it is quite likely they could not have passed the examinations had they attempted it. It should also be explained that special students are not eligible to diplomas or de- grees ^ e£& But Campe and Knuth did not believe the nerve-rack- ing plan of examinations wise, any more than it is wisdom to pull up a plant and examine the roots to see how it prospers. Neither did they prize a college de- gree. They knew full well that a college degree is no proof of excellence of character; to them a degree was too cheap a thing to deviate in one's orbit to secure. They were after bigger game. At Frankfort, Knuth and his charges lived in the fam- ily of Professor Loffler, " so as to rub off a little knowl- edge from this learned man." They studied history, law, political economy, philosophy and natural history. We would say their method was desultory were it not for the fact that they were always thorough in all that 105 LITTLE JOURNEYS they undertook. They were simply three boys together, intent on getting their money's worth. William was a little better student than Alexander, and was the leader ; he was larger in stature and seemed to have more vitality. Two years were spent at the University of Frankfort, and then our trio moved on to the University of Got- tingen where there were distinguished lecturers on Natural History and Archaeology. Antiquity especially interested the boys, and the evolution and history of races were followed -with animation. William took especially to philosophy as expressed in the writings of Kant, while Alexander developed a love for botany and what he called "the science of out-of- doors." Jt, & Two years at Gottingen, following the bent of their minds and listening only to those lectures they liked, and they moved on to Jena. Here they were in the Goethe country. Soon there were overtures from Ber- lin that they enter the service of the Government. These overtures were set in motion by Campe, who, however, kept out of sight in the matter, and when ac- cused, stoutly declared that it -was every man's duty to help himself, and that he personally had never helped any one get a position and never would. William was twenty-three, Alexander twenty-one. William was gracious and graceful in manner and made himself at home in the best society ; Alexander was studious, reserved and inclined to be shy. An invitation came that they should visit Weimar and 106 spend some weeks in that little world of art and let- ters created by Goethe and Schiller. To William this was very tempting ; but Alexander saw at Weimar scant opportunity to study botany and geology. Be- sides that, he felt that sooner or later he would drift into the employ of the Goverment, following in his father's tootsteps. His ambition was practical mining, with a taste for finance. The brothers kissed each other good-bye, and one went to Weimar to assist Schiller in editing a maga- zine that did not pay expenses, bask in the sunshine of the great Goethe, and incidentally to secure a wife. The other started on a geological excursion, and this excursion was to continue through life, and make the man the greatest naturalist that the world had seen since Aristotle lived, two thousand years before. LITTLE JOURNEYS UMBOLDT'S first book was on the geo- logical formation of the Rhine, published when he was twenty-six years old. The work was so complete and painstaking that it led to his being appointed "As- sessor of Mines" at Berlin. This was the same office that Swedenborg once held in Scandinavia. Q For the benefit of our social science friends, it is rather interesting to note that at this time in Europe nearly all mines belonged to the Government. An in- dividual might own the surface, and up to the sky, but his claim did not go to the center of the earth. Iron, 107 LITTLE JOURNEYS coal, copper, silver and gold were largely mined, and the Government either operated the mines direct, or else leased them on a percentage. I am told that in America all mining is done by indi- viduals or private companies, and that four-fifths of all mining companies have no mines at all — merely sam- ples of ores, blue-prints, photographs and prospects. The genus promoter is a very modern production and is a creation Humboldt never knew ; the " salting ' of mines was out of his province, and mining operations carried on exclusively in sky-scrapers was a combi- nation he never guessed. Whether society will ever take a turn backward and the whole people own and control the treasures de- posited by Nature in the earth, is a question I will leave to my Marxian colleagues to determine. As a mine manager Humboldt was hardly a success. He knew the value of ores, utilized various by-prod- ucts that had formerly been thrown away, made plans for the betterment of his workers, and once sent a protest to the King against allowing women and children to be employed under ground. But the cost per ton of his product was out of propor- tion to expenses. While other men mined the ore he wrote a book on "Subterranean Vegetation." The details of business were not to his liking. His own pri- vate financial affairs were now turned over to Knuth, his modest fortune resolved into cash and invested in bonds that brought a low rate of interest. Freedom was his passion — to come and go at will was his de- 108 sire. The thirst for travel was upon him — travel, not LITTL/E for adventure, but for knowledge. JOURNEYS He resigned his office and tramped with knapsack on back across the Alps. The habit of his mind was that of the naturalist investigator. Geology, botany and zoology were his properties by divine right. These sciences really form one — geognosy, or the science of the formation of the earth. The plants dissolve and disintegrate the rocks ; the animal feeds upon the plants ; and animal life makes new forms of vegetation possible. So the mineral, vegetable and animal king- doms evolve together, constantly tending toward a greater refinement and complexity. The highest form of animal life is man ; and the high- est type of man is evolved where there is a proper balance between the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Q Humboldt discovered very early in his career that the finest flowers grow where there are the finest birds, and man separated from birds, beasts and flow- ers could not possibly survive. About this time Humboldt, taking the cue from Goethe, said, " Man is a product of soil and climate, and is brother to the rocks, trees and animals. He is depend- ent on these, and all things seem to point to the truth that he has evolved from them. The accounts of spec- ial creation are interesting as archaeology, but biology is distinctly the business of modern scientists. The scientist tells what he knows, and the theologist what he believes." And again we find Humboldt writing from Switzer- 109 LITTLE JOURNEYS land in 1796, making observations that have been re- cently unconsciously paraphrased by the United States Secretary of Agriculture who said in a printed re- port, " Western farmers who raise and sell hogs and cattle, feeding them grain instead of selling it, are sure to acquire a competence. The farmers who sell grain are the ones who do not pay off their mortgages." Says Humboldt, "Here on the sides of these tower- ing and forbidding mountains we find the most fertile and beautiful miniature farms, nestling in little valleys or on plateaus. Indeed, I heard today of a man falling out of his farm and being seriously injured. He ven- tured too near the edge. These Swiss gardens with their prosperous and intelligent owners are only pos- sible through the fact that the owners keep all the cows and poultry that can comfortably exist on the acres. The peasants sell butter, cheese and eggs, instead of grain and vegetables exclusively. They give back to the earth all that they take from it, so in the course of a hundred years a fine soil evolves that supports valu- able animals, including valuable men ; choice fruit, flowers and birds appear, and we have what we are pleased to call Christian civilization. It is not for me to quibble about terms, but civilization is not neces- sarily Christian, since it is more a matter of economics and natural science than religion." Where the climate is fairly propitious, but not so much so but that it compels watchfulness, economy and effort, man will work, and to aid him in his work he utilizes domestic animals. And the act of domesti- 110 eating the animal domesticates the man. As man im- LITTLE proves the animal, he improves himself. One reason JOURNEYS the American Indian did not progress was because he had neither horses, camels, oxen, swine nor poultry. He had his dog, and the dog is a wolf, and always re- mains one, in that his intent is on prey. This fitted the mood of the Indian and he continued to live his pre- dacious career without a particle of evolution. To stand still is to retreat, and there is evidence that long before the year 1492, there was a North American In- dian that was a better Indian than the Indians who watched the approach of Columbus and exclaimed, ** Alas ! we are discovered." In crossing the Alps, Humboldt was impressed with the truth that man was a necessary factor in working out "creation," just as much as the earthworm. When men stir the soil so as to make it produce grain that the family may be fed, and utilize animals in this work, civilization is at hand. Nations with a controlling de- sire to absorb, annex and exploit are still to that degree savages. Creation still is going on, Snd this earth is be- coming a better and more beautiful place as men work in line with reason and allow science to become the handmaid of instinct. Humboldt, above all men, prepared the way for Dar- win, Spencer and Tyndall — all of these built on him, all quote him. His books form a mine in which they constantly delved. Humboldt in boyhood formed ]the habit of close and accurate observation, and he traveled that he might 111 LITTLE gratify this controlling impulse of his life — the habit of JOURNEYS seeing and knowing. His genius for classification was superb; he approached every subject with an open mind, willing to change his conclusions if it were shown that he was wrong; he had imagination to see the thing first with his inward eye ; he had the strength of body to endure physical' discomfort, and finally he had money enough so he was free to follow his bent. These qualifications made him the prince of scientific travelers — the pioneer of close, accurate and reliable explorers. BEFORE Humboldt's time travelers had been mostly of the type of Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville, who discovered strange and wondrous things, such as horses with five legs, dogs that could talk, and anthropopagi whose heads did grow beneath their shoulders. The temptation to be interesting at the expense of truth has always been strong upon the sailor-man. Read even the history of Christopher Columbus and you will hear of islands off the coast of America inhabited exclusively by women who had only one calling-day in a year when their gentlemen friends from a neighboring island came to see them. The world needed accurate, scientific knowledge con- cerning those parts of the world seldom visited by man. Travel a hundred years ago was accompanied by great 112 expense and more or less peril. Nations held them- TT«T«T T? selves aloof from each other, and travelers were looked T~TTOXTT^VO , . JUU KIN H» Y o upon as renegades or spies. Alexander von Humboldt had explored mines, climbed mountains, visited that strange people, the Basques of Spain, got little glimpses into Africa where the jungle was waiting for a Livingstone and a Stanley before giving up its secrets. The Corsican had thrown Europe into a fever of fear, , and war was on in every direction, v^hen in 1799 Humboldt ran the blockade and sailed out of the har- bor of Corunna on the little corvette " Pizarro," bound for the Spanish possessions in the New World. Spain had discovered America in the gross two hun- dred years before, but what this country really con- tained in way of possibilities, Spain had most certainly never discovered. Humboldt's mind conceived the idea of a Scientific Sur- vey, and in this he was the maker of an epoch. In this undertaking he secured the assistance of the Prime Minister who secretly issued passports and letters of recommendation to Humboldt, first cautioning him that if the Court at Madrid should know anything about this proposed voyage of discovery it could never be made, so jealous and ignorant were the officials. Only one thing did Spain have in abundance, and that was religion. At that time the Spanish Colonies included Louisiana, Florida, Texas, California, Mexico, Central America, Cuba, most of the West Indies, and the most of South 113 LITTLE JOURNEYS America, not to mention the Philippines. These colo- nies covered a territory stretching over five thousand miles from North to South. Twice a year Spain sent out trading ships, convoyed by armed cruisers. Trade then was monopoly and extor- tion. The goods sent out were as cheap and tawdry as could be palmed off; and all that were brought back were bartered for at the lowest possible prices. Cheat- ing in count, weight and quality was considered per- fectly proper, and as the Government officials at home got a goodly grab into all transactions in way of per- quisites all went swimmingly — or fairly so. For a Spainard to trade with any other nation was treason and if caught, his property was confiscated and probably his head forfeited. No foreigners were allowed in the colonies, and exclusion was the rule. To hold her dependencies Spain thought she must keep them under close subjection; and she seemed beautifully innocent of the fact that she was the de- pendent, not they. She did not believe in Free Trade. QThe Government was absolutely under military rule. Of the botany, zoology, geology, not to mention the topography of her American posessions, the officials of Spain knew nothing save from the tales of sailors. Such were Spanish conditions when Humboldt got himself smuggled on board the " Pizarro ' and sailed away June, 4th, 1799. With Humboldt was one companion, Bonpland, a Swiss by birth, and a rare soul. Humboldt was a nat- uralist and a philosopher and by nature he was a trav- 114 eler. But he lacked that intrepid quality possessed by, LITTLE say, Lewis and Clarke. He had too much brain — too JOURNEYS fine a nerve-quality to face the forest alone. Bonpland made good all that he lacked. He used to call Bon- pland his "Treasure." And surely such a friend is a treasure, indeed. Boapland was a linguist, as most of the Swiss are. He was a mountain climber, and had been a soldier and sailor, and he knew enough of liter- ature and science so he was an interesting companion. He was small in stature, lithe, immensely strong, ab- solutely fearless, and had left behind him neither fam- ily nor friends to mourn his loss. To Humboldt he was guide, teacher, protector and friend. Bonpland was the soul of unselfishness. Perhaps a certain quality of man attracts a certain quality of friend — I really am not sure. But this I know, that while Alexander von Humboldt had few personal friends, he always had just those which his nature re- quired— his friends were hands, feet, eyes and ears for him, to quote his own words. This voyage on the " Pizarro ' occupied five years. The travelers visited Teneriffe, Cuba, Mexico, and skirted the coast of South America, making many lit- tle journeys inland. They climbed mountains that had never been scaled before ; they ascended rivers where 'white men had never been, and pushed their way through jungle and forest to ^visit savage tribes who fled before them in terror thinking they "were gods. On the return trip they visited the United States ; spending some weeks in Washington, where they were 115 LITTLE JOURNEYS the guests of the President, Thomas Jefferson. A very firm friendship sprang up between Humboldt and Jef- ferson : they 'were both freethinkers, and 'when Hum- boldt recorded in his journal that Jefferson was by far the greatest man in America, he not only recorded his personal conviction, but he spoke the truth. And as if not to be outdone, although he did not then know what Humboldt had said of him, Jefferson declared that Alexander von Humboldt was the greatest man he ever saw. Most of the vast number of specimens and natural his- tory curiosities gathered by Humboldt and Bonpland were placed on a homeward bound ship that sailed from South America. This ship was lost and all the precious and priceless cargo went for naught. Had Humboldt and his companion sailed on the ship, as they first intended, instead of returning by way of the United States, the world would not have known the name of Alexander von Humboldt. 'HEN Humboldt landed at Bordeaux in August, 1804, after his five-years' journey, he immediately set out to visit his brother who was then the German Ambassador at Rome. We can imagine it was amost joyous meet- ing. Of it "William said, " I could not recognize him for my tears — but beside this he seemed to have grown in stature and was as brown as a Malay. Was he really 116 brother? Ah, the hand was the hand of Esau, but LITTLE when he spoke, it was the same, gentle, loving voice JOURNEYS — the voice of my brother." A few weeks at Rome and Alexander grew restless for work. He had made great plans about publishing the record of his travels. This work was to outstrip anything in book-making that the world had ever seen, dealing 'with similar subjects. The Jwriting was done on ship-board, by camp-fires, and in the forest and jungle, but now it had all to be gone over and revised and much of it translated into French, for the original notes were sometimes in English and sometimes in German. Only in Paris could the work of book-making be done that would fill Humboldt's ideals. In Paris were printers, engravers, artists, binders — Paris was then the artistic center of the world, as it is today. The result of this first great scientific voyage of dis- covery was written out in a work of seventeen volumes. It was entitled, "The Travels of Humboldt and Bon- pland in the Interior of America." Humboldt wrote the book, but he wanted his friend to have half the credit. This superb set of books, containing many en- gravings, was issued under Humboldt's supervision and almost entirely at his own expense. It was di- vided into five general parts : Geography and the Dis- tribution of Plants; Zoology and Comparative Anat- omy ; Political Essays and Description of Peoples and Institutions in the Kingdom of New Spain; Astrono- my and Magnetism ; Equinoctial Vegetation. 117 LITTLE It took two years to issue the first volume, but the JOURNEYS others then came along more rapidly, yet it was ten years before the last book of the set was published. QThe total expenditure required in issuing this set of books was over a million francs, or to be exact, two hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars. The cost of a set of these books to subscribers was two thousand five hundred and fifty dollars, although there were a few sets containing hand-colored plates and original drawings that were valued at 'twenty thousand dollars. One such set can now be seen at the British Museum. In all only three hundred sets of these books • were issued. One set at least came to America, for it "was presented to Thomas Jefferson, and I believe is now in the Congressional Library. This American Expedition fixed Humboldt's place in history, but after its completion and the record was written out he had still over half a century to live. •LEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT was an atheist at a time when few men could afford the luxury. Very fortunately he had sufficient fortune to place him beyond the reach of the bread-and-butter problem, and his books were written in the language of the esoteric. He did not serve as an iconoclast for the common people — his name was never on the tongue of rumor — comparatively few, indeed, knew of his exist- ence. His books were issued in de luxe limited edi- 118 tions, and were for public libraries, the shelves of no- LITTLE bility, or rich collectors. JOURNEYS Humboldt was judical in all of his statements, ap- proaching every question as if nothing were known about it. He built strong and was preparing the way, throwing up ramparts and storing ammunition for the first decisive battle that was to take place between Theology and Science. In his day Theology was su- preme, the practical dictator of human liberties. But a World's Congress of Freethinkers has recently been held in Rome. There were present over three thou- sand delegates, representing every civilized country on the globe. The deliberations of the Congress were held in a hall supplied by the Italian Government, and all courtesies and privileges were tendered the delegates. Q The only protest came from the Pope who turned protestant and ordered special services in all the Catholic churches of Rome " to partially mitigate the blot upon the fair record of the Holy City." Forty years ago armed men would have routed this Congress by force, and a hundred years ago the bare thought ot such a meeting would have placed a person who might have suggested it in imminent peril. Humboldt prophesied that the world would not for- ever be ruled by religious superstition — science must surely win. But he did not expect that the change would come so quickly as it has ; neither did he antici- pate the fact that orthodox religion would admit the facts of science and still flourish. The number of Church communicants now is larger than it was in 119 LITTLE Humboldt's time. The Church is a department store JOURNEYS that puts in the particular goods that the people ask for. Freethinkers do not leave the Church ; the Church is built on a Goodyear patent, and its lines expand when Freethinkers get numerous, so as to include them. The Church would rather countenance vice, as it has in the past, than disband. In New York City we now have the spectacle of the Church operating a sa- loon and selling strong drink. In all country towns, religion failing in being attractive, to keep churches alive, resort is had to raffles, lotteries, concerts, chicken-pie socials, and lectures and exhortations by strange men in curious and unique garb, and singers of reputation. The Church, being a part of society, evolves as society evolves. Christianity is a totally different thing now from what it was in Humboldt's time — it was a different * thing in Humboldt's time from what it was a hundred years before. Behold the spectacle of a thousand highly educated and gentle men, from all over the world, decorating with garlands the statue of Bruno in Rome, on the site where Churchmen piled high the fagots and burned his living body! I foretell that when the next World's Congress of Free- thinkers occurs in Rome, the Pope will welcome the delegates and their deliberations will occur by invita- tion in the wide basilica of St. Peter's. The world moves, and the Pope and all the rest of us move 'with it. 120 When a meeting was recently called in Jersey City to LITTLE welcome Turner, the so-called anarchist, the Mayor JOURNEYS forbade the meeting and placed a cordon of policemen around the intended meeting-place. But lo, in their ex- tremity the " anarchists " were invited by a clergyman to come and use his church and he led the way to the sacred edifice, warning the police to neither follow nor enter. As we become better we meet better preachers. CfHumboldt could see no rift through the clouds out- side of the death of the Church and the disbanding of her so-called sacred institutions. We now perceive that very rarely are religious opinions consciously abandoned ; they change, are modified and evolve into something else. Churches are now largely social clubs. In America this is true both of Catholic and Protest- ant. All denominations are interested in social better- ment because the trend of human thought is in that direction. The Church is being swept along upon the tide of time. In a few instances churches have already evolved practical industrial betterments, conducted directly under the supervision of the church and in its edifice. There are hundreds of Kindergartens now car- ried on in church buildings that a few years ago were idle and vacant all the week. Others have sewing cir- cles and boys' clubs, and these have metamorphosed in some instances into Manual Training Schools where girls are taught Domestic Science and boys are given instruction in the Handicrafts. I know a church that derives its support from the sale of useful things that are made by its members and 121 LITTLE JOURNEYS workers under the supervision of its pastor who is a master in handicraft. So this pretty nearly points the ideal — a church that has evolved into an ethical and industrial college, where the pastor is not paid for preaching, but for doing. Charles Bradlaugh once said, "A paid priesthood blocks evolution. These men are educated to uphold and defend the institution. They can do nothing else. Most of them have families dependent upon them — do you wonder that it is a fight to the death ! It is not truth that the clergy struggles for — they may think it is — but the grim fact remains, it is a fight for material existence." We all confuse our interests 'with the eternal verities — the thing that pays us we consider righteous, at least justifiable. This is the most natural thing in the world. An artist who painted very bad pictures once took one of his canvases to 'Whistler for criticism. Jimmie shrugged his shoulders and made a grimace that spoke volumes. " But a man must live some way ! ' pleaded the poor man in his extremity. " I do not see the necessity," was the weary reply. Q Preachers must live ; their education and environ- ment has unfitted them for useful effort ; but they are a part of the great seething struggle for existence. And so we have their piteous and plaintive plea for the obsolete and the outworn. Disraeli once in an incautious moment exclaimed, "If 122 we do away with the Established Church what is to LITTLE become of the fourteen million prepared and pickled JOURNEYS sermons? Think for a moment of the infinite labor of writing new sermons based upon a different point of view — let us be reasonable and not subject an over- worked profession to the humiliation of destroying the bulk of its assets." Science deals directly with the maintenance of human life and the bettering of every condition of existence through a wider, wiser and saner use of the world. Q Civilization is the working out and comprehending and proving how to live in the best way. Theology prepares men to die ; science fits them to live. Science deals with your welfare in this world ; theology in an- other & <£ Theology has not yet proved that there is another world — its claims are not even based upon hearsay. It is a matter of belief and assumption. Science, too, assumes, and its assumption is this : The best preparation for a life to come is to live here and now as if there were no life to come. Your belief will not fix your place in another world — what you are, may. The individual who gets most out of this life is fitting himself to get most out of another if there is one & £• And this brings us up to that paragraph in the Cosmos where Humboldt says, " I perceive a period when the true priesthood will not be paid to defend a fixed sys- tem of so-called crystallized truth. But I believe the time will come when that man will be most revered 123 LITTLE JOURNEYS who bestows most benefits here and now. The clergy of Christendom have long stood as the leaders of thought, but to hold this proud position they must abandon the intangible and devote themselves to this world and the people who are alive." ;OST of Humboldt's time during his mid- dle life was spent at Paris where he was engaged in the herculean task of issuing his splendid books. However, he varied his work, so several hours daily were de- voted to study and scientific research ; and from time to time he made journeys over Europe and Asia. In 1827 a personal request came from the King of Prussia that Humboldt should thereafter make Berlin his home. He was too big a man for Germany to lose. QHe acceded to the King's request, moved to Berlin and was spoken of as " The First Citizen," although he would not consent to holding office, nor -would he ac- cept a title. In vexed questions of diplomacy he was often consulted by the King and his Cabinet, and in many ways he furthered the interests of education and civilization by his judicial and timely advice. He was always a student, always an investigator, al- ways a tireless worker. He lived simply and quietly — keeping out of society and away from crowds, except- ing on the rare occasions when necessity seemed to demand it. 124 The quality of the man was well mirrored in those LITTLE magnificent books — all that he did was on the scale of JOURNEYS grandeur. His books were too high in price for the average reader but on the request of the King he consented to give a course of five, free, popular lectures for the people. No one foresaw the result of these addresses. The course was so successful that it extended itsell into sixty-one lectures, and covered a period of over ten years' time. No admittance was charged, free tick- ets being given out to applicants. Very soon after the first lecture a traffic sprang up in these free tickets, car- ried on by our Semitic friends, and the tickets soared as high as three dollars each. Then the strong hand of the Government stepped in — the tickets were can- celled, and the public was admitted to the lectures without ceremony. Boxes, however, were set apart for royalty and foreign visitors, some of whom came from England, Belgium, Switzerland and France. The size of these audiences was limited simply by the capacity of the auditorium — the attendance at first being about a thousand ; later a larger hall was secured and the at- tendance ran as high as four thousand persons at each address. The subjects were as follows : Three lectures on the History of Science. Two on reasons why we should study Science. Four on the Crust of the Earth, and the nature of Vol- canoes and Earthquakes. 125 LITTLE JOURNEYS Two on the form of the Earth's Surface and the ele- vation of the Continents. Five on Physical Geography. Sixteen on Astronomy. Five on the nature of Heat and Magnetism. Two on Mountains and how they are Formed. Three on the nature of the Sea. Ten on the Atmosphere as an Elastic Fluid. Three on the Distribution of Matter. Three on the Geography of Animals. Three on Races of Men. Every good thing begins as something else, and what was intended for the common people became scientific lectures for educated people. "The man who was most benefited by these lectures was myself," said Humboldt. : Men grow by doing things. Lectures are for the lec- turer. Humboldt found out more things in giving these lectures than he knew before — he discovered himself. And long before they were completed he knew that his best work was embodied right here — in doing for others he had done for himself. In attempting to reveal the Universe or " Kosmos" he revealed most of his own comprehensive intelligence. That many of his conclusions have since been aban- doned by the scientific world does not prove such ideas valueless — they helped and are helping men to find the truth. These sixty-one "popular" and free lectures make up the gigantic work known as " Humboldt's Cosmos." 126 •AYS Robert Ingersoll in his tribute to Alexander von Humboldt : His life was pure, his aims lofty, his learning varied and profound, and his achievements vast. We honor him because he has ennobled our race, because he has contributed as much as any man, living or dead, to the jeal prosperity of the world. We honor him because fre has honored us — because he labored for others — because he was the most learned man of the most learned nation of his time — because he left a legacy of glory to every human being. For these reasons he is honored throughout the world. Millions are doing homage to his genius at this moment, and millions are pronouncing his name with reverence and recounting what he accomplished. We associates the name of Humboldt with oceans, continents, mountains, and volcanoes — with towering palms — the wide deserts — the snow-lipped craters of the Andes — with primeval forests and European capi- tals— with wilderness and universities — with savages and savants — with the lonely rivers of unpeopled wastes— with peaks, pampas, steppes, and cliffs and craigs — with the progress of the world — with every f science known to man, and with every star glittering in the immensity of space. Humboldt adopted none of the soul-shrinking creeds of his day; he wasted none of his time in the stupidi- ties, inanities and contradictions of theological meta- physics; he did not endeavor to harmonize the astron- omy and geology of a barbarous people with the science of the nineteenth century. Never, for one moment, did he abandon the sublime standard of truth : he inves- tigated, he studied, he thought, he separated the gold from the dross in the crucible of his brain. He 127 was never found on his knees before the altar oi superstition. He stood erect by the tranquil column of Reason. He was an admirer, a lover, an adorer of Nature, and at the age of ninety, bowed by the weight of nearly a century, covered with the insignia of honor, loved by a nation, respected by a world, with kings for his servants, he laid his weary head upon her bosom — upon the bosom of the Universal Mother — and with her loving arms about him, sank into that slumber 'which we call Death. History added another name to the starry scroll of the immortals. The world is his monument ; upon the eternal granite of her hills he inscribed his name, and there upon everlasting stone his genius wrote this, the sublimes^ of truths : THE UNIVERSE IS GOVERNED BY LAW. 128 I AY the Lord deliver us all from Cant. May the Lord, what- ever else He do or for- bear, teach us to look o facts honestly in the face, and to beware (with a kind of shudder) of smearing them over with our despicable and damnable palaver, into incognizability. O Heaven, it is the most accursed sin of man; and done everywhere, at present, on the streets and high places at serious] noon< hief say, and pray as my chief orison, the Lord deliver us from Cant! CARL Y L E Vol. XVI MAY, 1905 No. 5 tttle Journeys Co flomes of <§reat Scientists By ELBERT H U B B J* R D UK ^ •. Ev I JL^ Single Copies 25 cents By the Year, $3. 00 * A Missionary Move F your subscription reaches us within two weeks after you receive this offer, we will present you GRATIS a silk- lined leather-bound book, the regular price of which is Two Dollars This is the offer: Remit us Two Dollars and we will send you "The Philistine' Magazine for one year, " Little Journeys " for 1905, beginning with the January number, also one $2.00 Roycroft Book- all for $2.00, if you send your subscription at once. LITTLE JOURNEYS BY ELBERT HUBBARD, FOR 1905 WILL BE TO THE HOMES OF GREAT SCIEN- TISTS, AND THE SUBJECTS ARE AS FOLLOWS: Copernicus Galileo Sir Isaac Newton Humboldt Sir Wm. H. Herschel Charles R. Darwin Ernst Haeckel Carl von Linnaeus Thomas H. Huxley John Tyndall Alfred Russel Wallace John Fiske Address THE ROYCROFTERS at their Shop, which is at East Aurora, Erie County, New York Entered at the postoffice at East Aurora, New York, for transmission as second-class mail matter. Copyright, 1905, by Elbert Hubbard Hcrschcl YORK LIBPxARY ASTOR, LENOX TILDEN FOUNDATION K«»S2yzSgK»f* ^Y4(^ii^»M *VJ ^(LITTLE JOURNEYS TO HOMES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS WRITTEN BY ELBERT HUBBARD AND DONE INTO BOOK FORM BY THE ROYCROFTERS AT THEIR SHOP, WHICH IS IN EAST AURORA, YORK, A.D. MCMV /Y ***\ m *>< •x »ifj SIR WILLIAM HERSCHEL great number of alterations of stars that we are certain have happened within the last two centuries, and the much greater number that we have reason to suspect to have taken place, are curious features in the history of the heavens, as curious as the slow wearing away of the landmarks of our earth on mountains, on river banks, on ocean shores. If we consider how little attention has formerly been paid to this subject, and that most of the observations we have are of a very late date, it would perhaps not appear extra- ordinary were we to admit the number of alterations, that have prob- ably happened to different stars, within our own time, to be a hundred. —WILLIAM HERSCHEL. HERSCHEL ILLIAM HERSCHEL, born in the city of Hanover, in 1738, was the fourth child in a family of ten. Big families, I am told, usually live in little houses, while little families live in big houses. The Hersch- els were no exception to the rule. Isaac Herschel, known to the world as being the father of his son, was a poor man, depending for support upon his meagre salary as band-master to a regi- ment of the Hanoverian Guards. At the garrison school, taught by a retired cap- tain, William easily was the star scholar. In mathematics he propounded problems that made the worthy captain pooh-pooh and change the subject. At fourteen he was playing a hautboy in his father's band and practicing on the violin at spare times. For music he had a veritable passion, and to have a pas- sion for a thing means that you excel in it — excellence is a matter of intensity. QOne of the players in the band was a Frenchman, and William made an ar- rangement to give the " parle vous " les- sons on the violin as payment for lessons in French jt & This whole brood of Herschel children 129 LITTLE JOURNEYS was musical, and very early the young Herschels be->- came self-supporting as singers or players. "It is the only thing they can do," their father said. But his loins were wiser than his head. In 1755 "William accompanied his father's band to England, where they went to take part in a demon- stration in honor of a Hanoverian, one George III., who later was to play a necessary part in a symphony that was to edify the American Colonies. America owes niuch to George III. Young Herschel had already learned to speak English, just as he had learned French. In England he spent all the money he had for three volumes of "Locke on the Human Understanding." These books were to re- main his lifelong possession and to be passed on, well- thumbed, to his son over half a century later. "William Herschel was nineteen on the breaking out of the Seven Years' War. His regiment had been ordered to march in a week. Here was a pivotal point —should he go and fight for the glory of Prussia? Not he — by the connivance of his mother and sisters, he was secreted on a trading sloop bound for England. Q This is what is called desertion; and just how the young man evaded the penalties, since the King of England was also Elector of Hanover, I do not know, but the House of Hanover made no effort toward pun- ishment of the culprit, even "when the facts were known. Perhaps musicians of quality were needed in England; and as sheep-stealing is looked upon lightly by priests who love mutton, so do kings forgive infrac- 130 tions if they need the man. Q When William Herschel LITTLE landed at Dover he had in his pocket a single crown JOURNEYS piece, and his luggage consisted of the clothes he wore and a violin. The violin secured him board and lodging along the road as he walked to London, just as Oliver Gold- smith paid his way with a similar legal tender. In London Herschel's musical skill quickly got him an engagement at one of the theatres. In a few months we hear of his playing solos at Bra- bandt's aristocratic concerts. Little journeys were taken by the orchestra to which Herschel belonged in "the provinces." Among other places visited was Bath, and here the troupe was booked for a two-weeks' engagement. At this time Bath was run wide open. Bath was a rendezvous for the gouty dignitaries of Church and State who had grown swag through sloth and much travel by the gorge route. There were ministers of state, soldiers, admirals-of- the-sea, promoters, preachers, philosophers, poets, players, polite gamblers and buffoons. They idled, fiddled, danced, gabbled, gadded and gossiped. The School for Scandal was written on the spot with mod- els drawn from life. It wasn't a play — it was a cross- section of Bath society. Bath was a clearing-house for the wit, learning and folly of all England — the combined Hot Springs, Coney Island, Saratoga and Old Point Comfort of the King- dom. The most costly church of its size in America is 131 LITTLE at St. Augustine, Florida. The repentant ones patron- JOURNEYS ize it in Lent, the rest of the year it is closed. At Bath there was the Octagon Chapel with the best pipe organ in England. Herschel played the organ — where he learned how nobody knew — he himself did not know. But playing musical instruments is a little like learning a new language. A man who speaks three languages can take a day off and learn a fourth almost any time. Somebody has said that there is really only one language, and most of us have only a dialect. Acquire three languages and you perceive that there is a universal basis upon which the various tongues are built. Herschel could play the hautboy, the harpsichord and the violin. The organ came easy. When he played the organ in the Chapel at Bath, fair ladies forgot the Pump Room, and the gallants followed them — natu- rally. Herschel became the rage. He was a handsome fellow, with a pride so supreme that it completed the circle, and people called it humility. He talked but little, and made himself scarce — a point every genius should ponder well. The disarming of the populace — confiscating canes, umbrellas and parasols — before al- lowing people to enter an art gallery is necessary; al- though it is a peculiar comment on humanity to think people have a tendency to smite, punch, prod and poke beautiful things. The same propensity manifests itself in wishing to fumble a genius. Get your coarse hands on Richard Mansfield if you can! Corral Maude Adams — hardly. To do big things, to create — breaks 132 down tissue awfully, and to mix it with society and LITTLE still do big things for society is impossible. JOURNEYS At Bath, Herschel was never seen in the Pump Room, nor on the North Parade. People who saw him, paid for the privilege. "In England about this time look out for a shower of genius," the almanackers might have said. To Bath came two Irishmen, Edmund Burke and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Burke rented rooms of the worthy Doctor Nugent, and married the doctor's daughter, and never regretted it. Sheridan also married a Bath girl, but added the right touch of romance by keeping the matter secret, with the intent that if either party wished to back out of the agreement it would be allowed. This was quite Irish-like, since according to English Law a marriage is a marriage until Limbus congeals and is used for a skating rink. With the true spirit of chivalry, Richard Brinsley Sheridan left the questions of publicity or secrecy to his Wife — she could have her freedom if she wished. He was a fledgeling barrister, with his future in front of him, the child of "strolling players"; she, the beautiful Miss Linlay, was a singer of note. Her father was leader of the Bath Orchestra, and had a School of Oratory where young people agitated the atmos- phere in orotund and tremolo and made the ether vi- brate in glee. Dr. Linlay's daughter was his finest pupil, and with her all of his theories concerning the Sixteen Perspective Laws of Art were elucidated. 133 LITTLE She also proved a few points in stirpiculture. She was JOURNEYS a most beautiful girl of seventeen when Sheridan led her to the altar, or I should say to a Dissenting Par- son's back door by night. She could sing, recite, act, and impersonate in pantomime and Greek gown, the passions of Fear, Hate, Supplication, Horror, Re- venge, Jealousy, Rage and Faith. Romney moved down to Bath just so as to have Miss Linlay and Lady Hamilton for models. He posed Miss Linlay as the Madonna, Beulah, Rena, Ruth, Miriam and Cecilia; and Lady Hamilton for Susannah at the Bath, Alicia and Andromache, and also had her illus- trate the Virtues, Graces, Fates, and Passions. When the beautiful Miss Linlay, the pride and pet of Bath, got ready to announce her marriage, she did it by simply changing the inscription beneath a Rornney portrait that hung in the ante-room of the artist's studio, marking out the words "Miss Linlay," and writing over it "Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan." QThe Bath porchers who looked after other people's business, having none of their own, burbled and chor- tled like siphons of soda, and the marvel to all was that such a brilliant girl should thus throw herself away on a sprig of the law. "He acts, too, I believe," said Goldsmith to Dr. Johnson. And Dr. Johnson said, "Sir, he does nothing else," thus anticipating James McNeill Whistler by over a hundred years. But alas for the luckless Linlay, the Delsarte of his day, poor man! he used words not to be found in Johnson's Dictionary, and outdid Cassius in the quarrel scene 134 to the Brutus of Richard Brinsley. QBut soon things settled down — they always do when mixed with time — and all were happy, or reasonably so, forever after. QHerschel resigned from Brabandt's Orchestra and remained in Bath. He taught music, played the organ, became first violinist for Professor Linlay and later led the orchestra when Linlay was on the road starring the one-night stands and his beautiful daughter. Things seemed to prosper with the kindly and talented German. He was reserved, intellectual, and was re- spected by the best. He was making money — not as London brokers might count money, but prosperous for a music teacher. And so there came a day when he bought out the school of Professor Linlay, and became proprietor and leader of the famous Bath Orchestra. But the talented Mrs. Brinsley Linlay Sheridan was sorely missed — a woman soloist of worth was needed. QHerschel thought and pondered. He tried candi- dates from London and a few from Paris. Some had voices, but no intellect. A very few had intellect, but were without voice. Some thought they had a voice when what they had was a disease. Other voices he tried and found guilty. Those who had voice and spirit had tempers like a tornado. Herschel decided to educate a soloist and assistant. To marry a woman for the sake of educating her was risky business — he knew of men who had tried it — for men have tried it since the time of the Cave-Men. bright thought came to him! He would go back to 135 LITTLE JOURNEYS LITTLE Deutschland and get one of his sisters, and bring her JOURNEYS over to England to help him in his work. T was a most fortunate stroke for Herschel "when he went back home to get one of his sisters to come over into Macedonia and help him. No man ever did a great work unless backed up by a good woman. There were five of these Herschel girls — three were married, so they were out of the question, and one was engaged. This left Caroline as first, last and only choice. Caroline was twenty-two, and could sing a little. She had appeared in concerts for her father when a child. But when the father died the girl was set to work in a millinery and dressmaking shop, to help support the big family. The mother didn't believe that women should be educated — it unfitted them for domesticity, and to speak of a woman as ed- ucated 'was to suggest that she was a poor house- keeper. In Greece of old, educated women 'were spoken of as "companions" — and this meant that they were not what you call respectable. They were the intellectual companions of men. The Greek term of disrespect carried 'with it a trifle of a suggestion not intended; i. e., that women who were not educated — not intellectual — were really not companionable— but let that pass. It is curious how this idea that a -woman is only a scullion and a drudge has permeated society until 136 even the women themselves partake of the prejudice LITTLE against themselves. JOURNEYS Mother Herschel didn't want her daughters to be- come educated, nor study the science of music nor the science of anything. A goodly grocer of the Dutch School had been picked out as a husband for Caro- line, and now if she went away her prospects were ruined — ach, mein Gott! or words to that effect. And it was only on William's promise to pay the mother a weekly sum equal to the wages that Caroline received in the dressmaking shop that she gave consent to her daughter's going. Caroline arrived in England wearing wooden shoon and hoops that were exceeding Dutch, but without a word of English. In order to be of positive use to her brother, she must acquire English and be able to sing, not only sing well, but remarkably well. In less than a year she -was singing solo parts at her brother's concerts to the great delight of the aristo- crats of Bath. They heard her sing, but they did not take her captive and submerge her in their fashion- able follies as they would have liked to do. The sister and brother kept close to their own rooms. Caroline was the housekeeper, and took a pride in being able to dispense with all outside help. She was small in figure, petite, face plain but full of animation. QA11 of her spare time she devoted to her music. After the concerts she and her brother would leave the theatre, change their clothes and then walk off into the country, getting back at one or two o'clock in the 137 LITTLE JOURNEYS morning. On these midnight walks they used to study the stars and talk of the wonderful work of Kepler and Copernicus. There were various requests that Caroline should go to London and sing, but she stead- fastly refused to appear on a stage excepting where her brother led the orchestra. About this time Caroline wrote a letter home, which missive, by the way, is still in existence, wherein she says: "William goes to bed early when there are no concerts or rehearsals. He has a bowl of milk on the standbesidehim, andhe reads Smith's « Harmonics ' and Ferguson's 'Astronomy.' I sit sewing in the next room and occasionally he will call to me to listen while he reads some passage that most pleases him. So he goes to sleep buried beneath his favorite authors, and his first thought in the morning is how to obtain instru- ments so we can study the harmonics of the sky." And a way was to open — they were to make their own telescope — what larks! Brother and sister set to work studying the law of optics. In a second-hand store they found a small Gregorian reflector with an aper- ture of about two inches. This gave them a little peep into the heavens, but was really only a tantalization. They set to work making a telescope tube out of pasteboard. It was eighteen feet long, and the "board" was made in the genuine pasteboard way — by pasting sheet after sheet of paper together until the substance was as thick and solid as a board. So this brother and sister worked at all odd hours 138 pasting sheet after sheet of paper — old letters, old LITTLE books — with occasional strips of cloth laid in to give JOURNEYS extra strength. The tube was eighteen feet long. Lenses were procured in London and at last our precious musical pair, with astronomy for their fad, had the satisfaction of getting a view of Saturn that showed the rings. It need not be explained that astronomical observations must be made out-of-doors. Further, the whole tele- scope must be out-of-doors so to get an even temper- ature. This is a fact that the excellent astronomers of the Mikado of Japan did not know until very recently. It seems they constructed a costly telescope and housed it in a costly observatory house, with an aper- ture barely large enough for the big telescope to be pointed out at the heavens. Inside, the astronomer had a comfortable fire, for the season was winter and the weather cold. But the wise man could see nothing and the belief was getting abroad that the machine was bewitched, or that their Yankee brothers had lawson- ized the buyers, when our own David P. Todd, of Amherst, happened along and informed them that the heat waves which arose from their warm room caused a perturbation in the atmosphere which made star- gazing impossible. At once they made their house over, with openings so as to insure an even temperature and Prince Fusiyama Noguchi wrote to Professor Todd, making him a Knight of the Golden Dragon on special order of the heaven-born Mikado. The Herschels knew enough of the laws of heat and 139 LITTLE refraction to realize that they must have an even tem- JOURNEYS perature, but they forgot that pasteboard was porous. So one night they left their telescope out-of-doors, and a sudden shower transformed the straight tube into the arc of a circle. All attempts to straighten it were vain, so they took out the lenses and went to work making a tube of copper. In this, brother, sister and genius — which is concentra- tion and perseverance — united to overcome the innate meanness of animate and inanimate things. A failure was not a failure to them — it was an opportunity to meet a difficulty and overcome it. The partial success of the new telescope aroused the brother and sister to fresh exertions. The work had been begun as a mere recreation — a rest from the ex- actions of the public which they diverted and amused with their warblings, concussions and vibrations. They were still amateur astronomers and the thought that they would ever be anything else had not come to them. But they wanted a better view of the heavens — a view through a Newtonian reflecting telescope. So they counted up their savings and decided that if they could get some instrument maker in London to make them a reflecting telescope six feet long, they would be willing to pay him fifty pounds for it. This study of the skies was their only form of dissi- pation, and even if it was a little expensive it enabled them to escape the Pump-Room rabble and flee bore- dom and introspection. A hunt was taken through London, but no one could 140 be found who would make such an instrument as they LITTLE wanted for the price they could afford to pay. They, JOURNEYS however, found an amateur lens polisher who offered to sell his tools, materials and instruments for a small sum. After consultation the brother and sister bought him out. So at the price they expected to pay for a telescope they had on their hands a machine shop. CJThe "work of grinding and polishing lenses is a most delicate business. Only a person of infinite patience and persistency can succeed at it. In Alleghany, Penn- sylvania, lives John Brashear, who, by his own efforts, assisted by a noble wife, graduated from a rolling mill and became a maker of telescopes. Brashear is prac- tically the one telescope lens-maker of America since Alvan Clark resigned. There is no competition in this line — the difficulties are too appalling for the average man. The slightest accident or an unseen flaw, and the work of months or years goes into the dust-bin of time, and all must be gone over again. So when we think of this brother and sister sailing away upon an unknown ocean — working day after day, night after night, week after week and month after month, discarding scores of specula which they had worked upon many weary hours in order to get the glass that would serve — we must remove our hats in reverence. 141 LITTLE ?A^9^A?OD sends great men in groups. From about JOURNEYS ^;^^^ 1740 for the next thirty-five years the in- tellectual sky seemed full of shooting stars. 'Watt had watched his mother's teakettle to a purpose; Boston Harbor was transformed into another kind of Hy- son dish; Franklin had been busy with kite and key; Gibbon was writing his "Decline and Fall"; fate was pitting the Pitts against Fox; Hume was challenging the worshippers of a fetich and supplying arguments still bright with use; Voltaire and Rousseau were pre- paring the way for Madame Guillotine; Horace Wai- pole was printing marvelous books at his private press at Strawberry Hill; Sheridan was writing autobio- graphical comedies ; Garrick was mimicking his way to immortality ; Gainsborough was working the apoth- eosis of a hat; Reynolds, Lawrence, Romney, and West the American, were forming an English School of Art; George 'Washington and George III. 'were linking their names preparatory to sending them down the ages ; Boswell was penning undying gossip ; Black- stone was writing his " Commentaries " for legal lights unborn ; Thomas Paine was getting his name on the blacklist of orthodoxy ; Burke the Irishman, was polishing his brogue so that he might be known as England's greatest orator; the little Corsican was dreaming dreams of conquest; Arthur Wellesley was having presentiments of coming difficulties; Gold- smith was giving dinners with bailiffs for servants; 'Warren Hastings was defending a suit where the 142 chief participants were to die before a verdict was rendered; Captain Cook was giving to this world new lands, while William Herschel and his sister were showing the world still other worlds, till then un- known. LITTLE JOURNEYS |HE brother and sister had thought they would be content when they had followed the subject of astronomy as far as Fer- guson had followed it, and knew all that he knew. Progress depends upon being continually dissatisfied. Ferguson now only aggravated them by his limitations. In their music they amused, animated and inspired the fashionable idlers. William gave lessons to private pupils, led his orchestra, played the organ and harp- sichord and managed to make ends meet, and would have gotten reasonably rich had he not invested his spare cash in lenses, brass tubes, eye-pieces, specula and other such trifles, and stood most of the night out on the lawn peering at the sky. He had been studying stars for seven years before the Bath that he amused awoke to the fact that there was a genius among them. And this genius was not the idolized Beau Nash whose statue adorned the Pump Room! No, it was the man -whose back they saw at the concerts. During all these years Herschel had worked alone and had scarcely ever mentioned the subject of astron- 143 LITTLE omy with any one save his sister. One night, however, JOURNEYS he had moved his telescope into the middle of the street to get away from the shadows of the houses. A doctor who had been out to answer a midnight call stopped at the unusual sight and asked if he might look through the instrument. Permission was courte- ously granted. The next day the doctor called on the astronomer to thank him .for the privilege of looking through a better telescope than his own. This doctor was Sir William Watson, an amateur astronomer and all-'round scien- tist, and a member of the Royal Society of London. Q Herschel had held himself high — he had not gos- siped of his work with the populace, cheapening his thought by diluting it for cheap people. Watson saw that Herschel, working alone, isolated, had surpassed the schools. There is a nugget of wisdom in Ibsen's remark, "The strongest man is he who stands alone," and Kipling's paraphrase, "He travels the fastest who travels alone." The chance acquaintance of Herschel and Watson soon ripened into a very warm friendship. Herschel amused the neurotics, Watson dosed and blistered them — both for a consideration. Each had a beautiful contempt for the society they served. Watson's father was of the purple, while Herschel's was of the people, but both men belonged to the aristocracy of intellect. ' Q "Watson introduced Herschel into the select scien- tific circle of London, where his fine reserve and dig- nity made their due impress. Herschel's first paper to 144 the Royal Society, presented by Dr. Watson, was on LITTLE the periodical star in Collo Ceti. JOURNEYS The members of the Society, always very jealous and suspicious of outsiders, saw they had a thinker to deal with jt ^ Some one carried the news to Bath — a great astron- omer was among them! About this time Horace Wai- pole said, "Mr. Herschel will content me if instead of a million worlds, he can discover me thirteen colonies well inhabited by men and women, and can annex them to the Crown of Great Britain in lieu of those it has lost beyond the Atlantic." Bath society now took up astronomy as a fad, and fashionable ladies named the planets backward and forward from a blackboard list set up in the Pump House by Fanny Burney, the clever one. Herschel was invited to give popular lectures on the music, of the spheres. Herschel's music parlors were besieged by good people who wanted to make engagements with him to look through his telescope. One good woman gave the year, month, day, hour and minute of her birth and wanted her fortune told. Poor Herschel declined, say- ing he knew nothing of astronomy, but could give her lessons in music if desired. In answer to the law of supply and demand, thus proving the efficacy of prayer, an itinerant astronomer came down from London and set up a five-foot tele- scope on the Parade and solicited the curious ones at tuppence a peep. 145 LITTLE JOURNEYS This itinerant interested the populace by telling them a few stories about the stars that were not recorded in Ferguson, and passed out his cards showing where he could be consulted as a fortune-teller during the day jt> & Once Herschel was passing by this street astronomer, who was crying his wares, and a sudden impulse coming over him to see how bad the man's lenses might be, he stopped to take a peep at Earth's satel- lite. He handed out the usual tuppence, but the owner of the telescope loftily passed it back saying, "I takes no fee from a fellow-philosopher!" This story went the rounds, and when it reached London it had been amended thus: Charles Fox was taking a ramble at Bath, ran across William Herschel at work, and mistaking him for an itinerant, the great statesman stopped, peeped through the aperture, and then passing out a tuppence moved along blissfully unaware of his error, for Herschel being a perfect gentleman would not embarrass the great man by re- fusing his copper. When Herschel was asked if the story were true he denied the whole fabric, which the knowing ones said was further proof of his gentlemanly instincts — for a true gentleman will always lie under two conditions — first to save a woman's honor, and second to save a friend from embarrassment. As a profession, astrology has ever proved a better in- vestment than astronomy. Astronomy has nothing to offer but abstract truth, and those who love astronomy 146 must do so for truth's sake. Astronomical discoveries LITTLE cannot be covered by copyright or patent, nor can new JOURNEYS worlds be claimed as private property and financed by stock companies, frenzied or otherwise. Astrology, on the other hand, relates to love-affairs, vital statistics, gold mines, misplaced jewels and lost opportunities. Cf Even yet, in this year of grace, 1905, Boston news- papers carry a column devoted to announcements of astrologers, while the Cambridge Astronomical Obser- vatory never gets so much as a mention from one year's end to the other. Besides that, astronomers have to be supported by endowment — mendicancy — while as- trologers are paid for their prophecies by the people whose destinies they invent. This shows us how far as a nation we have traveled on the stony road of Science. Science? Oh, yes, of course — science — bang! bang! bang! (N March, 1791, Herschel found his place as a fixed star among the -world's great as- tronomers by the discovery of Uranus. Years before this, "William and Caroline had figured it out that there must be an- other planet in our system in order to ac- count plausibly for the peculiar ellipses of the others. That is to say, they felt the influence of this seventh planet ; its attractive force was realized, but where it was they could not tell. Its discovery by Herschel was quite accidental. He was sweeping the heavens 147 LITTLE for comets when this star came within his vision. JOURNEYS Others had seen it too, but had classified it as "a va- grant fixed star." It was the work of Herschel to dis- cover that it was not a fixed star, but had a defined and distinct orbit that could be calculated. To look up at the heavens and pick out a star that could only be seen with a telescope — pick it out of millions and as- certain its movement seems like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. The present method of finding asteroids and comets by means of photography is simple and easy. The plate is exposed in a frame that moves by clock-work with the earth, so as to keep the same field of stars steady on the glass. After two, three or four hours ex- posure the photograph will show the fixed stars, but the planets, asteroids and comets will reveal them- selves as a white streak of light, showing plainly where the sitters moved. Herschel had to watch each particular star in person, •whereas the photographic lens will watch a thousand. Of How close and persistent an observer a man must be, who, watching one star at a time, discovers the one in a million that moves, is apparent. Chance, surely, must also come to his aid and rescue if he succeeds. Q Herschel found his moving star, and at first mistook it for a comet. Later he and Caroline were agreed that it was indeed their long-looked-for planet. There are no proprietary rights in newly discovered worlds—- the reward is in the honor of the discovery, just as the best recompense for a good deed lies in having done it. 148 QThe Royal Society was the recording station, as LITTLE Kiel, Greenwich and Harvard are now. Herschel made JOURNEYS haste to get his new world on record through his kind neighbor, Dr. Watson. The Royal Society gave out the information and soon vairous other telescopes corroborated the discovery made by the Bath musician. Herschel christened his new discovery " Georgium Sidus" in honor of the King, but the star belonged as much to Germany and France as to England, and as- tronomers abroad scouted the idea of peppering the heavens with the names of nobodies. Several astron- omers suggested the name "Herschel," if the dis- coverer would consent, but this he would not do. Dr. Bode then named the new star Uranus, and Uranus it is, although perhaps with any other name 'twould shine as bright. Herschel was forty-three years old when he discovered Uranus. He was still a professional musician, and an amateur astronomer. But it did not require much urging on the part of Dr. Watson when he presented Herschel's name for membership in the Royal Society for that respectable body to at once pass favorably on the nomination. As one member in seconding the motion put it, "Herschel honors us in accepting this membership, quite as much as we do him in granting XL* 9&* ^2^ And so the next paper presented by Herschel to the Royal Society appears on the record signed "William Herschel, F. R. S." Later it was to appear, "William 149 LITTLE JOURNEYS Herschel, F. R. S., LL. D. (Edinburgh);'^ and then "Sir William Herschel, F. R. S., LL. D., D. C. L. (Oxon)." N 1782 George III. invited his distinguished Hanoverian countryman to become an at- tache of the Court with the title of "As- tronomer to the King." The Astronomer- Royal, in charge of the Greenwich Ob- servatory, was Dr. Maskelyne, a man of much learning, a stickler for the fact, with a mustard- seed imagination. Being asked his opinion of Herschel he assured the company thus, "Herschel is a great musician — a great musician!' Afterward Maskelyne explained that the reason Herschel saw more than other astronomers was because he had made himself a better telescope. One real secret of Herschel's influence seems to have been his fine enthusiasm js> He worked with such a vim, such animation, that he radiated light on every side. He set others to work, and his love for astronomy as a science created a demand for telescopes, which he himself had to supply. It does not seem that he cared especially for money — all he made he spent for new apparatus. He had a force of a dozen men making telescopes. He worked with them in blouse and overalls, and not one among his workmen excelled him as a machinist. The King bought several of his telescopes for from 150 one hundred to three hundred pounds each, and pre- LITTLE sented them to universities and learned societies JOURNEYS throughout the world. One fine telescope was pre- sented to the University of Gottingen, and Herschel was sent in person to present it. He 'was received with the greatest honors, and scientists and musicians rivaled with each other to do him homage. In 1782 Herschel and his sister gave up their musical work and moved from Bath to quarters provided for them near Windsor Castle. Herschel's salary was the modest sum of two hundred pounds a year. Caroline was honored with the title " Assistant to the King's Astronomer," with the stipend of fifty pounds a year. It will thus be seen that the kingly idea of astronomy had not traveled very far from what it was when every really respectable court had a retinue of singers, mu- sicians, clowns, dancers, palmists and scientists to amuse the good people somewhat ironically called "nobility." King George III. paid his Cook, Master of the Kennels, Chaplain, and Astronomer the same amount. The father of Richard Brinsley Sheridan was "Elocutionist to the King," and was paid a like sum. When Dr. Watson heard that Herschel was about to leave Bath he 'wrote, "Never bought King honour so cheap." £• & It was nominated in the bond that Herschel should act as "Guide to the heavens for the diversification of visitors whenever his Majesty wills it." But it was also provided that the astronomer should be allowed to carry on the business of making and selling tele- 151 LITTLE JOURNEYS scopes. QHerschel's enthusiasm for his beloved sci- ence never abated. But often his imagination outran his facts. Great minds divine the thing first — they see it with their inward eye. Yet there may be danger in this, for in one's anxiety to prove what he first only imagined, small proof suffices. Thus Herschel was for many years sure that the moon had an atmosphere and was inhabited; he thought that he had seen clear through the Milky Way and dis- covered empty space beyond; he calculated distances, and announced how far Castor was from Pollux; he even made a guess as to how long it took for gaseous nebula to resolve itself into a planetary system; he believed the sun was a molten mass of fire — a thing many believed until they saw the incandescent electric lamp — and in various other ways made daring proph- ecies which science has not only failed to corroborate, but which we now know as errors. But the intensity of his nature was both his virtue and his weakness. Men who do nothing and say nothing are never ridiculous. Those who hope much, believe much and love much, make mistakes. Constant effort and frequent mistakes are the stepping-stones of genius. Q In all, Herschel contributed sixty-seven important papers to the proceedings of the Royal Society, and in one of these written in his eightieth year he says, " My enthusiasm has occasionally led me astray, and I wish now to correct a statement I made to you twenty- eight years ago." He then enumerates some particular statement about the height of mountains in the moon, 152 and corrects it. Truth was more to Herschel than con- LITTLE sistency. The earnestness, purity of purpose and sim- JOURNEYS plicity of his mind, indeed, stamp him as one of the world's great men. At Windsor he built a two-story observatory. In the winter time, every night when the stars could be seen, •was sacred. No matter how cold the weather, he stood and watched, while down below, the faithful Caroline sat and recorded the observations that he called down to her. Caroline was his confidante, adviser, secretary, ser- vant, friend. She had a telescope of her own and when her brother did not need her services she swept the heavens on her own account for maverick comets. In her work she was eminently successful, and at least five comets are placed to her credit on the honor roll by right of priority. Her discoveries were duly for- warded by her brother to the Royal Society for record. Q Later, the King of Prussia was to honor her with a gold medal, and several learned societies elected her an honorary member. When Herschel reached the discreet age of fifty he married the worthy Mrs. John Pitt, former wife of a London merchant. It is believed that the marriage was arranged by the King in person out of his great love for both parties. At least Miss Burney thought so. Miss Burney was Keeper of the Royal Wardrobe at the same salary that Herschel had been receiving — two hundred pounds a year. She also took charge of the Court Gossip, with various volunteer assistants. 153 LITTLE "Gold, as well as stars, glitters for astronomers," JOURNEYS said little Miss Burney. "Mrs. Pitt is very rich, meek, quiet, rather pretty and quite unobjectionable." But poor Caroline ! It nearly broke her heart. William was her idol — she lived but for him — now she seemed to be replaced. She moved away into a modest cottage of her own, resolved that she would not be an encum- brance to any one. She thought she was going into a decline, and would not live long anyway, — she was so pale and slight that Miss Burney said it took two of her to make a shadow. But we get a glimpse of Caroline's energy when we find her writing home explaining how she had just painted her house, inside and out, with her own hands. Q Things are never so bad as they seem. It was not very long before 'William was sending for Caroline to come and help him out with his mathematical calcu- lations. Later, when a fine boy baby arrived in the Herschel solar system, Caroline forgave all and came to take care of what she called " the Herschel planetoid." She loved this baby as her own, and all of the pent-up motherhood in her nature went out to little " Sir John Herschel," the knighthood having been conferred on him by Caroline before he was a month old. Mrs. Herschel was beautiful and amiable, and she and Caroline became genuine sisters in spirit. Each had her own work to do; they were not in competition save in their love for the baby. As the boy grew, Caroline took upon herself the task 154 of teaching him astronomy, quite to the amusement LITTLE of the father and mother. JOURNEYS Fanny Burney now comes in with a little flung-off nebulae to the effect that " Herschel is quite the happiest man in the kingdom." There is a most charming little biography of Caroline Herschel, written by the wife of Sir John Herschel, wherein some very gentle foibles are laid bare, and where at the same time tribute is paid to a great and beautiful spirit. The idea that Caroline was not going to live long after the marriage of her brother, was "greatly exagger- ated " — she lived to be ninety-eight, a century lacking two years ! Her mind was bright to the last — when ninety she sang at a concert given for the benefit of an old ladies' home. At ninety-six she danced a minuet with the King of Prussia, and requested that worthy not to introduce her as " the woman astronomer, be- cause, you know, I was only the assistant of my brother!" William Herschel died in his eighty-fourth year, with his fame at full, honored, respected, beloved. Sir John Herschel, his son, was worthy to be called the son of his father. He "was an active worker in the field of science. A strong, yet gentle man, with no jealousy nor whim in his nature. " His life was full of the docility of a sage and the innocence of a child." He died at Collingwood, May 11, 1871, and his dust rests in Westminster Abbey close beside the grave of England's most famous scholar, Sir Isaac Newton. 155 HERE ENDETH THE LITTLE JOURNEY TO THE HOME OF HERSCHEL, AS WRITTEN BY ELBERT HUBBARD. THE BORDERS, INITIALS AND ORNAMENTS DESIGNED BY ROYCROFT ARTISTS, THE PRESSWORK BY LOUIS SCHELL, & THE WHOLE DONE INTO A BOOK BY THE ROYCROFTERS AT THEIR SHOP WHICH IS IN EAST AURORA, NEW YORK, IN MAY OF THE YEAR MCMV Vol. XVI JUNE, 1905 No. 6 fttle Co flomes of <&reat g>ctenttets By ELBBRT H U B B Jt R D D A R WI N Single Copies 25 cents By the Year, $3. OQ A Missionary Move » F your subscription reaches us within two weeks after you receive this offer, we will present you GRATIS a silk- lined leather-bound book, the regular price of which is Two Dollars ^ & & This is the offer: Remit us Two Dollars and we will send you "The Philistine" Magazine for one year, " Little Journeys " for 1905, beginning with the January number, also one $2.00 Roycroft Book-- all for $2.00, if you send your subscription at once. LITTLE JOURNEYS BY ELBERT HUBBARD, FOR 1905 WILL BE TO THE HOMES OF GREAT SCIEN- TISTS, AND THE SUBJECTS ARE AS FOLLOWS: Copernicus Ernst Haeckel Galileo Carl yon Linnaeus Sir Isaac Newton Thomas H. Huxley Humboldt John Tyndall Sir Wm. H. Herschel Alfred Russel Wallace Charles R. Darwin John Fiske Address THE ROYCROFTERS at their Shop, which is at East Aurora, Erie County, New York Entered at the postoffice at East Aurora, New York, for transmission as second-class mail matter. Copyright, 1905, by Elbert Hubbard ••» • ^ ^(LITTLE JOURNEYS HOMES SCIENTISTS WRITTEN BY ELBERT HUBBARD AND DONE INTO BOOK FORM BY THE ROYCROFTERS AT THEIR SHOP, WHICH IS IN EAST AURORA, [, A.D.MCMV CHARLES DARWIN SFEEL most deeply that this whole question of creation is too profound for human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton ! Let each man hope and believe what he can. CHARLES DARWIN to Asa Gray. i ONE have fought better, and none have been more fortunate than Charles Darwin. He found a great truth trodden underfoot, reviled by bigots, and ridiculed by all the world ; he lived long enough to see it, chiefly by his own efforts, irrefragably established in science, inseparably incorporated into the common thoughts of men. What shall a man desire more than this ? THOMAS HUXLEY, Address, April 27, 1882 c 1 7 Darwin • ASTOR, LENOX • EN FOTJ ' ION CHARLES DARWIN >VOLUTION is everywhere at work, even in the matter of jokes. Once in the House of Commons, Disraeli, who prided him- self on his scholarship as well as his Hyperion curl, interrupted a speaker and sharply corrected him on a matter of " I would rather be a gentleman than a scholar ! " the man replied. "^7 friend is seldom either," came the quick response. When Thomas Brackett Reed was Speaker of the House of Representa- tives, a member once took exception to a rulinS of the "Czar," and having in mind Reed's supposed presidential as- pirations closed his protests with the thrust, " I would rather be right than president." " The gentleman will never be either," came the instant retort. But some years before the reign of the American Czar, Gladstone, Premier of England, said, " I would rather be right and believe in the Bible, than excite a body of curious, infidelic, so-called sci- entists to unbecoming wonder by tracing their ancestry to a troglodyte." 157 LITTLE JOURNEYS And Huxley replied, " I, too, would rather be right — I would rather be right than Premier." Charles Darwin was a Gentle Man. He was the great- est naturalist of his time, and a more perfect gentle- man never lived. His son Francis said, " I cannot remember of ever hearing my father utter an unkind or hasty word. If in his presence some one was being harshly criticised he always thought of something to say in way of palliation and excuse." One of his companions on the " Beagle," who saw him daily for five years on that memorable trip wrote, "A protracted sea voyage is a most severe test of friend- ship, and Darwin was the only man on our ship, or that I ever heard of, who stood the ordeal. He never lost his temper or made an unkind remark." Captain Fitz-Roy of the " Beagle " was a disciplina- rian, and absolute in his authority, as a ship- captain must be. The ship had just left one of the South American ports where the captain had gone ashore and been enter- tained by a coffee-planter. On this plantation all the work was done by slaves, who, no doubt, were very well treated. The Captain thought that negroes well cared for were very much better off than if free. And further, he related how the owner had called up va- rious slaves and had the Captain ask them if they wished freedom, and the answer was always, "No." Q Darwin here interposed by asking the Captain what he thought the answer of a slave was worth when being interrogated in the presence of his owner. Here 158 ' Fitz-Roy flew into a passion, berating the volunteer LITTLE naturalist, and suggested a taste of the rope's end in JOURNEYS lieu of logic. Darwin made no reply, and seemingly did not hear the uncalled-for chidings. In a few hours a sailor handed him a note from Cap- tain Fitz-Roy full of abject apology for having so for- gotten himself. Darwin was then but twenty-two years old, but the poise and patience of the young man won the respect, then the admiration and finally the affec- tion of every man on board that ship. This attitude of kindness, patience and good will formed the strongest attribute of Darwin's nature, and to these godlike qualities he was heir from a royal line of ancestry. No man was ever more blest — more richly endowed by his parents with love and intellect — than Darwin. And no man ever repaid the debt of love more fully — all that he had received he gave again. Darwin is the Saint of Science.^ He proves the possible ; and when mankind shall have evolved to a point where such men will be the rule, not the exception — as one in a million — then and not till then can we say we are a civilized people. Charles Darwin was not only the greatest thinker of his time (with possibly one exception), but in his simplicity and earnestness, in his limpid love for truth — his perfect willingness to abandon his opinion if he were found to be wrong — in all these things he proved himself the greatest man of his time. Yet it is absurd to try to separate the scientist from 159 LITTLE JOURNEYS the father, neighbor and friend. Darwin's love for truth as a scientist was what lifted him out of the fog of whim and prejudice and set him apart as a man. Q He had no time to hate. He had no time to indulge in foolish debates and struggle for rhetorical mastery — he had his work to do. That statesmen like Glad- stone misquoted him, and churchmen like Wilberforce reviled him — these things were as naught to Darwin — his face was toward the sunrising. To be able to know the truth, and to state it, were vital issues — whether the truth was accepted by this man or that, was quite immaterial, excepting possibly to the man himself. In Darwin's nature there was no resentment. Only love is immortal — hate is a negative condition. It is love that animates, beautifies, benefits, refines — creates. So firmly was this truth fixed in the heart of Charles Darwin, that throughout his long life the only things he feared and shunned were prejudice and hate. "They hinder and blind a man to truth," he said, "a scientist must only love." >MERSON has been mentioned as the cul- minating flower of seven generations of New England culture. Charles Darwin seems a similar culminating product. Surely he showed rare judgment in the selection of his grandparents. His grand- father on his father's side was Dr. Erasmus Darwin, a poet, a naturalist, and a physician so discerning that 160 he once wrote, " The science of medicine will some LITTLE time resolve itself into a science of prevention rather JOURNEYS than a matter of cure. Man was made to be well, and the best medicine I know of is an active and intelligent interest in the world of nature." Erasmus Darwin had the felicity to have his biography written in German, and he has his place in the Encyclopedia Brittanica quite independent of that of his gifted grandson. Charles Darwin's grandfather on his mother's side was Josiah Wedgwood, one of the most versatile men. He was as fine in spirit as those exquisite de- signs by Flaxman that you will see today on the Wedgwood pottery. Josiah Wedgwood was a business man — an organizer, and he was beyond this, an artist, a naturalist, a sociologist and a lover of his race. His portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds reveals a man of rare intelligence, and his biography is as interesting as a novel by Kipling. His space in the Encyclopedia Brit- tanica is even more important than that occupied by his dear friend and neighbor, Dr. Erasmus Darwin. The hand of the Potter did not shake when Josiah Wedgwood was made. Josiah Wedgwood and Dr. Darwin had mutually promised their children to each other in marriage. Wedgwood became rich and he made numerous other men rich, and he enriched the heart and the intellect of England by setting before it beautiful things, and by living an earnest, active and beautiful life. Josiah Wedgwood coined the word " queensware." He married his cousin Sarah Wedgwood. Their 161 LITTLE daughter, Susannah Wedgwood, married Dr. Robert JOURNEYS Darwin, and Charles Darwin, their son, married Emma Wedgwood, a daughter of Josiah Wedgwood the Sec- ond. Caroline Darwin, a sister of Charles Darwin, married Josiah Wedgwood the Third. Let those who have the time work out this origin of species in detail and show us the relationship of the Darwins and Wedgwoods. And I hope we '11 hear no more about the folly of cousins marrying, when Charles Darwin is before us as an example of natural selection. From his mother Darwin inherited those traits of gen- tleness, insight, purity of purpose, patience and per- sistency that set him apart as a marked man. The father of Charles Darwin, Dr. Robert Darwin, was a successful physician of Shrewsbury. His marriage to Susannah Wedgwood filled his heart, and also placed him on a firm financial footing, and he seemed to take his choice of patients. Dr. Darwin was a man devoted to his family, respected by his neighbors, and he lived long enough to see his son recognized, greatly to his surprise, as one of England's foremost scientists. Charles Darwin in youth was rather slow in intellect, and in form and feature far from handsome. Physically he was never strong. In disposition he was gentle and most lovable. His mother died when he was eight years of age, and his three older sisters then mothered him. Between them all existed a tie of affection, very gentle, and very firm. The girls knew that Charles would become an eminent man — just how they could not guess — but he would be a leader of men — they felt 162 it in their hearts. It was all the beautiful dream that LITTLE the mother has for her babe as she sings to the man- JOURNEYS child a lullaby as the sun goes down. In his autobiographical sketch, written when he was past sixty, Darwin mentions this faith and love of his sisters, and says, " Personally, I never had much am- bition, but when at college I felt that I must work, if for no other reason, so as not to disappoint my sisters." QAt school Charles was considerable of a grubber, he worked hard because he felt that it was his duty. Eng- lish boarding-schools have always taught things out of season, and very often have succeeded in making learning wholly repugnant. Perhaps that is the reason that nine men out of ten who go to college cease all study as soon as they stand on "the threshold," look- ing at life ere they seize it by the tail to snap its head off. To them education is one thing and life another. Q But with many headaches and many heartaches Charles got through Cambridge and then was sent to attend lectures at the University of Edinburgh. Of one lecturer in Scotland he says, "The good man was really more dull than his books, and how I escaped without all science being utterly distasteful to me I hardly know." To Cambridge, Darwin owed nothing but the associa- tion with other minds, yet this was much, and almost justifies the college. " Send your sons to college and the boys will educate them," said Emerson. The most beneficent influence for Darwin at Cambridge was the friendship between himself and Professor 163 LITTLE Henslow. Darwin became known as "the man who JOURNEYS walks with Henslow." Henslow taught botany, and took his classes on tramps afield and on barge rides down the river, giving out-of-door lectures on the way. This common-sense way of teaching appealed to Dar- win greatly, and although he did not at Cambridge take botany as a study, yet when Henslow had an out- of-door class he usually managed to go along. In his autobiography Darwin gives great credit to this very gentle and simple soul, who, although not being great as a thinker, yet could animate and arouse a pleasurable interest. Henslow was once admonished by the faculty for his lack of discipline, and young Darwin came near getting himself into difficulty by declaring, "Professor Henslow teaches his pupils in love, the others think they know a better way ! ' The hope of his father and sisters was that Charles Darwin would become a clergyman. For the army he had no taste whatsoever, and at twenty-one the only thing seemed to be the Church. Not that the young man was filled with religious zeal — far from that — but one must do something, you know. Up to this time he had studied in a desultory way, he had also dreamed and tramped the fields. He had done considerable grouse shooting and had developed a little too much skill in that particular line. To paraphrase Herbert Spencer, to shoot fairly well is a manly accomplish- ment, but to shoot too -well is evidence of an ill-spent youth. Dr. Darwin was having fears that his son was going to be an idle sportsman, and he was urging the 164 divinity school. The real fact was that sportsmanship LITTLE was already becoming distasteful to young Darwin, JOURNEYS and his hunting expeditions were now largely carried on with a botanist's drum and a geologist's hammer. Q But to the practical Doctor these things were no bet- ter than the gun — it was idling, anyway. Natural His- tory as a pastime was excellent, and sportsmanship for exercise and recreation had its place, but the busi- ness of life must not be neglected — Charles should get himself to a divinity school and quickly, too. Things urged become repellant — and Charles was groping around for an excuse when a letter came from Professor Henslow saying, among other things, that the Government was about to send a ship around the world on a scientific surveying tour, especially to map the coast of Patagonia, & other parts of South Amer- ica and Australia. A volunteer naturalist was wanted — board and passage free, but the volunteer was to supply his own clothes and instruments. The proposition gave Charles a great thrill: he gave a gulp and a gasp and went in search of his father. The father saw nothing in the plan beyond the fact that the Government was going to get several years' work out of some foolish young man, for nothing — gadzooks ! Charles insisted— he wanted to go! He urged that on this trip he would be to but very little expense. "You say I have cost you much, "but the fellow who can spend money on board ship must be very clever." " But you are a very clever young man, they say," the father replied. 165 LITTLE JOURNEYS That night Charles again insisted on discussing the matter. The father was exasperated and exclaimed, " Go and find me one sane man who will endorse your wild-goose chase and I will give my consent." Charles said no more — he would find that "sane man." But he knew perfectly well that if any average person endorsed the plan his father would declare the man was insane and the proof of it lay in the fact that he endorsed the wild-goose chase. In the morning Charles started of his own accord to see Henslow. Henslow would endorse the trip, but both parties knew that Dr. Darwin would not accept a mere college professor as sane. Charles went home and tramped thirty miles across the country to the home of his uncle, Josiah Wedgwood the Second. There he knew he had an advocate for anything he might wish in the person of his fair cousin, Emma. These two laid their heads together, made a plan and stalked their prey. They cornered Josiah the Second after dinner and showed him how it was the chance of a lifetime — this trip on H. M. S. the "Beagle!" Charles wasn't adapted for a clergyman, anyway, he wanted to be a ship-captain, a traveler, a discoverer, a scientist, an author like Sir John Mandeville, or something else. Josiah the Second had but to speak the word and Dr. Darwin would be silenced, and the recommendation of so great a man as Josiah Wedgwood would secure the place £• & Josiah the Second laughed — then he looked sober. He 166 agreed with the proposition — it was the chance of a lifetime. He would go back home with Charles and put the Doctor straight. And he did. And on the personal endorsement of Josiah Wedgwood and Professor Henslow, Charles Robert Darwin was duly booked as Volunteer Naturalist in Her Majesty's service. 3APTAIN FITZ-ROY of the "Beagle" liked Charles Darwin until he began look- ing him over with a professional eye. Then he declared his nose was too large and not rightly shaped, besides, he was too tall for his weight — outside of these points the Volunteer would answer. On talking with young Darwin further, the Captain liked him better, and the imperfections were waived, although no promise was made that they would be remedied. In fact, Captain Fitz-Roy liked Charles so well that he in- vited him to share his own cabin and mess with him. The sailors seeing this, touched respectful forefingers to their caps and addressed the Volunteer as ''Sir." QThe " Beagle" sailed on December 27th, 1831, and it was four years and ten months before Charles Dar- win again saw England. The trip decided the business of Darwin for the rest of his life, and thereby an epoch was worked in the upward and onward march of the race. 167 LITTLE JOURNEYS LITTLE Captain Fitz-Roy of the British Navy was but twenty- JOURNEYS three years old. He was a draftsman, a geographer, a mathematician and a navigator. He had sailed 'round the world as a plain tar, and taken his kicks and cuffs with good grace. At the Portsmouth Naval School he had won a gold medal for proficiency in study, and an- other medal had been given him for heroism in leaping from a sailing ship into the sea to save a drowning sailor & & Let us be fair — the tight little island has produced the men. To evolve a few good men she may have pro- duced many millions of the spawn of earth — but let the fact stand : England has produced men. Here was a beardless youth, slight in form, silent by habit, but so well thought of by his Government that he was given a ship, five officers, two surgeons and forty-one picked men to go around the world and make measurements of certain coral reefs and map the dan- gerous coasts of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. The ship was provisioned for two years, but the orders were, " Do the work, no matter how long it may take, and your drafts on the Government will be honored." Q Captain Fitz-Roy was a man of decision — he knew just where he wanted to go, and what there was to do. He was to measure and map dreary wastes of tossing tide, and do the task so accurately that it would never have to be done again — his maps were to remain for- ever a solace, a safety and a security to the men who go down to the sea in ships. England has certainly produced themen — and Fitz-Roy 168 was one of them. Q But Fitz-Roy is now known to us, LITTLE not for his maps which have passed into the mutual JOURNEYS wealth of the world, but because he took on his trip, merely as an afterthought, a volunteer naturalist. Before the "Beagle" sailed, Captain Fitz-Roy and young Mr. Darwin went down to Portsmouth, and the Captain showed him the ship. The Captain took pains to explain the worst. It was to be at least two years of close, unremitting toil. It was no pleasure excursion — there were no amusements provided, no cards, no wine on the table — the fare was to be simple in the extreme jfi Jt, This way of putting the matter was most attractive to Darwin — Fitz-Roy became a hero in his eyes at once. The Captain's manner inspired confidence — he was a man who did not have to be amused or cajoled. " You will be left alone to do your work," said Fitz-Roy to Darwin, "and I must have the cabin to myself when I ask for it." And that settled it. Life aboard ship is like life in jail. It means freedom, * freedom from interruption — you have your evenings to yourself, and the days as well. Darwin admired every man on board the ship, and most of all, the man who selected them, and so wrote home to his sisters. He admired the men because each was intent on doing his work, and each one seemed to assume that his own particular work was the most important. Second Officer Wickham was entrusted to see that the 169 LITTLE ship was in good order, and so thorough was he that JOURNEYS he once said to Darwin, who was constantly casting his net for specimens, " If I were the skipper I 'd soon have you and your beastly belitterment out of this ship with all your devilish, damned mess." And Darwin, much amused, wrote this down in his Journal, and added, "Wickham is a most capital fellow." The discipline and system of ship life, the necessity of working in a small space, and of improving the calm weather, and seizing every moment when on shore, all tended to work in Darwin's nature exactly the habit that was needed to make him the greatest naturalist of his age. Every sort of life that lived in the sea was new and wonderful to him. Very early on this trip Darwin be- gan to work on the Cirripedia (barnacles) and we hear of Captain Fitz-Roy obligingly hailing homeward- bound ships, and putting out a small boat, rowing alongside, asking politely, to the great astonishment of the party hailed, " Would you oblige us with a few barnacles off the bottom of your good ship? " All this that the Volunteer, who was dubbed the" Flycatcher," might have something upon -which to work. When on shore a sailor was detailed by Captain Fitz- Roy to attend the " Flycatcher," with a bag to carry the specimens, geological, botanical and zoological, and a cabin boy was set apart to write notes. This boy who afterward became Governor of Queensland and a K. C. B. used in after years to boast a bit, and rightfully, of 170 his share in producing " The Origin of Species." Q When LITTLE urged to smoke, Darwin replied, "I am not making JOURNEYS ? any new necessities for myself." When the weather was rough the " Flycatcher' was sick, much to Wickham's delight, but if the ship was becalmed, Darwin came out and gloried in the sun- shine, and in his work of dissecting, labeling and wri- ting memoranda and data. The sailors might curse the weather, he did not. Thus passed the days. At each stop many specimens were secured and these were to be sorted and sifted out at leisure. On shore the Captain had his work to do, and it was only after a year that Darwin accidentally discovered that the sailor who "was sent to carry his specimens, was always armed with knife & revolver, and his orders were not so much to carry what Wickham called, " the damn plunder," as to see that no harm befell the "Flycatcher." Fitz-Roy's interest in the scientific work was only general — longitude, latitude, his twenty-four chronom- eters, his maps and constant soundings, with minute records kept his time occupied. For Darwin and his specimens, however, he had a constantly growing re- spect, and 'when the long five-years' trip was ended Darwin realized that the gruff and grim Captain was indeed his friend. Captain Fitz-Roy had trouble with everybody on board in turn, thus proving his impar- tiality, but when parting was nigh, tears came to his eyes as he embraced Darwin, and said, with prophetic 171 LITTLE JOURNEYS yet broken words, " The 'Beagle's' voyage may be re- membered more through you than me — I hope it will be so!" And Darwin, too moved for speech, said nothing ex- cepting through the pressure of his hand. >HE idea of evolution took a firm hold upon the mind of Darwin, in an instant, one day on board the "Beagle." From that hour the thought of the mutability of species was the one controlling impulse of his life. On his return from the trip 'round the world he found himself in possession of an immense mass of speci- mens and much data bearing directly upon the point that creation is still going on. That he could ever sort, sift and formulate his evidence on his own account, he never at this time imagined. Indeed, about all he thought he could do was to present his notes and specimens to some scientific society in the hope that some of its members would go ahead and use the ma- terial & Jti With this thought in mind he opened up correspon- dence with several of the universities and various professors of science, and found, to his dismay that no one was willing to even read his notes, much less house, prepare for preservation and index his thou- sands of specimens. He read papers before different scientific societies, 172 however, from time to time, and gradually in London LITTLE it dawned upon the few thinkers that this modest and JOURNEYS low-voiced young man was doing a little thinking on his own account. One man to whom he had offered the specimens bluntly explained to Darwin that his speci- mens and ideas were only valuable to himself, and it •was folly to try to give such things away. Ideas are like children and should be cared for by their parents, and specimens are for the collector. Seeing the depres- sion of the young man, this friend offered to present the matter to the Secretary of the Exchequer. Every- thing can be done when the right man takes hold of it — the sum of one thousand pounds was appropriated by the Treasury for Charles Darwin's use in bringing out a Government report of the voyage of the "Beagle." Q And Darwin set to work, refreshed, rejoiced and en- couraged Jt, £• He was living in London in modest quarters, solitary and alone. He was not handsome and he lacked the dash and flash that make a success in society. On a trip up to his old home, he walked across the country to see his uncle, Josiah Wedgwood the Second. When he left it was arranged that he should return in a month and marry his cousin Emma Wedgwood. Q And it was all so done. One commentator said he married his cousin because he did n't know any other woman that would have him. But none were so unkind as to say that he married her in order to get rid of her, yet Henslow wondered how he ceased wooing science long enough to woo the lady. Doubtless the parents of 173 LITTLE JOURNEYS both parties had something to do with the arrange- ment, and in this instance it was beautiful and well. Q Darwin was married to his work, and no such fallacy as marrying a woman in order to educate her filled his mind. His wife was his mental mate, his devoted helper and friend. It is no small matter for a wife to be the friend of her husband. Mrs. Darwin had no small oval aspirations of her own. She flew the futile Four-o'clock and made no flannel nightgowns for Fijis. Twenty years after his marriage, Darwin wrote thus : "It is probably as you say — I have done an enormous amount of work. And this was only possible through the devotion of my wife, who, ignoring every idea of pleasure and comfort for herself, arranged in a thousand ways to give me joy and rest, peace and most valuable inspira- tion and assistance. If I occasionally lost faith in myself she most certainly never did. Only two hours a day could I work, and these to her were sacred. She guarded me as a mother guards her babe, and I look back now and see how hopelessly undone I should have been without her." In 1842, Darwin and his wife moved to the village of Down, County of Kent. The place where they lived -was a rambling old stone house with ample garden. The country was rough & unbroken, and one might have imagined he was a thousand miles from London instead of only twenty. There were no aristocratic neighbors,, no society to speak of. With the plain farmers and sim- ple folk of the village Darwin was on good terms. He 174 became treasurer of the local improvement society, and LITTLE thereby was serenaded once a year by a brass band. JOURNEYS We hear of the village rector once saying, " Mr. Dar- win knows botany better than anybody this side of Kew ; and although I am sorry to say that he seldom goes to church, yet he is a good neighbor and almost a model citizen." Together the clergyman and his neigh- bor discussed the merits of climbing roses, sweet peas and morning-glories. Darwin met all and every one on terms of absolute equality, and never forced his sci- entific hypotheses upon any one. In fact, no one in the village imagined that this quiet country gentleman in the dusty gray clothes that matched his full iron-gray beard, was destined for a place in Westminster Abbey — no, not even himself! Darwin's father, seeing that the Government had recognized him, and that the scientific societies of London were quite willing to do as much, settled on him an allowance that was ample for his simple wants. QOn the death of Dr. Darwin, Charles came into pos- session of an inheritance that brought him a yearly income of a little over five hundred pounds. Children came to bless this happy household — seven in all. With these Darwin was comrade and teacher. Two hours a day were sacred for science, but outside of this time the children made the study their own and littered the place with their collections gathered on heath and dale. The recognition of the "holy time' was strong in the minds of the children, so no prohi- bitions were needed. One daughter has written in 175 LITTLE familiar way of once wanting to go into her father's JOURNEYS study for a forgotten pair of scissors. It was the " holy time," and she thought she could not wait, so she took 'off her shoes and entered in stockkig-feet, hoping to be unobserved. Her father was working at his microscope — he saw her, reached out one arm as she passed, drew her to him and kissed her forehead. The guilty little , girl never trespassed again — how could she, with the father that gave her only love ! That there was no sternness in this recognition of the value of the working hours is further indicated in that little Francis, aged six, once put his head in the door and offered the father a sixpence if he would come out and play in the garden. For several vears Darwin was village magistrate. Most of the cases brought before him were for poach- ing or drunkenness. " He always seemed to be trying to find an excuse for the prisoner, and usually suc- ceeded," says his son ^ Once when a prosecuting attorney complained because Darwin had discharged a prisoner, the magistrate, who might have fined the impudent attorney for contempt of court, merely saidp " Why, he 's as good as we are. If tempted in the same way I am sure that I would have done as he has done. We can't blame a man for doing what he has to do ! " QThis was poor reasoning from a legal point of view. Darwin after-ward admitted that he did n't hear much of the evidence, as his mind was full of orchids, but the fellow looked sorry and he really could n't punish anybody who had simply made a mistake. 176 The local legal lights gradually lost faith in Magistrate Darwin's peculiar brand of justice — he had n't much respect for law, and once when a lawyer cited him the criminal code, he said, "Tut, tut, that was made a hundred years ago!" Then he fined the man five shillings, and paid the -fine himself, when he should have sent him to the workhouse for six months. 'HE men who have benefited the world most, have, almost without exception, been looked down upon and depreciated by the priestly class. That is to say, the men upon whose tombs society now carves the word Savior, were outcasts and criminals in their day. In a society where the priest is regarded as the mouth- piece of divinity — and therefore the highest type of man — the artist, the inventor, the discoverer, the gen- ius— the man of truth — has always been regarded as a criminal. Society advances as it doubts the priest, dis- trusts his oracles, and loses faith in his institution. In the priest, at first, was deposited all human knowl- edge, and what he did not know he pretended to know. He was the guardian of mind and morals, and the cure* of souls. To question him was to die here and be damned for eternity. The problem of civilization has been to get the truth past the preacher to the people — he has forever barred and blocked the way, and until he was shorn of his 177 LITTLE JOURNEYS LITTLE temporal power there was no hope. The prisons were JOURNEYS first made for those who doubted the priest ; behind and beneath every episcopal residence were dungeons; the ferocious and delicate tortures that reached every physical and mental nerve were his. His anathemas and curses were always quickly turned upon the strong men of mountain or sea who dared live natural lives, said what they thought was truth, or did what they deemed was right. Science is a search for truth, but theology is a clutch for power. Nothing was so distasteful to a priest as freedom — a happy, exuberant, fearless, radiant and self-sufficient man he both feared and abhorred. A free soul was re- garded by the Church as one to be dealt with. The priest has ever put a premium on pretense and hy- pocrisy. Nothing recommended a man more than humility and the acknowledgment that he was a worm of the dust. The ability to do and dare were in them- selves considered proof of depravity. The education of the young has been monopolized by priests in order to perpetuate the fallacies of theology, and all endeavor to put education on a footing of usefulness and utility has been fought inch by inch. Andrew D. White, in his book, "The Warfare of Science and Religion," has calmly and without heat sketched the war that Science has had to make to reach the light. Slowly, stubbornly, insolently the- ology has fought Truth step by step — but always re- treating, taking refuge first behind one subterfuge, then 178 another. When an alleged fact was found to be a LITTLE fallacy, we were told it was not a literal fact, simply a JOURNEYS spiritual one. All of theology's weapons have been taken from her and placed in the Museum of Horrors — all save one, social ostracism. And this consists in a refusal to invite Science to indulge in cream-puffs. We smile, knowing that the man who now successfully defies theology is the only one she really, yet secretly admires. If he does not run after her, she holds true the poetic unities by running after him. Mankind is emancipated (or partially so). Darwin's fame rests, for the most part, on two books, "The Origin of Species " and " The Descent of Man." Yet before these were published he had issued " A Journal of Research into Geology and Natural His- tory," "The Zoology of the Voyage of the 'Beagle,'" "A Treatise on Coral Reefs," "Volcanic Islands," " Geological Observations," and "A Monograph of the Cirripedia." Had Darwin died before " The Origin of Species" was published he would have been famous among -scientific men, although it was the abuse of theologians on the publication of " The Origin of Species 'r that really made him world famous. Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin's chief competitor, said that "A Monograph on the Cirripedia' is enough upon which to found a deathless reputation. Darwin was equally eminent in Geology, Botany and Zoology jfi Jt> On November 24th, 1859, was published "The Origin of Species." Murray had hesitated about accepting the 179 LITTLE work, but on the earnest solicitation of Sir Charles JOURNEYS Lyell, who gave his personal guarantee to the pub- lisher against loss, quite unknown to Darwin, twelve hundred copies of the book were printed. The edition was sold in one day, and who was sur- prised most, the author or the publisher, it is difficult to say & £• Up to this time theology had stood solidly on the biblical assertion that mankind had sprung from one man and one woman, and that in the beginning every species was fixed and immutable. Aristotle, three hundred years before Christ, had suggested that by cross-fertilization and change of environment, new species had been, and were being evoked. But the Church had declared Aristotle a heathen, and in every school and college of Christendom it was taught that the world and everything in it was created in six days of twenty-four hours each, and that this occurred four thousand and four years before Christ, on May Tenth. Q Those who doubted or disputed this statement had no standing in society, and in truth until the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, were in actual danger of death — heresy & treason being usually regarded as the same thing. Erasmus Darwin had taught that species were not immutable, but his words were so veiled in the language of poesy that they went unchallenged. But now the grandson of Dr. Erasmus Darwin came forward with the net result of thirty years' continuous work. "The Origin of Species" did not attack any one's religious belief — in fact, in it the biblical account of 180 t \ x, creation is not once referred to. It was a calm, judicial LITTLE record of close study and observation, that seemed to JOURNEYS prove that life began in very lowly forms, and that it has constantly ascended and differentiated, new forms and new species being continually created, and that the work of creation still goes on. In the preface to "The Origin of Species' Darwin gives Alfred Russel 'Wallace credit for coming to the same conclusion as himself, and states that both had been at work on the same idea for over a score of years, but each working separately, unknown to the other. Q Andrew D. White says that the publication of Dar- win's book was like plowing into an ant-hill. The theologians, rudely awakened from comfort and repose, swarmed out angry, wrathful and confused. The air was charged with challenges, and soggy sermons, books, pamphlets, brochures and reviews, all were flying at the head of poor Darwin. Questions that he had anticipated and answered at great length were flung off by men who had neither read his book nor expected an answer. The idea that man had evolved from a lower form of animal life was especially con- sidered immensely funny, and jokes about "monkey ancestry," came from almost every pulpit, convulsing the pew with laughter. In passing it may be well to note that Darwin nowhere says that man descended from a monkey. He does, however, affirm his belief that they had a common ancestor. One branch of the family took to the plains, and evolved into men, and the other branch remained 181 / r LITTLE in the woods and are monkeys still. The expression, JOURNEYS "the missing link" is nowhere used by Darwin — that was a creation of one of his critics. Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, summed up the argu- ment against Darwinism in the "Quarterly Review," by declaring that "Darwin was guilty of an attempt to limit the power of God;" that his book "contradicts the Bible;' that "it dishonors Nature." And in a speech before the British Association for the Advance- ment of Science, where Darwin was not present, the Bishop repeated his assertions, and turning to Huxley, asked if he really were descended from a monkey, and if so, was it on his father's or his mother's side! Q Huxley sat silent, refusing to reply, but the audience began to clamor, and Huxley slowly arose and calmly but forcibly said: " I assert and I repeat, that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would be a man, a man of restless and versatile intellect, 'who, not content with success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real ac- quaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhet- oric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digression and a skillful appeal to religious prejudices." Captain Fitz-Roy, who was present at this meeting, was also called for. He was now Admiral Fitz-Roy, and felt compelled to uphold his employer, the State, so he upheld the State Religion and backed up the 182 \ Bishop of Oxford in his emptiness. " I often had oc- LITTLE casion on board the 'Beagle' to reprove Mr. Darwin JOURNEYS for his disbelief in the First Chapter of Genesis," solemnly said the Admiral. And Francis Darwin writes it down without comment, probably to show how much the Volunteer Naturalist was helped, aided and inspired by the Captain of the Expedition. But the reply of Huxley was a shot heard round the world, and for the most part the echo was passed along by the enemy. Huxley had insulted the Church, they said, and the adherents of the Mosaic account took the attitude of outraged and injured innocence. Q As for himself, Darwin said nothing. He ceased to attend the meetings of the scientific societies, for fear that he would be drawn into debate, and while he felt a sincere gratitude for Huxley's friendship, he depre- cated the stern rebuke to the Bishop of Oxford. " It will arouse the opposition to greater unreason," he said £> & And this was exactly what happened. Even the Eng- lish Catholics took sides with Wilberforce the Protes- tant, and Cardinal Manning organized a society ''to fight this new, so-called science that declares there is no God and that Adam was an ape." Even the Non-Conformists and Jews came in, and there was the peculiar spectacle witnessed of the Church of England, the Catholics, the Non-Conform- ists and the Jews aroused and standing as one man, against one quiet villager who remained at home and said, "If my book cannot stand the bombardment, why 183 LITTLE JOURNEYS then it deserves to go down, and to be forgotten." QSpurgeon declared that Darwinism was more dan- gerous than open and avowed infidelity, since "the one motive of the whole book is to dethrone God." QRabbi Hirschberg wrote, " Darwin's volume is plaus- ible to the unthinking person; but a deeper insight shows a mephitic desire to overthrow the Mosaic books and bury Judaism under a mass of fanciful rubbish." Q In America Darwin had no more persistent critic than the Rev. DeWitt Talmage. For ten years Dr. Talmage scarcely preached a sermon without refer- ence to "monkey ancestry " and "baboon unbelievers." QThe New York "Christian Advocate" declared, " Dar- win is endeavoring to becloud and befog the whole question of truth, and his book will be of short life." Q An eminent Catholic physician and writer, Dr. Con- stantine James, wrote a book of three hundred pages called "Darwinism, or the Man-Ape." A copy of Dr. James' book being sent to Pope Pius IX., the Pope acknowledged it in a personal letter thanking the author for his "masterly refutations of the vagaries of this man Darwin, wherein the Creator is left out of all things and man proclaims himself independent, his own king, his own priest, his own God — then degrad- ing man to the level of the brute by declaring he had the same origin, and this origin was lifeless matter. Could folly and pride go farther than to degrade science into a vehicle for throwing contumely and disrespect on our holy religion ! ' This makes rather interesting reading now for those 184 who believe in the infallibility of popes. So well did LITTLE Dr. James' book sell, coupled with the approbation of JOURNEYS the Pope, that as late as 1882 a new and enlarged edition appeared, and the author was made a member of the Papal Order of St. Sylvester. It is quite needless to add that those who read Dr. James' book refuting Darwin never read Darwin, since "The Origin of Species ' was placed on the Index Expurgatorius in 1860. Some years after, when it was discovered that Darwin had written other books, these were all like- wise honored. The book on barnacles being called to the attention of the Censor, that worthy exclaimed, " Some new heresy, I dare say — put it on the Index!' And it was so done. The success of Dr. James' book reveals the popularity of the form of reasoning that digests the refutation first, and the original proposition not at all. In 1875, Gladstone in an address at Liverpool said, " Upon the ground of what is called evolution God is relieved from the labor of creation and of governing the universe." Herbert Spencer called Gladstone's attention to the fact that Newton "with his law of gravitation, and the physical science of astronomy was open to the same charge. Gladstone then took refuge in the " Contempo- rary Review," and retreated in a cloud of words that had nothing to do with the subject. Thomas Carlyle, who has facetiously been called a liberal thinker, had not the patience to discuss Darwin's book seriously, but grew red in the face and hissed 185 LITTLE in falsetto when it was even mentioned. He wrote of JOURNEYS Darwin as " the apostle of dirt," and said, " He thinks his grandfather was a chimpanzee, and I suppose he is right — leastwise I am not the one to deprive him of the honor." Scathing criticisms were uttered on Darwin's ideas, both on the platform and in print by Dr. Noah Porter of Yale, Dr. Hodge of Princeton, and Dr. Tayler Lewis of Union College. Agassiz, the man who was regarded as the foremost scientist in America, thought he had to choose between orthodoxy and Darwinism, and he chose orthodoxy. His gifted son tried to rescue his father from the grip of prejudice, and later has endeav- ored to free his name from the charge that he could not change his mind, but alas! Louis Agassiz's words were expressed in print, and widely circulated. There were two men in America whose names stand out like beacon-lights because they had the courage to speak up loud and clear for Charles Darwin while the pack was baying the loudest. These men were Dr. Asa Gray, who influenced the Appletons to publish an American edition of "The Origin of Species," and Professor Edward L. Youmans, who gave up his own brilliant lecture work in order that he might stand by Darwin, Spencer, Huxley and Wallace. For the man who was known as " a Darwinian " there was no place in the American Lyceum. Shut out from addressing the public by word of mouth, Youmans founded a magazine that he might express himself, and he fired a monthly broadside from his "Popular Science 186 Monthly." And it is good to remember that the faith LITTLE of Youmans was not without its reward. He lived to JOURNEYS see his periodical grow from a confessed failure — a bill of expense that took his monthly salary to maintain — to a paying property that made its owner passing rich. Gray, too, outlived the charge of infidelity, and was not forced to resign his position as Professor at Harvard, as was freely prophesied he would. As for Darwin himself he stood the storm of misun- derstanding and abuse without resentment or scorn. " Truth must fight its way," he said, " and this gaunt- let of criticism is all for the best. What is true in my book will survive, and that which is error will be blown away as chaff." He was neither exalted by praise nor cast down by censure. For Huxley, Lyell, Hooker, Spencer, Wallace and Asa Gray he had a great and profound love — what they said affected him deeply, and their steadfast kindness at times touched him to tears. For the great, seething, outside world that had not thought along abstruse scientific lines, and could not, he cared little. "How can we expect them to see as we do," he wrote to Gray — "it has taken me thirty years of toil and research to come to these conclusions. To have the unthinking masses accept all I say would be calamity. This opposition is a winnowing success, and all a part of the Law of Evolution that works for good." 187 LITTLE JOURNEYS [OR forty years Darwin lived in the same house at Down, in the same quiet, simple way. Here he, lived and worked, and the world gradually came to him — figuratively and literally. Gradually it dawned upon the theologians that a God who could set in motion natural laws that worked with beneficent and absolute regularity, was just as great as if He had made everything at once and then stopped. The miracle of evolution is just as sub- lime as the miracle Qf Adam's deep sleep and the making of a woman out of a, man's rib. The faith of the scientist who sees order, regularity, and unfailing law is quite as great as that of a preacher who believes everything he reads in a book. The scientist is a man with faith plus. When Darwin died in 1882, the words Darwinism and infidelity were no longer synonymous. The discrepancies and inconsistencies of Darwin's theories were seen by him as by his critics, and he was ever willing to admit the doubt. None of his disciples were as ready to modify: their opinions as he. "We must beware of making science dogmatic," he once said to Haeckel. And at another time he said, " I would feel I had gone too far were it not for Wal- lace, who came to the same conclusions, quite inde- pendent of me." Darwin's mind was simple and child- like. He was a student, always learning, and no one was too mean or poor for him to learn from. QThe patience, persistency, and untiring industry of 188 the man, combined with the daring imagination that saw the thing clearly long before he could prove it, and the gentle forbearance in the presence of unkindness and misunderstanding, won the love of a nation. He wished to be buried in the village churchyard at Down, but at his death, by universal acclaim, the gates of Westminster swung wide to receive the dust of the man whom bishops, clergy & laymen alike had reviled. Darwin had wbn, not alone because he was right, but because his was a great and loving soul — one without resentment. Archdeacon Farrar, quoting Huxley, said, " I would rather be Darwin & be right than be Premier of England — we have had and will have many pre- miers, but the world will never have another Darwin." LITTLE JOURNEYS 189 Formulas Bookbinders Author of "The Whisper" and Head Binder in The Roy croft Shop Being a collection of Trade Formulas, the result of twenty-five years' study and practice in the Arts of Tooling in Gold, Edge-Gilding, Marbling, Stamping, and the various other departments of bookbinding. CIRCULARS ON APPLICATION SOME OF THE SUBJECTS COVERED Finishing and Stamping Edge Gilding and Metal Edges Stamping of Ooze Leather Colored & Red-under-Gold Edges Tooling of Levant Book-Edge Marbling Stamping of Silk (Badges, etc.) Miscellaneous Formulas Only those who have struggled to attain perfection can appreciate the value of this volume. Here are trade secrets for which men have paid, and wisely, thousands of dollars — secrets that have heretofore been jealously guarded by the masters of this most difficult craft. This book will be of great benefit to every binder who is satisfied only with the best. Bench workers have very little time for experiment — they want results, and here Mr. Kinder, a master, steps in and gives you just the final word you need. On Imperial Japan Paper, One Hundred and Twenty Pages, size of page 9x12. Bound solidly and plainly in boards. The Price is Twenty-Five Dollars in advance. THE ROYCROFTERS East Aurora, Erie County, New York ONE -THIRD YOUR LIFE IS SPENT IN BED The first requisite for sound sleep is bodily comfort. Every one admits this, but how about that bed tick full of excelsior called a mattress, and how do you feel in the morning? Now a mattress that has a will of its own does not produce the sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care. But these will : — ROYCROFT MATTRESSES AND ROYCROFT BOX SPRINGS The first is hand-made by an honest Roy crofter who knows the trick of handling a good quality of cot- ton ; the second is made by this same Roycrofter. Q Never was a better Box Spring produced — this is how he does it — a wooden frame, sixty-three steel coil springs, well tied together — a two-inch layer of cotton and the whole thing covered with ticking & all bound with a Roycroft Binding. Roycroft Mattresses, full size (4ft. 6in. x eft. 4in.) $12.00 Roycroft Box Springs « " " « 15.00 If other sizes are desired, advise us and we will make prices THE ROYCROFTERS Furniture Shop, East Aurora, New York 4 'Beautify your Home" WITH THE FAMOUS ART STUDIES FROM Purr Jflcintosf) Justly claimed by its many admirers to be 6 ' The Most Beautiful Magazine in the World ' ' Each month 50 or more superb pictures of Celebrities. Scenes and incidents are presented, many of them in several colors, and the balance printed in duotone ink on fine enamel paper. The cover is an art study in colors, and the magazine is BOUND WITH SILK CORD of a color harmonizing with the color scheme of each issue. Every Picture Worthy a Frame Thousands of fine American Homes are adorned with pages from the BURR McINTOSH MONTHLY, many of them framed with Japanese Wood Veneer prepared by us expressly for these pic- tures. Booklet, showing rooms beautified with Burr MclnlOSU Monthly pictures, sent free on request. Our Special One Dollar Offer The subscription price of the Burr Mdntosh Monthly is $3.00 a year, and the wonder is that it can be sold at that price. We want to introduce the magazine to the readers of Little Journeys, and make you the following special offer : SEND US ONE HOL- LAR and we will send you the June, July, August and Septem- ber, 1905, numbers of the Burr McIntOSh Monthly, and also send you FREE the 50 cent Christmas, 1904, number, conceded to be the most superb Christmas number of the season. You will be delighted with this magnificent magazine. Send now, before the Christmas numbers are gone. Co., 4 m 22tr At, j£eto ^ark Cttp \ A Little Journey to the Home of Elbert Hubbard By TERENCE V. POWDERLY HE conductor shouted: "All out for East Aurora!' And he told the truth, for everybody got out and the train went off in a lonesome, re- gretful kind of a way. The conductor and train-hands wished they could stop off, too, but they were on the run and could n't. I looked around for some one to tell me where to find Elbert Hubbard, and a young man dressed in a little brief authority and a suit of overalls, wearing a Roycroft badge and a welcoming grin asked, "Goingto Roycroft?': I said <:Yes," and he separated me from my satchel and umbrella, gave me a hearty hand-shake and told me to walk straight ahead and I could n't miss it. Were you ever in East Aurora? No, then you 've missed a lot. It is not a paradise, but would make a first-class vestibule for one. Trees, old trees with rugged trunks and wide-spreading limbs, line the walks, and every tree nods and whispers a thousand welcomes from among the leaves that hide the sun of an August clay from view. QThe walk from the station to the Phalansterie may be a mile, a half-mile, or a quarter of a mile, more or less, but you don't notice the length of it while eagerly push- ing forward to see the place where the most wonderful of books and the quaintest of furniture are made. You meet men, women and children as you walk along, you don't know them from Adam, but they all say a kind word, or smile approvingly as you pass. When I wras a child I knew an old German woman who lived down where the woods had been cleared away to make room for houses. She was our next door neigh- bor and boylike, I could be found at her house when I should have been at home. She grew flowers all round the house. They crept up the porch and sent their per- fume thru the door with you as you entered. They peeped in the windows and climbed the fence to meet and welcome you, johnny-jump-ups, four-o'clocks, dahlias, fox-gloves, harebells, phlox, larkspurs, scores of others and nasturtiums. The nasturtiums she grew were tinted with all the hues of a glorious sunset, and thru the long years that stretch between that far-away time and now, I can see the silvery leaves and catch the odor of the blossoms. I asked no one where the Roy croft Shops were, and when I came upon them did not see them for a long time. A low, well-built stone wall runs around Roycroftie, and along that wall, over it, caressing it, shielding and com- muning with it were the brilliant-hued, never-forgotten companions of the days when cut-down breeches, rav- elled stitches and misplaced switches (as I then regarded them) were new to me. Extending a welcome in red and yellow, green and gold, the nasturtiums pointed the way to the "Chapel " where I saw other pilgrims standing, chatting and listening. When a church or chapel comes to view one instinctively sobers down into a feeling of reverential calm. I do any- way, and the Roycroft Chapel, beautiful in its homelike exterior and grand in its simplicity, acknowledged the introduction of the nasturtiums as I entered. Erected by willing, well-trained hands and dedicated to the service of God thru helping Man, the Chapel is not unlike others I have seen. It is, however, open to all. Turk, Jew and Atheist may touch elbows with the Catholic, Presbyterian and Methodist without feeling that any of the powder of piety has been rubbed off. God does His best work thru the best of all His instruments, and / • • 11 in this Chapel the work of man cheers the eye, pleases the senses and makes one feel that he is in the house of God, because the place is dedicated to His children. Made by man, for man and open to mankind 'of all de- scriptions ' you feel at home the moment you enter it. Pictures around the walls, roomy seats that do not give you a taste of the "sweet ultimately" by cramping your knees up against your chin, pleasant-faced people who laugh and talk out loud, you find in this Chapel. You find just such people in other chapels but somehow or other they do not laugh there. You will see and hear men and women weep in church, speak no word above a whisper there, and yet people do not go there for trouble, they do not go there to whisper or cry, to seek sorrow or grief. They go there to be real, to find rest, peace and happiness, but do not give audible expression to their happiness in a laugh. Man made the church, God made man and the trees; in church man may not laugh aloud but under the grand, wonderful trees which God spreads above us we may laugh, sing and do what we will so long as it is not of- fensive to God or our neighbor. But bless me! I am mor- alizing, and that won't do. Leaving the Chapel I sought Hubbard and found him standing beneath the bell that summons the faithful to lectures and concerts. He was dressed in a suit of over- alls and looked the sympathetic, soulful man he is. He said: u Hello, Terence, glad you came." I remarked: 'Glad to find you dressed up for com- pany," and then he said, "I will have you in a suit like this before you are here very long." That was the meeting and the greeting. After a lecture on what to eat and how to eat, I went to eat — at the Phalansterie. Young women who did artistic work in the Roycroft Shop week-days and sang in the Chapel on Sundays waited on the table every day. Ev- • • • 111 erybody knew every one else tho they had never met before. You just took your seat where your fancy or the waitress suggested, and began a course of physical culture among the well-filled dishes. Turn to the left or right and begin a talk on politics, religion, socialism, finance, forestry, botany, bugology or burglary, and your neigh- bor knew how to answer you. No frills, no restraint. QI was there several days — the time was all too short. There was no starch, no fuss and feathers, no ostentation, no pomp or ceremony. That conference acted like one great family coming home from many parts to attend a reunion. Surely there must be something in the Philis- tine habit, once acquired, that brings strangers into close touch as friends without the formality of an introduction. Q There were Philistines there from everywhere, and royal good fellows they were. Many of the Roycrofters are women, and they were well and handsomely repre- sented at that conference. East Aurora is not a drinking town, but it was full the day I got there, and Mr. Hubbard took me beneath his roof, as his guest during my stay. He just took me to my room, pushed open the door and said: 'This is yours while you are here, you may come when you get ready, go when you please, do as you please, get up in time for breakfast at the Phalansterie — if you want to — no doors are locked here so you need not hurry home nights." Q I stayed there four or five days, and by the second day a feeling of honesty began to steal over me. I found myself leaving that room without even closing my satchel. Hubbard has not advertised for any of his personal property since I left, and that speaks well for me. Marshall P. Wilder was there, too. He is the biggest little man in the country. Hubbard did n't know but that it might rain or be cloudy part of the time during the con- ference, and he brought Wilder there to take the place of the sunshine. . IV He is just a lump of concentrated sunshine. Wilder is not very tall lengthwise, but he is tall enough crosswise to make up for it and he is fun all the way 'round. You don't laugh at Wilder, you laugh with him. All his jokes are not new, either, but he hands out a new laugh with every one of them. You don't always get the best time out of the watch with the biggest case, but you can always count on having a good time with Marshall P. Wilder. You ask what is Elbert Hubbard doing, is he in earnest, what does he propose to do? I don't know that I can an- swer you — on second thought I know I cannot. Hubbard is doing a noble work. He is making a community of artists of those who grow up in East Aurora and they are, thru their work, inspiring the rest of the world to do likewise. Those who do things in the Roycroft Shops put part of themselves into their product, and when the last finishing touch is imparted the worker sends out a bless- ing with his work and with it the wish that it may bring peace and happiness to "whomsoever these presents may come.' 4 Is he in earnest? ' Look into that handsome, thought- ful face, read his eye and you will find nothing but earnestness there. He makes books that appear as heaven's messengers in this commonplace world of ours. Beauty, art, joy, gladness, satisfaction are all bound be- tween the covers of Elbert Hubbard's books. Don't ask me to describe them, I cannot. Send for one, any one, read it, examine it,and you will realize that there is nothing quite like it anywhere. Its touch brings satisfaction, its language is simple but beautiful, and here let me remark that the simpler a man writes the less will he have to con- sult the dictionary. Hubbard is not proposing to do anything, that I know of, he just goes ahead and does it, whatever it is. He is teaching men and women, boys and girls, to do things instead of each other. He makes furniture as well as books, and when you see it you want to sit on it if it is a bench, or eat from it if it is a table. Everything made here speaks of home, not the studied, fixed-up home with be- dizened chairs from which the gilt peels guiltily off, when you look at them, straight-backed sofas, tidies, throws and doilies scattered everywhere, ready to fasten themselves to your back and elope with you when you leave. No, but articles that are grand in their propor- tions, simple, solid, substantial and artistic. As with the books I will not try to describe them, get some of that furniture and it will tell its own story, I don't know how. Q<;What does he propose?' I don't know. He does n't propose to turn the tide on which men float to ruin, but he does try to turn the strugglers and help them battle against the tide by causing them to do, and have respect for honest labor. He is reviving the lost art of illumin- ing books by hand, and is doing it well: he is inspir- ing a love of the beautiful and artistic as well as the useful. The last day I was there I saw men hand-tooling books making a hundred different marks and scrolls on the binding, doing it by hand, no two books alike. There is an individuality about the Roycroft books that you find nowhere else between covers, or on pages. When I turned away from the workmen, and I did it re- luctantly, a black spaniel stood at my heels and followed me down stairs. No one molested him: he walked around there as unreservedly as I did. Going down stairs we, the dog and I, met a little curly-haired girl going up. She had an armful of flowers. I asked her if she was bring- ing them in to her sister or her papa. She shook her curls, laughed and said: uNo, just fetchin' 'em in for 'em all." Q If that child, while in the Shop, saw a box of paints, a brush and sheet of paper, she might test her ability and suit her fancy in painting a leaf for one of the books you get from the Roycrofters. If she did it well she would be vi paid for it, but, well or badly, she would be invited to come again and try it over. No one feels a stranger or ill at ease in the Roycroft. I watched Mr. Hubbard walk along the streets and saw the children meet him. They had a cheery word for him, they all smiled and talked to him. They all received a kind word from him and they were all happy, the children be- cause they met him and he spoke to them ; he, because they were happy. Roycroft is no place for the artificial man, and, by the way, I rather guess that in this artificial age the man who acts naturally is regarded as insane. The chap with the clocked stockings that ticks loud enough to be heard upstairs in the garret, and pulls his trousers up to show them off, should pass on to Buffalo, and not stop off at East Aurora. When you go there, take a second suit of clothes along. Roycroft is a stylish place, it has a style of its own, it is a fashionable place, it has a fashion of going out to the fields among the buttercups and daisies, out in the woods among the ferns, the shrubs and shades. If you have a suit that will stand the wear and tear of out-door life, take it with you along with "your best suit of clothes," for you will wear it more than the other. You may wear what you like so long as it is respectable. No one pays attention to what you wear, but they do heed what you say, so study up and try to talk well before go- ing there, or else cultivate that becoming silence which is a benediction to heal the blows of sound. 'What did I do?" Oh, I have been to so many places, have been written up — and down — so much that no one minds me now. In the summer the habit grows on you, and all who visit Roycroft, get out early in the fields and woods. I met a singular character there named Freeland. He did n't stop at the Phalansterie or anywhere else that I know * • Til of. I met him out in the woods one morning and was surprised to find him with an armful of stones, roots and specimens that he must have been hours gathering. Asked him if he came out before breakfast and he said : * No, just took a cup of coffee before coming out and af- ter I got here, stubbed my toe and took a roll." I met Wilson Fay there. You must meet him when you visit Roycroft. He knows more than any man I ever met about earth, trees, grasses, flowers, birds, beasts, (our kind excepted), rocks, stones and everything in na- ture. His knowledge is wonderful, his language is poetry itself, for it is the language of flowers. Think of- A tree, a shrub, a radiant flower, A crystal brook, a shaded bower, A sunlit field, a golden day And you know the soul of Wilson Fay. He will pick up a weed, and from its leaves and roots read a poem to you. He says there are no noxious weeds, that a noxious weed is a plant we do not understand, and is not that true of men ? The poor fellow going to the dogs thru drink — no, not to the dogs, for they do not drink — who is shunned and reviled, called a bad weed, may be only a plant we do npt understand, and a little kindness, a word of cheer, a smile may change his whole career and make a posey of him. Try it on the next one you meet and you will do more good than if you handed out a quarter or half-dollar to him. I don't mean to say that you should not hand out the half-dollar, too, if he needs it, but if you do, don't throw in a chunk of advice or a sermon — it won't do any good. But be kind. Kindness is like the measles, it is catch- ing. I have it myself sometimes. Mr. Hubbard doesn't keep his visitors in the Shop talk- ing about himself, he talks less of himself than any man I know. He takes you out in the woods and talks plants and plant life, horses, animals of all kinds, and how to • • • Vlll labor satisfactorily and well. Animals are his friends, he knows all about them and loves them. I -heard men say after they were at Roycroft a day or two and had gone afield once or twice, that they could not understand why they had not taken interest in such things at home. Here they were eager to hear the lessons taught by Mr. Hubbard or Mr. Fay, and they took deep interest in shrub and flower. On going to East Aurora you go to a place where more people who love inanimate nature go than to most places. At home you do not meet such people, and you are richer for your visit. When at home, returning from your work, you may be in a brown study, or a blue or a green study, about a tree or flower, you wonder- is the flower pistillate or staminate, Then, why did you stay so late.? Where 's that sugar, where 's that ham? Until inside you think a dam, the sugar and the ham take the place of tree and flower. Anyway there 's a time and place for everything, and at times the odor of ox-tail soup is apt to supplant ox-eye daisies in your affections. At home, with its worries and toils and cares, You 're apt to see the rents and tears. But steal off to the woods for a quiet hour, And you '11 hear God talk from tree and flower. Learn the lesson and learn it well; As you walk through field and shady dell, Let it sink in deeply as it can, That you cannot love flowers and not love man. God made both, and He made them well; He made the flowers, but man made hell. There 'd be no hell if man could see The beauty hidden in shrub and tree; The flowers afield, the ferns in the wood Are all so pure, so sweet, so good, But God is wise, He knows best. One day He '11 call man home to rest. Man rules the earth, he 's monarch here; ix But God rules here and everywhere. The sceptre from man's hand will pass And o'er him will rule the flowers and grass, and so on. After all, the flowers and grass are man's best friends, they give him happiness in life, and cover him, with all his faults and virtues, after death. But what about Hubbard, you ask. He radiates love of the beautiful, the artistic and the useful. He is an inspiration. He asks no one to do what he is not willing to do him- self; and he will do whatever comes to his hand to do. Honest work, done with all your heart and soul, is what you should do — and that is the way he works. No one thinks of the clock in the Roycroft Shop. I should think that the man who stole an hour, or minute of time there would feel his own pocket after awhile and wonder who had picked it. Once a year, you may go oftener if you wish, Elbert invites to East Aurora a number of Philistines, some of whom, like myself, have been slain many times over with the jaw-bone of Balaam's teacher of languages. This gathering is called the Roycroft Conference. Men and women who think for themselves, but who respect the opinions of others, gather here. You do not find the long-haired man or short-haired woman, but you find the manly man and womanly woman at the Conference each year. If you care to ex- press your opinion no one takes offence so long as you do not run thru the realms of vulgarity, obscenity or profanity — these have no cards of admission to the Roy- croft Conference. There are lectures at the Chapel and out at the pavilion in the woods, visits to the barn where Ali Baba milks the cows and speaks a wonderful language that all, including the cows, may understand, walks afield and out to the woods where- x To him who in the love of nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language, and makes one feel better for having mingled with the Royal Roycrofters who believe the good things of this earth were made for its men and women, made to be en- joyed here and not hereafter, made to be enjoyed by all, shared by all, for joy and happiness may be given to others and in the doing of it we make ourselves happier. You are not asked to give up any of your earthly posses- sions, but in giving and taking kindness, considerate treatment, happiness and good-cheer, all are commu- nists. An inspiring genius must have given birth to all this, and his name is Elbert Hubbard during his visit to this earth. The world has produced many great men — it has never produced a faultless man. Hubbard's faults, and I hope he is not without them, are his own. I did not enquire into or meddle myself with them and I felt greatly re- lieved when he did not enquire into mine, for I am not made of the kind of clay that can throw stones accurately. I know more about myself than I know about Hubbard, or any one else, and, while I have heard and read many bad things about myself, I do not believe them all. Any- way the worst of them is not so bad as I could tell about myself if I became real chummy with the public. Therefore am I pleased that no one knows me as I know myself, and if any of my friends are blessed with faults and some other friend wishes to gossip about them, I am not the one to " cast the first stone ' or the last one either. The world will write Elbert Hubbard a benefactor of the race. He seeks to cause workers to put in practice the old advice : " Whatever your hand finds to do, do it well." He detests cant, hates hypocrisy, and despises sham. He is a real man in all that he does. His writings are virile, xi arrow-tipped and strong bowed. His blow has the effect of a sledge, but he uses only a quill. His vocabulary is wonderful, his Little Journeys are classics. Every fellow who thought he knew how to write before he read Elbert Hubbard, is barking at him, calling him fake, upstart, insane, insincere, and a lot of other names that he has to consult the dictionary to learn how to spell — and then he tries to imitate him. When the mental hydrophobia that now animates them has been buried with them, Hubbard will be remembered as one who served his fellowmen without asking leave, helped them in his own way to lift themselves out of the rut, that was beaten for them by others, and to walk in a new road. He is teaching man to do his work well, to respect the labor of his own hands, to be kind, to be cheerful in his work, to aspire to the highest ideals; he is teaching man to be proud of his work and to throw his false pride to the dogs. Hubbard does not ask you to agree with his religious or political views, or with any of his views for that matter, but he claims for all men the right to do as he does — ex- press their views without fear or favor, and be true to themselves. Hubbard keeps his hands in his own pockets; some of his critics prefer exploring their neighbors' pockets. He makes many a vigorous plea for freedom, but no man knows better than Elbert Hubbard that freedom implies responsibility. In his private life Hub- bard is a regular Puritan. He is not afraid of work, for the last time I saw him he was walking slowly, but fearlessly toward the wood-pile, where a sawbuck stood exposed to view. If this Little Journey to the Home of Elbert Hubbard is not satisfactory to you, why go to East Aurora yourself. xn KNOW I am restless, and make others so; • I know my words are weapons, ful> of danger, full of death ; (Indeed I am the real soldier; It is not he, there, with his bayonet, and not the red-striped artilleryman;) For I confront peace, security, and all the settled laws, to unsettle them; I am more resolute because all have de- nied me, than I could ever h^ve been had all accepted me; I heed not, and have never heeded either experience, caution, majorities, nor ridicule; And the threat of what is call'd hell is lit- tle or nothing to me; And the lure of what is call'd heaven is little or nothing to me; **'.-*Dear Camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still urge you, without the 'least idea what is bur destination, Or whether we shall be victorious, or ut- terly quell'd and defeated. — Waif Whitman JAN 2 6 1931 ,