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THE

POPULAE SCIENCE

MONTHLY.

CONDUCTED BY E. L. AND W. J. YOUMAJSTS.

VOL. XXIV.

NOVEMBER, 1883, TO APRIL, 1884.

NEW YORK :
B. APPLETON AND COMPANY,

1, 3, and 5 BOND STREET.

1884.

COPYRIGHT, 1884,

By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

/ o 4- *f 5

LAMARCK.

THE

POPULAR SCIENCE
MONTHLY.

NOVEMBER, 1883.

"THE GKEEK QUESTION."*

By JOSIAH PARSONS COOKE,

PROFESSOB OF CHEMISTRY IN HARVARD COLLEGE.

THE question whether the college faculty ought to continue to
insist on a limited study of the ancient Greek language, as an
essential prerequisite of receiving the A. B. degree, has been under
consideration at Cambridge for a long time ; and, since the opinions
of those with whom I naturally sympathize have been so greatly
misrepresented in the desultory discussion which has followed Mr.
Adams's Phi Beta Kappa oration, I am glad of the opportunity to say
a few words on the " Greek question."

This question is by no means a new one. For the last ten years
it has been under discussion at most, if not at all, of the great univer-
sities of the world ; and, among others, the University of Berlin, which
stands in the very front rank, has already conceded to what we may
call the new culture all that can reasonably be asked.

Let me begin by asserting that the responsible advocates of an
expansion of the old academic system do not wish in the least degree
to diminish the study of the Greek language, the Greek literature, or
the Greek art. On the contrary, they wish to encourage such studies
by every legitimate means. For myself I believe that the old classical
culture is the best culture yet known for the literary professions ; and
among the literary professions I include both law and divinity.
,Fifty years ago I should have said that it was the only culture worthy
of the recognition of a university. But we live in the present, not in
the past, and a half -century has wholly changed the relations of human

* Remarks made at the dinner of the Harvard Club of Rhode Island, Newport, Au-
gust 25, 1883.

vol. xxrv. — 1

2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

knowledge. Regard the change with favor or disfavor, as you please,
the fact remains that the natural sciences have become the chief fac-
tors of our modern civilization ; and — which is the important point
in this connection — they have given rise to new professions which
more and more every year are opening occupations to our educated
men. The professions of the chemist, of the mining engineer, and of
the electrician, which have entirely grown up during the lifetime of
many here present, are just as "learned" as the older professions, and
are recognized as such by every university. Moreover, the old pro-
fession of medicine, which, when, as formerly, wholly ruled by author-
ity or traditions, might have been classed with the literary professions,
has come to rest on a purely scientific basis.

In a word, the distinction between the literary and the scientific
professions has become definite and wide, and can no longer be ig-
nored in our systems of education. Now, while they would accord to
their classical associates the right to decide what is the best culture
for a literary calling, the scientific experts claim an equal right to
decide what is the best culture for a scientific calling. Ever since the
revival of Greek learning in Europe the literary scholars have been
working out an admirable system of education. In this system most
of us have been trained. I would pay it all honor, and I would here
bear my testimony to the acknowledged facts that in no departments
of our own university have the methods of teaching been so much im-
proved during the last few years as in the classical. I should resist
as firmly as my classical colleagues any attempt to emasculate the
well-tried methods of literary culture, and I have no sympathy what-
ever with the opinion that the study of the modern languages as polite
accomplishments can in any degree take the place of the critical study
of the great languages of antiquity. To compare German literature
with the Greek, or, what is worse, French literature with the Latin, as
means of culture, implies, as it seems to me, a forgetfulness of the true
spirit of literary culture.

But literature and science are very different things, and " what is
one man's meat may be another man's poison," and the scientific
teachers claim the right to direct the training of their own men. It
is not their aim to educate men to clothe thought in beautiful and
suggestive language, to weave argument into correct and persuasive
forms, or to kindle enthusiasm by eloquence. But it is their object
to prepare men to unravel the mysteries of the universe, to probe the
secrets of disease, to direct the forces of nature, and to develop the
resources of this earth. These last aims may be less spiritual, lower
on your arbitrary intellectual scale, if you please, than the first ; but
they are none the less legitimate aims which society demands of edu-
cated men : and all we claim is that the astronomers, the physicists,
the chemists, the biologists, the physicians, and the engineers, who
have shown that they are able to answer these demands of society,

"THE GREEK QUESTION." 3

should be intrusted with the training of those who are to follow them
in the same work.

Now, such is the artificial condition of our schools, and so com-
pletely are they ruled by prescription, that, when we attempt to lay
out a proper course of training for the scientific professions, we are
met at the very outset by the Greek question. Greek is a requisition
for admission to college, and the only schools in which a scientific
training can be had do not teach Greek, and, what is more, can not be
expected to teach it.

This brings us to the root of the whole difficulty with which the
teachers of natural science have been contending, and which is the
cause of the present movement. We can not obtain any proper scien-
tific training from the classical schools, and the present requisitions for
admission to college practically exclude students prepared at any
others. At Cambridge we have vainly tried to secure some small
measure of scientific training in the classical schools : first, by establish-
ing summer courses in practical science especially designed for train-
ing teachers, and chiefly resorted to by such persons ; and, secondly,
by introducing some science requisitions into the admission examina-
tions. But the attempt has been an utter failure. The science requi-
sitions have been simply " crammed," and the result has been worse
than useless ; because, instead of securing any training in the methods
of science, it has in most cases given a distaste for the whole subject.
True science-teaching is so utterly foreign to all their methods that
the requisitions have merely hampered the classical schools, and the
sooner they are abandoned the better. Both the methods and the
spirit of literary and scientific culture are so completely at variance
that we can not expect them to be successfully united in the same pre-
paratory school.

We look, therefore, to entirely different schools for the two kinds
of preparation for the university which modern society demands —
schools which, for the want of better distinctive names, we may call
classical and scientific schools. In the classical school the aim should
be, as it has always been, literary culture, and the end should be that
power of clothing thought in words which awakens thought. Of
course, the results of natural science must to a certain extent be taught ;
for even literary men can not afford to be wholly ignorant of the great
powers that move the world. But the natural sciences should be
studied' as useful knowledge, not as a discipline, and such teaching
should not be permitted in the least degree to interfere with the se-
rious business of the place. In the scientific school, on the other hand,
while language must be taught, it should be taught as a means, not as
an end. The educated man of science must command at least French
and German — and for the present a limited amount of Latin — as well
as his mother-tongue, because science is cosmopolitan. But these
languages should be acquired as tools, and studied no further than they

4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

are essential to the one great end in view, that knowledge which is
the essential condition of the power of observing, interpreting, and
ruling natural phenomena.

In such a course as this it is obvious that the study of Greek would
have no place, even if there were time to devote to it, and we can not
alter the appointed span of human life, even out of respect to this
most honored and worthy representative of the highest literary cul-
ture. Of course, no one will question that the scholar who can com-
mand both the literary and the scientific culture will be thereby so
much the stronger and more useful man ; and certainly let us give
every opportunity to the " double firsts " to cultivate all their abilities,
and so the more efficiently to benefit the world. But such powers are
rare, and the great body of the scientific professions must be made up
of men who can only do well the special class of work in which they
have been trained ; and, if you make certain formal and arbitrary
requisitions, like a small amount of Greek, obstacles in the way of
their advancement, or of that social recognition to which they feel
themselves entitled as educated men, those requisitions must neces-
sarily be slighted, and your policy will give rise to that cry of " fe-
tich " of which recently we have heard so much.

Now, all the schools which prepare students for Harvard College
are classical schools. We do not wish to alter these schools in any
respect, unless to make them more thorough in their special work. As
I have already said, the small amount of study of natural science which
we have forced upon them has proved to be a wretched failure, and
the sooner this hindrance is got out of their way the better. We do
not wish to alter the studies of such schools as the Boston and Rox-
bury Latin Schools, the Exeter and Andover Academies, the St. Paul's
and the St. Mark's Schools, and the other great feeders of the college.
No — not in the least degree ! We do not ask for any change which
in our opinion will diminish the number of those coming to the col-
lege with a classical preparation by a single man. We look for our
scientific recruits to wholly different and entirely new sources. For,
although we think that there are many students now coming to us
through the classical schools who would run a better chance of be-
coming useful men if they were trained from the beginning in a
different way, yet such is the social prestige of the old classical
schools and of the old classical culture that, whatever new relations
might be established, the class of students which alone we now
have would, I am confident, all continue to come through the old
channels.

This is not a mere opinion ; for only a very few men avail them-
selves of the limited option which we now permit at the entrance ex-
aminations— nine, at least, out of ten, offering what is called maximum
in classics.

We look, then, for no change in the classical schools. Our only

"THE GREEK QUESTION."

5

expectation is to affiliate the college with a wholly different class of
schools, which will send us a wholly different class of students, with
wholly different aims, and trained according to a wholly different
method. At the outset we shall look to the best of our New Eng-
land high-schools for a limited supply of scientific students, and hope
by constant pressure to improve the methods of teaching in these
schools, as our literary colleagues have within ten years vastly im-
proved the methods in the classical schools. In time we hope to bring
about the establishment of special academies which will do for science-
culture what Exeter and St. Paul's are doing for classical culture. We
expect to establish a set of requisitions just as difficult as the classical
requisitions — only they will be requisitions which have a different mo-
tive, a different spirit, and a different aim ; and all we ask is, that they
should be regarded as the equivalents of the classical requisitions so
far as college standing is concerned. "We do not at once expect to
draw many students through these new channels. To improve meth-
ods of teaching and build up new schools is a work of years. But
we have the greatest confidence that in time we shall thus be able
to increase very greatly both the clientage and the usefulness of the
university.

Is this heresy ? Is this revolution ? Is it not rather the scientific
method seeking to work out the best results in education as elsewhere
by careful observation and cautious experimenting, unterrified by au-
thority or superstition ? Certainly, the philologist must respect our
method ; for of all the conquests of natural science none is more re-
markable than its conquest of the philologists themselves. They have
adopted the scientific methods as well as the scientific spirit of inves-
tigation ; but, while thus widening and classifying their knowledge,
they have rendered the critical study of language more abstruse and
more difficult ; and this is the chief reason why the time of prepara-
tion for our college has been so greatly extended during the last twenty-
five years. Nominally, the classical schools cover no more ground than
formerly, but they cultivate that ground in a vastly more thorough and
scientific way.

These increased requirements of modern literary culture suggest
another consideration, which we can barely mention on this occasion.
How long will the condition of our new country permit its youths to
remain in pupilage until the age of twenty-three or twenty-four ; on
an average at least three years later than in any of the older countries
of the civilized world ? It is all very well that every educated man
should have a certain acquaintance with what have been called the
" humanities." But when your system comes to its present results,
and demands of the physician, the chemist, and the engineer — whose
birthright is a certain social status, which by accident you tempo-
rarily control — that he shall pass fully four years of the training period
of his life upon technicalities, which, however important to a literary

6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

man, are worthless in his future calling, is it not plain that your con-
servatism has become an artificial barrier which the progress of society-
must sooner or later sweep away ? Is it not the part of wisdom, how-
ever much pain it may cost, to sacrifice your traditional preferences
gracefully when you can direct the impending change, and not to wait
until the rush of the stream can not be controlled ?

♦•»

INFLUENCE OF THE ENVIRONMENT ON RELIGION.

By Professor JAMES T. BIXBY.

WHILE religious phenomena are in some respects singularly con-
stant, they are, nevertheless, as noted for their diversity.
While certain essential elements are common to almost all faiths, on
the other hand, every individual faith has something peculiar to itself.
It not only differs in some respects from other religions, but, as we
trace down its history, we find it varying from itself.

The Hindoos, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Kelts, Teutons, and
Slavs, are shown by philological research to have come originally
from a single stock — the primitive Aryan. Their ancestors originally
dwelt together in a common home in the neighborhood of the Caspian
Sea ; and in this ancient time their religion was, probably, one and
the same faith, i. e., in substance. Yet how widely diverse have the
faiths of these nations come to be, in the four to five thousand years
since that ancient home was little by little deserted ! How has this
diversity come about ? What are the forces or influences that dif-
ferentiate religions ? We may divide them roughly into two kinds :
1. The external variables. 2. The internal variables. In this paper
I shall try to sketch the first ; i. e., those environing influences about
man, about a special race or nation, that tend to produce variation
in the course of the development of religion.

1. I would mention the varied influences of outward nature. The
diverse phenomena of the world naturally diversify the direction and
character of faith. The religious capacities common to all men evolve
a stock of religious feeling which lies latent and fluent, as it were,
in the soul — like an electric charge in the battery — until some expe-
perience of the man occurs to elicit its discharge and give it direc-
tion. The form and path of faith are determined, in much, by the
kind of natural objects with which the spiritual faculty is most closely
or impressively brought in contact. Where the spirit of man is fre-
quently confronted with Nature in its power, beauty, or wrath —
where sky, sun, mountain, or river, is an important factor in the daily
experience and fortune — there arise naturally the corresponding forms
of religion — Nature-worship, fetichism, and pantheism. Where, how'

RELIGION AND THE ENVIRONMENT. 7

ever, it is dreaded and mysterious animate things — the gloomy, awe-
inspiring forest, the venomous serpent, the terrible lion — that most
agitate man's heart, there we see, as in Africa, e. g., and among the
American aborigines, tree-worship and beast-worship abounding

There are certain great natural phenomena that are common to
all countries, familiar with all tribes and nations, such as sun, moon
stars, earth, rain, wind, etc. These are, therefore, the objects univer-
sally divinized. In some countries, where the scenery is very slightly
diversified, these few objects, personified over and over again, in
varied aspects and under various symbols, seem to constitute the
whole pantheon, the whole mythology. It was thus in Egypt, e. g.,
whose numberless gods represent, after all, but about half a dozen
great natural objects. But when we pass out of the level plains of
such countries as Egypt and Babylon, to countries where the moun-
tains rise to stupendous and frowning heights, and bowlders and cliffs
abound, we have a new class of divinities added to the objects that
man worships. The mountaineer, gazing aloft to the white peak, saw,
far up, the shining morn strike the cheek of virgin snow, and in his
guileless faith it became an abode of the gods ; or a deity itself, hold-
ing aloft the heavenly dome. If on the soft sandstone of a hill, be-
fore petrifaction, bird or beast had left its tracks, then the place, like
the Enchanted Mountain of Georgia, was deemed haunted. If the
mount, like Kineo, in the north of Maine, happens to have the shape
of a moose, then it is reputed to be the queen and progenitor of the
moose-tribe turned to stone.

"When the barbarian cries out in joy or pain beneath the rocky
wall, he hears a mysterious voice answering him back — a voice that
belongs to no material creature, and that must, therefore, belong to
some divinity or departed spirit. So the sounds that come from cav-
erns, or the roar of the billows on the sea-shore, are thought to be
produced by the spirits that have their haunt there ; and the kobolds
and water-nixies are accordingly added to the lists of the gods popu-
larly believed in. The strange phenomena of volcanoes, or the explo-
sion of confined gases in certain rocks, in their ebullition through
springs, would suggest the idea of mighty superhuman beings who
lived beneath the earth, and to whose activity the volcano's eruptions
were due. The Koniagas think that, when the craters of Alaska send
forth fire and smoke, the gods are cooking their food and heating their
sweat-houses. So among the Australians, the volcanic rocks found in
various places suggest the belief that sulky demons, the igna, have
made great fires and thrown out red-hot stones ; and the Nicaraguans
offered vessels of food and even human victims to Popogatipec, i. e.,
smoking mountain, to appease her when there was a storm or an earth-
quake.

Wave and frost are great sculptors of rude images, bearing near
enough likeness to man or beast to impress profoundly the imagina-

8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

tion of the uncultivated. All along our Northern coasts and in our
Western mountains are to be found such figures — like the Stone-face,
at the White Mountains ; the Bishop Rock, at Campobello, on the Maine
coast ; and the Master of Life, at the entrance to Lake Superior. So
in the North and West of our country there are many erratic bowl-
ders, some oval, or glistening with native copper or mica scales, or
balanced on convex prominences so that they readily oscillate. In un-
enlightened but pious minds, such curious figures naturally inspire
veneration and worship as the abodes of spirits, as was the case with
the O jib ways, Ottawas, and Dakotas ; or they give rise to wild myths
of transformation, such as the Indian legends abound in. So, where
the rocky and mountainous aspect of nature produces cataracts or
dangerous rapids, and the waters roar and toss their white manes in
the air, these places — as, e. g., Niagara, the mouth of the Wabash,
or the Brear Beaux Falls on the Wisconsin — became to the savage
the haunt of spirits or demons, who must be propitiated with offer-
ings of tobacco and meat.

And this mention of tobacco may serve to turn our thoughts to
remembrance of the influence of trees and plants in drawing forth
religious veneration. Wherever plants are found, like tobacco, or the
Peruvian coca, the snake-root, the Indian hemp, the wine of Bacchanal
worship, that had a special effect ; whether stimulating, narcotic, poi-
sonous, or curative, they were held to possess supernatural power, and
were used for various magic rites and became sacred. The soma of
the ancient Aryans even became exalted to a place among the gods,
and to drink it was the means of gaining immortality. So, likewise,
the mysterious whisperings of the wind in ancient forests, or the inex-
plicable movements of some half -blown-down tree, as the heat of the
sun contracted or lengthened its twisted roots, and caused it alter-
nately to rise and fall, have more than once attracted the superstitious
awe of the barbarian, and supplied new objects for his adoration.

Thus do the peculiarities of natural objects supply molds in which
the metal of religious faith, already lying latent, readily sets. And
not only directly, but indirectly, do they shape the forms of faith.
The rushing river, e. g., not merely attracts the reverence of the primi-
tive man to itself, but by its swift and treacherous motion, its sinuous
course, and snake-like hiss and gleam, it is personified as a mighty di-
vine serpent, and next makes sacred by association the serpents of the
country about. The sky, personified by the ancient Egyptian as a
heavenly goose, enveloping and hatching the cosmic egg, made sacred
henceforth all geese to the pious dwellers by the Nile. In climes like
Egypt, where the skies are rainless and the whole aspect of nature
equable, almost unchanging, there the gods are marked by calmness of
bearing and serenity of nature. We must go to the slopes of the
Himalayas or the ridges of the Apennines to find the howling Rudra,
with his attendant Maruts, the pounders, rushing wildly through the

RELIGION AND THE ENVIRONMENT. 9

glens, or to see the bullocks slain in honor of Jupiter Tonans, the
Thunderer. In cold and temperate climes it is the enlivening and
warming sun that is loved and adored ; but, in the sultry air of the
tropics, the sun and the sky of day become evil and destructive dei-
ties, and affection is transferred to the refreshing sky of night.

So, also, in their ideas of heaven and hell, there is a natural con-
trast between the faith of the man of the tropics and the man of the
Arctic zone. To the first, the future home of the good is some abode
of coolness, some garden of the Hesperides, or a breezy Olympian
height, and the place of punishment a place of fire. To the Ice-
lander, hell is the place of cold, worse far to him than fire, and heaven,
some comfortable hall surrounded by a hedge of flame. Again, in hot
climes, where the soil of the river-bottoms is deep and rich, and na-
ture teems with productiveness, there the gods are credited with the
same sensuous nature ; religious ideas are apt to revolve about the
mysteries of procreation, and the worship of the people is apt to in-
clude not a few impure rites and symbols.

The numerous gods of fertility among the agricultural Egyptians
— Chem, Min, Chnam, Osiris — the sexual rites of Babylonia, and the
numerous objectional symbols in Hindoo worship, illustrate this. On
the contrary, under the clear skies and bright moon and the pure
streamlets of Greece, it is the virgin goddesses of the most exacting
purity, Dianas and Pallas Athenes, rather than loose-zoned and wanton
mistresses, that are suggested. Aphrodite and Cybele, and Dionysos
indeed, were, later, members of the Olympian court ; but they came
from regions farther east, where they were tinged with an earthly and
sensuous dye, such as we do not find in the native worship of Hellas.

The tribes of Northern Asia, wandering amid the bleak wastes of
Mongolia or the gloomy forests of the Ural, their frail shelter shaken
by the riotous winds, whose mysterious sighs and howlings often make
them quake with terror, come naturally to be believers in dim, mys-
terious, supernatural powers, with which their own lot is bound up,
and readily devote themselves to whatever occult and magic rites the
shaman may produce. The Shemite, on the broad plains of Chaldea
or the sandy wastes of Arabia, found nothing to arrest his eyes till they
rested on the glistening skies, brilliant, in that clear air, with a brill-
iancy beyond anything that we know : and he became thus, most natu-
rally, a devout star- worshiper ; invested the chief celestial objects
with the most exalted attributes, and raised them, in his fervid ado-
ration, to more and more absolute majesty and incomparable power,
till at length the idea of the divine was exalted into monotheism.
- The Aryan, on the contrary, grew up among the mountain pastures
of Bactria, where the clouds are often about his feet, and the heavens
are not so far away. The earliest Yedic hymns are marked by a sense
of the nearness of the gods, and men are seen mingling with them,
familiarly, as friends. Nature did not oppress man with dreadful

io THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

earthquake or hurricane, vast and fatal desert, or frowning mountain ;
but by its pleasing diversity it stimulated, without overwhelming, his
soul. That portion of the Aryans that, upon their migration from the
old Bactrian home, reached the shores of the ^Egean, found there a land
that fostered still more these traits. Here nature was picturesque
and diversified, without the stupendous magnitudes that overawe the
soul. Above him, the sky was bluest of the blue. The marble hills
formed continual pictures. The streams rippled cheerily down their
songful beds. The wavelets chased each other playfully in the light
zephyrs. All the aspects of earth and sea and sky were bright and
gladsome, and conspired to stimulate the imagination of the Greek.

Hellenic religion came thus, by right, to be a happy and luxuriant
faith, full of pretty fancies, putting man at ease with the divine, and
personifying the gods under the most familiar and graceful shapes :

" Sunbeams upon distant hill,
Gliding apace with shadows in their tram,
Might, with small help from fancy, be transformed
Into fleet oreads, sporting visibly."

The wind was fancied a divine harper, who makes music in the
tree-tops, and drives the flocks of the sun — the fleecy clouds — where
he wills. The murmuring spring was imaged as a gentle nymph ; and
within each fine tree was an imprisoned dryad. In short, the diversi-
fied and charming scenery supplied an unequaled wealth of religious
and mythic lore. And, as man, in this climate, exempt from the de-
bilitating heats of the tropics and the stunting of too severe cold,
reached the ideal of bodily perfection, the human form became, not
unnaturally, to the Greek, the noblest type under which he could
represent the divine. The gods were humanized — stronger and more
beautiful beings, to be sure, than ordinary men, but possessed of the
same forms, members, and passions.

The course which the Norsemen took when they, in their turn,
went forth from the common Aryan home, was less propitious. It led
them to a land where the summer was short and the sun soon had to
wage a bitter and losing war for long months with frost and snow ; a
land where the fiords were heavily sealed with ice, and man had a
bitter task to keep the wolf of starvation and death from his door.
The sternness and gloom of the land were reflected in the Northman's
thought and faith. Woden, the stormful, Thor, the thunderer, and
Loki, the vengeful and cunning destroyer, become the chief figures
in his myths. The interest centers in the struggles of the Aesir, the
deities of light and beneficence, against the frost-giants and their allies
or servants — the midgard-serpent, the fenris-wolf, and the dreaded
Hel — varied personifications of darkness, cold, and death.

Delighting himself, as the Norseman did, in the vigorous exercise
and the hearty feasting, to which the frosty air stimulated, his gods

RELIGION AND THE ENVIRONMENT. n

likewise were boisterous and stalwart beings, riding on the tempest,
amusing themselves by feats of strength, reveling in the crash of
battle, and gathering the fallen heroes into the bright Valhalla, there
to reward them for their courage with foaming cups of mead, and the
barbaric delights of ceaseless combats, in indestructible bodies. Thus,
instead of the Graces and the beautiful Apollo of Greece, we find in
Scandinavia deities as blustering and uncouth as the Northland itself,
but manly and good-hearted. While in Greece the primitive Aryan
faith takes on a more aesthetic and refined aspect, in Germany and
Scandinavia it becomes more tragic and intense.

Let us follow next the steps of that part of the Aryans who turned
their steps southward into the languorous plains of India, and we shall
see a different change. The first thing we notice is, that Dyans — the
shining one, the bright sky of day — loses his ancient pre-eminence.
His supremacy in the thoughts of the Aryan emigrants is first taken
by Varuna — the night-sky. In the hot clime of India, the bright sky
of day was no longer so pleasant to them, and Varuna seemed a kinder
deity, and therefore became more popular. But soon he also is super-
seded by Indra, the rain-god, who, with his glittering lance — the light-
ning— pierces and releases the imprisoned waters. For in India, then,
as to-day, the coming of the rainy season after the long drought is
by far the most important of all nature's changes. It was not long
before Indra, therefore, by his terrible might and his beneficent prowess
in slaying the drought-serpent, became, with his coadjutors, the Maruts,
the beating winds, the chief object of Vedic adoration. And soon we
notice an equally significant change. The vigorous Aryan, in the
debilitating heats of the Indian plains, became a victim of lassitude.
He lost his healthful delight in the good things of sense and earth.
The languid air lulled him in dreamy reveries. Meditation takes the
place of service in the commandments of religion ; and asceticism, in-
stead of the divine blessings, becomes the pious practice. So great
and so rapid is the change that comes over their faith that, before
many centuries have passed, pessimistic views of life become so seated
in the race that the illusiveness of the world and the essential wretch-
edness of life become cardinal doctrines of faith ; and the great desire
of men's heart's is not for renewed lease of life, but for the means of
obtaining exemption from the misery of rebirth. And so it has been
with other nations and races. The physical characteristics of the
countries they have dwelt in have powerfully modified the aspect of
their religion. The races inhabiting the most barren and unfavorable
quarters of the globe — such as the Patagonians, Hottentots, Kamschat-
kans — have suffered correspondingly in their possibility of religious
progress. Conversely, it is that intermediate zone between the tropical
and the temperate — the land of the olive, the fig, and the orange —
where the mean temperature is not lower than 60° Fahr. nor more
than 75° Fahr., that has been the home of the great founders of re-

12 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ligions — Zoroaster, Moses, Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius, and Christ.
Moreover, we may notice, as Peschel has pointed out, the suggestive
fact that it is in the wide expanses and awe-inspiring solitudes of the
desert, where the imagination, while vividly excited, is yet not dis-
tracted and divided among the manifold wonders of nature — shim-
mering leaf and gnarled trunks, writhing mists and rattling thunder,
and the weird sounds of forest or sea-beach — that suggest and develop
the polytheistic gods, but can give itself up entirely to the impressions
of a single Majesty and Infinity — it is, I say, amid these noble yet
simple aspects of nature, that the great monotheistic religions, Judaism,
Mohammedanism, and Christianity, have been originated. It was at
Sinai that Moses promulgated his stern prohibitions of idolatry and
polytheism. It was by a Bedouin foster-mother that Mohammed was
reared, and as a shepherd and caravan-merchant, traveling across the
Arabian deserts, that he passed his early life. And it was in the
desert that Christ listened to the preaching of John the Baptist, and
passed the forty days in which he prepared himself for his great career.
2. In the second place, we must notice, as of equal if not greater
influence in giving diversity to religious faith, man's experiences with
himself and with his fellows. It is an old maxim that it is " in the
experiences of life that each individual finds or loses his god." Start-
ing on the lowest range of the soul's experience, we notice the effect
of the dreams, trances, swoons, ecstasies, and other abnormal phe-
nomena of human nature, in giving direction and variety to religious
conceptions. While I regard it as a grave error to derive religion
solely from these morbid phenomena, nevertheless they have undoubt-
edly done much in awakening the spiritual powers of man, and in giv-
ing shape to his religious instincts. Life, in its most familiar and
natural phases, is a mysterious thing — a wonder which doubtless filled
the primitive man with ill-understood awe, as it has made even the
pride of modern science stand abashed before it. And its more eccen-
tric and exceptional aspects would especially set men to marveling,
and suggest explanations which we may to-day laugh at, but without
really having penetrated into the heart of the mystery any more than
our remotest ancestors. Thus, among almost all peoples the shadow
has been looked upon as a second self, and as one of the causes if not
the cause of life. The breath, likewise, with whose cessation life ends,
has been especially identified with the soul, the principle of life, as is
shown by the same or similar words employed in most languages, as
their names — atman in Sanskrit ; nephesh and ruach among the He-
brews ; icang among the Australians ; anemos and anima in Greek
and Latin — indicate. As in dreams the savage seems to see his distant
kinsmen, to visit remote localities, to behold again the long-dead par-
ent or grandparent ; so he comes to believe that the soul, an impal-
pable form within the fleshly organism, is capable of leaving the body
when it pleases, of taking long journeys and flashing with incredible

RELIGION AND THE ENVIRONMENT. 13

swiftness from place to place, of possessing its will and consciousness
independently of the body, and continuing to exist and appear after
the death of the body.

This conception of the soul once formed, the abnormal facts of
disease, insanity, epilepsy, and hysteria, come readily to be explained
by the invasion into these bodies of other spirits than their own — celes-
tial or demoniac, superhuman or infra-human, according to the phe-
nomena observed. These notions, once diffused, give rise, in their turn,
to a whole cycle of kindred animistic theories and religious practices —
such as divination by dreams, exorcisms of demons, dervish-dancings,
and other artificially produced swoons and ecstasies, and fetichistic
magic of all sorts. Sneezing, hiccough, and all painful diseases, are
to the savage the work of some spirit that has crept into his body.
Fasting, as occasioning vivid visions, becomes a method of seeing one's
tutelar deity, as among our Indians, or as the proper rite to fit the
priest for initiation into his sacred office, as generally in savage tribes.

When it is evil spirits that do their work in man, they must be
cast out by invoking some beneficent and more powerful god. Hence
exorcism, witchcraft, medicine-men. When it is good spirits that do
their work in man, we have inspired seers and priestesses — divine
oracles, like those of Delphi and Dodona. Out of a belief that the
spirits of the dead still maintain an interest in those they have left,
and are causers of good and evil to them, come propitiation of them
by gifts and prayers, and ancestor- worship — so prevalent in ancient
China, Egypt, and Rome, as among many African and Polynesian
tribes still— is developed.

Next, perhaps (as happens in many cases), the departed chieftain
or patriarch, still looked upon as protecting his descendants and tribes-
men, becomes the guardian deity of the tribe, or the ruler of the hid-
den land to which the ghosts of the dead must journey. As still
further evolutions from this root, we find the belief in the resurrection
of the body and the transmigration of souls, the custom of embalming,
and the varied ideas of the nature of the future life found in different
nations.

3. Next, we must notice the great influence of man's intercourse with
his fellows. Under this third head I would call attention to the action
of the political condition or environment, as a differentiating factor.
In ancient times, the connection between religion and government was
far closer than we see almost anywhere to-day. That separation be-
tween church and state, that independence of politics and faith so
prevalent everywhere to-day, was unknown to antiquity. The state
and the church were one. The king was high-priest by virtue of his
office, and the priest as much a state or civic official as judge or war-
rior-chief. Not infrequently, the same individual held both what we
now distinguish as secular and sacred offices. Among the ancient
Aryans — as with the early Hindoos, Greeks, and Romans — religion

i4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

was a domestic rite. Each home had its altar and its sacred fire,
whose flame must never be allowed to go out. And so the word
hestia or vesta — the fixed place for the family hearth-fire — came to
represent the divine mother, the guardian of the family, who, if duly
honored, would preserve it in honor and prosperity. It was the office
of the father or grandfather, the living head of the family, to pour on
the sacred flame the offerings of meal and butter, to offer the incense
and pour out the libations, and to salute with prayer and praise the
beneficent god of light, at his morning rising ; or when, by neglect
properly to feed the deity of the hearth, the god had left them, it was
the duty of the father to bring him back, by the friction of the sacred
sticks.

As families increased to tribes, and tribes were consolidated, the
chief of the tribe, the patriarch of the community became, of course,
the proper officer to perform the religions rites for the greater social
body ; as was the case in ancient Egypt, Assyria, Greece, and Rome,
and is still the case in China to-day. The gods were conceived of
as belonging to and concerned only with the tribe or nation that wor-
shiped them ; often, indeed, were imagined inseparable from a particu-
lar land ; and he who went away from it was beyond the protection of
his accustomed gods.

Thus David, in his well-known appeal (1 Samuel, xxvi, 19), says to
Saul, If men have stirred thee up against me, they are cursed, for
they have driven me out this day from dwelling in Jehovah's heritage,
saying to me, Go, serve other gods. The idea that all lands might
be under the care of one god, and the people of different nations
might be of one religion, was a conception slow in arising. Who-
ever belonged to a tribe or nation was bound to worship the gods
of that nation. "When a man was adopted into a nation, or a woman
married into another gens or tribe, such a person was held to adopt
the divinities and tutelar deities of their new companions also. The
promise of Ruth to Naomi, "Thy people shall be my people, and
thy God my God," was not an exceptional but a necessary conjunc-
tion. To disown or ignore the gods of one's fathers was to disown
one's nationality.

Conversely, the god of a special people must protect and favor his
own. In the historical books of the Old Testament, e. g., we see many
times appearing the idea that Jehovah's honor is so bound up with that
of his people that he could not neglect to protect and bless them, no
matter how great his wrath against their trespasses. The existence
of foreign gods was not at all disbelieved, nor their power denied. But
they were looked upon as naturally confining their favors to their own
land and people. It was proper that their own people should worship
them, but to foreigners they would be indifferent or hostile. To in-
troduce strange gods into the state was therefore a dangerous experi-
ment, entailing the risk of alienating their rightful divine protectors.

RELIGION AND THE ENVIRONMENT. i5

Similarly, the idea of seeking proselytes to one's own religion was, at
first, quite antagonistic to the instincts of faith. The favor of Brahma,
the blessings of Jehovah, were privileges of the chosen people of these
gods ; especial boons, which were not to be rashly cheapened by ad-
mitting foreigners to them. The sudra, however, desirous of knowing
and worshiping the Brahmanic deities, was never allowed to read the
Yeda, or join in the most holy ceremonies.

Now, from this local character of ancient divinities it is evident
what greater influence political conditions would have on religion
than is possible in our day, when state and church are so independent
of each other. In races, like the Aryan, where the early organiza-
tion was into small communities with a patriarchal or quasi-republi-
can government, where both the diversified face of the land and then-
own free spirit kept a host of small cities and states in independent
existence, there the loose coalescence which comes through commerce,
and identity of speech and civilization into a national life and religion,
does nothing to destroy the various local gods, and we have, as in
India, Greece, and Germany, a bewildering pantheon of divinities,
many most similar to one another, because originally representative
of aspects of the same natural objects or phenomena. Their religion
was as full of variety and as lacking in centralization as their political
system.

The first result on religion of advance toward national unity is,
therefore, a great multiplication of deities. But soon other forces are
called into play. Wherever, by conquest, intermarriage of princes, or
treaties of alliance, two or more small states are thoroughly merged
into a larger, there a coalescence of their gods and diminution of the
number of the divinities are apt to take place. "While their fetich-
gods — divinities of merely local origin, mountain, earth, tree, cavern,
river — would be different, the elemental gods — deities of sun, moon,
sky, wind, and storm — would be common to both, and have more or
less common features. They would, therefore, be readily identified,
and their worship, under a name and ritual compounded, very likely,
from the traditions of both tribes, would gain in popularity, while the
more local gods, worshiped only by parts of the new nation, would
fall into oblivion.

Again, when an ancient nation was subjugated, it was not believed
to be due merely to the weakness of the people, or their inferior cour-
age or military skill ; but the people's tutelar deities were supposed
to have withdrawn their protection, or to have been shown inferior in
their guardian power to the gods of the victorious people. The people
often, therefore, voluntarily abandoned their own deities, to secure the
more effective protectorship of the victorious gods. In the wake of
the great armies of Assyria and Rome, faith after faith of antiquity
was left a wreck of its former self, its sacred prestige ruined, and its
gods degraded into subordinates of the triumphant foreign deities.

1 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

The conquerors sometimes relentlessly stamped out the worship of the
conquered. Often, out of policy or pity, they gave it a quasi-recogni-
tion ; and then came about an amalgamation of beliefs.

These international religions tended to subdue the ethnic distinc-
tions and local worships, and to give prominence to the hio-her and
more universal deities. Thus, the great monarchies of antiquity,
through their very tyranny and the absoluteness of the royal power in
them, broke the path for the universal religions. The Roman Empire
was the forerunner that made straight the way for Christianity. Sar-
gon of Assyria is no more famous for his conquests than for his sys-
tematization of the Mesopotamian religion. And in Egypt we find its
religion unified step by step with the government. The rival cycles
of gods and goddesses, the varied triads of its different epochs, the
confusing medley of divinities, great and small, of whom, now one,
now another, is said to be the supreme, can never be comprehended
until we recognize that the political unity of Egypt was not original
or constant, but a growth, through the consolidation of the forty-two
distinct nomes or districts which occupied the length of the valley.

Each of these little kingdoms, or duchies, as we may call them (re-
sembling, in their relations to one another, the little duchies of Ger-
many before Prussia swallowed them up so effectually), had its capi-
tal, its hereditary duke, its special deity or deities, and its shrine or
great temple. We find the names of the Egyptian gods followed by
the name of their special home, as Neith of Sais ; Aman-Ra, chief in
Aptu, i. e., Thebes. When gods of the same name or origin were wor-
shiped in different places, they were regarded as more or less differ-
ent deities, and often had different characteristics or symbols.

Thus we find four Sets mentioned in one inscription and six Anu-
bises in another. Though originating from the same natural object,
different aspects of the divine power were deified in each. When at
length these independent districts were united in a single empire and
a close social unity, the deities were naturally consolidated more or
less.

Out of political comity and national sympathy, the people of each
nome would admit the deities of other sections as also venerable and
worshipful ; but, in their own grading of the comparative dignity of
the various gods, each would put its own local deities in the chief seats,
and make the deities of other districts subordinate to them. Hence
would arise distinctions among the gods, as, some of the first order,
others of the second, others of the third. Those that in one nome,
say, that of Thebes, were placed at the head, in another, such as that
of Memphis, always jealous of its rival for the dignity of the metro-
politanship of Egypt, would be likely to be put down into the second
or third class, to make room for the ancient hereditary favorites of the
worshipers of that locality.

As, in the political struggles of the country, one nome after another

RELIGION AND THE ENVIRONMENT. i7

became the seat of the central government — now This, now Thebe3
now Memphis, now Tanais — or as the royal house (through some dy-
nastic change, or intermarriage with princesses from a distance) fa-
vored one or another local group of gods or particular deity, so the
hierarchical order and the very character of the deities shifted. Thus,
when the Hyksos came into power, a Semitic dynasty, they favored
especially the god Set, whom they fancied identical with their own
Sedeq or El-Shaddai. They took him for their providential leader, and
discouraged the worship of the other gods. But when, by their op-
pressions, they had stirred up the Egyptians, at length, to revolt, and
were driven out of the country, Set, though before an honored deity,
was now associated with all that was evil, and was credited with en-
tire malevolence, and made, instead of Apap, the serpent of darkness,
the great antagonist of the beneficent Osiris. The hatred of the Egyp-
tians for the very name of Set was carried so far that it was chiseled
out of the monuments ; the day that had been dedicated to him be-
came the Black Friday of the Egyptians ; and the animals chosen to
symbolize him were the most hateful monsters known to them, the
crocodile and the hippopotamus : he became, in short, the almighty
destroyer and blighter — the great devil of their pantheon.

This is no isolated instance. Repeatedly do we find wars between
nations, arraying their gods, in the popular belief, in hostility ; and
the only historical record we have of the military conflict is the myth
of the wars between the supernatural guardians of the different
peoples. Such a myth is that of the wars between the Hellenic gods
and the Titans and giants, and the celestial usurpation by which Zeus
and Apollo drive Saturn from his throne, banishing the sons of earth
to the regions of night and death, burying Enceladus under Etna, and
fastening Prometheus by eternal fetters to his rock of punishment.
The historical fact beneath this is the struggle between the celestial
deities of the Aryan invaders and the rude, burly peasant gods of the
peasant aborigines.

Similarly, out of the conflicts of the Iranians with their brother-
people, the Brahmans — whom they seem at first to have accompanied
in their migration from Bactria — we have a religious change of a nota-
ble character. One part of the immigrants, the Iranians, seemed to
desire to cease their wanderings and adopt a settled agricultural life ;
the other were unwilling to do so, and would not respect the inclosed
fields of the Iranians. Hence an hereditary feud, that antagonized
them religiously as well as politically. Originally, both the words
devas, i. e., the bright ones, and asuras, the living ones, were used as
names of the Aryan gods, both terms being terms of respect and love.
But gradually the term deva came to be the favorite with the Brah-
mans, and the term asura or ahura the favorite with the Iranians.
But, after the feud broke out, we find the asuras of the Iranians be-
coming such an object of dislike to the Brahmans that gradually the
VOL. xxit.— 2

18 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

word ceased to be used for the good gods, to whom the terra devas
was appropriated. And to the Iranians, the devas of their foes became
so hateful that the word became synonymous with evil spirit — a mean-
ing still retained in our word devil. Out of the throes of this bitter
early contest of the Parsees came that trumpet-call to intensest and
unceasing struggle against all sin and impurity and wickedness that
put the religion of Zarathushtra on such an astonishingly lofty moral
plane.

Thus, when two nations stand for a length of time in hostility,
neither prevailing, the result is usually to intensify the special pecul-
iarities in the faith of each and widen their diversity. But, when one
conquers the other, the result is generally to amalgamate the religions
of the two peoples, in more or less degree. It is natural, of course,
that the faith of the subjected people should be shaped over in the
mold of the victor's faith. But the reverse of this is almost equally
common, and we repeatedly see, as we follow down the course of his-
tory, the race conquered in battle gradually reasserting itself under
the new regime, and subduing the conquerors, socially and religiously,
by infusing among them the customs and faith they had sought at
first to trample under foot. Thus, we find the Turanian peoples whom
the Iranians subdued in Persia retaliating upon the victors, by uncon-
sciously, as the years went by, introducing into the higher Zara-
thushtran faith the doctrine of the fravashis, or ancestral tutelary
spirits, the magical practices and excessive adoration of fire, and the
soma, or drink of immortality — none of which seemed native to the
Aryan religion.

So in the Brahman religion, the idea of the transmigration of souls,
quite absent from the early Vedic hymns, becomes, when we reach
the time of the collection called the laws of Manu, one of the most
prominent features of the religion. Unknown as it is in all other
branches of the Aryan family, its rise and prominence among the
Brahmans are to be referred to the pre- Aryan occupants of the Ganges
Valley, whom the Aryans conquered and absorbed, and from whose
belief in it the Brahmans derived it, when, at length, the conquerors
and conquered had been fused together into one people. So with the
animal-worship of Egypt, so opposite in character to the worship of
Osiris and Ra. It is best explainable as a remnant of the religion of
the inferior people who inhabited the land of the Nile in far remote
ages, and who were subdued by the emigrants from Asia, who brought
higher knowledge and a more spiritual faith with them and founded
the wonderful civilization that in ancient times distinguished that
land. The new faith, unfortunately, could not wean the common
people altogether from their grosser faith, but was forced to receive
much of it into itself.

Again, we may notice the influence of political considerations, in
establishing some of the peculiar institutions of religion, such as that

RELIGION AND TEE ENVIRONMENT. i9

of caste, which has played such a great role in Hindoo society. In
the oldest hymns of the Vedas, we find no mention of it. It arose out
of the bitter struggles against the non- Aryan people — the dark race,
whom, at last, they succeeded in conquering. The word for caste-
varna means kind or color, and indicated at first the difference be-
tween the whiter conquering race and the darker-tinted race whom
they subdued, and with whom they would brook no slightest inter-
course nor mixture, no relation but that of a slave to his masters.

This strong antipathy of race and bitter contempt for all who could
not fight, nor recite the sacred hymn, petrified into impassable barriers.
Pride of birth and intolerance of spirit united to increase these heredi-
tary disabilities, and the priestly class did not fail to fan the fire of
superstition that gave them such privileges. But, much as the Brah-
mans, at first and probably since, have congratulated themselves on
the advantages of the institution, the student of history beholds, as its
product, the most bitter fruit — an intolerable rigidity, a cumbrous cere-
monialism, and the alienation and degradation of the common people.
It was no wonder that ere long Buddhism should arise, and in the
strength of the popular disaffection sweep over all India, and if, in
another century, it lost this conquest, yet should go on in triumphant
march over Eastern Asia, till it came to number more souls in its ranks
than any other faith.

4. We must notice the great influence of man's varied social condi-
tions in differentiating religious belief. The level of religion with any
people corresponds to the general level of social organization and re-
finement. " Thou art fellow with the spirit that thy mind can grasp,"
is the pregnant monition of Mephistopheles in Goethe's " Faust." The
coarse, imbruted, petty-minded man can not entertain any high or pure
notions of God. The negroes of the West Coast represent their deities
as black and mischievous, delighting to torment men in various ways.
The god of the Polynesian cannibals is believed by them to feed on
the souls of the men sacrificed to him, as they themselves do on the
bodies. When the negro's fetich does not bring him good fortune,
the stock or stone gets a drubbing.

Among tribes that still remain in the predatory state, subsisting by
hunting, and continually resorting to plunder and war, we find religion
in its crudest forms. Animal-worship, great regard for omens and use
of magic, and shamanistic practices of all sorts, swarm in their reli-
gions. Their rites are apt to be cruel and their sacrifices bloody, often
demanding human victims. The religions of the warlike negroes of
the Gold Coast, the Feejee-Islanders, and the hunting tribes of Amer-
ica, illustrate this.

Even where nations have risen to a high level of civilization, but
have retained their military habits, as the Assyrians and the Aztecs,
e. g., there the sanguinary and revolting character of their religion
shows the same influence. On the other hand, where pastoral life pre-

zo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

vails, there, as among the Hottentots and Caffres, religion has a milder
aspect ; while, among those tribes which, besides cattle-breeding and
agriculture, have engaged also in industry and commerce, a still more
humane spirit characterizes their worship.

A similar difference, though on a less pronounced scale, is seen in
the two elements that united to form the Greek nation. The older
stock, whose blood ran in the peasantry, were a half-savage people and
their gods consequently rude — half -bestial satyrs and centaurs, black
Demeters, images of the unsown earth ; mountain Titans, uncouth
Pan ; thievish, tricksy Hermes ; the mighty but reckless, wanton Her-
acles, type of the red and angry sun, gods but half-focused in the
minds of their own worshipers, and represented often by rude blocks
of wood and stone. But these could not content the spiritual demands
of the later comers, the more polished Iranians, finer of temperament,
and imbued by their contact with the civilization of Asia Minor with
higher tastes. So we find among them more graceful and elevated
gods — stately Hera and chaste Artemis, heaven-born Pallas and the
beauteous Apollo — noble ideals of the highest manhood and woman-
hood that they could conceive.

And as civilization still further progresses, as peace and law be-
come the rule in the community, as arts and knowledge increase, the
conceptions of the divine and the worship suitable for him rise pro-
portionately. With the exacter study of nature, sorcery and omens
become less credible. The gods themselves are seen to be subject to
an unchangeable order. Indications of intelligence, of goodness, and
of rectitude in the world, point irresistibly to a divine with the high
attributes from which alone these effects can proceed. As the reason
grows, the crude polytheism in which man at first rested is found en-
vironed with perplexities and inconsistencies. Reason pushes steadily
toward the universal and the single. If the thunder-cloud was a di-
vine being, why not every drop of rain that fell ? If the lion or bull
was a god, why not every fly and midge ? In revolt against such
cheapening of the idea of divinity, there would arise, with the devel-
opment of intelligence, a tendency to absorb the host of gods in fewer
and more potent gods. Next, the interaction of nature's processes
would be noted. The fire that warms the house is recognized as essen-
tially one and the same force with that which flushes the sky at dawn,
flashes from the solar orb, or gleams in the lightning's quick illumina-
tion : " Thou Agni," as the Vedic poet at length cried — " thou Agni
art Indra, art Vishnu, art Brahman-aspati. Thou Agni art born Va-
runa, becomest Mitra when kindled. In thee, son of strength, art all
the gods."— ("Rig- Veda," vii, 30, 31, vii, 1-3.)

As observation widens, then, the diverse parts of nature are more
and more woven into one web. The various deities are recognized as
but aliases under which a single power hides. The unity of the world
forbids us to think of it as the prey of numberless capricious and in-

RELIGION AND THE ENVIRONMENT. 21

dependent personalities. Thus the early scientific investigators, as
Anaxagoras and Parmenides, necessarily broke with polytheism, and
proclaimed the essential oneness of that power from which all came.
Men of philosophic spirit everywhere, whether in India, Egypt, China,
or Rome, have pressed behind the confusing throng of pagan panthe-
ons, to reach some elder, more eternal, more majestic, and absolute
power behind them all. Nutar = the power ; Tao = the eternal prin-
ciple ; Akevana Zarvana = boundless time ; Brahma = the supernatural
essence of all. The questions, " Whence has all come ? What is the
source of all ? " have become more and more urgent. One after an-
other, the idols of ancient belief have been broken by the iconoclastic
hammer of fuller knowledge, and the yearning arms of faith, that
must embrace some adored object, have reached up to purer concep-
tions of the divine, more worthy of worship.

Or when, on the contrary, civilization is decaying, and the incur-
sions and conquests of barbarians are, from century to century, making
society coarser and rougher, as happened in Europe from the fifth to
the tenth century, then we see a corresponding degeneration in re-
ligion.

How lofty and pure the spiritual truths that Jesus taught ! And,
in the simple, ingenuous narratives of the gospel, what an anchor to
the Christian Church to keep it, one would think, from ever drifting
far away from its original place ! And yet, what melancholy degrada-
tion, what gross perversions, did Christianity lapse into among the
dissolute Greeks and Romans, the rude Franks and Vandals ! As we
study mediaeval Christianity, with its belief in witchcraft and all sorts
of pious and impious magic ; its melancholy asceticism ; the gross wor-
ship of saints, relics, and images, and deifications of Virgin and eucha-
ristic bread and wine ; with its martial, steel-clad bishops, ready to fight
in public as in private ; with its exaltation of ceremony above morality,
and investment of priest and pope with supernatural power and au-
thority— it seems almost incredible that the glad-tidings of the gospel,
the simple faith that started as a message of peace on earth and good-
will to men, could ever have been transformed into this. It is only
by the irresistible influence of a corrupt society in the first place, and,
secondly, of a barbarous society, that it is at all explainable.

The first forms of religion have well been called a kind of primi-
tive philosophy. So, . full-fledged philosophy has been the constant
pioneer of a purer theology, and the diverse speculations of the intel-
lect, from the days of Ptah-hotep and Lao-Tsee down to those of Hegel
and Cousin, have been prominent forces in giving pious hearts their
special directions in the religious field. According as the metaphysics
of a people varies — following the empiric or the intuitive, the positive
or the idealistic type — so will its religion vary. See, e. g., what a dif-
ferent thing Buddhism developed into among the nation of positivists,
the Chinese, from the form it took among the idealistic Brahmans.

22 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

The student of history, as he looks back at the great religious move-
ments of the world, can discern how each great wave of spiritual feel-
ing was preceded, prepared for, and received its direction from, some
philosophic current. Aristotle, e. g., did more to determine the spe-
cial phase of mediaeval Christendom than any of its popes. These
four philosophers, Kant, Hegel, Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer, sur-
pass in their influence on the religious situation any forty theologians
who can be mentioned. Religion at certain epochs, such as that of
the Hindoo Upanishads, the Neoplatonism of the second and third
centuries, or the mediaeval scholasticism, is but philosophy in priestly
robe.

As religions develop, the work of conscious thought and reasoning
becomes greater and greater. It is these that mold the warm and im-
pressible wax of pious feeling into such different theologic types. It
is these that draw up creeds, and that define doctrines with ever-
increasing detail ; that subtilize over the pre-existent state of great
prophets, that invent theories of incarnation and transubstantiation,
and that multiply dogmatic distinctions and schemes of salvation, until
the sects become multitudinous. And, if this may be said to the dis-
credit of metaphysic speculation, to its credit, on the other side of
the account, we may put the fact that it is only through the influence
of the philosophic reason that religion is exalted above dull naturalism
or sensuous anthropomorphism. It is impossible, by mere observa-
tion and induction, to ascend from the imperfect creation to the per-
fect divine. The finite universe may suggest a being of vast power
and astonishing wisdom, but it demonstrates no infinitude. All that
we draw from nature and the human is of the relative and transient
order, and supplies no warrant to us of any absolute and eternal. Rude
and uneducated minds are always found investing Deity with physi-
cal characteristics and human imperfections. " God is a good man,"
said Dogberry, and, to the sensuous thought, he is to-day but little
more than the magnified image of our own humanity. It is by philo-
sophic training alone that we learn to analyze and carry out to their
rational conclusions those principles of reason which demand of us to
recognize as most characteristic of God's attributes, beyond anything
that either nature or the human body presents, those attributes of
infinity, perfection, and absolute existence, which constitute true di-
vinity.

5. Similarly the moral condition of a people is a most important
variable in its development. Ideas of heaven and hell correspond to
the moral elevation of the community. The warlike Maori imagined
life after death a constant series of battles, in which the gods are
always victorious. The Moslem's paradise excites our disgust by its
sensualities ; the Greek's, by its trivialities. It is only where the moral
nature is elevated that heaven is ennobled to a place worthy the long-
ings of a manly man.

RELIGION AND THE ENVIRONMENT, 23

God-fearing armies, as Carlyle tells us, are the best armies. So,
as Bagehot has pointed out, those kinds of morals and that kind of
religion which tend to make the firmest and most effectual character
are sure to prevail, all else being the same ; and creeds or systems that
conduce to a soft, limp mind tend to perish. Strong beliefs win strong
men, and then make them stronger. Such is, no doubt, another cause
why monotheism tends to prevail over polytheism. It at once attracts
and produces steadier character. It is not confused by competing
rites nor distracted by miscellaneous duties.

As in man, at the outset, the moral and spiritual faculties lie mostly
latent, overshadowed by his animal wants and passions, so the gods,
in whose image he fashions at first the dimly discerned divine, are be-
ings of physical power and sensuous nature, personifications of giant
strength, imperative will, terrible passions, dangerous to arouse — a
wanton Mylitta, a thievish Hermes, an implacable Pluto, the Moloch
only to be propitiated by giving him the best-beloved child to de-
vour in his sacred flame ; or a burly Thor, whose hammer-blows rive
huge valleys in the ground, to whom any deceit by which he may over-
come his foes is entirely allowable.

From this low nature range, where morality is not yet known, the
conceptions of the gods move up to the philosophic level, and from
that to the ethical range. The Hindoo Rita, at first simply the fixed
path of the sun or other heavenly bodies, became, as the next step,
generalized in laio or order in the abstract ; and then was exalted
into the celestial path of rectitude and peace, the eternal power mak-
ing for righteousness. Osiris, at first the setting sun, becomes next
the mysterious principle of life and harmony ; then, the great judge
of men's conduct, the source of good.

All nature-religions, derived as they are from the physical world
and its processes, and originating in the infancy of civilization, are
ethically imperfect. They are not immoral, so much as innocent of
those distinctions, modesties, and virtues, to which so much regard is
later given. But, just because of this, many incidents of their sacred
histories come in time to seem impure and revolting. While Zeus
was clearly recognized as the sky that fertilizes the earth and quickens
nature, the myths of his manifold amours — how, in swan-garb of
feathery cirrhus, he approaches and overshadows Leda ; how in a
shower of golden, sunlight rain he impregnates Danae, the imprisoned
earth of frosty spring — all these would be intelligible and inoffensive.
But when Zeus became the supreme ruler of earth and heaven, the all-
holy law-giver, then men could not but soon find these narratives
shocking to their moral sense. We do not easily bear the thought
that the objects of our worship should be inferior in any respect to
ourselves. When this is felt, then the worship must be radically re-
formed, or it falls before some faith of purer type.

All the great universal religions — Buddhism, Christianity, and

24 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Mohammedanism — are distinguished for their high moral quality, and
by this won their glorious victories ; and their crystallization in the
heart of a noble-minded prophet and reformer was in each case pre-
ceded by a great social and moral quickening throughout the commu-
nity in which they arose. When the depths of the human heart are
moved and the imperative claims of justice, truth, and purity once
perceived, then the death -knell of mere nature-worship has. been
rung in that land. As the pagan god, Wainamoinen, in the Finnish
epic of the Kalevala, when he hears of the birth of Christ, enters his
canoe and paddles away to the northern wastes of snow and silence,
so must the worship of force give way to the more majestic divinity
of conscience. The varied influences of man's environment conspire
with the aspiring instincts of his in most soul to conduct him con-
stantly out of the imperfect toward the perfect. Whether or not he
reach it, it is that that must be the goal of his striving.

-♦-•-♦-

ISCHIA AND ITS EAETHQUAKES.

By M. CH. V&LAIN.

THE island of Ischia, which has recently been so terribly rent by an
earthquake, is situated in the northwestern part of the Bay of
Naples, and near the Phlegrean fields, with which the little island of
Procida, likewise volcanic, constitutes a connecting link. It forms a
part of the Neapolitan volcanic region, which may be considered as
still in a state of solfatarian activity, which is exemplified by the
well known solfatara of Puzzuoli, where the sulphur is re-deposited, as
far as it is mined, by numerous gaseous emanations, and by the escape
of carbonic acid in the Grotto del Cane near Lake Agnano. All of
these exhalations, which are the mark of a declining volcanic activity,
attest that this region, situated on a great line of fracture running
northwest and southeast from Vesuvius to Vultura, is still in direct
communication with the subterranean sources. The ancients fully
recognized this, and regarded all those explosive craters, now trans-
formed into a chain of remarkably picturesque lakes across the Phle-
grean fields, as so many doors of Tartarus through which the infernal
divinities took souls to the banks of the Acheron. The most celebrated
of them, Lake Avernus, " Atri Janua Ditis " (the gate of black hell),
now smiling and salubrious, then exhaled torrents of suffocating gases
which well justified its name, and rendered a stay there mortal to the
birds that ventured into its neighborhood.

The Neapolitan volcanic region extends from Vesuvius to Vultura,
on the eastern edge of the Apennines, and includes the Phlegrean fields
and the connected islands of Ischia and Procida. The volcanic activity

IS CHI A AND ITS EARTHQUAKES.

25

of this whole space is now concentrated at Vesuvius, and is manifested
at other places in the vicinity only by the emanations and thermal
springs of which we have spoken, and from time to time, during pe-
riods when the volcano is inactive, by violent shocks, of which the
terrible disaster of the 28th of July, at Ischia, has just given an im-
pressive example.

Previous to the Christian era, Vesuvius, covered with a rich vege-
tation, was wholly inactive. Nothing except the form of the mountain
could give a suspicion of the intensity of the fires that were raging
beneath it. Volcanic activity, then localized in the Phlegrean fields,

rni volcanic tutas

ionsL^I (scoria)

a tLLUV

V C'JATEHKIM 3 PLIOCthE

•^Jlavas E23TR»eH»Tie tufas

2 EOCENE LCRETACE0U3

Fig. 1.— Bat op Naples. Geological Map showing the Relations op Ischia with the

Phlegrean Fields.

attained its maximum in Ischia, which was its escape-valve during the
entire period of Vesuvian quiet. It produced then, through the action
of a large number of eruptions taking place within a period of several
thousand years, a considerable island, which now rises more than eight
hundred metres, or two thousand six hundred feet, above the level of
the sea. It is eighty kilometres, or a little less than fifty miles, in cir-
cumference at the level of the sea, eight kilometres, or not quite five
miles, long from east to west, and eight kilometres, or about three
miles, broad. From its center rises Mount Epomeo, which, crowned
by an abrupt, semicircular rampart, which is nothing else than the
eastern edge of the grand crater, whence have issued all the trachytic
projections that now form the greater part of the island, presents the
somber aspect of a fire-vomiting mountain. This crater has never
given out lavas. Built on masses of pumiceous tufas of slight con-

26 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

sistency, the lava-flows have always been produced upon the slope or
at the base of the mountain. At each of the orifices of issue the pro-
jections forced out by tumultuous jets of gas have formed adventitious
cones of dimensions often considerable, like those of il Toppo, il Trip-
piti, and il Garifoli ; and we may count some ten such cones around
Epomeo, all of which have been centers of activity and furnished large
flows.

The appearance of Ischia was relatively of recent date ; it is not
placed farther back than the older quaternary. The foundation of the
island was begun by submarine eruptions, above wThich opened the
crater of Epomeo, at first appearing above the surface of the sea as an
annular reef, from which were thrown out jets of trachytic scoria.
The island was raised up in successive stages by the accumulation of
the projected matter around the orifice of issue. The proof of this is
drawn from the fact that we may still find on the sides of Mount
Epomeo, carried to a height of four hundred and seventy metres,
masses of marine shells of species yet living in the Mediterranean, en-
cased in clays that have resulted from the decomposition of trachytic
tufas under water. The whole of this trachytic mass is itself estab-
lished on marls and clays, including numerous remains of Mediterra-
nean shells, and has evidently acquired its present relief within the
historical epoch.

The most ancient of the recorded eruptions in Ischia was that of
Montagnone, to which is ascribed the origin of the vast crater of regular
form that still existed before the recent earthquake, in a state of per-
fect preservation, in the northwestern part of Ischia. About 470 b. c,
successive eruptions at Point Comacchia gave rise to the vast flows of
Manecoco and Bale, which extended far into the sea and prolonged the
point to the north. Numerous efforts have been made since these an-
cient times to plant colonies on this unstable land, even then fertile
and covered with a luxuriant vegetation.

Lyell, who made a long exploration of the island in 1828, relates
that first the Erythreans and afterward the Chalcideans, who had set-
tled in the island before the Christian era, were driven away by the
incessant earthquakes and the mephitic exhalations escaping from
every point. At a later time, 280 b. c, Hiero, king of Syracuse, tried
to found a colony there, but it was soon driven away by a formidable
explosion preceding the great flows of lava which gave rise to the
masses now forming the promontories of Zaro and Camso.

The same fate befell the Grecian colonies which afterward tried at
different times to occupy the island. The eruption that forced the
retreat of the first Grecian colony gave rise to Monte Rosa to, that
cone of projections the sudden formation of which is comparable to
that of Monte Nuovo. The last-named mountain was raised in Sep-
tember, 1538, in forty-eight hours, at Puzzuoli, after a succession of
formidable shocks which occasioned great disasters in the Phlegrean

ISCHIA AND ITS EARTHQUAKES. 27

fields and destroyed a great number of Roman buildings. These two
mountains of volcanic erection, formed under similar conditions, at two
distinct epochs corresponding in each case with a period of repose in
Vesuvius, are distinguished by their regular form, which may be com-
pared with that of the classic volcanoes of the chain of the puys of
Auvergne. Both, terminating in a vast crater, have emitted, like the
volcanoes of Auvergne, only a single flow of lava, which seems to have
exhausted all their energy. A long period of repose followed. Dur-
ing more than a century " Ischia the Joyous," as it was called, rested
in perfect tranquillity. The pleasure-loving Romans made of it the
most enchanting resort in the world ; all their magnates had villas

there.

It is to be remarked that this period of repose was correspondent
with a resumption of activity on Vesuvius. The first symptom of an
awakening of energy in that volcano was an earthquake, which in the
year 68 occasioned considerable damage in the neighboring towns.
We know well how, eleven years later, in 79, the hitherto peaceful
mountain, covered at the time with rich plantations and forests nearly
to its crater, revealed by a sudden explosion the terrible force that
was sleeping in its depths. La Somma, reduced to powder, was pro-
jected into the air ; then a column of thick smoke was seen to rise
vertically from the summit of the mountain, and to spread horizontally,
covering the country under its immense shadows. The sun was ob-
scured even as far as to Rome, and it was believed that the " great
night of the earth " was about to begin. When light was restored,
the dismantled mountain had changed its form ; the luxuriant forests
that had covered it had disappeared, and so had the populous cities of
Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabise, buried, with their inhabitants,
under ashes and volcanic debris. From this time, Vesuvius does not
appear to have emitted any eruption of lava for several hundred
years ; and this period of quiet at that center seems to have been
marked at Ischia by a resumption of the fires of Epomeo, which had
enjoyed so long a rest that large forests had grown up to the very
edge of its crater. In 1302, after the island had been shaken with a
succession of earthquakes during the previous year, the lava gushed
out by a new opening near the city of Ischia, and in less than four
hours reached the sea, having destroyed everything in its passage as
if it had been a torrent of fire. The city was terribly afflicted ; large
houses and numerous villas were buried, with their inhabitants. The
rough surface of this lava stream has resisted all weathering, and still
refuses to bear any vegetation. The new eruptive phase was of long
duration, and it is remarked that while it continued Vesuvius was
quiet. The alternations between the eruptive movements of lava in
the two volcanic centers find a natural explanation in the facts that
they are both on the same line of fracture, and a subterranean com-
munication probably exists between them.

28 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Epomeo became tranquil after Vesuvius resumed its eruptions ;
and for long series of years the island of Ischia had no other outlets
for the escape of the gases generated in its depths than its thirty or
forty thermal springs, which have contributed, together with the pure
air and the beauty of the situation, to increase every year the crowd
of visitors.

Every indication tends to support the belief that Ischia, a rival to
Vesuvius in the height of its volcano, is an ancient cone composed of
the matter thrown up by extremely violent submarine eruptions which
took place before the present epoch. As the mountain increased in
height through the successive accumulations of the trachytic projec-
tions from the central crater, the weaker parts of its flanks, yielding
to the height of the liquid column in the vent, were cleft in every di-
rection ; the injection of lavas into all the fissures thus formed giving
rise to the flows we have just mentioned, melted in with and consoli-
dated the structure, which is thus the result of a protracted alternation
of projected debris and flows of compact lavas. We can in this man-
ner account for the disposition of the grand ravines which, descending
from Epomeo, plow the flanks of the mountain to a great depth.

Fig. 2.— Coast of Ischia, been from the West, Point Comacchia.

The island has, therefore, been progressively raised above the
waters, and has grown laterally during the historic period, as is testi-
fied by the flows of lava still visible on the Arso and on Monte Tabor,
which are prolonged to the sea, and by the numerous secondary cones
scattered over its plateaus. It definitely acquired its present relief
toward the beginning of this century. Since that time, Mount Epomeo
has not given any other signs of its volcanic character than those which
the scientific observer might deduce from the analogy of its form with
the forms of other volcanoes. Its arid, slashed summit, looking up to
the sky, served as the end of the promenade for the numerous visitors
who every summer frequented the thermal stations at Casamicciola,
Castiglione, and San Lorenzo. Its springs, highly endowed with ther-
mal qualities, and the exceptional fertility of its volcanic soil, on which
small shrubs became arborescent, would have sufficed to give to the
fortunate, healthful, and gay island great wealth, had not its earth-
quakes always caused apprehensions.

These disturbances of the earth, the relations of which with the
volcanic structure are most evident have repeatedly brought frightful
disasters upon Ischia. Hardly a trace of the splendid Roman struc-
tures once built upon it now remains ; without mentioning specifically

IS CHI A AND ITS EARTHQUAKES. 29

all the recorded earthquakes, that of 1881, which is still comparatively-
fresh in memory, partly destroyed the city of Casamicciola, which has
now been obliterated. It gave a warning by which no one knew how
to profit. The constitution of the soil of the island, which is com-

Fig. 3.— Castle of Ischia.

posed chiefly of trachytic tufas and unconsolidated loose matters, is a
considerable element in promoting these disasters.

The Ischian earthquakes are narrowly localized. Their origin is
not doubtful, but is readily traceable to the efforts which the lavas and
the gases, strongly compressed under the earth, make to escape. Their
effects never extend to great distances. The catastrophe which has
just consummated the destruction of Casamicciola, already severely
shaken in 1881, is a striking example of them. A violent shock, quick
as the firing of a cannon, was enough to unsettle and partly destroy
the whole northern slope of the island. Procida, which was near it, was
shaken, but only a few rumblings in the earth were felt on the neigh-
boring coast. The phenomena are marked by vertical shocks, acting
only upon a definite point, and violent in proportion as they are lim-
ited in extent. These shocks are propagated irregularly, without con-
tinuity, by sudden starts, across the trachytic tufas forming the sub-
soil of the island. Slides of the ground are thus produced, which carry
off with them cultivated fields and buildings. One is sometimes
tempted to compare them, on account of the formidable subterranean
sounds that accompany them, and of their suddenness, to mine explo-
sion's ; but the illustration would be badly chosen, for these move-
ments have never caused a sudden rising of the soil, and there is
nothing about them comparable to the disturbances produced by an
explosion.

They are rather sinkings down, into a soil already cracked and

3o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

partly disintegrated by the thermal waters, that have produced all
these disasters which we now know have been greater in the neighbor-
hood of the points where these springs are most active and most abun-
dant. Casamicciola, where the hydro-thermal activity of the island is
concentrated, has been destroyed forever, for prudence will demand
that it never be rebuilt. A single house remains standing in the midst
of that disorder of ruins and that accumulation of dead bodies that
now cover the site of a watering-place once so prosperous and so
thronged. The city of Ischia itself has suffered severely ; Loco
Ameno exists no more ; Forio is almost in ruins ; Porto d'Ischia has
also been very much tried ; and we might say that there is not one of
those picturesque villas, hung upon the mountain-side, or hidden in
the verdure of the valleys, that has not been damaged ; and the num-
ber of victims buried under the mass of ruins will probably never be
fully ascertained.

We shall have to go very far back in the history of the Neapolitan
volcanoes to find an example of another such catastrophe. Since
Herculaneum and Pompeii were buried under a cover of ashes and
lava, the most recent great disaster we can at all compare with the
destruction of Ischia is that of Potenza, which, in December, 1857, cost
the lives of more than ten thousand persons. This was in Calabria —
that is, in one of the provinces between Vesuvius and Etna, which
have frequently been subjected to terrible disturbances. — Translated
for the Popular Science Monthly from La Nature.

-+■*■+-

A PLEA FOE PUKE SCIENCE.*

By H. A. EOWLAND,

PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS IN JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.

THE question is sometimes asked us as to the time of year we like
the best. To my mind, the spring is the most delightful ; for
Nature then recovers from the apathy of winter, and stirs herself to
renewed life. The leaves grow, and the buds open, with a suggestion
of vigor delightful to behold ; and we revel in this ever-renewed life
of Nature. But this can not always last. The leaves reach their limit ;
the buds open to the full, and pass away. Then we begin to ask our-
selves whether all this display has been in vain, or whether it has led
to a bountiful harvest.

So this magnificent country of ours has rivaled the vigor of spring
in its growth. Forests have been leveled, and cities built, and a large

* Vice-Presidential Address delivered before Section B, of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, August 15, 1883. Abridged for The Popular Science
Monthly.

A PLEA FOR PURE SCIENCE. 31

and powerful nation has been created on the face of the earth. We
are proud of our advancement. We are proud of such cities as this,
founded in a day upon a spot over which, but a few years since, the
red-man hunted the buffalo. But we must remember that this is only
the spring of our country. Our glance must not be backward ; for,
however beautiful leaves and blossoms are, and however marvelous
their rapid increase, they are but leaves and blossoms, after all.
Rather should we look forward to discover what will be the outcome
of all this, and what the chance of harvest. For, if we do this in time,
we may discover the worm which threatens the ripe fruit, or the bar-
ren spot where the harvest is withering for want of water.

I am required to address the so-called physical section of this As-
sociation. Fain would I speak pleasant words to you on this subject ;
fain would I recount to you the progress made in this subject by my
countrymen, and their noble efforts to understand the order of the
universe. But I go out to gather the grain ripe to the harvest, and I
find only tares. Here and there a noble head of grain rises above the
weeds ; but so few are they that I find the majority of my country-
men know them not, but think that they have a waving harvest, while
it is only one of weeds, after all. American science is a thing of the fu-
ture, and not of the present or past ; and the proper course of one in my
position is to consider what must be done to create a science of physics
in this country, rather than to call telegraphs, electric lights, and such
conveniences, by the name of science. I do not wish to underrate the
value of all these things : the progress of the world depends on them,
and he is to be honored who cultivates them successfully. So also
the cook who invents a new and palatable dish for the table benefits
the world to a certain degree ; yet we do not dignify him by the name
of a chemist. And yet it is not an uncommon thing, especially in
American newspapers, to have the applications of science confounded
with pure science : and some obscure American who steals the ideas of
some great mind of the past, and enriches himself by the application
of the same to domestic uses, is often lauded above the great origina-
tor of the idea, who might have worked out hundreds of such appli-
cations, had his mind possessed the necessary element of vulgarity. I
have often been asked which was the more important to the world,
pure or applied science. To have the applications of a science, the
science itself must exist. Should we stop its progress, and attend
only to its applications, we should soon degenerate into a people like
the Chinese^ who have made no progress for generations, because they
have been satisfied with the applications of science, and have never
sought for reasons in what they have done. The reasons constitute
pure science. They have known the application of gunpowder for
centuries ; and yet the reasons for its peculiar action, if sought in the
proper manner, would have developed the science of chemistry, and
even of physics, with all their numerous applications. By contenting

3z THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

themselves with the fact that gunpowder will explode, and seeking no
further, they have fallen behind in the progress of the world ; and we
now regard this oldest and most numerous of nations as only barba-
rians. And yet our own country is in this same state. But we have
done better ; for we have taken the science of the Old World, and ap-
plied it to all our uses, accepting it like the rain of heaven, without
asking whence it came, or even acknowledging the debt of gratitude
we owe to the great and unselfish workers who have given it to us.
And, like the rain of heaven, this pure science has fallen upon our
country, and made it great and rich and strong.

To a civilized nation of the present day, the applications of science
are a necessity ; and our country has hitherto succeeded in this line,
only for the reason that there are certain countries in the world where
pure science has been and is cultivated, and where the study of na-
ture is considered a noble pursuit. But such countries are rare, and
those who wish to pursue pure science in our own country must be
prepared to face public opinion in a manner which requires much moral
courage. They must be prepared to be looked down upon by every
successful inventor whose shallow mind imagines that the only pursuit
of mankind is wealth, and that he who obtains most has best succeeded
in this world. Everybody can comprehend a million of money ; but
how few can comprehend any advance in scientific theory, especially
in its more abstruse portions ! And this, I believe, is one of the causes
of the small number of persons who have ever devoted themselves to
work of the higher order in any human pursuit. Man is a gregarious
animal, and depends very much, for his happiness, on the sympathy of
those around him ; and it is rare to find one with the courage to pur-
sue his own ideals in spite of his surroundings. In times past, men
were more isolated than at present, and each came in contact with a
fewer number of people. Hence that time constitutes the period when
the great sculptures, paintings, and poems were produced. Each man's
mind was comparatively free to follow its own ideals, and the results
were the great and unique works of the ancient masters. To-day the
railroad and the telegraph, the books and newspapers, have united each
individual man with the rest of the world : instead of his mind being
an individual, a thing apart by itself, and unique, it has become so in-
fluenced by the outer world, and so dependent upon it, that it has lost
its originality to a great extent. The man who in times past would
naturally have been in the lowest depths of poverty, mentally and
physically, to-day measures tape behind a counter, and with lordly air
advises the naturally born genius how he may best bring his outward
appearance down to a level with his own. A new idea he never had,
but he can at least cover his mental nakedness with ideas imbibed from
others. So the genius of the past soon perceives that his higher ideas
are too high to be appreciated by the world ; his mind is clipped down
to the standard form ; every natural offshoot upward is repressed,

A PLEA FOR PURE SCIENCE. 33

until the man is no higher than his fellows. Hence the world, through
the abundance of its intercourse, is reduced to a level. What was
formerly a grand and magnificent landscape, with mountains ascend-
ing above the clouds, and depths whose gloom we can not now appre-
ciate, has become serene and peaceful. The depths have been filled,
and the heights leveled, and the wavy harvests and smoky factories
cover the landscape.

As far as the average man is concerned, the change is for the bet-
ter. The average life of man is far pleasanter, and his mental con-
dition better, than before. But we miss the vigor imparted by the
mountains. We are tired of mediocrity, the curse of our country.
We are tired of seeing our artists reduced to hirelings, and imploring
Congress to protect them against foreign competition. We are tired
of seeing our countrymen take their science from abroad, and boast
that they here convert it into wealth. We are tired of seeing our
professors degrading their chairs by the pursuit of applied science in-
stead of pure science ; or sitting inactive while the whole world is
open to investigation ; lingering by the wayside while the problem of
the universe remains unsolved. We wish for something higher and
nobler in this country of mediocrity, for a mountain to relieve the
landscape of its monotony. We are surrounded with mysteries, and
have been created with minds to enjoy and reason to aid in the un-
folding of such mysteries. Nature calls to us to study her, and our
better feelings urge us in the same direction.

For generations there have been some few students of science who
have esteemed the study of nature the most noble of pursuits. Some
have been wealthy, and some poor ; but they have all had one thing
in common — the love of nature and its laws. To these few men the
world owes all the progress due to applied science, and yet very few
ever received any payment in this world for their labors.

Faraday, the great discoverer of the principle on which all machines
for electric lighting, electric railways, and the transmission of power,
must rest, died a poor man, although others and the whole world have
been enriched by his discoveries. And such must be the fate of the
followers in his footsteps for some time to come.

But there will be those in the future who will study nature from
pure love, and for them higher prizes than any yet obtained are wait-
ing. We have but yet commenced our pursuit of science, and stand
upon the threshold wondering what there is within. We explain the
motion of the planet by the law of gravitation ; but who will explain
how two bodies, millions of miles apart, tend to go toward each other
with a certain force ?

We now weigh and measure electricity and electric currents with

as much ease as ordinary matter, yet have we made any approach to

an explanation of the phenomenon of electricity ? Light is an undu-

latory motion, and yet do we know what it is that undulates ? Heat

vol. xxrv. — \

34 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

is motion, and yet do we know what it is that moves ? Ordinary mat-
ter is a common substance, and yet who shall fathom the mystery of
its internal constitution ?

There is room for all in the work, and the race has but commenced.
The problems are not to be solved in a moment, but need the best work
of the best minds, for an indefinite time.

Shall our country be contented to stand by, while other countries
lead in the race ? Shall we always grovel in the dust, and pick up the
crumbs which fall from the rich man's table, considering ourselves
richer than he because we have more crumbs, while we forget that he
has the cake, which is the source of all crumbs ? Shall we be swine,
to whom the corn and husks are of more value than the pearls ? If I
read aright the signs of the times, I think we shall not always be con-
tented with our inferior position. From looking down we have almost
become blind, but may recover. In a new country, the necessities of
life must be attended to first. The curse of Adam is upon us all, and
we must earn our bread.

But it is the mission of applied science to render this easier for the
whole world. There is a story which I once read, which will illus-
trate the true position of applied science in the world. A boy, more
fond of reading than of work, was employed, in the early days of the
steam-engine, to turn the valve at every stroke. Necessity was the
mother of invention in his case : his reading was disturbed by his
work, and he soon discovered that he might become free from his
work by so tying the valve to some movable portion of the engine as
to make it move its own valve. So I consider that the true pursuit of
mankind is intellectual. The scientific study of nature, in all its
branches, of mathematics, of mankind in its past and present, the pur-
suit of art, and the cultivation of all that is great and noble in the
world — these are the highest occupations of mankind. Commerce, the
applications of science, the accumulation of wealth, are necessities
which are a curse to those with high ideals, but a blessing to that por-
tion of the world which has neither the ability nor the taste for higher
pursuits.

As the applications of science multiply, living becomes easier, the
wealth necessary for the purchase of apparatus can better be obtained,
and the pursuit of other things besides the necessities of life becomes
possible.

But the moral qualities must also be cultivated in proportion to the
wealth of the country, before much can be done in pure science. The
successful sculptor or painter naturally attains to wealth through the
legitimate work of his profession. The novelist, the poet, the mu-
sician, all have wealth before them as the end of a successful career.
But the scientist and the mathematician have no such incentive to
work : they must earn their living by other pursuits, usually teaching,
and only devote their surplus time to the true pursuit of their science,

A PLEA FOR PURE SCIENCE. 35

And frequently, by the small salary which they receive, by the lack
of instrumental and literary facilities, by the mental atmosphere in
which they exist, and, most of all, by their low ideals of life, they are
led to devote their surplus time to applied science or to other means
of increasing their fortune. How shall we, then, honor the few, the
very few, who, in spite of all difficulties, have kept their eyes fixed on
the goal, and have steadily worked for pure science, giving to the
world a most precious donation, which has borne fruit in our greater
knowledge of the universe and in the applications to our physical life
which have enriched thousands and benefited each one of us ? There
are also those who have every facility for the pursuit of science, who
have an ample salary and every appliance for work, yet who devote
themselves to commercial work, to testifying in courts of law, and to
any other work to increase their present large income. Such men would
be respectable if they gave up the name of professor, and took that of
consulting chemists or physicists. And such men are needed in the
community. But for a man to occupy the professor's chair in a promi-
nent college, and, by his energy and ability in the commercial applica-
tions of his science, stand before the local community in a prominent
manner, and become the newspaper exponent of his science, is a dis-
grace both to him and his college. It is the death-blow to science in
that region. Call him by his proper name, and he becomes at once a
useful member of the community. Put in his place a man who shall
by precept and example cultivate his science, and how different is the
result ! Young men, looking forward into the world for something
to do, see before them this high and noble life, and they see that there
is something more honorable than the accumulation of wealth. They
are thus led to devote their lives to similar pursuits, and they honor
the professor who has drawn them to something higher than they
might otherwise have aspired to reach.

I do not wish to be misunderstood in this matter. It is no disgrace
to make money by an invention, or otherwise, or to do commercial
scientific work under some circumstances. But let pure science be the
aim of those in the chairs of professors, and so prominently the aim
that there can be no mistake. If our aim in life is wealth, let us hon-
estly engage in commercial pursuits, and compete with others for its
possession. But if we choose a life which we consider higher, let us
live up to it, taking wealth or poverty as it may chance to come to us,
but letting" neither turn us aside from our pursuit.

The work of teaching may absorb the energies of many ; and, in-
deed, this is the excuse given by most for not doing any scientific
work. But there is an old saying, that where there is a will there is a
way. Few professors do as much teaching or lecturing as the German
professors, who are also noted for their elaborate papers in the scien-
tific journals. I myself have been burdened down with work, and
know what it is : and vet I here assert that all can find time for scien-

3 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

tific research if they desire it. But here, again, that curse of our coun-
try, mediocrity, is upon us. Our colleges and universities seldom call
for first-class men of reputation, and I have even heard the trustee of
a well-known college assert that no professor should engage in research
because of the time wasted ! I was glad to see, soon after, by the call
of a prominent scientist to that college, that the majority of the trus-
tees did not agree with him.

That teaching is important, goes without saying. A successful
teacher is to be respected ; but, if he does not lead his scholars to that
which is highest, is he not blameworthy ? We are, then, to look to
the colleges and universities of the land for most of the work in pure
science which is done. Let us therefore examine these latter, and see
what the prospect is.

One, whom perhaps we may here style a practical follower of Rus-
kin, has stated that while in this country he was variously designated
by the title of captain, colonel, and professor. The story may or may
not be true, but we all know enough of the customs of our country-
men not to dispute it on general principles. All men are born equal :
some men are captains, colonels, and professors, and therefore all men
are such. The logic is conclusive ; and the same kind of logic seems
to have been applied to our schools, colleges, and universities. I have
before me the report of the Commissioner of Education for 1880. Ac-
cording to that report, there were three hundred and eighty-nine,* or
say, in round numbers, four hundred institutions, calling themselves
colleges or universities, in our country ! We may well exclaim that
ours is a great country, having more than the whole world besides.
The fact is sufficient. The whole earth would hardly support such a
number of first-class institutions. The curse of mediocrity must be
upon them, to swarm in such numbers. They must be a cloud of mos-
quitoes, instead of eagles as they profess. And this becomes evident
on further analysis. About one third aspire to the name of univer-
sity ; and I note one called by that name which has two professors
and eighteen students, and another having three teachers and twelve
students ! And these instances are not unique, for the number of small
institutions and schools which call themselves universities is very great.
It is difficult to decide from the statistics alone the exact standing of
these institutions. The extremes are easy to manage. Who can doubt
that an institution with over eight hundred students, and a faculty of
seventy, is of a higher grade than those above cited having ten or
twenty students and two or three in the faculty ? Yet this is not al-
ways true ; for I note one institution with over five hundred students
which is known to me personally as of the grade of a high-school.
The statistics are more or less defective, and it would much weaken
the force of my remarks if I went too much into detail. I append the

* Three hundred and sixty-four reported on, and twenty-five not reported.

A PLEA FOR PURE SCIENCE. 37

following tables, however, of three hundred and thirty so-called col-
leges and universities :

218 had from 0 to 100 students.

88 " " 100 " 200

12 " " 200 " 300 "

6 " " 300 u 500 "

6 over 500

Of three hundred and twenty-two so-called colleges and universities —

206 had 0 to 10 in the faculty.

99

a

10 " 20

a

a

17

((

20 or over

a

u

If the statistics were forthcoming — and possibly they may exist —
we might also get an idea of the standing of these institutions and
their • approach to the true university idea, by the average age of the
scholars. Possibly also the ratio of number of scholars to teachers
might be of some help. All these methods give an approximation to
the present standing of the institutions. But there is another method
of attacking the problem, which is very exact, but it only gives us
the possibilities of which the institution is capable. I refer to the
wealth of the institution. In estimating the wealth, I have not in-
cluded the value of grounds and buildings, for this is of little impor-
tance, either to the present or future standing of the institution. As
good work can be done in a hovel as in a palace. I have taken the
productive funds of the institution as the basis of estimate. I find —

234 have below S500,000.

8 " between $500,000 and $1,000,000.
8 " over $1,000,000.

There is no fact more firmly established, all over the world, than
that the higher education can never be made to pay for itself. Usu-
ally the cost to a college, of educating a young man, very much ex-
ceeds what he pays for it, and is often three or four times as much.
The higher the education, the greater this proportion will be ; and a
university of the highest class should anticipate only a small accession
to its income from the fees of students. Hence the test I have applied
must give a true representation of the possibilities in every case. Ac-
cording to the figuresy only sixteen colleges and universities have
$500,000 or over of invested funds, and only one half of these have
$1,000,000 and over. Now, even the latter sum is a very small endow-
ment for a college ; and to call any institution a university which has
less than $1,000,000 is to render it absurd in the face of the world.
And yet more than one hundred of our institutions, many of them
very respectable colleges, have abused the word " university " in this
manner. It is to be hoped that the endowment of the more respect-
able of these institutions may be increased, as many of them deserve

3 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

it ; and their unfortunate appellation has probably been repented of
long since.

But what shall we think of a community that gives the charter of
a university to an institution with a total of $20,000 endownment,
two so-called professors, and eighteen students ; or another with three
professors, twelve students, and a total of $27,000 endowment, mostly
invested in buildings ! And yet there are very many similar institu-
tions ; there being sixteen with three professors or less, and very many
indeed with only four or five.

Such facts as these could only exist in a democratic country, where
pride is taken in reducing everything to a level. And I may also say
that it can only exist in the early days of such a democracy ; for an
intelligent public will soon perceive that calling a thing by a wrong
name does not change its character, and that truth, above all things,
should be taught to the youth of the nation.

It may be urged that all these institutions are doing good work in
education ; and that many young men are thus taught who could not
afford to go to a true college or university. But I do not object to
the education — though I have no doubt an investigation would dis-
close equal absurdities here — for it is aside from my object. But I
do object to lowering the ideals of the youth of the country. Let
them know that they are attending a school, and not a university ;
and let them know that above them comes the college, and above that
the university. Let them be taught that they are only half -educated,
and that there are persons in the world by whose side they are but
atoms. In other words, let them be taught the truth.

It may be that some small institutions are of high grade, especially
those which are new ; but who can doubt that more than two thirds
of our institutions calling themselves colleges and universities are un-
worthy of the name ? Each one of these institutions has so-called pro-
fessors, but it is evident that they can be only of the grade of teach-
ers. Why should they not be so called ? The position of teacher is
an honored one, but is not made more honorable by the assumption of
a false title. Furthermore, the multiplication of the title and the
ease with which it can be obtained render it scarcely worth striving
for. When the man of energy, ability, and perhaps genius, is re-
warded by the same title and emoluments as the commonplace man
with the modicum of knowledge, who takes to teaching, not because
of any aptitude for his work, but possibly because he has not the en-
ergy to compete with his fellow-men in business, then I say one of the
inducements for first-class men to become professors is gone.

When work and ability are required for the position, and when
the professor is expected to keep up with the progress of his subject,
and to do all in his power to advance it, and when he is selected for
these reasons, then the position will be worth working for, and the suc-
cessful competitor will be honored accordingly. The chivalric spirit

A PLEA FOR PURE SCIENCE. 39

which prompted Faraday to devote his life to the study of nature may
actuate a few noble men to give their lives to scientific work ; but, if
we wish to cultivate this highest class of men in science, we must
open a career for them worthy of their efforts.

Jenny Lind, with her beautiful voice, would have cultivated it to
some extent in her native village ; yet who would expect her to travel
over the world, and give concerts for nothing ? and how would she
have been able to do so if she had wished ? And so the scien-
tific man, whatever his natural talents, must have instruments and a
library, and a suitable and respectable salary to live upon, before he
is able to exert himself to his full capacity. This is true of advance
in all the higher departments of human learning, and yet something
more is necessary. It is not those in this country who receive the
largest salary, and have positions in the richest colleges, who have ad-
vanced their subject the most : men receiving the highest salaries,
and occupying the professor's chair, are to-day doing absolutely noth-
ing in pure science, but are striving by the commercial applications of
their science to increase their already large salary. Such pursuits, as
I have said before, are honorable in their proper place ; but the duty
of a professor is to advance his science, and to set an example of
pure and true devotion to it which shall demonstrate to his students
and the world that there is something high and noble worth living for.
Money-changers are often respectable men, and yet they were once
severely rebuked for carrying on their trade in the court of the
temple.

Wealth does not constitute a university, buildings do not : it is
the men who constitute its faculty, and the students who learn from
them. It is the last and highest step which the mere student takes.
He goes forth into the world, and the height to which he rises has been
influenced by the ideals which he has consciously or unconsciously im-
bibed in his university. If the professors under whom he has studied
have been high in their profession, and have themselves had high
ideals ; if they have considered the advance of their particular subject
their highest work in life, and are themselves honored for their intel-
lect throughout the world — the student is drawn toward that which
is highest, and ever after in life has high ideals. But if the student
is taught by what are sometimes called good teachers, and teachers
only, who know little more than the student, and who are often sur-
passed and even despised by him, no one can doubt the lowered tone
of his mind. He finds that by his feeble efforts he can surpass one
to whom a university has given its highest honor ; and he begins to
thi'nk that he himself is a born genius, and the incentive to work is
gone. He is great by the side of the mole-hill, and does not know
any mountain to compare himself with.

A university should not only have great men in its faculty, but
have numerous minor professors and assistants of all kinds, and should

4o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

encourage the highest work, if for no other reason than to encourage
the student to his highest efforts.

But, assuming that the professor has high ideals, wealth such as
only a large and high university can command is necessary to allow
him the fullest development.

And this is specially so in our science of physics. In the early
days of physics and chemistry, many of the fundamental experiments
could be performed with the simplest apparatus. And so we often
find the names of Wollaston and Faraday mentioned as needing
scarcely anything for their researches. Much can even now be done
with the simplest apparatus ; and nobody, except the utterly incompe-
tent, need stop for want of it. But the fact remains, that one can
only be free to investigate in all departments of chemistry and physics,
when he not only has a complete laboratory at his command, but a
friend to draw on for the expenses of each experiment. That simplest
of the departments of physics, namely, astronomy, has now reached
such perfection that nobody can expect to do much more in it with-
out a perfectly equipped observatory ; and even this would be useless
without an income sufficient to employ a corps of assistants to make
the observations and computations. But, even in this simplest of phys-
ical subjects, there is great misunderstanding. Our country has very
many excellent observatories : and yet little work is done in compari-
son, because no provision has been made for maintaining the work of
the observatory ; and the wealth which, if concentrated, might have
made one effective observatory which would prove a benefit to astro-
nomical science, when scattered among a half-dozen, merely furnishes
telescopes for the people in the surrounding region to view the moon
with. And here I strike the key-note of at least one need of our coun-
try, if she would stand well in science. . . .

Americans have shown no lack of invention in small things ; and
the same spirit, when united to knowledge and love of science, be-
comes the spirit of research. The telegraph operator, with his limited
knowledge of electricity and its laws, naturally turns his attention to
the improvement of the only electrical instrument he knows anything
about ; and his researches would be confined to the limited sphere of
his knowledge, and to the simple laws with which he is acquainted.
But as his knowledge increases, and the field broadens before him, as
he studies the mathematical theory of the subject, and the electro-
magnetic theory of light loses the dim haze due to distance and be-
comes his constant companion, the telegraph instrument becomes to
him a toy, and his effort to discover something new becomes research
in pure science.

It is useless to attempt to advance science until one has mastered
the science : he must step to the front before his blows can tell in the
strife. Furthermore, I do not believe anybody can be thorough in any
department of science without wishing to advance it. In the study of

A PLEA FOR PURE SCIENCE. 4i

what is known, in the reading of the scientific journals, and the discus-
sions therein contained of the current scientific questions, one would
obtain an impulse to work, even though it did not before exist. And
the same spirit which prompted him to seek what was already known
would make him wish to know the unknown. And I may say that 1
never met a case of thorough knowledge in my own science, except in
the case of well-known investigators. I have met men who talked
well, and I have sometimes asked myself why they did not do some-
thing ; but further knowledge of their character has shown me the
superficiality of their knowledge. I am no longer a believer in men
who could do something if they would, or would do something if they
had a chance. They are impostors. If the true spirit is there, it will
show itself in spite of circumstances.

As I remarked before, the investigator in pure science is usually a
professor. He must teach as well as investigate. It is a question
which has been discussed in late years as to whether these two func-
tions would better be combined in the same individual, or separated.
It seems to be the opinion of most that a certain amount of teaching
is conducive, rather than otherwise, to the spirit of research. I myself
think that this is true, and I should myself not like to give up my
daily lecture. But one must not be overburdened. I suppose that
the true solution, in many cases, would be found in the multiplication
of assistants, not only for the work of teaching, but of research. Some
men are gifted with more ideas than they can work out with their
own hands, and the world is losing much by not supplying them with
extra hands. Life is short : old age comes quickly, and the amount
one pair of hands can do is very limited. What sort of shop would
that be, or what sort of factory, where one man had to do all the work
with his own hands ? It is a fact in nature, which no democracy can
change, that men are not equal — that some have brains, and some
hands. And no idle talk about equality can ever subvert the order of
the universe.

I know of no institution in this country where assistants are sup-
plied to aid directly in research. Yet why should it not be so ? And
even the absence of assistant professors and assistants of all kinds to
aid in teaching is very noticeable, and must be remedied before we
can expect much.

There are many physical problems, especially those requiring exact
measurements, which can not be carried out by one man, and can only
be successfully attacked by the most elaborate apparatus, and with a
full corps of assistants. Such are Regnault's experiments on the fun-
damental laws of gases and vapors, made thirty or forty years ago by
aid from the French Government, and which are the standards to this
day. Although these experiments were made with a view to the prac-
tical calculation of the steam-engine, yet they were carried out in such
a broad spirit that they have been of the greatest theoretical use.

42 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Again, what would astronomy have done without the endowments of
observatories ? By their means, that science has become the most per-
fect of all branches of physics, as it should be from its simplicity.
There is no doubt in my mind that similar institutions for other
branches of physics, or, better, to include the whole of physics, would
be equally successful. A large and perfectly equipped physical labora-
tory, with its large revenues, its corps of professors and assistants, and
its machine-shop for the construction of new apparatus, would be able
to advance our science quite as much as endowed observatories have
astronomy. But such a laboratory should not be founded rashly. The
value will depend entirely on the physicist at its head, who has to de-
vise the plan, and to start it into practical working. Such a man will
always be rare, and can not always be obtained. After one had been
successfully started, others could follow ; for imitation requires little
brains.

One could not be certain of getting the proper man every time, but
the means of appointment should be most carefully studied, so as to
secure a good average. There can be no doubt that the appointment
should rest with a scientific body capable of judging the highest work
of each candidate.

Should any popular element enter, the person chosen would be
either of the literary-scientific order, or the dabbler on the outskirts
who presents his small discoveries in the most theatrical manner.
What is required is a man of depth, who has such an insight into
physical science that he can tell when blows will best tell for its ad-
vancement.

Such a grand laboratory as I describe does not exist in the world
at present for the study of physics. But no trouble has ever been
found in obtaining means to endow astronomical science. Everybody
can appreciate to some extent the value of an observatory ; as astron-
omy is the simplest of scientific subjects, and has very quickly reached
a position where elaborate instruments and costly computations are
necessary to further advance. The whole domain of physics is so wide
that workers have hitherto found enough to do. But it can not al-
ways be so, and the time has even now arrived when such a grand
laboratory should be founded. Shall our country take the lead in this
matter, or shall we wait for foreign countries to go before? They
will be built in the future, but when and how is the question.

Several institutions are now putting up laboratories for physics.
They are mostly for teaching, and we can expect only a compar-
atively small amount of work from most of them. But they show
progress ; and, if the progress be as quick in this direction as in
others, we should be able to see a great change before the end of
our lives.

As stated before, men are influenced by the sympathy of those
with whom they come in contact. It is impossible to immediately

A PLEA FOR PURE SCIENCE. 43

change public opinion in our favor ; and, indeed, we must always
seek to lead it, and not be guided by it. For pure science is the
pioneer who must not hover about cities and civilized countries, but
must strike into unknown forests, and climb the hitherto inaccessible
mountains which lead to and command a view of the promised land —
the land which science promises us in the future ; which shall not
only flow with milk and honey, but shall give us a better and more
glorious idea of this wonderful universe. We must create a public
opinion in our favor, but it need not at first be the general public.
We must be contented to stand aside, and see the honors of the world
for a time given to our inferiors ; and must be better contented with
the approval of our own consciences, and of the very few who are ca-
pable of judging our work, than of the whole world besides. Let us
look to the other physicists, not in our own town, not in our own
country, but in the whole world, for the words of praise which are to
encourage us, or the words of blame which are to stimulate us to re-
newed effort. For what to us is the praise of the ignorant ? Let us
join together in the bonds of our scientific societies, and encourage
each other, as we are now doing, in the pursuit of our favorite study ;
knowing that the world will some time recognize our services, and
knowing, also, that we constitute the most important element in
human progress.

But danger is also near, even in our societies. When the average
tone of the society is low, when the highest honors are given to the
mediocre, when third-class men are held up as examples, and when
trifling inventions are magnified into scientific discoveries, then the
influence of such societies is prejudicial. A young scientist attending
the meetings of such a society soon gets perverted ideas. To his
mind, a mole-hill is a mountain, and the mountain a mole-hill. The
small inventor or the local celebrity rises to a greater height, in his
mind, than the great leader of science in some foreign land. He
gauges himself by the mole-hill, and is satisfied with his stature ; not
knowing that he is but an atom in comparison with the mountain,
until, perhaps, in old age, when it is too late. But, if the size of the
mountain had been seen at first, the young scientist would at least have
been stimulated in his endeavor to grow.

We can not all be men of genius ; but we can, at least, point them
out to those around us. - We may not be able to benefit science much
ourselves ; "but we can have high ideals on the subject, and instill them
into those with whom we come in contact. For the good of ourselves,
for the good of our country, for the good to the world, it is incumbent
on us to form a true estimate of the worth and standing of persons
and things, and to set before our own minds all that is great and good
and noble, all that is most important for scientific advance, above the
mean and low and unimportant.

It is very often said that a man has a right to his opinion. This

44 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

might be true for a man on a desert island, whose error would influ-
ence only himself. But when he opens his lips to instruct others, or
even when he signifies his opinions by his daily life, then he is directly
responsible for all his errors of judgment or fact. He has no right to
think a mole-hill as big as a mountain, nor to teach it, any more than
he has to think the world flat, and teach that it is so. The facts and
laws of our science have not equal importance, neither have the men
who cultivate the science achieved equal results. One thing is greater
than another, and we have no right to neglect the order. Thus shall
our minds be guided aright, and our efforts be toward that which is
the highest.

Then shall we see that no physicist of the first class has ever
existed in this country, that we must look to other countries for our
leaders in that subject, and that the few excellent workers in our
country must receive many accessions from without before they can
constitute an American science, or do their share in the world's
work. . . .

We call this a free country, and yet it is the only one where there
is a direct tax upon the pursuit of science. The low state of pure
science in our country may possibly be attributed to the youth of the
country ; but a direct tax, to prevent the growth of our country in
that subject, can not be looked upon as other than a deep disgrace. I
refer to the duty upon foreign books and periodicals. In our science,
no books above elementary ones have ever been published, or are
likely to be published, in this country ; aud yet every teacher in
physics must have them, not only in the college-library, but on his
own shelves, and must pay the Government of this country to allow
him to use a portion of his small salary to buy that which is to do
good to the whole country. All freedom of intercourse which is
necessary to foster our growing science is thus broken off ; and that
which might, in time, relieve our country of its mediocrity is nipped
in the bud by our Government, which is most liberal when appealed to
directly on scientific subjects. One would think that books in foreign
languages might be admitted free ; but, to please the half-dozen or so
workmen who reprint German books, not scientific, our free inter-
course with that country is cut off. Our scientific associations and
societies must make themselves heard in this matter, and show those
in authority how the matter stands. . . .

B

THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 45

THE EEMEDIES OF NATUBE.

By FELIX L. OSWALD, M. D.

THE ALCOHOL-HABIT {concluded).

II.
UT, in tracing the causes which led to the present development of
the poison-vice, we should not overlook the working of another
principle which I must call a reaction against the effect of a wrong
remedy. We can not serve our cause by ignoring its weak points,
for, if we persist in closing our eyes to the significance of our mistakes,
our enemies will not fail to profit by our blindness. We can not work
in the dark. In order to reach our goal, we must see our way clear ;
and I. trust that no earnest fellow-laborer will misconstrue my motive
if I dare to say the whole truth.

The matter is this : At a time when the civilization of antiquity
had become extremely corrupt, a society of ethical reformers tried to
find the panacea for vice, as we now seek the remedy for intemperance.
But, instead of recognizing the local causes of the evil, they ascribed
it to the general perversity of the human heart. They, too, failed to
distinguish between natural appetites and morbid appetencies, and,
misled by the glaring consequences of perverted passions, they con-
ceived the unhappy idea that man's natural instincts are his natural
enemies. In order to crush a few baneful nightshades and poppy-
blossoms, they began a war of extermination against the flowers of
this earth. But that attempt led to an unexpected result : the soil of
the trampled fields engendered weeds that were far harder to destroy
than the noxious herbs of the old flower-garden. The would-be re-
formers had overlooked the fact that it is easier to pervert than to
suppress a natural instinct ; but the history of the last twelve hundred
years has illustrated that truth by many dreadful examples. The sup-
pression of rational freedom led to anarchy. Celibacy became the
mother of the ugliest vices. The attempt to suppress the pursuit of
natural science led to the pursuit of pseudo-science — astrology, necro-
mancy, and all sorts of dire chimeras. The suppression of harmless
pleasures has always fostered the penchant for vicious pleasures. The
austerity of the Stoics helped to propagate the doctrines of Epicurus ;
in Islam the era of the Hanbalite ascetics was followed by the riots of
the Bagdad caliphate ; and the open licentiousness of the English anti-
Puritans, as well as the secret excesses of their northern neighbors, can
be distinctly traced to the mistaken zeal of the party which had waged
a long and unrelenting war against every form of physical pleasure,
and hoped to find salvation in the suppression of all natural desires.
That doctrine has never become the permanent faith of any Aryan
nation, though now and then it has reached a local ascendency which

46 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

made it a grievous addition to the evils it proposed to cure. More
than fifteen hundred years ago the Emperor Julian, and even St. Clem-
ens Alexandrinus, denounced the absurdities of the Marcionite Gnostics,
who " abstained from marriage, the pursuit of worldly advantages, and
all temporal pleasures." The original rigor of those dogmas could not
maintain itself against the healthier instincts of mankind ; but what
they lost in consistency they made up in aggressiveness : an influential
sect of the last century attempted to enforce upon others what the
Marcionites practiced in private, and, while the Syrian ascetics preferred
the desert to the world, the Scotch ascetics tried to turn the world into
a desert.

" According to that code," says the author of the " History of
Civilization," " all the natural affections, all social pleasures, all amuse-
ments, and all the joyous instincts of the human heart, were sinful.
They looked on all comforts as wicked in themselves, merely because
they were comforts. The great object in life was to be in a state of
constant affliction ; . . . whatever pleased the senses was to be sus-
pected. It mattered not what a man liked ; the mere fact of his liking
it made it sinful. Whatever was natural was wrong. It was wrong
to take pleasure in beautiful scenery, for a pious man had no concern
with such matters. On Sunday it was sinful to walk in the fields, or
in the meadows, or enjoy fair weather by sitting at the door of your
own house."

" Whatever was natural was wrong " — though even the extremists
of that school might have shrunk from the consistency of their Syrian
exemplar, who forbade his anchorites to sleep twice under the same
tree, lest their spiritual interests should be imperiled by an undue
affection for any earthly object !

If it were possible that such dogmas could ever again overpower
the common sense of mankind, we should welcome the poison-mania
as the lesser evil, for it is better to seek happiness by a wrong road
than to abandon the search altogether. It is better to taste a forbid-
den fruit than to destroy all pleasant trees. But it is impossible that
such chimeras should have survived their native night. After the ter-
rible experience of the middle ages, it is impossible that any sane per-
son should fail to recognize the significance of the mistake, and we can
not hope to maintain the field against the opponents of temperance till
we have deprived them of their most effective weapon : we must fur-
nish practical proofs that they, not we, are the enemies of human hap-
piness ; that we make war upon vice, and not upon harmless pleasures.

It is a significant fact that in every civilized country of this earth
drunkenness is rarest among the classes who have other and better con-
vivial resources. In the United States, where the " almighty dollar "
confers unlimited privileges, the well-to-do people are the most temper-
ate in the world, the poor the most intemperate. In Turkey, where
the lower classes are indulged in many pastimes which are considered

THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 47

below the dignity of an effendi, the poison-vice is actually confined
to the upper-ten : temperance reigns in the cottage, while opium-
smoking and secret dram-drinking prevail in the palace. In Scotland,
where all classes have to conform to the moral by-laws which discoun-
tenance holiday recreations, total abstinence is extremely rare. For

" Nature will have her revenge, and, when the most ordinary and harm-
less recreations are forbidden as sinful, is apt to seek compensation
in indulgences which no moralist would be willing to condone. The
charge brought against the Novatians in the early ages of the Church
can, with equal plausibility, be brought against the Puritans in our
own day. One vice, at all events, which Christians of every school,
as well as non-Christian moralists, are agreed in condemning, is re-
puted to be a special opprobrium of Scotland ; and the strictest observ-
ance of all those minute and oppressive Sabbatarian regulations to
which we referred just now has been found compatible with conse-
crating the day of rest to a quiet but unlimited assimilation of the
liquid which inebriates but does not cheer. And under the old regime
to be drunk in private, though of course not sanctioned as allowable,
would have been accounted a far less heinous outrage on the dignity
of the Sabbath than to whistle in the public street." — (The " Saturday
Review," July 19, 1879, p. 75.)

There is, indeed, no doubt that the " snuffling, whining saints, who
groaned in spirit at the sight of Jack in the Green," * have driven as
many pleasure-seekers from the play-ground to the pot-house as des-
potism has turned freemen into outlaws and robbers. For the practi-
cal alternative is not between conventicles and rum-riots, but between
healthful and baneful pastimes. Before we can begin to eradicate the
poison-habit we must make reform more attractive than vice ; and, as
long as the champions of temperance shut their eyes to the significance
of that truth, their legislative enactments will always remain dead-letter
laws. Our worst defects we owe, in fact, less to the shrewdness of our
beer-brewing opponents than to the blindness of our Sabbatarian allies.
A free Sunday-garden, with zoological curiosities, foot-races, and good
music, would do more to promote the cause of temperance than a whole
army of Hudibras revivalists, f

* Macaulay'a " History," vol. i, p. 371.

f " Every one who considers the world as it really exists, and not as it appears in the
writings of ascetics and sentimentalists, must have convinced himself that, in great towns,
where multitudes of men of all classes and all characters are massed together, and where
there are innumerable strangers, separated from all domestic ties and occupations, public
amusements of an exciting order are absolutely necessary, and that, while they are often
the vehicle and the occasion of evil, to suppress them, as was done by the Puritans of the
Commonwealth, is simply to plunge an immense portion of the population into the lowest
depths of vice." — (Lecky, " History of Rationalism," vol. ii, p. 286 (cf. ibid., vol. ii, p. 350.)

"Sir," said Johnson, "I am a great friend to public amusements, for they keep people
from vice." — ("Boswell," p. 171.)

" Insani fugiunt mundum, immundumque sequuntur." — Giordano Bruno (Moriz Car-
riere, "Weltanschauung," p. 396).

48 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Individuals, too, should be treated on that plan, and, next to abso-
lute abstinence from stimulating poisons, the most essential condition
of a permanent cure is a liberal alloicance of healthful stimulants, in
the form of diverting pastimes and out-door exercise. For the chief
danger of a relapse is not the attractiveness of intoxication, but the
misery of the after-effect, the depressing reaction that follows upon
the abnormal excitement, and for several weeks seems daily to gain
strength against the reformatory resolves of the penitent. This apathy
of the unstimulated system can become more intolerable than positive
pain, and embitter existence till, in spite of prayers and pledges, its
victims either relapse into alcohol or resort to cognate stimulants —
chloral, absinthe, or opium. In stress of such temptations the prophy-
lactic influence of a mind-stimulating occupation is almost as effective
as is the deliquium of disappointed love. Ennui is the chief coadjutor,
of the poison-fiend. On the Militar - Grenze, the " Military Frontier "
of Eastern Austria, a soldier's life is a ceaseless guerrilla- war against
smugglers, outlaws, and Bulgarian bed-bugs ; yet hundreds of German
officers solicit transfer to that region as to a refuge from the tempta-
tions of garrison tedium, deliberately choosing a concentration of all
discomforts, as a Schnapps- Kur, a whisky-cure, as they express it with
frank directness ; and for similar purposes many of Fremont's contem-
poraries took the prairie-trail to the adventure-land of the far West.
Frederick Gerstaecker found that the California rum-shops got their
chief patronage from unsuccessful miners ; the successful ones had
better stimulants.

For the first month or two the convalescent should not content
himself with negative safeguards, but make up his mind that tempta-
tions will come, and come in the most grievous form, and that active
warfare is nearly always the safest plan. The alcohol-habit is a phys-
ical disease, and a Rocky Mountain excursion, a visit to the diggings,
a month of sea-side rambles and surf -baths, will do more to help a con-
vert across the slough of despond than a season-ticket to all the lecture-
halls of the Christian Temperance Union.

But such excursions should be undertaken in company. Soldiers
in the ranks will endure hardships that would melt the valor of any
solitary hero ; and in the presence of manly companions the spirit of
emulation and " approbativeness " will sustain even an enervated fel-
low. The esprit de corps of a temperance society is more cogent than
its vows.

An appeal to the 2^assions is the next best thing. Everything is
fair in the war against alcohol : love, ambition, pride, and even ac-
quisitiveness, may be utilized to divert the mind from a more bane-
ful propensity — for a time, at least. For, after the tempter has been
kept at bay for a couple of months, its power will reach a turning-
point ; the nervous irritability will subside, the outraged digestive
organs resume their normal functions, and the potency of the poison-

THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 49

hunger will decrease from day to day. After that the main point is
to gain time, and give Nature a fair chance to complete the work of
redemption. As the vis vital recovers her functional vigor the employ-
ment of other tonics can be gradually dispensed with, except in the
moments of unusual dejection that will now and then recur — especially
on rainy days and after sultry nights. But in most such cases the
demon can be exorcised with the price of an opera-ticket, and not
rarely with a liberal dinner. " Good cheer " is a suggestive term ; the
mess, as well as music, has power to soothe the savage soul, and, before
invoking the aid of medicinal tonics, Bibulus should try the dulcifying
effect of digestible sweetmeats.

But, on the other hand, when luck and high spirits give a suffi-
cient guarantee against present temptation, do opportunity should be
missed to forego a meal. Fasting is a great system-renovator. Ten
fast-days a year will purify the blood and eradicate the poison-diathe-
sis more effectually than a hundred bottles of expurgative bitters.

And only then, after the paroxysmal phase of the baneful passion
has been fairly mastered, moral suasion gets a chance to promote the
work of reform. For, while the delirium or the crazing after-effects of
the alcohol-fever distract the patient, exhortations are as powerless as
they would be against chronic dysentery. Dr. Isaac Jennings illus-
trates the power of the poison-habit by the following examples : A
clergyman of his acquaintance attempted to dissuade a young man
of great promise from habits of intemperance. "Hear me first a few
words," said the young man, " and then you may proceed. I am sen-
sible that an indulgence in this habit will lead to loss of property, the
loss of reputation and domestic happiness, to premature death, and to
the irretrievable loss of my immortal soul ; and now with all this con-
viction resting firmly on my mind and flashing over my conscience
like lightning, if I still continue to drink, do you suppose anything
you can say will deter me from the practice ? "

Dr. Mussey, in an address before a medical society, mentioned a
case that sets this subject in even a stronger light. A tippler was put
into an almshouse in a populous town in Massachusetts. Within a
few days he had devised various expedients to procure rum, but failed.
At length he hit upon one that proved successful. He went into the
wood-shed of the establishment, placed one hand upon a block, and,
with an axe in the other, struck it off at a single blow. With the
stump raised and streaming, he ran into the house, crying, "Get some
rum — get some rum ! my hand is off ! " In the confusion and bustle
of the occasion somebody did bring a bowl of rum, into which he
plunged his bleeding arm, then raising the bowl to his mouth, drank
freely, and exultingly exclaimed, " Now I am satisfied ! "

More than the hunger after bread, more than the frenzy of love or
hatred, the poison-hunger overpowers every other instinct, and even
the fear of death. In Mexico, my colleague, Surgeon Kellermann, of
vol. xxiv. — 4

5o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

the Second Zouaves, was one night awakened by the growling of his
spaniel, and thought he saw something like the form of a man crawl-
ing out of his tent. The next day the captain informed the company
that some fellow had entered the hospital-camp with burglarious in-
tent, and that he had instructed the sentries to arrest or shoot all noc-
turnal trespassers. About a week after, the doctor was again awak-
ened by his dog, and, lighting a match, he distinguished the figure of
a large man crawling from under his table and carrying in his hand a
box or a big book. He called upon him to stop, cocking his pistol at
the same time, but the fellow made a rush for the door, and in the
next moment was floored by a ball that penetrated his skull two inches
above the neck. He lived long enough to confess the motive of his
desperate enterprise. His regiment had been stationed in Northern
Algiers, where he learned to smoke opium, and having exhausted his
supply, and his financial resources, as well as the patience of the hos-
pital steward, who had at various times furnished him small doses of
the drug, he felt that life was no longer worth living, and resolved to
risk it in the attempt at abducting the doctor's medicine chest. What
can exhortation avail against a passion of that sort ? We should learn
to treat it as the advanced stage of a physical disorder, rather than as
a controvertible moral aberration.

And, even after the delirium of that disease has subsided, homilies
should be preceded by an appeal to reason. Ignorance is a chief cause
of intemperance. The seductions of vice would not mislead so many
of our young men if they could realize the significance of their mis-
take. All the efforts of the Temperance party have thus far failed to
eradicate the popular fallacy that there is some good in alcohol ; that
somehow or other the magic of a stimulating drug could procure its
votaries an advantage not attainable by normal means. Nor is this
delusion confined to the besotted victims of the poison-vice. Even
among the enlightened classes of our population, nay, among the
champions of temperance, there is still a lingering belief that, with
due precaution against excess, adulteration, etc., a dram-drinker might
" get ahead " of Nature, and, as it were, trick her out of some extra
enjoyment.

There is no hope of a radical reform till an influential majority of
all intelligent people have realized the fact that this trick is in every
instance a losing game, entailing penalties which far outweigh the
pleasures that the novice may mistake for gratuitous enjoyments, and
by which the old habitue can gain only a temporary and qualified
restoration of the happiness which his stimulant has first deprived him
of. For the depression of the vital energy increases with every repe-
tition of the stimulation-process, and in a year after the first dose all
the " grateful and exhilarating tonics " of our professional poison-vend-
ers can not restore the vigor, the courage, and the cheerfulness which
the mere consciousness of perfect health imparts to the total abstainer.

THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 5,

A great plurality of all beginners underrate the difficulty of control-
ling the cravings of a morbid appetite. They remember that their
natural inclinations at first opposed, rather than encouraged, the indul-
gence ; they feel that at the present stage of its development they
could abjure the passion and keep their promise without any difficulty.
But they overlook the fact that the moral power of resistance decreases
with each repetition of the dose, and that the time will come when
only the practical impossibility of procuring their wonted tipple will
enable them to keep their pledge of total abstinence. It is true that
by the exercise of a constant self-restraint a person of great will-force
may resist the progressive tendency of the poison-habit and confine
himself for years to a single cigar or a single bottle of wine per day.
But, if all waste is sinful, is not this constant pull against the stream a
wicked misuse of moral energy — a wanton waste of an effort which
in less treacherous waters would insure the happiest progress, and pro-
pel the boat of life to any desired goal ?

But, while temperance people, as a class, are apt to underrate the
difficulty of a total cure of a confirmed poison-habit, they generally
overrate the difficulty of total prevention. The natural inclination of
a young child is in the direction of absolute abstinence from all noxious
stimulants. I do not speak only of the children of temperate people
who strengthen that inclination by moral precepts, but of drunkards'
boys, of the misbegotten cadets of our tenement barracks and slum-
alleys. All who will make their disposition a special study may repeat
the experiments which have convinced me that the supposed effects of
hereditary propensities are in almost every case due to the seductions
of a bad example, and that the influence of an innate predisposition has
been immoderately exaggerated. Watch the young picnickers of an
orphan-festival, and see what a great majority of them will prefer
sweet cold milk to iced tea, and the lemonade-pail to the ginger-beer
basket. Offer them a glass of liquor, and see how few out of a hun-
dred will be able to sip it without a shudder. Or let us go a step
further, and interview the inmates of a house of correction, or of a
Catholic " protectory " for young vagrants. The superintendent of a
penitentiary for adults (in Cologne, Germany) expressed a conviction
that a - plurality of his prisoners would stretch out their hands for a
bottle of the vilest liquor rather than for a piece of gold. In the
house of correction I would stake any odds that ninety per cent of
all boy-prisoners under fourteen would prefer an excursion-ticket to a
bottle of the best wine of Tokay or Johannisberg. At home, in a
preparatory school of all vices, they of course imitate their teachers,
but only by overcoming almost the same instinctive repugnance which
is the best safeguard of the total abstainer's child. At the first at-
tempt even the offspring of a long lineage of drunkards abhors the
taste of alcohol as certainly as the child of the most inveterate smoker
detests the smell of tobacco.

52 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

But it is true that the impaired vitality of the habitual drunkard
transmits itself mentally in the form of a peculiar disposition which
I have found to be equally characteristic of the children (and even
grandchildren) of an opium-eater. They lack that spontaneous gayety
which constitutes the almost misfortune-proof happiness of normal
children, and, without being positively peevish or melancholy, their
spirits seem to be clouded by an apathy which yields only tK> strong
external excitants. But out-door work and healthy food rarely fail to
restore the tone of the mind, and even before the age of puberty the
manifestations of a more buoyant temper will prove that the patient
has outgrown the hereditary hebetude, and with it the need of artificial
stimulation. Temptation, of course, should always be guarded against,
and also everything that could tend to aggravate the lingering de-
spondency of the convalescent — harsh treatment, solitude, and a mo-
notonous occupation.

"With normal children such precautions are superfluous. They
will resist temptation if we do not force it upon them. No need of
threats and tearful exhortations ; you need not warn a boy to abstain
from disgusting poisons — Nature attends to that ; but simply provide
him with a sufficient quantity of palatable, non-stimulating food, till
he reaches the age when habit becomes as second nature. It was
Rousseau's opinion that a taste for stimulants could be acquired only
during the years of immaturity, and that there would be little danger
after the twentieth year, if in the mean while observation and confirmed
habits had strengthened the protective instincts which Nature has
erected as a bulwark between innocence and vice. We need not for-
tify that bulwark by artificial props, we need not guard it with anx-
ious care ; all we have to do is to save ourselves the extraordinary
trouble of breaking it down. After a boy becomes capable of induc-
tive reasoning, it can, of course, do no harm to call his attention to
the evils of intemperance, and give him an opportunity to observe the
successive stages of the alcohol-habit, the gradual progress from beer
to brandy, from a " state of diminished steadiness " to delirium tre-
mens. In large cities, where the evils of drunkenness reveal them-
selves in all their naked ugliness, children can easily be taught to
regard the poison-vice as a sort of disease which should be guarded
against, like small-pox or leprosy.

But it should always be kept in mind that even the milder stimu-
lant-habits have a progressive tendency, and that under certain cir-
cumstances the attempt to resist that bias will overtask the strength
of most individuals. According to the allegory of the Grecian myth,
the car of Bacchus was drawn by tigers ; and it is a significant circum-
stance that war, famine and pestilence have so often been the fore-
runners of veritable alcohol-epidemics. The last Lancashire strike was
accompanied by whisky riots ; the starving Silesian weavers tried to
drown their misery in Schnapps. In France almost every general de-

THE AGE OF TREES. 53

cline of material prosperity has been followed by a sudden increase of
intemperance, and after a prolonged war the vanquished party seems
to be chiefly liable to that additional affliction. The explanation is
that, after the stimulant-habit has once been initiated, every unusual
depression of mental or physical vigor calls for an increased applica-
tion of the wonted method of relief. Nations who have become ad-
dicted to the worship of a poison-god will use his temple as a place
of refuge from every calamity ; and children whose petty ailments
have been palliated with narcotics, wine, and cordials, will afterward
be tempted to drown their deeper sorrow in deeper draughts of the
same nepenthe.

And even those who manage to suppress that temptation have to
suppress the revivals of a hard-dying hydra, and will soon find that
only abstinence from all poisons is easier than temperance.

•»>»

THE AGE OF TEEES.

By J. A. FAEEEE.

SINCE De Candolle, the celebrated Swiss botanist, propagated the
idea that a tree has no limits set by nature in its constitution to
the term of its existence, the question of the age attainable by trees
has never ceased to be debated with considerable interest. De Can-
dolle's argument was to the effect that whereas animals have, by the
physiological construction of their vessels, a set limit to the duration
of their lives, trees have no such natural termination ; and that al-
though their decay and death are so familiar to us that we commonly
speak of this or that species as living for a given period like two hun-
dred years, yet such decay is rather the result of accident or disease
than of any law inherent in their nature such as in our own case we
designate as death by old age. Whence, the same botanist inferred,
there is no reason why trees under perfectly favorable conditions
should ever perish ; and he proceeded to adduce in favor of that the-
ory instances of trees which even then were in the enjoyment of no
contemptible moment of eternity.

Until accurate observations have been made for hundreds or per-
haps thousands of years, it would seem impossible to arrive at even
an approximate solution of so wide a problem as this. Under the
best conditions we could never eliminate those causes of tree mortality
whicn De Candolle fairly enough calls accidental, but which are con-
tained in the invariable laws of the elements. The largest, and there-
fore probably the oldest, trees are the special sport of the lightning ;
and the storm which has so often felled trees of the most prodigious
size will, even if it spare the trunk, break off boughs, thus admitting

54 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

at the point of fracture that caries into the trunk which will ulti-
mately reduce it to a mere shell, similar to one of those bull-oaks
wherein the bull loves to hide himself. These causes of disease and
decay can never be absent, since they evidently belong to the perma-
nent order of nature.

Again, De Candolle accounts with great probability for the di-
minished rate of tree-growth after a certain period by such considera-
tions as the greater distance of the roots from the air, their coming
into contact with the roots of other trees, or with a rocky or otherwise
unsuitable substratum, or the diminished elasticity of the bark ; and
though it is possible that trees might continue to grow in their fifth
century at the same rate as in their first, if the conditions remained
equally favorable, yet, since the proviso can never be insured, a fur-
ther difficulty, amounting to insuperability, occurs, to prevent such an
hypothesis from being brought to the test of either observation or ex-
periment.

Whether, therefore, a tree might possibly continue living and
growing forever is a question of less entertainment than the question
of its possible duration in the common state of nature and under the
irreversible conditions of climate, soil, and the elements. What age
may we ascribe to some of our largest specimens, either still existing
or recorded in trustworthy history ? Is the period of one thousand
years, the favorite figure of tradition, a common or probable period
of arboreal longevity, or have our proudest forest giants attained their
present size in half the time that is commonly claimed for them ?

In the discussion of this question we have but few known data to
guide us, since statistics of the rate of growth, as afforded by careful
measurement, date only from about the beginning of the eighteenth
century. Of such statistics we may dismiss at once measurement of
height or of the spread of a tree's boughs, the measurement of girth
being far easier and more conclusive. But it is unfortunate that no
standard of distance from the ground has yet been adopted for meas-
urement, so that the needless perplexity might be avoided which is
derived from giving the circumference now at the ground and now at
two, or three, or six feet above it.

The counting of the rings added by exogenous trees every year to
their circumferences can only, without risk of great error, be applied
to trees cut down in their prime, and hence is useless for the older
trees which are hollow and decayed. Trees, moreover, often develop
themselves so unequally from their center that, as in the case of a
specimen in the museum at Kew, there may be about two hundred and
fifty rings on one side to fifty on the other. Perhaps the largest num-
ber of rings that has ever been counted was in the case of an oak felled
in 1812, where they amounted to seven hundred and ten ; but De Can-
dolle, who mentions this, adds that three hundred years were added to
this number as probably covering the remaining rings which it was no

THE AGE OF TREES. 55

longer possible to count. This instance may be taken to illustrate
how unsatisfactory this mode of reckoning really is for all but trees
of comparatively youthful age.

The external girth measurement is for these reasons the best we can
have, being especially applicable where the date of a tree's introduc-
tion into a country or of its planting is definitely fixed, since it ena-
bles us to argue from the individual specimen or from a number of
specimens, not with certainty, but within certain limits of variability,
to the rate of growth of that tree as a species. In these measurements
of trees of a century or more in age, such as are given abundantly in
Loudon'3 "Arboretum," lies our best guide, though even then the
growth in subsequent ages must remain matter of conjecture. The
difficulty is to reduce this conjectural quantity to the limits of proba-
bility ; for, given the ascertained growth of the first century, how
shall we estimate the diminished growth of later centuries ? The
best way would seem to be to take the ascertained growth of the first
century, and then to make, say, the third of it the average growth of
every century. Thus, if we were to take twelve feet as the ascer-
tained growth of an oak in its first century, four feet would be its con-
stant average rate, and we might conjecture that an oak of forty feet
was about a thousand years old. But clearly it might be much less ;
for the reason for taking the third is not so much that it is a more
probable average than the half, as that it is obviously less likely to
err on the side of excess of rapidity.

The cypress affords an instance where the approximate certainty
of its introduction into England enables us to form some conclusions
with regard to its attainable age. The fact of its being first men-
tioned in Turner's " Names of Herbs," published in 1548, makes it
probable that it was not introduced into England before the begin-
ning of that century. But, at all events, the cypress at Fulham, which
in 1793 was two feet five inches at three feet from the ground, can not
have been planted there before 1674, the year that Compton, the
great introducer of foreign trees into England in the seventeenth cen-
tury, became Bishop of London. That gives a growth of about two
feet in the first century ; but sometimes it attains a higher rate, as in
the case of the cypress planted by Michael Angelo at Chartreux,
which was thirteen feet round in 1817, giving the average rate of over
four feet in the first three centuries. Now, the cypress at Somma,
between Lake Maggiore and Milan, for whose sake Napoleon bent the
road out of the straight line, is not more than twenty-three feet in
girth, so that the tradition which makes its planting coeval with
Christianity would seem doubtful ; though if we take three feet as the
first century's growth, and take the third as the average, it may evi-
dently have been standing in the time of Caesar, as an old chronicle of
Milan is averred to attest.

The Lebanon cedar first planted at Lambeth in 1683 was only seven

5 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

feet nine inches (girth measurements alone need be given) one hun-
dred and ten years later. Dr. Uvedale's cedar, planted at Enfield not
earlier than 1670, was fifteen feet eight inches when measured in 1835,
i. e., one hundred and sixty-five years afterward. And the large cedar
at Uxbridge, which was blown down in 1790, was one hundred and
eighteen years old when Gilpin measured it in 1776, and found it to be
fifteen feet and a half. We should therefore be justified in assuming
twelve feet as the possible first century's growth of a cedar even in
England ; whence we may test the probability of the oldest cedars now
on Mount Lebanon having been growing there in the days of King
Solomon. In the year 1696 the traveler Maundrell measured one of
the largest of them and found it to be twelve yards six inches.
Four feet a century being the average rate, the cedar measured by
Maundrell would have required only nine centuries to have attained
its dimensions of thirty-six feet ; so that it need have been no older
than the time of Charlemagne, and, allowing for a more rapid growth
on a site where it is indigenous, may probably have been considerably
younger.

From the claims to antiquity of the cedars of Lebanon let us pass
to those of the Tortworth Spanish chestnut in Gloucestershire, which
sometimes boasts to be the oldest tree in England, and bears an in-
scription to the effect that King John held a Parliament beneath it.*
Sir Robert Atkyns, whose history of that county was published in
1712, usually bears the responsibility of connecting the tree with King
John ; but he only speaks of it as said by tradition " to have been
growing there in the reign of King John. It is nineteen yards in com-
pass, and seems to be several trees incorporated together, and young
ones are still growing up which may in time be joined to the old body."
It was also probably on hearsay evidence that Evelyn spoke of it as
standing on record that a chestnut (at Tamworth) formed a boundary
tree in the reign of Stephen. We may assume Evelyn to have meant
the tree in question ; we may pass the hesitation of tradition between
two kings not remote from one another in time ; and we may accept
fifty-seven feet as the maximum measurement, though no subsequent
measurement gives so high dimensions. Now, that a chestnut may
attain seventeen feet in its first century is proved by the fact that a
chestnut at Nettlecombe, planted within the recollection, and therefore
within the life, of Sir John Trevelyan, who died in 1828, was over
seventeen feet.f But we may be content with fifteen feet for the first
century. Then, on the principle of the third as the average, we should
require a period of eleven centuries for fifty-seven feet ; but that this
average would be too low is evident from the fact that in seventy-one
years — i. e., between 1766 and 1837 — it was proved to have increased
two feet in girth. Therefore we should have a diminishing series be-

* Jesse, " Gleanings in Natural History," i, 341.
f Selby, "Forest Trees," 334 (1842).

THE AGE OF TREES. 57

tween, say, fifteen feet a century at one end and a little over two feet
a century at the other. This might be at the following rate, taking
each figure for the growth of a century : 15 + 13 + 10 + 8 + 6 + 3+2 =
57. By which calculation seven centuries would have been the tree's
age when Sir Robert Atkyns declared it to be fifty-seven feet in 1712,
an antiquity that would amply satisfy tradition, but could not remove
the probability that the tree is not a single trunk, but really a number
of different trees that have become incorporated together.

A somewhat similar theory may be applied to the famous Castagna
di Cento Cavalli on Mount Etna, so called because a Queen of Ara-
gon and one hundred followers on horseback are said to have taken
shelter beneath it from a shower of rain. Brydone, in 1790, measured
the circumference to be two hundred and four feet, but it seemed to
him that the tree in question, of which only separate trunks remain,
was really five separate trees ; and though he professed to have found
no bark on the insides of the stumps nor on the sides opposite to one
another, yet a more recent traveler states, in Murray's guide-book, that
this is only true of the southernmost stem, and that one of the masses
still standing does show bark all round it, which would of course prove
it to be a separate tree. Of the other large chestnuts on Etna the Cas-
tagna del Nave is rather larger than the Tortworth specimen, while
the Castagna della Galea is seventy-six feet at two feet from the
ground. The rich soil of pulverized volcanic ash combined with
decomposed vegetable matter probably enabled them to attain their
present size within a shorter period than would be implied by such
dimensions elsewhere ; but whether they are five centuries or ten it is
absolutely impossible to conjecture.

The great variability in the rate of growth in trees of the same
species is perhaps the most remarkable thing afforded by statistics.
We say, for instance, roughly, that the beech grows twice as fast as
an oak ; but take four beeches mentioned by Loudon, placing their
years in one column and their circumference in another :

One in King's County at 60 years was 17 feet.

One at Foster Hall " 100 " " 12 "

One at Courtachy Castle " 102 " "18 "

One in Callendar Park " 200 " " 17 "

So that of three beeches nearly the same in size one was only sixty,
another one hundred and two, and another as much as two hundred.
And this variability of rate is still more conspicuous in the oak. De
Candolle, who counted the rings of several oaks that had been felled,
found one that at two hundred years had only the same circumference
that another had attained at fifty. Some had grown slowly at first,
and then rapidly ; others, like bad racers, had begun fast and ended
slowly. And even the diminished rate of growth would not seem to
be an invariable rule, for one oak of three hundred and thirty-three
years was shown to have increased as much between three hundred

5 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

and twenty and three hundred and thirty as it had between ninety and
one hundred.

This reduces the computation of the age of an oak to little more
than guess-work. The Cowthorpe oak, the largest existing in Eng-
land, reached at one time seventy-eight feet in circumference. Da-
mory's oak, in Dorsetshire, was only ten feet less when it was so
decayed that it was cut up and sold for fire- wood in 1755 ; and the
Boddington oak, in the vale of Gloucester, was fifty-four feet at the
base when it was burned down in 1790. It is needless to mention other
English oaks which are also claimants to a remote antiquity ; but it is
obvious, from the very variable rate of the growth of oaks, that size
establishes no indisputable title, and that the Cowthorpe oak need not
therefore be the oldest English oak because it is the largest recorded.
From Loudon's statistics of oaks are extracted the following notices
of trees, according to their age and girth :

Feet of
Tears. circumference.

40 8

83 12

100 12

100 18

100 21

120 14

180 15

Feet of
Years. circumference.

200 n

200 25

201 21

220 20

250 '.. 19*

300 33

330 27 '

This table not only shows the great variability of growth, but, if we
take the three specimens of one hundred years old, gives us the high
average of seventeen feet as that of only the first century. Taking,
then, as usual, the third as the average growth, we should require
rather more than eight centuries for an oak of fifty feet, which re-
duces to a very small number the oaks in England that can claim a
thousand years.

When, therefore, Gilpin, in his " Forest Scenery," speaks of nine
hundred years as of no great age for an oak, it must be said that very
few oaks can be named which by measurement would sustain their
title to that age. Tradition, which is always sentimental, leans nat-
urally to the side of exaggerated longevity. William of Wainfleet
gave directions for Magdalen College, Oxford, to be built near the
great oak which fell suddenly in the year 1788, and out of which the
president's chair was made, in memory of the tree. Gilpin assumes
that for the tree to have been called great it must have been five hun-
dred years old, and, therefore, perhaps standing in the time of King
Alfred. But it is clear that it need not have been a century old to
have fairly earned the title of great, and that, therefore, a period of
six centuries may have covered its whole term of existence.

We are certainly apt to underrate the possible rate of growth
where a tree meets with altogether favorable conditions. The silver
fir was only introduced into England in the seventeenth century by

THE AGE OF TREES. 59

Sergeant Newdigate ; and one tree of his planting was thirteen feet
round when Evelyn measured it eighty-one years afterward. A com-
parison of the statistics of growth, as above collected with reference
to the oak, indicates with respect to most trees a more rapid rate than
is commonly supposed. Let us test the claims of some of the oldest
limes. The Swiss used often to commemorate a victory by planting a
lime-tree, so that it may be true that the lime still in the square of
Fribourg was planted on the day of their victory over Charles the
Bold at Morat in 1476. A youth, they say, bore it as a twig into the
town, and arriving breathless and exhausted from the battle had only
strength to utter the word " Victory ! "' before he fell down dead. But
this tree was only thirteen feet nine inches in 1831, i. e., three hundred
and fifty-five years afterward, and it would be extraordinary if a lime
had not attained in that period greater bulk than even an oak might
have reached in a century. The large lime at Neustadt, in Wurtem-
berg, mentioned by Evelyn as having its boughs supported by columns
of stone, was twenty-seven feet when he wrote (1664), and in 1837 it
was fifty-four, so that within a period of one hundred and seventy-
three years it had gained as much as twenty-seven feet. Conse-
quently, making allowance for diminished growth, we may fairly
assume that two hundred years would have been more than enough
for the attainment of the circumference of the first twenty-seven feet
which it had reached in the time of Evelyn. No English lime appears
to have reached such dimensions as would imply a growth of more
than three centuries, though the lime at Depeham, near Norwich,
which was forty-six feet when Sir Thomas Browne sent his account of
it to Evelyn, sufficiently dispels the legend that all limes in this coun-
try have come from two plants brought over by Sir John Spelman,
who introduced the manufacture of paper into England from Ger-
many, and to whom Queen Elizabeth granted the manor of Port-
bridge.

It would be natural to expect the greatest longevity in indigenous
trees, and, though it has been much disputed what kinds are native to
the English soil, etymology alone would indicate that the following
trees were of Roman importation : the elm (idmus), the plane (pla-
tanus), the poplar (populus), the box (buxus), the chestnut (castanea).
The yew, on the contrary, is probably indigenous, though its opponents
find some. reason for their skepticism in the fact that its larger speci-
mens are chiefly found in church-yards and artificial plantations. In
favor of its claim is the fact that its pretensions to longevity seem to
be better founded than those of any other English tree, not even ex-
cluding the oak. A yew that was dug up from a bog in Queen's
County was proved by its rings to have been five hundred and forty-
five years of age ; yet for the last three hundred years of its life it had
grown so slowly that near the circumference one hundred rings were
traceable within an inch. Some great and sudden change for the worse

60 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

in the external conditions may have accounted for so slow a rate ; but
it would hardly be safe, with such evidence before us, to allow more
than three feet a century as the normal growth of a yew, in which case
the Fortingal yew in Scotland, fifty-six feet round in 1769, may have
lived more than eighteen centuries ; and a longevity in proportion must
be accorded to the yews at Fountain's Abbey, or to the Tisbury yew
in Dorsetshire, which boasts of thirty-seven feet in circumference.
Hence tradition in this case would seem to contain nothing incredible
when it asserts that the yews on Kingley Bottom, near Chichester,
were on their present site when the sea-kings from the North landed
on the coast of Sussex.

It is, however, but seldom that any real aid can be derived from
tradition in estimating the longevity of trees. We have even to be
on our guard against it, especially when it associates the general claim
to antiquity by a specific name or event. In the classical period the
tendency was as strong as it is still ; and we should look to our own
legends when tempted to smile at the Delian palm mentioned by Pliny
as coeval with Apollo, or at the two oaks at Heraclea as planted by
Hercules himself. Pausanias, traveling in Greece in the second century
of our era, saw a plane-tree which was said to have been planted by
Menelaus when collecting forces for the Trojan war, whence Gilpin
gravely inferred that the tree must have been thirteen centuries old
when Pausanias saw it. Tacitus calculated that a fig-tree was eight
hundred and forty years old because tradition accounted it the tree
whereunder the wolf nursed Romulus and Remus. Nor was Pliny's
inference more satisfactory, that three hollies still standing in his day
on the site of Tibur must have been older than Rome itself, inasmuch
as Tibur was older than Rome, and they were the very trees on
which Tiburtus, the founder of the former, saw the flight of birds
descend which decided him on the site of his city. There is of course
no more reason to believe in the reality of Tiburtus than of Francion,
the mythical forefather of France, or of Brute the Trojan, the reputed
founder of the British Empire.

These things suffice to justify suspicion of trees associated with par-
ticular names, such as Wallace's Oak, or trees claiming to have been
planted by St. Dominic or Thomas Aquinas. Our only safe guide is
measurement, applied year by year to trees alike of known and of un-
known age, of insignificant as of vast dimensions, and recorded in some
central annual of botanical information, facilitating the work of com-
parison and the arrival at something like trustworthy averages. The
experiment, moreover, has not been sufficiently tried whether our old-
est trees are capable of an increased rate of growth by the application
of fresh earth round their roots, favorable though the case of the Tort-
worth chestnut is to the probability of such a result. Until, therefore,
such statistics are more numerous than at present, we must be content
to rest in the uncertainty with regard to the ages of trees which the

SOME UNSOLVED PROBLEMS IN GEOLOGY. 61

preceding attempt to estimate them makes sufficiently manifest, and to
arrive at no more definite conclusion than was long ago arrived at by
Pliny, that " vita arborum quarundam immensa credi potest " (" The
life of some trees may be believed to be prodigious "). — Longman's
Magazine.

SOME UNSOLVED PEOBLEMS IN GEOLOGY.*

By Db. J. W. DAWSON.

II.

AGAIN" : we are now prepared to say that the struggle for existence,
however plausible as a theory, when put before us in connection
with the productiveness of animals, and the few survivors of their multi-
tudinous progeny, has not been the determining cause of the introduc-
tion of new species. The periods of rapid introduction of new forms
of marine life were not periods of struggle, but of expansion — those
periods in which the submergence of continents afforded new and
large space for their extension and comfortable subsistence. In like
manner it was continental emergence that afforded the opportunity
for the introduction of land animals and plants. Further, in connec-
tion with this, it is now an established conclusion that the great
aggressive faunas and floras of the continent have originated in the
north, some of them within the Arctic Circle ; and this in periods of
exceptional warmth, when the perpetual summer sunshine of the Arctic
regions co-existed with a warm temperature. The testimony of the
rocks thus is, that not struggle, but expansion, furnished the requisite
conditions for new forms of life, and that the periods of struggle
were characterized by depauperation and extinction.

But we are sometimes told that organisms are merely mechanical,
and that the discussions respecting their origin have no significance,
any more than if they related to rocks or crystals, because they relate
merely to the organism considered as a machine, and not to that which
may be supposed to be more important, namely, the great determin-
ing power of mind and will. That this is a mere evasion, by which
we really gain nothing, will appear from a characteristic extract of an
article by an eminent biologist, in the new edition of the " Encyclo-
paedia Britannica " — a publication which, I am sorry to say, instead of
its proper role as a repertory of facts, has become a strong partisan,
stating extreme and unproved speculations as if they were conclusions
of science. The statement referred to is as follows : " A mass of
living protoplasm is simply a molecular machine of great complexity,
the total results of the working of which, or its vital phenomena,

* Address of the President of the American Association for the Advancement of Sci-
ence, delivered at Minneapolis, August 15, 1883. Reprinted from "Science."

62 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

depend on the one hand on its construction, and, on the other, on the
energy supplied to it ; and to speak of vitality as anything but the
name for a series of operations is as if one should talk of the horo-
logity of a clock." It would, I think, scarcely be possible to put into
the same number of words a greater amount of unscientific assumption
and unproved statement than in this sentence. Is "living proto-
plasm " different in any way from dead protoplasm, and, if so, what
causes the difference ? What is a " machine " ? Can we conceive of
a self -produced or uncaused machine, or one not intended to work out
some definite results? The results of the machine in question are
said to be " vital phenomena " ; certainly most wonderful results, and
greater than those of any machine man has yet been able to construct !
But why " vital " ? If there is no such thing as life, surely they are
merely physical results. Can mechanical causes produce other than
physical effects ? To Aristotle, life was " the cause of form in organ-
isms." Is not this quite as likely to be true as the converse proposir
tion ? If the vital phenomena depend on the " construction " of the
machine, and the " energy supplied to it," whence this construction,
and whence this energy ? The illustration of the clock does not help
us to answer this question. The construction of the clock depends on
its maker, and its energy is derived from the hand that winds it up.
If we can think of a clock which no one has made and which no one
winds — a clock constructed by chance, set in harmony with the uni-
verse by chance, wound up periodically by chance — we shall then
have an idea parallel to that of an organism living, yet without any
vital energy or creative law ; but in such a case we should certainly
have to assume some antecedent cause, whether we call it " horologi-
ty " or by some other name. Perhaps the term " evolution " would
serve as well as any other, were it not that common sense teaches that
nothing can be spontaneously evolved out of that in which it did not
previously exist.

There is one other unsolved problem, in the study of life by the
geologist, to which it is still necessary to advert. This is the inability
of paleontology to fill up the gaps in the chain of being. In this re-
spect, we are constantly taunted with the imperfection of the record ;
but facts show that this is much more complete than is generally sup-
posed. Over long periods of time and many lines of being, we have
a nearly continuous chain ; and, if this does not show the tendency
desired, the fault is as likely to be in the theory as in the record. On
the other hand, the abrupt and simultaneous appearance of new types
in many specific and generic forms, and over wide and separate areas
at one and the same time, is too often repeated to be accidental.
Hence paleontologists, in endeavoring to establish evolution, have been
obliged to assume periods of exceptional activity in the introduction
of species, alternating with others of stagnation — a doctrine differing
very little from that of special creation as held by the older geologists.

SOME UNSOLVED PROBLEMS IN GEOLOGY. 63

The attempt has lately been made to account for these breaks by
the assumption that the geological record relates only to periods of
submergence, and gives no information as to those of elevation. This
is manifestly untrue. In so far as marine life is concerned, the periods
of submergence are those in which new forms abound for very obvi-
ous reasons already hinted. But the periods of new forms of land
and fresh-water life are those of elevation, and these have their own
records and monuments, often very rich and ample ; as, for example,
the swamps of the carboniferous, the transition from the cretaceous
subsidence to the Laramie elevation, the tertiary lake-basins of the
West, the terraces and raised beaches of the pleistocene. Had I time
to refer in detail to the breaks in the continuity of life, which can not
be explained by the imperfection of the record, I could show at least
that nature, in this case, does advance per saltum — by leaps, rather
than by a slow, continuous process. Many able reasoners, as Le Conte
in this country, and Mivart and Collard in England, hold this view.

Here, as elsewhere, a vast amount of steady conscientious work is
required to enable us to solve the problems of the history of life.
But, if so, the more the hope for the patient student and investigator.
I know nothing more chilling to research, or unfavorable to progress,
than the promulgation of a dogmatic decision that there is nothing to
be learned but a merely fortuitous and uncaused succession, amenable
to no law, and only to be covered, in order to hide its shapeless
and uncertain proportions, by the mantle of bold and gratuitous
hypothesis.

So soon as we find evidence of continents and oceans, we raise the
question, " Have these continents existed from the first in their pres-
ent position and form, or have the land and water changed places in
the course of geological time ? " In reality both statements are true
in a certain limited sense. On the one hand, any geological map
whatever suffices to show that the general outline of the existing land
began to be formed in the first and oldest crumplings of the crust.
On the other hand, the greater part of the surface of the land consists
of marine sediments which must have been derived from land that
has perished in the process, while all the continental surfaces, except,
perhaps, some high peaks and ridges, have been many times sub-
merged. Both of these apparently contradictory statements are true ;
and, without assuming both, it is impossible to explain the existing
contours and reliefs of the surface.

In the case of North America, the form of the old nucleus of Lau-
rentian rock in the north already marks out that of the finished conti-
nent, and the successive later formations have been laid upon the edges
of this, like the successive loads of earth dumped over an embankment.
But, in order to give the great thickness of the palaeozoic sediments,
the land must have been again and again submerged, and for long
periods of time. Thus, in one sense, the continents have been fixed ;

64 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

in another, they have been constantly fluctuating. Hall and Dana
have well illustrated these points in so far as Eastern North America
is concerned. Professor Hull, of the Geological Survey of Ireland, has
recently had the boldness to reduce the fluctuations of land and water,
as evidenced in the British Islands, to the form of a series of maps
intended to show the physical geography of each successive period.
The attempt is probably premature, and has been met with much ad-
verse criticism ; but there can be no doubt that it has an element of
truth. When we attempt to calculate what could have been supplied
from the old eozoic nucleus by decay and aqueous erosion, and when
we take into account the greater local thickness of sediments toward
the present sea-basins, we can scarcely avoid the conclusion that ex-
tensive areas once occupied by high land are now under the sea. But
to ascertain the precise areas and position of these perished lands may
now be impossible.

In point of fact, we are obliged to believe in the contemporaneous
existence in all geological periods, except perhaps the very oldest, of
three sorts of areas on the surface of the earth : 1. Oceanic areas of
deep sea, which must always have occupied the bed of the present
ocean, or parts of it ; 2. Continental plateaus, sometimes existing as
low flats or as higher table-lands, and sometimes submerged ; 3. Areas
of plication or folding, more especially along the borders of the oceans,
forming elevated lands rarely submerged, and constantly affording the
material of sedimentary accumulations.

Every geologist knows the contention which has been occasioned
by the attempts to correlate the earlier palaeozoic deposits of the At-
lantic margin of North America with those forming at the same time
on the interior plateau, and with those of intervening lines of plication
and igneous disturbance. Stratigraphy, lithology, and fossils are all
more or less at fault in dealing with these questions ; and, while the
general nature of the problem is understood by many geologists, its
solution in particular cases is still a source of apparently endless de-
bate.

The causes and mode of operation of the great movements of the
earth's crust which have produced mountains, plains, and table-lands,
are still involved in some mystery. One patent cause is the unequal
settling of the crust toward the center ; but it is not so generally un-
derstood as it should be that the greater settlement of the ocean-bed
has necessitated its pressure against the sides of the continents in the
same manner that a huge ice-floe crushes a ship or a pier. The geo-
logical map of North America shows this at a glance, and impresses
us with the fact that large portions of the earth's crust have not only
been folded, but bodily pushed back for great distances. On looking
at the extreme north, we see that the great Laurentian mass of cen-
tral Newfoundland has acted as a protecting pier to the space imme-
diately west of it, and has caused the Gulf of St. Lawrence to re-

SOME UNSOLVED PROBLEMS IN GEOLOGY. 65

main an undisturbed area since palaeozoic times. Immediately to
the south of this, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick are folded back.
Still farther south, as Guyot has shown, the old sediments have been
crushed in sharp folds against the Adirondack mass, which has shel-
tered the table-land of the Catskills and of the Great Lakes. South of
this, again, the rocks of Pennsylvania and Maryland have been driven
back in a great curve to the west. Nothing, I think, can more forci-
bly show the enormous pressure to which the edges of the continents
have been exposed, and at the same time the great sinking of the
ocean-beds. Complex and difficult to calculate though these move-
ments of plication are, they are more intelligible than the apparently
regular pulsations of the flat continental areas, whereby they have
alternately been below and above the waters, and which must have
depended on somewhat regularly recurring causes, connected either
with the secular cooling of the earth, or with the gradual retardation
of its rotation, or with both. Throughout these changes, each succes-
sive elevation exposed the rocks for long ages to the decomposing in-
fluence of the atmosphere. Each submergence swept away, and de-
posited as sediment, the material accumulated by decay. Every
change of elevation was accompanied with changes of climate and
with modifications of the habitats of animals and plants. Were it
possible to restore accurately the physical geography of the earth in
all these respects, for each geological period, the data for the solution
of many difficult questions would be furnished.

It is an unfortunate circumstance that conclusions in geology, ar-
rived at by the most careful observation and induction, do not remain
undisturbed, but require constant vigilance to prevent them from being
overthrown. Sometimes, of course, this arises from new discoveries
throwing new light on old facts ; but when this occurs it rarely works
the complete subversion of previously received views. The more usual
case is, that some over-zealous specialist suddenly discovers what seems
to him to overturn all previous beliefs, and rushes into print with a
new and plausible theory, which at once carries with him a host of
half -informed people, but the insufficiency of which is speedily made
manifest.

Had I written this address a few years ago, I might have referred
to the mode of formation of coal as one of the things most surely set-
tled and understood. The labors of many eminent geologists, micro-
scopists, and chemists in the Old and the New Worlds had shown that
coal nearly always rests upon old-soil surfaces penetrated with roots,
and that coal-beds have in their roofs erect trees, the remains of the
last forests that grew upon them. Logan and I have illustrated this
in the case of the series of more than sixty successive coal-beds exposed
at the South Joggins, and have shown unequivocal evidence of land-
surfaces at the time of the deposition of the coal. Microscopical ex-
amination has proved that these coals are composed of the materials

VOL. XXIV. — 5 N

66 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

of the same trees whose roots are found in the under-clays, and their
stems and leaves in the roof -shales ; that much of the material of the
coal has been subjected to sub-aerial decay at the time of its accumula-
tion ; and that in this, ordinary coal differs from bituminous shale,
earthy bitumen, and some kinds of cannel, which have been formed
under water ; that the matter remaining as coal consists almost en-
tirely of epidermal tissues, which, being suberose in character, are
highly carbonaceous, very durable, and impermeable by water,* and
are hence the best fitted for the production of pure coal ; and finally
that the vegetation and the climatal and geographical features of the
coal period were eminently fitted to produce in the vast swamps of
that period precisely the effects observed. All these points and many
others have been thoroughly worked out for both European and Ameri-
can coal-fields, and seemed to leave no doubt on the subject. But sev-
eral years ago certain microscopists observed on slices of coal layers
filled with spore-cases — a not unusual circumstance, since these were
shed in vast abundance by the trees of the coal-forests, and because
they contain suberose matter of the same character with epidermal
tissues generally. Immediately we were informed that all coal con-
sists of spores ; and, this being at once accepted by the unthinking,
the results of the labors of many years are thrown aside in favor of
this crude and partial theory. A little later, a German microscopist
has thought proper to describe coal as made up of minute algae, and
tries to reconcile this view with the appearances, devising at the same
time a new and formidable nomenclature of generic and specific names,
which would seem largely to represent mere fragments of tissues.
Still later, some local facts in a French coal-field have induced an emi-
nent botanist of that country to revive the drift theory of coal, in op-
position to that of growth in situ. A year or two ago, when my friend
Professor Williamson, of Manchester, informed me that he was pre-
paring a large series of slices of coal with the view of revising the
whole subject, I was inclined to say that, after what had been done by
Lyell, Goeppert, Logan, Hunt, Newberry, and myself, this was scarcely
necessary ; but, in view of what I have just stated, it may be that all
he can do will be required to rescue from total ruin the results of our
labors.

An illustration of a different character is afforded by the contro-
versy now raging with respect to the so-called fucoids of the ancient
rocks. At one time the group of fucoids, or algae, constituted a gen-
eral place of refuge for all sorts of unintelligible forms and markings ;
graptolites, worm-trails, crustacean tracks, shrinkage-cracks, and, above
all, rill-markings, forming a heterogeneous group of fucoidal remains
distinguished by generic and specific names. To these were also added
some true land-plants badly preserved, or exhibiting structures not
well understood by botanists. Such a group was sure to be eventually

* " Acadian Geology," third edition, supplement, p. 68.

SOME UNSOLVED PROBLEMS IN GEOLOGY. 67

dismembered. The writer has himself done something toward this *
but Professor Nathorst has done still more : f and now some intellio-i-
ble explanation can be given of many of these forms. Quite recently,
however, the Count de Saporta, in an elaborate illustrated memoir,];
has come to the defense of the fucoids, more especially against the
destructive experiments of Nathorst, and would carry back into the
vegetable kingdom many things which would seem to be mere trails
of animals. While writing this address, I have received from Pro-
fessor Crie, of Rennes, a paper in which he not only supports the algal
nature of rusichnites, arthrichnites, and many other supposed fucoids,
but claims for the vegetable kingdom even receptaculites and archaeo-
cyathus. It is not to be denied that some of the facts which he cites,
respecting the structure of the siphoniae and of certain modern incrust-
ing alga?, are very suggestive, though I can not agree with his conclu-
sions. My own experience has convinced me that, while non-botanical
geologists are prone to mistake all kinds of markings for plants, even
good botanists, when not familiar with the chemical and mechanical
conditions of fossilization, and with the present phenomena of tidal
shores, are quite as easily misled, though they are very prone, on the
other hand, to regard land-plants of some complexity, when badly pre-
served, as mere algae. In these circumstances it is very difficult to
secure any consensus, and the truth is only to be found by careful
observation of competent men. One trouble is, that these usually
obscure markings have been despised by the greater number of paleon-
tologists, and probably would not now be so much in controversy were
it not for the use made of them in illustrating supposed phylogenies
of plants.

It would be wrong to close this address without some reference to
that which is the veritable pons asinorum of the science, the great
and much-debated glacial period. I trust that you will not suppose
that, in the end of an hour's address, I am about to discuss this vexed
question. Time would fail me even to name the hosts of recent au-
thors who have contended in this arena. I can hope only to point out
a few landmarks which may aid the geological adventurer in travers-
ing the slippery and treacherous surface of the hypothetical ice-sheet
of pleistocene times, and in avoiding the yawning crevasses by which
it is traversed.

No conclusions of geology seem more certain than that great
changes of climate have occurred in the course of geological time ;
and the evidence of this in that comparatively modern period which
immediately preceded the human age is so striking that it has come
to be known as pre-eminently the ice age, while, in the preceding ter-

* "Footprints and Impressions on Carboniferous Rocks," "American Journal of Sci-
ence," 1873.

f Royal Swedish Academy, Stockholm, 1881.
\ "A propos des Algues Fossiles," Paris, 1883.

68 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

tiary periods, temperate conditions seem to have prevailed even to the
pole. Of the many theories as to these changes which have been
proposed, two seem at present to divide the suffrages of geologists,
either alone, or combined with each other. These are — 1. The theory
of the precession of the equinoxes in connection with the varying ec-
centricity of the earth's orbit, advocated more especially by CrolL;
and, 2. The different distribution of land and water as affecting the
reception and radiation of heat and the ocean-currents — a theory ably
propounded by Lyell, and subsequently extensively adopted, either
alone or with the previous one. One of these views may be called the
astronomical ; the other, the geographical. I confess that I am in-
clined to accept the second or Lyellian theory, for such reasons as the
following : 1. Great elevations and depressions of land have occurred
in and since the pleistocene, while the alleged astronomical changes
are not certain, more especially in regard to their probable effect on
the earth. 2. "When the rival theories are tested by the present phe-
nomena of the southern polar region and the North Atlantic, there
seem to be geographical causes adequate to account for all except ex-
treme and unproved glacial conditions. 3. The astronomical cause
would suppose regularly recurring glacial periods of which there is no
evidence, and it would give to the latest glacial age an antiquity which
seems at variance with all other facts. 4. In those more northern re-
gions where glacial phenomena are most pronounced, the theory of
floating sheets of ice, with local glaciers descending to the sea, seems
to meet all the conditions of the case ; and these would be obtained, in
the North Atlantic at least, by very moderate changes of level, caus-
ing, for example, the equatorial current to flow into the Pacific, instead
of running northward as a gulf stream. 5. The geographical theory
allows the supposition not merely of vicissitudes of climate quickly
following each other in unison with the movements of the surface, but
allows also of that near local approximation of regions wholly covered
with ice and snow, and others comparatively temperate, which we see
at present in the north.

If, however, we are to adopt the geographical theory, we must
avoid extreme views ; and this leads to the inquiry as to the evidence
to be found for any such universal and extreme glaciation as is de-
manded by some geologists.

The only large continental area in the northern hemisphere sup-
posed to be entirely ice- and snow-clad is Greenland ; and this, so far
as it goes, is certainly a local case, for the ice and snow of Greenland
extend to the south as far as G0° north latitude, while both in Norway
and in the interior of North America the climate in that latitude per-
mits the growth of cereals. Further, Grinnell Land, which is separated
from North Greenland only by a narrow sound, has a comparatively
mild climate, and, as Nares has shown, is covered with verdure in
summer. Still further, Nordenskiold, one of the most experienced

SOME UNSOLVED PROBLEMS IN GEOLOGY. 69

Arctic explorers, holds that it is probable that the interior of Green-
land is itself verdant in summer, and is at this moment preparing to
attempt to reach this interior oasis. Nor is it difficult, with the aid of
the facts cited by Woeickoff and Whitney,* to perceive the cause of
the exceptional condition of Greenland. To give ice and snow in
large quantities, two conditions are required — first, atmospheric hu-
midity ; and, secondly, cold precipitating regions. Both of these
conditions meet in Greenland. Its high coast-ranges receive and con-
dense the humidity from the sea on both sides of it and to the south.
Hence the vast accumulation of its coast snow-fields, and the intense
discharge of the glaciers emptying out of its valleys. When extreme
glacialists point to Greenland, and ask us to believe that in the glacial
age the whole continent of North America as far south as the latitude
of 40° was covered with a continental glacier, in some places several
thousands of feet thick, we may well ask, first, what evidence there is
that Greenland, or even the Antarctic Continent, at present shows such
a condition ; and, secondly, whether there exists a possibility that the
interior of a great continent could ever receive so large an amount of
precipitation as that required. So far as present knowledge exists, it
is certain that the meteorologist and the physicist must answer both
questions in the negative. In short, perpetual snow and glaciers must
be local, and can not be continental, because of the vast amount of
evaporation and condensation required. These can only be possible
where comparatively warm seas supply moisture to cold and elevated
land ; and this supply can not, in the nature of things, penetrate far
inland. The actual condition of interior Asia and interior America in
the higher northern latitudes affords positive proof of this. In a state
of partial submergence of our northern continents, we can readily
imagine glaciation by the combined action of local glaciers and great
ice-floes ; but, in whatever way the phenomena of the bowlder clay
and of the so-called terminal moraines are to be accounted for, the
theory of a continuous continental glacier must be given up.

I can not better indicate the general bearing of facts, as they pre-
sent themselves to my mind in connection with this subject, than by
referring to a paper by Dr. G. M. Dawson on the distribution of drift
over the great Canadian plains east of the Rocky Mountains. f I am
the more inclined to refer to this, because of its recency, and because
I have so often repeated similar conclusions as to Eastern Canada and
the region of the Great Lakes.

The great interior plain of Western Canada, between the Lauren-
tian axis on the east and the Rocky Mountains on the west, is seven
hundred miles in breadth, and is covered with glacial drift, presenting
one of the greatest examples of this deposit in the world. Proceed-

*" Memoir on Glaciers," Geological Society of Berlin, 1881; "Climatic Changes,"
Boston, 1883.

\ " Science," July 1, 1883.

7o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ing eastward from the base of the Rocky Mountains, the surface, at
first more than four thousand feet above the sea-level, descends by-
successive steps to twenty-five hundred feet, and is based on creta-
ceous and Laramie rocks, covered by bowlder clay and sand, in some
places from one hundred to two hundred feet in depth, and filling up
pre-existing hollows, though itself sometimes piled into ridges. Near
the Rocky Mountains the bottom of the drift consists of gravel not
glaciated. This extends to about one hundred miles east of the moun-
tains, and must have been swept by water out of their valleys. The
bowlder clay resting on this deposit is largely made up of local debris
in so far as its paste is concerned. It contains many glaciated bowl-
ders and stones from the Laurentian region to the east, and also smaller
pebbles from the Rocky Mountains ; so that at the time of its forma-
tion there must have been driftage of large stones for seven hundred
miles or more from the east, and of smaller stones from a less distance
on the west. The former kind of material extends to the base of the
mountains, and to a height of more than four thousand feet. One
bowlder is mentioned as being forty-two by forty by twenty feet in
dimensions. The highest Laurentian bowlders seen wrere at an eleva-
tion of forty-six hundred and sixty feet, on the base of the Rocky
Mountains. The bowlder clay, when thick, can be seen to be rudely
stratified, and at one place includes beds of laminated clay with com-
pressed peat, similar to the forest-beds described by Worthen and
Andrews in Illinois, and the so-called interglacial beds described by
Hinde on Lake Ontario. The leaf -beds on the Ottawa River and the
drift-trunks found in the bowlder clay of Manitoba belong to the
same category, and indicate that throughout the glacial period there
were many forest oases far to the north. In the valleys of the Rocky
Mountains opening on these plains there are evidences of large local
glaciers now extinct, and similar evidences exist on the Laurentian
highlands on the east.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the region is that immense
series of ridges of drift piled against an escarpment of Laramie and
cretaceous rocks, at an elevation of about twenty-five hundred feet,
and known as the " Missouri Coteau." It is in some places thirty
miles broad and a hundred and eighty feet in height above the plain
at its foot, and extends north and south for a great distance ; being,
in fact, the northern extension of those great ridges of drift which
have been traced south of the Great Lakes, and through Pennsylvania
and New Jersey, and which figure on the geological maps as the edge
of the continental glacier — an explanation obviously inapplicable in
those Western regions where they attain their greatest development.
It is plain that in the North it marks the western limit of the deep
water of a glacial sea, which at some periods extended much farther
west, perhaps with a greater proportionate depression in going west-
ward, and on which heavy ice from the Laurentian districts on the

SOME UNSOLVED PROBLEMS IN GEOLOGY, 7i

east was wafted southwestward by the Arctic currents, while lighter
ice from the Rocky Mountains was being borne eastward from these
mountains by the prevailing westerly winds. We thus have in the
West, on a very wide scale, the same phenomena of varying submer-
gence, cold currents, great ice-floes, and local glaciers producing ice-
bergs, to which I have attributed the bowlder clay and upper bowl-
der drift of Eastern Canada.

A few subsidiary points I may be pardoned for mentioning here.
The rival theories of the glacial period are often characterized as those
of land glaciation and sea-borne icebergs. But it must be remem-
bered that those who reject the idea of a continental glacier hold to
the existence of local glaciers on the highlands more or less exten-
sive during different portions of the great pleistocene submergence.
They also believe in the extension of these glaciers seaward and
partly water-borne, in the manner so well explained by Mattieu Will-
iams ; in the existence of those vast floes and fields of current-and
tide-borne ice whose powers of transport and erosion we now know to
be so great ; and in a great submergence and re-elevation of the land,
bringing all parts of it and all elevations up to five thousand feet suc-
cessively under the influence of these various agencies, along with those
of the ocean-currents. They also hold that, at the beginning of the
glacial submergence, the land was deeply covered by decomposed
.rock, similar to that which still exists on the hills of the Southern
States, and which, as Dr. Hunt has shown, would afford not only
earthy debris, but large quantities of bowlders ready for transporta-
tion by ice.

I would also remark that there has been the greatest possible ex-
aggeration as to the erosive action of land-ice. In 1865, after a visit
to the Alpine glaciers, I maintained that in these mountains glaciers
are relatively protective rather than erosive agencies, and that the
detritus which the glacier streams deliver is derived mostly from the
atmospherically wasted peaks and cliffs that project above them.
Since that time many other observers have maintained like views, and
very recently Mr. Davis, of Cambridge, and Mr. A. Irving have ably
treated this subject.* Smoothing and striation of rocks are undoubt-
edly important effects, both of land-glaciers and heavy sea-borne ice ;
but the leveling and filling agency of these is much greater than the
erosive. As. a matter of fact, as Newberry, Hunt, Belt, Spencer, and
others have shown, the glacial age has dammed up vast numbers of
old channels which it has been left for modern streams partially to
excavate.

The till, or bowlder clay, has been called a " ground moraine,"
but there are really no Alpine moraines at all corresponding to it. On
the other hand, it is more or less stratified, often rests on soft niateri-

* " Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History," xxii ; " Journal of the
Geological Society of London," February, 1883.

72 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

als which glaciers would have swept away, sometimes contains marine
shells, or passes into marine clays in its horizontal extension, and in-
variably in its imbedded bowlders and its paste shows an unoxidized
condition, which could not have existed if it had been a sub-aerial
deposit. When the Canadian till is excavated, and exposed to the
air, it assumes a brown color, owing to oxidation of its iron ; and
many of its stones and bowlders break up and disintegrate under the
action of air and frost. These are unequivocal signs of a sub-aqueous
deposit. Here and there we find associated with- it, and especially
near the bottom and at the top, indications of powerful water-action,
as if of land-torrents acting at particular elevations of the land, or
heavy surf and ice action on coasts ; and the attempts to explain
these by glacial streams have been far from successful. A singular
objection sometimes raised against the sub-aqueous origin of the till is
its general want of marine remains, but this is by no means universal ;
and it is well known that coarse conglomerates of all ages are gener-
ally destitute of fossils, except in their pebbles ; and it is further to
be observed that the conditions of an ice-laden sea are not those most
favorable for the extension of marine life, and that the period of time
covered by the glacial age must have been short, compared with that
represented by some of the older formations.

This last consideration suggests a question which might afford
scope for another address of an hour's duration — the question how
long time has elapsed since the close of the glacial period. Recently
the opinion has been gaining ground that the close of the ice age is
very recent. Such reasons as the following lead to this conclusion :
The amount of atmospheric decay of rocks and of denudation in gen-
eral, which have occurred since the close of the glacial period, are
scarcely appreciable ; little erosion of river-valleys or of coast-terraces
has occurred. The calculated recession of water-falls and of produc-
tion of lake-ridges lead to the same conclusion. So do the recent state
of bones and shells in the pleistocene deposits and the perfectly mod-
ern facies of their fossils. On such evidence the cessation of the gla-
cial cold and settlement of our continents at their present levels are
events which may have occurred not more than six thousand or seven
thousand years ago, though such time estimates are proverbially un-
certain in geology. This subject also carries with it the greatest of
all geological problems, next to that of the origin of life ; namely, the
origin and early history of man. Such questions can not be discussed
in the closing sentences of an hour's address. I shall only draw from
them one practical inference. Since the comparatively short post-gla-
cial and recent periods apparently include the whole of human history,
we are but new-comers on the earth, and therefore have had little
opportunity to solve the great problems which it presents to us. But
this is not all. Geology as a science scarcely dates from a century
ago. We have reason for surprise, in these circumstances, that it has

INLETS FOR INFECTION. 73

learned so much, but for equal surprise that so many persons appear
to think it a complete and full-grown science, and that it is entitled to
speak with confidence on all the great mysteries of the earth that have
been hidden from the generations before us. Such being the newness
of man and of his science of the earth, it is not too much to say that
humility, hard work in collecting facts, and abstinence from hasty
generalization, should characterize geologists, at least for a few gen-
erations to come.

In conclusion, science is light, and light is good ; but it must be
carried high, else it will fail to enlighten the world. Let us strive to
raise it high enough to shine over every obstruction which casts any
shadow on the true interests of humanity. Above all, let us hold up
the light, and not stand in it ourselves.

■♦•»

INLETS FOE INFECTION.*

Bt e. thoene thoene, f. e. c. p.

IN selecting a subject to bring before you, I felt that I should not
be trespassing beyond the lines indicated by the committee who
.have organized this series of lectures if I addressed my remarks to
some points connected with those specific fevers the prevention of
which must be regarded as coming within the scope of sanitary ad-
ministration. I may, perhaps, indicate the importance of such a sub-
ject by quoting a few figures from the reports of the Registrar-General
of England. Limiting myself to those diseases the spread of which
is admittedly to be controlled by the adoption either of efficient sani-
tary works, or of such sanitary measures as isolation and disinfection,
I find that during 1871-80 the following deaths were registered in
England and Wales : From typhus fever, 13,975 ; from enteric or ty-
phoid fever, 78,421 ; from simple continued fever, which when fatal
is probably nothing less than an ill-defined form of enteric fever, 25,-
643 ; from diphtheria, 29,425 ; and from scarlet fever, otherwise called
scarlatina, 174,232. These deaths are essentially due to diseases which
may be called preventable, and they amount in all to 321,696 in the
ten years. But the influence of these diseases upon the population can
not be judged of by the death-roll alone. For every fatal case there
have probably occurred at least ten non-fatal attacks, and thus we
come to be confronted with a total of 3,538,656 attacks from the pre-
ventable specific fevers. Mr. Simon, C. B., F. R. S., in dealing with
such death returns, has said : " Of the incalculable amount of physical
suffering and disablement which they occasion, and of the sorrows and

* Abridged from a leeture delivered at Cheltenham, March 15, 1883, and published
in "The Practitioner."

74 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

anxieties, the often permanent darkening of life, the straitened means
of subsistence, the very frequent destitution and pauperism, which
attend or follow such suffering, death statistics, to which alone I can
refer, testify only in sample or by suggestion."

The means by which infection is likely to be conveyed to house-
holds are far too numerous to be dealt with in a single lecture, and I
have thought it best to select for consideration three or four of what
I feel to be among the more important, and to deal with these in
detail.

In a report on an epidemic of enteric fever at Croydon, in 1875, Dr.
Buchanan, F. R. S., makes use of the following words : " The air of
the sewers is, as it were, ' laid on ' to houses." That significant ex-
pression " laid on " comes in aptly, as giving prominence to the special
features of one of the channels for conveying infection to households,
to which I propose drawing your attention. From the inside of every
ordinary dwelling-house there pass certain waste-pipes intended to
convey liquid refuse, first to the house-drains without, and thence to
the public sewers. It is the custom to regard these conduits as pass-
ing from house to sewer, but this evening I would ask you to compare
them with the pipes for the supply of coal-gas, and to view them
rather as passing from the sewer as a center to the periphery within
our dwelling-houses. In our comparison the public sewer may be re-
garded as corresponding with the gasometer ; the house-drain and the
waste-pipes as representing the service-pipes for gas ; and the so-called
" trap " indoors as taking the place of the metal tap found in connec-
tion with each gas-bracket. Sewer-air, even in its normal state, is a
grave source of danger to health ; but when the sewers receive in
their course along the streets the infectious refuse discharged from
houses where specific disease prevails, then the sewer-air — harmful
hitherto — is changed into an intense poison.

How is it usually sought to debar this poisonous agent from dwell-
ings ? The sole means adopted, in nine cases out of ten, consists in
placing at some point of the pipe which connects the interior of the
house with the interior of the sewer a small body of water which is
known as a " trap," and which is designed to act as a barrier to the
passage of all sewer-air. The contrivance most commonly resorted to
is the so-called bell-trap, an apparatus in which the rim of a bell-
shaped cup is suspended in a small body of water contained within a
circular depression. This form of trap is of all the least efficient ; it
is not only one in which the water-lock constituting the trapping may
at any moment be entirely removed at the will of the individual, but
at its best it provides between the house and the sewer a layer of
water only about one half or three quarters of an inch in depth. Even
the most efficient of all traps, the so-called " siphon-bend," is not much
better. Dr. Andrew Fergus maintains that trapping has but little
effect in keeping sewer-air out of houses, as the entrance of the con-

INLETS FOR INFECTION.

75

taminating air is not so much due to occasional and temporary failure
in the efficacy of the trap as to an almost constant absorption of sewer-
air by the water on the sewer-side of the trap, and its subsequent dis-
charge from the house-side. Dr. Fergus has made a series of experi-
ments in a glass tube so bent as to resemble the ordinary " siphon "
trap, and charged with water. Certain gases were evolved on what
we may call the sewer-side of the trap (5), and tests were applied to
ascertain whether the gases succeeded in passing through the water.
The results as tabulated by Dr. Fergus are as follows :

GAS.

Sp. gr.

Source.

Test.

Time for reaction to show.

Ammonia

•50
•50

2-25
1-25
2-50
2*50

1-50
1-50

Solution.

a

u
a
a
a

Generated

u

Litmus.
Nessler.

Litmus.
Lead paper.
Iodide of starch paper.
Litmus-water in trap.

Lime-water in trap.
Litmus suspended
over water in trap.

15 minutes.

((

30 minutes. Ate through

Sulphurous acid

Sulphuretted hydrogen
Chlorine

a small wire in less than
24 hours.
1 hour.

3 to 4 hours.

4 hours

u

Be^an to show in a few

Carbonic acid

minutes. In half an
hour the whole was
bleached.
1^ hour.

a

3 hours.

It was, however, urged that the results would probably be different
if the trap were ventilated. A ventilating-shaft (c) was, therefore,
inserted in the upper part of the bend on the
sewer-side, and the experiments were repeated.
"The results," says Dr. Fergus, "were much
the same, except that the reaction was a little
longer in showing itself."

Ordinary sewer-air may be taken to contain
in every hundred parts about seventy-nine parts
of nitrogen, nearly twenty of oxygen, not quite
half a part of carbonic acid, and traces of sul-
phuretted hydrogen, marsh-gas, and ammonia.
These gases, however, when inhaled in the pro-
portions indicated, can hardly be regarded as
materially affecting health. Sewer-air also con-
tains organic matter in the form of vapor, and
of definite particles ; but doubts have been ex-
pressed as to whether these organic particles
succeed in making their way through water-
traps, and some carefully executed experiments

of Dr. Neil Carmichael, of Glasgow, have gone far to show that they
do not do so.

There are other ways, however, in which danger comes about.
The water in traps is apt to be sucked out by siphon-action, as the

Fio. 1.

76 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

result, for example, of a rapid flow along the drain into which the
waste-pipes discharge, and, under these circumstances, sewer-air and
its organic ingredients pass unhindered into our houses. So, also, traps
are liable to be forced by the pressure of the sewer-air upon them.
Having regard to some of Dr. Carmichael's experiments, it might at
first sight be supposed that organic particles contained in bubbles of
air would be detained in their passage through a water-trap. This,
however, is by no means the case. In certain experiments carried out
at the Royal Institution by Professor Tyndall, F. R. S., it was found
that air, passing through an experimental tube, carried with it " a con-
siderable amount of mechanically suspended matter." Dr. Carmichael
freely admits the inadequacy of water-traps as they exist, and points
out many dangers attendant upon them. He enforces the caution he
gives by a case related in a report of Dr. J. B. Russell, Medical Offi-
cer of Health for Glasgow. In certain tenements of one apartment,
having no connection with the sewer, there had been a death-rate from
diphtheria of 12, and from enteric fever of 24'9, per hundred thousand
inhabitants. The introduction of a sink increased the diphtheria
death-rate to 25*3 — i. e., 110 per cent — and from enteric fever to 67*7
— i. e., 171 per cent — the rate of mortality from certain allied diseases
also undergoing a corresponding increase. Not knowing whether there
were other circumstances that favored this special incidence of disease
upon these tenements, I should find some difficulty in asserting that
the drain-connection was the cause of the whole of the increase in the
diseases specified ; nevertheless, Dr. RusselPs opinion that it was, car-
ries great weight.

One striking instance, which further illustrates this point, came un-
der my own cognizance. Some years ago I received instructions to
inquire into the cause of an outbreak of enteric fever in a small town-
ship in Yorkshire. The main incidence of the disease was upon a
group of houses, which formed an irregular square, containing twenty-
three cottages, occupied by eighty-eight persons. Up to the first
week in June the inhabitants of this locality had been free from fever,
but at that date a series of attacks of well-marked enteric fever oc-
curred almost simultaneously in a number of houses, fresh attacks tak-
ing place day by day until, in the space of a few weeks, one or more
inmates in fifteen out of the twenty-three cottages had been attacked,
the number of patients amounting to thirty-five. Now, when the con-
tagium of enteric fever is conveyed by water, the persons attacked are
generally attacked almost simultaneously. There is, however, in the
case of enteric fever, a definite interval, generally of some ten to four-
teen days, between the reception of the poison into the system and
the occurrence of symptoms of the disease. The water-supply which
these families generally used in common was a well in the neighbor-
ing field ; but this had been disused for a period which more than
covered the " period of incubation " above referred to.

INLETS FOR INFECTION.

77

In the course of my investigations I entered a wash-house belong-
ing to one group of the houses in question. I was followed in by its
owner, an old lady, who sought at once to satisfy my curiosity by
assuring me that the building was rarely used ; indeed, that the last
time it was used was six weeks ago, at which date she had washed
some linen there for a young man who had been very ill, and who
lived some distance away. I had before this noticed that all the cot-
tages were provided with sinks in their living-rooms, and that by means
of these sink-pipes, which were in unbroken communication with a
drain outside, offensive effluvia at times made their way into the dwell-
ings, these having been especially noticed toward evening, when the
houses were shut up and the fires were lighted. It at once occurred
to me that if the sick man referred to had suffered from enteric fever,
and if the drains for the several parts of the square all communicated

r^^C^iV^-rtyj^^y^^^

Pig. 2.

with the sewer by which the liquid refuse from the wash-house was
conveyed away, then a specifically contaminated sewer-air had replaced
the ordinary foul effluvia, and that in this way infection had been
"laid on "to the several households. I found that the young man

78 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

had indeed suffered from enteric fever, and, laborers having laid bare
the drains, these were all seen to communicate with the sewer above
mentioned, this being further of such faulty construction as to be
little better than an elongated cesspool.

In view of the danger of direct communication between a sewer
and our dwellings, " What," you may fairly ask, " is the remedy ? " I
answer that the remedy is simply breaking the direct connection which
has been referred to. In the case of a waste-pipe from a sink, the
pipe should be brought through the wall into the outer air, and there
be cut off, its contents flowing to a trapped drain-inlet outside the
dwelling. (This point was explained by means of diagrams.) This
principle of disconnection is, however, of much wider application than
I have as yet indicated. All waste-pipes coming from lavatories, baths,
water-closets, etc., as also the overflow-pipes from cisterns, and the
rain-pipes, especially such as have their heads anywhere near windows,
or beneath overhanging eaves, should, like the sink-pipes, have an air-
space intervening between them and the drain-inlets into which they
empty.

There is exceptional danger in the direct connection which is often
maintained between houses and the sewers by means of the overflow-
pipes of cisterns. These pipes are very generally provided with a
" siphon-bend," but the water constituting the trapping is often ab-
sent. The ball-cock of the cistern is intentionally so contrived as to
prevent overflow, and hence, when once evaporation of the water in
the trap has taken place, sewer-air passes through it without let or
hindrance.

Adapting the principle of disconnection to the house-drain itself,
I would further urge that an air-break should always be contrived
between the end of the drain and a trapped inlet leading to the
public sewer ; the more so as when this is effected a further safe-
guard can be insured, namely, two ventilating apertures to the drain,
and the maintenance of a constant current of air through its entire
length.

(The conveying of infection by means of an " intermittent water-
supply " was next described.)

I feel sure that many other methods by which water can act as a
vehicle for conveying infection will occur to you. Milk, also, must be
regarded as at least an equally important medium for the transmission
of infection. I shall, however, ask your further consideration only of
certain distributions of ice and cream as forming channels by which
disease may be conveyed to households.

I believe that the first instance in which the consumption of ice
was shown to have been followed by an outbreak of disease is that re-
corded in the " Seventh Annual Report of the State Board of Health
of Massachusetts." The occurrence took place in one of the large
hotels at Rye Beach, New Hampshire. At the beginning of the season

INLETS FOR INFECTION. ?Q

of 1875 about a thousand visitors were assembled at Rye Beach, and
a considerable number were attacked with a series of symptoms which
led to the suspicion that they had consumed some noxious article. The
incidence of the disease was entirely confined to three hundred persons
occupying one of the large hotels. The sanitary state of this hotel is
said to have been exceptionally good, and, although suspicion seemed
at first to attach to the water-supply, yet the disease was found to have
affected many who, "having apprehended trouble from the use of
the water," which was strongly impregnated with salts of lime and
magnesia, " had carefully limited themselves since their arrival to other
beverages." Indeed, as the result of a careful process of elimination,
suspicion came at last to be directed to the ice furnished to the house.
The water obtained by melting the ice was discolored and charged
with suspended matter, and gave off a decidedly disagreeable odor ;
the atmosphere of the ice-house was offensive, and some persons who
had used the ice away from the hotel were found to have suffered in
the same way from violent illness. The ice in question had been de-
rived from a local pond, the water of which was found to have become
foul from long-continued stagnation ; one portion of the pond, measur-
ing about five hundred feet in length and one hundred and fifty feet
in width, was occupied by " a homogeneous mass of putrescent mat-
ter." A piece of ice, carefully cleansed from all surface impurities,
was then melted, and the water thus obtained was submitted to chemi-
cal analysis, the result being the detection in it of a quantity of " de-
caying organic matter." The use of the ice had also in the mean time
been discontinued, and coincident with its disuse " there was observed
an abrupt amelioration in the symptoms of nearly all who had hitherto
been ill." So, also, no fresh attacks occurred during the remainder of
the season.

Even among the more educated classes there prevails an impres-
sion that even if water is contaminated it is purified by freezing.
Many experiments have, however, shown the fallacy of this view. In
some of these made recently by Mr. C. P. Pengra, an American chem-
ist, various organic matters (urea, albumen, etc.) were mixed with
water, and the specimens were gradually frozen. A certain amount
of purification did take place — the ice containing thirty and even forty
per cent less organic matter than the unfrozen liquid. But a large
amount of the added pollution remained, and the investigator, though
expressing surprise that the purification had been as great as it was,
says that the experiments afford abundant proof that we ought not to
tolerate the indiscriminate collection of ice.

These experiments do not, however, prove that the contagium of
an infectious fever can withstand the process of freezing, but as to
this we are not left in doubt. Dr. E. Klein, F. R. S., thus reports the
results of some of his experiments in freezing bacillus anthracis : " I
have exposed in a capillary pipette fluid full of spores to the influence

80 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

of ether spray, and, having thus kept the liquid frozen for several
minutes, have injected it into the Guinea-pig and rabbit with fatal
result. ... I then placed a capillary tube filled with spores in a mix-
ture of ice and salt, and kept it there for one hour exposed to a tem-
perature of 12° to 15° Cent, below freezing-point ; after thawing, the
material was injected into the subcutaneous tissue of a Guinea-pig.
This animal died of typical anthrax on the third day."

We are thus bound to accept the position that the morbific organ-
isms, the introduction of which into the human system produces spe-
cific infectious diseases, are not destroyed by freezing, but, on the con-
trary, that ice collected from an infected water and supplied to house-
holds would act as a vehicle for the introduction of the poison of those
diseases. In short, a wholesome ice can be derived only from a whole-
some water.

I now pass to my last point. On the 9th of June, 1875, a party of
sixteen persons sat down to dinner at a house in South Kensington,
and later on in the evening about one hundred and fifty additional
guests assembled with the family of the host and hostess in the draw-
ing-room ; the service of the house was also re-enforced for the even-
ing by seven extra servants. Within five days eighteen of the assem-
bled guests suffered from more or less well-marked attacks of scarlet
fever ; two others had " sore throats " ; one of the waiters had scarlet
fever ; and a few days later a lady, not at the house on the 9th,
but who lunched there the next day, was found to be suffering from
a distinct attack of the disease. In all, twenty -two persons were
attacked.

The circumstances of the outbreak were investigated by Dr. Bu-
chanan, F. R. S., and his report on it is specially instructive as indicating
the method in which such an inquiry should be conducted. It was
ascertained that the scarlet fever could not have been communicated
by any of the guests, by any member of the host's family, nor by any of
the servants, nor indeed did the circumstances of the outbreak suggest
infection from such a source. On the other hand, strong circumstan-
tial evidence was forthcoming in favor of the infection having been
communicated by means of some article of food or drink.

The dinner guests were the principal ones affected ; several of the
household who could not have touched any of the articles of food
served up escaped altogether, and there was a marked incidence of the
disease on those who had several opportunities of eating certain ex-
ceptional articles supplied on that day. Up to this point, however,
no one article of food had come under suspicion.

Two special supplies of cream were delivered at the house on the
day of the entertainment ; one, which arrived at 4 r. m., was " double
cream " from a London dairy, and was used for ice-puddings, custards,
and " creams" ; the other, arriving at 5 p. m., was from a Hampshire
dairy, and was mainly used as cream. The latter supply was generally

INLETS FOR INFECTION. 81

used by all the evening guests, among whom there was but little scar-
let fever ; the former, or four-o'clock, cream was distributed essen-
tially to the family and to the dinner guests. It was again used at
luncheon the next day, and thirteen persons who were known to have
had opportunity of partaking of it suffered from scarlet fever within
five days. The bulk of this four-o'clock cream was used in the prep-
aration of articles which had to be boiled previous to their being used
in a cool or frozen form, and those persons who partook of such articles
alone were not specially attacked. But of this cream some that was
in excess of the cook's requirements was put into at least one jug
along with the five-o'clock cream.

This mingling of the two creams added materially to the difficulty
of the investigation, because it was that remnant of the four-o'clock
cream which had not been boiled previous to use to which interest was
now found specially to attach. For " no less than seven ladies who
were at the dinner, and who took cream in their coffee in the drawing-
room, afterward became ill, none of them who took that cream hav-
ing escaped." There was, however, no such incidence of disease on the
gentlemen who took coffee down-stairs. And further, whereas all who
partook of cream on the day following the dinner were ill, none of
those who did not partake of it suffered. Now, it was known that it
was the four-o'clock cream that was used at the luncheon on the 10th,
and if it so happened that the cream which was sent up into the draw-
ing-room with coffee for the ladies who had left the dinner-table was
the jug of mingled cream, then that four-o'clock supply from the Lon-
don dairy comes strongly under suspicion.

The complicated nature of the conditions which had to be con-
tended with in pursuing such an investigation in the metropolis for-
bade any conclusive demonstration as to the exact method by which
this special cream-supply may have become infected. It was, how-
ever, ascertained that upon one section of the London dairyman's cus-
tomers there had been a large incidence of scarlet fever, and a suspi-
cious history as to scarlet fever in the person of one of the dairy-staff
who was engaged in milking and carrying out the milk was also
elicited. In short, there is little doubt that the cream supplied from
this dairy was the vehicle by which the infection of scarlet fever was
conveyed to that household in South Kensington.

Some years ago I conducted a somewhat similar inquiry. The
same disease had attacked a large proportion of persons who had met
at a London dinner-table, and the source of infection must have been
some article of food. In this case, fruit as well as cream came under
suspicion, and the employment as strawberry-gatherers of persons in
the desquamative stage of scarlet fever seemed as likely a source of
infection as that which might have operated through the agency of a
dairy. The circumstances were, however, too complex to be unraveled,
and further inquiry was abandoned.
vol. xxiv. — 6 *

82 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

In considering each of the previous channels of infection I have
pointed to some remedy. That which promises most in dealing with
infection conveyed in the manner just indicated is the early isolation
of persons suffering from the several infectious fevers.

•♦»♦■

EEMAEKS ON THE INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE.*

By LESLIE STEPHEN.

" " [~F it were a qualification for his oflice," Mr. Stephen remarked, " to
J- be impartial in the sense of not having an opinion on the matter,
it would have been hardly possible to select a less qualified chairman
in all London than himself. He believed that the spread of scientific
influence had not only not been bad, but that the thing of which we
stand most in need is a great deal more scientific thought and method
in every direction. He felt, however, that his case was so strong that
he could afford to give points to the opposite side ; and for this rea-
son, and because to a certain extent he was prepared to go with the
opener in his remarks, he hoped to be able to point out fairly where
the various arguments which had been used found their proper place.
The only definition, or rather description, of science which ever ap-
peared satisfactory to him was, that Science is that body of truths
which may be held to be definitely established, so that no reasonable
person doubts them. To speak of mischievous science is, therefore, to
assert that truth is mischievous, an assertion to which no one would
be likely to seriousty agree, especially in such a place as University
College. If it is to be supposed that science is mischievous, it must
either be meant that certain false theories which call themselves sci-
ence are wrongful, which may well be the case, or that the scientific
progress at the present time happens to be exercising a mischievous
influence.

" No one denies that science may accidentally lead to a large num-
ber of our particular mischiefs, as in the case of the invention of
dynamite ; but it can not in any way be admitted on that account that
science is mischievous. For the question arises, If science is bad, what
can be substituted for it ? and in what way will these mischiefs be
remedied if we are not scientific ? It is impossible to say that erro-
neous impressions will make us better off than correct ones. For
instance, the old belief in medicine subjected people to years of tor-

* Remarks by Mr. Leslie Stephen in summing up a debate at University College, Lon-
don, on the motion by Mr. B. Paul Newman : " That the spread of scientific thought and
method has, on the whole, exercised an injurious influence on English society." The mo-
tion was supported by Mr. N. Mickleman, and opposed by the Rev. A. Capes Tarbolton
and Mr. J. G. Pease.

REMARKS ON THE INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE. 83

ture because of supposed witchcraft. In India it is still believed in
some parts that small-pox is a demon, and efforts are made to pro-
pitiate it, so that, if unnecessary torture and small-pox are evils, we
are better for the light which the scientific man has thrown on these
subjects. Still, it must be admitted that in particular ways the de-
velopment of science has produced new evils as well as new benefits,
and for that matter no sort of progress is made without collateral evils.
But the question then remained as to the remedy, and in his opinion
that remedy could be very shortly described as more science and
not less. There is no sort of conflict between a scientific and a
literary education. Everybody ought to have some literary knowl-
edge, and everybody ought to be taught the first principles of science ;
even a smattering of chemistry might be useful in a literary pursuit.
He himself had found what little smattering of science he had ac-
quired at Cambridge and elsewhere of the greatest use in every other
kind of study. The habits of thought and feeling acquired by the
study even of mathematics, which he took to be the most uninterest-
ing science there is to most individuals, are very useful when one
comes to need accurate thinking anywhere, even in matters purely
literary.

" It had been urged that science prevents a man from taking the
same sort of pleasure in nature as he would do without it. Words-
worth was very fond of saying this, and of denouncing generally the
scientific position. But the reason of that was, that Wordsworth
knew nothing about science. The result was, that there is no other
instance of so great a poet leaving off writing great poems so early
in his career. All his finest poems were written in his early life ; and
the reason is, that he went mooning about the mountains by himself,
and did not get any new thoughts. In contrast to him Goethe stands
out as a man great in both science and poetry, and is a typical example
of the way in which they react on one another. Whenever it was sug-
gested that science is opposed to a love of nature, the speaker always
thought of the greatest man of science of modern times, Mr. Darwin,
whose books are, apart from their scientific value, quite delightful in
their literary style. No one, for instance, could read his * Voyage in
the Beagle ' without seeing that Darwin's love of science was only a
part of his love of nature. There is, indeed, no conflict between the
two, and a man can not strengthen the one side of his nature without
at the same time contributing to strengthen the other. Indeed, the
reason why so many of our living poets are inferior to those who wrote
at the beginning of this century, or to those of an earlier generation
still, is just that they have not had the pluck to look science in the
face, but have only taken a passing and sideway glance at it.

" An important point in the argument— namely, the relation of sci-
L ence to morality — was suggested by the remarks that had been made
on the subject of vivisection. The vivisection question, in the first

84 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

place, did not seem to him to be quite fairly stated. People speak as
though vivisection were a recent practice, just introduced by a hard-
hearted scientific generation. But, in point of fact, vivisection had
been going on for many centuries. The thing which was new was the
objection to it. The stock argument in favor of vivisection — that by
it the discovery of the circulation of the blood was made — is only one
of many instances.

" It had been remarked by a previous speaker, with whom he was
inclined to agree, that there had been a great increase in humanity in
modern times, and that this increase is to be attributed to the growth
of science. It is not true, for instance, to say that the abolition of
excessive and cruel punishments has been due to the action of a few
energetic but unscientific individuals. They were, on the contrary, put
down by the growth of the scientific spirit of the age — a spirit closely
allied to humanity, and which showed itself in the philosophy of the
eighteenth century, especially in the writings of Hume and Bentham.
They gave up the idea of punishment as simply a revenge to gratify
the feelings of the punishers, and took the utilitarian ground that it
must only be administered in so far as it is beneficial to society. They
were thus inevitably drawn into denouncing excessive punishments.
Romilly, who had been cited by the other side, was probably a pupil
of that school ; and certainly Bentham and Mill were, who really
spread the principles which led to the abolition of excessive punish-
ment. And those principles were only the principles of science ap-
plied to morality.

" Though he admired our ancestors of the sixteenth century, he
felt bound to admit that they were a brutal lot. An instance of how
far we have improved in point of humanity is to be seen in ' Roder-
ick Random.' After having reduced his young, amiable, and beloved
hero to very great straits through * dissipation,' Smollett makes him
go to India to purchase a lot of slaves, whom he sells in America at a
large profit. This we should consider brutal and degrading conduct,
and the fact that we do so consider it marks the great improvement
which has taken place in our morality. It is quite true that it is not
merely the growth of science, but the general intellectual develop-
ment of the country, which has put a stop to cruelty ; but it is equally
true that the growth of science is an integral part of that development,
and one that can not be separated from it. None of these things
would have been possible unless the intellect had widened ; and sci-
ence has helped to do this. We may hope for similar good results
from the application of science to other things ; for example, to poli-
tics, where there is little enough of scientific principles at present.

" On the religious question I can only say this," Mr. Stephen re-
marked in conclusion, " that you have got this plain dilemma to face,
which can not be avoided. In the first place, if any religion, or reli-
gious belief, is true, what can the holders of it have to fear from the

A HOME-MADE TELESCOPE. 85

growth of truth, which you call scientific truth ? If these beliefs are
destroyed, is it not a conclusive proof that they may be false, or at
least contain an element of untruth ? The religion may, indeed, have
been very useful, although not true, and not qualified to satisfy all the
aspirations of a cultivated mind. You may see, when a civilized race
comes in contact with a lower race, that the effect of the sudden con-
tact may be to destroy the religion and the rule of life of the inferior
race, without putting anything in its place. Evils of that kind have
been caused by modern science. It is destroying inevitably many be-
liefs which people have lived under well and happily. It is undeniable
that this causes pain, and that it may be injurious to their morality I
shall not attempt to deny. But when I am asked to say that therefore
science is injurious, I have to come back to my original proposition —
the remedy is more science. The only way out of the difficulty is
this : we ■ are here, and we have got to go — forward. And the only
way is, to apply the test of truth to all our beliefs. This effects a cer-
tain amount of pain, as every other kind of progress does ; but the
only other way is to go on believing what you know to be lies. And,
without saying which are true and which are false, I can not see who
any person can wish to do anything else but increase the amount of
truth, the only satisfactory cure." — Knowledge.

-♦*♦-

A HOME-MADE TELESCOPE.

By Dr. GEORGE PYBUEN.

TO render easier of attainment instruments which assist in the in-
vestigation or contemplation of natural phenomena, and which
supplement man's sense-organs, is to forward by so much the diffusion
of real knowledge, and to aid the work of human enlightenment and
progress. Indeed, it is not to be doubted that the popularizing of
instrumental aids for experimentally verifying the teachings of scien-
tific discoverers will form a notable part of the work of the future
schoolmaster.

A few years ago I derived great pleasure from successfully con-
structing a home-made microscope, guided by directions contained in
" The Popular Science Monthly," at a time when my means did not
enable me to purchase a good instrument from the optician. I now
lay before my fellow-readers the following directions which, step by
step, I myself have put in practice, in making a really serviceable
achromatic telescope, which will exhibit the moon's surface magnifi-
cently, and show very satisfactorily the spots on the sun's disk, the
satellites of Jupiter, and other celestial phenomena.

Some people conclude that, if they can not possess a first-class in-

S6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

strument of this or that kind, they are better off without any ; but
a moment's consideration will show the fallacy of this conclusion,
and that, on the contrary, even a very poor instrument of observation
or precision, or generally of research, in aid of the senses — be it tele-
scope, microscope, spectroscope, balance, thermometer, chronometer,
or chemical reagent — is vastly better than none. We have but to
remember the great strides made in the acquisition of knowledge by
the aid of the very imperfect first-forms of every instrument which
has been invented, to be assured of this. Moreover, reflect ! — so far as
vision is concerned, men, on an average, without instrumental assist-
ance, are inexorably kept at a distance from " things " of ten inches,
and must view them under the angle thence subtended. But the
use of a simple lens of two and a half inches focus annihilates three
fourths of this distance, quadruples the angle of vision, and enables
us to see objects only one sixteenth as large as the least we can
see with the naked eye. And for some purposes a poor instrument
is as good as the best : an egg or a potato gives the housewife all
the advantages, in measuring the density of her brine, which she
would derive from the most skillfully-constructed hydrometer, or the
most accurate balance and specific-gravity bottle. Galileo, with his
simple-lens telescope, saw what, perhaps, never man before saw — viz.,
the moons of Jupiter ; and by exhibiting the partial illumination of
Venus, with the same imperfect instrument, he removed one of the
strongest objections raised against the heliocentric theory of Coperni-
cus. A word to the wise is enough. To my fellow-students I say :
Whatever may be your several lines of study, get real knowledge,
where possible, by seeing and handling things for yourselves ; and, if
you can not possess or have the use of a good instrument, do not
therefore refuse the assistance of a poor one ; but in all cases get and
use the best you can. Rembrandt made pictures with a burned stick
before ever he possessed pigment or pencil.

The lenses requisite for such a telescope as I have constructed, and
shall describe, can be purchased of an optician by those who live in
large cities ; those who reside at a distance may have them sent by
mail at a trifling additional cost. They are : 1. An achromatic object-
glass, one and a half inch diameter, with a focus of thirty inches.
2. Two plano-convex lenses of the respective foci of two inches and
three fourths of an inch. The object-glass will cost about two dollars,
and the other two lenses about seventy-five cents each.

Now procure a straight cylindrical roller of pine, two and five
eighths inches in diameter, and thirty inches long ; procure also a
roller seven eighths of an inch in diameter, and fifteen or sixteen
inches long. These are for forming the tubes on. Take stout brown
wrapping-paper, and, with book-binder's paste, form a tube, twenty-
nine inches long, on the large roller. Spread the paste on evenly, and
rub the several layers of paper down smoothly with a cloth. Nine or

•A HOME-MADE TELESCOPE. 87

ten thicknesses of paper will form a tube sufficiently thick and firm
for our purpose ; but only three or four layers should be laid at one
time, and, when these are dry, three or four more may be added, and
so on, until the requisite thickness is attained. When thoroughly dry,
which will be in three or four days, you will have a stiff, straight,
and light tube, the ends of which must be neatly and squarely cut off
with a sharp knife, so as to leave it, when finished, exactly twenty-
eight inches long. With a bit of sponge tied on the end of a stick,
and some common or India ink, black the whole inside of the tube, and
set it aside, on end, until the other parts are ready.

Next form a tube on the smaller roller, with only four or five
thicknesses of paper, fifteen inches in length. When this is dry, pro-
ceed to form a third tube, over this second one as a roller, using six
or seven thicknesses of paper in its formation. This last is to be used
as a draw-tube for focusing with, and must be cut neatly and squarely
off at the ends to a length of fifteen inches. A portion of the inner
tube on which this was formed will be required for the eye-piece,
directions for making which I shall give further on. Blacken the in-
sides of both tubes, and set them aside, on end.

One more tube is required, viz., that in which the draw-tube shall
slide. It needs to be only six inches long, but, in order to smooth
working, should be lined inside with fine cloth or cotton-velvet. Pro-
cure, therefore, a piece of black broadcloth, six inches long, and of
sufficient width to fit easily and accurately around the draw-tube.
Then, using the latter as a roller, first neatly fit the cloth thereon as a
first layer ; next paste or gum the back of the cloth, and, with this for
the innermost layer, form a short tube, six inches long, with paper and
paste, as before directed, using here not more than six thicknesses. The
draw-tube will now be found to move easily and smoothly back and
forth in this cloth-lined sheath ; but, for fear that the gum or paste
should have penetrated the cloth lining, and should stick the tube
and its sheath together, it will be safer to draw them apart before
drying, and thus save needless trouble and annoyance.

On comparing the external diameter of this sheath with the in-
terior diameter of the large tube first made, it will be found that
some packing is required, to hold the former steadily and concen-
trically within the latter. Take, therefore, some three-quarters inch
strips of brown paper, and, having pasted them, wind around the
sheath at each end, to form rings or collars of equal thickness, and
large enough to fit snugly within the main tube. The appearance of
the sheath when completed will be as shown in Fig. 1, where a a' are
the collars just described.

Now take the compound object-glass, consisting of a double-convex
crown-glass lens, A (Fig. 2), and a plano-convex flint-glass lens, B.
They will come from the optician's shop separate, but loosely fitted
into each other. Be careful to see that their several surfaces are bright

88

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

and free from specks, and, in handling them, touch only their edges.
Remember, also, that the double-convex lens must be outside when the
telescope is fitted up. Have ready a strip of tissue-paper, just the
width of the thickness of the lenses at the edges : gum this on one
side, and, holding the two lenses together with the fingers of the left

Fig. i.

Fig. 2.

hand, wind the strip around the edges, so as to fix them together, and
thus make a single piece which can be easily handled. When this is
dry, take a strip of brown paper one and a quarter inch wide, and with
paste form a short tube or cell, C, around the object-glass, using (say)
five thicknesses. Fig. 2 shows the object-glass and cell in section.

To form the eye-piece : cut off a portion of the smallest tube — that
on which the draw-tube was rolled — one and three-eighths inch in
length, and make the ends even and square. Make, now, two disks of
blackened cardboard, of the diameters respectively of seven-eighths
inch and one inch. Punch or cut out exactly in the center of each
disk an aperture one quarter inch in diameter. Gum the edges of the
smaller disk, and fit it into the tube, exactly three quarters of an inch
from one end, and, of course, five eighths of an inch from the other end.
Then take the two-inch plano-convex lens, and, having made it per-
fectly clean, cement it on to the end of the tube nearest the perforated
disk, with the plane surface inward. Use shellac varnish, or gold-size,
for cementing the lens on to the edge of the tube. Cement the three-
quarters inch plano-convex on to the one-inch perforated disk, centrally
over the aperture, and with the plane surface next the card. When

the cement on both lenses is dry, which
will be in a day or two, fasten this one-
inch disk to the open end of the tube,
keeping the lens inside. A single layer
of tissue-paper, gummed on to the out-
side of the tube, and turned down about
one sixteenth of an inch all around the
edge of the two-inch lens, and around
the disk at the other end, will now serve
as a sort of fastener to both, and will complete the eye-piece, which is
shown in full size in section, Fig. 3. The smaller lens a must be next
the eye when the telescope is fitted up ; the larger lens b, called the
field-glass, will be inside and facing the object-glass.

For fitting together the various parts now completed few directions

Fig. 3.

A HOME-MADE TELESCOPE.

89

are needed. The cell containing the object-glass must first be slid into
one end of the large tube, and made to fit neatly, by even-wrapping
with tissue-paper or other soft material. The sheath (Fig. 1) must
now be slid into the other end of the large tube, and fitted in a similar
manner. Now push the draw-tube into the sheath, and slide the eye-
piece about half-way into the end of the draw-tube, and the telescope
is completed. Those who are aesthetically inclined may give an extra
finish to the main tube, and also to the draw-tube and eye-piece, by
using for the outermost layers gilt-paper, or other smooth and colored

W

Fig 4.

material. A sun-shade, consisting of a wide tube, three inches long,
may also be made to slide over the object-end of the telescope ; and a
cap may be added to this to keep out dust. A kind of cap, perforated
with an aperture one quarter of an inch in diameter, may also be con-

9o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

structed for slipping over the eye-piece, so as to preserve the proper
distance between the eye and the eye-lens when making observations ;
and a second similar cap should be made, and furnished with a disk
of black or red glass, for protecting the eye wrhen viewing the sun.
For myself, I use a disk of thin microscopic glass, smoked and fast-
ened in a cap which slips over the eye-piece.

But a telescope, even such as I have described, and wdrich has a
power of only twenty-five or twenty-six diameters, needs a stand, and
this can be constructed easily and cheaply of one-inch pine and a few
nails and screws, something after the pattern shown in Fig. 4. By
laying the telescope on the two end -supports, Y Y', greater steadiness
is secured than by using a single support in the center ; and the rods
y y' are easily raised or lowered, and may be fixed in their positions
by the little wedges w w'. The stand is thirty inches high, sixteen
inches broad, and twenty-five inches long. The rods y y' are forty
inches and sixty inches long respectively. The blocks B B' are built
up of pieces of one-inch board, nailed together ; then an auger-hole
is bored through the whole, so as to form a sheath or tube in which
the rods may slide easily, but without so much lateral motion, or
"wiggle," as they would have if they only passed through one thick-
ness of board.

By following these directions you will have a really useful achro-
matic telescope ; small, indeed, and insignificant when compared with
the six-foot reflector of Lord Rosse, or with one of Clark's twenty-six-
inch refractors ; but, nevertheless, a veritable Jacob's ladder, by which
you can ascend — if not into — at least twenty-five twenty-sixths of the
way toward heaven ; a perpetual source of pleasure, to a family of in-
telligent children, on moonlight nights and on occasions of eclipses ;
worth a whole year's " schooling " as an incentive and help to the study
of the universe, and a practical realization of an answer to the oft-
mouthed prayer —

" Nearer, my God, to thee ! "

■♦•♦■

THE UTILITY OF SCHOOL-RECESSES.

By JOSEPH CARTER.

THERE is a growing tendency to abandon the school-recess. The
editor of the Boston "Journal of Education" says of the no-
recess experiment, adopted in Rochester, New York, that it has given
" perfect satisfaction." Among the advantages gained, he mentions,
" a continuous school-session without interruptions in school-work " ;
" better health of pupils, on account of freedom from exposure to cold
and wet wTeather in the midst of each session " ; " discipline easier, on

THE UTILITY OF SCHOOL-RECESSES. 91

account of freedom from recess-troubles " ; " more time for teachers,"
etc. ; " less tardiness and absenteeism " ; and less frequent opportu-
nities for vicious pupils to come in contact with and corrupt other
pupils." Believing that these reasons are unsatisfactory, and that the
tendency is a bad one, I propose to offer some general considerations
that weigh strongly against it.

The schools are utilitarian in their aim ; to fit the child for living
successfully is the object of their existence. As animal strength is
the foundation of all moral and physical welfare, and is the chief
condition of success in all the pursuits of life, the future welfare
of the child in every way depends upon the normal development of
his body.

An effeminate man is half sick ; and when it comes to any of the
severer trials of life, either physical or moral, where great endurance
or courage is required, the weakest must inevitably be the first to
succumb. This is as true of moral trials as of physical, for moral
cowardice often results from physical feebleness. It is to be doubted
if anything that is taught in the schools is of so much value to a
child that it would not better be foregone than to be obtained by
the loss of any physical vigor whatever. Taken in the truest sense,
that city has the best schools where the school restraints have least
effect upon the physical growth and normal development of the
pupils, and not the one where the pupils show the greatest proficiency
in acquiring in a rnemoriter way a few fragments of conventional
facts which happen irrationally to pass current for an education.
But because in so many schools the test to be applied at the end of
the term, or at the end of the course, is the rnemoriter one, and be-
cause no teacher expects her pupils to be examined as to their health,
or as to whether they are forming habits of life that will be conducive
to healthfulness, it is not to be wondered at that all the plans of the
teacher look more to the development of conventional proficiency than
to the infinitely more important matter of health.

Under our present standard for successful teaching, it is a necessity
that the teacher bend all her energies to the attainment of those things
which are to be measured by a technical school examination, and that
the matter of health be entirely ignored ; in fact, it is a thing rather
to be shunned, for, as a rule, the nervous, sallow-cheeked, flat-chested
boy or girl, with the attenuated skeleton, will vanquish his more robust
and healthful brother in one of these examination- jousts ; and that
teacher whose, school contains the largest per cent of the former class
may reasonably expect to obtain the greatest per cent from the ex-
amination by the superintendent. Hence it is that the " no-recess "
plan will frequently meet with great favor among teachers who are
most zealous and honest in doing their duty as they understand it.

There is already too strong a tendency, under our mode of civili-
zation, to form troglodytic habits. This is shown by the number of

92 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

people who flock to the cities, by the number of boys who seek in-door
employment, and by the prevalent sentiment that any person who is
properly educated will secure something to do where he may stay in
the shade and away from the weather. That the abandonment of the
out-door recess in our schools will strengthen this tendency to an in-
door life, and weaken the disposition, born with every child having a
normal development, to get out-of-doors, can not be doubted. That
this " no-recess " plan is in direct opposition to all the instincts of
the child's nature, ought to insure its immediate condemnation.

Muscular action for the health of a growing child is a necessity,
and the amount of exercise that a child will take, when permitted to
roam out-of- doors with congenial company at his own sweet will, is a
quantity of vast magnitude. Muscular action is and should be a thing
for which the child has an appetite, a craving, as intense as any he
ever feels for food or fruit, and no school discipline should be allowed
to interfere with its necessary gratification. The play-ground is more
of a necessity to a school of young children than any of the other
school appliances.

Recognizing the violence that the no-recess plan is doing to the
future well-being of their pupils, some superintendents have invented
a series of in-door games, which are played for a few minutes, at short
intervals, in the school-room, under the charge of the teacher, such as
tossing little bags of beans, marching, exercises with the arms and
legs, and the like. The best of such exercises fall very far short of
the real, soul-stirring, cheek-glowing, muscle and brain making exer-
cise of the play-ground ; while the poorest of them — and all are poor
when they take the place of the open-air recess — are the severest
trial of the day, both to the nerves and the amiability of teacher and
pupils. As a rule, there is no other school exercise in which there is so
much friction between teacher and pupils, none other where so fre-
quent appeals are made to higher authority, and none other from1*,
which the pupil so often tries to escape, as this gymnastics. The
law of physics, that all bodies move in the direction of least resistance,
ought to show teachers that this plan, in its present form, should be
abandoned. Children do not like to be marched around under the
direction of a teacher who needs the exercise more than they, and who
sits or stands still while they are marching. During a five years' mili-
tary service, the hardest campaign I went through was a three months'
drill, and I never saw a regiment but would sooner undertake a week
of severest marching than a week of camp-drilling. That gymnastics
can be, and sometimes is, made of great benefit to the pupils, is true,
but the teachers who have the skill, ability, and enthusiasm requisite
for the work are very rare. Children have a desire to manage for
themselves. How often do we observe their impatience at our open-
ing some box or package of theirs that they wish to open for them-
selves ! And, if the teacher were competent to enter thoroughly into

THE UTILITY OF SCHOOL-RECESSES. 93

the spirit of the in-door game, the children would still prefer to man-
age it in their own way.

But if the exercise in the house, so far as muscular action is con-
cerned, answered every purpose, it would still be unwise, because it
begets the habit of in-door life, and this is destructive of all educa-
tional development except in a few very narrow lines, and it is ques-
tionable if these lines are educational in any true sense. A child with
the in-door habit may be an adept at parsing, he may be skillful in
translating Latin and Greek, and be able to follow in the beaten track
of mathematics ; but when it comes to any of the sciences, when he
attempts any of the studies which relate to the phenomena of the liv-
ing world, or of the objective world about him, because he has never
observed these phenomena himself, he will fail. He will fail because
in what he has seen and experienced there is nothing by which he will
be able to translate to himself the words or the pictures of the text-
book. In all the branches of natural history he can learn nothing but
the words of the book. What the science of chromatics would be to
a blind child, or acoustics to a deaf one, is the greater part of our sci-
ence-teaching, in cities especially, to the boys and girls — Kaspar Hau-
sers — whose life is spent in the house. Knowing so little of the phe-
nomena of the world, they are, of course, unable to comprehend any
of the grand generalizations which follow a knowledge of their causes
.and sequences ; and, being deprived of this, they are without both the
powers of observation and of the deeper reasoning which can come
only as a result of facts obtained by observations of their own and kin-
dred ones of others. To teach such children text-book science is not
only a waste of the time of the child, but it is a very great damage to
him, both because it will have a stultifying effect upon his mental
powers, and because it will make him believe — if he learns the words
and secures a fair per cent from his teacher — that he has an under-
standing of the subject, when, as a matter of fact, he knows nothing
of it but the words in which the thoughts are expressed, while the
very existence of the true thoughts is all unknown to him.

To speak of the advantages of an out-of-door life seems almost like
stating truisms universally accepted ; and yet the great mortality among
the dwellers in-doors, their precarious tenure of life, the prevalence of
nervous diseases among them, and the tendency to crime, all show that
it is still necessary to refer to the ruddy health of the farmer, to his
greatly prolonged life, to his freedom from insomnia, to his immunity
from pulmonary complaints, and to his absence both from the prison
and the almshouse, as a proof that out-door life is necessary to health
and to happiness. The tendency of book-learning, under the most fa-
vorable conditions, is to too much in-door life, and, when this tendency
receives the additional influence of the no-recess plan, it certainly has
a powerful hold upon the young person just emerging from the school-
room. Is Solomon's injunction, to "train up a child in the way he

94 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

should go," sufficiently heeded ? Dr. Oswald says : " Early impres-
sions are very enduring, and can make evil habits as well as useful
ones a sort of second nature. In order to forestall the chief danger of
an in-door life, make your children love-sick for fresh air ; make them
associate the idea of fusty rooms with prison-life, punishment, and sick-
ness." So at school, the deprivation of the regular recess ought to be
as severe a punishment as the criminal code of the school permits, and
to be sent to the school-room from the play -ground should be a suffi-
cient penalty for the worst offense, and is a punishment that should be
administered to the juvenile offender only for offenses of a nature simi-
lar to those which in the adult offender are punished by incarceration
in the jail or bridewell.

Our physical constitution was never intended for the sluggish in-
activity of our sedentary and bookish school-life, and we sin against
the laws of our being when we forego necessary physical exercise.
Sloth is not one of our original sins, but an acquired one, and perhaps
in no other place is its acquisition so rapid as in a modern school-room,
where pencils arid paper are passed to the pupils, and every move-
ment must be quiet, subdued, and noiseless, and where the tempera-
ture is kept at a uniform degree, so that not even the involuntary
muscles get any exercise. When along with this condition come the
multitude of studies pursued, and the pressure of emulation, and upon
all the abolition of the regular play-spell, what is there to prevent the
boys and girls from forming the most fatal habits of muscular indo-
lence ? A recent writer in the " Monthly " says : " Where the chief
danger seems to lie, in most schools, is in the encroachment made on
the play-hours. In some schools the lessons set to be learned at home
are absurdly long and tedious. I find that in other schools, public and
private, a great deal of work is done during the period nominally
allotted to recreation only. This is a very important part of the act-
ual school system, and one which requires great care on the part of
the masters" ("Science Monthly," March, 1880). In a school of
eighty pupils, with ages ranging from twelve to fifteen years, each
pupil counted his pulsations for one minute immediately before and
after a fifteen minutes' recess, and recorded each result upon a card ;
the recess was varied, sometimes an out-door, sometimes an in-door,
with light gymnastics, and sometimes the pupils were advised to fol-
low their own inclination in the matter, but always to record upon the
card how the recess was passed. These are some of the general aver-
ages :

1. Those pupils who go out and engage in play increase the num-
ber of pulsations per minute by 13'4. 2. Those who engage in in-door
gymnastics increase the number by 3. 3. Those who stay in the school-
room at their seats, or visiting their neighbors, decrease their number
by 3-8. This increase of number of pulsations from the recess-play is
by no means the full measure of the benefit derived, for that increase

THE UTILITY OF SCHOOL-RECESSES. 95

implies a more rapid flow of the fluid through the hemal channels, and
when we know that the carrying power of fluid currents increases as
the sixth power of their velocities, we can appreciate with how much
greater force these currents sweep through their courses, washing
away the ashes, which have been made by previous combustion, from
the brain-hearth and the muscle-hearth. To the child who has been
busily engaged upon his lessons, it frequently happens that the further
ability to accomplish mental work successfully, and without nervous
debility, depends upon the thorough removal of the debris caused by
cerebral exercise. When this removal has been accomplished by rec-
reation, the child's power has been recreated. That pupils generally
do their best school-work just after recess, and that they are less
" nervous " at that time, is because the exercise has increased their
nerve-power, and given them a better control of their intellectual fac-
ulties, and a greater willingness to do hard thinking. Muscular exer-
cise, then, becomes a motive power for driving forward the machinery
of thought.

Were there no other objection to this plan, the one that it keeps
children away from the sunlight would still be enough to condemn it.
When we see the boys and girls of this country gathering at the
call of the school-bell at 9 a. m.. and remaining till 4 p. m., away from
the sunlight — except a few minutes' walk to and from dinner — and
this continued from six to sixteen years of age, for five days in a week
and ten months in a year, how can we help fearing that this school-
life, however good it may be in other respects, can not fail to leave its
pupils with emaciated bodies, attenuated limbs, and with a general
strength much below the average of what it should be, and much be-
low the average of what it must be, in order to give them that start in
the struggle for existence which they must have if they would win ; it
is not possible to save them- from this competition ; all must meet it, and
the power of physical endurance is an absolute necessity for success.

Neither Latin, Greek, grammar, nor geography, can give this pow-
er ; but an hour's play in the sunshine daily, for this ten years of school-
life, might do so.

Not only do the out-door recesses have the advantage of air and
sunshine in good weather, but in bad weather they have the advantage
of exposure also ; and, contrary to the commonly accepted theories, ex-
posure to inclement weather, in a reasonable degree and with proper
care, is of very great advantage. For nine years past it has been my
invariable practice, at four different periods daily, for a time aggre-
gating ninety minutes, to supervise a play -ground where several hun-
dred children of a public school assemble. I have observed that there
are certain ones, some of each sex, who are seldom absent. No cold,
except, perhaps, half a dozen days of the severest, and no storm except
a most drenching rain, ever drives them into their school-rooms.
Through all ordinary rains and snows they seem to feel no discomfort.

96 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

With lists of the names of these I have examined the registers of
daily attendance kept by the teachers, and, upon making out lists of
their absences from school on account of sickness, find their per cent
is not one fifth as great as that of the whole school, and not one
twelfth as great as that of an equal number of pupils of the same
grade who are never seen upon the play-ground in either good or bad
weather.

At first sight these figures seem inexplicable ; but when any one
looks about his own town and sees families of laboring-men with half
a dozen children to each house, and sees their houses are poorly built,
that they admit the wind and sometimes the rain, he sees the children
running about in quite frosty weather barefoot, he sees them playing
in the rain and storm with perfect freedom from colds, and he knows
they are seldom sick — then if he looks up the avenue to some residence
with its double windows, its base-burner, which keeps the house at a
uniform temperature, and observes when the children come out how
carefully they are protected from the weather, and how very delicate
they are, he will, if he is thoughtful, soon conclude that the good
health of the children of the laboring-man is because they encounter
exposure, and not that they encounter exposure because of their good
health.

Where school-rooms are warmed by an abundance of pure, warm
air, and where pupils have perfect liberty to go at any time to the regis-
ters to warm and dry shoes and clothing, they will not suffer by any
voluntary out-door exposure, however inclement the weather. There
seem to be no other gymnastics for the involuntary muscles, those con-
trolling the vital functions of respiration and circulation, but exposure
and vigorous exercise. Who has ever heard a hale old man, who had
long since passed his allotted halting-place of threescore-and-ten, tell
of his youth, but could tell of exposure, constant and severe, in his
youth ? Hunters, wood-choppers, ranchers, and soldiers, are not afraid
of the weather, nor are they subject to coughs and colds. During five
years of army life as a trooper, our regiment was never in barracks,
and much of the time was without tents. Often we were wet to the
skin, and sat our horses till our clothes dried upon us by the heat from
our bodies without feeling any other effect than an increased appetite.
By exposure we were made water-proof ; and I believe children can be
made largely cold-proof, and sickness-proof, by allowing them their
own free- wills as to exposure.

Children need the rough-and-tumble of an out-door recess to tough-
en the sinews of the body. Many at home are so tenderly cared for
that, what with cushioned chairs, stuffed sofas, and spring-seats to the
very carriages in which they ride to school, they are in danger of be-
coming too tender for even this usage ; and, if they are ever to accom-
plish anything in this world, they must somewhere acquire the physi-
cal power to endure many hard knocks in the various ways and sta-

THE UTILITY OF SCHOOL-RECESSES. 97

tions of life. They can not always be held in their nurses' arms. They
will meet with accidents which, if they are accustomed to the games
of the play-ground, will not affect them at all, but which, if they are
not, will lay them up with a lame side, a sprained ankle, or a dislo-
cated joint. Falls and tumbles occur daily upon the play-ground, with
no injurious effects whatever, which would put some of the tenderly
nurtured in bed for a week. The play-ground is the only place con-
nected with the schools where children can become hardy : and this
element of hardiness has been very strongly marked in all successful
men. It is not the carpet-knights who to-day rule in politics or in
business — no, nor in science or religion — but the men who have grit
and toughness, men who fear neither ridicule nor a crowd of rowdies.

Take the boy who has a few companions to play with him upon
his own lawn, and who, like himself, are carefully kept from the soci-
ety of the rougher and more world-wise boys of the street, and how
is he to get any knowledge of the methods or the power by which
these others are to be controlled in after-life ? Yet this boy and his
class are those who in many respects ought to have a controlling influ-
ence on the destiny of his neighborhood, but, because he has no ac-
quaintance with the other class, because he does not know what are
their ruling motives, he is powerless for good among them. By
means of this knowledge those agitators among the people, like Moody
and Dennis Kearny, the leading politician in each town and ward, and
the organizers of strikes, have such power among the masses ; and
their lack of this knowledge is the main cause of failure of our citi-
zens' social-reform societies and kindred organizations which attempt
some very laudable reforms. As the boy is father to the man, so the
play-ground is the antecedent of the future society of the town or
ward, and upon the play-ground, more than in the school-room, the
leaders of the future are made ; there the boy must learn, if he ever
learn it, how to lead, control, and master the others — boys to-day, but
men to-morrow. The school-room is an autocracy, with the teacher for
autocrat and the pupils for subjects, but the play-ground is a pure
democracy : there each, in proportion to his strength, dexterity, and
skill, is equal to any other ; there the egotist learns his insignificance,
the rude boy gets his first lessons in common courtesy, and there the
bully learns that his ways are not approved.

But the ruling sentiment of the play-ground must not be allowed
to form itself by accident : children must not be left to themselves at
these times.

An out-door recess needs the controlling presence of the teacher
quite as' much as an in-door one, and more than the ordinary exercise
of the school-room, and because this has been neglected is the reason
why some people have objected to it. Several hundred children, after
experiencing the restraint of the school-room, should not be released
"upon the play-ground without supervision competent to suppress what-

VOL. XXIV. — 7

9S THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ever may appear that is pernicious. There is no other time in all the
day when competent guidance can do so much to make boys manly
and girls womanly as when they are at their games. It is not enough
to leave the play-ground to the janitor or to some inferior authority ;
it is the place where the principal teacher and nearly all the others
are most needed — not to direct the games, or to meddle in any way
with the sports, but to be ready with a cheery voice and an easy
grace to suggest to any one about to engage in anything improper
that he has forgotten himself. Ruffianism will soon disappear, timid
children will learn to assert themselves, and an esprit de corps of the
play-ground can soon be formed which will have a wonderful influ-
ence on the characters as well as the actions of the pupils. Nor is the
benefit to the pupils all that is derived from this plan ; the teacher
needs such a recess quite as much as, and in many cases more than, her
pupils. Fifteen minutes of each ninety in the open air, away from
the sights and thoughts of the lessons, will remove the nervous, tired,
irritable, and almost despondent feeling experienced by many teachers,
and give them renewed strength and cheerfulness and mental elas-
ticity for the remainder of the session. By being upon the play-
ground among her pupils, many a teacher learns their character, their
ambitions, the bent of their minds, as she can not learn them in the
peculiar position in the school-room ; and yet there are many children
who, unless understood in these particulars, can not be successfully
taught. To the teacher who sees her pupils only in their relation of
pupils, the school- work is very likely to become a grind, a machine at
which she is to perform a regular and a constant part, and the chil-
dren are little else than so much raw material which is to pass through
the mill over which she presides. She sees no individuality in them,
and of course her work is arranged for the aggregate, and individuals
receive no consideration as such. To overcome this error there is
nothing better than for her to see them daily at their sports, for there
their distinctive characteristics are manifested as in no other place.
If the schools are to build character, certainly an out-door recess is an
absolute essential for both teacher and pupils.

•♦•»

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY.

By W. MATTIEU WILLIAMS.

XVI.

A CORRESPONDENT of Manchester asks me which is the most
nutritious, a slice of English beef in its own gravy, or the
browned morsel as served in an Italian restaurant with the burnt-
sugar addition to the gravy ?

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY. 99

This is a very fair question, and not difficult to answer. If both
are equally cooked, neither over-done nor under-done, they must con-
tain, weight for weight, exactly the same constituents in equally di-
gestible form, so far as chemical composition is concerned. Whether
they will actually be digested with equal facility and assimilated with
equal completeness depends upon something else not measurable by
chemical analysis, viz., the relish with which they are respectively
eaten. To some persons the undisguised fleshiness of the English
slice, especially if under-done, is very repugnant. To these the cor-
responding morsel, cooked according to Francatelli rather than Mrs.
Beeton, would be more nutritious. To the carnivorous John Bull,
who regards such dishes as " nasty French messes " of questionable
composition, the slice of unmistakable ox-flesh from a visible joint
would obtain all the advantages of appreciative mastication and that
sympathy between the brain and the stomach which is so powerful
that, when discordantly exerted, may produce the effects that are re-
corded in the case of the sporting traveler who was invited by a Red
Indian chief to a " dog-fight," and ate with relish the savory dishes at
what he supposed to be a preliminary banquet. Digestion was tran-
quilly and healthfully proceeding, under the soothing influence of the
calumet, when he asked the chief when the fight would commence.
On being told that it was over, and that in the final ragoUt he had
praised so highly the last puppy-dog possessed by the tribe had been
cooked in his honor, the normal course of digestion of the honored
guest was completely reversed.

Reverting to the fat used in frying, and the necessity of its purifi-
cation, I may illustrate the principle on which it should be conducted
by describing the method adopted in the refining of mineral oils, such
as petroleum or the paraffin distillates of bituminous shales. These
are dark, tarry liquids of treacle-like consistency, with a strong and
offensive odor. Nevertheless, they are, at but little cost, converted
into the " crystal-oil " used for lamps, and that beautiful pearly sub-
stance, the solid, translucent paraffin now so largely used in the manu-
facture of candles. Besides these, we obtain from the same dirty
source an intermediate substance, the well-known "vaseline" now
becoming the basis of most of the ointments of the pharmacopoeia.
This purification is effected by agitation with sulphuric acid, which
partly carbonizes and partly combines with the impurities, and sepa-
rates them in the form of a foul and acrid black mess, known technic-
ally as "acid tar." When I was engaged in the distillation of cannel
and shale in Flintshire, this acid tar was a terrible bugbear. It found
its way mysteriously into the Alyn River, and poisoned the trout ; but
now, if I am correctly informed, the Scotch manufacturers have turned
it to profitable account.

Animal fat and vegetable oils are similarly purified. Very objec-
tionable refuse fat of various kinds is thus made into tallow, or mate-

ioo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

rial for the soap-maker, and grease for lubricating machinery. Un-
savory stories have been told about the manufacture of butter from
Thames mud or the nodules of fat that are gathered therefrom by the
mud-larks, but they are all false. It may be possible to purify fatty
matter from the foulest of admixtures, and do this so completely as to
produce a soft, tasteless fat, i. e., a butter substitute, but such a curi-
osity would cost more than half a crown per pound, and therefore the
market is safe, especially as the degree of purification required for
soap-making and machinery-grease costs but little, and the demand
for such fat is very great.

These methods of purification are not available in the kitchen, as
oil of vitriol is a vicious compound. During the siege of Paris some
of the Academicians devoted themselves very earnestly to the subject
of the purification of fat in order to produce what they termed " siege-
butter " from the refuse of slaughter-houses, etc., and edible salad oils
from crude colza oil, the rancid fish oils used by the leather-dresser,
etc. Those who are specially interested in the subject may find some
curious papers in the " Comptes Rendus " of that period. In vol. lxxi,
page 36, M. Boillot describes his method of mixing kitchen-stuff and
other refuse fat with lime-water, agitating the mixture when heated,
and then neutralizing with an acid. The product thus obtained is
described as admirably adapted for culinary operations, and the method
is applicable to the purpose here under consideration.

Further on in the same volume is a "Note on Suets and Alimentary
Fats " by M. Dubrunfaut, who tells us that the most tainted of ali-
mentary fats and rancid oils may be deprived of their bad odors by
"appropriate frying." His method is to raise the temperature of the
fat to 140° to 150° Centigrade (284° to 302° Fahr.) in a frying-pan ;
then cautiously sprinkle upon it small quantities of water. The steam
carries off the volatile fatty acids producing the rancidity in such as
fish-oils, and also the neutral offensive fatty matters that are decom-
posed by the heat. In another paper by M. Fua this method is ap-
plied to the removal of cellular tissue of crude fats from slaughter-
houses. It is really nothing more than the old farm-house proceeding
of "rendering" lard, by frying the membranous fat until the mem-
branous matter is browned and aggregated into small nodules, which
constitute the " scratchings " — a delicacy greatly relished by our Brit-
ish plowboys at pig-killing time, but rather too rich in pork-fat to
supply a suitable meal for people of sedentary vocations.

The action of heat thus applied and long continued is similar to
that of the strong sulphuric acid. The impurities of the fat are organic
matters more easily decomposable than the fat itself, or, otherwise
stated, they are dissociated into carbon and water at about 300° Fahr.,
which is a lower temperature than that required for the dissociation
of the pure oil or fat (see No. 13 of this series). By maintaining this
temperature, these compounds become first caramelized, then carbon-

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY. 101

ized nearly to blackness, and all their powers of offensiveness vanish,
as such offense is due to slow decomposition of the original organic
compounds, which now exist no longer, and the remaining caramel or
carbon cinders being quite inoffensive or no further decomposable by
atmospheric agency.

In the more violent factory process of purification by sulphuric
acid the similar action which occurs is due to the powerful affinity of
this acid for water ; this may be strikingly shown by adding to thick
sirup or pounded sugar about its own bulk of oil of vitriol, when a
marvelous commotion occurs, and a magnified black cinder is pro-
duced by the separation of the water from the sugar.

The following simple practical formula may be reduced from these
data. When a considerable quantity of much-used frying fat is accu-
mulated, heat it to about 300° Fahr., as indicated by the crackling of
water when sprinkled on it, or, better still, by a properly constructed
kitchen thermometer graduated to about 400° Fahr. Then pour the
melted fat on hot water. This must be done carefully, as a large
quantity of fat at 400° poured upon a small quantity of boiling water
will illustrate the fact that water when suddenly heated is an explo-
sive compound. The quantity of water should exceed that of the fat,
and the pouring be done gradually. Then agitate the fat and water
together, and, if the operator is sufficiently skillful and intelligent, the
purification may be carried further by carefully boiling the water
under the fat, and allowing its steam to pass through ; but this is a
little dangerous, on account of the possibility of what the practical
chemist calls " bumping," or the sudden formation of a big bubble of
steam that would kick a good deal of the superabundant fat into the
fire.

Whether this supplementary boiling is carried out or not, the fat
and the water should be left together to cool gradually, when a dark
layer of carbonized impurities will be found resting on the surface of
the water, and adhering to the bottom of the cake of fat. This may
be peeled off and put into the waste grease-pot, to be further refined
with the next operatiou. Ultimately the worst of it will sink to the
bottom of the water. Then it is of no further value, and will be found
to be a mere cinder.

XVII.

-

Regarding the fat used in frying as a medium for conveying heat,
freedom from any special flavor of its own is a primary desideratum.
01ive-o;l of the best quality is almost absolutely tasteless, and, having
as high a boiling-point as animal fats, it is the best of all frying media.
In this country there is a prejudice against the use of such oil. I have
noticed at some of those humble but most useful establishments where
poor people are supplied with penny or twopenny portions of good fish,
better cooked than in the majority of " eligible villa residences," that

102 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

in the front is an inscription stating that " only the best beef -dripping
is used in this establishment." This means a repudiation of oil. Such
oil as has been supplied for fish-frying may well be repudiated.

On my first visit to arctic Norway I arrived before the garnering
and exportation of the spring cod harvest was completed. The packet
stopped at a score or so of stations on the Lofodens and the mainland.
Foggy weather was no impediment, as an experienced pilot free from
catarrh could steer direct to the harbor by " following his nose." Huge
caldrons stood by the shore in which were stewing the last batches of
the livers of cod-fish caught a month before and exposed in the mean
time to the continuous arctic sunshine. Their condition must be im-
agined, as I abstain from description of details. The business then
proceeding was the extraction of the oil from these livers. It is, of
course, " cod-liver oil," but is known commercially as "fish-oil," or
"cod-oil." That which is sold by our druggists as cod-liver oil is de-
scribed in Norway as " medicine-oil," and though prepared from the
same raw material, is extracted in a different manner. Only fresh
livers are used for this, and the best quality, the " cold-drawn " oil, is
obtained by pressing the livers without stewing. Those who are un-
fortunately familiar with this carefully prepared, highly refined prod-
uct, know that the fishy flavor clings to it so pertinaciously that all
attempts to completely remove it without decomposing the oil have
failed. This being the case, it is easily understood that the fish-oil
stewed so crudely out of the putrid or semi-putrid livers must be
nauseous indeed. I am told that it has nevertheless been used by
some of the fish-fryers, and I know that refuse " Gallipoli " (olive-oil
of the worst quality) is sold for this purpose. The oil obtained in the
course of salting sardines, herrings, etc., has also been used.

Such being the case, it is not surprising that the use of oil for fry-
ing should, like the oil itself, be in bad odor.

I dwell upon this because we are probably on what, if a fine writer,
I should call the "eve of a great revolution" in respect to frying
media.

Two new materials, pure, tasteless, and so cheap as to be capable
of pushing pig-fat (lard) out of the market, have recently been intro-
duced. These are cotton-seed oil and poppy-seed oil. The first has
been for some time in the market offered for sale under various fic-
titious names, which I will not reveal, as I refuse to become a medium
for the advertisement of anything — however good in itself — that is
sold under false pretenses. If the lamp of Knowledge, more fortu-
nate than that of Diogenes, should light upon some honest men who
will retail cotton-seed oil as cotton-seed oil, I shall gladly (with the
editor's permission) do a little straightforward touting for them, as
they will be public benefactors, greatly aiding the present movement
for the extension of the use of fish-food.

As every bale of cotton yields half a ton of seed, and every ton of

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY. 103

seed may be made to yield twenty-eight to thirty-two pounds of crude
oil, the available quantity is very great. At present only a small quan-
tity is made, the surplus seed being used as manure. Its fertilizing
value would not be diminished by removing the oil, which is only a
hydro-carbon, i. e., material supplied by air and water. All the fer-
tilizing constituents of the seed are left behind in the oil-cake from
which the oil has been pressed.

Hitherto cotton-seed oil has fallen among thieves. It is used as an
adulterant of olive-oil ; sardines and pilchards are packed in it. The
sardine trade has declined lately, some say from deficient supplies of
the fish. I suspect that there has been a decline in the demand, due to
the substitution of this oil for that of the olive. Many people who
formerly enjoyed sardines no longer care for them, and they do not
know why. The substitution of cotton-seed oil explains this in most
cases. It is not rancid, has no decided flavor, but still is unpleasant
when eaten raw, as with salads or sardines. It has a flat, cold charac-
ter, and an after-taste that is faintly suggestive of castor-oil ; but faint
as it is, it interferes with the demand for a purely luxurious article of
food. This delicate defect is quite inappreciable in the results of its
use as a frying medium. The very best lard or ordinary kitchen but-
ter, eaten cold, has more of objectionable flavor than refined cotton-
seed oiL

I have not tasted poppy-seed oil, but am told that it is similar to that
from the cotton-seed. As regards the quantities available, some idea
may be formed by plucking a ripe head from a garden poppy and
shaking out the little round seeds through the windows on the top.
Those who have not tried this will be astonished at the numbers pro-
duced by each flower. As poppies are largely cultivated for the pro-
duction of opium, and the yield of the drug itself by each plant is very
small, the supplies of oil may be considerable ; 571,542 cwt. of seeds
were exported from India last year, of which 346,031 cwt. went to
France.

Palm-oil, though at present practically unknown in the kitchen,
may easily become an esteemed material for the frying-kettle (I say
" kettle," as the ordinary English frying-pan is only fit for the cook-
ing of such things as barley bannocks, pancakes, fladbrod, or oat-
cakes). At present, the familiar uses of palm-oil in candle-making
and for railway grease will eause my suggestion to shock the nerves
of many delicate people, but these should remember that before palm-
oil was imported at all, the material from which candles and soap were
made, and by which cart-wheels and heavy machinery were greased,
was tallow — i. e., the fat of mutton and beef. The reason why our
grandmothers did not use candles when short of dripping or suet was
that the mutton-fat constituting the candle was impure ; so are the
yellow candles and yellow grease in the axle-boxes of the railway car-
' riages. This vegetable fat is quite as inoffensive in itself, quite as

io4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

wholesome, and — sentimentally regarded — less objectionable, than the
fat obtained from the carcass of a slaughtered animal.

When common sense and true sentiment supplant mere unreasoning
prejudice, vegetable oils and vegetable fats will largely supplant those
of animal origin in every element of our dietary. We are but just
beginning to understand them. Chevreul, who was the first to teach
us the chemistry of fats, is still living, and we are only learning, how to
make butter (not " inferior Dorset," but " choice Normandy ") without
the aid of dairy produce. There is, therefore, good reason for antici-
pating that the inexhaustible supplies of oil obtainable from the vege-
table world — especially from tropical vegetation — will ere long be
freely available for kitchen uses, and the now popular product of the
Chicago hog factories will be altogether banished therefrom, and used
only for greasing cart-wheels and other machinery.

As a practical conclusion of this part of my subject, I will quote
from this month's number of " The Oil Trade Review " the current
wholesale prices of some of the oils possibly available for frying pur-
poses. Olive-oil} from £43 to. £90 per ton of 252 gallons ; Cod-oil,
£36 per ton ; Sardine or train (i. e., the oil that drains from pilchards,
herrings, sardines, etc., when salted), £27 10s. to £28 per ton. Cocoa-
nut, from £35 to £38 per ton of 20 cwt. (This, in the case of oil, is
nearly the same as the measured ton.) Palm, from £38 to £40 10s.
per ton ; Palm-nut or copra, £31 10s. per ton ; Refined cotton-seed,
£30 10s. to £31 per ton ; Lard, £53 to £55 per ton. The above are
the extreme ranges of each class. I have not copied the technical
names and prices of the intermediate varieties. One penny per pound
is = £9 6s. Sd. per ton, or, in round numbers, £1 per ton may be reck-
oned as one ninth of a penny per pound. Thus the present price of
best refined cotton-seed oil is S^d. per pound ; of cocoanut-oil, 3f d. ;
palm-oil, from Z\d. to k\d., while lard costs 6d. per pound wholesale —
usually 7d.

I should add, in reference to the seed-oils, that there is a possible
objection to their use as frying media. Oils extracted from seeds con-
tain more or less of linoleine (so named from its abundance in linseed-
oil), which, when exposed to the air, combines with oxygen, swells and
dries. If the oil from cotton-seed or poppy-seed contains too much of
this, it will thicken inconveniently when kept for a length of time ex-
posed to the air. Palm-oil is practically free from it, but I am doubt-
ful respecting palm-nut-oil, as most of the nut-oils are " driers." —
Knowledge. -

SKETCH OF LAMARCK. 105

SKETCH OF LAMARCK.

THERE are two classes of scholars. Those of the one class, who
travel in the footsteps of their predecessors, increase the domain
of knowledge, and add. new discoveries to those that were made before
them ; their labors are immediately appreciated, and they enjoy their
well-earned fame in full measure. Others, who leave the trodden ways,
emancipate themselves from traditions, and expose to the light of the
sun the germs of future discovery which lie buried in the teachings
of the present. Sometimes they are appreciated at their full value
during their lifetime, but more frequently they pass away, misun-
derstood by the scientific public of their time, which is incapable
of comprehending and following them. Indolence, routine, and igno-
rance oppose an invincible resistance against them during their career,
and they die isolated and forsaken. In the mean time, science ad-
vances, facts increase, methods are perfected, and their contempora-
ries who survive them gradually come up to the mark they had left.
Then all their forgotten services are brought into the light, justice is
partly done to their labors, their genius is admired, it is recognized
that they foresaw the future, and a tardy posthumous fame comforts
their pupils for the neglect which the masters had to endure during
the years of vain struggle for the triumph of the truth.

Lamarck belonged to both of these classes. By his descriptive
labors in botany and zoology, and by the improvements which he intro-
duced in the classification of animals, and which were accepted by
his contemporaries, he gained a first place among the naturalists of
his time ; but his philosophical views on organic beings in general
were rejected, and did not even enjoy the honor of a sincere testing.
They were only accorded a polite silence, or treated with scornful
irony.

Jean Baptist Pierre Antoine de Monet, known as the Chevalier de
Lamarck, was born on the 1st of August, 1744, at Bazentin, a little
town between Albert and Bapaume, in Picardy. He was the eleventh
child of Pierre de Monet, lord of the manor, who was descended from
an old family in the county Beam, and called only a small hereditary
estate his own. His father had designed him for the church, then the
common destination for the younger sons of noble families, and took
him to the Jesuit college at Amiens. This, however, was not the
natural vocation of our young nobleman. Everything in his family
-associations inclined his mind toward military fame. His eldest brother
had fallen in the breach at the siege of Berg-op-Zoom ; the other two
brothers were still in the service, while France was exhausting its
forces in an unequal contest. His father opposed his wishes on this
point ; but, when the father died, Lamarck, following his own inclina-

io6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

tioD, betook himself on a poor horse to the army, which was encamped
near Lippstadt, in Westphalia. lie was furnished with a letter of
introduction from Frau von Laraeth, proprietor of a neighboring es-
tate, to Colonel de Lastic, of the Beaujolais regiment. This officer,
when he saw the seventeen-year-old youth, who looked much younger,
sent him to his quarters. A battle took place on the next day. M. de
Lastic drew up his regiment, and noticed his protege in the front
rank of a company of grenadiers. The French army was under the
command of Marshal Broglie and Prince Soubise while the allied
troops were commanded by Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick. The
two French officers, -who did not agree together, were killed. The
company Lamarck had joined was broken up by the enemy's fire,
and was forgotten in the confusion of the retreat. The officers and
under-officers were killed, and only fourteen were left standing. The
oldest of these counseled retreat ; Lamarck, who had, on the spur of
the moment, improvised himself to the command, answered : " We
have been assigned to this position, and we must not forsake it till we
are relieved." The colonel, who now remarked that the company was
not with his regiment, recalled it by an order which he managed to
get back to it by a secret way. On the next day Lamarck was ap-
pointed an officer, and soon afterward a lieutenant. Fortunately for
science, this brilliant beginning of a military career was not decisive
of the future of the youth. After the conclusion of peace he per-
formed garrison duty in Toulon and Monaco, till an inflammation of
the lymphatic glands of the neck made it necessary for him to go to
Paris to undergo an operation by Tenon, the scar of which he carried
all his life.

The aspect of the vegetation in the neighborhood of Toulon and Mo-
naco had attracted the attention of the young officer, who had already
acquired some knowledge of botany from the " Traite des plantes
usuelles " of Chomel. After he withdrew from the military service
and had been awarded a modest pension of four hundred francs, he
became engaged with a banker in Paris. Moved by an irresistible
impulse to the study of Nature, he observed from his attic-room the
forms and movements of the clouds, and made himself acquainted with
plants in the royal gardens, and by means of botanical excursions. He
felt that he was on the right way, and recalled Voltaire's judgment
on Condorcet, that discoveries to come would secure him more fame
with posterity than a company of soldiers. Dissatisfied with the bo-
tanical systems in use, he wrote in a half-year his " Flore francaise,"
and published his " Cle dichotomique," by the aid of which it is easy
for a beginner to ascertain the name of the plants he is accustomed to
see. This was in 1778. Through Rousseau botany became a fashiona-
ble study ; the lords and ladies of the world of society busied them-
selves with plants ; Buffon had the three volumes of the " Flore fran-
chise" published at the Royal Printing-House ; and in the next year

SKETCH OF LAMARCK. l0?

Lamarck entered the Academy of Sciences. Buffon, who wished his
son to travel, gave him Lamarck as a conductor, with a commission
from the government. They journeyed through Holland, Germany,
and Hungary, and Lamarck became acquainted with Gleditsch in Ber-
lin, Jaquin in Vienna, and Murray in Gottiugen.

The " Encyclopedic methodique," begun by d'Alembert and Dide-
rot, was not yet finished. Lamarck composed four volumes of this
work, and in them described all the then known plants the names of
which begin with the letters from A to P — a huge work, which was com-
pleted by Poiret, and included twelve volumes, appearing between
1783 and 1817. A still more important work, which also forms a part
of the " Encyclopaedia," and is continually quoted by botanists, is en-
titled " Illustration des genres " (" Illustration of Genera "), in which
Lamarck described the characteristics of two thousand species. The
work, says the title-page, is illustrated with nine hundred copper-plate
engravings. Only a botanist can form a conception of the researches
in herbaria, gardens, and books, which such an undertaking demanded.
Lamarck accomplished it all by means of the most restless industry.
If a traveler came to Paris, he was the first one to announce himself
to him. Sonnerat returned from India with immense collections.
Nobody but Lamarck took the trouble to look at them, and Sonnerat
was so pleased with him for this that he presented the splendid herba-
rium to him. In spite of his indefatigable labors, Lamarck's situa-
tion was miserable enough. He lived by his pen, and in the service of
the book-sellers. Even the petty position of overseer of the Royal
Herbarium was refused him. Like the majority of naturalists, he
contended for many years with the difficulties of life. A fortunate
circumstance, which gave his activity another direction, brought im-
provement in his condition. The convent ruled over France. Carnot
organized victory. Lamarck undertook to organize the sciences. The
Museum of Natural History was founded upon his motion. They
had been able to name professors for all the branches except zoology ;
but, in those times of ardent enthusiasm, France found warriors and
men of science wherever it needed them. Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hi-
laire was twenty-one years old, and was engaged with Haity in miner-
alogy. Daubenton said to him : " I take the responsibility for your
inexperience upon myself ; I have the authority of a father over you.
Be so bold as to assume the chair of zoology, and it may be said some
day that you have made a French science of it." Geoffroy acceded,
and undertook the higher animals. Lakanal had well comprehended
that a single professor would not be adequate to the task of working
out the whole animal kingdom. Since the classification of the verte-
brates only was taken care of by Saint-Hilaire, the whole list of inver-
tebrates, including the insects, mollusks, worms, zoophytes, etc., still
remained in chaos — in the unknown. Lamarck, says Michelet, under-
took the unknown. He had busied himself a little, under Bruguieres's

10S THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

direction, with the raollusks, but he still had nearly all to learn, or, to
speak more accurately, nearly all to create, in that uninvestigated
world in which Linnaeus had failed to introduce the methodical ar-
rangement which he had been so successful in introducing among the
higher animals. After devoting a year to preliminary studies, La-
marck began his lectures in the Museum in the spring of 1794 ; he
immediately instituted the great division of animals into vertebrates
and invertebrates, which has become fixed in science. Adhering to
the Linn scan division of the vertebrates into mammalia, birds, reptiles,
and fishes, he divided the invertebrates into mollusks, insects, worms,
echinoderms, and polyps. In 1799 he separated the order of crusta-
ceans from the insects with which it had been confounded ; in 1800
he separated the arachnids from the insects ; in 1802 he set off the
annelids as a subdivision of the worms, and the radiates as separable
from the polyps. Time has confirmed the justice of his division, which
depends in every respect upon the organization of the animals. This
is the rational method, incorporated in science by Cuvier, Lamarck,
and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

As our sketch has so far dealt only with Lamarck's achievements in
natural history, we pass with a simple mention a few works in which
he treated of physics and chemistry ; mistakes of a good intention,
which attempted to establish truths that rest exclusively on experi-
ment, by reasoning alone, or to resuscitate old theories like that of
phlogiston. These efforts did not even receive the honor of a contra-
diction ; they did not deserve it ; and they should serve as a warn-
ing to all those who would write upon any science without being
acquainted with it, and without having had practical experience in it.

The generalizations of Lamarck in geology and meteorology, sci-
ences which at the time he wrote had hardly come into existence, were
mistaken in another sense. They were premature. Every science
must begin with the knowledge of facts and phenomena. When these
are numerous enough, a partial generalization is possible ; as they in-
crease, the basis grows broader ; but systems which can justly claim to
be absolute and definitive can never be, for they presuppose that all
the phenomena and facts are known, a condition which will be impos-
sible as long as man lives. In the beginning of this century geology
did not exist, and little was known of the matters of which it treats ;
but systems were created that included the whole earth. Lamarck
elaborated his system in 1802 ; and twenty-three years afterward the
clear mind of Cuvier succumbed to the prevailing tendency, and he
published his treatise on the revolutions of the globe. It was La-
marck's merit that he perceived that there were no revolutions in
geology, and that the slow manifestations of force through hundreds
of thousands of years far better explained the wonderful changes of
which our planet has been the scene than violent disturbance could do.
" To nature," he said, " time is nothing : it is no obstacle. Nature

SKETCH OF LAMARCK. 109

always has time enough at its disposal ; time is a means of unlimited
capacity, through which it produces the greatest as well as the smallest
effects."

He was the first who distinguished the littoral fossils from the deep-
sea fossils. Yet no one will to-day accept his idea that the sea, by force
of its ebb and flow, could have hollowed out its bed and changed its
local position on the surface of the earth without altering the relative
level of the different points on the surface. In view of recognized
facts, it is impossible to ascribe the origin of all the valleys to the
wear of the waters. Just as Lamarck's conclusions in the science
of organic beings, which he knew so well, were sharp-sighted and pro-
phetic, so were they, in the sciences which were strange to him, care-
less, hazardous, and destined to be contradicted in the future. Like
the metaphysicians, he built in the air, and his structure, like theirs,
fell for want of a firm foundation. Limited by his lectures in the
Museum, and by the duty of classifying the collections to a definite
scientific work, he devoted himself entirely to this double object. In
1802 he published his "Considerations sur l'organisation des corps
vivants " (Considerations on the Organization of Living Bodies) ; in
1809, his " Philosophic Zoologique " (" Zoological Philosophy "), an ex-
pansion of the " Considerations," and from 1816 to 1822 the "Histoire
naturelle des animaux sans vertebres " (" Natural History of the Inver-
tebrate Animals "), in seven volumes. This was his principal work, and,
as it was exclusively descriptive and systematic, it was received by the
learned world with great favor. His paper on the fossil mollusks of
the neighborhood of Paris, in which his profound knowledge of living
mollusks permitted him to make an accurate classification of those re-
mains of animals that had laid for thousands of years in the bosom of
the earth, was likewise well received.

Lamarck had begun his zoological work when fifty years old. The
painstaking study of minute animals, visible only through the lens and
the microscope, wore upon his eyesight, which grew feebler and fee-
bler till he became totally blind. Four times married, the father of
seven children, he saw his little inheritance, and also his earlier sav-
ings, disappear in one of those high-sounding speculations with which
a credulous public is often deluded. His modest salary as a professor
only kept him from want. The friends of science, whom his fame as
a zoologist attracted to him, were shocked when they observed in
what neglect he lived. He spent the last years of his life in total
darkness, but comforted by the loving care of his two daughters. The
elder daughter wrote at his dictation a part of the sixth, and some of
-the seventh, volume of his " History of the Invertebrates." After the
father could not leave his room, the daughter would not go out of
the house ; and, when she did at last go out, she could not endure the
open air from which she had been excluded so long. Lamarck died
on the 18th of December, 1829, at the age of eighty-five years.

no THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

It has been more the fashion to condemn Lamarck for his specu-
lations than to give him the credit that is his due for his great work in
classification. Recently, however, two naturalists have endeavored to
present these speculations in a more favorable light, and, without de-
nying that they embodied much that was not well enough established,
to show that much in them was only anticipatory of what science has
since accepted : Herr Haeckel, in Germany, who declares that in Dar-
win, Goethe, and Lamarck, " each of the three great civilized nations
of middle Europe has presented mankind in the course of a hundred
years with an intellectual hero of the first rank, who comprehended in
its full significance the fundamental idea of the concordant develop-
ment of the world from natural causes " ; and M. Barthelemy, in
France, who considers that Lamarck was a forerunner of Darwin, and
a greater than he.

M. Barthelemy, while admitting that Lamarck's theories on physics,
chemistry, and meteorology were frequently rash and lacking the pre-
cision that experiment gives, says : " He believed in natural laws, in
the unity and transformation of physical and physiological forces, be-
cause he attributed a special signification to nature. To him nature
was a power subordinate to God, its sublime author, who must not be
confounded with it, and whose function it is to put to work forces
and laws which it has not made, and can not modify. His cosmical
system is summarized in the three elements : God, nature, and the
universe. Transformism, with Lamarck, is not born of abstract medi-
tations and a priori conceptions, as has sometimes been said. It is
connected with the whole of the theories that precede. He rose from
the careful study of the immense multitude of beings he had to ex-
amine to carry order and light into the chaos of invertebrate animals.
In his first lectures he began with the most rudimentary beings, the
origin of which he attributed to physico-chemical forces, and then saw
the organization and the circulation of the fluids become more com-
plicated and more perfect as the scale of being rose with new faculties
resulting from the acquisition of new organs derived from the cellular
tissue, and owing their origin to new wants or new circumstances in
which the being found itself placed. He conceived very clearly the
influence of external conditions, and attributed the modifications of
organisms to two factors, one interior and constant and regular in its
operation ; the other exterior and irregular, and including modifica-
tions of media, temperature, nutrition, etc. He concluded from
this that a .continuous chain of beings is not possible, for, if such
a chain existed, it would quickly be broken by the accidental or
irregular circumstances to which beings are obliged to adapt them-
selves."

Ilcrr Haeckel pronounces Lamarck's "Philosophic Zoologique," in
respect to its uniform and complete deduction of the development
theory, as well as to its many-sided empirical basis, far more impor-

SKETCH OF LAMARCK. m

tant than the similar efforts of all his contemporaries, even than the
similar work of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and styles it "the greatest
production of the great literary epoch of the beginning of our centu-
ry." According to this naturalist's review of Lamarck's system, it
supposes that " all the forms of animals and plants which we distin-
guish as species have only a relatively temporary stability, and the
varieties are incipient species. Therefore the form-group or type of
the species is just as much an artificial product of our analyzing rea-
son as are the genus, order, class, and other categories of the system.
Changes in the conditions of life on one side, the use and non-use of
the organs on the other side, constantly exert a formative influence on
the organism ; through adaptation they bring about a gradual meta-
morphosis of forms, the principal features of which are transmitted
by inheritance from generation to generation. The whole system of
animals and plants is thus peculiarly their genealogical tree, and re-
veals to us the relations of their natural blood-kinship. The course
of development on the globe has therefore been continuous and un-
broken, like that of the earth itself. . . . Lamarck regarded life as
only a very complicated physical phenomenon ; for all the phenomena
of life depend on mechanical antecedents, which are themselves de-
pendent on the adaptedness of the organic matter. Even the phe-
nomena of the mental life are not different in this respect from the
others. For the conceptions and acts of the mind depend upon motor-
organs in the central nerve-system." He did not shrink from the solu-
tion of the difficult question of the origin of life on the globe, and
assumed " that the common primitive forms of all organisms were ab-
solutely simple beings which originated by spontaneous generation,
under the combined operation of different physical causes, out of the
inorganic matter in water." "Undoubtedly," adds Herr Haeckel,
" the greatest defect in Lamarck's work was the insufficient number
of observations and experiments which he adduced in proof of his
far-reaching theories." A great part of Darwin's immense success
was owing to the fact that he was backed by a host of clear and con-
vincing observations and experiments, while "poor Lamarck, trusting
too much to the logical acumen of the naturalist, in great part neg-
lected them."

112

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

CORRESPONDENCE.

DE. OSWALD AGAIN EEPLIES TO DE.
BLACK.
Meters. Editors :

DR. J. R. BLACK'S second epistle, pub-
lished in the October issue of the
" Monthly," can hardly have surprised your
intelligent readers, and may even have ex-
cited their pity. When people like Dr.
Black see a way to achieve publicity, they
must be pardoned for trying to make the
best of their chance, even on the terms ac-
cepted by that Paris quack who volunteered
to be pilloried, if they would permit him
to exhibit himself in a pair of canvas
breeches, displaying a printed advertise-
ment of his pills. Besides, the doctor has
somewhat modified his original plan. Hav-
ing undertaken to pose as a martyr of med-
ical orthodoxy, but finding his nasal organ
out of plumb to a degree he had not quite
bargained for, he now attempts to effect his
retreat under a dust-cloud of irrelevant ob-
scurities.

After admitting that dyspepsia in chil-
dren can be explained by the agency of
causes distinct from hereditary transmission
(which he had denied in his first letter), he
now defies me to prove that, by moderate
eating and abstinence from virulent drugs,
children can escape the disease. Has the
plan ever failed where it had a chance of a
fair trial, as in hygienic homes, or in
Schrodt's " Boarding Kindergartens " ? Or
does Dr. Black know what his thesis im-
plies ? He can not deny — 1. That the di-
gestive organs of children are governed by
the same pathological laws as those of
adults, the difference, if any, being in favor
of the children, since every birth is a hy-
gienic regenesis, and since diseases, as he
himself admitted in his first letter, do not
exist per se from the moment of birth. 2.
That a correct regimen and abstinence from
noxious drugs will prevent dyspepsia in
adults, and cure even far-gone dyspeptics.
Yet he holds that a correct regimen and ab-
stinence from noxious drugs will not prevent
dyspepsia in children. In other words, the
laws of health hold good in the ordinary
affairs of life, but may be set aside when it
comes to account for the mortality in the
infant-wards of an Ohio drug-hospital. Dr.
Black informs us that the public is deeply
interested in the issue of our controversy.
Feverishly. But your readers can make
their minds easy. Nature is not so incon-
sistent as Dr. Black; and I will under-
take to insure any child against dyspepsia,
nay, any cured dyspeptic against a relapse
of the disease, on the sole condition that

they shall avoid dietetic abuses and Dr.
Black's prescriptions. In his distress to
evade the logical inference of his admis-
sions, Dr. Black suggests that some of my
arguments might be used to disprove the
hereditary tendency of insanity and con-
sumption. Before the doctor's friends per-
mit him to undertake another pathological
controversy, I would advise them to en-
lighten his mind on the difference between
functional and organic disorders, and thus
enable him to understand the reason why
consumption or cancer, but not dyspepsia, can
be called an hereditary disease, and why he-
reditary diseases and not dyspepsia reappear
in successive generations at the same period
of life when they were first contracted. If
I had ever doubted the chronic persistence
of mental derangements, I confess that Dr.
Black's arguments would have convinced
me of my error. The manner of his attempt
to defend the drivel of his first letter is a
sufficient proof that the taint of idiocy is
ineradicable.

In trying to explain away the silliness of
his soap-water argument, Dr. Black volun-
teers the confession that Nature protests
against the use of soap when the sensitive-
ness of the cutaneous tissue has been mor-
bidly increased by the influence of a skin-
disease. In other words, he admits that a
morbid condition increases the danger of
using even the mildest chemical depurative.
Yet to the morbidly sensitive membrane of
the diseased digestive organs he proposes
to apply the virulent " intestinal soaps," as
he calls his cathartic drugs. The " striking
benefit " resulting from the use of patent
laxatives is too exclusively confined to the
experience of the patentee.

Dr. Black's assertion that I propose to
cure syphilis on the let-alone plan is a fic-
tion which can be pardoned only to a non-
plused sophist at the brink of a reduciio
ad absurdum. Not only have I never pro-
pounded such a theory, but I have repeat-
edly named syphilis as the representative
disorder of the exceptional class of diseases
which (for reasons stated on page 729 of
" The Popular Science Monthly " for Octo-
ber, 1881, and on page 199 of my work on
" Physical Education ") have to be cured by
an artificial removal of the cause.

As a last attempt to retrieve the re-
verses of his game, Dr. Black tries to score
a point on a lexicographical quibble. In
defending my plea for longer pauses be-
tween meals, he says, I have spoken of di-
gestion and assimilation as being one and
the same thing. The truth is, that I men-

CORRESP ONDENCE.

113

tioned them as synergistic operations. But
within the scope of my argument I would
have been justified in treating them as
identical functions. Does Dr. Black wish
to deny that intestinal digestion, in its nor-
mal phases, includes an assimilative process ?
But, as in the case of dyspepsia infantum, the
doctor's experience is perhaps limited to the
action of a drug-convulsed system, in which
case the activity of the digestive organs does,
indeed, but rarely lead to assimilation.

Dr. Black's exception-plea in favor of
the stimulant superstition illustrates only
the radical confusion of his pathological
theories. For that energy of action which
he mistakes for a sign of restored functional
vigor demonstrates nothing but the urgency
of an expulsive process. The functional
activity excited by the influence of a drastic
tonic proves only the virulence of the drug,
and the system's eagerness to rid itself of a
deadly foe. In my treatises on " Dyspepsia
and Climatic Fevers " I have exposed the
two most specious fallacies of the stimu-
lant-delusion ; and there is an end to all in-
ductive reasoning if the analogies of the
stimulant-vice and the medicine-habit do
not establish my tenet that the poi son-hun-
ger in all its forms, whether as mania a
potu, or a hankering after a digestive excit-
ant, is wholly abnormal and mischievous ;
that its repeated gratification rarely fails to
inoculate the system with the seeds of a
progressive stimulant-habit ; that the dys-
peptic's dependence upon Dr. Black's calo-
mel pills is an aggravation of the original
disease ; and that even the temporary results,
effected at such risk, by the use of virulent
drugs, can, in nine cases out of ten, be more
safely and as directly attained by other
means, as by refrigeration in the treatment
of malarial fevers, or indirectly by reform
of the predisposing habits, as in consump-
tion and various enteric disorders.

In one of his tirades against heretical
theories. Dr. Black carries his bravado to
the degree of appealing to the testimony of
" stubborn facts " — in other words, to the
lessons of experience. I would advise my
colleague to avoid that arena. Hospital
statistics might prove that the homoeopa-
thists can challenge our best record and dem-
onstrate by proofs, which should satisfy a
depredator of their sugar-pellets, that they
can beat it. by total abstinence from the so-
called remedies of the drug-shops.

In his first letter Dr. Black proposed to
let dyspeptics trust themselves to the guid-
ance of their morbid appetite, and, after I
proved that the absurdity of that plan could
be demonstrated by the analogies of the
alcohol-habit, our entrapped medicine-man
tries to slip out by the following hole : The
chronic hunger of the dyspeptic, he informs
us, is a craving after food, while the un-
quenchable thirst of the alcohol-drinker is

tol. xxiv. — 8 „

a craving after poison. Does that subvert
my tenet that, in regard to the persistency
of the appetite, both cravings are wholly
abnormal V For, let us remember that
the original point at issue was the question
about the proper number of daily meals.
Xow, in pursuance of Dr. Black's plan, his
patients would have to eat about forty
meals a day ; for, in his first letter, he ad-
vised dyspeptics to follow the promptings
of an appetite which he now admits to be
morbid and unappeasable, as caused by a
chronic state of semi-starvation. Thus Dr.
Black continually shifts his ground, to dodge
the inferences of his own premises. But
the fact is, that he never expected to main-
tain his positions. He merely wrestles
against time, and accepts his successive
overthrows in the secret hope that the
shrieks of his afflictions might attract the
aid of some brother-sophist. Hence, also,
his repeated allusions to a " numerous class
of physicians " whose wrath he warns me to
deprecate. Like other champions of ortho-
doxy who find that their logic leaves them
in the lurch, he tries to retreat behind the
shelter of a numerical majority.

By my outspoken denunciation of the
stimulant-superstition, Dr. Black holds that
I have offered an insult to that large body
of medical men to whom is due the credit
of the most important discoveries in hygiene,
physiology, surgery, etc. My orthodox con-
temporary will try in vain to identify the
interests of his cause with the progress of
those sciences. All their promoters have
contributed their share to undermine the
foundations of the position which he tries
to defend. For the last hundred years the
history of medical science has been the his-
tory of a continued and increasingly rapid
collapse of the drug -delusion — a delusion
whose defenders have always tarried in the
rear of progress, and, after doing their ut-
most to obstruct the path of reform, have
recognized its triumphs only by sharing the
fruits of its victories. My invectives were
not directed against the thousand earnest
seekers after truth, not against its great dis-
coverers, the pioneers of the true healing
art, not against men like Bichat,* Schrodt,f

* " To what errors have not mankind been led
in the employment and denomination of medicines !
They created deobstruents when the theory of ob-
struction was in fashion; and incisives when that
of the thickening of the humors prevailed. Those
who saw in diseases only a relaxation or tension of
the fibers employed astringents and relaxants.
The same identical remedies have been employed
with all these opposite views. . . . Hence the vague-
ness and uncertainty our science presents at this
day. An incoherent assemblage of incoherent opin-
ions, it is. perhaps, of all the physiological sciences,
that which best shows the caprices of the human
mind. What do I say ? For a methodical mind it
is not a science at all. It is a shapeless collection
of inaccurate ideas ; of observations often puerile ;
of deceptive remedies, and of formulas as fantasti-
cally conceived as they are tediously arranged."

t " If we reflect upon the obstinate health of

ii4

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Magendie,* Bock,f Jules Virey,:}: Jennings,§
Rush, | but against bigots like Dr. Black ;
against medical obscurantists who dread the
enlightenment of their victims as vampires
dread the dawn of the morning ; who op-
pose independent thinkers with that rancor-
ous hatred which Jesuits feel toward the
divulgers of their trade-secrets ; who, by
holding on to the last planks of their wrecked
dogmas, by illogical compromises and tempo-
rizing sophisms, are trying to perpetuate the

animals and savages, upon the rapidity of their re-
covery from injuries that defy all the mixtures of
materia medica : also upon the fact that the homoe-
opathists cure their patients with milk-sugar and
mummery, the prayer-ChriBtianB with mummery
without milk-sugar, and my followers with a milk-
diet without sugar or mummery — the conclusion
forces itself upon us that the entire system of thera-
peutics is founded upon an erroneous view of dis-
ease "

* " I hesitate not to declare, no matter how
sorely I shall wound our vanity, that so gross is our
ignorance of the real nature of the physiological
disorders called diseases, that it would perhaps he
better to do nothing, and resign the complaint we
are called upon to treat to the resources of Nature,
than to act, as we are so often compelled to do,
without knowing the why and the wherefore of our
conduct, and at the obvious risk of hastening the
end of the patient.'"

t " By special methods of diet nearly all known
diseases can be cured as well as caused. . . . Twen-
ty-five years' experience at the sick-bed and the
dissecting-table, in the nursery and on the battle-
field, have convinced me that, "with rare exceptions,
the disorders of the human body, which have been
treated after such an infinite variety of drug-sys-
tems, can be as well cured without any drugs at
alL"

% " Our system of therapeutics is so shaky " (va-
cillant) u that the soundness of the basis itself must
be suspected.''1

§ " It is unnecessary for my present purpose to
give a particular account of the results of homoeop-
athy ; . . . what I now claim with respect to it is,
that a wise and beneficent Providence is using it to
expose and break up a deep delusion. In the re-
sults of homoeopathic practice we have evidence, in
amount and of a character sufficient, most incontest-
ably to establish the fact that disease is a restorative
operation, or renovating process, and that medicine
has deceived us. The evidence is full and complete.
It does not merely consist of a few isolated cases,
whose recovery might be attributed to fortuitous
circumstances, but it is a chain of testimony fortified
by every possible circumstance. . . . All kinds and
grades of disease have passed under the ordeal and
all classes and characters of persons have been con-
cerned in the experiment as patients or witnesses ;
. . . while the process of iivftnitesimally attenu-
ating the drugs used was carried to such a ri-
diculous extent that no one will, on sober reflec-
tion, attribute any portion of the, cure to the
medicine. I claim, then, that homoeopathy may
be regarded as a providential sealing of the fate of
old medical views and practices."

1 " I am here incessantly led to make an apology
for the instability of the theories and practice of
physic ; and those physicians generally become the
most eminent who have the soonest emancipated
themselves from the tyranny of the schools of
physic. Dissections daily convince us of our igno-
rance of disease, and cause us to blush at our pre-
scriptions. What mischief have we done under the
belief of false facts and false theories 1 We have
assi.sti'd in multiplying diseases; we have done more,
we have increased their mortality. I will not pause
to beg pardon of the faculty for acknowledging, in
this public manner, the weakness of our profession.
I am pursuing Truth, and am indifferent whither I
am led, if she only is my leader."

curse of a life-blighting delusion ; who sub-
ordinate the interests of mankind to the
interests of their clique, and disparage re-
formers till they find it convenient to appro-
priate the credit of their discoveries.

" Some acute philosophers," our obliging
correspondent informs us, " think that all
the phenomena of the universe can be ex-
plained on the laws of mechanics, from the
motions of a molecule up to those of the
celestial masses." Just so. And Dr. Black
might as well confess the secret of his pre-
dilection for that system. Its application
to therapeutics has so simplified the practice
of medicine ; and its recognition as the law
of the universe would confirm the prestige of
the orthodox cause. Instead of troubling
himself with a life-long study of the laws
and revelations of Nature, the lessons of
instinct, the interaction of the vital func-
tions, their modifications under abnormal
circumstances, the secrets of the reproduc-
tive and self-regulating principle of the hu-
man organism, our mechanical philosopher
would prefer to re-establish the system of
the good old times, when he could consult a
pocket-index of drugs, set against an alpha-
betical list of diseases, point to his diploma
as a presumptive proof that he had learned
to repeat the Latin synonyms and construct
the pharmaceutic symbols of the various
" remedial agents," etc., and magisterially
reprimand hygienic " idealists," as a village
schoolmaster, well read in Genesis, would
reprove an exponent of the evolution doc-
trine.

" Dr. Oswald," says our astute corre-
spondent, " is apparently unable to discern
that all the customs and habits of savages
are intimately correlated to their vital or-
ganism, and that for us to adopt only one
of them might prove murderous to civilized
beings." Because we can not imitate all
the customs of a primitive nation, is that a
reason why we should not adopt some of
them ? With such arguments our medical
censor dares to insult the intelligence of
your readers ! Must we avoid the unleav-
ened bread of the ancient Hebrews because
we dislike circumcision ? Must we dispar-
age Japanese temperance, because we do not
want to commit hari-kari ? Would the Sa-
mian water-cure prove more murderous to
civilized beings than Dr. Black's blue-pills ?
If I should recommend the system of the
medical philosopher Asclepiades, who used
to prescribe a special course of gymnastics
for every form of human disease, Dr. Black
would try to retreat behind his correlation-
dodge. " Such systems," he would probably
remark, " were intimately correlated to the
physical and social organism of the pagan
savages and their uncivilized doctors ; but
nowadays every intelligent druggist would
agree with me that it would never do to let
people cure their diseases with such reme-

CORRESP ONDENCE.

115

dies. In a country like ours," he would add
in a whisper, " the introduction of such a
system might prove murderous to some civ-
ilized beings."

Dr. Black complains of my supercilious-
ness in preferring a charge of ignorance
against a contemporary who has for a long
series of years anxiously sought the solution
of " the problem how the sick can be made
well." Sad enough ; but that is no reason
why I should withdraw my charge. Dr.
Black may have sought that solution for a
most venerable series of years, but, unless
he holds his own time as cheap as that of
your readers, he ought to seek it more anx-
iously than ever, for it is very evident that
he has not yet found it.

Felix L. Oswald.

T^E GEOLOGICAL DISTRIBUTION OF
FORESTS.
Messrs. Editors :

IN discussing " The Geological Distribu-
tion of North American Forests," in your
August number (pp. 521, 522), Mr. Thomas
J. Howell makes the general statement that
the loess (or lacustral deposits) of the cam-
pestrian province " is devoid of trees," ex-
cept where cut through by erosion ; from
which he infers that " the loess is not ca-
pable of sustaining forest-growths for any
length of time." By way of explanation,
he adds that the loess " evidently was tim-
bered during the time that part of it was
covered by lakes and marshes," but, " when
the great rivers cut their beds down to
nearly their present level, the timber gradu-
ally died out." To generalization, inference,
and explanation, exception must alike be
taken.

In much of Eastern Iowa, and in South-
eastern Minnesota, the loess is confined to
an irregular zone, five to fifty miles wide,
flanking the deeply eroded valley of the Mis-
sissippi on the west, and overlapping the
glacial drift which forms the greater part of
the surface of both States. The western
limit of this zone is exceedingly sinuous ;
lobes of drift extend for miles within its
general area, and narrow, finger-like belts of
loess, sometimes separating into isolated
outliers, extend still farther upon the drift-
plain. Now, this drift-plain is quite timber-
less ; but the loess is naturally wooded to
its extreme margin, and its outliers are also
generally wooded. The coincidence of for-
est-growth with loess is indeed so perfect in
this region that maps showing the wooded
area indicate with almost equal accuracy the
loess area. This is a region, too, in which
not only the " great rivers," but many of
their minor tributaries, have cut their chan-
nels through the loess, and far into the sub-
jacent roeks, thus developing the pictur-
esque river bluffs which lure so many tourists

to the upper Mississippi region. A parallel
relation between loess and forests obtains
in Central and Southern Illinois. Here the
loess first appears, in passing from north to
south, as isolated mounds rising from the
almost dead-level drift-plain ; which mounds,
however far from other forests, are well
wooded. The Missouri River loess-belt is,
it is true, generally treeless, except along
water-ways, which may or may not, however,
cut through its deposits ; but natural tim-
ber is far more abundant than over con-
tiguous drift-areas, while its capability of
supporting arborescent vegetation is em-
phatically attested by the unprecedented
growth of artificially-planted fruit and for-
est trees, which is at once the marvel of
Eastern and the boast of Western horticul-
turists. The potent influence of geological
structure in determining the flora of any re-
gion is demonstrated by these relations of
loess and forests, especially in Northeastern
Iowa ; but the connection is directly oppo-
site from that which Mr. Howell seeks to
establish.

But other and equally significant rela-
tions exist. Thus, it has been repeatedly
pointed out by the director of the Iowa
Weather Service, Dr. Gustavus Hinrichs,
that the lines of equal timber in Eastern
Iowa correspond remarkably, though in a
general way, with the lines of equal rainfall.

Again, the origin of the loess is yet a
mooted point in geology, and the declaration
that its surface was once marshy is scarcely
warranted ; while no unequivocal evidence
that it was ever more heavily or continu-
ously wooded than now has ever been ad-
duced.

The question as to the distribution of
forests, particularly in the campestrian prov-
ince, • is inextricably involved with that of
the treelessness of the prairies, concerning
which so much has been written, but con-
cerning which it is evident (since neither of
the relations pointed out in this note have
ever been adequately considered by those
who have addressed themselves to the prob-
lem) that the last word has not yet been
spoken. Mr. Howell would sever the Gor-
dian knot at a stroke ; but certainly some
of its strands have escaped his blade.

Yours, W. J. McGee.

"Washington, D. C, July 24, 1SS3.

INFANTILE DYSPEPSIA.

Messrs. Editors :

Referring to the very interesting pas-
sage at arms between Dr. Oswald, repre-
senting the natural, and Dr. Black, the anti-
natural school of medicine, while not desir-
ing to provoke further controversy, I beg
leave to offer a few remarks upon one point
at issue, viz., that pertaining to the alimen-
tation of infants. Dr. Black (see October

u6

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

" Popular Science "), while granting the
soundness of Dr. Oswald's position as to the
" millions of infants who from the moment
of birth are overfed and drug-poisoned," viz.,
that we have here a sufficient cause of dys-
pepsia, asks : " Well, what of the millions
that are not ? Are they the ones who do
not show any such tendency, despite the
fact that some of their progenitors do ? "
Would Dr. Black have us believe that, out-
side of " baby -farms,'' a single babe, of all
the millions who live to be born, escapes
being constantly overfed and (in conse-
quence) occasionally medicated ? I assert
that, as to the first count in the indictment,
an infant is about as sure to be excessively
fed as he is to be born. The only excep-
tion in general practice is where the babe
is nourished at the breast, and the supply
happens to be short of an excess, and even
in these cases all haste is made to supple-
ment his natural aliment with the bottle ;
for mothers are unhappy unless their babies
are growing obese at the rate of a pound
or more a week. Infants usually measure
more round the body, arms, and legs, and
weigh more, at some period during their
first year — often at six months — than at the
age of two and a half or three years. No
growing thing, in either the animal or vegeta-
ble kingdom, can, under natural conditions,
exhibit anything of this sort. Parents, no
more than the average " druggist," are aware
of the fact that the normal or true growth
of an infant is never more than three to five
ounces per week, and that all the gain
above this is from fat, representing excess,
though seldom all of the excess — more or
less being daily purged away by the bowels,
or excreted through other outlets. All this
produces or constitutes disease, leads on to
sickness, and probably dosing. While we
have to admit that only about forty or fifty
per cent are, before the age of five years,
stamped out by this combination — a method
of getting rid of the weakling* far more
cruel than the Spartan plan, of freezing
them, or the African, of feeding to the
crocodiles — ninety-nine in every hundred
are made sick by overfeeding, and few of
these escape being more or less drugged.
Having made the question of infant die-
tetics a specialty for the past ten years, I
find that to hold to cow's milk as the exclu-
sive diet of bottle-babes (a portion of the
cream to be removed in case the milk is
very rich in this constituent), limiting the
number of meals to three, and somewhat re-
stricting the amount at each meal, and allow-
ing nurslings three to five meals (according

* Quoth Dr. Black. '• Now, wo nurse thorn (the
weaklinps) to adult life! " In fact, only about fifty
to sixty per r,i,t of all infants arrive at adult age,
and these have been fitly described as "tootomrh
to kill."1 liven these, to'the last one. would make
healthier men and women, if saved the abuses we
have named.

as the breast may or may not require the
"stimulation " of frequent drawing), is an al-
most absolute guarantee against the gastro-
intestinal disorders which are popularly sup-
posed to be unavoidable at this period of
life.

Considerable restriction is essential with
bottle - babies ; for a greedy infant will at
any age swallow at two " sittings " a full
physiological ration for twenty-four hours,
and, if there is to be no restriction as to the
quantity taken at each meal, no more than
two should be offered. Furthermore, every
infant who is not fed ad nauseam will be
" greedy." In case of infants nourished at
the breast, the flow, if excessive, must be
diminished by regulating the mother's diet ;
for in such cases the excess is due to an
over-stimulating or slop diet, which affects
the nursing-woman as a " driving" diet does
our dairy cows, causing a large yield of un-
naturally constituted, though perhaps "rich"
milk. In order to show the wide contrast
between the universal cramming and a truly
wholesome diet, I will cite the case of my
own infant, now a " stout, strapping boy "
of twelve months, who is one of a number
known to me as having enjoyed a really fair
chance for proving their fitness to survive.
His allowance at this time is a coffee-cup-
ful, or about eighteen tablespoonfuls, at
each meal. It is usual for infants to swal-
low as much, often more than, three such
cupful s, every day, at the age of three or
four months, except when nausea or lack of
appetite prevents. They are either " con-
stantly" fed, or at least have a meal every two
or three hours. This is the practice with the
" million," by which I presume Dr. Oswald
meant all " civilized " infants, including Dr.
Black's, if he has been blessed with such
" troublesome comforts," as they are univer-
sally called — a term, by - the - way, in itself
very significant in this connection ; for, again
referring to the few infants who have been
exceptinoally fed, " breathed," clad, and
exercised, i. e. — 1. Fed in the manner I have
described as constituting a physiological
diet ; 2. Given the breath of life, viz., out-
door air twenty-four hours a day, whether
the babe is in-doors or out ; 3. Saved from
sweltering clothing — allowing the skin to
" breathe " ; 4. nationally " neglected," or,
in other words, instead of being constantly
held, tended, or wheeled, early allowed the
opportunity, on the floor or lawn, of rolling,
tumbling, stretching out, and learning to
creep at an early age, thus earning a good
digestion, and avoiding one of the principal
causes of infantile dyspepsia, by being, like
kittens, puppies, and young monkeys, large-
ly " self-supporting," and like them develop-
ing naturally in all parts of the frame — by
these means, I would say, it has been shown
to be entirely practicable to insure for the
" infant race " a condition as comfortable,

EDITOR'S TABLE.

117

happy, and thrifty, as that enjoyed by the
most fortunate of the nurslings of our do-
mestic animals or household pets.

If in order, I would also venture to cite
a case of gastric cramps similar to that
mentioned by Dr. Black, but more " natural-
iy " cured. I was called one day during the
past summer to the bedside of an old lady
friend, who is sixty-six years of age, and
very frail. She was suffering intensely
from acute dyspepsia. " Well, doctor," she
moaned, between the spasms, "you — will
have — to — give — me — some — medicinethis-
time ! " " Very good," I replied, " here it
is." (Having obtained a hint from the
nurse as to the state of affairs, I had or-
dered up a pitcher each of hot and cold
water.) " Just drink this cupful of warm
water. Take it right down, please, as if it
were a delicious draught, and you were feel-
ing very thirsty." This she did, and then
another and another, and so on until she

had, within twenty minutes, taken eight full
cups. Then I asked her to make a slight
exploration to see if she could touch that
warm water with her forefinger ! She made
the attempt and succeeded — the water meet-
ing her more than half-way. Along with
the water came the cause of the cramps, in
the shape of undigested food. Directly
after this she swallowed, though under pro-
test, seven cupfuls more of the same safe
remedy, which had just the effect I antici-
pated. She soon became entirely at ease,
rested quietly for the balance of the after-
noon, slept soundly that night, and awoke
next morning to laugh over the experience
of the day before. There was no poison
taken to tax the organism. The water did
its perfect work — washing the stomach, di-
luting the blood, and aiding in the elimina-
tion of impurities, instead of adding to them
in the least degree. C. E. Page.

New Yoke, September 17, 1S83.

EDITOR'S TABLE.

TEE CURRENT STUDY OF CLASSICS A
FAILURE.

PRESIDENT PORTER has replied
to Mr. Adams on the Greek ques-
tion. The President of Yale College,
we need not say, is a very strong man
— an eminent scholar, an experienced
educator, a keen controversialist, and
thoroughly familiar with this subject;
and so in the "Princeton Review"
for September, in the opening article,
entitled "A College Fetich," lie has
given what must be virtually accepted
as the official answer to Mr. Adams's
argument. Assuming, then, that Presi-
dent Porter has made out the best. case
possible, let us see whether Mr. Adams's
main position has been successfully as-
sailed or remains undisturbed.

It will be remembered that in his
Phi Beta Kappa address Mr. Adams
arraigned the system of classical study
in Harvard College, and more emphat-
ically that of Greek, as a failure ; and he
appealed to his owrn experience, and to
that of three generations of his ances-
tors, in proof of the charge. He alleged
that the time spent upon classical lan-
guages was wasted, first, because he did

not master them, and, second, because
the time spent upon them ought to
have been given to more valuable ac-
quisitions in preparation for the duties
and responsibilities of modern life.

President Porter takes issue with
Mr. Adams on the main points of his
argument. He holds to " the perfec-
tion of the Greek language as an instru-
ment for the perpetual training of the
mind of the later generations " ; and
maintains that " the ancient languages,
in their structure, their thoughts, also
in the imagery which their literature
embodies, are better fitted than any
modern languages can be for the single
office of training the intellect, and the
feelings, and the taste ; and in every
one of these advantages the Greek is
pre-eminently superior to the Latin."
As a consequence, he maintains that
"the old classical training" is the best
preparation for the intellectual work of
modern life, the best corrective of its
injurious influences, and therefore not
an educational failure.

But Mr. Adams had condemned the
svstem after trial of it. He had dili-
gently pursued the classics as prescribed

n8

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

and taught in the preparatory schools
and at Harvard College, and found that
they had yielded to him none of the
great and salutary results that are
claimed for them. President Porter
replies that we are not bound to accept
the cause assigned for the alleged fail-
ure. He savs : " Mr. Adams seems to
forget that at least three solutions may
be given for the apparent failure of his
own college life, of ^ hich he has recog-
nized but one: 1. The failure was only
apparent, but not real, or not to the
extent which he imagines. He de-
rived more advantage than he is now
aware of, even from the Greek. ... 2.
The curriculum may have been wisely
selected, and the teaching may have
been imperfect. ... 3. The student may
neglect and render futile the most
wisely-selected curriculum, even when
enforced by the most skillful and zeal-
ous teaching."

It is upon the first of these consid-
erations that President Porter lays the
greatest stress in his article. He does
not urge the other alternatives — either
that the Harvard teaching was bad, or
that Mr. Adams was idle or negligent,
but he argues that Mr. Adams is mis-
taken in his assertion that he derived
no important benefits from his classical
studies. He says: "In judging of the
effects of a course of studies, the sharp
distinction should be made between the
impressions which are actually received,
and the reflective recognition of these
impressions by the recipient and his own
consequent estimate of them." And
again : " It is certainly no new thing for
children, even those of an older growth,
to fail to appreciate the value of the
training to which they owe all their
success in life, and to esteem those
features of it the least to which they
owe the most."

We have here the old stock defense
of the classical superstition. It is not a
failure, because it exerts certain won-
derful and mysterious influences of
which the student may not be aware,

but which are abundantly vindicated
by time. That is, the student is not
the proper judge of the effects upon his
own mind of the leading studies to
which he gives the best years of his
life. But it is proper to ask, If those
who have had experience of it " fail to
appreciate the value of the training to
which they owe all their success in
life," who else has authority to speak
in the matter? The argument cuts
both ways. If Mr. Adams did not
know when he declared that the study
of Greek had in his case proved a fail-
ure, does President Porter know when
he denies it ? If the evidence of expe-
rience is not to be trusted, what evi-
dence is to be taken ? The case looks
like one of dogmatic assumption against
positive self-knowledge. If a college
graduate, after long trial of his educa-
tion in the arena of practical life, is
incompetent to decide upon its adapta-
bility and adequacy to his needs, then
there are no valid grounds of judgment
in the matter. But the idea is an out-
rage upon common sense, and we might
be well surprised that it should be put
forth by a distinguished college presi-
dent if we did not know to what ridic-
ulous shifts the classicists are driven in
defense of their anomalous traditions.
Sydney Smith long ago declared, in re-
lation to the classical superstition, that
it has been the practice of the universi-
ties "to take credit for all the mind
they did not succeed in extinguishing."
The practice lives on in the equally
preposterous assumption that all the
success a university man achieves in
life is due to the Greek and Latin he
learned or did not learn — whether he
knows it or not. That this nonsensical
notion should be so all-prevalent, and
still so influential with multitudes, only
shows how completely even our high-
er education is still in the fetichistic
stage.

What President Porter had before
him to do was to break the force of
Mr. Adams's testimony that his clas-

EDITOR'S TABLE.

119

sical education had proved a failure.
He first tried to discredit him as not
knowing the difference between failure
and success, intimating that Mr. Adams
has been after all a very successful man ;
that he studied Greek ; therefore, by a
well-known classical formula, his suc-
cess was due to his Greek. But Presi-
dent Porter is not entirely satisfied with
the sufficiency of this logic, and so he
proceeds to strengthen his case by re-
sorting to counter-testimony. Sudden-
ly converted to the faith that the evi-
dence of men of experience is worth
something — at least when it comes on
his side — he cites repeated cases of
men who, in opposition to Mr. Adams,
set a high value on their classical edu-
cation. The question, then, is, to what
extent is Mr. Adams's view substanti-
ated by the testimony of others, and
of those who must be regarded as the
highest authorities ? Let us rule out the
enemies of the classics — those ignorant
of them or prejudiced against them —
and appeal to men whose sympathies
and predilections are on the other side,
but who have had large opportunities
of observing the results of classical
study — eminent educators, college pres-
idents, experienced teachers, and pro-
fessors of Latin and Greek, and those
who have systematically and under re-
sponsibility inquired into the general
working of this kind of education.

A conspicuous example of such testi-
mony is obtained without going very far.
The eminent President of Columbia Col-
lege, Dr. F. A. P. Barnard, is a man of
enlarged experience in the field of colle-
giate education, and he has anticipated
Mr. Adams in the emphatic reproba-
tion of dead-language studies, on the
ground of their incontestable failure.
In an address before the University Con-
vocation a few years ago President Bar-
hard said: "What are in fact the re-
sults which we do actually reach in the
teaching of the classics at this time?
Are they in truth anything like what
we claim for them? "We hear, for in-

stance, a great deal said of the intel-
lectual treasures locked up in the lan-
guages of Greece and Rome, which it
is asserted that our system of educa-
tion throws open to the student freely
to enjoy. And yet we know that prac
tically this claim is without foundation.
It will not, I presume, be affirmed of
the graduates of American colleges gen-
erally that they become familiar with
any portions of the literature of Rome
and Greece which do not form part of
their compulsory reading. It wjjl hard-
ly be affirmed that one in ten of them
does so. And why not? The reason
is twofold: First, there is hardly one
in ten in whose mind the classics ever
cease to be associated with notions of
painful labor. Reading is not therefore
pursued beyond the limit of what is re-
quired, because it is not agreeable. But,
secondly and chiefly, there is hardly one
in ten whose knowledge of the Latin
or the Greek is ever sufficiently famil-
iar to give him the command of the
ancient literature which it is asserted
for him that he enjoys. I suppose that,
to read with any satisfaction any work
in any language, we should be able to
give our attention to the ideas that it
conveys, without being embarrassed or
confused by want of familiarity with
the machinery by which they are im-
parted. It will not be for mere pleas-
ure that we shall pursue our task, if
every sentence brings us a new neces-
sity to turn over our lexicons, or to rea-
son out a probable meaning by the ap-
plication of the laws of syntax. And
yet, if there be any of our graduates
who are able, without such embarrass-
ments, to read a classical author, never
attempted before, the number must be
very few. If there are any who can
read even such books of Latin and
Greek as they have read before, with
anything like the fluency with which
they read their mother-tongue, the
number can not be large ; and if there
are any who can read, with similar fa-
cility, classic works which they take up

120

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

for the first time, it is so small that I
have never seen one. . . .

" Can a person be said to know a
language which he can not read? And
is it a result worth the time and labor
expended upon it to attain such a
doubtful acquaintance with a language
or anytlnng else, as that which the
majority of our graduates carry away
with them of these, at the close of
their educational career? Might not
the same amount of time and labor dif-
ferently employed have produced at
last something having a value at least
appreciable? And is not the immense
disproportion between labor expended
and results obtained itself the best evi-
dence that this labor has not been ex-
pended most wisely for the accomplish-
ment of its own avowed end? For
surely there can not be any language,
dead or living, in the known world,
which any intelligent person ought not
to be able to acquire, so as at least to
read it, in a course of ten years' study."

But it may be said that the Ameri-
can standard of classical attainment is
low, and that we must go where the
system has been more faithfully tried,
for the highest evidence of its advan-
tages. Very well, and it happens that
this evidence is abundant. Classical
studies have been tested upon the most
extensive scale, and under all the most
favorable conditions. For hundreds of
years they have been the staple ele-
ments of English culture. The English
universities and the great public schools
of England form a consolidated system
devoted for centuries almost exclusively
to classical teaching. The system has
had the authority of tradition, it has
been backed by abounding wealth, it
has had the patronage of church and
state, and has been cherished by insti-
tutions of every grade, which have been
independent of all disturbance from
the caprice of public opinion. If "the
perfection of the Greek language," as
President Porter assumes, fits it as " an
instrument for the perpetual training

of the mind of the later generations,"
then the circumstances of English edu-
cation have been most favorable for
proving it. But what is the result? A
thousand authorities may be summed
up in the following sentence of a letter
from Professor Blackie, of Edinburgh,
to the late Dr. Hodgson. He says, " I
entirely agree with you that the present
system of classical education, as a gen-
eral method of training English gentle-
men, is a superstition, a blunder, and a
failure." The evidence is overwhelm-
ing that the great mass of students, in
the best English institutions, so far from
gaining access to the sphere of clas-
sical thought, do not even get a decent
knowledge of the bare forms of the
dead languages themselves. To such
an extent had classical study become
itself an utter failure, and to such an
extent did it stand in the way of all
other studies, that it came to be widely
denounced as a scandal to the nation,
and the Government was called upon
to interfere and put an end to it. They
are very cautious in England about
meddling with old and venerated things
by the intervention of law, but they
have a salutary habit of inquiring into
them with great thoroughness upon
suitable occasions. Parliamentary com-
missions were therefore appointed to
investigate the condition of education,
both in the universities and in the
great public schools which prepare
young men for the universities. The
reports that resulted were monuments
alike of searching inquiry and the to-
tal failure of the cherished classical
education. The London " Times " thus
summed up the report of the commis-
sioners upon the teaching of the pub-
lic schools : " In one word, we may
say that they find it to be a failure — a
failure, even if tested by those better
specimens, not exceeding one third of
the whole, who go up to the universi-
ties. Though a very large number of
these have literally nothing to show
for the results of their school-hours,

EDITOR'S TABLE.

121

from childhood to manhood, but a
knowledge of Latin and Greek, with a
little English and arithmetic, we have
here the strongest testimony that their
knowledge of the former is most inac-
curate, and their knowledge of the lat-
ter contemptible."

And now let us observe how this
thorough-going system is characterized
by one who has had the best possible
opportunities for observing and know-
ing its results. In a lecture delivered
before the Eoyal Institution of Great
Britain, by the Eev. F. W. Farrar, a
distinguished author and philologist,
and who was one of the masters of
HaiTOw School, and for thirteen years
a classical teacher, we have the follow-
ing estimate of the present value of the
system. Canon Farrar says : " I must,
then, avow my own deliberate opinion,
arrived at in the teeth of the strongest
possible bias and prejudice in the op-
posite direction — arrived at with the
fullest possible knowledge of every sin-
gle argument which may be urged on
the other side — I must avow my dis-
tinct conviction that our present sys-
tem of exclusively classical education,
as a whole, and carried out as we do
carry it out, is a deplorable failure. I
say it, knowing that the words are
strong words, but not without having
considered them well ; and I say it be-
cause that system has been ' weighed
in the balance and found wanting.' It
is no epigram, but a simple fact, to say
that classical education neglects all the
powers of some minds, and some of the
powers of all minds. In the case of
the few it has a value which, being
partial, is unsatisfactory ; in the case of
the vast multitude it ends in utter and
irremediable waste."

In speaking of the defects in teach-
ing the dead languages, President Por-
ter refers to the superiority in some
points of English over American meth-
ods. He says : " The culture and ele-
vation which might come were the
power of rapid and facile reading cul-

tivated, and the use of it, or the ex-
pression of thought and feeling appre-
ciated, fail in great measure to be at-
tained. These mistakes and failures
are probably more conspicuous in the
American colleges than in those of
England or Germany, for the reason
that in England composition in prose
and verse compels to a certain mastery
of the vocabulary, and a sense of the
use of words which mere grammatical
analysis can never impart."

Certainly, if anywhere, we should
expect to find in these critical construc-
tive exercises in " composition in prose
and verse," which President Porter
recognizes as a special excellence of the
English teaching, the most successful ex-
emplification of the benefits of classical
culture. But Canon Farrar refers to
this very practice in the following scath-
ing terms as the worst failure of the sys-
tem : " To myself, trained in the system
for years, and training others in it for
years — being one of those who succeed-
ed in it, if that amount of progress which
has been thought worthy of high clas-
sical honors in two universities may
be called success — influenced, therefore,
by every conceivable prejudice of au-
thority, experience, and personal van-
ity in its favor, I can only give my
emphatic conclusion that every year
the practice of it appears to me increas-
ingly deplorable, and the theory of it
every year increasingly absurd."

After giving some examples, this dis-
gusted but but unusually candid clas-
sical teacher thus proceeds : " This
is the sort of ' kelp and brick-dust '
used to polish the cogs of their mental
machinery ! And when, for a good dec-
ade of human life, and those its most
invaluable years, a boy has stumbled on
this dreadful mill-round, without pro-
gressing a single step, and is plucked
at his matriculation for Latin prose, we
flatter ourselves, forsooth, that we have
been giving him the best means for
learning Latin quotations, for improving
taste (or what passes for such), for ac-

122

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

quiring the niceties of Greek and Latin
scholarship! We resent the nickname
of the ' Chinese of Europe,' yet our
education offers the closest possible
analogue to that which reigns in the
Celestial Empire, and for centuries we
have continued, and are continuing, a
system to which (so far as I know) no
other civilized nation attaches any im-
portance, yet which leaves us to bor-
row our scholarship second-hand from
them; which is now necessary for
the very highest classical honors at
the University of Cambridge alone ; in
which only one has a partial glimmer-
ing of success, for hundreds and hun-
dreds who inevitably fail ; and in which
the few exceptional successes are so
flagrantly useless that they can only be
regarded at the best as a somewhat
trivial and fantastic accomplishment —
an accomplishment so singularly bar-
ren of all results that it has scarcely
produced a dozen original poems on
which the world sets the most trifling
value ; while we waste years in thus
perniciously fostering idle verbal imita-
tions, and in neglecting the rich fruit of
ancient learning for its bitter, useless,
and unwholesome husk — while we thus
dwarf many a vigorous intellect, and
disgust many a manly mind — while a
great university, neglecting in large
measure the literature and the philoso-
phy of two leading nations, contents it-
self with being, in the words of one of
its greatest sons, 'a bestower of re-
wards for school-boy merit ' — while
thousands of despairing boys thus waste
their precious hours in * contracting
their own views and deadening their
own sensibilities ' by a failure in the
acquisition of the useless — while we
apply this inconceivably irrational pro-
cess to Greek and Latin, and to no other
language ever yet taught under the sun
— while we thus accumulate instruction
without education, and feel no shame
or compunction if at the end of many
years we thrust our youth, in all their
unwarned ignorance, through the open

gate of life — while, I say, such a system
as this continues and flourishes, which
most practical men have long scorned
with an immeasurable contempt, do not
let us consider that we have advanced
a single step in reforming education, to
reform which, in the words of Leib-
nitz, is to reform society and to reform
mankind."

This is sufficiently explicit and em-
phatic as to the worth of current clas-
sical study, but the ever-ready objec-
tion is, that all this condemnation is
only true of the bad methods by which
the dead languages are taught, and
that, if they were taught as they should
be and can be, there would be no basis
for the charge of failure. But Mr. Ad-
ams's arraignment was of the existing
practice, and he did not deny that
there may possibly be a better practice
in which classical studies shall be suc-
cessful. President Porter does not
hesitate to fall back upon the bad
methods of teaching as giving some ex-
cuse for the charge of failure. "We
suspect, however, that a good deal
more is made of this bad-method pre-
text than it will bear, and that the
study of dead languages as a leading
element of higher education in this age
must remain a failure, whatever the
perfection of the methods employed in
their acquisition. Indeed, it becomes
a serious question whether, broadly
considered, perfected methods would
not lead to worse failure than the ex-
isting practice. But we must postpone
this aspect of the discussion to another
time.

LITERARY NOTICES.

French and German Socialism in Modern
Times. By Richard T. Ely, Ph. D.
New York : Harper & Brothers. Pp.
262. Price, 15 cents.

Professor Ely has here presented in

small compass and attractive form a large

amount of information about the notable

socialistic and communistic schemes that

have been brought forward in the two coun-

LITERARY NOTICES,

123

tries where most of such projects have origi-
nated. The distinction between socialism
and communism he states as follows : " The
central idea of communism is economic
equality. It is desired by communists that
all ranks and differences in society should
disappear, and one man be as good as an-
other, to use the popular phrase. The dis-
tinctive idea of socialism is distributive
justice. It goes back of the processes of
modern life to the fact that he who does
not work lives on the labor of others. It
aims to distribute economic goods according
to the services rendered by the recipients."
The earliest leader to receive attention is
Baboeuf, whose career began about a hun-
dred years ago. He and Cabet, who was
born twenty-four years later, are described
by the author as " the two leading French
representatives of pure communism." Ba-
boeuf s plan for the reorganization of so-
ciety was adapted to produce a cheerless
monotony, but that of Cabet is more attract-
ive. Under that of the latter, goods and
labor are common property ; executives are
chosen by ballot ; marriage and family are
held sacred. Young persons may choose
their own career, but overcrowding of any
profession is to be prevented by competi-
tive examination. Science and literature are
encouraged. Professor Ely describes the
system of Count Henry de Saint-Simon as
the first example of pure socialism. Saint-
Simonism regards the dead level of com-
munism as even more unjust than the pres-
ent state of things, and aims to proportion
each man's share of benefits to the service
he renders the world. Religion should be
reformed, not abolished, and all men should
regard each other as brothers. All privi-
leges of birth, including inheritance, were
to be abolished. We find Saint-Simon and
Fourier thus compared : " Each was re-
quired as a complement of the other. The
one started in his career as a man of wealth
and social eminence, the other as a man
of the people. The one observed society,
studied its history, its development, and
sought to find therein a clew to guide him
in his work of regenerating the world, mor-
ally and economically ; the other, regarding
the past as such a series of blunders as to
afford no proper basis for future formations,
searched the depths of his own conscious-

ness, and discovered a law which furnished
premises enabling him to construct deduc-
tively an ideal and perfect society, and to
explain with mathematical accuracy the
past, present, and future." Recognizing
the absurdity of a large part of Fourier's
writings, our author maintains that this is
no reason for condemning the social scheme
which he originated. Chapters are devoted
to Louis Blanc, Proudhon, and to " Social-
ism in France since Proudhon."

German socialism is distinguished by its
profundity. " One of its leading charac-
teristics," says our author, "is its thorough-
ly scientific spirit. Sentimentalism is ban-
ished, and a foundation sought in hard, relent-
less laws, resulting necessarily from the phys-
iological, psychological, and social constitu-
tion of man and his physical environment."
Rodbertus, one of the earliest and ablest of
German socialists, selects as the two chief
economic evils, which cause most of the oth-
ers, pauperism and financial crises. These
could only be abolished by securing to labor-
ers " a share in the national product, which
increases pari passu with increasing produc-
tion." A clear account is given of social
democracy, and of the views of Karl Marx
and Lassalle, the most prominent members
of the party. A short chapter is devoted to
the professorial socialists, among whom Bis-
marck is numbered ; and, lastly, the views of
the Christian socialists are presented.

The spirit in which Professor Ely deals
with his subject is most commendable. His
book is entirely free from the partisan views
and the epithets that we find in the writings
of so many of those who view socialism from
the outside. It will do a great deal to cor-
rect the ignorant notion that socialists are a
set of vagabonds who are anxious to divide
with any one who has more than they, and
to distinguish the views that some socialists
hold on other subjects from socialism itself.

The Vertebrates of the Adirondack Re-
gion. By Clinton Hart Merriam, M. D.
From the Transactions of the Linnaean
Society of New York for 1882. Press
of L. S. Foster, New York.
The Adirondack Mountains have a more
than local reputation as the happy hunting-
ground of those who find in " roughing it "
the panacea for most earthly ills. We
have read much of the thrilling times when

124

THE POPULAR SCIEXCE MOXTHLY.

painted savages made their echoes ring with I
wicked cries, and are familiar with the
pleasured that peace and later days give
to the lover of deep woods. Now Dr. Mer-
riam has taken up the natural history of
the wilderness, and is the first to give us
the characteristics which distinguish this
tract, as a whole, from the surrounding
country, and to present with scientific ac-
curacy the peculiarities of its fauna and
flora.

The first chapter treats of the location
and boundaries of the Adirondacks, geo-
logical history, topography, climate, general
features, botany, and faunal position, and
contains much that is of general interest.

" From a geological

The author says
.nd-point, the Adirondacks are interesting
as constituting one of the few islands that
rose above the level of the mighty conti-
nental sea previous to Paleozoic time. . Its
stern Archasan shores were washed by the
waves of countless ages before the under-
most strata of the lower Silurian were de-
posited upon them, entombing and preserv-
ing many of the trilobites, brachiopods, and
other curious inhabitants of that vast ocean.
This lower Silurian zone marked the shore-
line, so to speak, of the ancient island, and
consists of Potsdam sandstone and the lime-
rocks of the Trenton period. Though broken
and interrupted, enough of it still remains
to afford us tantalizing glimpses of the life
of the time, torn pages of fragmentary chap-
ters that constitute but a half-told story to
excite our imagination and regret."

As to the forms of the mountains, they
are in no sense a chain, but consist of more
or less irregular groups, isolated peaks, and
short ranges, having no regular trend, con-
forming to no definite axis, and sloping in
all possible directions.

The entire region is studded with hun-
dreds of beautiful lakes of various sizes and
depths, two of them upward of four thou-
sand feet above tide-level. Under the head
of " Climate " the writer speaks at some
length of the meteorology of the region,
and states that the mean annual rainfall
exceeds that of most portions of the State
by about five inches. After dwelling upon
the causes which serve to lower the temper-
ature, increase the humidity, and promote
great luxuriance of vegetation, he recounts

the singular fact that many characteristic
marsh-plants grow upon the highest sum-
mits, as the conditions previously described
tend to produce upon them the effect of
marshes. On the very top of Mount Marcy
a number of these swamp-plants have been
found ; a matter of especial interest, as
there are no trees to protect them, from the
sun, and they grow on the open summit
nearly five thousand feet above tide-level.

In " Botany ' he enumerates thirty-two
species of forest-trees, fifty-seven of under-
shrubs, and one hundred and seventy-eight
of the most noticeable flowering-plants. As
to the " Faunal Position," he is of the opin-
ion that the temperature alone would show
that the district belongs to the Canadian
fauna, and a number of the resident birds
and mammals are cited in support of this
view.

The other five chapters are given to Mam-
malia, Aves, Reptilia, Batrachia, and Pisces,
respectively. Of the " Mammalia " forty-two
species are enumerated, but the first part
ends with the consideration of the carnivora,
and constitutes a most important original
contribution to the literature of North
American mammals. We have grown ac-
customed to the modern iconoclast haunting
all paths of learning, and now it is Dr. Mer-
riam who robs us of our time-honored pan-
ther, the bloodthirsty monster of the deep
woods. Not that he takes him entirely
away, but he only lets him do some fearful
leaping to satisfy our old ideal. He says
the panther is an arrant coward ; that he
is not fierce unless he is wounded, and cor-
nered at that ; he does not climb trees ex-
cept at the point of the bayonet, as it were,
and he does not scream screams that curdle
the blood ; at least, it is the testimony of
the most reliable hunters that he rarely
makes any noise at all. But he does eat
porcupines until his mouth bristles with
quills, and he does catch deer, even if he
has to make quite a jump to do it.

Lack of space obliges us to refer the
reader to the book itself for a further
knowledge of its contents, which will abun-
dantly repay perusal, and will confirm what
indeed is apparent throughout the work, that
the author is thoroughly acquainted with his
subject, and writes about it in a style which
is at once entertaining and instructive.

LITERARY XOTICES.

125

Van Nostrand's Science Series, No. 66,
Dynamo-Electric Machinery. A series
of Lectures by Sylyanus P. Thompson,
Professor of Experimental Physics in
University College, Bristol. New York :
D. Van Nostrand. Pp. 218. Price, 50
cents.

This latest addition to the Science Series
deals with a variety of machine "which has
so rapidly attained prominence that few
persons have yet been able to gain an ade-
quate idea of its forms or principles. In
the first of these lectures, on " The Dynamo
in Theory," Professor Thompson proposed a
division of dynamos into three classes, ac-
cording to the movement of their armatures
in the field of electrical force. He then
took up the conditions on which the amount
of force generated depends, and showed how
far the fulfillment of each is compatible with
fulfillment of the others. In respect to the
condition of size, he calculates that, if the
size of a machine is increased n times in
linear dimensions, the efficiency will be in-
creased n5 times. Under " The Dynamo in
Practice " he has described the arrangement
of the several elements as they appear in
the machines of a large number of promi-
nent electricians. The third lecture sets
forth the principles on which is based the
employment of the dynamo in converting
the energy of electric currents into the en-
ergy of mechanical motion, and contains a
demonstration of the mathematical law of
efficiency of the dynamo as a motor. The
volume is well supplied with illustrations.

Local Government in Illinois. By Albert
Shaw, A. B. ; and Local Government
in Pennsylvania. By E. R. L. Gould,
A. B. Pp. 37. Price, 30 cents. Local
Government in Michigan and the
Northwest. By Edward TV Bemis,
A. B. Pp. 25. Price, 25 cents. Balti-
more : Johns Hopkins University.

These pamphlets belong to the series of
" Johns Hopkins University Studies in His-
torical and Political Science," and speak
well for the practical value of the plan on
which the studies are based. The paper on
Illinois shows how the southern counties of
that State, being settled from the South,
were organized on the Virginia plan, in
which the county is the chief factor and
the township is insignificant; while the
northern counties, settled later from New

England, were organized on the New Ens-
land plan, with the township as the princi-
pal factor. The two systems have met and
struggled for the mastery; the New Eng-
land plan is prevailing, and now only about
one fifth of the one hundred and two coun-
ties in the State cling to the old county sys-
tem. The history of the development of the
Pennsylvania system is more complicated.
As it stands, it occupies the middle ground
between the New England township and the
Southern county systems, and aims at a par-
tition of power, for the terms of which we
must refer to the pamphlet. The organiza-
tion in Michigan is a transplantation of the
New England system, with unimportant dif-
ferences. In Mr. Bemis's paper, the Michi-
gan system is compared with that of each of
the older Eastern States and with the sys-
tems which have been or are being adopted
in the other States of the "West and North-
west, including the newer Territories ; and
the gradual introduction and growth of the
township system in the Southern States is
noticed.

The Sciences among the Jews before and
during the Middle Ages. By M. J.
Schleiden, Ph. D. Baltimore : D. Bin-
swanger & Co. Pp. 64.

Four editions of this essay have been
published in Germany, but this is the first
time it has been given in an English dress.
It presents, in a rapid view, the record of
what the Jews achieved for the advancement
of mankind during the period indicated in
the title, by their labors in literature, phi-
losophy, science, and art. Their schools in
Europe were, it is claimed, among the best
of the period, and were attended even by
the Christian clergy, because they furnished
almost the only means of mental culture.
Having no doctrinal theology, they were
able to pursue every branch of study un-
trammeled, and their literature is rich in
the fruits cf their many-sided work, partic-
ularly in philosophy, ethics, mathematics,
astronomy, and hygiene. Down to the thir-
teenth century, they " far surpassed their
Christian contemporaries, as well in point
of intellect as in all the sciences having an
important bearing on fife." They contrib-
uted much to the revival of learninET in the
West, for they understood the languages in

126

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

which the ancient learning was embraced,
and, " had it not been for the efforts of Jew-
ish translators, it is quite likely that the
darkness of the middle ages would have
enveloped us a good while longer." They
were also active in the arts and trades, and
carried on commerce. These statements
are not bare assertions, but are sustained
by abundant citations and references to au-
thorities, which really constitute the bulk of
the volume.

Lake Agassiz : A Chapter in Glacial Ge-
ology. By Warren Upham. Winona,
Minn. : Jones & Kroeger, Printers. Pp.
24.

Lake Agassiz is the name given to a
body of water which is supposed to have
been formed in the basin of the Red River
of the North and of Lake Winnipeg, during
the final melting and recession of the ice-
sheet. Measured by the shore-line it was
1*75 miles, in a direct line 142 miles, from
north to south. At its greatest height its
outlet was about 1,055 feet above the sea,
and was then through the valley of the
Minnesota River, the flow to the north
which the rivers of the valley now take hav-
ing been restrained at that time by the
thickness of the continental ice-sheet. The
elucidating of these hypotheses is accom-
panied by a study in detail of the geological
features of the district supposed to have
been occupied by the lake.

The Iroquois Book of Rites. Edited by
Horatio Hale, M. A. Philadelphia : D.
G. Brinton. Pp. 222. Price, $3.

This is the second volume of the "Library
of Aboriginal American Literature" of which
Dr. Brinton has undertaken the publication.
The book itself is an aboriginal composition,
partly in the Mohawk and partly in the
Onondaga languages, and comprises the
speeches, songs, and other ceremonies which
composed the proceedings of the council
when a deceased chief was lamented and
his successor was installed in office. The
ritual, which had been preserved by tradi-
tion for a period of unknown duration, was
reduced to writing at about the middle of
the last century, when many of the mem-
bers of the tribes having learned to write
in the orthography devised by the mission-
aries, the chiefs of the great council directed

its composition in that form for permanent
preservation. Copies of one part of the
work were obtained by Mr. Hale from John
Smoke Johnson, Speaker of the Great Coun-
cil, and a descendant of Sir William John-
son, and Chief John Buck, Record Keeper ;
and of the other part, from the interpreter
Daniel La Fort, of Onondaga Castle. Be-
sides the ritual-books in their originals and
English translations, with glossaries and
notes, the volume contains a history of the
Iroquois nation and league, an exposition of
its policy, an account of the origin and com-
position of the books, a review of the his-
torical traditions of the nation, and an
analysis of the Iroquois language. The
book is one of great ethnological value, in
the light it casts on the political and social
life, as well as the character and capacity,
of the people with whom it originated.

a rpT

The noMosoPATHic Leader.'' Edited by
Walter Williams Cowl, M. D., and As-
sociates. Monthly: July, 1883. Pp.
78. Price, per year, $4.

This is the first number of a new maga-
zine, the intended character of which is in-
dicated bv its name. It contains, besides a
poetical salutatory, nine contributed articles
on subjects of disease and treatment, edi.
torial articles, notes, and proceedings of
homoeopathic societies. The editor reports
upon a kind of election he has taken among
the practitioners called homoeopathic, for
the purpose of determining to what extent
they adhere to the original principles of the
school, in which they have been accused of
indulging a growing laxity. So far as the
" returns " have come in, the majority still
appear to " continue to believe in infinitesi-
mals and dynamization, they still believe in
the law of similars, and continue to honor
the man who declared the fact and proved
its truth."

A Practical Arithmetic. By G. A. Went-
worth, A. M., and Rev. Thomas Hill,
D. D., LL. D. Boston : Ginn, Heath &
Co. Pp. 351. Price, $1.10.

TnERE is much that is new in this book

as compared with the arithmetics of ten years

ago, notably in the arrangement. After five

pages on " Numbers," " Decimal Fractions "

are at once introduced, and are explained by

means of the divisions of United States

LITERARY NOTICES.

127

money, no separate chapter being given to
this latter topic. Then follow the Four
Rules, and after them " Metric Measures."
The next chapter is on " Common Frac-
tions," and " Measures in Common Use "
come next, after the pupils have learned
the metric system, an arrangement which
can not fail to impress upon the young that
the English measures are as absurdly infe-
rior to the decimal system as British money
is more inconvenient than American. The
examples are not of the old-fashioned im-
aginary kind, but " are intended to convey,
incidentally, a great deal of accurate and
valuable information ; so that, by means of
the index, the book becomes a book of ref-
erence for many physical and mathematical
constants."

The Yellowstone National Park. A
Manual for Tourists. By Henry J. "Win-
ser. New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons.
Pp. 96. Illustrated, with Maps. Price,
40 cents.

A convenient and acceptable description
of the great national Yellowstone reserva-
tion, with its mammoth hot springs, the
great geyser basins, the cataracts, the ca-
nons, and other features of this land of won-
ders. The park is about 2,500 miles from
New York by way of the Northern, and
3,000 miles by the Union Pacific Railroad.
The Northern Pacific road carries, or will
shortly carry, passengers directly to the
park by its Yellowstone Park branch, while
the Union Pacific will deliver them by 110
miles of staging from Beaver Canon. The
fare to the park and back is from $155 to
$165.

How can we escape Insanitt ? By Charles
W. Page, M. D. Hartford, Conn. : Case,
Lockwood & Co. Pp. 22.

The author believes that hereditary
bias must be taken account of, " although
it has become too popular as an excuse for
results which, through ignorance or design,
are often obscure," but that insanity is large-
ly promoted by intemperance, overwork,
over-study, and many over-stimulating influ-
ences of American life. The escape from
it must be prepared for by proper mar-
riages, the cultivation of temperance in all
things, and by counteracting the deteriorat-
ing influences that affect us.

Chemistry, Inorganic and Organic With
Experiments. By Charles Loudon
Bloxam, Professor of Chemistry in
King's College, London. Fifth edition.
Philadelphia: P. Blakiston, Son & Co.
Pp. 640. Price, $4.

Bloxam's "Chemistry" is a compre-
hensive text-book, intended " to give a clear
and simple description of the elements and
their principal compounds, and of the chemi-
cal principles involved in some of the most
important branches of manufacture." The
book is adapted to beginners, and the more
special parts, that the general student
would wish to omit, are put in small type.
The promise in regard to technological sub-
jects is well kept in treating of the extrac-
tion of the several useful metals, of glass,
pottery, building materials, explosives, fuel,
organic dyes, sugars, animal chemistry, etc.
The volume contains a large number of cuts
illustrative of the experiments introduced,
and of the commercial processes described,
and its table of contents is made very full,
so as to afford the student a means of self-
examination. This new edition "has been
carefully revised, and some alterations have
been made in the theoretical portion, to bring
it into harmony with modern views." The
volume is about equally divided between or-
ganic and inorganic chemistry.

Manual of Taxidermy. A Complete Guide
in collecting and preserving Birds and
Mammals. By C. J. Maynard. Illus-
trated. Boston: S. E. Cassino & Co.
Pp. 101. Price, $1.25.
This little book consists of directions
for collecting, skinning, and mounting birds
and mammals, so that they may be not only
ornamental objects, but also useful for the
study of natural history. The last chapter
is on " Mounting Reptiles, Batrachians, and
Fishes."

Revista de Agricultura (Review of Ag-
riculture), Nicomedes P. De Adan, Di-
rector. August, 1883. Havana: La Pro-
paganda Literaria. Pp. 32.
The " Review " is the monthly organ of
a circle of land-owners of Cuba, and aims at
the development and improvement of the
agricultural resources of the island. The
contents relate predominantly to the culti-
vation of sugar-cane and the manufacture
of sugar. An article is also published on
the cultivation of the eucalyptus.

128

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Brain-Rest. Bv J. Leonard Corning, M. D.
New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp.
103. Price, §1.

Dr. Corning's treatment of this impor-
tant subject consists first of an examination
of the nature and phenomena of sleep, and
of the relation of the blood-supply to the
activity of the brain. Then follow some
practical directions in regard to sleeping,
and a discussion of the nature of several
varieties of insomnia. Finally, some meth-
ods of diminishing the cerebral circulation
are described, one of them being the " ca-
rotid truss," an invention of the author's for
lessening the supply of blood through the
carotid arteries.

On the Conservation of Solar Energy.
By C. William Siemens, F. R. S., D. C. L.,
etc. With Illustrations. London : Mac-
millan & Co. Pp. 111. Price, $1.75.

This volume contains Dr.Siemens's Royal
Society paper on this subject, the substance
of which is included in his article entitled
"A New Theory of the Sun," published in
the " Monthly " for June, 1882. Other papers
are, letters by MM. Faye and Hirn, T. Sterry
Hunt, C. A. Young, and others, criticising
his theory, and Dr. Siemens's replies to the
same. There is also a paper " On Electri-
cal Discharges in Vacuum-Tubes, and their
Relation to Solar Physics," being an extract
from a presidential address by the author
before the British Association. The appen-
dix comprises a paper entitled " On the
Electric Furnace," by C. William Siemens
and A. K. Huntington ; one on " Sunlight
and Skylight at High Altitudes," by Cap-
tain Abney ; " Remarks of Professor Lang-
ley on Ceptain Abney's Paper " ; and " Dis-
sociation of Attenuated Compound Gases,"
by Professor Liveing.

A New Theory of the Origin of Species.
By Benjamin G. Ferris. New York :
Fowler & Wells. Pp.278. Price, $1.50.

The author first examines Darwin's the-
ory, and endeavors to show that the causes
it assigns for the production of new species
are insufficient. Some of his arguments are
based on the non-production of new types in
recent time, and on the great changes that the
ape of to-day would have to make to develop
into the man of to-day. lie next discusses
the nature of life, and the difference be-

tween human and brute life. A chapter is
devoted to the question of the existence of
a First Cause, which the author is disposed
to answer in the affirmative. Finally, he
proposes his new theory, which is, that, as
" every living organism within historic times
has required a receptacle or matrix for its
conception, gradual development, -and final
birth, ... if species are reproduced by this
ordinary process, then it is fair to conclude
that they must have originated not by an
'unusual birth,' but by an extraordinary
generation'''' — that is, the first members of
each new species were produced from a
mother of another species by the influence
of a " direct creative influx" — i. e., by a sort
of miraculous conception.

The American Citizen's Manual. Part II.
The Functions of Governments (State
and Federal). By Worthington C. Ford.
New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp.
184. Price, $1.

The purpose of this series — to make
citizens at large acquainted with the theory,
functions, and operations of the State and
national governments, and with their rights
and duties — is admirable, and the concep-
tion of the several books is well adapted to
further it. The present volume treats of
protection to life and property ; the func-
tions of the Federal Government in the mat-
ters of war, foreign relations, regulation of
commerce, naturalization, post-offices and
post-roads, Indians, the public lands, and
patent and copyright laws ; the functions of
the State government in reference to corpora-
tions, education, charitable institutions, and
immigration ; and State finances.

Dr. B. C. Faust's Laws of Health. Edited
by Dr. S. Wolffberg. Translated and
improved by Herman Kopp. Brooklyn :
II. Kopp & Co. Pp. 37. Price, 20 cents.

This work is a collection of more than a
hundred and fifty admirable maxims tersely
expressed, embodying sound hygienic prin-
ciples and practical instructions for the pres-
ervation of health. Its peculiar merit is the
conciseness with which the rules are phrased,
whereby they arc more sharply stamped up-
on the memory and borne in mind. The trans-
lator has arranged the manual with particu-
lar adaptation to its use in the fourth-reader
"radc of schools and for self -instruction.

LITERARY NOTICES.

129

HOW TO GET ON IN THE WORLD, AS DEMON-
STRATED by the Life and Language of
William Cobbett: to which is added
Cobbett's English Grammar, with Notes.
By Robert Waters, Teacher of Lan-
guage and Literature in the Hoboken
(N. J.) Academy. New York: James
W.Pratt. Pp.551. Price, $1.75.

The literary style of Cobbett receives in
this book about equal attention with the
incidents and achievements of his life. Al-
though he is not often named among the
masters of English that students of rhetoric
are advised to read, and his grammar has
been allowed to go out of print, yet the au-
thor is able to quote several good judges
who agree with him in a high rating of Cob-
bett's style. Many extracts from Cobbett's
writings are given, partly as specimens of
his English, and partly as affording a better
picture of the man than description could
give. The author has secured for his esti-
mate of the character of Cobbett the pre-
sumption of correctness, in that he men-
tions and condemns Cobbett's faults as un-
hesitatingly as he praises his virtues. The
grammar, which is in the form of letters to
a son, occupies about half the volume.

French Forest Ordinance of 1669 ; with
Historical Sketch of Previous Treat-
ment of Forests in France. Compiled
and translated by John Croumbie Brown,
LL. D. Edinburgh : Oliver & Boyd. Pp.
150.

Dr. Brown was formerly Colonial Bota-
nist at the Cape of Good Hope, and had his
attention particularly directed to the sub-
ject of forestry by observation of the evils
which had been brought upon South Africa
by the reckless destruction of its woods.
He has since become engaged in a kind of
philanthropic work of publishing at his own
risk books enforcing the necessity of renew-
ing or preserving forests, and explaining
the manner in which these objects are to be
accomplished ; the proceeds of one book, if
there be any, being applied to the getting
out of another in the series. The present
volume embodies a translation in full of the
famous ordinance from which it derives its
name — a statute which the author claims
has exercised a deeper, more extended, and
more prolonged influence on the forest econ-
omy of Europe than has any other work
known to him. As introductory to it, are
vol. xxiv. — 9

given notices of the treatment of forests in
France in prehistoric times ; of the incursion
of the Normans and the changes introduced
by them ; of the administration of the for-
ests of France in the first half of the sev-
enteenth century, and the abuses and dev-
astation of forests which followed ; of the
method of exploitation then practiced — jar-
dinage, or the system of felling a selected
tree here and there, and leaving the others
standing ; of the method of tire et aire — or
" cut and come again " ; of the method of
compartiments — or the division of the wood
into equivalent instead of equal portions, as
in the former system, each of which is to be
cut in its order in a regular succession of
years ; and explanations of some of the old
technical terms used in the ordinance.

The Pine Moth of Nantucket {Retinia
Frwtrana). By Samuel H. Scudder.
Boston: A. Williams & Co. Pp. 22,
with Plate.

The pines on the Island of Nantucket,
set out some twenty or thirty years ago, are
fast dying in large numbers from some cause
hitherto unknown. Mr. Scudder began his
investigations as to the cause of the destruc-
tion in 1876, and found it at the extreme
tips of the living twigs, in the shape of a
moth-larva, which is hatched out in the bud
and eats its way to the heart, sapping the
life of the needles, one by one, as it goes
downward. As the insects are numerous
and prolific they soon take possession of
the tree and eat away its life. The present
monograph gives an account of the insect
and its life-history, as well as descriptions
of its relatives, and suggestions as to the
way of contending with it.

A Book about Roses. How to grow and
show them. By S. Reynolds Hale.
New York : William S. Gottsberger. Pp.
326.

The author has been a successful grower
and exhibitor of roses, and essays in this
book to tell how he has gained his success.
With considerable copiousness of words and
numerous digressions, all of which go to
make his story lively and pleasant, he gives
a great deal of information of practical
value on all matters pertaining to the culti-
vation of sood roses.

13°

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Authors and Publishers. A Manual of
Suggestions for Beginners in Literature.
New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp.
96.

The forcible presentation in this work
of the publisher's side of the questions on
which publishers and authors are supposed
to be liable to controversy or misunder-
standing has awakened a lively discussion
in the literary journals relative to the merits
and faults of the two classes. This is well,
for the subject is important, vague ideas
prevail about it, and the questions relating
to it should be settled, so that all can un-
derstand the situation, and be ready to ac-
cept it. This matter is, however, only an
incident in the general purpose of the
book, which is to teach young authors how
to compose their books and to make bar-
gains with publishers, 60 as to secure the
greatest advantages to themselves, and at
the same time make matters easy for the
trade. The work contains a description of
publishing methods and arrangements, di-
rections for the preparation of manuscript
for the press, explanations of the details of
book-manufacturing, instructions for proof-
reading, specimens of typography, the text
of the United States copyright law, and in-
formation concerning international copy-
rights, and useful general hints for authors.
All this is of practical value to those who
are bent on authorship, and are determined
to disregard the advice given in the bcok to
refrain from it.

Record for the Sick-Room. Philadelphia :
P. Blakiston, Son & Co. Pp. 26. Price,
25 cents each, $2.50 per dozen.

The book is a set of blank tables, each
ruled so as to give a record of the condi-
tion of a single patient during twelve hours.
Columns are provided to show the condition
of the pulse, temperature, respiration, and
bowels, the medicines and nourishment
given, the baths or lotions administered,
the temperature of the room, and general
notes on the condition of the patient, at
each hour, with space at the foot of the
table for the physician's directions and
memoranda for the nurse. The second page
of the cover is occupied with directions for
nurses, lists of poisons and their antidotes,
and instructions for emergencies.

Contributions to' the IIistory of Lake
Bonneville. By G. K. Gilbert. Wash-
ington : Government Printing-Office. Pp.
32, with Plates.

This monograph is a part of the report
of the Director of the United States Geo-
logical Survey. The study of which it re-
cords the results is one of a series designed
to include all the lakes of the Quaternary
formation. The geological structure of the
Great Salt Lake Valley indicates that it was
once the seat of an immense lake, with
shores a thousand feet above the level of
the present lake, while the mountains around
bear the marks of shore-lines at different
levels, testifying to a system of oscillations
of the waters of this great sheet. Mr. Gil-
bert's studies were directed to the determi-
nation of the period at which this lake ex-
isted, and of the order of its oscillations. '•
His conclusions are, that the history of the
lake reveals the existence of two periods of
maxima of moisture, separated by an inter-
val of extreme dryness ; that the time since
the Bonneville epoch has been briefer than
the epoch, and that the two together are in-
comparably briefer than such a geologic
period as the Tertiary ; that the period of
volcanic activity in the Great Basin, which
covered a large share of Tertiary time, con-
tinued through the Quaternary also, and
presumably has not yet ended; that such
earth-movements as are concerned in the
molding of continents had not ceased in
Western Utah at the close of the Bonne-
ville epoch, and presumably have not yet
ceased ; and that the Wahsatch Range has
recently increased in height, and presumably
is still growing.

Libraries and Readers. By William
E. Foster. Pp. 136. Libraries and
Schools. Papers selected by Samuel S.
Green. Pp. 126. New York : F. Ley-
poldt. Price, 50 cents each.

One of the good signs of the times is
the increased attention that is given to the
management of public libraries and the cul-
tivation of correct reading habits and a taste
for profitable reading in the general public.
Both these books bear on these objects.
The first relates to the direction of the at-
tention of those who visit the libraries to
the books that will be most advantageous
to them — facts to be learned as to each

LITERARY NOTICES.

131

reader by ascertaining the bent of his tastes
and the nature of the subjects in which he
has the most living interest — and to the in-
ducement in him of the habit of systematic
and methodical reading. The other book
is a selection of papers by different authors,
having in part a similar bearing with rela-
tion to the children in schools ; and, in
part, showing how the library, properly
used, may be made a most efficient auxil-
iary to the studies of the school.

Handsaws, their Use, Care, and Abuse.
How to select, and how to file them. By
Fred T. Hodgson. Xew York : The In-
dustrial Publication Company. Pp. 96.
Price, $1.

This is a book of practical information
on matters relative to the qualities and ma-
nipulation of all kinds of handsaws, for the
benefit of those persons, whether operative
mechanics or amateurs, who use them ; and
it possesses a value to such to which its
price bears a really small proportion. It is
well illustrated ; and a list of works referred
to in the preface shows that a considerable
literature on the subject exists in out-of-the-
way places.

Studies in Logic. By Members of the
Johns Hopkins University. Boston :
Little, Brown & Co. Pp. 203. Price, $2.

The " Studies " are the work of students
of the university, with one essay contributed
by Professor C. S. Peirce at their request.
Two of the papers present new develop-
ments of the logical algebra of Boole. An-
other paper relating to deductive logic de-
velops those rules for the combination of
relative numbers of which the general prin-
ciples of probabilities are special cases. In
another essay, Dr. Marquand shows how a
counting - machine, or a binary system of
numeration, will exhibit De Morgan's eight
modes of universal syllogism. A second
paper by Dr. Marquand explains the views
of the Epicureans, known to us mainly
through a fragment of the work of Philode-
mus. Professor Peirce's paper contains a
statement of what appears to him to be the
true theory of the inductive process, and
the correct maxims for the performance of
it. The neophyte who takes up these essays
with the view of mastering them will find
abundant occupation.

Deep Breathing. By Sophia Marquise
A. Ciccolina. Translated from the Ger-
man by Edgar S. Werner. New York •
M. L. Holbrook & Co. Pp. 48.

The subject is considered as a means
of promoting the art of song, and of cur-
ing weaknesses and affections of the throat
and lungs, especially consumption. The au-
thor speaks from experience, having had
her voice — a rare one for song — restored
after she had lost it, by practice in deep
breathing. We are told, in the preface to
the present edition, that a class in deep
breathing was formed in a certain sanitari-
um after reading one of the chapters of the
book ; as a result of a few weeks of prac-
tice in which, one young woman invalid in-
creased the size of her chest three inches
and greatly improved her health, and all re-
ceived much benefit.

Books for the Young. A Guide for Par-
ents and Children. Compiled by C. M.
Hewins. Xew York : F. Leypoldt. Pp.
94.

A classified list of the books most suit-
able for boys and girls, including both chil-
dren and youth of from ten to sixteen years
of age. The author is librarian of the Hart-
ford Library Association. The list is pref-
aced by a terse review of children's books
in general ; a number of suggestions on the
right use of books; notices of the best
works for children in English and American
history ; and a " symposium," in which are
quoted the expressions of several authors
and authorities on the reading best suited
for children.

The Modern Sphinx, and some of her Ped-
dles. By M. J. Savage. Boston : George
H. Ellis. Pp. 160. Price, $1.

A volume of Sunday-morning sermons,
of which the first six, constituting a series,
deal particularly with the objects of life,
business, and education. In the first ser-
mon, " The Modern Sphinx " is made to pro-
pound the question, What is the end of
man? The answer given is that, as the
earth and heavens glorify God by being,
man can glorify God only by being himself.
To help him accomplish this perfectly, busi-
ness, brains, and education should be used
and sought, not for themselves only, but as
means and aids to help him give himself the

132

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

highest development. The other sermons
are on " The Newspaper — its Good and its
Evil " ; " A True Republic " ; " Progress and
Poverty " ; " Religious Transition " ; and
" The Reign of the Dead."

On the Relations of Micro-organisms to
Disease. By William T. Belfield,
M. D. Chicago : W. T. Keener. Pp.
131.

This volume is composed of the four
" Cartwright Lectures " delivered by the au-
thor in February last, before the Alumni
Association of the College of Physicians and
Surgeons of New York. It presents a clear
and intelligent discussion of the subject,
considering the nature and classification of
the micro-organisms, their action on plants
and animals, the diseases they occasion, and
the methods of studying them, with remarks
on the germ theory of disease, accompanied
by good illustrations. We have been asked
to name some comprehensive work on the
bacteria. The present treatise is concise
and methodical, and makes full use of the
latest investigations.

Handbook of Vertebrate Dissection. By
H. Newell Martin, D. Sc, and William
A. Moale, M. D. Part II. How to dis-
sect a Bird. New York : Macmillan &
Co. Pp. 174. Price, 60 cents.

The intention of the series of which this
book is a member is not to enable the stu-
dent to determine species, but to give the
young morphologist practical directions as-
sisting him to learn for himself what a fish,
an amphibian, a reptile, a bird, and a mam-
mal are, when considered from an anatomical
point of view and contrasted with one an-
other. In the present volume are given
specific and detailed directions for perform-
ing the several operations of dissection on
a bird, which are made more clear by well-
executed illustrations. The work has been
composed chiefly by Dr. Moale, under the
direction of Professor Martin.

Die Kupferlegirungen, ihre Darstellung
und verwendung bei den volkem des
Alterthums. (Copper alloys: their rep-
resentation and application by the peo-
ple of antiquity.) By Dr. E. Reyer.
Vienna. Pp. 16.

The author, who is Professor of Ge-
ology in the University of Vienna, has al-

ready published a number of monographs on
several of the metals which are the objects
of man's mining enterprise and have been
applied by him to his use, in which he has
compressed much valuable information. In
the present work he describes the uses that
have been made of the alloys of copper, in
sections treating of the geology and discov-
ery of the metal, the characteristics of the
alloys, the valuable uses that have been
made of them, a summary, by nations, of
the kinds of alloys that have been used by
different people, and the literature of the
subject.

Die Korperliche Eigenschaften der Ja-
paner. (The Physical Characteristics
of the Japanese.) An Anthropological
Study. By Dr. Erwin Baelz. First Part.
Yokohama: Press of the "Echo du Ja-
pan." Pp. 16.

The author of this study is Professor of
Clinical Medicine in the University of Tokio,
and the essay is a contribution to the " Trans-
actions " of the German East- Asia tic Soci-
ety. Authorities differ greatly in their esti-
mates of the stature and other physical pe-
culiarities of the Japanese, and betray great
inaccuracy in their statements on the sub-
ject. Dr. Baelz has sought to remedy this
difficulty by instituting a series of system-
atic and exact measurements. The paper
gives the results he has reached. The pres-
ent (first) part considers anatomical details.
It is to be followed by a second part, treat-
ing of physiological peculiarities.

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.

Archaeological Institute of America. Fourth An-
nual Report of the Executive Committee Cam-
bridge : John Wilson & Son. 1888. Pp. 56.

The Journal of Physiology. Vol. IV, Nos. 2
and 3. Edited by Michael Foster, M. D., F. K. S.
Supplement to Vol. IV, containing: List of Titles of
Works and Papers of Physiological Interest pub-
lished in 1882. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity. August, 1883.

The Sonnets of Shakspere : When, to Whom,
and by Whom Written. Pp. 12.

New and Important Discoveries in Physiology.
By George H. Russell. Newville, Pa. 18S3. Pp.
14. 25 cents.

Observations on the Habits of the American
Chameleon. By R. W. Shufeldt. 1883. Pp.8. Il-
lustrated.

The Relations of Pain to Weather. By Captain
R. Catlin, United States Army, with Notes by
S. Weir Mitchell, M. D. Philadelphia: Collins,
printer. 18S3. Pp. 19.

A Synopsis of Copyright Decisions. By W. M.
Griswold. Bangor, Me. 1883. Pp.8.

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

133

The Structure and Appearance of a Laramie
Dinosaurian, pp. 4, with Plates ; and On the Mutual
Relations of the Bunotherian Mammalia, pp. 7. By
E. D. Cope. 1883.

Notes on the Volcanoes of Northern California,
Oregon, and Washington Territory. By Arnold
Hague and Joseph P. Iddings. 1883. Pp. 18.

The Heart of Man. An Attempt in Mental
Anatomv. By Putnam P. Bishop. Chicago:
Shepard"& Johnston, printers. 1883. Pp. 93.

A History of the New York State Teachers' As-
sociation. By Hyland C. Kirk. New York : E. L.
Kellogg & Co. 1883. Pp.174. Illustrated.

Svllabus of the Instruction in Sanitary Science.
By Delos Fall. Albion, Mich. 1883. Pp. 7. 10
cents.

On the Eight Use of Books. By "William P.
Atkinson. Boston : Eoberts Brothers. 1879. Pp.
65.

God and the State. By Michael Bakounine.
Translated from the French by Benjamin R. Tucker.
Boston : Benjamin R. Tucker, publisher. 1883.
Pp. 52. 15 cents.

A Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Edited
by George Grove, D. C. L. Parts XVII and XVIII.
London and New York : Macmillan & Co. 1883.
Pp. 239. $1 per Part.

Sewer-Gas and its Alleged Causation of Typhoid
Fever, pp. 20; and The Status of Professional
Opinion and Popular Sentiment regarding Sewer-
Gas and Contaminated Water as Causes of Typhoid
Fever, pp. 10. By George Hamilton, M. D. Phila-
delphia. 1883.

The Influence of Athletic Games upon Greek
Art. By Charles Waldstein, Ph. D. London. 1883.
Pp.24.

Studies from the Biological Laboratory of Johns
Hopkins University. Edited by H. Newell Martin
and W. K. Brooks. Vol. II, No. 4. Baltimore. 1883.
Pp. 85, with Plates.

Professional Papers of the Signal Service. No.
VIII. The Motions of Fluids and Solids on the
Earth's Surface. By Professor William Ferrel, with
Notes by Frank Waldo. Pp. 51. No. IX. Geo-
graphical Distribution of Rainfall in the United
States. By H. C. Dunwoody. Pp. 51, with Maps.
No. XI. Meteorological and Physical Observations
on the East Coast of British America. By Orray
Taft Sherman. Pp.202. No. XII. Popular Essays
on the Movements of the Atmosphere. By Pro-
fessor William Ferrel. Pp. 59. Washington : Gov-
ernment Printing-Office.

Verbal Pitfalls. By C. W. Bardeen. Syracuse,
N. Y. : C. W. Bardeen, publisher. 1883. Pp. 223.

Henry Irving. New York : W. S. Gottsberger.
1883. Pp. 207.

Van Nostrand's Science Series. No. 68. Steam-
Heating. By Robert Briggs, C. E. Pp. 108. No.
69. Chemical Problems. By James C. Foye, Ph.
D. Pp. 141. New York : 1). Van Nostrand. 1883.
50 cents each.

Astronomy. By Simon Newcomb, LL. D., and
Edward S. Holden, M. A. New York : Henry Holt
& Co. 1883. Pp. 338. $1.40.

A New School- Dictionary of the English Lan-
guage. Philadelphia : J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1883.
Pp. 390. 90 cents.

The Fertilization of Flowers. By Hermann Mul-
ler. With a Preface by Charles Darwin. London :
Macmillan & Co. 1883. Pp.669. $5.

Annual Report of the Operations of the United
States Life-Saving Service for the Year ending June
»30, 1882. Washington : Government Printing-Office.
1883. Pp. 504.

Finland: Its Forests and Forest Management.
By John Croumbie Brown, LL. D. Montreal :
Dawson Brothers. 1883. Pp. 290.

Annual Report of the Board of Reeents of the
Smithsonian Institution for the Year 1881. Wash-
ington : Government Printing-Office. 1883. Pp. 837.

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

School Examinations. — In an address
before the Teachers' Association of Cook
County, Illinois, Colonel Francis W. Parker,
formerly of Boston, now Principal of the
County Normal School, severely condemned
the prevalent system of examining in schools.
He believed that none were more faithful in
their efforts than the teachers of to-day, and
none were more anxious to do good than
they. He had wondered why progress had
not been greater, and had come to the con-
clusion that the greatest obstacle was the
examinations. The standard for the work
had a powerful influence on the work it-
self. He believed that examinations were
the greatest curse the schools had, though
they might be made the greatest blessing.
" What is the true motive of examinations ?
Real teaching leads to the systematic, all-
sided upbuilding of a compact body of
knowledge in the mind. In this upbuild-
ing or instruction, every faculty of the mind
is brought into action — perception, judg-
ment, classification, reason, imagination, and
memory. Examinations, then, should test
the condition and progress of the mind in
its development. Is the common standard
of examinations a test of real teaching ? If
I am not mistaken, the examinations usually
given simply test the pupil's power of mem-
orizing disconnected facts. The surest way
to effectually kill all desire to study any
subject, say history, when the pupil leaves
school, is the memorizing of disconnected
facts. A no less sure way of creating an
intense desire to read history is to take one
interesting subject and read from various
books all that is said about it, and then
under the guidance of a skillful teacher to
put together this information, arranging
events in logical order, and finally writing
out in good English the whole story. It is
very easy for an expert in examinations to
judge of the true teaching power of the
teacher in such work, by the written papers.
If meaningless words have been memorized,
if there is a lack of research, investigation,
and original thought, the results will be
painfully evident.

" Examinations should not be made the
test of fitness for promotion. Those who
understand children will readily appreciate

134

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

the excitement and strain under which they
labor, when their fate depends upon the
correct answering of ten disconnected ques-
tions. It is well known to you that some
of the best pupils generally do the poorest
work in the confusion that attends such
highly-wrought nervous states. IIow much
better, then, it is to take the work of the
pupil for the whole year, than the results of
one hour, under such adverse conditions ! If
the teacher really teaches, and faithfully
watches the mental growth of her pupils
through the work of one or more years, she
alone is the best judge of their fitness to do
the work of the next grade. The examina-
tions of a superintendent should be to ascer-
tain whether the principals under his charge
have the requisite ability and knowledge to
organize, teach, and supervise a large school.
The examinations of the principal should
test the teaching power of his teachers.
And, lastly, the teachers should test by ex-
aminations the mental growth of their pupils.
This is the true economical system of respon-
sibility. First ascertain that superintend-
ent, principal, and teacher can be trusted, and
then trust them. The testimony of count-
less good -teachers has been uniform, when
asked, ' "Why don't you do better work ? why
don't you use the methods learned in normal
schools, and educational periodicals, and
books ? ' ' "We can not do it. Look at our
course of study. In three weeks or months
these children will be examined. We have
not one moment of time to spend in real
teaching.' No wonder that teaching is a
trade and not an art ! No wonder there is
little or no demand for books upon the sci-
ence and art of teaching ! "

The Alps in Roman Times.— The ancient
Romans, says Professor H. Nissen, of Stras-
burg, saw in the Alps a kind of a wall com-
pletely shutting them out from the people
living beyond them, and so for centuries
they hesitated to take possession of the
mountain-lands, although their legions had
subjected all the country at the base of the
Alps to the Rhine, and had made demon-
strations toward Germany and England. So
great was their dread of those unknown
heights that they quietly endured the au-
dacity of the rapacious tribes inhabiting
them till about fifteen years b. c. Yet Han-

nibal had crossed them for the first time in
September of 218 b. c. This was consid-
ered a deed of such magnitude that its suc-
cess was ascribed by the southern people
to the assistance of the heavenly powers.
The darkness that rested over the Alps was
first illuminated by the historian Polybius,
who visited them and described them from
his own observations. Roman power was
extended over them by Augustus Caesar, b. c.
15. Afterward roads were built over them,
fourteen at least, the laying out of which
shows that they were made after careful
studies of the situation by the engineers.
The opening of the mountains to travel was
followed by a great streaming of adventur-
ers in search of the riches to be found in
the regions beyond, and scenes were enacted
very much like those which were witnessed
a few years ago in California. At one time
gold was found in such abundance that the
price of the metal was depreciated thirty-four
per cent through all Italy. The treasure-
hunters carried vines with them and planted
them wherever they settled down ; and to
this, in part, Germany owes its wealth in
vineyards. The forests were laid waste, as
a matter of course, just as they are now
wherever a new settlement is planted, and
with similar results. The Romans had no
appreciation of the beauty and grandeur of
the mountains, so highly admired by mod-
ern taste, but expressed only dread of them
and abhorrence of their savage aspect, which
they considered well represented in the bar-
barous names their indwellers gave to them.
They entertained the wildest ideas of the
height of the mountains, which they exag-
gerated tremendously. Pliny, who was a na-
tive of Como, at their very foot, speaks of
one of the peaks as being fifty miles high,
or sixteen times as high as Mont Blanc.

The Venom of Snakes. — Drs. S. Weir
Mitchell and Edward T. Reichert have ob-
tained the venoms from several snakes in
the shape of a turbid, yellowish fluid, vary-
ing in viscidity, odorless, and having an acid
reaction. All the venoms are soluble in
water at ordinary temperatures, save for a
slight cloudiness which but slowly settles.
The poisonous principle of the venom of
the moccasin and the rattlesnake appears to
reside in two out of three protcids which it

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

135

contains, one of which is analogous to pep-
tones and is a putrefacient, while the other
is akin to globuline and is a much more
fatal poison, probably attacking the respir-
atory centers and destroying the power of
the blood to clot. The third proteid resem-
bles the albumens, and is probably innocent.
The poisons of the rattlesnake, copperhead,
and moccasin are capable of being destroyed
by bromine, iodine, bromohydric acid (thirty-
three per cent), sodium hydrate, potassium
hydrate, and potassium permanganate.

Antiseptic Qualities of Copper. — A few

years ago copper was universally regarded
as a deadly poison, and any questioning on
the subject would, as M. Gautier observes,
have been regarded as absurd. This opin-
ion has been shaken by recent investiga-
tions. M. V. Burq claims for copper bene-
ficial properties as a disinfectant and pro-
phylactic. He has observed for thirty years
that workmen in copper and players on musi-
cal instruments of brass, who were liable
daily to absorb notable quantities of pure
copper-dusts, enjoyed a remarkable immu-
nity from infectious diseases. This was es-
tablished in the case of the cholera in 1869
and 1873, during the epidemic which pre-
vailed in Paris in 1876 and 1877, and in
the recent visitation of typhoid fever, which
was the immediate occasion of M. Burq's
making a communication to the French
Academy on the subject. M. Burq has
been encouraged, by his own experiments
and those of other physicians whom he
cites, to recommend the administration of
salts of copper as a preventive and remedy
in cases of infectious disease. M. A. Gautier
has recently published a book on " Copper
and Lead in Food and Industry," in which
he -denies that copper is as dangerous a
substance as it has been considered to be.
Citing the observations of Burq, Galippe,
and other authors, he discusses, in substan-
tial agreement with them, the effect which
copper has in industry and in general use
upon workmen engaged with it, and upon
public health. He represents it as a normal
constituent in many of our foods. Wheat,
barley, rice, beans, coffee, etc., constantly
contain of it quantities varying from four to
ten milligrammes per kilogramme. Prepared
foods — greened pickles, chocolate, etc. — con-

tain much more copper, from ten to two
hundred milligrammes per kilogramme ;
and the author shows that, as a rule, we
consume five milligrammes of metallic cop-
per a day without receiving any serious in-
jury from it. These quantities could be in-
creased without much danger, but the taste
of the salts of the metal is so disagreeable,
and their color so conspicuous, that stronger
doses would make the food nauseous and
repulsive, so that the danger of one taking
a fatal dose of copper is really quite remote.
All food becomes uneatable when it con-
tains four grammes per kilogramme of cop-
per salts ; even voluntary poisoning by cop-
per is almost impossible. A practical infer-
ence from these observations would be, that
the care we take to tin our copper cooking-
vessels is useless. M. Gautier maintains,
that it is even dangerous ; for most tin con-
tains lead, a deadly poison even in small
doses ; and it is this metal, in M. Gautier's
opinion, that is guilty of the damage that
has been attributed to copper. It meets us
everywhere, and always leaves its mark in
some damage to our system, slight in the de-
tail, but cumulative in the aggregate. "We
absorb it with our preserved foods, from
glazed papers and oil-cloths, from paint,
from enamels and crockery, from tin-ware,
and from cosmetics, a little every day, till
at last enough of the poison is accumulated
in the system to make its strength very
plainly felt.

How Raisins are dried. — Malaga raisins
are made from two distinct kinds of grapes
— the Muscat, which is indigenous ; and the
Pero-Ximenes, which was imported from
Germany two hundred or more years ago.
Opinions differ concerning the respective
merits of the two varieties. The vines are
strongly manured, and are allowed to stretch
themselves over the ground and absorb all
atmospheric heat. The fruit is not all gath-
ered at one time, but the same piece of
ground is gone over three times, so that all
the grapes may have the necessary ripeness.
The raisins are prepared by washing, by dry-
ing by steam, or by simple drying in the sun.
To dry the grapes by the washing method,
furnaces of feeble draught are made in which
wood is used as fuel. A round kettle of
three or four hundred quarts' capacity re-

136

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ceives a lye formed from the residue or
refuse of the grapes after pressing, which is
either that obtained from the present year
or some that has been kept from a previous
vintage. The raisins, held in wire colan-
ders holding from five to eight pounds each,
are plunged in this lye while it is boiling.
After the immersion, the workmen exam-
ine the skins to see if they are shriveled
enough. If not, they immerse the grapes
a second time, which is usually the last.
The process of immersion is a very delicate
one, requiring skillful watching and keen
judgment on the part of the workmen. The
grapes must not be allowed to burst, nor
the skins to crack. The grapes must not
get too hot or be too 6wect, or the raisins
will mold. Raisins dried by this process
are considered inferior. To prepare rai-
sins by steam, the grapes, after having been
sunned for twenty-four hours, are put on
drying-shelves in a room heated by steam to
160° Fahr., and kept there for twenty-four
hours, when they are taken to a cooling-
room to be gradually cooled till they are
ready to be packed. Drying in the sun is pre-
ferred to the other processes wherever the
sun affords enough heat. Stagings are built
of brick or stone, on which the grapes are
exposed at such an angle of inclination as
to be in the sun throughout the day. A
temperature of 145° is thus attained in Au-
gust. At night, the grapes are covered with
canvas or with boards. During the process
of drying, those grapes that remain green or
are spoiled are carefully removed, and each
grape is turned, in order to preserve a uni-
formity in the darkening of color. Raisins
prepared by the scalding process dry in four
davs, while those dried in the sun take ten
days, but the difference of time is largely
compensated for by the economy of ex-
penditure. The raisins are not ready for
packing immediately after being dried, but
have to be kept for several days in the
stores on the planks on which they are car-
ried. Those that- are spoiled or defective
are picked out, especially if they appear
broken or bruised, for one drop of moisture
from them would probably damage a whole
box. The crop of raisins produced in the
Malaga district from the vintage of 1880
and 1881 is estimated at between 2,000,000
and 2,050,000 boxes of 22 pounds each.

Centripetal and 'Centrifugal Movements
of the Limbs. — Dr. G. Delaunay controverts
the theory of Carl Vogt, that the direction
of the lines in writing, whether from right
to left, the result of a centripetal, or from
left to right, the result of a centrifugal,
movement of the hand, depends upon ex-
terior conditions rather than a physiological
necessity. His investigations have taught
him to believe that the general direction of
all movements is determined by physiological
and anatomical influences. Quadrupeds, he
says, as a rule are capable only of vertical
or forward and backward movements ; a
few of them, as the cat and monkeys, can
make centripetal movements. Man is the
only one who can execute centrifugal ones.
The physiological evolution from vertical to
lateral — first centripetal, then centrifugal —
movements, is a result of an anatomical evo-
lution that has been well described by
Broca, in his work on the " Order of Pri-
mates." According to M. Delaunay's re-
searches, movements are rather centripetal
than centrifugal with primitive or inferior
races — rather centrifugal than centripetal
with superior races ; and the change from
one to the other takes place as the race
advances. Formerly watches were wound
from right to left — now they are wound
from left to right. Some English watches
are an exception, but the Americans, who
are more advanced in evolution (so M. De-
launay says) than the European English,
wind their watches from left to right. As
it is with watches, so it is with most other
machinery. Writing from right to left was
characteristic of the earlier nations, and is
still so of the less advanced peoples, but
has given way to writing from left to right
as the races have improved. As between
the sexes, women are more inclined to cen-
tripetal, men to centrifugal, movements;
this is seen in drawing and in the adjust-
ment of clothing. Children are more in-
clined to centripetal than to centrifugal
movements; they strike with their palms
rather than with the backs of their hands,
draw from right to left, and have a propen-
sity to spell and write in the same direction.
M. Delaunay sees in this a tendency to
atavism. As between individuals, the more
intelligent persons, better scholars, are more
ready in left to right, or centrifugal ; the less

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

l37

intelligent, poor scholars, in right to left,
or centripetal motions. Idiots can hardly
strike with the back of the hand, and are
not at ease in lateral movements. In a
psychological respect, centripetal gestures
denote primitive, egoistic, retrograde ideas,
as is seen in the attitude of the miser hold-
ing his treasure, and of the coward in the
presence of danger. Centrifugal gestures
express generous, expansive, altruistic, brave
ideas and passions. The gesture of ac-
clamation or applause, for example, is as
elevated, as outward, as centrifugal, as pos-
sible. " Pleasure," says M. Charles PJchet,
" corresponds with a movement of blooming,
of dilatation, of extension. In grief, on the
other hand, we shrink, we withdraw upon
ourselves in a general movement of flexion."
Thus, in the psychological as well as in
other points of view, centripetal gestures
mark inferiority, centrifugal ones superi-
ority.

Ancient Lotc of Honey.— The bodies of
Alexander the Great and of the Spartan
King Agesipolis were preserved in honey.
The ancient Assyrians also used the same
substance for embalming. Its preservative
effects are, however, only temporary, for,
although it prevents the entrance of the
germs of decay for a time, it is itself ulti-
mately overtaken by decay, and the bodies
it covers must follow it. The ancient use of
honey for food was much more important
than its application to purposes of embalm-
ing. The Greek mythology attributes its
origin to Jupiter, who in his youth was fed
by goats with milk and by bees with honey.
He adopted ambrosia, a compound of milk
and honey, to be the food of the gods, and,
taking care that the earth should be sup-
plied, caused it to fall as a dew from the
sky, and taught the bees to make cells of
wax and store honey in them. Aristotle
said that honey fell from the air at the ris-
ing of the stars and whenever there was a
rainbow ; Pliny, that it comes out of the air
at about daybreak ; whence, he adds, u we
find the leaves bedewed with honey when
the morning twilight appears, and persons
in the open air may feel it in their clothes
and hair." He also regrets that it can not
reach us as pure as it starts, but has to be
polluted by the various substances it meets

in coming through the air. The northern
sagas likewise represent honey as a heavenly
product, and relate that it drops upon the
earth from the holy ash, and is food to the
bees. The ancients used honey as exten-
sively as they did, probably, because they
had not learned to extract sugar from the
cane. Nearchus says the Macedonians
found the sugar-cane in India, referring
probably to the bamboo and its sweet juices,
and Diodorus and Theophrastus speak of
the sweet juice produced by a cane or reed-
like plant; but, if cane-sugar was known
at all in antiquity, it was known only as
a rarity, and honey was still the pre-emi-
nent sweetener. The ancients were well ac-
quainted with the variations in the quality
of honey, according to the season when it
was stored and the plants whence it was de-
rived. Honey was also used as a medicine
for affections of the throat, inflammations
of the lungs, and pleurisy, and as an anti-
dote for snake and mushroom poisoning. It
was given with mead in apoplexy; mixed
with rose-oil it was applied to diseased ears ;
and it was used to kill vermin in the head.
The ancient Germans had a mead or honey
wine, which was made by the fermentation
of a mixture of honey, water, and herbs, and
contained about seventeen per cent of alco-
hol. Some ancient writers ima<nned that
bees were developed in the decomposing
bodies of animals, and an Arcadian shep.
herd is credited with having discovered the
art of cultivating them in this way. Melanch-
thon believed something of the kind, and
saw in it evidence of Providence and a noble
symbol of the Christian Church. Honey
formed an important article of trade in the
middle ages, but gradually declined under
the competition of cane-sugar. The destruc-
tion of the monasteries at the time of the
Reformation caused also a limitation in the
use of wax-lights, and a reduction in the de-
mand for comb.

Trees of Lake Chad.— Dr. Nachtigal in
his " African Journeys " describes some curi-
ous trees that grow in the region of Lake
Chad. The butter-tree, called in that coun-
try toso-kan, bears a green round fruit,
ripening into yellow, about as large a3 a
small citron. This fruit consists of a nut
resembling a horse-chestnut in color and

i38

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

size, and a palatable, fleshy, smooth-skinned
covering like ■ plum. The nut affords an
oil, which solidities under a slight decrease
of temperature, and is used throughout
North Africa as a substitute for butter.
The Farina biglobosa (rinuio-k-au) of the
same region, a leguminous plant, furnishes
an excellent food in its seeds, which are
eatable while still unripe. The ripe seeds
contain a thick, saffron-colored marrow in-
closing black, shining grains. The meal
made from them forms when mixed with
water or milk a pap, which has a sweet and
pleasant taste at first, but soon cloys. Re-
lieved with sour milk or tamarind-juice, it
forms a dish healthful and enjoyable to all.
The wool-tree (Eriodcndron anfractuosum)
is the third characteristic tree of the coun-
try. It rises straight up, with thick, hori-
zontal branches arranged in whorls one
above the other, and derives its name from
its fruit, which bursts like the pods of cot-
ton and discloses a similar mass of fibers,
lustrous and soft as eider-down. This
" wool " is used for the stuffing of cushions
and mattresses and for the wadding-armor
of the heavy cavalry. It has the valuable
property of never becoming so compact but
that it can be restored to its original volume
by a short exposure to the sun. The tree is
a favorite place of refuge for the negroes in
time of danger. Taking their children and
goods up with them, they secure an excel-
lent natural fortress among the whorls of
its limbs.

Disposition of Sewage. — Professor Ilen-
ry Robinson remarks, in a paper on " Home
Sanitation and Sewage Disposal," that the
latter cmestion should be regarded as involv-
ing a combination of sanitary and agricul-
tural interests, of which the first is para-
mount and the latter should be disregarded
when incompatible with it. Sewage is puri-
fied in passing through the soil by one or
more of three processes: 1. By simple fib
tration or removal of the suspended matter ;
2. By the precipitation and retention, in the
soil, of ammonia and various organic sub-
stances previously in solution ; and, .'5. The

IdatiOn <>f ammonia and of organic mat-
ter with the aid of living organisms. A fil-
t i Led may be constructed so as to have a
greater oxidizing power than would be pos-

sessed by ordinary soil and subsoil, by lay-
ing over a system of drain-pipes a few feet
of soil obtained from the surface of a good
field, care being taken to select a soil con-
taining a considerable amount of carbonate
of lime and organic matter. Such a filter-
bed would be far more porous than a natu-
ral soil and subsoil, and would possess ac-
tive oxidiizng functions throughout its whole
depth. The presence of antiseptics inter-
feres with the fermentation, and refuse from
chemical works hinders the progress of pu-
rification. Much valuable information has
been published by Drs. Lawes and Gilbert
on the chemical changes that take place in
the soil under varying circumstances ; and
Dr. Angus Smith, a rivers pollution inspect-
or, has much to say in his last annua 1 re-
port on the action of air on sewage and the
mode of treating sewage so as to hasten
aeration ; while in a previous report he has
discussed the treatment of sewage by chem-
icals. Much information on these subjects
may also be found in Mrs. Robinson's work on
" Sewage Disposal " (Spon, London). Well-
adapted lands have been found capable of
purifying the sewage of about five hundred
people per acre. The average amount dis-
posed of in nineteen towns where broad ir-
rigation was practiced was equivalent to the
sewage of one hundred and thirty-seven peo-
ple per acre.

Conimnnicability of Disease by Food.—

Except the diseases associated with tape-
worm and trichina?, the only animal diseases
which there is or has been ground for regard-
ing as transmissible to man, through ingest-
ed meat, are cattle-plague, swine-typhoid,
epizootic pleuro-pneumonia, foot-and-mouth
disease, anthrax and anthracoid diseases,
erysipelas, and tuberculosis. Mr. Francis
Vacher, medical officer, of Birkenhead, Eng-
land, having examined the evidence in re-
spect to the communicability of these seven
diseases, has announced the conclusion, in
the " Sanitary Record," that only two of
them — foot-and-mouth disease and anthrax
— can as yet be pronounced communicable
to man by infected flesh, while the commu-
nieability of the others, although it can not
be positively denied, remains unproved.
Tattle-plague has been supposed to be al-
lied to various forms of human disease, but

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

139

pathologists now refuse to accept such kin-
ship in any shape. The possibility of com-
municating even a mild form of disease by
eating meat infected with rinderpest is not
supported by any recorded instance; yet
experiments whether such food would con-
vey infection must have been tried millions
of times. Instances are cited in which thou-
sands of affected cattle were eaten during
epizootics with no bad results. Typhoid
fever of swine was declared by Dr. William
Budd, in 1865, to be the exact counterpart
of enteric fever in man, but his conclusion
has recently been found untenable after a
most exhaustive research. The meat of
swine ill with it is of inferior quality and
diminished nutritive value, and is unfit for
food in an advanced stage of the disease,
but it docs not carry typhoid fever. Epizo-
otic plcuro-pneumonia taints the whole car-
cass of the animal affected, and commu-
nicates blood-poisoning by inoculation. Dr.
Livingstone says that in South Afriea the
meat of animals that died of it caused
malignant carbuncles in those who ate it.
Dr,. Lcthcby relates that a number of per-
sons were made sick by eating sausages
made of it in London in 18G0. Dr. (Jamgce
mentions a prevalence of carbuncles in a
convict establishment where such meat was
used, which ceased when the use was dis-
continued ; but similar meat has been used
largely in Paris, the north of France, at
Lille, and even in England, without visible
dangerous effects. Cattle fed on parts of
diseased hogs, and made to drink the food
from diseased pleura), and animals in the
Zoological gardens fed on the meat, suffered
no ill effects. The communication of foot-
and-mouth disease to man, according to
Gamgee, " admits of no doubt." The dis-
ease has been transmitted by drinking the
milk of animals affected and by inoculation,
and there is a strong' presumption that it
can be conveyed by ingested meat. The
existence of anthrax is determined by the
presence of the bacillus anthracis in the
blood of the subject. It is communicable
by contact, for the bacilli can make their
way through capillaries and large vessels,
and can pierce the skin and insinuate them-
selves where it has not been broken. Ex-
periment shows that the disease " can be
as readily conveyed by food as in any other

way. If any portion of food ingested con-
tains live bacilli, or their spores, the con-
sumer runs a terrible risk ; and the tenacity
of life of these organisms is so great we
can not assign a limit to it." Several forms
of disease have been referred to anthraeoid
causes. Whether they are anthraeoidal or
not can be ascertained by searching for the
bacillus, which, if present, may be seen with
a glass of not very high power. The com-
municability of erysipelas to man from in-
fected food, though exceedingly probable,
is hardly capable of direct proof. To con-
vey it through food by inoculation only re-
quires that it be present in the food, that
the food be imperfectly cooked, and that
the consumer have a minute wound in his
mouth. With regard to tuberculosis, Mr.
Vacher contends that direct evidence of the
human form of the disease having been
conveyed by ingested flesh from animals
affected by bovine tuberculosis, or " pearl-
disease," is wanting, although such flesh is
daily sold and bought in the open market,
and daily consumed by all classes. The
indirect evidence " has really little bearing
upon the point at issue."

Massage and Mental Hygiene as Cnra-
tive Agents. — Dr. Play fair has given ac-
counts in the " British Medical Journal " of
three really wonderful recoveries from seri-
ous disease by the " Weir Mitchell " treat-
ment, in which massage and mental hygiene
arc the principal agents relied upon. One
patient, who had been unable to retain food
in any quantities for five years, began to
recover in three days, and in ten days had
an enormous appetite; another, a sufferer
for four years from partial paralysis, began
to recover in forty-eight hours, and was well
in a month; the third had been epileptic
ami partly paralytic for sixteen years. She
began to improve in a few days, was out
driving and walking in six weeks, and two
months afterward went on a sea-voyage to
the Cape of Good Hope, in the course of
which she attended her former nurse through
a fit of sickness, and from which she came
back in robust health. The treatment in
these cases consisted of removal of the pa-
tient from her home surroundings, and her
complete isolation with her nurse ; and sys-
tematic muscular movement, with the use of

140

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

the faradaic current, and vigorous feeding —
to which the appetite was found ready to
respond. Dr. Playfair attributes the chief
value of the treatment to the fact that it ap-
peals not to one only but to many influ-
ces of a curative character. The " Louis-
ville Medical News," reviewing the cases,
believes that the imagination is the most
prominent agent in effecting the cures, and
is ready to class them with " faith-cures."

Phosphorescence in Plants. — M. Crie re-
marks, in a communication to the French
Academy of Sciences, that " it is known that
the flowers of phanerogams are capable un-
der certain circumstances of producing phos-
phorescent light. The phenomenon has been
verified, especially of the nasturtium and the
marigold. Some years ago I myself saw
phosphorescent lights emitted in stormy
weather from the flowers of the Tropo'elum
majus, cultivated in a garden. The emission
is especially noticeable in the mushrooms
The agaric of the olive, which grows in
Provence, at the foot of the olive-trees, is
distinguished for its white, quiet, uniform
light, which resembles that of phosphorus
dissolved in oil." Several other species of
luminous agaric are known, but the property
is not limited to that genus. The Rhizo-
morpha, or the vegetative apparatus of a
considerable number of mushrooms, are also
phosphorescent. These cryptogams, which
are common in mines, give a light by which
miners can see their hands. The luminous
threads of Rhizomorpha subterranea are
easy to perceive in the Pontpean mine, near
Rennes. Luminous filaments of a rhizomor-
pha have been observed in branches of the
elder. The Xylaria polyrnorpha, collected
from old stalks in a garden, has been seen
to emit a feeble white glow, like that of
phosphorus in the air.

Professor Virchow on Hnmboldt. — A

monument to William and Alexander von
Humboldt was unveiled at the University
of Berlin on the 28th of May. Professor
Virchow delivered an address on the occa-
sion, in which he spoke in the highest terms
of the character and value of the work of the
two brothers. " We older men," he said,
11 who have learned personally from Alex-
ander von Humboldt, and have in part

worked with him, feel our strength renewed
when we see how the memory of the time of
the new birth of our people is perpetuated to
posterity in the many monuments of our city.
One who walks through our streets will dis-
cover that Goethe and Schiller, Stein and
the Humboldts, Bliicher and Schwarnhorst,
did not casually live side by side, but that a
recognizable connection prevailed in their
development, and wove their works together
to a single end. Every German will look
with pride upon the men who have risen
from out of the midst of the people to the
highest places of honor, because they
wakened and unfettered the noblest forces
of the nation. Especially could our aca-
demic youth, who have these models before
their eyes every day, learn from the history
of such men what recompense genuine
work can gain. Humboldt, who completed
the ' Cosmos ' in extreme age, and who wrote
in the last year of his life, ' For thirty years
I have had no rest, except at night,' was at
one time a sickly lad, whose teacher in the
first years of his childhood doubted whether
he would ever manifest any more than the
most ordinary mental faculties. He, whose
youth fell in an age when hardly anything
but speculative wisdom, poetic invention and
dogmatic tradition were held in honor, had,
in his incessant struggles in nearly all the
domains of natural science, brought into
avail that stronger objective method of
thought, comprehensive in its grasp, which
has since become the pride and the common
estate of the learned of modern times.
When he at last, like the world-sages of
antiquity, united in himself all the knowl.
edge of his time on natural subjects, and
with it the comprehension of its historic
growth, it was not the knowledge of a com-
piler that he displayed, but the fruit of long
special work in each single field. He served
in the ranks as a national economist and
as a miner, as an astronomer and as a
physicist, as a chemist and as a geologist,
as an anatomist and as an experimenter in
vegetable and animal physiology. He was
the first scientific traveler who independent-
ly studied all the natural and political condi-
tions of the countries visited by himself.
Political and physical geography, the study
of terrestrial magnetism, plant -geography,
and ethnography, grew under his care to be

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

141

independent branches of science. His ex-
ample was operative everywhere, as that of
one of the most self-active masters in the
shop. He has been called vain and selfish ;
but his vanity was never so strong as to
overcome his love of the truth, and his self-
ishness never prevented his fostering all
budding talent and joyfully greeting every
advance in knowledge. He refused high
positions, so strongly was his innate incli-
nation turned toward the advancement of
knowledge. Long after he had become one
of the recognized teachers of mankind, he
did not cease to learn ; but he learned as an
investigator learns ; and, even as against
the most adept, he never gave up the right
of testing by his own proofs. It was thus
that we learned to know Alexander von
Humboldt. His frame was bent under the
burden of years and labors, but his spirit
was high-set, and his eyes still looked clear-
ly into the world. He was valuable to us
as one who had the highest knowledge, and
was at the same time perfectly discreet, as
a high-priest of truth and humanity, as a
true friend of civic freedom. Feeling this?
we have erected his monument. May it be
a symbol to many generations of the efforts
of this age ! "

The Physicians' Part in Evolution.— The

" Lancet " has been asked, " Why, if it be
natural and expedient that only the ' fittest '
should survive, are we [the medical men] as
a profession chiefly interested in prolonging
the lives of those who have been rendered
unfit by disease or accident ? " It admits
that, " if it were really a fact that the whole
business of our lives, the work to which we
devote the best of our strength and intelli-
gence, had for its object to antagonize the
natural course of progress as regards the
race, although compassion for the individual
might impel us to continue the effort, it
would certainly damp the ardor of our en-
terprise to reflect that those we are striving
to keep alive ought in the interests of pos-
terity to be left to die." The seeming par-
adox the " Lancet " reasons is, however, in
truth a fallacy. It is founded on an imper-
fect view of the inter-relations of the world.
" Survival of the fittest " is not the same
thing in its result as " adaptation to circum-
stances." Development, through and by the

environment, is the method of Nature, but
this does not necessitate that man should
be the creature of circumstances. The en-
vironment is not a constantly progressive
agency of development. It is itself subject
to the law of survival. It can not, therefore,
be absolutely or abstractly true that the
fittest for the existing conditions of life in
any particular place or epoch ought to sur-
vive. It is wholly out of our power to de-
termine whether the particular type of de-
velopment which seems to be making its
way in the world and asserting its superi-
ority by survival, and is for a time regarded
as normal, is the best type, or that which is
destined to endure and be perfected. The
surroundings of life are progressively chang-
ing as well as the subjects of life. There is
a perpetual struggle for supremacy between
the two, and it is always an open question
whether the resultant of this struggle will
be found to embody a greater or less modi-
fication of subject or circumstance. M Our
duty as practitioners of the art of healing
does not relate to the surroundings, except
in so far as these may be regarded a tribu-
tary to the central fact of life. If we can
modify the conditions and circumstances of
existence so as to render life easier, it is in
our day's work to do this, and to do it
heartily ; but the commission we hold is to
prolong life, and to fight against all that
tends to destroy or weaken it. In so doing,
we are not merely benefiting the individual,
but the race, because, so far as we know,
man is the highest created organism, and as
such he is destined to dominate circum-
stances. For us • man ' takes the form of
men. The race may be higher than the in-
dividual, but it is with the latter we have to
deal."

Ancient and Modern Egyptian Schools
and Libraries. — Mr. Keginald Stuart Poole
has attempted to trace an historical connec-
tion between the ancient Egyptian schools
and library at Heliopolis and the Alexan-
drian Library and University, and even the
present Moslem University at Cairo. The
sources of information respecting the an-
cient schools are chiefly old hieratic papyri,
some of which were actually exercise-books
of students, and they tell us of temples at-
tached to colleges in various large towns.

142

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

At Ileliopolis, where were the most famous
schools, religion, law, mathematics, medicine,
and language were taught. Primary schools
were provided for all classes ; and libraries
were attached to the temples. The old
methods were adopted in the institutions
founded at Alexandria by the Ptolemies,
but, as these were intended for a mixed pop-
ulation of Egyptians, Greeks, and Hebrews,
law and religion were excluded, to avoid
controversy. Learned men were maintained
by the state to prosecute research, and a
botanical garden and a menagerie were
added. The first Alexandrian Library was
burned when Julius Caesar captured the
place. The second disappeared at the time
of the Arabian conquest. The university
was restored by one of the caliphs two cen-
turies after the conquest. The great Uni-
versity of Cairo, which has five thousand
students, and practically includes all the. Al-
exandrian faculties except medicine, was
founded by a Greek officer of the Fatimite
caliphate, a. d. 969-970.

The Jackal, the Fox-Fables, and the
Dog-Star, — Herr 0. Keller, in a paper on
" The Jackal in Antiquity," urges that the
Western nations, who had foxes but no jack-
als, borrowed the traits ascribed to jackals,
in Oriental fables, with the fables, and trans-
ferred them to their foxes. Thus the Gre-
cian foxes were endowed with the attributes
of two animals, and the most curious fox-
fables of vEsop are in their origin Indian
jackal-fables. Some of iEsop's fables rep-
resent the fox as the follower and servant
of the lion, which he is not known to be in
any sense. The jackal, however, is in the
habit of following the lion at a respectful
distance, and lives on what he can pick up
from the deserted repasts of the king of
beasts. This trait was observed by the an-
cient Indians, and it was a natural result of
the observation that their vivid imagina-
tions, discovering royal prerogatives in the
lion, should endow his follower with the
qualities of a minister and counselor, and
make him to assist his majesty by using in
his behalf the qualities of slyness and cun-
ning in which the royal beast was deficient.
The Greeks substituted foxes for jackals be-
cause they knew nothing about them, and
their foxes came nearer than any other ani-

mal to answering the descriptions of them-
The transfer was made easier by the gradual
development of the fables from simple na-
ture-stories into moral lessons, in the course
of which absolute truth to nature grew less
essential, and the representation of abstract
qualities under purely conventional masks
became more prominent. The incongruous
association by the Greeks of the supposed
evil influences of Sirius with the harmless
dog are susceptible of a similar explanation.
The Chinese, however, who also attributed
evil qualities to the dog-star, called it the
jackal-star, and appropriately ; for as the
heat and drought of which it is the forerun-
ner are destructive to the crops, so likewise
are the jackals, which make their home in
the fields, and are constantly running through
them in gangs, destroying myriads of plants,
in search of their food. To the Egyptians,
Sirius was also the jackal-star, but foreboded
good, for it appeared just before the time of
the inundation. The Mesopotamians also
recognized in it a forerunner of beneficent
inundations, and gave it the name of the
dog, an animal which they held in high es-
teem. The Greeks borrowed the Mesopo-
tamian name, and kept the Chinese idea,
which harmonized well with the character
of their own dog-days. The origin of the
dog-star has been associated by some other
writers with the idea that Sirius, the chief
of the stars, was the shepherd-dog to the
host of the heavenly sheep, represented by
the other stars.

Deforestization and Floods in China. —

The country of the lower Yangtse-Kiang
in China suffered terribly from floods last
July and August. Dr. Macgowan has taken
advantage of a trip up the river, for the dis-
tribution of relief to sufferers, to make in-
quiry whether any connection existed be-
tween the inundations and the removal of
the forests. China, old as it is, is not so
old but that the process of denuding the
land of trees may be distinctly traced. The
treeless aspect of the hills of the lower
Yangtse now attracts attention from every
voyager ; yet no mention is made of their
barren condition by Ellis or Davis in their
narratives of Lord Amherst's embassy in
1816, but wooded hills are alluded to ; from
which it would seem that the deforestization

NOTES.

H3

is recent. The ^inundations by which the
lower country is frequently submerged come
from the Poyang Lake, concerning which
very little is actually known, either as re-
gards its floods or its rain-falls. It is known
only that there is evidence of a great thin-
ning out of forests on the mountains of
Southern Kiangsi, although it has not been
carried to the extent that Che-kiang has
experienced, where arboriculture is system-
atically pursued to meet demands for tim-
ber. In the hills near the coast, which are
stripped annually of grass, ferns, and bush-
es for fuel, the process of the gradual de-
nudation of the hills is distinctly observ-
able. The soil is never carpeted by leaves ;
no humus forms ; rain, instead of slowly
percolating as through a sponge, rushes in
water-courses as from the roof of a house into
gutters, speedily filling them, and carrying
with it soil, which tends to increase the evil.
In this way the lakes are destined to be-
come desiccated much sooner than they oth-
erwise would be. It is because of the occa-
sional sudden rush of waters that freshets
are always attributed to the spouting of
chias — subterranean monsters. Several of
those are reported as being concerned in the
late floods. While there is conclusive evi-
dence that there has been in recent times a
great destruction of forests, it is not clear
that floods have proportionately increased
in number or rapidity ; it is, however, what
might be expected, and it is what is affirmed
by natives when accosted on the subject.
Deforestation has had one favorable effect
in the south of China, in reducing the rav-
ages of jungle malaria, which recedes with
the advance of agriculture.

New Serviceable Metallic Alloys.— Three
new metallic alloys have been recently in-
troduced, which seem fitted to serve as sub-
stitutes for bronze, imitation gold, and imi-
tation silver. Delta, a bronze made by Mr.
Alexander. Dick, of London, is a compound
of iron, zinc, and copper, the proportions of
the ingredients being varied according to
the color it is sought to obtain, and has the
advantages of extraordinary tenacity and
flexibility. It can be beaten, and forged,
and drawn when cold, takes a perfect pol-
ish, and, exposed to the air, is less liable to
tarnish than brass. Aphthite is a " gold,"
which does not change, and is composed of

eight hundred parts of copper, twenty-five
of platinum, and ten of tungsten. Its
shade of color may be changed by varying
the proportions of its constituent metals.
Sideraphthite is a similar "silver" metal,
and is composed of sixty-five parts of iron,
twenty-three of nickel, four of tungsten,
five of aluminum, and five of copper. These
alloys are capable of resisting hydrosulphu-
ric acid, are not attacked by organic acids,
and are only slightly attacked by inorganic
acids.

NOTES.

Mr. F. H. King, State Geologist, esti-
mates the bird population of Wisconsin at
sixty-six per square mile, or 3,565,000 for
the State. Each bird is assumed to eat fifty
insects a day, or 6,000 for the summer.
Hence all the birds will consume 21,884,-
000,000 insects a year. "Add to this
amount the work which these birds do in
their Southern homes, and we have a low
estimate of the influence they exert over in-
sect life."

An improvement on the Bunsen cell, by
M. Azapis, consists in substituting for the
acidulated water a solution of about fifteen
per cent of cyanide of potassium, caustic
potash, common salt, or sal-ammoniac. The
intensity in the new form is as great as in
Bunsen's, and the advantages are, greater
constancy, less waste of zinc, and very little
smell ; further, the zinc does not need amal-
gamating.

H. T. Cresson has obtained, from Aztec
clay flageolets, the fourth, seventh, and oc-
tave tones of the diatonic scale, and the ad-
ditional sounds or semitones which consti-
tute the chromatic scale. These notes are
produced by means of the four finger-holes
and by stopping or half stopping the bell of
the instrument. The flageolets are pitched
in different keys, and, if the Aztecs knew
the full capacity of their instruments, their
music must have far surpassed that of other
uncivilized peoples.

Professor Archibald Geikie remarks,
concerning the future history of the Grand
Canon of the Colorado, that it has still about
a thousand feet to remove from the bottom
of its channel before its slope will become
so slight that its erosive power will nearly
cease, and that it is conceivable that, should
no geological revolution occur in the region,
the canon may still be deepened to that
amount. There are indications, however,
that a limit maybe set to the possible depth
of the chasm. As in the " creep " of a coal-
mine, the bottom of the canon, relieved from

i44

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

the weight of the overlying column of rock,
may be forced upward by the pressure of
the walls on either side. In that case, the
channel might rise as fast as the river cut it
down, so long as nothing occurred at the
surface materially to diminish the height of
the walls.

Shad, which were first introduced there
seven years ago, are now to be found all
along the coast of California, and are rapidly
making their way northward. The "run"
in the Columbia River this year was described
as wonderful, and the fish were a drug in the
market. In California they have not yet
come into popular use, owing partly to the
fact that the closed season established by
law is just when they are in the rivers. The
order of their running in that State is differ-
ent from that in the Atlantic States. They
appear in San Francisco Bay in October, and
leave it in May ; while for other parts of the
coast their run begins later as the latitude
increases.

The Convocation of the University of
Oxford has voted £10,000 for building a
laboratory, working-rooms, and lecture-room
for the Waynflete Professor of Physiology,
Dr. Burdon-Sanderson. The grant was op-
posed by some of the members of the board,
on the ground of their objections to vivisec-
tion, but was carried by a majority of three
in a house of one hundred and ninety-three
members.

A curious application is made of liquid
carbonic acid at Krupp's foundry, in Essen,
Prussia. The cannon made there are bound
with rings, which are put on in nearly the
same manner as the tires are put on wagon-
wheels ; that is, they are heated very hot,
and driven on over the cold cannon, so that
when they cool they hold it very tight.
Sometimes it is desirable to get the rings
off. This is done by freezing the cannon
by means of the evaporation of liquid car-
bonic acid, when they contract and leave the
rings loose. The French journal, "La Pro-
duction," calls the operation " a formidably
neat one, and of really Herculean elegance."

Dr. Chaille, of New Orleans, has made
a study of the influence of the inundations
to which Louisiana is subject upon health.
He finds that they do not cause inevitably
or generally any notable increase of malaria
or of other disease, and that they certainly
do not usually either cause or promote
epidemics. Their direct influence is, there-
fore, not usually to be dreaded. They may,
however, in certain soils and conditions be
charged with after-influences of a deleteri-
ous character, as when the soil is loaded
with malaria, or deposits of filth have accu-
mulated upon it. Such soils and deposits,
festering in the sun after the floods have
retired, may develop very serious evils.

M. Perrier describes an Asteria ( Caulas-
ter peduiiculatus) that was dredged up in the
Travailleur expedition, which appears to
furnish a link between the ancient crinoids
and the modern star-fishes. It is a star-fish,
having on its back a peduncle quite similar
to that of the crinoids, which is surrounded
by a system of plates resembling those that
composed the "calyx" of those animals.
The peduncle probably served as a support
for the young star-fish while it was tempo-
rarily fixed, and was probably destined to
disappear by the progress of development ;
but this view needs to be confirmed by fur-
ther examination.

M. Marchand, having repeated with wa-
ter some of the experiments which Professor
Tyndall has performed on the air, declares
that there is no really clear water in exist-
ence. Filling a bottle with the liquid, he
covered it with black paper, and pierced in
the paper two holes at opposite points.
Looking through the holes at the light, the
dust-particles floating in the water were
made plainly visible. They were trans-
parent, only two millimetres in diameter,
and elastic enough to pass through the
closest filters.

Mr. Joseph "Willcox remarked at a re-
cent meeting of the Academy of Sciences of
Philadelphia on the scarcity of springs and
running streams in Canada. Where streams
exist, they are almost exclusively the out-
lets of lakes. He ascribes the feature to
the fact that the ancient glaciers swept away
a large proportion of the soil of the coun-
try, leaving the underlying rocks usually
near the surface, and in many cases visible
above the ground. Thus the material is de-
ficient which, in countries where springs and
streams abound, soaks up the rain and melt-
ing snow, and afterward gives out a peren-
nial flow of water.

"La Nature" records the death, at Ca-
tania, Sicily, in the thirty-third year of his
age, of M. Tedeschi di Ercole, an investi-
gator of earthquakes and volcanic and other
physical phenomena, and a frequent con-
tributor to it on subjects relating to them.

Mr. Jacob Ennis specifies as two great
works to be done on our sidereal system — to
ascertain what way the great ring of the
milky way revolves, and to discover in what
direction to look for the center of the svs-
tern and estimate its distance. The tasks
are to be wrought out gradually by observ-
ing and measuring the proper motions of
the stars, and composing a map by the aid
of which the relations of those motions to
each other and to the common center may
be determined. The details of his method
are explained in a pamphlet of twelve pages
published bv Judd & Detweiler, Washington,
D.C.

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT.

THE

POPULAR SCIENCE
MONTHLY.

DECEMBER, 1883.

ALEXANDER YON HUMBOLDT *

By EMIL DU BOIS-EEYMOND,

EECTOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN.

PROPERLY to appreciate Alexander von Humboldt's life-work,,
one must form a conception of the intellectual atmosphere from
which he issued. The opinion may not unfrequently be found among
laymen that there was no real German naturalist before Humboldt,
They are accustomed, as if to a Hercules, to ascribe all deeds to him.
It is not necessary to say that this is all a mistake ; but even profes-
sional naturalists frequently remember too little of our older history.
I do not speak of the almost ancient figures of Copernicus, Kepler, and
Otto von Guericke ; nor of Leibnitz, who had as clear a comprehen-
sion of the fundamental ideas of nature as we ; but the eighteenth
century displays names worthy of the highest degree of respect, almost
as brilliant as these.

The Bernoullis developed analytic mechanics, Euler recognized the
feasibility of achromatic glasses, Tobias Mayer reformed the theory of
the moon, Lambert laid the foundation of photometry, Kant conceived
the nebular hypothesis, and William Herschel, whom we count among
our own, enlarged our knowledge of the starry heavens almost as if the
telescope had just been discovered. Had the Dutch physicists left
him time, the Canon of Camin would have certainly possessed a perfect

* From a memorial address delivered in the hall of the university, August 3, 1883.
The 'speaker began his address by referring to the custom of annually celebrating the
foundation of the university and the memory of its founder, King Frederick William III
of Prussia ; he then related the history of the efforts to raise funds to erect the statues
of the brothers William and Alexander von Humboldt, just placed in the grounds of the
university. Following this account with a brief comparative estimate of the talents of
the two brothers, he continued, speaking more especially of Alexander.
vol. xxiv. — 1Q

146 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

title to have the Leyden-jar called by his name. Volta's* electrophore
is really Wilcke's discovery. Segner's water-wheel, Leidenfrost's and
Sulzer's experiments, became the germs of important discoveries and ap-
plications. Stahl's phlogiston, even if it was a false conception, and
Haller's elementa, in the long run, made chemistry and physiology
German sciences. Herr Hofman has very lately taught us how to
appreciate Marggraf's services in technical chemistry. Yater and
Lieberkilhn are still mentioned in the finer anatomy, and the first part
of Sommering's classical activity belongs to the same category. Cas-
par Frederick Wolf reformed the development-history and outlined
the doctrine of the metamorphosis of plants. As early as 1785 Blu-
menbach, the founder of physical anthropology, led a class in com-
parative anatomy. In natural history, Rosel earnestly advanced the
labors of Swammerdam and Reaumur ; Ledermuller described the
creatures which he called infusorice. Gleditsch performed the experi-
mental demonstration of the sexuality of the phanerogams by fer-
tilizing the palms in our botanical gardens with pollen from Leipsic.
Even in classification, in which the rivalry of the seafaring nations
with the Germans was so arduous, a few, like the creator of our fish-
collection, Bloch, won imperishable fame. Germans also approved
themselves as scientific travelers : the two Forsters, Cook's compan-
ions around the world ; and in connection with the Russian expedition
for observing the second transit of Yenus, our Pallas, as a student of
the Siberian fauna. Finally, in geognosy had Werner secured the
uncontested leadership for the Germans as the pre-eminently mining
people, among whom Agricola had previously created mineralogy.

This enumeration, which might be considerably extended, shows
what good progress German natural science had made in the last cen-
tury. Indeed, it is doubtful whether any other people can boast of a
greater richness of notable achievements during the same period. But,
toward the end of the century, the aspect was changed, to our disad-
vantage, and not without our fault.

After its early bloom in the middle ages, and the activity of the
Reformation, the German mind, disturbed in its development by the
Thirty Years' War, remained, as respects literary production, in the
background. At most, it trifled a little in a tasteless way. Then,
all at once, in the second half of the century, it rose to so mighty
a flight that it not only recovered its lost rank, but placed itself,
in some kinds of poetic creation, at the head of modern mankind.
A constellation of talent arose, the like of which the ages of Augustus
and Louis XIY did not see, nor the fifteenth century, except in other
fields. Who can describe the intoxication of the nation, when im-
mortal songs announced that the king's son had come whose kiss
was to awaken the thorn-rose of German poetry out of its half a
thousand years' slumber? At the same time there pressed upon us
the new naturalism and emotionalism from England, and enlighten-

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. H7

ment and gushing philanthropy from France. German society now
acquired a strong literary interest. But while that part of the edu-
cated world which was susceptible to the more tender emotions led
an aesthetic dream-life, the stronger minds were chained to the con-
templation of the antique, or were sunk in the profundities of the
simultaneously ripened critical philosophy. Thus the thought of the
nation was far removed from realities, and directed toward beautiful
fancies and ideal truths. If this had had the result of only diverting
some from research and observation, the loss might have been borne.
But, with the thoroughness with which the German does everything,
the damage went deeper. The distinctions between aesthetic and scien-
tific demands were effaced from the universal comprehension. The
intuitions of art usurped the place of induction and deduction. Even
the critique of the reason, just achieved by Kant, was pushed aside as
narrow-minded scholasticism. An arrogant speculation believed its
synthetic judgments a priori had grown so strong that it could under-
take to construct the world from a few delusive formulas, and it looked
down with extreme insolence upon the unpretentious daily work of the
empiric. In short, the day came of that false philosophy which re-
dounded to the shame of German science for a quarter of a century,
whose advocates threatened our own generation, and which the best
heads, elevating vague fancy and taste above the practical, were least
able to resist.

The recollection of this perversion of the German mind is the more
mortifying because it occurred simultaneously with the brightest
phases of science outside of Germany, especially in France. While
under the first republic and the first empire the muses were hushed to
silence, there was gathered in Paris a circle of learned men of whom
not only has each one left a bright trace behind him, but also in which
as a whole lived the comprehension of the true method to which the
Academy of Sciences has always persistently adhered. Coulomb and
Lavoisier, Laplace and Cuvier, Biot and Arago, were partly the fore-
runners, partly the coryphees of that great epoch from which is dated
the leadership which, during the first half of this century, made Paris
the scientific capital.

The period of this momentous transformation in Germany, when
aesthetic contemplation of the world and overweening speculation were
mutually crowning each other and pushing intelligent experiment, like
Cinderella, into a corner — this period was that of Alexander von Hum-
boldt's youth. A remarkable youth he must have been, exuberant of
thought, and yet burning with the thirst for action ; eloquent and en-
thusiastic like a poet, and yet devoted with all his mind to the study of
Nature; in knowledge already a reflection of the Cosmos, and yet inde-
fatigable in accurate examination and experiment ; a born master of
the German speech, yet at home in every idiom ; in such guise he ap-
peared in the intellectual center of the Germany of the day, in Jena,

148 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

younger than Goethe by twenty, than Schiller by ten years, and yet
welcomed by both as if he were their peer in age.

He figured as the friend of Willdenow, Georg Forster, and Leo-
pold von Buch, as the pupil of Blumenbach, Lichtenberg, and Werner,
already known by minor writings in which his industrious manysided-
ness had early displayed itself, already a much-traveled man according
to the ideas of the day, and, although of independent means, a servant
of the state, on the way to the highest honors. In what was he not
interested, and what did he not take up ? Ancient weaving, subterra-
nean flora, basalt, meteorological phenomena, the theory of logarithms,
had engaged him ; but, when it was worth while, he knew how to con-
centrate his strength upon a single point. Galvani's discovery had
recently stirred naturalists and physicians to effort. " In the fall of
1792, having become acquainted with it in Vienna, Humboldt, trav-
ersing Germany in every direction as a miner, physicist, and botanist,
'wandering upon desolate and remote mountains where he was some-
times cut off from all literary intercourse,' already revolving the plan
of his tropical journey in his head, had still found time to make thou-
sands of most delicate experiments. Even on horseback, besides ham-
mer, glass, and compass, he was never without 'his galvanic apparatus,
a pair of metal rods, pincers, a glass stand and an anatomical knife,'
and the curse which the Bolognan anatomist had invoked upon the
poor race of batrachians overtook them under Humboldt's hand, even
in places in which they had previously been secure from it." Now he
had talked with Alessandro Yolta, in his villa on the Lake of Como, of
the crucial experiment in animal electricity, Galvani's convulsion with-
out metals, and was preparing to collect the results of his investiga-
tions in the book on " Excited Muscular and Nervous Fibers." He
must confirm his own researches with experiments on frogs' legs,
and he opportunely called not only his brother, but also " Herr von
Goethe," to be his witnesses.

Among the various individualities which were united in him into a
complicated whole, and which we meet in analyzing this being, is first
of all an artist. The " Rhodian Genius," the " Views of Nature," the
address at the opening of the assembly of naturalists, are art- works.
That work of Humboldt's which, like Goethe's " Faust," contemplated
from youth, was completed with an astonishing energy only in an ad-
vanced old age, may certainly claim to be an artist's production. We
shall for the present leave unanswered the question of the utility of this
kind of mingling of the poetic element with the scientific, in which we
may recognize a return to the models of Plato and Lucretius. Aside
from his native propensity, Humboldt was led toward it by the aesthetic
manner of thinking then prevailing in Germany, which had become a
second nature to him, and especially by his intercourse with our great
poets. It must not, however, be forgotten that something of the same
kind had been observed a little while before in France. Buffon's

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. i49

" Epoques de la Nature," his sketches, flowing in splendid word-waves,
of men and animals, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's magnificent pictures
of tropical nature, were well fitted to spur Humboldt's literary ambi-
tion in emulation of them. If his style has lately been criticised, that
shows that he had a style. Indulgence in the creation of beautiful
forms of language was agreeable to the taste of his age ; and why
should I not tell how he, presuming upon a similar receptivity in my-
self, read to me from the proof-sheets of his " Cosmos " passages which
particularly pleased him, such as the one in which he ingeniously sum-
marizes all that the moon is to our earth ; enlivening the firmament by
its changes, comforting the heart with its mild luster, and in geological
periods carving out continents through the erosive work of the tides ?
More subject to criticism is the other influence which the dominat-
ing mind of Humboldt exercised over Germany in his ninetieth year.
At nothing are laymen more surprised than when they hear that Hum-
boldt did not stand on the extreme height as a naturalist, but that his
situation in a mental respect was like that he found himself in on Chim-
borazo, when an impassable chasm separated him from the summit.
The gap which opened between him and the topmost peak of natural
science, was the want of physico-mathematical knowledge. Not that
this was denied his talents. He had in his youth an inclination to pure
mathematical research. But the taste, and later also the mental habit,
of analyzing phenomena within a certain scope and tracing them to
their ultimate recognizable principles, deserted him. He became satis-
fied with establishing and examining facts. The mere telling, even at
large, of those things that occupied his vision, and which he compre-
hended to the most minute details, or could deduce at every instant,
was tiresome to him. It was, indeed, the cosmos ; only there is, in
that highest sense, no scientific comprehension of the cosmos. Mathe-
matical physics knows of no difference between cosmos and chaos. By
blind natural necessity, by the central forces of atoms independent of
time, or by some other equivalent hypothesis of the constitution of
matter, it concedes that cosmos may have come out of chaos. The
cosmos, the beautiful and harmonious aggregate of nature, is an aes-
thetic anthropomorphism. Humboldt explained the title " Cosmos '
with the phrase, " Sketch of a physical description of the universe."
According to Herr Gustav Kirchhoff's definition of mechanics, one
might easily place these words upon Newton's "Principia" or Laplace's
" Mecanique celeste." But, by description, Humboldt understood only
a graphic, not a mechanical description, and there is the same differ-
ence between his description of the world and that of Newton or La-
place as between the description of a plant and the calculation of a dis-
turbance. In that he adhered to his conception through his whole life,
and attached the highest value to it, he showed himself a genuine child
of a stage of discipline more fitted for artistic methods of view than
for scientific analysis.

i5o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

While German science was involved in the enervating network of
aesthetic speculations, his own energy and happy skill enlisted Hum-
boldt in wider spheres of healthy activity for its salvation. Even in
our fast-living age, it is hard to conceive that only two years after he
had been enjoying in the Saal Valley those visions, short indeed, but
in a certain sense, like a young love, decisive as to his life, he was
observing in Cumana the first periodical shower of stars, and discov-
ering the electric folds in the brain of the torpedo-eel ; was exploring
the caves of Caripe resonant with the cries of the guachero ; was
threading in a pirogue, environed with alligators, the stream-net of the
Rio Negro and the Cassiquiare between the Orinoco and the Amazon ;
and in Esmeralda, on the upper Orinoco, was observing the concoction
by the natives of the weird arrow-poison, curare, which owes its
name to him. Nothing was wanting to raise the fantastic charm of
these journeys, from which, nevertheless, Humboldt brought back a
greater sum of acute, distinct observations in every conceivable field
of science, in geography and anthropology, than any single observer
ever collected either before him or after him. No ! The world will
" never see his like " in comprehensive, restless activity, combined with
lofty thought ; in dauntless venture for ideas, with the wisest saving of
means and strength ; in soaring height of feeling, the expression of
which frequently, in view of the sad contentions of mankind or of the
horrors of slavery, for instance, has an elegiac tone, as in a similar way
a delicate haze adorns his sketches of the giant heights of the Cor-
dilleras.

It is essential to the success of a scientific journey, first of all, that
the traveler return. But, besides threatening him with physical dan-
gers, which Humboldt's apparently not very strong body resisted won-
derfully, long journeys in wild regions have other inconvenient conse-
quences. Habituation to perfect freedom in solitude, to constant
change and external stimulation, even excitement, the diversion from
accustomed literary occupations, render it very hard for travelers to
feel themselves at home again, to give themselves up to the compli-
cated demands of cultivated society, and to be satisfied to make the
most of the treasures they have brought with them. They seem to
prefer to such allegiance a return to the wilderness, so that it is said
of African travelers that the greatest danger that threatens them is
the unconquerable propensity, when they have once escaped the perils
of the journey, to try them again. Thus it was with Humboldt's fel-
low-traveler, Bonpland, who was drawn back to South America, where
it was his fate, not to perish, but to be lost to science, a prisoner to
Dr. Francia. He left to Humboldt, in whom no trace of such weak-
ness could be found, the fruit of many of their common labors.

Humboldt had lived in Paris before his journey. He now perma-
nently fixed his place of labor there, as the only place where he could
perfect the literary undertakings he had planned ; and as with curious

ALEXANDER VOJST HUMBOLDT. i$1

facility he had become a Spaniard in New Spain, so, without denying
his German, he made the Parisian academicians forget that he was not
a Frenchman. In this, that gift of ready wit with which, while a stu-
dent at Frankfort, he had troubled the more serious William, and
which he used as a powerful weapon in his subsequent court-life, was
of much advantage to him. Associated with Gay-Lussac and Proven-
cal in labors which are still instructive, he was received into that small
circle of learned men that gathered around the venerable Berthollet
at Arcueil. All of these and numerous other friendships of Hum-
boldt's are thrown into the shade by the life-long connection he formed
with Arago, to which the contrast of their natures lent a peculiar
charm.

Humboldt was at first sight of insignificant, flattering, and pliant
appearance, Arago of imposing bearing, a type of fiery Southern man-
hood ; Humboldt of encyclopedic mind and knowledge, Arago an
astronomer and mathematico-physicist of so sharply limited a scope
and so strict a school that, while he analyzed according to three axes
the modifying effects which neighboring masses of metals exercise
upon magnetic deflections, he left it to Faraday, who could not square
a binomial, to find out their causes. Like Humboldt, Arago was a
master of comprehensive scientific description ; but, while Humboldt
inclined to melting pathos, the dazzling polish of Arago's keen lan-
guage becomes a tiresome mannerism. Sympathy in political views
was a bond between them. Arago was a republican, Humboldt called
himself a democrat of 1789. Probably this was the reason of the
contemptuous condescension with which Napoleon I, among whose
faults was not want of respect for science, used to meet him.

In connection with Arago, Humboldt, as he was fond of telling,
ruled for twenty years what was then the first scientific body in the
world. If not of his fame, this period was the climax of his life. As
in the primitive forest he had watched through nights undisturbed by
the murmur of the cataracts, the humming of the mosquitoes, the
near roaring of the jaguars, and the fearful cry of the beasts in the
tree-tops above him, so now were the confusing pressure of the world's
metropolis, the thousand personal demands daily thrust upon him, the
brilliant society of the salon, the intrigues of academical lobbies, to
him only a pleasant, stimulating life-element. He found gratification
in this mental tumult, which, busy with the air and matter of life,
overlooked him while he built up the gigantic coral structure of the
many-membered story of his travels. More and more consumed with
an inextinguishable enthusiasm for science ; in unlimited devotion to
-knowledge, neglecting domestic fortune ; drawing into the line of his
activity hosts of learned men and artists, and skillfully utilizing their
talents for his own objects ; not, indeed, teaching ex cathedra, but in-
spiring youth by his example and continually encouraging them — he
was at that time in Paris, as afterward in Berlin, a central figure, from

i52 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

which force radiated on every side, and in which numerous threads ran
together.

That was the time when he, sometimes with an essay only a few
pages long, created new studies, like that of plant-geography ; or by
some suggestive medium of graphic representation, such as the iso-
thermal curves, revealed the law hidden in formless masses of single
facts. As the whole real world waved before his inner vision, so
" swelled before him also the historical flood of floods," only that he
festooned the bare scaffold of civic history with the fruit and flower
garlands of the history of civilization, of discovery, and of art. As
Uhland composed some of his finest romances in Paris, there likewise
originated the " Views of Nature," Humboldt's favorite work.

While the reminiscences of Jena were thus revived in him, his
mind was nevertheless permanently purified from much dross that had
clouded it in those days. In the interval that separates Humboldt's
labors after the journey to the tropics from the " Experiments on Ex-
cited Muscular and Nervous Fibers," we recognize the influence of his
intercourse with the Parisian academicians, of their always careful,
frequently exaggeratedly skeptical views. In one point, excelling
through the greater depth of German thought, he left his masters
behind him. While a kind of shallow vitalism was prevailing in
France, Humboldt had long passed the position he had once sustained
in the " Rhodian Genius," and had explained the process of life as a
result of the physical and chemical qualities of the matters combined
in the organic texture.

It is perhaps less known that Humboldt was a pre-Darwinian Dar-
winian. He gave me the "Essay on Classification," sent him by Louis
Agassiz, in which, only three years before the appearance of the " Origin
of Species," a book Humboldt did not live to see, the doctrine of peri-
ods of creation and teleological views were portrayed with unblunted
sharpness, and supported by numerous plausible arguments. Hum-
boldt's expressions on this occasion left me no doubt that he, far from
sympathizing with Agassiz's views, was a believer in mechanical causa-
tion, and an evolutionist. If we may credit certain Parisian traditions,
Humboldt and Cuvier were not on the best footing with each other.
Perhaps Humboldt was more inclined toward the doctrines of Lamarck
and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

It is time to consider what had become of German science during
this period. It had, in a certain sense, sunk deeper and deeper. Philo-
sophical speculation had won ground at nearly all points, and in nearly
all the universities its subtilties were announced as ready wisdom by
professional philosophers as well as by naturalists and doctors, and
were eagerly taken up by the misguided youth. Goethe's false theo-
ries and maxims, supported by his fame as a poet, increased the con-
fusion. The wars of Napoleon did harm to German science, not only
by external force, but also through the Christian-romantic reaction

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. i53

against the Hellenistic classicism of the preceding period that came in
with the national rising.

Not that there were wanting voices to protest against the disorder,
or men who knew better, but who disdained to engage in contention
with persons talking like madmen. Germany could still boast of one
of the first mathematicians and mathematico-physicists of all time.
On his return, Humboldt had found the academy at Paris full of the
fame of the youthful author of " Disquisitiones Arithmeticae." Be-
sides Humboldt, there were then in Paris to save the reputation of
German science our Paul Erman, who received from the academy the
prize in galvanism founded by Napoleon, and whose anatomy of the
Echinoderms was also crowned by it, and pre-eminently Gauss. But
even Gauss illustrates how small a place science and mathematics had
in German ideas. Our pleasure in the dainty jest which Heinrich
Heine, in his " Reisebildern," utters against the scientists of Guttingen,
in the spcrtive parallel between Georgia Augusta and Bologna, is some-
what troubled when we remember that among those scientists was the
immortal Gauss. Never on a similar occasion would a young French
poet have overlooked the existence of Laplace.

Finally, the revolution approached. " The brilliant and brief satur-
nalia of a purely ideal natural science," as Humboldt mildly described
it, was drawing toward an end. Natural philosophy had fulfilled none
of its glittering promises ; its draught, foaming and pungent at first, had
grown stale. And just as, two generations before, a race of poets and
thinkers had been produced all at once, so it happened, by a coinci-
dence so remarkable that we guess a law in it, that there arose at this
time a healthy and strong crop of genuine naturalists. There was,
however, another element by which the external fortune of German sci-
ence was henceforward materially affected. Frederick the Great had
kept the eyes of the world turned toward the capital of his monarchy
for half a century. By the calling of such men as Maupertius, Euler,
and Lagrange, he had given the Academy of Sciences, recently founded
by him, a temporary high luster, partly borrowed from abroad. A seat
of German intellectual life, Berlin did not become, under him. The
center of culture in Berlin lay in the French colony. If we abstract
Lessing's brief residence, Moses Mendelssohn, the prototype of his
Nathan, the correct, frigid Ramler, and the author of " The Joys of
the Young Werther," Berlin had, in the last century, hardly attained
any importance in German literature.

That since then Berlin, having become the political capital of Ger-
many, has also pushed into the advance of the other German cities in
an intellectual respect, was not the effect of a single cause, nor the
work of any one man. Chief in the succession of circumstances that
contributed to it was unquestionably the creation of the University of
Berlin. The university could, indeed, not raise a new German Par-
nassus, even if the Berlin of that time had been the place for it ; and

i54 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

it could also only indirectly contribute to the blossoming of art. But
it became, in the pursuit of its work from the first, the most important
center of German knowledge as a whole. In reality the general en-
lightenment which had so often comforted the nation in its divisions,
still remained spread over Germany to its salvation. In some points
Berlin saw itself surpassed by small universities like that of Giessen.
Between these and Berlin there was, however, always the difference
that, while now and then some one or another small university would
blaze up like a variable star to the first magnitude in some branch or
another, to sink in a little while back into comparative obscurity, the
sum of the asrsrresrated mental forces in the Berlin University and
Academy was the same, or rather increased, from the beginning.

Almost simultaneously with the blossoming of the university, in
alliance with the national rising, and favored by the growth of the
city and its prosperity, there had also been developed here a real Ger-
man culture, and a perhaps not very productive but cleverly critical
society had collected whose influence on German intellectual life was
more perceptible because of the preponderance with which Berlin had
come out of the war for freedom. As far as the habitual influence of
so many older centers of learning and the independent spirit of the
Germans, hostile to centralization, permitted, Berlin henceforth main-
tained the rank of intelligence appropriate to it as the capital of the
state. That illustrious circle of writers, artists, and actively sym-
pathizing women is now inconceivable without the background of the
Berlin University ; without Schleiermacher and Frederick Augustus
"Wolf, Savigny and Carl Hitter, Boeckh and Lachmann, Buttmann and
Bopp, Hegel and Gauss ; and in this sense we may say, that, through
the foundation of the university, William von Humboldt elevated
Berlin to be the intellectual capital of Germany.

While the University of Berlin fully represented science in nearly
every direction, every mental phase of the nation was likewise reflected
in it. Here was fought out in jurisprudence the battle between the
historical and the philosophical schools ; here was seen, in theology,
dogmatic reaction to give way to rationalism. Here unrestrained
speculation continued to have its way for a long time, natural phi-
losophy blew its last party-colored bubbles, and Goethe's Farbenlehre
was taught ex cathedra. Here it was, also, that that host of men
arose who, in connection with many illustrious minds still adorning
the Fatherland, repaired the faults of philosophical error, and gave to
natural science an activity which was full of consequence for the
world as well as for Prussia and Germany, and which still continues.
Is it necessary to name them, when so many of them are looking down
upon us from these walls — Eilhard Mitscherlich, Heinrich and Gus-
tav Rose, Encke and Poggendorff, Weiss and Lichtenstein, Ehrenberg
and Johannes Muller, Dove and Gustav Magnus, and besides them
the mathematicians, Lejeune-Dirichlet and Steiner, and later still

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. 155

Jacobi ; and finally, yet remaining among us, the last of his race,
Herr Peter Riess ? It was a glorious time for German science, little
as a precocious and spoiled youth is wont to esteem the men who,
themselves almost without teachers, trained their teachers ; a time to
write whose connected history, the materials for which lie at hand in
numerous memorial addresses, would be a thankful task and a patriotic
duty ; for it was the time when the German nationality, to which so
much importance is now attached, grew strong in science also, to
proud independence. But the crowning was reserved for the epoch
in which Alexander von Humboldt exchanged his former residence in
Paris for Berlin. The Italian double-entry book-keeping, which he
had learned when young in the trade-school at Hamburg, enabled him,
as he told me, to observe how his originally quite considerable means
were wasting away in the sums which the publication of his travel-
work consumed. When this occasion compelled him, in obedience to
the wish of King Frederick William III, much against his inclination,
to remove to Prussia, we can only see in this turn of fortune the
fulfillment of his high calling, and in the epos of his " much-moved
life " admire the remarkable concatenation by means of which, during
Alexander's long absence, his brother William, by the foundation of
the Berlin University, had prepared a suitable location for his con-
tinued activity.

It is hard in this all-leveling time to give an idea of the dominant
position that spontaneously fell to him here. In consequence of the
long depression of science in Germany and its contemporaneous bloom
in France, Paris was endowed in the eyes of German naturalists with
a luster of which the present generation knows nothing. We learned
from French text-books, we worked with instruments made in Parisian
shops, and a long residence in Paris was considered an indispensable
finish to a good scientific education. We may conceive, from this
consideration, what a halo would surround the head of a man who
had played such a part in Paris as Humboldt had done. He returned
home as a king comes back to his kingdom after a long campaign of
conquest, and was received by the circle of Berlin naturalists, which
had grown up in the mean time, as a prince is received by his magnates.

We can more easily represent to-day the favorable circumstances
that assured to the brother of William von Humboldt his familiar
place in the highest circles of society and his relations to the court.
The Cosmos-lectures, the meeting of the German naturalists at Berlin
in 1828, the journey into Central Asia, made under the commission of
the Czar of Russia, pressed Alexander von Humboldt's figure before
the German public far in advance of that of any other scientific man.
His peculiar dependent-independent position between the court and
ministry ; the impregnable footing of scientific fame and unselfish
exertion on which he stood ; his profound knowledge of men and af-
fairs, and his perfect tact ; a power for work that was equal to numer-

156 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ous visits, notes, and letters, as well as to days and nights of con-
tinuous observations of magnetic terms ; and, finally, a grace in inter-
course that disarmed all contradiction — all of these things together
made him a real power ; and how frequently did he use his power for
the good of this university !

At that time, when the limited means of the state made it harder
to raise a couple of hundred thalers for scientific purposes than as
many thousand marks now, no emergency arose for which Humboldt
did not obtain the needed means by his personal intercession ; and as
now the Academy of Sciences will on satisfactory assurances advance
money to young men engaged in merely prospective scientific enter-
prises, so was Humboldt then the earthly providence of all students.
What matter is it that his zeal was sometimes mistaken, and that
among the number of those to whom he opened the way was now and
then one who came short of fulfilling the hopes set upon him ? Even
academicians are not infallible in the choice of their proteges. If he
had a preference for travelers, for his own specialty, did he not also
let his sun shine on philologists as well as on naturalists ? Who would
examine as with a psychological lens the secret motives that impelled
him to such touching sacrifices for things quite remote from him ?
Of course, Humboldt had the faults of his virtues. Ambition is the
source of all greatness, but it is hard to draw the line that separates it
from vanity. Humboldt used his sharp tongue and pen not only as
weapons of defense, but he frequently gave them freer license than
was perhaps good. But what signifies the dread that some felt of his
criticisms, in the face of such testimony as that of August Boeckh,
that he never came away from Humboldt's presence without feeling
exalted and inspired with new love for all that is good and noble ?
There is one other example of a personality which, like Humboldt's,
reached such power by pure intellectual force that peoples on both
sides of the great sea waited for his words, and kings listened to him :
this was Voltaire, in the eighteenth century. The two men, notwith-
standing the deep-reaching differences between them, afford many
points of resemblance. Both were born in a capital — Voltaire in Paris,
Humboldt in Berlin; Voltaire reaching out of the " grand century " into
a new period which he had helped to introduce ; Humboldt from the
classical period of our literature to a new scientific period that had been
partly prepared for by him ; in both a poet was paired with a natural-
ist, but the poet predominating in Voltaire, the naturalist in Humboldt ;
both disappearing from the scene for a period in youth, Voltaire to
return after his study-travel to England, Humboldt from his tropical
journey, with great acquisitions ; Voltaire afterward in Berlin, Hum-
boldt, at least in his later abode in Paris, living near the throne ; both
occasionally intrusted with diplomatic business ; both animated to the
noblest exertions, but not above a well-directed jest ; both regarding
mankind as their family, without a domestic hearth ; Voltaire power-

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. 157

fully grasping the tragic fate of Calas, Sirven, and De la Barre, Hum-
boldt in happier times only summoning his force to obtain a salary for
poor Eisenstein, or to prosecute Haupt's appeal ; the fame of both
suffering from the fact that their teachings and discoveries having
long ago become common property, only a few know whom to thank
for them ; finally, both in extreme old age glowing " with that youth
which never forsakes us," and active to the latest breath ; Voltaire
busy with his " Irene " and the " Dictionnaire de l'Academie," Hum-
boldt with the " Cosmos." What the " Experiments on Excited Mus-
cular and Nervous Fibers " was for the youth Humboldt, and the
" Travels " and " Views of Nature " for the man, the " Cosmos " was for
the old man. We have already questioned the fundamental thought
of this famous book from the point of view of theoretical natural his-
tory, and of the doctrine of the persistence of force. We have frequent-
ly entertained the query whether such a mixture of styles as rules
in it is correct or not. It certainly is not becoming to the naturalist.
But it is clear that it is exactly this form of representation that makes
possible the immense influence of the book, that has over the whole
inhabited earth prompted hundreds of thousands to join in asking
questions they had not thought of before ; that, particularly in Ger-
many, lifted the ban under which natural science had lain in the ideas of
the cultivated, as if it were a domain from which common men were
excluded, and were accessible only to a few particularly qualified to
enter it, and about which one need not be concerned unless he have
some special inclination or calling for it. It has been remarked that
by science the French understand only natural science, by Wissen-
schaft the Germans only mental science. Goethe's scientific efforts, in
consequence of their semi-aesthetic character, their desultoriness, and
the bitter hostility he showed to all associated research, could not
change the case. If it is now different, and the state recognizes the
full importance of science, it is, of course, immediately the result of
the technical triumphs science has achieved. But the turn for the
better we ascribe originally to the Cosmos-lectures, which, for the first
time in Germany, led a cultivated German audience to imagine that
there was something else in the world than belles-lettres and music,
than the " Morgenblatt " and Henrietta Sonntag. And although Hum-
boldt himself, as we have already said, did not rise to the very apex
of science, it was, nevertheless, this less exalted height at which he
stopped that permitted him to make himself comprehensible to the
ordinary children of men.

While, indeed, he was not as sublime as Newton or Laplace, while
he did not mirror one side of the world in absolute perfection like
Gauss, he was able to make an entrance among the multitude for the
truths discovered by those archangels of science. While he shared
with them the universal human feeling for the beautiful in sublime
things, he was incited to project a " picture of Nature," at the risk that

158 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

it would not give back the measure of the depth, and that no frame
could inclose the infinity of the object. Having once come out from
Heyne's philological school, and still, when sixty years old, with the
college portfolios under his arm, taking his place in our audience-rooms
among Boeckh's students, he was the man to lay the bridge between
the old and the new time, between the philological-historical, aesthetic-
speculative Germany, as the turn of the century saw it, and the mathe-
matico-scientific, technical, inductive Germany of our days.

The German people, indeed the world, has remembered his loving,
enthusiastic devotion. Not the thousands of well-observed, important,
and new facts with which he has enriched single branches ; not the
happy and suggestive thoughts thrown out as seed-corns and sometimes
grown up to new sciences ; still less his historical and geographical
works composed with ceaseless industry — furnish the reasons why he
sits out there in a marble image. The composition of the whole world
into an artistically harmonious figure attempted by him, the combina-
tion of the ideal with the real realized in him, of the poet with the
naturalist, made him, in Emerson's sense, a representative man of sci-
ence, and educated manhood in that statue has set up Alexander von
Humboldt as a personification of a new phase of its own genius, of
which it became conscious through him.

The custom of honoring the memory of a great man by a monu-
ment would have little significance if the monument had no other pur-
pose than to keep up that memory ; for, if the remembrance would
be lost without the monument, it would not be worth keeping up. The
monument should rather, calling back to thought the hero who has
gone out from among us, lead us, in reflecting on his virtues, to renew
the determination to emulate them. We should ask ourselves how the
man to whom we look up in grateful admiration would judge us if he
should return to us, and whether he would recognize us as worthy
prosecutors of the work he had begun.

Alexander von Humboldt died in a gloomy time. The reign of a
king friendly to the muses, to whom he had personally stood closer
than it is often allowed to a subject to stand, had fallen short of ful-
filling expectations. The rule of Napoleon III, personally hateful to
him, a friend of the house of Orleans, weighed upon France. A new
and strong hand had taken the reins of Prussian state life ; but it was
sad to close his eyes at the instant when even to us a momentous de-
cision seemed .unavoidable.

With how deep satisfaction Humboldt would now see the imperial
banners waving from the palace of the prince regent, and how the
revolution in the fortune of the Fatherland, which we have witnessed
since his death, would gratify him ! But how deeply would it pain
him to learn at what price the recovered power of the German Em-
pire had to be bought ! — that instead of the feeling of mutual esteem
and friendship which during his life had bound Germany and France,

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. i59

and to the confirmation of which he had contributed so much, had
come in on the side of the French vengeful hatred and unappeasable
hostility. Humboldt, a son of the eighteenth century, was, like Goethe,
cosmopolitan in his feelings, without being on that account any less a
patriot. Nothing would have shocked him, who spent the best part
of his life in Paris, in intercourse with the noblest men of the nation,
more than the preponderance of Chauvinism ; nothing would have
troubled him more than to observe that mental disease suggesting a
back-sliding into the barbarism of primitive society which is becoming
epidemic over Europe, and more seriously threatens the progress of
mankind than the rivalry of dynasties ever could do.

Among the articles of faith with which Humboldt was thoroughly
permeated, was that of the unity of the human race. On it he theo-
retically based his abhorrence of slavery, the worser side of which in
practice he had observed in its very home, and he spared no oppor-
tunity to make his convictions public. The Abolitionist party in the
United States did not fail to make use of so desirable a confederate,
and at many an anti-slavery meeting, besides " Uncle Tom's Cabin,"
brought the " Cosmos " into the fight. Humboldt did not live to see
the melancholy drama of the war of secession. The final defeat of
the slave-holders and the abolition of slavery would have given him
great joy. But how would we have stood before him, the friend of
the house of Mendelssohn, who corresponded with Henrietta Herz in
the Jewish current hand, if he had heard of the race-persecution we
have instituted ?

In science we could, however, point with peculiar pride to the in-
sight into the unity of the forces of Nature which has become so clear :
to spectrum analysis ; to the recognition of the nature of comets, a
sequel to his observations in Cumana ; and to the establishment of
the doctrine of descent, and the associated one of persistent natural
selection. To-day, when the nebular hypothesis has, through the me-
chanical theory of heat, been combined with geology, and the hand of
the doctrine of descent is reaching through paleontology over the
hiatus of spontaneous generation ; when we can so far survey the
birth of cosmos out of chaos as to be able clearly to define the really
doubtful points — now, perhaps, a " Cosmos " might be written, but no
one longer thinks of doing it. Two qualities which Humboldt pos-
sessed in the highest degree, and would be missed by us with regret
were necessary to it, and can no more be found — the view over the
whole field of science, and the careful effort to create beautiful forms.
Humboldt would also deeply lament the decay of the historical sense,
which often in the growth of science first teaches us the true connec-
tion of things.

Since Alexander von Humboldt was a universal naturalist, and
thought historically, while William, not less universal in the mental
sciences, sometimes acted as a naturalist, the two brothers met at

160 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

many points where the natural and mental sciences march upon each
other, and together formed, in the measure of the enlarged condition
of knowledge, a universitas liiteraria, as Leibnitz called it in his time.
The statues of the two brothers, in whom, by the rarest coincidence,
the various faculties of the human mind diverged and were again
drawn together, as in a German university, are therefore the most sig-
nificant ornament of our edifice, and lend it at once, by a speaking
symbolism, the character of a palace of science. The situation of this
building, opposite the palace of the ruling house, was a significant
mark of the capital of the Hohenzollerns. The Humboldt statues
confirm and perfect its significance. As fences and troops guard
against marauders by night, so do the spirits of these brothers keep
watch against the tricks of blockheads. Where William and Alexan-
der von Humboldt are sentries, there will always be the seat of the
noblest manly effort, of free investigation and free teaching.

■+•+-

SUGGESTIONS OX SOCIAL SUBJECTS.

PASSAGES SELECTED FROM PROFESSOR W. G. SUMXEr's NEW BOOK,
ENTITLED "WHAT SOCIAL CLASSES OWE TO EACH OTHER."

IX the introduction to his little volume, Professor Sumner remarks :
" During the last ten years I have read a great many books and
articles, especially by German writers, in which an attempt has been
made to set up * the state ' as an entity, having conscience, power, and
will sublimated above human limitations, and as constituting a tutelary
genius over us all. I have never been able to find in history or expe-
rience anything to fit this concept. I once lived in Germany for two
years, but I certainly saw nothing of it there then. Whether the
state which Bismarck is molding will fit the notion is at best a mat-
ter of faith and hope. My notion of the state has dwindled with
growing experience of life. As an abstraction, the state is to me only
All-of-us. In practice — that is, when it exercises will or adopts a line
of action — it is only a little group of men chosen in a very hap-hazard
way by the majority of us to perform certain services for all of us.
The majority do not go about their selection very rationally, and they
are almost always disappointed by the results of their own operation.
Hence * the state,' instead of offering resources of wisdom, right rea-
son, and pure moral sense, beyond what the average of us possess,
generally offers much less of all these things. Furthermore, it often
turns out in practice that ' the state ' is not even the known and ac-
credited servants of the state, but, as has been well said, is only some
obscure clerk hidden in the recesses of a government bureau into whose
power the chance has fallen for the moment to pull one of the stops

SUGGESTIONS ON SOCIAL SUBJECTS. 161

which control the government machine. In former days it often hap-
pened that * the state ■ was a barber, a fiddler, or a bad woman. In
our day it often happens that ' the state ' is a little functionary on
whom a big functionary is forced to depend."

In Chapter I — " On a New Philosophy : that Poverty is the
Best Policy " — Professor Sumner says : " It is commonly asserted that
there are in the United States no classes, and any allusion to classes is
resented. On the other hand, we constantly read and hear discussions
of social topics in which the existence of social classes is assumed as a
simple fact. ' The poor,' * the weak,' i the laborers,' are expressions
which are used as if they had exact and well-understood definitions.
Discussions are made to bear upon the assumed rights and misfortunes
of certain social classes ; and all public speaking and writing consists
in a large measure of the discussion of general plans for meeting the
wishes of classes of people who have not been able to satisfy their own
desires. These classes are sometimes discontented and sometimes not.
Sometimes they do not know that anything is amiss with them until
the * friends of humanity ' come to them with offers of aid. Some-
times they are discontented and envious. They do not take their
achievements as a fair measure of their rights. They do not blame
themselves or their parents for their lot as compared with that of other
people. Sometimes they claim that they have a right to everything of
which they feel the need for their happiness on earth. To make such a
claim against God or Nature would, of course, be only to say that we
claim a right to live on earth if we can. But God and Nature have
ordained the chances and conditions of life on earth once for all. The
case can not be reopened. We can not get a revision of the laws of
human life. We are absolutely shut up to the need and duty, if we
would learn how to live happily, of investigating the laws of Nature,
and deducing the rules of right living in the world as it is. These are
very wearisome and commonplace tasks. They consist in labor and
self-denial repeated over and over again, in learning and doing. When
the people whose claims we are considering are told to apply them-
selves to these tasks, they become irritated and feel almost insulted.
They formulate their claims as rights against society — that is, against
some other men. In their view they have a right not only to pur-
sue happiness, but to get it ; and, if they fail to get it, they think
they have, a claim to the aid of other men — that is, to the labor and
self-denial of other men — to get it for them. They find orators and
poets who tell them that they have grievances so long as they have
unsatisfied desires. . . . The humanitarians, philanthropists, and re-
formers, looking at the facts of life as they present themselves, find
enough which is sad and unpromising in the condition of many mem-
bers of society. They see wealth and poverty side by side. They
note great inequality of social position and social chances. They
eagerly set about the attempt to account for what they see, and

VOL. XXIV. — 11

\6z THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

to devise schemes for remedying what they do not like. In their
eagerness to recommend the less fortunate classes to pity and con-
sideration, they forget all about the rights of other classes ; they
gloss over all the faults of the classes in question, and they exaggerate
their misfortunes and their virtues. They invent new theories of
property, distorting rights and perpetrating injustice, as any one is
sure to do who sets about the readjustment of social relations with the
interests of one group distinctly before his mind and the interests of
all other groups thrown into the background. When I have read cer-
tain of these discussions, I have thought that it must be quite dis-
reputable to be respectable, quite dishonest to own property, quite
unjust to go one's own way and earn one's own living, and that the
only really admirable person was the good-for-nothing. The man who
by his own effort raises himself above poverty appears, in these dis-
cussions, to be of no account. The man who has done nothing to
raise himself above poverty finds that the social doctors flock about
him, bringing the capital which they have collected from the other
class, and promising him the aid of the state to give him what the
other had to work for. . . . On the theories of the social philoso-
phers to whom I have referred, we should get a new maxim of judi-
cious living : * Poverty is the best policy. If you get wealth, you will
have to support other people ; if you do not get wealth, it will be the
duty of other people to support you.' "

In his second chapter, the author dilates upon the proposition that
-" A Free Man is a Sovereign, but that a Sovereign can not take
' Tips.' " He discourses as follows : " A free man, a free country, liberty
and equality, are terms in constant use among us. They are employed
as watchwords as soon as any social question comes into discussion. It
is right that they should be so used. They ought to contain the broad-
est convictions, and most positive faiths of the nation, and so they
ought to be available for the consideration of questions of detail. . . .
Probably the popular notion is, that liberty means doing as one has a
mind to, and that it is a metaphysical or sentimental good. A little
observation shows that there is no such thing in this world as doing
as -one has a mind to. There is no man, from the tramp up to the
President, the Pope, or the Czar, who can do as he has a mind to.
Moreover, liberty is not a metaphysical or sentimental thing at all.
It is positive, practical, and actual. It is produced and maintained by
law and institutions, and is therefore concrete and historical. Some-
times we speak distinctly of civil liberty ; but if there be any liberty
other than civil liberty— that is, liberty under law — it is a mere fiction
of the school-men which they may be left to discus. . . . The notions
of civil liberty which we have inherited is that of a status created for
the individually laics and institutions, the effect of which is that each
man is guaranteed the use of all his own powers exclusively for his own
welfare. iB is jaat at all a matter of elections, or universal suffrage, or

SUGGESTIONS ON SOCIAL SUBJECTS. 163

democracy. All institutions are to be tested by the degree to which
they guarantee liberty. It is not to be admitted for a moment that
liberty is a means to social ends, and that it may be impaired for
major considerations. Any one who so argues has lost the bearing
and relation of all the facts and factors in a free state. A human
being has a life to live, a career to run. He is a center of powers to
work and of capacities to suffer. What his powers may be, whether
they can carry him far or not ; what his chances may be, whether
wide or restricted ; what his fortune may be, whether to suffer much
or little — are questions of his personal destiny which he must work
out and endure as he can ; but for all that concerns the bearing
of the society and its institutions upon that man, and upon the sum
of happiness to which he can attain during his life on earth, the
product of all history and all philosophy up to this time is summed up
in the doctrine that he should be left free to do the most for himself
that he can, and should be guaranteed the exclusive enjoyment of all
that he does. If the society — that is to say, in plain terms, if his fel-
low-men, either individually, by groups, or in a mass — impinge upon
him otherwise than to surround him with neutral conditions of security,
they must do so under the strictest responsibility to justify them-
selves. ... It is not at all the function of the state to make men
happy. They must make themselves happy in their own way and at
their own risk. The functions of the state lie entirely in the con-
ditions or chances under which the pursuit of happiness is carried on,
so far as those conditions or chances can be affected by civil organiza-
tion. Hence, liberty for labor and security for earnings are the ends
for which civil institutions exist, not means which, may be employed
for ulterior ends. . . . Democracy, in order to be true to itself, and to
develop into a sound working system, must oppose the same cold re-
sistance to any claims for favor on the ground of poverty as on the
ground of birth and rank. It can no more admit to public discussion,
as within the range of possible action, any schemes for coddling and
helping wage-receivers than it could entertain schemes for restricting
political power to wage-payers. It must put down schemes for mak-
ing 'the rich' pay for whatever 'the poor' want, just as it tramples
on the old theories that only the rich are fit to regulate society. One
needs but to watch our periodical literature to see the danger that de-
mocracy will be construed as a system of favoring a new privileged
class of the many and the poor. ... In a free state every man is held
and expected to take care of himself and his family, to make no
trouble for his neighbor, and to contribute his full share to public in-
terests and common necessities. If he fails in this, he throws burdens
on others. He does not thereby acquire rights against the others. On
the contrary, he only accumulates obligations toward them ; and, if he
is allowed to make his deficiencies a ground of new claims, he passes
over into the position of a privileged or petted person — emancipated

164 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

from duties, endowed with claims. This is the inevitable result of com-
bining democratic political theories with humanitarian social theories.
Chapter III. " That it is not wicked to be eich ; nay, even

THAT IT IS NOT WICKED TO BE RICHER THAN ONE'S NEIGHBOR."

" We all agree that he is a good member of society who works his
way up from poverty to wealth, but, as soon as he has worked his
way up, we begin to regard him with suspicion as a dangerous mem-
ber of society. A newspaper starts the silly fallacy that * the rich are
rich because the poor are industrious,, and it is copied from one end
of the country to the other, as if it were a brilliant apothegm. * Capi-
tal ' is denounced by writers and speakers who have never taken the
trouble to find out what capital is. . . . The great gains of a great
capitalist in a modern state must be put under the head of wages of
superintendence. Any one who believes that any great enterprise of
an industrial character can be started without labor must have little
experience of life. . . . Especially in a new country, where many tasks
are waiting, where resources are strained to the utmost all the time,
the judgment, courage, and perseverance required to organize new
enterprises and carry them to success are sometimes heroic. Persons
who possess the necessary qualifications obtain great reward. They
ought to do so ; . . . the ability to organize and conduct industrial,
commercial, or financial enterprises is rare ; the great captains of
industry are as rare as great generals. . . . The aggregation of large
fortunes is not at all a thing to be regretted. On the contrary, it is a
necessary condition of many forms of social advance. If we should
set a limit to the accumulation of wealth, we should say to our most
valuable producers, ' We do not want you to do us the services which
you best understand how to perform, beyond a certain point.' It
would be like killing off our generals in wTar. . . . Human society
lives at a constant strain forward and upward, and those who have
most interest that this strain be successfully kept up, that the social
organization be perfected, and that capital be increased, are those at
the bottom. . . . Those who to-day enjoy the most complete emanci-
pation from the hardships of human life, and the greatest command
over the conditions of existence, simply show us the best that man
has yet been able to do. Can we all reach that standard by wishing
for it ? Can we all vote it to each other ? If we pull down those who
are most fortunate and successful, shall we not by that very act defeat
our own object ? Those who are trying to reason out any issue from
this tangle of false notions of society and of history are only involv-
ing themselves in hopeless absurdities and contradictions. If any
man is not in the first rank who might get there, let him put forth
new energy and take his place. If any man is not in the front rank,
although he has done his best, how can he be advanced at all ? Cer-
tainly in no way save by pushing down any one else who is forced to
contribute to his advancement."

SUGGESTIONS ON SOCIAL SUBJECTS. 165

Chapter V. " That we must have Few Men if we want Strong
Men." " Undoubtedly the man who possesses capital has a great ad-
vantage over the man who has no capital, in all the struggle for ex-
istence. . . . If it were not so, capital would not be formed. Capital
is only formed by self-denial, and if the possession of it did not se-
cure advantages and superiorities of a high order, men would never
submit to what is necessary to get it. . . . The man who has capital
has secured his future, won leisure which he can employ in winning
secondary objects of necessity and advantage, and emancipated himself
from those things in life which are gross and belittling. The posses-
sion of capital is, therefore, an indispensable prerequisite of educa-
tional, scientific, and moral goods. This is not saying that a man in
the narrowest circumstances may not be a good man. It is saying
that the extension and elevation of all the moral and metaphysical
interests of the race are conditioned on that extension of civilization
of which capital is the prerequisite, and that he who has capital can
participate in and move along with the highest developments of his
time. Hence it appears that the man who has his self-denial before
him, however good may be his intention, can not be as the man who
has his self-denial behind him. Some seem to think that this is very
unjust, but they get their notions of justice from some occult source
of inspiration, not from observing the facts of this world as it has
been made and exists.

The author expresses the opinion, in Chapter VI, " That He who

WOULD BE WELL TAKEN CARE OF MUST TAKE CARE OF HlMSELF," and

in enforcing this idea he observes : " The fashion of the time is to
run to government boards, commissions, and inspectors, to set right
everything which is wrong. No experience seems to damp the faith
of our public in these instrumentalities. The English liberals in the
middle of this century seemed to have full grasp of the principle of
liberty, and to be fixed and established in favor of non-interference.
Since they have come to power, however, they have adopted the old
instrumentalities, and have greatly multiplied them since they have
had a great number of reforms to carry out. They seem to think that
interference is good if only they interfere. In this country the party
which is ' in ' always interferes, and the party which is * out ' favors
non-interference. The system of interference is a complete failure of
the end it aims at, and sooner or later will fall of its own expense and
be swept away. The two notions — one to regulate things by a com-
mittee of control, and the other to let things regulate themselves by
the conflict of interests between free men — are diametrically opposed ;
and the former is corrupting to free institutions, because men who are
taught to expect government inspectors to come and take care of
them lose all true education in liberty. If we have been all wrong for
the last three hundred years in aiming at a fuller realization of indi-
vidual liberty as a condition of general and widely diffused happiness,

166 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

then we must turn back to paternalism, discipline, and authority ; but
to have a combination of liberty and dependence is inrpossible."

Chapter VIII is a very spicy discussion " On the Value as a So-
ciological Principle of the Rule to mind one's Own Business,"
and here the author remarks : " Every man and woman in society has
one big duty. That is, to take care of his or her own self. This is a
social duty. For, fortunately, the matter stands so that the duty of
making the best of one's self individually is not a separate thing from
the duty of filling one's place in society, but the two are one, and the
latter is accomplished when the former is done. The common notion,
however, seems to be that one has a duty to society as a special and
separate thing, and that this duty consists in considering and deciding
what other people ought to do. Now, the man who can do anything
for or about anybody else than himself is fit to be the head of a fam-
ily ; and when he becomes head of a family he has duties to his wife
and children in addition to the former big duty. Then, again, any
man who can take care of himself and his family is in a very excep-
tional position if he does not find in his immediate surroundings peo-
ple who need his care and have some sort of personal claim upon him.
If, now, he is able to fulfill all this and to take care of anybody outside
his family and his dependants, he must have a surplus of energy, wis-
dom, and moral virtue, beyond what he needs for his own business.
No man has this ; for a family is a charge which is capable of infinite
development, and no man could suffice to the full measure of duty
for which a family may draw upon him. Neither can a man give to
society so advantageous an employment of his services, whatever
they are, in any other way as by spending them on his family. . . .
The danger of minding other people's business is twofold: First, there
is the danger that a man may leave his own business unattended to ; and,
second, there is the danger of an impertinent interference with another's
affairs. The * friends of humanity ' almost always run into both dan-
gers. I am one of humanity, and I do not want any volunteer friends.
I regard friendship as mutual, and I want to have my say about it. I
suppose that other components of humanity feel in the same way about
it. If so, they must regard any one who assumes the role of a friend
of humanity as impertinent. The reference of the friend of humanity
back to his own business is obviously the next step. . . . Yet we are
constantly annoyed, and the Legislatures are kept constantly busy, by
the people who have made up their minds that it is wise and conducive
to happiness to live in a certain way, and who want to compel every-
body else to live in their way. Some people have decided to spend
Sunday in a certain way, and they want laws passed to make other
people spend Sunday in the same way. Some people have resolved to
be teetotalers, and they want a law passed to make everybody else a
teetotaler. Some people have resolved to eschew luxury, and they want
taxes laid to make others eschew luxury. The taxing power is espe-

SUGGESTIONS ON SOCIAL SUBJECTS. 167

cially something after which the reformer's finger always itches. Some-
times there is an element of self-interest in the proposed reformation
as when a publisher wanted a duty imposed on books, to keep Ameri-
cans from reading books which would unsettle their Americanism ;
and when artists wanted a tax laid on pictures, to save Americans
from buying bad paintings. . . . Amateur social doctors are like the
amateur physicians — they always begin with the question of remedies,
and they go at this without any diagnosis, or any knowledge of the
anatomy or physiology of society. They never have any doubt of the
efficacy of their remedies. They never take account of any ulterior
effects which may be apprehended from the remedy itself. It gener-
ally troubles them not a whit that their remedy implies a complete
reconstruction of society, or even a reconstruction of human nature.
Against all such social quackery the obvious injunction to the quacks
is, to mind their own business. . . . We have inherited a vast number
of social ills which never came from nature. They are the compli-
cated products of all the tinkering, meddling, and blundering of social
doctors in the past. These products of social quackery are now but-
tressed by habit, fashion, prejudice, platitudinarian thinking, and new
quackery in political economy and social science. . . . Society, there-
fore, does not need any care or supervision. If we can acquire a
science of society based on observation of phenomena and study of
forces, we may hope to gain some ground slowly toward the elimina-
tion of old errors and the re-establishment of a sound and natural
social order. What we gain that way will be by growth, never in the
world by any reconstruction of society on the plan of some enthusi-
astic social architect. The latter is only repeating the old error over
again, and postponing all our chances of real improvement. Society
needs, first of all, to be freed from these meddlers ; that is, to be let
alone. Here we are, then, once more back at the old doctrine — laissez
faire. Let us translate it into blunt English, and it will read, 'Mind
your own business.' It is nothing but the doctrine of liberty. Let
every man be happy in his own way. If his sphere of action and in-
terest impinges on that of any other man, there will have to be com-
promise and adjustment. Wait for the occasion. Do not attempt to
generalize those interferences, or to plan for them a priori. We have
a body of laws and institutions which have grown up as occasion has
occurred for adjusting rights. Let the same process go on. Practice
the utmost reserve possible in your interferences, even of this kind,
and by no means seize occasion for interfering with the natural adjust-
ments. ... To mind one's own business is a purely negative and un-
productive injunction ; but, taking social matters as they are just now,
it is a sociological principle of the first importance. There might
be developed a grand philosophy on the basis of minding one's own
business."

Chapter IX considers "the Case of a Certain Man who is

168 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

never thought of." " Almost all legislative effort to prevent vice
is really protective of vice, because all such legislation saves the
vicious man from the penalty of his vice. Nature's remedies against
vice are terrible. She removes the victims without pity. A drunkard
in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and
tendency of things. Nature has set up on him the process of decline
and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived
their usefulness. Gambling and other less mentionable vices carry
their own penalties with them.

" Now, we can never annihilate a penalty. "We can only divert it
from the head of the man who has incurred it to the heads of others,
who have not incurred it. A vast amount of * social reform ' consists
in just this operation. The consequence is, that those who have gone
astray, being relieved from Nature's fierce discipline, go on to worse,
and that there is a constantly heavier burden for the others to bear.
Who are the others ? When we see a drunkard in the gutter we pity
him. If a policeman picks him up, we say that society has interfered
to save him from perishing. c Society' is a fine word, and it saves
us the trouble of thinking. The industrious and sober workman, who
is mulcted of a percentage of his day's wages to pay the policeman,
is the one who bears the penalty. But he is the Forgotten Man. He
passes by, and is never noticed, because he has behaved himself, ful-
filled his contracts, and asked for nothing.

" The fallacy of all prohibitory, sumptuary, and moral legislation is
the same. A and B determine to be teetotalers, which is often a wise
determination, and sometimes a necessary one. If A and B are moved
by considerations which seem to them good, that is enough. But A
and B put their heads together to get a law passed which shall force
C to be a teetotaler for the sake of D, who is in danger of drinking
too much. There is no pressure on A and B. They are having their
own way, and they like it. There is rarely any pressure on D. He
does not like it and evades it. The pressure all comes on C. The
question then arises, Who is C ? He is the man who wants alcoholic
liquors for any honest purpose whatsoever, who would use his liberty
without abusing it, who would occasion no public question, and trouble
nobody at all. He is the Forgotten Man again, and, as soon as he is
drawn from his obscurity, we see that he is just what each one of us
ought to be.

" The doctrine which we are discussing turns out to be in practice
only a scheme for making injustice prevail in human society by re-
versing the distribution of rewards and punishments between those
who have done their duty and those who have not.

" It is plain that the Forgotten Man and the Forgotten Woman are
the real productive strength of the country. The Forgotten Man
works and votes — generally he prays — but his chief business in life is
to pay. His name never gets into the newspapers, except when he

THE HABITATION AND THE ATMOSPHERE. 169

marries or dies. He is an obscure man. He may grumble sometimes
to his wife, but he does not frequent the grocery, and he does not talk
politics at the tavern. So he is forgotten. Yet who is there whom
the statesman, economist, and social philosopher, ought to think of
before this man ? If any student of social science comes to appreciate
the case of the Forgotten Man, he will become an unflinching advocate
of strict scientific thinking in sociology, and a hard-hearted skeptic as
regards any scheme of social amelioration. He will always want to
know, Who and where is the Forgotten Man in this case, who will
have to pay for it all ?

"Certainly there is no harder thing to do than to employ capital
charitably. It would be extreme folly to say that nothing of that
sort ought to be done, but I fully believe that to-day the next most
pernicious thing to vice is charity in its broad and popular sense."

♦•♦-

THE HABITATION" A1STD THE ATMOSPHEKE.

By M. R. RADAU.

IN a former article we endeavored to elucidate some of the princi-
ples which have been developed from the later researches and ex-
periments on the relations of our clothing with the atmosphere (see
"Popular Science Monthly," October, 1883). The house, also, may
be regarded as a kind of clothing, as a large and ample garment,
designed to regulate our relations with the surrounding medium,
and to deliver us from its tyranny, but not to isolate us. It ought
not to deprive us of air, though that point is too often forgotten.
Fortunately, no voluntary prison is so tightly calked up that air
from out-of-doors does not find entrance without our perceiving it.
The fact that water will readily penetrate a wall or ceiling is known
to all, for they can see the spots it makes ; but the air that passes
through walls is not seen, and so we imagine that it does not penetrate
them. This is a mistake. Walls would not prevent us from being in
communication with the outside air, even if no cracks were left around
the doors and windows. If water can find a way through them, what
is to hinder a subtile gas from doing the same ? The porosity of walls
is very far from being an evil ; and we shall shortly see that it is ne-
cessary to prevent houses being damp.

0 A very simple experiment by Dr. Pettenkofer illustrates the per-
meability of building materials. He took a cylinder of dry mortar
twelve millimetres (4*7 inches) long and one third as thick, and waxed
all of it except the ends, in which he fastened two glass funnels, one
of which was extended by an India-rubber tube, while the other ter-
minated in a very fine orifice. Blowing through the India-rubber

i7o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

tube, he was able to drive the air through the cylinder with force
enough to extinguish a candle at the other extremity. Similar results
may be obtained with wood and such varieties of stones as allow air
to pass through them without difficulty ; while other stones, like com-
pact limestones, are hardly permeable.

All materials become impermeable to the air when they are wet.
The experiment with the cylinder of mortar will not be successful if
the mortar is moistened. It has also been found less easy to drive
moisture through bricks and mortar than to make air pass through
them ; only a few drops of the liquid can be made to appear on the
free surface. Water is therefore not easy to dislodge from the pores
it has occupied, and is at most removed very slowly by evaporation.
But, when water stops the pores, it prevents the air from circulating
through them — a mischievous effect upon the permeability of build-
ing materials, which is more perceptible in proportion as their grain is
finer and more compact.

In ordinary weather, and when they are dry, walls perspire. They
are continually traversed by feeble atmospheric currents, wnich renew
the air of closed rooms and rid it of the moisture with which it is
loaded. The atmosphere of a house is saturated with moisture by
the respiration and perspiration of its inmates, and by the water daily
used in housekeeping, even if we do not take account of the dew that
is deposited whenever some air from without gets into cold rooms.
This moisture, which is always undergoing renewal, ought to be ab-
sorbed by the walls, to be evaporated from the outside, under the ac-
tion of the sun and wind. For this reason it is well for building mate-
rials to be porous and permeable, and for them to interpose no obstacle
to the circulation of the air which is depended upon to promote evap-
oration. This remark is especially applicable in the North, where the
windows can not always be wide open ; it is perhaps of less importance
in the South.

The moisture which the walls receive from the exterior atmos-
phere, from fogs and rain, generally disappears quickly enough under
the operation of the winds that constantly lick the surface of the
house. But the moisture that comes from within, which is deposited
on the walls of poorly ventilated rooms, passes away with difficulty
when the walls are not porous. Even the heating apparatus only
causes it to change its place, by leaving the surfaces that become
warmed and settling farther away where the heat has not yet reached.
Inconveniences from interior moisture are especially sensible in newly
built houses, where the mortar still contains a large proportion of
water, and in ground-floors built on a damp soil, which become im-
pregnated by capillarity. The water stops up the invisible channels
through which the air should circulate, and the wall remains damp
notwithstanding the evaporation that takes place at the surface, to the
great harm of the inmates. Like wet clothes, damp walls are un-

THE HABITATION AND THE ATMOSPHERE. 171

healthy because the water they contain increases their conductibility,
and, consequently, the flow of heat from within outward ; and also
because evaporation absorbs or neutralizes much heat. M. Bouchar-
dat, remarking in his "Treatise on Hygiene" on the exposure to
which the tenement population are subjected in wind-penetrated Man-
sard-roofs and in damp basements, adds that the commissioners of
unhealthy dwellings are wrrong when they rank overcrowding and
uncleanliness among the worst sources of danger.

Dr. Pettenkofer calculates that a house having a cellar and base-
ment and two stories of five rooms and a kitchen each, would take
800,000 kilogrammes of bricks, and that these would hold about 40,000
kilogrammes of water. The mortar, although less bulky, would hold
as much more water. Thus, the entire masonry would hold, in a house
just built, 80,000 kilogrammes or eighty cubic metres of water — a
quantity which it is by no means easy to drive out. Among the
various means that have been devised for quickly drying the walls of
newly-built houses preparatory to tenants moving in, only those can
be of real effect that depend on the employment of heat combined
with an active aeration. The question is wholly one of promoting
ventilation. The lower the temperature, the greater the quantity of
air that is needed. At 50° Fahr. a cubic metre of air, which may be
already supposed to be three fourths saturated, contains seven
grammes of vapor, and is only capable of receiving a little more than
two grammes more. Thus, nearly 40,000,000 cubic metres of air at
50° will be needed to absorb the 80,000 kilogrammes of water in the
masonry. A moderate wind might, it is true, bring this volume of air
in contact with the exposed surface in the course of twenty-four
hours ; but it is evident that the moisture can not be carried off any
faster than it can get through the thickness of the wall to the outer
surface ; and, when this has to be done, the time required for a more
or less complete desiccation would be very long. A suitable degree
of heating would greatly hasten the drying, provided the air were
continually renewed. If, for example, the temperature of the room
were raised to 68° Fahr., the effect — depending partly on the increased
capacity of the air to absorb vapor, and partly on the greater rapidity
of ventilation — would be five or six times as great.

Aeration is thus the sovereign remedy for the moisture of dwelling-
houses, and it is favored by the use of porous materials. Viewed with
respect to this point, direct determinations of the porosity, permeabil-
ity, and hygroscopicity of different building materials are of great
interest. Messrs. F. and E. Putzeys, in their work on "Hygiene in
the Building of Private Houses," have compiled nearly all that has
been published on this subject. It appears from their tables that, in
the stones most usually employed, the pores occupy an important frac-
tion of the whole volume. According to Hunt, the decimal of po-
rosity is from 0'07 to 0*20 for some sandstones, from 0*06 to 0*14 for

i72 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

various dolomites, and 0*30 for the soft Caen limestone and Maltese
sandstone. These figures do not, however, permit us to predict the
relative permeability of walls into which the stone in question may
enter, for that will depend as essentially on the proportion of mortar
used and the kind of wash or plaster that is put over the stones, as on
the kind of stone employed. It must, then, be determined by direct
experiments. These are not wanting. Marker has shown that Walls of
brick let more air through than walls of cut sandstone. Arranged in
the order of increasing permeability, the building materials here men-
tioned would stand — sandstones, rough stones, limestones, brick, cal-
careous tufa, and adobe. Adobe has been found to be twice as per-
meable as burned brick, having a porosity of sixty per cent, while brick
has only twenty-five per cent, by volume. Mr. Lang has made more
complete researches on the co-efficient of permeability of different
materials, and puts calcareous tufa at the head of his table. Then
follow, in the order of decrease, bricks of slag, pine-wood, mortar,
beton, hand-made bricks, green sandstone, molded plaster, oak-wood,
and enameled bricks. Plaster is extremely compact, and little favor-
able to natural ventilation.

Paints, washes, and paper-hangings diminish the permeability of
walls. The following surfaces are mentioned by Lang, in the order of
their increasing effects : whitewash, mastic, glazed papers, common
papers, and oil-colors. Common papers are more impermeable than
glazed papers, according to Messrs. Putzeys, on account of the greater
quantity of starch with which they are impregnated.

Indispensable as is the renewal of the air as a means of preventing
moisture in dwellings, it is still more so as a precaution against im-
purities of every kind that would finally make the atmosphere unfit
for respiration. It is, then, important to learn by what sign we may
know when an atmosphere is vitiated, and what is the volume of air
which a man requires for free breathing in a close room. Normal air,
according to the mean of the results of five years of observations at
the observatory of Mont Souris, contains about three ten-thousandths
by volume of carbonic acid. Immense quantities of this gas are, how-
ever, produced in cities by the respiration of the inhabitants and by
the fires, but the whole is so rapidly removed by the winds that the
atmosphere is not sensibly vitiated by it ; and it is not necessary to
estimate the proportion of carbonic acid, even in the most densely
crowded localities, at more than four ten-thousandths.

In an occupied inclosure, like a sleeping-room, a school-room, or a
public assembly-hall, the air undergoes a progressive change through
the consumption of oxygen and by exhalations from the lungs and the
skins of the people ; and, unless a sufficient ventilation is kept up, it
will in time become unfit for respiration. This will be the case when
the impurities with which the atmosphere is charged become percept-
ible to the smell and provoke the uneasiness which is usually attributed

THE HABITATION AND THE ATMOSPHERE. 173

to a close atmosphere. It is generally agreed that this condition is
reached when the proportion of carbonic acid approaches one thou-
sandth.* Observation shows, in fact, that the proportion of carbonic
acid increases in the same degree as the insalubrity of the air, and
may, up to a certain point, afford a measure of it ; but the inconven-
ience we suffer from bad air is in reality attributable rather to the
putrescible organic products of respiration and transpiration which it
contains. According to Peclet, the air driven out from the ventilating
chimneys of crowded rooms exhales an odor so noxious that it can not
be borne with safety, even for a short time. According to some chem-
ists, the disagreeable odor that characterizes close air is due to a partic-
ular substance possessing an alkaline reaction and the property of giv-
ing off ammonia, which escapes from the lungs, f The real culprits are
these miasms which affect the smell. The carbonic acid, which is
comparatively an inoffensive gas, only indicates the change the air has
undergone. The experiments of MM. Regnault and Reizet go to
show that an animal can live in an atmosphere containing seven hun-
dredths of carbonic acid, provided the proportion of oxygen is main-
tained at twenty-one hundredths. Animals have been observed to
perish in a tight inclosure even when the carbonic acid is eliminated
as fast as it is formed, and the lost oxygen is restored ; and Mante-
gazza has shown that if two birds are placed under two different bell-
glasses, and the carbonic acid formed by one is absorbed by quicklime,
and the organic matter exhaled by the other is taken up by animal
charcoal, the latter bird will survive considerably longer than the
former. We add that Dr. Pettenkofer has been able to breathe for
several hours, without inconvenience, air containing one hundredth of
carbonic acid developed, not by respiration, but by a chemical process.
These facts indicate that the few thousandths of carbonic acid diffused
in it are not the cause of the effects produced by an atmosphere viti-
ated by respiration. The oxygen content diminishes in nearly the
same proportion as carbonic acid is developed ; but the effects pro-
duced by " close air " can not be explained by the deficiency — say of
one per cent — of oxygen ; that may be remedied in part by more ac-
tive breathing.

Carbonic acid has sometimes been wrongfully charged with effects
which were really due to a small proportion of carbonic oxide, a prod-
uct of imperfect combustion and of the reduction of carbonic acid.
Carbonic oxide is a deadly poison, and destroys the red globules of the
blood. To its disengagement may be attributed the unhealthy effects

* According to M, de Chaumont's observations in English barracks, the odor begins
to be perceptible when the proportion reaches 0*0008 ; and this hygienist is inclined to
reduce the admissible proportion to 0*0006 ; but I believe it sufficient to adopt one thou-
sandth as a limit which we shall be fortunate if we never exceed in practice.

f It blackens sulphuric acid, discolors permanganate of potash, and communicates to
water in solution a fetid odor (A. Proust, " Traite d'Hygiene ").

i74 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY,

of cast-iron stoves, effects from which sheet-iron stoves, which are not
pervious to it, are free ; and it is one of the products of the combus-
tion of poor illuminating gas. It is, nevertheless, customary to meas-
ure the degree of insalubrity which any atmospheric medium has
reached by the quantity of carbonic acid it contains. This is found to
increase rapidly in school-rooms, hospital-wards, and assembly-rooms of
all kinds, but not nearly so rapidly, unless the room is extremely close,
as the gas is actually developed by the life-processes of the inhabit-
ants of the rooms. This fact indicates that, even in rooms regarded
as close, a considerable renewal of air is all the time going on by nat-
ural or spontaneous ventilation.

Dr. Pettenkofer has made an ingenious use of the estimation of
the proportions of carbonic acid to measure the spontaneous ventila-
tion, or the speed with which the air gradually renews itself in rooms.
It is sufficient for this purpose to develop artificially in a room an ex-
actly ascertained quantity of the gas, and to determine by repeated
analyses the quantity of acid that disappears in a certain time. The
method is a good one, provided there is no opportunity for the acid to
be absorbed by fresh mortar. By gauging in this manner the ventila-
tion of a number of places, and then observing in the same places the
degree of alteration in the atmosphere resulting from the presence of
a given number of persons, Dr. Pettenkofer found that the atmos-
phere remained of a satisfactory quality when it was renewed at the
rate of sixty cubic metres an hour per head. The proportion of car-
bonic acid continued under these conditions to be less than a thou-
sandth. Experiments were made in a room with brick walls, and hav-
ing a capacity of seventy-five cubic metres. On the first day when
the temperature was 66° in the room and below the freezing-point out-
of-doors — the difference being nearly 36° — the rate of change (sev-
enty-four cubic metres) was sufficient to renew all the air in the room
in an hour ; with a good fire in the stove, the rate of ventilation was
raised to ninety-four cubic metres an hour. With paper pasted over
the joints of the doors and windows, it fell to fifty-four cubic metres.
On another day, when the difference between the inner temperature
and that out-of-doors was about seven degrees, the rate of ventilation
was only twenty-two cubic metres an hour ; and with a window half
open it was only increased to forty-two cubic metres ; thus an open-
ing of eighty square decimetres was of less effect upon ventilation
than the simple transpiration through the walls assisted by a difference
of about 36° between the outer and inner temperatures. A calcula-
tion based on these experiments indicates that a difference in tempera-
ture of 1° C. (1*8° Fahr.) causes to pass every hour about two hundred
and forty-five litres of air for each square metre of exposed wall-surface.

The question of the volume of air needed by a man for free respi-
ration is a complex one, on which hygienists do not readily agree. The
answer to it must depend, not only on the exterior conditions in view,

THE HABITATION AND THE ATMOSPHERE. i75

but also upon the limit of variation, or tolerance, which is regarded as
admissible in the normal composition of the air. In a room hermeti-
cally closed, where the volume of available air is limited by the ca-
pacity of the in closure, the proportion of carbonic acid will soon reach
the one thousandth, which we have adopted as the tolerable limit ;
and the more speedily as the size of the room is diminished, the more
tardily as it is enlarged. The volume of air required will also evidently
be proportioned to the time the man stays in the room. Assuming that
about twenty litres of carbonic acid are exhaled in an hour from the
lungs of an adult man, we find that he will require about thirty-three
cubic metres of fresh air every hour ; for this quantity of air already
has a normal content of thirteen litres of carbonic acid ; and the addi-
tion to this of the twenty litres exhaled will bring up the whole
amount to thirty-three litres, or the one-thousandth part of the vol-
ume of air, which we have accepted as the tolerable limit. Conse-
quently the space a person must have, if he is to live in a really close
room for an hour, is thirty-three cubic metres ; if he is to live there
two hours, sixty-six cubic metres. More will be needed if lamps or
gas-lights are kept burning in the room, for a candle in burning
will consume as much oxygen as a man ; but the carbonic acid pro-
duced by combustion is not so dangerous as are the exhalations
from a living being. The case of a perfectly close room will, how-
ever, never be realized ; for, however tightly we may close the doors
and windows, the air will always get in through some crack, and, if
there are no cracks, it will penetrate through the walls. The most
thoroughly calked room is not proof against the natural ventilation
that results from inequalities of temperature. Houses are great cen-
ters of draughts in cold weather, and are permeated by a spontaneous
ventilation that is dependent at once on the degree to which the outer
atmosphere is agitated, on the number and sizes of the doors and win-
dows, on the condition of the chimneys, and lastly on the permea-
bility of the walls. It may be increased by a suitable distribution of
ventilators, and is aided by the draught of the chimneys when fires
are kindled in them ; but fires may be regarded as artificial means of
ventilation. These agencies of natural ventilation diminish in a nota-
ble degree the danger of the air within houses stagnating, and will
always prevent its becoming vitiated to the extent that might other-
wise be apprehended from the causes of contamination which we have
reviewed. Their effect should be taken account of in estimating what
extent of artificial ventilation may be required ; otherwise, we might
make exaggerated provisions for it.

When an inClosure containing a given number of persons is sub-
jected to a regular ventilation, there is established, at the end of a
certain time, a permanent regime ; the adulteration of the air, having
reached a certain limit, does not vary any more, the noxious gases
being eliminated as fast as they are developed. The proportion of

i76 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

carbonic acid is from that time constant ; we obtain it simply by
assuming that the acid disengaged is distributed through the volume
of air introduced by the ventilation. This proportion-limit is, then,
independent of the disposable cubic space. A ration of forty cubic
metres of air, for example, with a production of twenty litres of car-
bonic acid, to which are added the sixteen litres of acid contained in
the forty cubic metres of fresh air, gives the proportion of 0*0009,
whatever may be otherwise the disposable space. The capacity of the
inclosure plays no other part than that of delaying the moment when
the constant regime is established ; the space acts as a reservoir which
is gradually filled till it contains the same proportion of acid as the cur-
rent of ah* that traverses it ; but, once saturated, it intervenes no more
in the course of the phenomenon. The advantage of a considerable
cubic space consists, then, chiefly in the fact that it retards the approach
of the moment when the alteration of the air attains the limit which
it will not pass. This consideration becomes of some importance in
fixing the size of rooms that are to be occupied only for a definite
number of hours at a time ; for it will be always possible to arrange
matters so that the proportion-limit shall not be reached before the
end of the contemplated time.

Let us suppose, for example, that the ventilation can supply six
cubic metres of fresh air per person per hour. This is the ration of
air which, according to Peclet, might be sufficient in case of extremi-
ty, because six cubic metres of air, half saturated at 60°, can absorb
the thirty-five or forty grammes of vapor given out by transpiration.
The fresh air containing already a proportion of 0*0004 of carbonic
acid, to which respiration adds 0*0033, we find that the proportion-
limit will be 0*0037. This limit will be almost reached and the regime
will be constant when the air has been renewed three times, for the
proportion of air will then exceed 0*0035. If the allotted space is only
one cubic metre, as we know happens sometimes to be the case in
theatres and other assembly-halls, a half an hour will be long enough
to bring about this state of things ; if the cubic space is increased to
ten cubic metres, five hours will be required, and ten hours if it is in-
creased to twenty cubic metres, to reach the same degree of alteration.
Such, then, would be the effect of a ventilation at the rate of six cubic
metres an hour, according to the capacity of the building. By rais-
ing the ration of air to thirty cubic metres, the proportion-limit be-
comes 0*0011, and we may assume that this has been reached when
the air has been renewed twice (the real proportion being then 0*0010).
This will happen at the end of four minutes in a space of one cubic
metre, after forty minutes in ten cubic metres, etc. But the pro-
longation of time obtained under these circumstances is not of the
same importance as in the preceding case, for the limit of 0*001 is a
characteristic of respirable air. With so energetic a ventilation as
this, the consideration of cubic space becomes a minor affair ; but it

THE HABITATION AND THE ATMOSPHERE. i77

is of great importance when the only dependence is upon natural ven-
tilation, for that is greatly facilitated by any increase of the extent
of exposed surfaces, and of doors and windows. We should also
keep in view that a like quantity of air will more readily traverse a
large than a small space without producing inconvenient currents ;
and that the air in a large space requires less frequent renewal, and
does not have to be kept in as rapid motion. Natural ventilation,
which is uniform and almost insensible, must not be confounded with
draughts and currents of air, with the injurious effects of which all
are acquainted.

The rules as to the amount of space that should be allowed in con-
nection with natural ventilation are various and indefinite. Aeration
from this source can not always, however, be depended upon ; and even
the opening of windows on opposite sides of an apartment frequently
f ailsto produce the changes of air that are needed. General Morin, who
has distinguished himself as an apostle of ventilation, and who made
numerous experiments bearing upon the subject, has given the follow-
ing estimates of the volume of air that should be withdrawn and in-
troduced every hour, for each person, in public institutions of different
kinds : Children's schools, twelve to fifteen cubic metres ; schools for
adults, twenty-five to thirty cubic metres ; amphitheatres, thirty cubic
metres ; assembly-halls and long-continued meetings, sixty cubic me-
tres ; play-houses, forty cubic metres ; barracks, thirty cubic metres dur-
ing the day, forty to fifty cubic metres at night ; hospitals for the ordi-
nary sick, sixty to seventy cubic metres ; hospitals for the wounded and
for women in childbirth, one hundred cubic metres ; the same in times
of epidemic, one hundred and fifty cubic metres ; prisons, fifty cubic
metres ; stables, one hundred and eighty to two hundred cubic metres.
These numbers certainly represent the maximum of reasonable de-
mands ; and M. Bouchardat thinks that they are exaggerated and not
justified by clinical experience. Besides effecting the renewal of the
air, ventilation also furnishes the means of obtaining a nearly constant
temperature — in winter by means of the circulation of hot air through
the house, in summer by air drawn from the cellar. The latter method
is quite effective for securing an agreeable temperature in hot weather
without much expense, whenever a sweet, dry cellar can be had. The
cabinet of the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, in Paris, is kept cool in
this way,. the draught of air being promoted by gas-jets kept burning
in the ventilating shafts ; as is also M. Daville's laboratory at the Nor-
mal School, where the opening of a few squares in the glass-roof fur-
nishes the required stimulus to the circulation. Similar principles have
been adopted at the palace of the Corps Legislatif. The subject of
applying the artificial refrigeration of the air in colonial life in hot
countries has been studied by M. Dessoliers, and elaborated by him
with a number of ingenious devices, among which the storing of cold
night-air for use during the day plays a part.
TOL. xxiv. — *12

i78 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

In temperate climates the principal object of ventilation is the re-
placement of vitiated air with fresh. Artificial ventilation is produced
either by inducing a movement of air by means of draught-chimneys,
or by forcing in air through the agency of mechanical ventilators. A
trial has been made at the Lariboisiere Hospital of a system of venti-
lation in which the air is drawn from the roof and forced into flues
that ramify into the several halls to be ventilated. At the moment of
entering the halls the air is heated by being brought in contact with
steam-pipes, so that a uniform temperature of 78° is maintained in the
wards, with an atmosphere free from odor. Notwithstanding purity
of air is secured, the mortality in this institution is not inferior to that
in non-ventilated hospitals. This is attributed by M. Bouchardat to
the mischievous influence of the high temperature which they endeavor
to maintain. He favors heating and ventilation by open fire-places.
This method is preferred in London, where fires are kept up in summer
as well as in winter, at least in the principal office of the institution,
and the windows are opened at all times when it is possible, while me-
chanical ventilating apparatus is used only exceptionally. The air,
sucked in by the strong draught of the chimneys, enters by the joints
of the doors and windows. The patients enjoy the sight of the fire and
the pleasant feeling of direct radiation, while they collect around the
hearths and breathe an air that has not been changed by contact with
a heated surface. Possibly the English go too far in this direction.
" The importance of pure air," says M. Proust, " has perhaps been
exaggerated in some cases by the English physicians, whose example
the Americans have followed. It is advisable, according to them, to
leave the larger openings, no matter what the weather may be, the
windows of dormitories and bedrooms, open during the night. These
principles, almost universally observed in the countries of which we
speak, entail, in our opinion, great inconveniences." There is really
some danger in exposing one's self to cold during sleep.

The study of the questions of heating and ventilation has made
considerable progress in France during the last fifteen or twenty years.
The construction of numerous school-houses has especially been the
occasion of many praiseworthy improvements, but much still remains
to be done. Dr. Larget, in an interesting work on rural habitations,
has pointed out an apparent relation between the number of openings
indicated in the tax-list of doors and windows and the mortality. The
general average, for France, of the number of openings per inhabitant,
is one and a half. In one hundred departments, in which the number
is less than the mean, fifty-five show a higher mortality, and forty-
live a mortality equal to the average ; while, in a hundred departments
in which the number is greater than the mean, sixty show a lower rate
of mortality than the average, and only twenty-five a higher rate.

Another point which is too easily forgotten is that, like the walls,
floors are permeable to the air. The atmosphere is not bounded by

THE HABITATION AND THE ATMOSPHERE. 179

the level of the soil, but extends below it to a considerable depth.
The most compact soils include a considerable volume of air, as well
as an ever- varying quantity of moisture. When we pour water into a
vessel full of well-packed gravel, and displace the air which is present,
we find that it generally forms one third of the total volume of the
mass. The porosity of the earth sometimes reaches fifty per cent ;
and miners and well-diggers accidentally buried under cavings-in have
sometimes been known to live for several days by the aid of the air
circulating through the earth.

Porous soil does not become impermeable to air till below the level
at which the subterranean water ceases to exist. Frozen ground does
not lose its porosity by the solidification of the water. Incessant in-
terchanges are taking place between the underground air and the free
atmosphere. It is by such means that infiltrations of lighting-gas im-
pregnate the soil of the street, penetrate sewers, and cause ills which
are wrongly attributed to typhoid affections ; and this is most liable to
take place in winter when the rise of gas from the soil is promoted by the
draught of the chimneys. Ventilation is thus partly carried on through
the floor, to such an extent that the atmosphere of a room sometimes
contains from ten to fifteen per cent of air from the ground. Hence
the danger from impurities absorbed by the soil. They rise, pitilessly re-
turning from the earth, as if to chastise us for our carelessness. The
air included in a garden-soil, and generally in any soil rich in organic
matters, always contains a strong proportion of carbonic acid. At
the same time the oxygen is in diminished quantity, proving that the
carbonic acid proceeds from slow combustions, and not from subter-
ranean emanations. According to the observations of Pettenkofer,
Fleck, and Fodor, the proportion of acid increases with the depth, and
at a few yards beneath the surface sometimes exceeds ten per cent.
This presence of carbonic acid is a sign of the activity of the life in
the soil. We do not know the exact manner in which the soil and
subsoil intervene in the etiology of endemic diseases and the appear-
ance of epidemics. It is a subject of active controversy. We can,
nevertheless, approve the teaching of the hygienists who advise us to
render our dwellings independent of the soil-air by making provisions
for aeration under the basements, or by making the floors impermeable.

Parks and gardens are beneficial, not only because they give a de-
gree of shade and coolness in hot weather, but also because vegetation
absorbs waste matter and purifies the soil, and thus diminishes the lia-
bility to epidemics.* It is well, for other reasons, to increase these oases
in cities where the air is not directly vitiated. But the quantity of oxy-
gen which the plants disengage is too small to be made an object. The
phenomena of vegetation are extremely slow of accomplishment. Vast
spaces and a long time are needed to produce the grass and the wood

* We may here take notiee of a scheme of M. Autier's for serving the citizens of Paris
in their houses with pure air brought through pipes from the forests.

i8o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

that are consumed in a few hours. Oxygen is absorbed more rapidly
than it is set free. We shall also have to give up the prevalent idea
that a little verdure can improve the atmosphere of a room. The ad-
vantage of plants, as Dr. Pettenkofer remarks, is rather in their moral
than in their physical influence. Public gardens are also desirable be-
cause they enliven the view. Even on hygienic grounds, we should
be careful not to underestimate the importance of whatever acts upon
the mind. AVe have endeavored, in this and a former essay,* to study
clothing and the habitation, with particular reference to their relations
with the atmosphere ; but, even as thus limited, the subject has proved
to be a very complex one, and in our progress we have struck upon more
than one question that is still imperfectly elucidated. It may, however,
not have been without use to attract attention to these questions, which
demand new investigations. Hygienic societies are multiplying ; de-
partments of hygiene have been created in numerous cities ; and the
hygienic conferences which have been held at Paris, Turin, and Ge-
neva, attest the growing interest that attaches to the development of
a science all of whose conquests redound to our physical and moral
profit. Every facility should be given for widening its scope and ex-
tending its sphere of action. Diseases that might have been avoided
constitute the heaviest taxes that can be laid upon a city. — Translated
for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue cles Deux Mondes.

<•»

A BELT OF SUN-SPOTS.

By GAEEETT P. SEEVISS.

EVERYBODY who watched the sun with a telescope last summer
must have wondered at the great belt of spots lying across the
southern part of the disk during the last half of July. Several of the
spots and groups were of extraordinary size, and their arrangement
was very singular. When the belt extended completely across the
sun, there was visible at one time almost every characteristic form that
sun-spots present. There was the yawning black chasm with sharply
defined yet ragged edges, vast enough to swallow up the whole earth,
with room to spare, and surrounded by a regular penumbral border as
evenly shaded as an artist could have made it ; there was the double
or triple spot whose black centers, though widely separated from one
another, were tangled, as it were, in one twisted and torn veil of
penumbra, or connected by long, shadowy bands ; there was the mon-
strous spot of grotesque form surrounded by a crowd of smaller spots
of even more fantastic shape, and enveloped in a broad, irregular pe-
numbra as bizarre and wonderful as the mighty sun-chasms inclosed

* " Popular Science Monthly " for October, 1883, p. 787.

A BELT OF SUN-SPOTS.

181

in it ; there was the great spot, often of singular outline, accompanied
outside its shadowy borders by one or more swarms of minute black
specks pitting the white photosphere in the most extraordinary fash-
ion ; there was the huge group, visible even to the unassisted eye, and
consisting of half a dozen or more large spots intermingled with
smaller ones whose number seemed to defy counting, and enveloped
in a penumbral cloak of becoming amplitude ; there, near the edges of
the disk, were the crinkling lines and heaped-up masses of faculae, the
mountainous hydrogen - flames which marked the places where the
intensest solar action was going on — in short, there was a panorama in
which every variety of sun-spot seemed to be passing in a gigantic pro-
cession across the disk. And what a procession it was ! — long enough,
nearly, to reach from the earth to the moon and back again three
times !

But the most extraordinary feature of this great solar display was
the linear arrangement of the spots making a belt, or band, that half
encircled the sun ; there was also a noticeable regularity in the distances
separating the groups composing this singular belt, and this peculiarity
increased the likeness to a procession which must have impressed every
observer who beheld the gradual march of the sun-spot army across the

Fig. 1.

solar disk. It was like watching a parade of masqueraders ; each
company of spots had its own characteristic and conspicuous make-up,
and each kept its place in the line at a nearly invariable distance from
the group in front of it and the one that followed.

The separate spots and groups did not, however, present an unva-
rying appearance. There was change as well as variety in this un-

i8z

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

paralleled pageant on the sun. Changes were continually going on in
the shape and even the size of the spots, and in the configuration of
the different members of the groups — minor evolutions in the ever-
advancing column. New spots of small size made their appearance in
the neighborhood of larger ones ; and in one instance, at least, a per-
fect swarm of little spots broke out near one of the largest components
of the belt, as if the surface of the sun had been suddenly punctured
by huge needles.

A very good idea of the appearance of the band of spots, and of
their progressive motion from east to west with the revolution of the
sun, as well as of the principal changes that took place in their form
and arrangement, can be obtained from the series of sketches accom-
panying this article. The originals of these sketches I made at the
time the spots were visible, and they represent with approximate ac-
curacy the appearance of the spots with a magnifying power of sixty-
five diameters. They do not, however, by any means show all the
details visible with such a power. With higher magnifying powers
the crowd of details in some of the larger groups was so great and
confusing as to defy the power of the pencil to represent them. Some
remarkable phenomena were also observed with the spectroscope dur-

Fig. 2.

ing this sun-spot display. When the huge group, seen near the left-
hand edge of the sun in Fig. 2, was just coming around the edge, its
approach was announced by an outburst of gas which M. Thollon ob-
served as a small but extremely brilliant protuberance, that exhibited
very marked displacement of the C-line toward the violet end of the

A BELT OF SUN-SPOTS.

183

spectrum. In a communication to the French Academy of Sciences,
M. Thollon says that an hour before his observation on the C-line he
had observed in the same region a slighter displacement not only of
the lines of hydrogen and of the 5-group but also of the coronal line
1,474. He observed on several days other remarkable spectroscopic
phenomena, and noticed that nearly the whole southern half of the
sun's disk gave manifest signs of violent agitation. In view of these
facts, it seems surprising that little apparent effect was produced upon
the earth by these solar outbursts. Two or three times in 1882 the
earth responded instantly with magnetic storms and brilliant auroral
displays to the solar activity, but this year the great sun-spots and their
accompanying phenomena have shown comparatively little power to
affect terrestrial magnetism.

Fig. 1 shows the sun as it appeared on the 16th of July, when
the advancing procession of spots had reached two thirds of the way
across the disk.

Fig. 2 represents the sun on the 20th of July, when the spot belt
extended completely across the disk.

Fig. 3.

•

Fig. 3 shows the appearance of the sun on the 25th of July, when
more than half of the procession had disappeared around the western
edge, and the great group bringing up the rear was near the meridian.

In the latter part of August and early in September a row of spots,
principally in the southern hemisphere, was again seen upon the sun,
but it was shorter, more crooked, and composed of fewer spots and
groups, than the great belt of July.

There is one point of view from which the sun-spot belt just de-

184. THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

scribed appears particularly interesting, and that relates to the sup-
posed resemblance between the larger planets, and more especially
Jupiter, and the sun. Everybody knows that Jupiter has a conspicu-
ous dark-colored belt on each side of his equator, for those belts are
one of the commonest objects of celestial sight-seeing. Saturn too
has belts similarly situated, although they are less conspicuous than
those of Jupiter. All the trustworthy evidence we have points to
the conclusion that these huge planets are yet in a state which has
more points of resemblance to the condition of a sun than to that of
a cool and solid globe. There can be little doubt that Jupiter is sur-
rounded by a cloud-laden atmosphere of great depth, and that his
geological development, so to speak, is in a stage much earlier than
any whose former existence is recorded in the present rock strata of
the earth. In other words, Jupiter probably has not yet a continuous
solid crust, even if the formation of such a crust has been begun.
But, accepting the nebular hypothesis, we must conclude that Jupiter
is gradually cooling and contracting, and that eventually he will have
as solid a surface as the earth's. ' He seems, then, to be in a transition
state between a luminous sun and an opaque world, and, if so, his pres-
ent condition may throw light upon the future condition of the sun,
just as the moon throws light upon the future condition of our own
earth. For this reason it may be interesting for the reader to compare

Fig. 4.

with the figures representing the belt of sun-spots seen last summer a
picture of Jupiter and his belts, shown in Fig. 4. It is, of course a
long step from the string of separate spots in one case to the unbroken
bands in the other, and yet it is easily seen that some resemblance

A BELT OF SUN-SPOTS. 185

exists, which becomes all the more striking if we believe that Jupiter
was once a true sun, which has parted with most of its light and heat,
and is approaching the condition of a crusted globe. It would only
be necessary to increase the number of sun-spots in order to make a
continuous belt around the sun, and, when one such belt was formed,
it is likely that there would be another to match it on the other side
of the equator, for, as is well known, the regions in which the greatest
number of sun-spots appear lie on each side of the solar equator, and
any general cause which increased the absolute number of sun-spots
would proportionally increase the number seen in the two regions of
their greatest frequency.

There are other points of resemblance between the sun and Jupiter
which add strength to the suggestion that the sun may now be just
entering upon a stage which is the precursor of the gradual loss of its
light and heat, and of its approach to the present condition of Jupiter.
Careful observation has shown that different portions of the sun rotate
in different times, the equatorial region moving faster than any other
part, and curiously enough the same peculiarity is seen in Jupiter.
This fact came out very clearly through the study of the great red
spot which made its appearance in the southern hemisphere of the
planet in the summer of 1878, and which has only just now faded out
of sight. It was found that the red spot lagged behind the equatorial
spots, so that the latter made a complete circuit of the planet, with
respect to the red spot, in about forty-four and a half days.

It must not be overlooked, however, that belts of sun-spots, no
matter how numerous the spots composing them might be, would bear
only a superficial resemblance to the belts of Jupiter, for the latter
have a cloud-like appearance, while sun-spots are clearly huge chasms
in the photosphere. In fact, a continuous band of sun-spots, as such,
could not exist. But in view of the close resemblance between the
situation of Jupiter's belts with respect to his equator, and that of the
zones of sun-spots with respect to the sun's equator, it is easy to con-
ceive that similar causes may be concerned in the production of both
phenomena, the effects varying with the difference in condition of the
two bodies. One of these causes, which would probably be operative
in both cases, is the rotation of the body acting upon its fluid envelope.
Even on the earth we have a zone of winds and violent revolving
storms produced in the atmosphere on each side of the equator. On
Jupiter, in corresponding latitudes, we see the great belts and spots,
whose broken and ever-changing aspect indicates the action of tem-
pestuous forces in the deep and dense atmosphere of that planet of a
magnitude incomparably greater than anything of the kind upon the
earth. On the sun, still in corresponding latitudes, we have the spot-
zones wherein rage solar tornadoes and hurricanes, as far exceeding
the storms upon Jupiter as the latter exceed those upon the earth.
"We see, then, that in three members of the solar system — the Earth,

186 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Jupiter, and the Sun — representing stages of development separated
by vast intervals of time, certain regions north and south of their
equators are the scene of violent disturbances in their fluid shells or
envelopes. But it will not do to liken these phenomena upon the
three different globes too closely to one another, for they unquestiona-
bly differ not merely in magnitude but in kind and in mode of opera-
tion, and this is specially true as to the earth and the sun. We may
speak of a sun-spot as a solar cyclone, but we must not forget that it is
very different from our West Indian cyclones or East Indian typhoons.
The point is that in each case — that of a solidified globe like the earth,
surrounded by a comparatively rare atmosphere ; that of a partially
cooled globe, like Jupiter, enveloped in a dense atmosphere of great
depth ; and that of a completely gaseous globe like the sun, possessing
a sort of shell of partly condensed gases — certain regions near the
equator are those in which the greatest disturbance is visible, and in
every case, probably, the force of rotation is a powerful factor in the
production of these zones of commotion. This shows a sort of sur-
vival of the action of certain causes under changed conditions, as a
globe proceeds in the process of cooling and condensation from the
condition of a sun to that of an unsolidified planet, and so on to the
condition of a crusted or solid earth. So, then, we may with some
show of reason suggest that the half -belted appearance of the sun last
summer was in a certain sense prophetic of its future condition, and
that in time its spot-zones will be succeeded by continuous belts re-
sembling those of Jupiter. But no human eye will ever behold the
sun thus robbed of his majesty, with his glorious light extinguished
by bands of gloomy vapors ; for, long before he could reach such a
condition, life would cease in the solar system, from want of his vivi-
fying radiations.

The picture of Jupiter here given possesses some interest in itself,
as it is a representation of the planet as it appeared in September,
1879, when the celebrated red spot was a very striking object. The
spot is seen at the left hand edge of the disk, just above the great
southern belt which is narrowed, or indented, in a very singular way,
opposite the spot. The red spot is no longer visible, and as it was,
perhaps, the most remarkable marking, except the belts themselves,
ever seen upon Jupiter, pictures of it will possess great interest in
the future.

THE MORALITY OF HAPPINESS. 187

THE MORALITY OF HAPPINESS.

By THOMAS FOSTEK.
I. INTRODUCTORY.

IT is known to all who watch the signs of the times — obvious, in-
deed, to them, and known to many who are less observant — that
those moral restraints which claim to be of sacred origin are no longer
accepted by a large and increasing number of persons. I have no wish
to inquire here whether those restraints should be regarded as of divine
origin or not. I note only the fact that by many they are not so re-
garded. I am not concerned to ask whether it is well or ill that their
authority should be rejected, and their controlling influence be dimin-
ishing or disappearing among many ; it suffices, so far as my present
purpose is concerned, that the fact is so. The question then presents
itself, Does any rule of conduct promise to have power now or soon
among those who have rejected the regulative system formerly preva-
lent ? We need not consider whether such a rule of conduct, neces-
sarily secular in origin, is in itself better or worse than a rule based on
commandments regarded as divine. All we have at present to ask is
whether such a regulative system is likely to replace the older one
with those over whom that older law no longer has influence.

Here at the outset we find that those who hold extreme views on
either side of the questions I have left untouched agree in one view
which is, I think, erroneous. On the one hand, those who maintain
the divine character of the current creed insist, not only that it is suffi-
cient for all, but that, in the nature of things, no other guide is possi-
ble. On the other hand, those who reject the authority of that creed
most energetically, assert as positively that no new regulative system,
no new controlling agency, is necessary. As Mr. Herbert Spencer has
well put it, "both contemplate a vacuum, which one wishes and the
other fears." But those who take wiser and more moderate views,
who, in the first place, recognize facts as they are, and, in the next,
are ready to subordinate their own ideas of what is necessary or best
for the ideal man to the necessities of man as he really is, perceive that
for the many who no longer value a regulative system which, so far as
they are concerned, is decaying, if not dead, another regulative system
is essential. Again, to use the words of the great philosopher whose
teachings are to be our chief guide in this series of papers, " Few
things can happen more disastrous than the decay and death of a
regulative system no longer fit" (for those we are considering), "be-
fore another and fitter regulative system has grown up to replace it."

My purpose in these papers is to show how rules of conduct may
be established on a scientific basis for those who regard the so-called

188 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

religious basis as unsound.* I shall follow chiefly the teachings of one
who has inculcated in their best and purest form the scientific doc-
trines of morality, and may be regarded as head, if not founder, of
that school of philosophy which, on purely scientific grounds, sets hap-
piness as the test of duty — the measure of moral obligation. To Mr.
Herbert Spencer we owe, I take it, the fullest and clearest answer to
the melancholy question, " Is Life Worth Living ? " whether asked
whiningly, as in the feeble lamentations of such folk as Mr. Mallock,
or gloomily and sternly, as in the Promethean groans of Carlyle. The
doctrine that happiness is to be sought for one's self (but as a duty to
others as well as to self), that the happiness of others is to be sought
as a duty (to one's self as well as to them) — happiness as a means, hap-
piness as the chief end — such has been the outcome of the much-
maligned philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer, such has been the lesson
resulting from his pursuance of what he himself describes as his " ulti-
mate purpose, lying behind all proximate purposes," that of "finding for
the principles of right and wrong, in conduct at large, a scientific basis."

If I can help to bring this noble and beautiful doctrine — for noble
and beautiful even those must admit it to be who deny its truth — be-
fore the many who regard Herbert Spencer's teachings with fear and
trembling, not knowing what they are, I shall be content. But I
would advise all, who have time, to read the words of the master him-
self. Apart from the great doctrines which they convey, they are de-
lightful reading, clear and simple in language, graceful and dignified
in tone, almost as worthy to be studied as examples of force and clear-
ness in exposition as for that which nevertheless constitutes their real
value — the pure and beautiful moral doctrines which they offer to those
over whom current creeds have lost their influence.

Let me hope that none will be deterred from following this study,
by the inviting aspect of the moral rules advanced by the great mod-
ern teacher — even as in past times men were anxious, or even angry,
when another teacher showed more consideration for human weak-
nesses than had seemed right to the men of older times. I will not
ask here whether doctrines of repellent aspect are likely to be more
desirable than those which are more benignantly advanced. It suffices
that with many the former now exert no influence, whether they should
do so or not. So that, as far as these (for whom I am chiefly writing)
are concerned, all must admit the truth of what Mr. Spencer says re-
specting the benefits to be derived from presenting moral rule under
that attractive aspect which it has when undisturbed by superstition
and asceticism. To close these introductory remarks by a quotation
from the charming pages of his " Data of Ethics ":

* I say " so-called," referring rather to the word " religious " than to any question con-
cerning the divine origin of current creeds. Strictly speaking, the word religious may be
as correctly applied to moral rules based on scientific considerations as to those formu-
lated in company with any of the diverse creeds prevailing among men.

THE MORALITY OF HAPPINESS. 189

" If a father, sternly enforcing numerous commands, some needful
and some needless, adds to his severe control a behavior wholly un-
sympathetic— if his children have to take their pleasures by stealth,
or, when timidly looking up from their play, ever meet a cold glance,
or more frequently a frown, his government will inevitably be disliked,
if not hated ; and the aim will be to evade it as much as possible.
Contrariwise, a father who, equally firm in maintaining restraints
needful for the well-being of his children, or the well-being of other
persons, not only avoids needless restraints, but, giving his sanction to
all legitimate gratifications, and providing the means for them, looks
on at their gambols with an approving smile, can scarcely fail to gain
an influence which, no less efficient for the time being, will also be per-
manently efficient. The controls of such two fathers symbolize the
controls of moralityas it is and morality as it should be."

II. CONDUCT AND DUTY.*

Morality relates to those parts of our conduct of which it can be
said that they are right or wrong. Under the general subject conduct,
then, morality is included as a part. On regarding the word " duty "
as implying all that we ought to do and all that we ought to avoid,
we may say that duty is a part of conduct. All actions which are not
purposeless may be regarded as included under the word " conduct,"
as well as some which, though purposeless at the time, result from
actions originally done with purpose until a fixed habit had been ac-
quired. But only those actions which we consider good or bad are
referred to when we speak of duty ; and the principles of what we call
morality relate only to these.

Here, however, we have already recognized a connection between
duty and conduct generally, which should show all who are familiar
with scientific methods that morality can not properly be discussed
in its scientific aspect without discussing conduct at large. Every
student of science knows that, rightly to consider a part, he must
consider the whole to which it belongs. In every department of sci-
ence this general law holds, though it is not always recognized. No
scientific subject has ever been properly dealt with until it has been

* I remind the reader that in these papers, as stated in the introductory one, I am
following the lines along which Mr. Herbert Spencer has already traced the general doc-
trine of the morality of happiness. Where his reasoning seems open to objection or too
recondite to be quite readily followed, I shall indicate such objections, and my own opin-
ion respecting them, or endeavor to remove such difficulties ; but the moral doctrine I
am here dealing with is that of which he has been the chief teacher, if he may not be re-
garded as its only founder. Even if the scientific study of ethics, on principles analogous
to those which have made astronomy, geology, and more recently biology, true sciences,
has been taken up by others and pursued till new truths have been recognized and per-
haps some errors pointed out in his treatment of it, it remains still true that he was the
first to indicate the true scientific method, and to show where hitherto it had been de-
parted from even by the founders of the school of philosophy to which he belongs.

i9o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

considered in its relations to its surroundings as well as separately.
Even in matters not usually considered from a scientific stand-point
the same law holds. To go no further than our own pages, the writer
who is dealing with the question "How "to get strong?" would not
consider how the arms are to be strengthened without duly considering
that the arms are part of the body, their exercise related to the exer-
cise of other portions, their development associated with the develop-
ment of other limbs, with the action of other parts of the body, with
the regimen proper for the whole frame.

It may not by many be regarded as a fault of most systems of
morality that they overlook the necessary connection between con-
duct in general and conduct as guided by moral considerations. For
many are content to regard moral laws as existing apart from any of
the results of experience — whether derived from individual conduct,
the conduct of men generally, or conduct as seen among creatures of
all orders. With many, morality is looked upon as a whole — the whole
duty of man — not as a part of conduct. They even consider that moral
obligations must be weakened when their dependence on conduct in
general is insisted upon. Moral rules, with them, are right in them-
selves and of necessity — and whether inculcated by extra-human au-
thority, or enjoined by law, or perceived intuitively, are open neither
to inquiry nor objection. Clearly if this were so, morality would not
be a fitting subject for the scientific method. Its rules would be deter-
minable apart from the discussion of evidence based on experience,
whether observational or experimental. I do not here inquire whether
this view is right or wrong. Later on it will fall into my plan to do
so. At present I only note that we are considering our subject from
the stand-point of those who desire to view morality in its scientific
aspect. For them it is essential that, as conduct in general includes
conduct depending on duty, the discussion of questions of duty can
not be complete or satisfactory unless it is conducted with due refer-
ence to the whole of which this subject forms a part.

If any doubt could exist in the mind of the student on this point,
it should be removed when he notes that it is impossible to draw any
sharply defined line between duty and the rest of conduct not depend-
ing on considerations of duty. Not only are those actions which un-
der particular circumstances seem absolutely indifferent found under
other circumstances to be right or wrong and not indifferent, not only
do different persons form different ideas as to what part of conduct is
indifferent or otherwise, but one and the same person in different parts
of his life finds that he draws different distinctions between conduct
in general and conduct to be guided by moral considerations. In the
evolution of conduct in a nation, in a town, in a family, or in the indi-
vidual man, the line separating conduct regarded as indifferent from
conduct regarded as right or wrong is ever varying in position — some-
times tending to include among actions indifferent those which had

GENIUS AND HEREDITY. i9i

been judged bad or good, oftener tending to show right or wrong in
conduct which had been judged indifferent.

If moral laws, then, are to be established on a scientific basis, it is
essential that conduct at large should be carefully considered ; and not
conduct only as it is seen in man, but as it is seen in animals of every
grade. Thus and thus only can the evolution of conduct be rightly
studied ; by the study of the evolution of conduct only can the scien-
tific distinction between right and wrong be recognized ; from and out
of this distinction only can moral laws be established for those with
whom the authoritative enunciation of such laws has no longer the
weight it once had, those who find no other inherent force in moral
statutes than they derive as resulting from experience, and who reject
as unreasonable all belief in the intuitive recognition of laws of morality.

We proceed, then, to consider the evolution of conduct in the various
types of animal life, from the lowest upward to man. — Knowledge.

-+•+-

GENIUS AM) HEREDITY.

By M. E. CAEO,

OF THE INSTITUTE OF FRANCE.

IT has been shown by the researches of Galton, Bibot, and others,
that a law of heredity exists, and is applicable to our psychological
qualities. Without attempting to deny the operation of this law, it is
our intention here, believing that its scope has been considerably mag-
nified, to endeavor to determine its limits in particular directions.
With this object, we shall confine our inquiry to two points : Is it
according to a good philosophical method to explain by heredity alone
all the most complex, most delicate, and most considerable phenomena
of human life, when we can, with at least as much probability, bring
in other causes which, though they have been much neglected, are very
perceptible and even more directly observable ? And is it true, as is
assumed, that all the exceptions to the law of heredity, even in the
intellectual and moral order, are only apparent ? We shall speak first
of those curious facts concerning intellectual heredity, some of which,
and those the most extraordinary ones, can not be accounted for by
any assignable cause. Other facts in the category can equally well,
perhaps better than by heredity, be explained by reference to the me-
dium, to education, to habit, to the moral and intellectual atmosphere
m which the child lives, to the force of the influences to which it is sub-
ject, and to the examples that are set before it. We acknowledge that
the medium can not afford an explanation of genius and can not create
superior faculties ; but it furnishes the opportunity for their manifes-
tation, and reveals them where they exist. How many noble and high
minds have been extinguished by unfavorable cricumstances and hos-

192 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

tile mediums ! "What an important part, on the other hand, may have
been played in the expansion of superior minds in certain favored
families, by the influence of examples of the most delicate methods of
investigation in questions of the natural sciences, by habituation to
rigorous methods in the exact sciences ! Who could in such cases sep-
arate what, in the working of such different influences, is attributable
to education and what to heredity ?

We must first leave out of the consideration genius, properly so
called, which can not be included in any determinate category. .At
this point we meet the error which has vitiated Mr. Galton's whole
work, and which is curiously illustrated in the title itself of his book,
" Hereditary Genius." Genius is of all things not a phenomenon of
heredity. It is precisely in what is extraordinary and exceptional in it
— that is, in its essential quality — that genius escapes all our formulas.
It is pre-eminently the abnormal phenomenon, the one that we can not
reduce to its elements, or put into a classification, an irreducible form-
ula, the resolution of which recognizes no law within the compass of
human knowledge. At this point, certainly, Mr. Galton's lists betray
their poverty ; and he tries in vain to connect the lines of artists and
scientific men with the illustrious genius who all at once bursts out
from among them. Even in the musical family of the Bachs, which
was distinguished for eight generations and through two centuries, we
may count up all the examples of the special musical talent which
appeared again and again in each generation ; we may review all those
gifted persons, the organists, the choir-singers, the choir-leaders, the
city musicians, whether they be ancestors, sons, or grandsons ; but we
can find only one Sebastian Bach. Whence came that particular
impulsion, that soaring force, that carried him to the very summit of
inspiration ? Why is it that he alone of the whole family could com-
pose that marvelous series of preludes, fugues, and oratorios which
stand as isolated monuments in the history of the great art ? Why
were none of the others like him ? Mr. Galton's tables do not give us
the key to this mystery ; they simply reveal a transmission of the
musical faculty, a community of aptitudes among the members of this
family. But that which was not common to him with the others, that
which made Sebastian Bach, is the thing we want explained, and it
is precisely this that heredity does not explain. The aptitudes were
transmitted like a patrimony, but the grand phenomenon of genius
was the property of only one, and was produced but once. It is, then,
outside of heredity, for it is unique. The same thoughts might be
applied to Beethoven, and with still more force, for the only musical
examples in his line were those of his father and grandfather, chapel-
masters. Similar instances are abundant. We might cite, among the
painters, Raphael, whose father, and Titian, whose sons and brother,
were respectable but not illustrious artists. Among great men of sci-
ence what real relation can exist, in the order of skill and genius, be-

GENIUS AND HEREDITY. i93

tween Aristotle and his father Nicomachus, court-physician, of whom
we hardly know anything ; or between Galileo and his father Vicenzo,
who wrote on the theory of music ; or between Leibnitz and his father,
law-professor at Leipsic ? In fact, only a single example can be op-
posed to our criticism, that of the family of the Bernouillis, which was
celebrated for the number of mathematicians and physicists whom it
produced through several generations. Yet here we have to take notice
of the fact that only one of the family, John, was rated by his con-
temporaries alongside of Newton and Leibnitz on account of his brill-
iant mathematical discoveries. The others were very distinguished
men, but that is a different thing. The genius stands apart.

Still, we can say that in these three orders of the creative art there
is something hereditary — not genius, indeed, but a kind of necessary
apprenticeship, or perhaps a physiological and mental aptitude tend-
ing to determine to certain vocations. In this way we can understand
why we meet so many musicians, or painters, or men of science, in the
same family. In the case of the painters, for example, there is some-
thing that inspiration can not do without, there are a number of pri-
mary gifts and technical properties in design or color which are easily
transmitted by example and imitation in the father's studio, and are
distributed as a common patrimony among the children. Only one of
the family will rise to the first rank ; but this initiation into his art i&
indispensable to him as a matter of economy of time and labor, and.
also to give greater freedom to his inspiration. Macaulay has well said
that Homer could never have made himself known to us in the lan-
guage of a savage tribe, and that Phidias could never have carved his-
Minerva out of a log with a fish-bone. It is necessary to take account
of these favorable circumstances, which in some families help to over-
come the first difficulties of the art, and furnish the future genius with;
convenient instrumentalities with which he can make himself familiar
and skillful from his earliest childhood. So the taste for music — that
is, an aptitude for measuring time and distinguishing notes — is innate
with many children, and is often derived from the father, mother, or
other ancestors. If both parents are musicians, all the children will
generally have a correct ear ; if only one of them is a musician, some
of the children may have the taste, while others may not. Likewise,
a facility in quickly grasping and handling numerical or algebraic
values is indispensable to the operations of the mathematician, and
may be remarked as a peculiar gift in certain families, among whom
may some time arise one illustrious in the science. These conditions
are not essentials of genius, but they are useful to it in helping it to
disengage and reveal itself. They are, as it were, the alphabet of his
art to the composer, mathematician, or painter ; and it is not without
advantage that the art has, by means of the example and traditions of
the family, become a kind of instinct for the future great man. This
explains how it is that great painters, mathematicians, or musicians,

VOL. XXIV.— si 3

i94 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

are so frequently produced in families in which the practice of those
arts and sciences is familiar. The same aptitude may be shared by
several members of the family, who will remain in the secondary rank,
while a single one rises above them all. It is the aptitude, not genius,
that is hereditary, while Mr. Galton has constantly confounded the
two. In the other orders of invention, as in poetry and eloquence,
there is nothing inconsistent with a solitary instance of genius being
produced in a family that does not seem to have been prepared for it.
The preparatory training, the special aptitude, are less necessary in
them. It is enough if the national language has reached a degree of
clearness and vigor in which it can give perfect expression. Gener-
ally, the great writer blossoms out alone. He seems to appear, an
unexpected phenomenon, in a succession of modest generations, the
uniform course of which he breaks at a blow. Sometimes similar
aptitudes may be found among other members of the family, but the
fact is without significance or consequences. Bossuet, Pascal, Moliere,
Yoltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Byron, and Goethe, however we may
try to account for them, can not be explained by heredity. They are
the first and the last in the families that produced them, without any
visible transmission of superior gifts. Going back in history, but still
keeping to modern times, are not Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare also
solitary great ones, who can not be satisfactorily accounted for, either
by organic evolution, the intellectual medium, or generation ? All those
external conditions of genius that have been so often analyzed and de-
scribed may have prepared for the event and primed for the occasion.
The last turn was still wanting, the supreme gift that should be de-
cisive over all the rest, and bring it about that among so many heads
in the same family or the same nation, equally predestined by the
same concurrence of circumstances, one only should have been chosen,
and that the light should have shone upon that elect head only ; and
we may keep on asking, Why on that head, and not on another ? No,
to this day the great gift of inspiration in science, poetry, and art has
not revealed its secret. Those sovereign minds, precisely by what
they possess that is incommunicable, rise high and alone above the
flood of generations which precede and follow them, and by reason of
this superior side of their nature they do not belong to nature. Those
exalted originals in mind who tower above mankind have no fathers
and leave no sons in the blood. Notwithstanding Mr. Galton, the
least hereditary thing in the world is genius.

M. de Candolle * appears to us to have exactly analyzed the origin
and conditions of the kind of mental heredity in a slighter degree that
we might represent by the words talent, vocation, and aptitude. While
he does not deny the influence of heredity in the development of vo-
cations, especially of scientific vocations, which are the special object
of his study, he does not declare it exclusive and decisive. After ma-

* " Histoirc des Sciences et des Savants depuis Deux Siecles."

GENIUS AND HEREDITY. 195

ture examination, he does not believe that there is any special heredity
for a particular science, but only admits a transmission of the element-
ary faculties in a condition of harmony and vigor agreeable to a sound
mind. This precious heritage may be applied in several very differ-
ent ways. A person who has received from his parents a certain de-
gree and a favorable combination of the faculties of attention, memory,
judgment, and will, is not destined to be condemned by a kind of fatal
heritage to any special kind of work. Generally, a reflexive choice, or
the rule of circumstances, rather than a special heredity, determines
the use that is made of these faculties ; its particular direction is
decided by the medium and the family ; and the success of the
effort is determined by the energetic application of the will. A res-
ervation should doubtless be made in the case of a determined taste
for a certain career imposing itself upon a young man when he enters
into life ; but the facts that such tastes and inclinations are often
opposed to paternal habits, and that they may be very different as
between brothers, are proofs that they are not hereditary ; they are
often the products of an active imagination called forth by certain
attractions, which it has forged for itself, or of notions suggested by
some conversation or some entertaining lecture. Much room, then,
is left for circumstances and liberty in the employment of the facul-
ties which one has received. " The man endowed with marked traits
of perseverance, attention, and judgment, with no considerable defect
in his other faculties, will become a jurist, historian, scholar, chemist,
geologist, or physician, according as his will is influenced by a host of
circumstances. In each of these occupations he will advance in pro-
portion to his strength, his zeal, and the concentration of his energy
upon a single specialty. I have little faith in the necessity of innate
and imperious vocations for particular objects. This is not to deny
the influence of heredity, but to reduce it to something very general,
compatible with the liberty of the individual, and susceptible of being
inclined or modified according to ulterior influences, the action of
which increases as the child becomes a man." Moreover, even when
mental heredity seems to have been effectual, it may be regarded as
working in the line of the grand categories of faculties, rather than of
special faculties. Thus, it is not uncommon to find two brothers, or
father and son, celebrated, one in the natural sciences, the other in his-
torical and social sciences : as, for instance, the two Humboldts ; Oersted
and his brother the jurist ; Hugo de Mohl, the botanist, and his brother
Jules de Mohl, the Orientalist ; Madame Necker, daughter of the ge-
ologist De Saussure ; Ampere, scholar and literary maD, son of a physi-
cist. If there were a special heredity guiding to a particular science,
these examples would be inexplicable, while they are quite natural
under the supposition of a transmission of general faculties applicable
to all sciences having analogous methods. — Translated for the Popular
Science Monthly from the Revue des Deux Mondes.

196 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

THE EEMEDIES OF NATURE.

By FELIX L. OSWALD, M. D.

ENTERIC DISORDERS.

ABOUT a century before the birth of the Emperor Augustus, the
most popular physician in Rome was the Grecian philosopher
Asclepiades. His system seems to have resembled that of our " move-
ment-cure " doctors. Instead of being stuffed with drugs, his patients
were invited to his palcestra, a sort of out-door gymnasium or hygienic
garden, where they were doctored with gymnastics, wholesome comes-
tibles, and, as some writers assert, with flattery— probably courteous
attention to the jeremiads of crapulent senators. At all events, his
method proved eminently successful, though we need not doubt that
all respectable druggists retailed canards about his establishment. He
had devised a special course of gymnastics for every disorder of the
human organism, and repeatedly declared that he would utterly re-
nounce the claim to the title of a physician if he should ever be sick
for a single day. Medicines he rejected on the ground that they ac-
complish by violent mea?is what the palmstra-method would effect in an
easier way.

Still, in certain cases, a short, sharp remedy might be preferable to
an easy-going one, but unfortunately there is a more serious objection
to the use of drugs, viz., the danger of complicating instead of curing
the disease. For — 1. The diagnosis may fail to establish the true
cause of the disorder. No watch-maker would undertake to explain
the irregularities of a timepiece by merely listening to a description of
the symptoms, and before he can trace the effect to its cause he must
minutely inspect the interior mechanism. But a physician is not only
generally obliged to content himself with the evidence of the external
symptoms, but he has to deal with an apparatus so infinitely more
complex than the most intricate chronometer, that, even under normal
circumstances, the process of its plainest functions has never been fully
explained.*

2. We risk to mistake the suppression of the symptoms for the sup-
pression of the disease. We would try in vain to subdue a conflagra-
tion by demolishing the fire-bells, but on exactly the same principle
the mediaeval drug-mongers attempted to restore the health of their

* " Every organic process is a miracle, that is, in every essential sense an unexplained
phenomenon." — Lorenz Oken.

" He obstinately refused to take medicine. " Doctor," said he, " no physicking. Do
not counteract the living principle. Let it alone ; leave it the liberty of defending it-
self ; it will do better than your drugs. The watch-maker can not open it, and must, in
handling it, grope his way blindfold and at random. For once that he assists and relieves,
by dint of torturing it with crooked instruments, he injures it ten times, and at last de-
stroys it."— (Scott's " Life of Napoleon," p. 368.)

THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. lg7

patients by attacking the outward symptoms of the disorder. Habitual
overeating produced a sick-headache : they applied a blister to the
head. Impure blood covered the neck with ulcers : they applied a
salve to the neck. The alcohol-vice resulted in a rheumatic affection
of the knee-joint : they covered the knee-paix with leeches. They sup-
pressed the alarm-signals of the disease, but, before the patient could
really recover, his constitution had to overcome both the malady and
the medicine.

3. We risk to confound an appeal for rest with an appeal for active
interference, and thus to turn a transient and necessary suspension of
an organic function into an actual disease. Numerous enteric disor-
ders, or bowel-complaints, are thus artificially developed. The mar-
velous self -regulating principle of the human organism now and then
limits the activity of special organic functions, in order to defray an
unusual expenditure of vital energy. The after-dinner lassitude can
thus be explained : the process of digestion engrosses the energies of
the system. Mental labor retards digestion ; a strenuous muscular
effort often suspends it entirely for hours together. Fevers, wounds,
etc., have an astringent tendency : the potential resources of the organ-
ism are engaged in a process of reconstruction. Perspiration is Na-
ture's effort to counteract the influence of an excessive degree of heat,
and, when the effect of sun-heat is aggravated by calorific food and
superfluous clothing, the work of reducing the temperature of the blood
almost monopolizes the energies of the system, while at the same time
the diminished demand for animal caloric lessens the influence of a
chief stimulus of organic activity. Warm weather, therefore, indis-
poses to active exercise, and produces a (temporary) tendency to cos-
tiveness. That tendency is neither abnormal nor morbid, and to coun-
teract it by dint of drastic drugs means to create, instead of curing, a
disease. If a foot-messenger stops at the wayside to tie his shoe-strings,
the time thus employed is not wasted. The sudden application of a
horsewhip would force him to take as suddenly to his heels, but dur-
ing his flight he might lose his way, and perhaps his shoes.

With a few exceptions, which we shall presently notice, chronic
constipation results from the abuse of aperient medicines. A spell of
dry, warm weather, sedentary work in an overheated room, a change
from summer to winter diet — perhaps a mere temporary abstinence
from a wonted dish of aperient food — has diminished the stools of an
otherwise healthy child. The simultaneous want of appetite yields to
a short fast, but the stringency of the bowels continues, and on the
third day the parents administer a laxative. That for the next twenty-
four hours the patient feels considerably worse than before does not
shake their faith in the value of the drug ; the main purpose has been
attained — the " bowels move." Properly speaking, that movement is
an abnormal convulsion, a reaction against the obtrusion of a drastic
poison, which has " cured " the stringency of the bowels as a shower-

198 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

bath of vitriol would cure the drowsiness of a tired man. An imagi-
nary evil has yielded to a real evil, and, what is worse, becomes itself
soon real enough to confirm the opinion of the drug-worshipers that
the patient must be " put under a course of corrective tonics." For
very soon the unnatural irritation is followed by an abnormal lassitude,
a digestive torpor, attended with symptoms of distress that plainly dis-
tinguish it from the original remissness of the bowels. In the eyes of
the drug-dupes, however, it is nothing but a relapse of the former com-
plaint, and must be combated with more effective remedies. " Treacle
and brimstone, thrice a day," was the verdict of the mediaeval iEscu-
lap. " The timely use of our incomparable invigorant will regulate
the action of the bowels and impart a generous and speedy impulse to
the organic functions of the whole body," says the inventor of the new
patent " liver-regulator " — a new combination of " valuable herbs "
with the usual basis of alcohol. "A wineglassful every morning."
The herbs prove their value by enabling the vender to accommodate
his customers on Sunday morning, when common dram-shops are closed,
and with an equal disregard of times and seasons the alcoholic prin-
ciple opens the bowels. The incomparable stimulant admits no such
excuses as fatigue or warm weather ; the charm works'; the regular
attacks of a life-endangering poison have to be as regularly repelled.
Other symptoms, such as troubled dreams, fretfulness, heart-burn and
irregular pulse, seem, indeed, to indicate the approach of a new dis-
ease, but that will be met by other drugs, and in the mean while the
liver-cure is continued. After the lapse of a few months the patient
gets possibly a chance to escape his doom ; out-door exercise, the ex-
citement of a pleasant journey, a new residence, a change of diet, en-
courage the hope that the bowels may be left to their own resources,
and the " tonic " is provisionally discontinued. An exceptionally strong
constitution may really be able to overcome the after-effects of the
drug-disease (for from beginning to end it has been nothing but that),
but in a great plurality of cases the event proves that the stimulant
has fastened upon the system : constipation, in an aggravated form,
returns, and can now be relieved only by the wonted means — " a fact,"
as the orthodox drug-doctor would not fail to observe, " which should
convince idealists that now and then Nature can really not dispense
with a little assistance." *

* Two generations ago the abuse of purgative drugs was carried to a degree which

undoubtedly shortened the average longevity of many families. Thousands of parents

made it a rule (which still has its advocates) to dose their children at the end of every

month ; and Wieland's practical philosopher not only prescribes a laxative for every fit

of ill humor, but answers the sentimental tirades of his wife by sentencing her to a prompt

enema :

" Brummt mein Engel wie ein Bar,

' Lise,' sprech ich, ' musst purgiren,*

Rufe dann den Bader her,

Lasse sie recht durch-klystiren."

THE REMEDIES OF NATURE, lg9

That assistance has made the fortune of numerous nostrum-mon-
gers and helped our made-dishes to wreck the health of many millions.
For, without the interference of a positive poison, dietetic abuses have
to be carried to a monstrous excess before they will result in chronic
constipation. A slight stringency of the bowels is often simply a tran-
sient lassitude of the system, and may be safely left to the remedial re-
sources of Nature. After the third day, however, the disorder demands
a change of regimen. A chief objection to our system of cookery is
the hygienic tendency of the essence-mcmia, the concentration of nutri-
tive elements. Ours is an age of extracts. We have moral extracts
in the form of Bible-House pamphlets ; language-extracts in the form
of compendious grammars ; exercise-extracts under the name of gym-
nastic curriculums ; air-extracts in the shape of oxygen-bladders, and-
a vast deal of such food-concentrations as Liebig's soup, fruit-jellies,
condensed milk, flavoring extracts, and branless flour. But, somehow
or other, the old plan seems, after all, the best. In the homes of our
forefathers morals were taught by example, and with very respectable
results. Six years of grammar-drill in a dead language do not further
a student as much as six months of conversation in a living tongue —
the concrete beats the abstract. Boat-racing, wood-chopping, and
mountain-climbing, are healthier, as well as more pleasant, than gym-
nastic crank-work ; the diverting incidents of out-door sports which
the movement-cure doctor tries to eliminate are the very things that
give interest and life to exercise. And, for some reasons (not easy to
define without the help of such analogies), concentrated nourishment
does not agree with the nature of the human organism. The lungs
find it easier to derive their oxygen from woodland air than from a
ready-made extract, and the stomach, on the whole, prefers to get its
nourishment in the form for which its organism was originally adapted.
Want of bulk makes our food so indigestible. In fruits and berries —
probably the staple diet of our instinct-taught ancestors — the percent-
age of nutritive elements is rather small, but the residue should not be
called worthless, since it serves to make the whole more digestible. A
large, ripe watermelon contains about three ounces of saccharine ele-
ments, which in that combination have a mildly aperient effect, while
in the form of glucose-candy they would produce constipation, heart-
burn, and flatulence. The coarsest bran-bread is the most digestible,
and to the palate of an unprejudiced child also far more attractive than
the smooth but chalky and insipid starch preparations called baker's
bread. Graham-bread and milk, whortleberries, rice-pudding, and
stewed prunes, once or twice a week, generally keep the bowels in tol-
erable order, provided that the general mode of life does not prevent
the influence of the natural peptic stimulants. But even in a case of
obstinate costiveness few people would resort to drugs after trying
the effects of a legumen-diet. Beans do not agree with some persons
(though the Pythagorean interdict has no hygienic significance), but

200 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

one of the three legumens — beans, peas, and lentils — is pretty sure
to suit every constitution, and as bowel-regulators their value can
hardly be overrated. Taken like medicine at regular intervals of eight
hours, and in doses of about a pint and a half, the third or fourth meal
of pea-soup (boiled in soft water and flavored with butter and a pinch
of chopped onions) will prove as effective as a moderate medicinal
aperient ; but, while the effect even of a mild cathartic is followed by
an astringent reaction, the relief obtained by an aperient regimen is
permanent, unless that effect is persistently counteracted by the origi-
nal cause of the disorder. Fruit, fresh or stewed, ripe grapes, or tam-
arind-jelly, and frequent draughts of pure cold water, will insure the
efficacy of the remedy.

Besides an astringent diet, the chief predisposing causes of consti-
pation are : warm weather, overheated rooms, want of exercise, seden-
tary occupations, tight garments, the after-effects of drastic drugs, of
malarial fevers, and sometimes of self abuse. Parturition is frequently
followed by a protracted period of close stools. In the most obstinate
cases of constipation clysters are preferable to cathartics, for the reason
that the former reach the special seat of the disease, viz., the lower
part of the rectum, while the latter begin their work by convulsing the
stomach, and, by irritating its sensitive membrane, disqualify it for the
proper performance of its function. But injections, even of the simplest
kind, should be used only as the last resort, after all the following
remedies have proved ineffective :

Mastication. — Thoroughly masticate and insalivate each morsel of
solid food. Eat slowly ; do not soak your bread, etc., to facilitate deg-
lutition, but let the saliva perform that business. The stomach of
bilious dyspeptics often rejects a stirabout of bread and milk, but
accepts the ingredients in a separate form.

Passive Exercise. — Kneading the abdomen, or riding on horseback
or in a jolting cart, often affords relief by dislodging the obdurated
obstructions of the lower intestines.

Cold sponge-baths excite a peristaltic movement of the colon, a,nd
often induce a direct evacuation.

Air-baths have an analogous effect, and in summer the bed should
be removed to the airiest room in the house. After the stools have
become more regular, exhausting fatigues (in warm weather especially)
should be carefully avoided. The advent of winter greatly lessens
the danger of a relapse. Frost is a peptic stimulant, and after Octo-
ber the cold ablutions can be gradually discontinued. Fresh air, an
occasional sleigh-ride, or an excursion on a rumbling freight-train, will
do the rest ; and the cure is complete if, during the next warm season,
the digestive organs perform their proper functions without the aid of
artificial stimulants. The remedies for bilious constipation have been
mentioned in the chapter on " Dyspepsia," but I will here repeat the
chief rule for the cure of chronic indigestion : " Never eat till you

THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 20i

have leisure to digest." Avoid after-dinner work ; break through every
rule of conventional customs, and postpone the principal meal to the end
of the day, rather than let the marasmus of the digestive organs reach
a degree that calls for a change of climate and occupation, as the only
alternative of a total collapse. Open your bedroom-windows, take a
liberal dose of fresh spring-water with the last meal, and an air-bath
before going to bed, and the result will convince you that night is not
an unpropitious time for digestion.

Unlike constipation, diarrhoea, even in its transient phases, is
always a morbid symptom, and a proof that either the quality or the
excessive quantity of the ingested food calls for abnormal means of
evacuation. For the incipient stages of the disorder the great specific
is fasting. Denutrition, or the temporary deprivation of food, exer-
cises an astringent influence, as part of its general conservative effect.
The organism, stinted in the supply of its vital resources, soon begins
to curtail its current expenditure. The movements of the respiratory
process decrease ; the temperature of the body sinks, the secretion of
bile and uric acid is diminished, and before long the retrenchments of
the assimilative process react on the functions of the intestinal organs ;
the colon contracts, and the smaller intestines retain all but the most
irritating ingesta.*

When that remedy fails, the presumption is that either some viru-
lent substance resists the eliminative efforts of Nature, or else that, in
spite of the diminished sources of supply, the accumulated alimentary
material still exceeds the needs of the organism. In the latter case,
unless a continuation of the fast should seem preferable, the waste can
be stopped by active exercise. After a hard day's work a man can
assimilate a quantum of food that would afflict an idler with grievous
crapulence. The Kamtchatka savage has earned the right to digest the
flesh of the brute which he has slain in a rough-and-tumble combat.
The stomach of the negro does not reject the fruit which he has
plucked from the top branches of a tall forest-tree. Loose bowels be-
come retentive if Epicurus has chopped his own wood and fetched his
own cooking-water. But the best of all astringent exercises is a pe-
destrian excursion. A liberal supply of green fruit has a laxative tend-
ency. A campaign in an orchard country costs the invaders a good
deal of laudanum ; in midsummer some forty per cent of the rank and
file are .generally on the sick-list with diarrhoea. But the first forced
march stops such symptoms. Laxatives and pedestrianism are what
lecturers on materia medica call "incompatibles." By a combination
,of foot-journeys and abstinence even a malignant case of chronic diar-

* A persistent hunger-cure will eliminate even an active virus by a gradual molecular
catalysis and displacement of the inorganic elements. The Arabs cure syphilis by quar-
antines d la Tanner ; and Dr. C. E. Page mentions the case of a far-gone consumptive
who starved the tubercles out of his system. Aneurisms (internal tumors) have been
cured by similar means.

202 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

rba?a can soon be brought under control, though the debility of the
patient should limit his first excursions to the precincts of his bedroom.
Care should, however, be taken not to abuse the partially restored vigor
of the digestive organs, especially during the period of deficient appe-
tite that often follows a colliquative condition of the bowels. Pro-
gressive doses of out-door exercise will gradually overcome that apathy,
and, when the stomach volunteers to announce the need of nourishment,
it can be relied upon to find ways and means to utilize it.

But the problem of a complete cure becomes more complicated if
the bowels have been tortured with astringent drugs. Diarrhoea itself
is an asthenic condition, indicating a deficiency of vital strength, yet
nearly every health-exhausting poison of the vegetable and mineral
kingdom has been employed to paralyze the activity and, as it were,
silence the protest of the rebellious organs. Bismuth, arsenic, calomel,
opium, mercury, nux vomica, zinc salts, acetate of lead, and nitrate of
silver, are among the gentle " aids to Nature " that have been employed
to control the revolt of the mutinous bowels. An attempt to control
a fit of vomiting by choking the neck of the patient would be an analo-
gous mistake. The prescription operates as long as the vitality of the
bowels is absolutely paralyzed by the virulence of the drug, but the
first return of functional energy will be used to eject the poison. That
new protest is silenced by the same argument ; for a while the ex-
haustion of the whole system is mistaken for a sign of submission, till
a fresh revolt calls for a repetition of the coercive measures. In the
mean time the organism suffers under a compound system of starva-
tion ; the humors are surcharged with virulent matter, the whole
digestive apparatus withdraws its aid from the needs of the vital
economy, and the flame of life feeds on the store of tissue ; the patient
wastes more rapidly than an un-poisoned person would on an air-and-
water diet. In garrets, where the last piece of furniture had been sold
to defray the costs of a direful nostrum, I have more than once seen
victims of astringent poisons in a state of misery which human beings
can reach by no other road : worn out, corpse-colored, emaciated
wretches, with that look of listless despair which the eyes of a dying
beast sometimes assume on the brink of Nirvana. The first condition
of recovery is the peremptory abolition of the poison-outrage. For
the first three days prescribe nothing but sweetened rice-icater, and
only tablespoonful doses of that ; give the stomach a sorely-needed
chance of rest. On the fourth and fifth day add a few drops of milk,
and toward the end of the week inspissate the broth to the consist-
ency of gruel. There are persons with whom milk disagrees in all its
forms ; for such prepare a surrogate of whipped eggs with sugar and
warm water — a tablespoonful every half-hour. Do not hope that the
stomach of a far-gone drug-martyr will at once tolerate even such
feather-weight burdens ; it will not repel them with the spasmodic
violence that characterized its reactions against a virulent nostrum,

THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 203

but it will often protest its disability to retain the whole quantum. A
small but increasing percentage will be assimilated, and, if the cor-
responding enlargement of the rations is not overdone, the patient, at
the end of the third or fourth week, may be rewarded by the return of
something like positive appetite, i. e., a craving for more solid food.
Try a slice of rice-pudding and fruit-jelly, or a homoeopathic dose of
blanc-mange. Try a soft-boiled egg or a baked apple. Eschew cor-
dials. Avoid food-extracts, even strong beef -tea, which for a person
in such circumstances is a stimulant rather than a nourishment. In
the mean time watch the weather, and on the first clear day screen the
lower windows, open the upper sashes, and treat the patient to a sun-
bath. Sunlight, applied for half an hour to the bare skin, is a better
tonic than cold water, which invigorates a healthy man, but exhausts
an asthenic invalid. In the form of tepid sponge-baths, however, water
should be applied as soon as the patient can bear the fatigue of keeping
on his legs for a couple of minutes. The first decided gain in strength
employ in the preparatory exercises of pedestrianism. Carpet the
room, clear a track for a circular walk, provide supports at proper
intervals, a small table in one corner, a chair or a curtain-strap in
the other. Interest the patient in his progressive achievements, keep
a record-book, procure a boxful of chips and tally off each round.
Three miles a day mark the time when the sanitarium can be trans-
ferred to the out-door world. In a vineyard country devote the vint-
age season to a three weeks' grape-cure. The cure consists in dining
on bucketfuls of ripe grapes and transparent slices of wheat bread.
Grape-breakfasts, grape-luncheons, and grape-suppers, ad libitum, but
no bread, nor anything else that could interfere with the system-reno-
vating effect of the sweet abstersive, that has been tried with signal
success in the treatment of bilious dyspepsia, gout, and cutaneous dis-
eases.* Extreme caution in the use of animal food, acids, and fer-
mented beverages, for the first six months at least, is as necessary as
after an attack of dysentery, which should be similarly treated, except
that a more rapid recovery of strength will permit a speedier return
to out-door and active exercise.

Colic can generally be traced to the presence of fermenting fluids,
and'is the penalty of excessive indulgence in such beverages as mush, new
beer, fresh cider, together with sour milk and watery vegetables, but
may in rarer cases indicate the agency of more dangerous substances,

* The grape-cures of Thionville, Staremberg, Meran, Lintz, and the Bergstrasse, near
Mannheim, are yearly visited by thousands. In the United States the best facilities might
be found at Hammondsport, Flushing, and Iona Island, New York ; Salem, Massachu.
feetts ; Hagerstown, Maryland ; Lebanon, Columbia, and Eagleville, Pennsylvania ; Gol-
conda, Illinois ; nermann, Missouri ; Cincinnati, Delaware, and Kelly's Island, Ohio. All
Southern California is now studded with vineyards, and the Trauben-kur of Meran hardly
excels the grapes of San Gabriel and Annaheim. Five cents a pound for the ripest
bunches is the average price on Kelly's Island ; in California from two to three cents a
pound ; in larger quantities perhaps even less.

2o4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

drastic mineral acids, putrefactive and zymotic poisons, noxious gases,
etc. Rest and warm bandages are the best remedies. The antidotes
of corrosive 2>oisons will be named in a separate chapter. The pains of
gastric spasms, as a consequence of dietetic sins, may be alleviated by
manipulation and friction with a moist piece of flannel ; in extreme
cases, indicating the presence of virulent acids, by means of a stomach-
pump. Generally a semi-horizontal position, reclining on the left side,
with the upper part of the body slightly raised, together with local
friction, will considerably ease the distressed organ, though intermit-
tent griping pangs may continue till the alchemy of the physiological
workshop has neutralized the irritating substance. From a kindred
affection colic can be distinguished by a simple test : if pressure
against the upper part of the groin increases the pain, the complaint
is an inflammation of the peritonaeum, but otherwise due to the pres-
ence cf acid fluids or expansive gases. Painter's colic may be recog-
nized by the discoloration of the gums and lips, and can be cured only
by the removal of the cause. A napkin, sprinkled with aromatic vine-
gar, and tied loosely across the nostrils, will, however, lessen the effect
of the noxious effluvia ; and the Italians recommend the internal use
of olive-oil (cotton-seed oil would probably serve the same purpose)
and wine. For a few days after a severe attack of colic, pure water
should be the only drink.

Flatulence tends to obviate the proximate cause of intestinal cramps.
As a concomitant of dyspepsia, it indicates the accumulation of undi-
gested food and the necessity of greater abstemiousness. Burnt mag-
nesia absorbs gastric acids, but at the same time impairs the functional
vigor of the stomach too often to be, on the whole, a lesser evil. It
is, however, one of the very few chemical remedies which act, tem-
porarily at least, by a direct removal of the proximate cause. Its per-
manent removal can be effected only by a change of regimen.

In the treatment of haemorrhoids, too, we have to distinguish be-
tween palliatives and radical remedies. If the statistics of the com-
plaint could be tabulated, I believe it would be found that its centers
of distribution coincide with a prevalence of sedentary occupations,
combined with the use of narcotic drinks, especially coffee. Monkeys
have posterior callosities, and their habits prove that an occasional sit-
ting posture is normal to the primates of the animal kingdom. But, in
a state of nature at least, our arboreal relatives are too restless to avail
themselves of their sitting facilities of tener than five or six times a day
— for about a minute at a time. In menageries they become sedate
enough for ten-minutes sessions. But a German chancery-clerk has to
sit fifteen hours a day, awaiting promotion and the supper-hour, for
he is often required to eat his dinner in situ. If his dinner-basket is
sent from a cheap boarding-house, it is sure to contain a selection of
highly astringent comestibles — tough beef, leathery potato-chips, all-
spice, ginger-cakes, and pickles. The accompanying flask contains

THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 205

coffee. If the man of sessions stoops, he damages his lungs ; if he
leans against the edge of the table, he may endanger his stomach ; but,
as sure as he sits, he compresses the region of the vena portce. Ob-
structions of that vein are favored by two circumstances : it has to pass
a double system of capillaries, and, before it can reach the liver, it has
to pump its heavy blood upward. Sooner or later the incessant press-
ure results in varicose enlargements, actual obstruction occurs, the
vein-bags become engorged and at last inflamed, and their rupture dis-
charges the blood, which mingles with the secretions of the rectum, and
causes that incessant pricking and burning that make haemorrhoids
(emerods, piles) as troublesome as a combination of itch and gout.
An astringent diet aggravates the evil by inspissating the blood and
retarding the process of circulation. The stricken Philistines ob-
tained relief by sacrificing golden facsimiles of the afflicted parts,
and cauterizations temporarily free the obstructed passages; but the
days of miracles are past, and, as long as the cause continues to operate,
it would not avail the patient to sacrifice his entire stock of emerods.
Inunctions of warm tallow will palliate the itch. Common mutton-
tallow serves that purpose as well as any patent ointment, for itch and
its cognate complaints are not amenable to the influence of the faith-
cure. The radical remedies are gymnastics and an aperient diet. The
gymnastic specifics are the exercises that promote deep and full respira-
tion, and at the same time react on the abdominal cavity, as spear-
throwing, swinging by the arms, and dumb-bell practice. The diet
should be digestible, and as fluid as possible ; while exercise stimulates
the circulation, the diluents will attenuate the blood, and thus obviate
the proximate cause of the disorder. If the patient has to stick to
his office, he should procure a combination-desk (which any carpenter
can construct without infringement of patents), and stand and sit by
turns.

The ancients kept slaves who had to work all day, sitting before a
primitive grist-mill, and it is possible that haemorrhoids are really a
very antique complaint. But during the age of gymnastics and unfre-
quent meals it is not probable that people suffered much from maw-
worms. Parasites are marvelous colonizers. Wherever the ground is
prepared for their reception, the seed is sure to make its appearance.
There are about sixty different kinds of mildew, a special variety for
nearly eyery special kind of fruit or vegetable ; and, if a decaying
berry of the rarest sort is exposed to the open air, it will soon be cov-
ered with its specific kind of mold. A piece of putrid flesh will attract
blow-flies, even where flies of that sort have never been seen before.
The germs of numberless parasites fill the air, and each species, after
its kind, will promptly fasten upon every sort of decaying or stagnant
organic matter, even in the interior of the body. But in the living
organism of the human system such stagnations are wholly abnormal.
In the economy of the digestive organs peptic disintegration should

zo6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

precede putrefactive decay ; the chyle should never stagnate, the
stream of the organic functions should move with an uninterrupted
current. There are rivers that become so low in summer that pools
of water can be found only in the deeper cavities of the river-bed, and
such pools are sure to swarm with " wrigglers," or incipient gnats.
But, as soon as the current of the rising river drains those pools, the
wrigglers speedily vanish.

The maw-worm plague is caused and should be cured on the same
principle. Most people eat too often. Before the stomach can dis-
pose of the first meal, it receives a second consignment, and soon after
a third, of comestibles elaborately contrived to retard digestion ; after-
noon work monopolizes the energies of the system; the melange in the
small intestines becomes unmanageable, stagnates, and at last ferments.
Babies are gorged with milk till the contents of the little vessel liter-
ally spill at the muzzle ; they are swaddled and bandaged, kept in
horizontal confinement, and anxiously prevented from every motion
that might ease the labor of the sorely overtaxed bowels. * Fresh air,
the next best peptic stimulant, is likewise carefully excluded. Nature
fights the enemy for a week or two, but at last succumbs to odds :
fermentation sets in ; parasites fasten upon their well-prepared pabu-
lum, and soon the tortures of the mummified little martyr are aggra-
vated by the wriggling of hundreds of ascarides. Nervous children
can thus be worried into epileptic fits, and even delirium and brain-
fever. Locally the worm-plague produces constipation, haemorrhages
(often resembling the symptoms of true haemorrhoids), and burning
stools.

If the evil has reached proportions that defy dietetic specifics, the
removal of the cause (as in prurigo, scabies, and syphilis) requires the
application of artificial remedies. Injections of warm water with an
infusion of quassia, or carbolic acid, will expel pin-worm ; oil of
chenopodium (worm-seed) in minute doses, administered with a tea-
spoonful of castor-oil, is an effective prescription for the expulsion of
the " round- worm."

Among the remedies against tcmice, or tape-worms, the following
vegetable specifics are not less effective and much safer than the calo-
mel preparations which were formerly prescribed for that purpose :
Pomegranate-bark ( Granati fructus cortex) / male fern (Filix mas-
cula) / but especially pounded pumpkin-seed. Three ounces of the
fresh seed, mixed with a pint of water and pounded into an emulsion,
taken after a twenty-four hours' fast, rarely fail to evict the tenant
within three hours.

But the germs of the parasites remain behind, and the same predis-
posing conditions may at any time effect their redevelopment. Dietetic
remedies must complete the cure. Children should be restricted to three
meals a day. Let them earn their recovery by exercise — running,
tumbling, dangling at the end of a grapple-swing. Adults should

LAND-BIRDS IN MID-OCEAN. 2o7

limit themselves to a lunch and a good dinner, drink a liberal quantum
of fresh, cold spring- water, but no fermented beverage, and strictly
abstain from indigestible food, especially cheese, sour rye-bread, sauer-
kraut, archaic sausages, pickles, and hard-boiled eggs. Light bread,
cream, and grapes (or baked apples), should constitute the staple of the
diet. A two- weeks grape-cure can do harm. An occasional fast-day
will insure the elimination of undigested food-deposits. Pin-worms
that have escaped the day of wrath may now and then betray their
presence, but they have ceased to multiply, and, after the current of
the organic circulation has once been fairly re-established, intestinal
parasites will disappear like the wrigglers of a drained river-pool.

-♦♦♦-

LAND-BIKDS EST MID-OCEAN".

By GEOEGE W. GEIM.

THE appearance of some of the smaller varieties of migratory birds,
such as sparrows, swallows, doves, etc., several hundred miles away
from the nearest land is by no means an unusual occurrence on the
ocean. About these little erratic visitors there are some curious and
interesting facts. Their appearance is almost always one at a time,
though I have known a considerable number, representing, perhaps, as
many different varieties, to accumulate in the course of a day. It is
usually, though not always, in stormy or unsettled weather.

The first curious fact about these birds is, that they never appear
to be tired out ; whereas birds are often met with near the land with
their strength quite exhausted. A second curious fact about them is
their preternatural tameness where there is no cat or dog on board,
and the crew show no disposition to molest them, as exhibited by their
apparently seeking rather than avoiding the presence of man.

Another curious fact about them is the recovery of all their native
wildness and their instinctive avoidance of man's presence on ap-
proaching the land. The first time I noticed this fact was with a
pair of olive-colored ring-doves, which, from their remarkable tame-
ness and familiarity, I was led to believe had been bred in a domestic
state and perhaps on shipboard. I kept them in the skylight in the
cabin, where they seemed to be quite contented ; but on approach-
ing the land they became the wildest of the wild. One of them es-
caped and flew away. I succeeded in taking the other into port, where
I gave it its liberty. Now, I am certain that these birds could not
have been apprised of the approach to the land through the medium
of any of their ordinary senses. This curious circumstance led me to
notice more particularly the conduct of other varieties of these little

208 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

wanderers upon the ocean so far from their native habitat, and I find
that they nearly all exhibit to a greater or less extent the same curi-
ous characteristics. Here the observant mariner with a smattering of
science may find something to cogitate upon.

Light, heat, sound, etc., are said to be effects produced upon the
living organism through the medium of appropriately developed or-
gans by as many different modes of motion, whereby the animal is
brought into conscious connection with surrounding objects, the effect
diminishing in a progressive ratio as the distance of the object in-
creases. Of these special organs there are said to be five in number
which are essential to the well-being of all perfectly develojDed animals.
But may there not be other analogous modes of motion, producing
analogous effects upon the living organism, whereby the animal is
brought into conscious connection with surrounding objects, and by
or through which it has a sense of the locality or direction of such
objects as are essential to its well-being to seek or avoid? Admit-
ting this, suppose a flock of birds have started on one of their migratory
excursions, guided mainly by this sense of direction, in pursuit of some
distant object. Then let us suppose that in their flight they pass
obliquely, but unwittingly, into another higher stratum or current of
air moving with great velocity in some other direction, but toward the
ocean. The flock would necessarily become very much scattered, and
in the confusion a portion of them would be carried unconsciously
out to sea, beyond the range of their sense of direction — having lost
which, they fly at random and at ease, exerting just sufficient effort to
sustain themselves in the air ; while another portion of the flock, keep-
ing within the limit of their sense of direction, will exhaust all their
strength vainly endeavoring to reach their object against a violent
wind.

So intimately associated with this sense of direction is their instinct
of self-preservation in avoiding the presence of man, that while the
one is in abeyance, the other, in the absence of anything to arouse it,
remains dormant. This, I believe, is the true meaning of the preter-
natural tameness exhibited by the birds on the Galapagos Islands men-
tioned by Darwin.

From the peculiar properties of air in its relation to heat, the at-
mosphere has a tendency to form itself into heterogeneous strata, more
or less inclined to the horizon ; each stratum having a horizontal motion
independent .of the others — a fact the significance of which, I think,
is frequently lost sight of by meteorologists, more especially by cyclo-
nologists. That some of the higher strata of the atmosphere have an
independent horizontal motion, the velocity of which is often incom-
parably greater than anything we experience in the lower stratum, is
evident not only from the appearance in mid -ocean of birds, but of
insects hundreds of miles from land, and apparently as lively as if
they were in their own native haunts. I have seen grasshoppers at

THE ILLUSION OF CHANCE. 209

least a thousand miles,* and dragon-flies certainly two hundred miles
from land.f During a recent voyage from New Zealand to New
South Wales, and thence to Japan, frequently, for several days in
succession, moths and butterflies were visible in the air nearly every
hour in the day.

■♦•»

THE ILLUSION OF CHANCE.

By WILLIAM A. EDDY.

STUDY of the movements of events reveals dynamical, necessary
sequences, and contemplation of the laws of probability, treated
mathematically, generally involves a mental attitude at variance with
theories of luck and premonition. It is believed that a rational treat-
ment of the question will help to dispel superstitious ideas by disclosing
the chain of continuity in all known actions. First, we will consider
events mathematically, or as illustrating the laws of probability ; and,
second, as related to the practical question of success in life. The
subject includes indirectly the question of ethics. Wrong or injurious
action seems to disappear into a vast labyrinth. As we judge super-
ficially or by immediate effects, we are easily misled into a belief that
fraud may result in permanent gain, or that oppression will cure some
political evils. It is important, for instance, that we have right ideas
regarding the tendency in affairs whereby continued injustice or abuse
of power comes to retribution. The jarring of the just relations of
things leads to complications too subtile to be controlled, as the tyrants
of history found by terrible experience, and the fact that our control
is partial, as noticed definitely further on, should cause fear of the
improper use of power. These truths well justify an examination of
the subject.

Before considering the more complicated question of partial con-
trol in its relation to success, we will first glance at the simple or
direct relations between familiar events, as seen in the calculable uni-
formity in the average results of great numbers of so-called games of
chance. The numerical results of card-playing and dice-throwing, as
examined by Professor Venn, have reaffirmed what is generally known

* "December 13, 1876, latitude 17° 24' north, longitude 44° 12' west. While taking
the sun at noon, noticed a number of grasshoppers about the vessel. Made several un-
successful attempts to capture one of them. The nearest point of land is the Island of
Montserrat, latitude 16° 48' north, longitude 62° 12' west, distant 1,023 miles."— (Extract
from a private log.)

\ In the vicinity of the river La Plata, violent westerly gales, called pamperos, are of
frequent occurrence. One of the surest precursors of these gales is the appearance of
numerous dragon-flies in the air. I have seen these insects collecting about the ship fully
two hundred miles from land, off the entrance of the river, while the wind was still blow,
ing a gale from the eastward.
vol. xxiv.-*-l 4

2io THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

— that resulting special aggregates, differing widely in number, show
a narrow margin of difference when combined into an average of many-
such aggregates. " Let us suppose," he says, " that we toss up a penny
a great many times ; the results of the successive throws may be said
to form a series. The separate throws of this series seem to occur in
utter disorder. . . . But when we consider the result of a long succes-
sion we find a marked distinction ; a kind of order begins gradually
to emerge, and at last assumes a distinct and striking aspect." *

It is claimed that at one time about two hundred persons commit-
ted suicide annually in London, but it is possible that the increase of
prosperity or the extension of moral influence might lessen the number.
Human actions, when compared with games in which no skill is ap-
plied, thus disclose a marked difference in the fact that the average
of many games shows a very small margin of departure from calcu-
lated uniformity, while during long periods human actions arising
from like causes differ widely, owing to the evolution of intelligence,
which gradually establishes extensive differences. Many natural phe-
nomena go through long periods of growth and decline. But this
method in nature may be far more difficult to trace than that in a
game of cards. It is completely beyond our power to arrange the
star systems in even a theoretical way that would seem in the slightest
degree complete. In phenomena repeated at conceivable intervals,
however, we may find the average as steadily maintained as that of
great numbers of games. This is seen in the slight variations in the
average of rainfall during a decade. If we extend the problem be-
yond the range of our short lives, we again find that apparently fixed
averages slowly change. It would, therefore, require inconceivable
lapses of time to discern the uniformity of average in these gradual
changes during many centuries. As an illustration of this, there are
good reasons for believing that the temperatures of the north and
south temperate zones vary so greatly in ten thousand five hundred
years that large portions of the globe now under cultivation will be
covered by glaciers. Mr. H. B. Norton, in a lecture delivered before
the Kansas Academy of Science,! makes a careful mathematical cal-
culation based on the precession of the equinoxes. He thus estimates
that the greatest variation in length between winters of the northern
and southern hemispheres occurs at recurring periods of twenty thou-
sand nine hundred and thirty-seven years. These great lapses of time
are, he claims, accompanied by alternate deep submergence of the
poles in accordance with the gradual change of the earth's axial in-
clination. He says :

"It thus appears probable that there have been many glacial
periods in each hemisphere, and that the ocean, like a mighty pen-
dulum, vibrates from pole to pole."

* " The Logic of Chance," by John Venn, M. A., p. 6.

\ Published in " The Popular Science Monthly," October, 1879.

THE ILLUSION OF CHANCE. 21l

Herbert Spencer points out similar truths in that part of his
philosophy concerning the rhythm of motion : * " Every planet, dur-
ing a certain long period, presents more of its northern than of its
southern hemisphere to the sun at the time of its nearest approach to
him ; and then, again, during a like period, presents more of its
southern hemisphere than of its northern — a recurring coincidence
which, though causing in some planets no sensible alterations of
climate, involves in the case of the earth an epoch of twenty-one
thousand years, during which each hemisphere goes through a cycle
of temperate seasons, and seasons that are extreme in their heat and
cold. Nor is this all. There is even a variation of this variation.
For the summers and winters of the whole earth become more or less
strongly contrasted, as the eccentricity of its orbit increases and de-
creases. ... So that in the quantity of light and heat which any
portion of the earth receives from the sun, there goes on a quadruple
rhythm, that of day and night ; that of summer and winter ; that due
to the changing position of the axis at perihelion and aphelion, tak-
ing twenty-one thousand years to complete ; and that involved by
the variation of the orbit's eccentricity, gone through in millions of
years."

These phenomena illustrate the regularity of averages on an im-
mense scale. The differences in temperature between unusually hot
or cold seasons in a given year all offset one another when reduced to
an average of a decade or of a century, just as we assume that the
great differences between glacial and tropical temperatures manifest
approximate uniformity in the long period above considered. It is
thus clear that circumstances or the motions of events lead to sus-
tained average results in spite of seeming irregularities. The slowness
with which some great changes take place is equivalent to the estab-
lishment of permanent conditions as far as the short duration of our
individual consciousness is concerned. The glacial period, whether
due to the precession of the equinoxes or some other cause, involves a
lapse of time far longer than is covered by the historical record of the
earliest races, along down the line of mingled civilization and barbar-
ity to the present time.

In deference to those who are too cautious to accept any doctrine
of averages in nature, it is well to give full weight to an opinion in a
letter from Professor C. H. Hitchcock, regarding the glacial period.
He thinks that every agency must be considered, including " obliquity
of orbit, precession of the equinoxes, axial variation, and elevated
planes at the north." He adds, " If you can prove that in an ice age
at the north the climate about the south pole was ameliorated, then
the fact that it is somewhat colder there now may be of service."
Beside the variation in ocean-level, we may consider it probable that,
when the earth cooled from its primeval molten state, it was left with

* " First Principles," pp. 256, 257.

212 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

slight excess of elevated surface at points either north or south of the
equator, and that in time this resulted in difference of temperature, in
ice accumulation, in axial variation due to unequal attraction. Pro-
fessor Hitchcock's suggestion of many causes is valuable because it
calls attention to the possibility or probability of a vast and connected
ring of variations, each related'to the other, so that ultimately we can
only understand the facts as illustrating the instability of the homo-
geneous as taught by Herbert Spencer. But the oscillation is mani-
fested in so many other ways that, even when it fails as applied to a
special series of geological facts, we are still justified in believing it as
an underlying truth not demonstrated in this case, owing to our want
of definite knowledge concerning the glacial period.

Having thus glanced at mathematical considerations, we now pass
to the identity pervading widely different phenomena. In addition
to this law by which exceptional events are found to accord with a
certain average, we further find identity in various kinds of action.
When the ice on the river is rent with a sound like the booming of
cannon, we detect some resemblance to the rumbling of an earthquake.
Hence the theory may be that the subterranean sound involves the
cracking of rocky strata. The motion of a small whirlpool, of a tor-
nado, of the solar system, and hypothetically of great extents of
nebulous matter, discloses an undercurrent of identity indicating that
we should not value the event in itself, but the wide play of phenomena
so represented. We may further conclude that the material universe,
as far as known, is of value as standing for something beside optical
appearances and mechanism. Aside from this representative value,
concerning sidereal systems, men of genius may discern direct practi-
cal power in small things, as in the following instances : Watt applies
to a wider use the lifting power of steam, as seen in the upward mo-
tion of a tea-kettle cover,* and Edison applies the lessened friction
between electrified metal and rough paper to the general purpose of
reducing the friction of machinery — at present this principle is used
to increase the sounding power of the telephone. Many things appear
trifling because we fail to see in them the wonderful analogies await-
ing disclosure and the possibilities of development, so that lack of
perception or combining power is the main condition of our helpless-
ness in the presence of many forms of material action or phenomena.

In direct opposition to the idea of mastery through knowledge and
continuous effort, we find the belief in luck, the central idea of which
is that a bias in our favor may pervade events. The notion of natural
order in events, followed regardless of persons, substitutes for the illu-
sion of luck the truth of a mere coincidence between what we like and
what results. Such favorable coincidences when not read aright have
wrecked the lives of some men who might otherwise have developed
useful powers. A careful study of such a fortunate turn of events

* The story has been discredited, but the truth is applicable.

THE ILLUSION OF CHANCE. 213

reveals some unpleasant but irresistible facts — that a sustained favor-
able coincidence is very rare and likely to be of doubtful permanent
value, because there is not a proper development of personal quality
whereby no injury will result from prosperity. The fortunate person
tries to swim in a sea of new conditions which he has not reached by
a natural process of growth. The phrase " always lucky " is open to
two objections not easily set aside, owing to the profound complexity
of events : that the person may have skill, tact, agreeableness ; and that
there may be error, owing to the special or restricted view of the per-
son judging. Belief in luck is directly and practically objectionable,
because it leads to submission in matters requiring action.

Another singular but essentially superstitious idea at times gains
credence. A connection between two events is affirmed strongly in
proportion to lack of evidence, or it is assumed that an event has
necessary relation to personal welfare. This was well illustrated by
an occurrence in the central part of Illinois during the presidential
contest between Lincoln and Douglas. Two flag-staffs, about two
hundred feet high, had been put up in the Court-House Square of the
town. Just before the election the staff in honor of Douglas fell,
owing to a defect in the timber. It was at once thought that this
foreshadowed the defeat of Douglas, and when the result seemed to
verify this prophecy the superstitious impression became stronger than
ever.

Our tendency to fill the unknown with imposing possibilities is a
natural and perhaps justifiable effect of the profound mysteries of life
and being which stimulate our curiosity and imagination, but there is
absurdity in postulating connections between special events which are
much better explained by means of the usual physical factors and the
reason. With some persons the supposed relation between death and
thirteen at table seems impressive, because it is assumed that there is
interference owing to unknown laws of action or association. It may
seem incredible that any well-educated person should hold this belief
seriously, yet beyond the shadow of a doubt it has influenced many
who were able in action, if not in dealing with questions of causation.
As death and thirteen at table are both quite common, it follows that
the concentration of attention upon this or any usual number must
result in the observation of many coincidences. An absence of the
coincidence is easily overlooked, because the allowance of one year for
the death to occur causes the prophecy to be forgotten. The disclosure
of this or any other causal connection at once deprives the superstitious
idea of its assumed value. This is evident in a like instance if we
maintain that spilling salt has relation to calamity because it indicates
carelessness and nervousness. Nature never overlooks carelessness,
and nervousness may arise from consciousness of impending trouble ;
hence statistics might show (if we could eliminate other influences)
that persons who spill salt or upset things are more liable to disaster

2i4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

than others. The rejection of a natural cause is unfortunate, because
it is one form of the belief that an imagined relation is objective. It
is assuming that an event will necessarily conform to a prophecy made
entirely without reasonable data. George Eliot pointed out this ab-
sence of reason by saying, in effect, that some people are surprised at
the presence of an evil which they have done everything to produce,
and at the absence of a wished-f or result which they have done nothing
to attain.

•♦»»•

FEMALE EDUCATION FKOM A MEDICAL POINT OF

YIEW*

By T. S. CLOUSTON, M. D.

THERE are a good many reasons why physicians should have opin-
ions about the education of youth rather different from those held
by most of the public and of the professional educators. Their whole
art is founded on the study of the human being — his beginning, his
development, his course, his decay, and his death. All his structures
and all his functions are carefully inquired into. A doctor must now-
adays be a physiologist, and a physiologist includes the mental as well
as the bodily functions of man in his range of inquiry. In fact, it is
one of the peculiarities of the physiological mode of studying human
nature that man is looked on as a whole — body and mind together — a
unity, in which they can not be studied apart from each other. Then
the practical aims of modern medicine, founded on this enlarged study
of man, are gettiDg to be more and more concentrated on measures
for the prevention of diseases, and not merely for their cure. To pre-
vent disease one must control the conditions of life. Especially in
youth, when the human being is most amenable to influences for good
and evil that affect the whole future life, must one regulate the con-
ditions of life, if health is to be preserved. The doctor finds that
health means far more than a good digestion. It means a conscious
sense of well-being all over, contentment, power of work, capacity to
resist evil influences, and, to some extent, good morality. It means a
sound mind in a sound body. The process and the method of educa-
tion undoubtedly influence health strongly. If the educator has dam-
aged the health, the doctor is expected to put it right. An important
part of the physician's duty is to study the sum-total of a man's heredi-
tary tendencies, and his bodily weak or strong points, what is com-
monly called his constitution. He finds that education in many of its
modern forms may be either a most helpful or a most dangerous pro-
cess to many constitutions. In fact, the modern physician is rather

* Lecture delivered at the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh, November, 1882.

FEMALE EDUCATION. 215

disposed to set up as the skilled engineer of the human machine, and
the authoritative exponent of its proper treatment in all its depart-
ments, both when it is working rightly as well as when it goes
wrong.

A careful study of the qualities and capacities of one's material is
the very first thing to be done before determining the wear and tear
to which it is to be subjected, or arranging the work it is to do. This
is a comparatively easy matter, when an ordinary machine is to be
made, however complicated. The iron and the steel of the locomotive
can be most accurately tested. Yet all prudent engineers allow an
enormous margin for casualties. The actual strain put on is not half
of what the machinery could really bear. Who would subject the
plates of a boiler to a pressure just up to their bursting-point ? Na-
ture in her mechanics usually makes much more allowance than engi-
neers do. The heart of an animal could send five times the amount
of blood that it has to propel at twice the rate of the normal blood-
current. The arterial pipes that contain and conduct the blood to the
extremities are of sufficient thickness and strength to resist five times
the pressure put on them day by day. The stomach in a healthy man
has usually the power of digesting twice or thrice the amount of food
really needed for nourishing the body. Woe betide the diners-out, if
it stopped short just at the point when enough for Nature's wants had
been digested ! This principle of having a reserve of spare power
beyond the ordinary daily needs, only to be called into operation on
rare and special occasions, is Nature's principle throughout the whole
region of life. She scatters seeds by the million where thousands only
can grow.

There is a law of Nature, too, that lies at the very root of the prin-
ciples I am going to advocate to-night. It is this, that every living
being has from its birth a limit of growth and development in all direc-
tions beyond which it can not possibly go by any amount of forcing.
Man can not add one cubit to his stature. The blacksmith's arm can
not grow beyond a certain limit. The cricketer's quickness can not
be increased beyond this inexorable point. The thinker's effort can
not extend further than this fixed limit of brain-power in each man.
This limit is fixed at different points in each man in regard to his vari-
ous powers, but there is a limit beyond which you can not go in any
direction in each faculty and organ.

The capacity for being educated or developed in youth, the recep-
tive capacity of each brain, is definitely fixed as to each brain of each
young man and woman.

Then the important laws of hereditary transmission of weaknesses
and peculiarities and strong points must be studied and kept in mind,
so far as we know them, by the educator of youth. To hear some
persons talk, you would imagine that every youth and maid had a con-
stitution as free from faults and weak points, and as little liable to go

zi6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY,

wrong, as a forty-shilling watch. Nothing is more certain than that
every man and woman is like their progenitors in the main. It takes
generations for new conditions of life to eradicate hereditary pecul-
iarities, and then they are always tending to come back. These heredi-
tary peculiarities in youth are mostly not seen as actualities that can
be pointed out and proved to exist by any outward signs. They exist
as potentialities only, and come out as actual measurable and ascertain-
able facts at certain ages, or under certain conditions. A young man
who inherits gout strongly may for the first five-and-twenty years of
his life be absolutely free from any trace of the disease. Yet we are
warranted in inferring that something is there which must be taken
into account in the diet and conditions of life, if we wish to contract
and eradicate the tendency. Many nervous diseases and conditions
are the most hereditary of all, and we have good reason to think that,
in those subject to them, the conditions of life, and the treatment to
which the brain and the rest of the nervous system are subjected dur-
ing the period of the building of the constitution — that is, during ado-
lescence from thirteen to twenty-five — are of the highest importance
in hastening and accentuating, or retarding and lessening, those nerv-
ous peculiarities. The problems of the hereditary transmission of
qualities and tendencies to disease are some of the most wonderful in
nature, and they are as yet by no means clearly elucidated. Many of
them, as yet, can not be brought under any law. In our present state
of physiological knowledge, it is, for instance, a quite inconceivable
thing what takes place when we have two generations of perfectly
healthy persons intervening between an insane great-grandmother and
an insane great-grandchild. The grandparent and the parent carried
something in their constitutions which was never appreciable to us at
all. Yet it was there just as certainly as if it had broken out as a dis-
ease. It is one of the future problems of physiology and medicine to
deduce the exact laws of heredity in living beings, and to counteract
the evil hereditary tendencies through conditions of life. To do the
latter we shall undoubtedly have to begin early in life, and we shall
have to control the education especially, and make it conformable to
Nature's indications, laws, and conditions.

Another law of living beings to be kept in mind is this : There is
a certain general energy in the organism which may be used in many
directions, and may take different forms, such as for growth, nutrition,
muscular force, thinking, feeling, or acquiring knowledge, according
as it is called out or needed. But its total amount is strictly limited,
and if it is used to do one thing, then it is not available for another.
If you use the force of your steam-engine for generating electricity,
you can not have it for sawing your wood. If you have the vital
energy doing the work of building the bones and muscles and brain
during the year that a girl grows two inches in height, and gains a
stone in weight, you can not have it that year for the acquisition of

FEMALE EDUCATION. 217

knowledge and for study. If by undue pressure you do call up and
use for education the energy that ought to go toward growth and
strengthening the body, you produce a small and unhealthy specimen
of humanity, just like those plants which have had their flowers un-
duly forced, and are deficient in bulk and hardiness, and will not pro-
duce seed. Nature disposes of her energies in a human being in due
proportion to the wants of each organ and faculty. There is a nat-
ural and harmonious relation which each bears to the other. This re-
lation is different in different persons, and at different periods of life.
The plowman takes up most of his energy in muscular effort and in
the repair of waste muscle, and he has little left for thinking. The
student uses his up in the mental effort of his brain, and has little left
for heavy muscular work. No doubt Nature is sometimes prodigal of
energy, and provides enough for the high-pressure working of both
the brain and the muscles in some cases. But this is not the rule, and
should not be assumed as applicable to many persons. At the differ-
ent periods of life Nature uses up her available energy in different
ways. She allocates it in babyhood chiefly to body-growth, in early
girlhood partly to growth and partly to brain development ; in adoles-
cence, the period of which I am to speak chiefly to-night, her effort
is evidently to complete the building up of the structures everywhere,
to bring to full development the various functions, to strengthen
and harmonize the whole body and the brain, so that they shall be
able to produce, and do in the succeeding years of full maturity all that
they are capable of. It is certainly not a period of production, but of
acquisition. If the original constitution derived from ancestry has
been good, if the conditions of life in childhood have been favorable,
if the education has been of the right kind, developing the whole being
in all her faculties equally and harmoniously after Nature's plan, and
if the period of adolescence has crowned and completed every organ
and every faculty, no faculty being unduly called on to the impov-
erishment of the others, then we expect, and indeed must have, a
woman in health, which means happiness, with the full capacity for
work, for production, and for resisting hurtful influences, and for liv-
ing her allotted time. But this can only result from a harmonious and
healthy development, which we may take as the physician's word to
denote education in his sense. It can only result from regarding the
woman as a unit, body and mind inseparable ; it can only result from
the educator's efforts being on the lines of Nature's facts, and Nature's
harmonies, and Nature's laws.

Another fact in regard to the vital energies and forces of the hu-
man body is this : That you may use up by an undue push and press-
ure at one time of life the power that ought to have been spread out
over long periods. We see this daily in men who have had trying or
or excited lives and occupations. Some of them wear out soon, and
grow old soon, and are old men with no energy or vitality left at fifty.

218 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

"What you put into one period of life you want at another. If with
ten tons of coal in the tender you keep your locomotive running at
sixty miles an hour for the first two hours, you do not expect it to do
this for long. Each period of life has its peculiar forces and energies
in which it is specially rich. In adolescence the strong points, mental
and bodily, are very marked. I shall specially allude to them by-and-
by. It is sufficient to say here that they are not thinking or intense
repression of all the general energies so as to concentrate them in men-
tal work. This may be done, but the question is, Is it well to do it ?
Does it make life more complete and happy to do so, looking at life as
a whole ? A physician, like a philosopher, must look on life from the
cradle to the grave, not on one portion of it only, as the educational-
ist is perforce obliged to do, having nothing to do with it afterward.
Like many architects and contractors building our houses for us, they
turn out an article finished up to the standard of the time, and then
hand it over to you. They never see it again. Its future does not
concern them much. I have often proposed that your architect and
contractor should be bound to come and look at your house every five
years for the first twenty, and should get certain deferred payments
at these periods according as the work is standing, and no defects
developing. So I would have the educator's reputation depend,
not on what he has turned out at twenty-one, but on the result at
forty or fifty or sixty. Education is a preparation for the work of
life, not a thing that is good in itself. If it has helped life to be
healthy, happy, successful, and long, then it has been good ; if in
any degree it has caused disease, unhappiness, non-success, then it has
been bad.

There is another vital fact in the constitution of human nature that
needs to be taken into account — at least I for one believe it to be a
fact. It is this, that one generation may, by living at high pressure,
or under specially unfavorable conditions, exhaust and use up more
than its share of energy. That is, it may draw a bill on posterity, and
transmit to the next generation not enough to pay it. I believe many
of us are now having the benefit of the calm, unexciting, lazy lives of
our forefathers of the last generation. They stored up energy for us ;
now we are using it. The question is, Can we begin at adolescence,
work at high pressure, keep this up during our lives (which in that case
will be on an average rather short), and yet transmit to our posterity
enough vital energy for their needs ? How often it has happened, in
the history of the world, that people who for generations have exhib-
ited no special energy, blaze out in tremendous bursts of national
greatness for a time, and then almost die out ! The Tartars under
Genghis Khan, the Turks when they overawed Europe, the Arabs
when they conquered Spain, are examples. We must take care that
this does not happen to us. How often we see a quiet country family,
that has for generations led quiet, humdrum lives, suddenly produce

FEMALE EDUCATION.

219

one or two great men, and then relapse into greater obscurity than be-
fore, or become degenerate and die out altogether !

Another fact in the body and mind history of human beings is this,
that there are certain physiological eras or periods in life, each of
which has a certain meaning. The chief of such eras are childhood,
puberty, adolescence, maturity, the climacteric, and senility. We have
to ascertain, What does Nature mean by these eras ? What does it
strive to attain to in each period ? What are the ideal conditions of
each ? No one of these periods can be studied from a bodily point of
view alone, or from a mental point of view alone. They must be re-
garded from the point of view of the whole living being, with all its
powers and faculties, bodily and mental. Not only so, but in most
cases the inherited weaknesses must be taken into account too. Those
eras of life can not be fully understood looked at with reference to the
individual. Their meaning is only seen when the social life, the an-
cestral life, and the life of the future race, are all taken into account.
And this is what makes some proper attention to those eras so very
important from the social as well as the physician's point of view. If
they are not understood, and so are mismanaged, not only the individ-
ual suffers, but society and the race of the future. Particularly the
era of adolescence is important, for it is the summer ripening time in
the vital history. If the grain is poorly matured, it is not good for
either eating or sowing.

Such is the physician's, or perhaps I should rather say the physiolo-
gist's, way of regarding a woman, her development, and her education.
It is because we do not think the average parent and the professional
educator in the technical sense always take this wide view, but that
the professional enthusiasm of the latter takes account of, and tries to
cultivate, one set of faculties only, viz., the mental ; because we think
the public mind is getting to regard as all-important in female educa-
tion what we think is not so important, and so to take little account of
what we regard as of supreme importance to the individual and to the
race — viz., the constitution and the health — that I think that the physi-
ological view of female education should be brought forward and pre-
sented to the public mind more frequently than is the case ; while the
bad results in after-life of disregarding Nature's laws, as these results
come under the notice of the physician, should be strongly and clearly
brought before the general mass of parents and educators. It is not a
matter that concerns the physician and his immediate patient only. It
concerns the whole of the people.

I shall now enter more into detail in illustration of the general
principles I have mentioned, as applied to that period of the life of a
young woman when the chief part of her education is going on. I am
not going to speak much of the period of childhood, or up to the age
of thirteen or so. Before that time it is no doubt important that edu-
cation should be conducted on physiological principles, with due regard

220 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

to the growth of the whole organism, and therefore without too many-
hours of mental work, with plenty of play and rest, and in well-ven-
tilated school-rooms. During the period of childhood few girls will
overwork themselves. If it is done, it is by outside pressure, and any
bad effects are usually temporary, and easily got over by a little rest,
and a good holiday in the country.

The era of adolescence is one of the greatest importance from a
bodily and mental point of view in young men and women, but espe-
cially in the latter. Bodily, the child eats, sleeps, grows, plays, and
does what she is told. Life has no seriousness. Everything in the
body and mind is inchoate and unformed. Nothing indicates perma-
nence. There are great and constant muscular energy, noise, sound
sleep, quick digestion. The delights of life consist in sweets and
games, the imagination is shallow, the affections are instinctive, " char-
acter " is nascent ; there is no morality in any correct sense, and no
real religious sentiment. There is little liability to nervous diseases ex-
cept those affecting the muscular system ; there are no neuralgias, no
liability to mental diseases, and most other diseases are sharp and soon
over. It is very different with the girl when adolescence commences.
Then bodily energies of a new kind begin to arise, vast tracts of brain
quite unused before are brought into active exercise. The growth
assumes a different direction and type, awkwardness of movement be-
comes possible, and on the other hand a grace never before attainable
can be acquired. The bones begin to cohere and solidify at their ends,
and the soft cartilage joinings to get firmer. The tastes for food and
drink often change. Bread and butter and sweets no longer satisfy
entirely. Stronger and more stimulating foods are craved. The car-
riage and walk change. The lines of beauty begin to develop. But
the mental changes are even more striking. All that is specially char-
acteristic of woman begins to appear ; childish things are put away ;
dolls no longer give pleasure. For the first time distinct individual
mental peculiarities show themselves. The effective portion of the
mental nature begins to assume altogether new forms, and to acquire
a new power. Literature and poetry begin to be understood in a vague
way, and the latter often becomes a passion. The imagination becomes
strengthened, and is directed into different channels from before. The
sense of right and wrong and of duty becomes then more active.
Morality in a real sense is possible. A sense of the seriousness and
responsibility of life may be said then to awaken for the first time.
The knowledge of good and evil is acquired. The religious instinct
arises then for the first time in any power. Modesty and diffidence in
certain circumstances are for the first time seen. The emotional nature
acquires depth, and tenderness appears. The real events and possi-
bilities of the future are reflected in vague and dream-like emotions
and longings that have much bliss in them, but not a little too of
seriousness and difficulty. The adolescent feels instinctively that she

FEMALE EDUCATION. 221

has now entered a new country, the face of which she does not know,
but which may be full of good and happiness to her. The reasoning
faculty acquires more backbone, but is as yet the slave of the instincts
and the emotions. A conception of an ideal in anything is then at-
tainable, and the ideal is very apt to take the place of the real. The
relations and feelings toward the other sex utterly change, and the
change makes its subject liable to tremendous emotional cataclysms,
that may utterly overmaster the rest of the mental life. There is a
subjective egoism, and often selfishness, tending toward objective
dualism. There is resolute action from instinct, and there is a tend-
ency to set at defiance calculation and reason. All those changes go
hand in hand with bodily changes and bodily development. There is
a direct action and interaction between body and mind, all through.
Accompanying all these there are, when health is present, a constant
ebullition of animal spirits, a joyous feeling, a pleasure in life for its
own sake, and there is a craving for light and beauty in something.
There should not only be enough energy in the body and mind to do
work, but there should be some to spare for fun and frolic, which is
just Nature's pleasant way of expending vital force that is not needed
at the time for anything else.

For the origination, for the gradual evolution of all these mental
changes into perfect womanhood, there are needed corresponding bod-
ily developments. Without these we should have none of those mar-
velous mental and emotional phenomena properly evolved and de-
veloped. If the health is weak, the nutrition poor, the bodily functions
disordered and imperfect, and the nervous force impaired, we are liable
to have the whole feminine mental development arrested or distorted.
If undue calls are made on the nervous force, or the mental power,
or the bodily energies, the perfection of nature can not be attained,
and womanhood is reached without the characteristic womanly quali-
ties of mind or body. The fair ideal is distorted. The girl student
who has concentrated all her force on cramming book knowledge,
neglecting her bodily requirements ; the girl betrothed who has been
allowed to fall in love before her emotional nature was largely enough
developed ; and the girl drudge who has been exhausted with physical
labor — all alike are apt to suffer the effects of an inharmonious, and
therefore an unhealthy, mental and bodily constitution. The body
and the mind go in absolute unison, just as the blush on the maiden's
cheek comes and goes with emotion, as the brightness and mobility of
her features go with mental vivacity and happiness.

All those mental and bodily changes are not sudden, nor fully
completed and brought to perfection at once ; it takes on an average
from ten to twelve years before they are fully completed. All that
time they are going on, and during that time there is an immense
strain on the constitution. All that time the whole organic nature
is in a state of what we call instability : that is, it is liable to be upset

222 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

in its working by slight causes. The calls on the inherent vital energy
to carry on and to bring to the harmonious perfection of full woman-
hood all these combined bodily and mental qualities I have referred
to, during these ten or twelve years, is very great indeed.

We physicians maintain that this period is one of momentous im-
portance, and we have good reason to know this, for we are often
called on to treat diseases that arise then, and, having originated then,
have been fully matured afterward. The risks and the dangers to
body and mind are then very great indeed. We count it a fearful
risk to run, not merely that actual disease should be brought on, but
that a girl capable of being developed into a healthy and happy
woman, with a rounded feminine constitution after Nature's type — the
only type that secures happiness and satisfaction to a woman — should
by bad management, misdirected education, or bad conditions of life,
grow into a distorted, unnatural, and therefore unhappy woman, who
can not get out of the life that she has only to live once all that it is
capable of yielding her. Like all the other physiological eras of life,
that of adolescence only comes once. If the developing process, which
is its chief characteristic, is not completed, then it is missed for life.
Whatever is done then is final ; whatever is left undone is also final.
If a woman is not formed at twenty-five, the chances are she will never
be so ; if she is not healthy then, she probably will not be so. Who
in his senses can deny that it is far better for nineteen women out
of twenty to be healthy than to be intellectually well educated ? No
acquirements of knowledge can possibly make up for health in after-
life. There is an organic happiness that goes only with good health
and a harmoniously constituted body and mind. Without that or-
ganic happiness life is not worth having. Cheerfulness is one of the
best outward signs of this perfect health, and what woman has not
missed her vocation in the world who is not cheerful ? A general
sense of well-being is the best conscious proof of perfect health. It
underlies all enduring happiness. It means good and harmonious de-
velopment of mind and body, properly working functions, and satis-
fied organic needs. Any method of education that impairs this must
be bad and one-sided.

Here it may be necessary to correct a too common notion that the
brain only subserves mental work. To hear the common expression
"brain-work," one would imagine that muscular exercise, ordinary
employments, and digestion, could go on without the brain's working
at all. No idea could be more mistaken. The brain is a most com-
plicated organ in structure and function, that regulates the working
of every portion of the body, that has certain portions of it devoted
to motion and feeling, and passion, and digestion, and body-growth,
and nutrition, etc. It is the one organ that dominates all the others,
regulating and harmonizing all their functions. If one side of it is
injured during growth, the opposite side of the body is left stunted

FEMALE EDUCATION. 223

and partially paralyzed, as well as the mental power weakened. If
undue calls are made on one part, the other portions suffer. Now this
wondrous and as yet only partially known organ has grown most of
its growth, in so far as mere bulk is concerned, by the time adolescence
begins. But its higher qualities — its force, its power of producing
varied energies — are then only nascent. They develop during this
period. It is then that the brain needs plenty of rest in sleep, fresh
air, pure blood, good, nourishing, non-stimulating food, and work that
develops but does not exhaust. The mental portion of the brain is no
doubt the highest, and undue calls on that portion exhaust more than
any other part. As I said, only a certain amount of energy or work
is possible by any amount of stimulation. The brain has most diver-
sified functions, but it has also a solidarity of action. No part is sick
without all the other parts suffering. No function is overtaxed with-
out all the other functions being weakened. Overtaxing of the men-
tal function is specially weakening. In mature life, after the body is
fully developed, such an overtaxing can be repaired by rest. The in-
jury is merely temporary. If a man overworks his brain in business
or study, and gives himself too little sleep, and gets an attack of indi-
gestion, it means that he has taken up the brain-energy that ought to
have gone toward digestion in mental work. But he stops work, goes
to the country, and his recuperated brain soon acquires force enough
to stimulate the stomach to secrete its juices and do its work. But if
in adolescence, before the bones are knit, and the growth completed,
and the feminine nature far advanced toward perfection, if the brain
that is in the process of doing all these things is year by year called
on to exert its yet imperfect forces chiefly in acquiring book-knowledge
by long hours of study, and in consequence the growth is stopped, the
blood is thinned, the cheeks are pallid, the fat destroyed, the wondrous
forces and faculties that I have spoken of are arrested before they
attain completion, then, when the period of growth and development
ceases, the damage is irreparable. There is no time or place of or-
ganic repentance provided by Nature for the sins of the schoolmaster.
Life has to be faced with an imperfect organism, its work and duties
done with impaired forces, and its chances of accidents met without a
stock of reserve power. This is a poor lookout for the individual ;
but when motherhood comes, and sound minds in sound bodies have
to be transmitted to posterity, how is it to be then with the future
race? This aspect of the question of female education during the
period of adolescence is of absolutely primary importance to the world.
Yet it is wholly ignored in many systems of education. What is the
use of culture, if it is all to end with the present generation ? What
a responsibility to transmit to future generations weak bodies and
over-sensitive brains, liable to all sorts of nervous disease ! Nothing
can be more certain than that the qualities, good and bad, acquired in
one generation are sent on to the next. The world may be all the

224 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

better of a generation of healthy, ignorant, and happy mothers, who
can produce stalwart, forceful sons and daughters (not that I wish this
lecture to be an apology for health and ignorance), but the world
must be worse for a system of stopping full and harmonious develop-
ment in the mothers of the next generation. My plea is, that as Na-
ture is harmonious in mental and bodily development, we should follow
on her lines, and not set up an educational standard for ourselves that
is one-sided, because it takes no proper account of the constitution of
the body and brain at all, only considering one brain-function — the
mental.

Along with these developments of mind and emotion during ado-
lescence there are, unfortunately, too apt to develop hereditary weak-
nesses, especially of the nervous kind. Physicians then meet with
hysteria, neuralgia, nervous exhaustion, insanity, etc., for the first
time. As normal individualities of bodily form and mental character
then arise, so abnormal developments arise too where they are in-
herited or brought on by unfavorable treatment. This law is found
to prevail in human constitutions : if you give Nature a good chance
by specially favorable conditions, and by counteractive measures early
in life, she tends to eradicate evil hereditary tendencies, and to return
to a healthy type, if the evil has not gone too far in the ancestry or in
the individual. Unfortunately, there are very few families indeed,
n6wadays, free from tendencies to some hereditary disease or other.
Our modern life tends to develop the brain and nervous system, and
undue development means risk of disease always. What the profes-
sion of medicine specially desires to guard our population now against,
is our becoming a nervous race. We want to have body as well as
mind ; otherwise we think that degeneration of the race is inevitable.
And, therefore, we rather would err on the safe side, and keep the
mental part of the human machine back a little, while we would en-
courage bulk, and fat, and bone, and muscular strength. We think
this gives a greater chance of health and happiness to the individual,
and infinitely more chance of permanence and improvement to the
race. This applies to the female sex, we think, more than to the male.
Man's chief work is more related to the present (from a physiological
point of view), woman's chief work to the future of the world. Why
should we spoil a good mother by making an ordinary grammarian ?

It will be said, as an hereditary fact, that most great men have had
mothers of strong minds. I believe this to be true, but it is not a
fact that many great men have had what would now be called "highly-
educated " mothers. On the contrary, very few such men have had
such mothers. There were usually an innate force and a good devel-
opment of mind and body in the mothers of such men, who usually
had led quiet, uneventful, unexciting lives. I am inclined to believe
that if the mothers of such men had been in adolescence worked in
learning book-knowledge for eight or ten hours a day in a sitting pos-

FEMALE EDUCATION. 225

ture ; if they had been stimulated by competition all that time, and
had ended at twenty-one by being first-prize women (as probably
most of them had the power of being) — if this had befallen them,
then, I think, their sons would have been small and distorted men,
instead of being the lights of the world.

One great argument for the " higher education " of women is that
it makes them fitter companions for highly-educated men. This view
should be looked at in the light of the ideal women that have been
created in literature by men and women of genius. If genius has the
instinct to discover the highest qualities, and to portray them for our
instruction, we should get guidance here. Women have been painted
by our poets, dramatists, and creative writers of fiction, by the thou-
sand. Many persons would accept the ideals thus sketched for them
as a surer guide than the labored deductions of the scientists. Men of
genius ought to have known the kind of women whose companionship
they liked, and whose influence on them was best. While they have
had to create every kind of woman in peopling the ideal worlds they
have made for us, it is certainly very remarkable that the ideal type
of the very highly book-educated woman of the modern educationalist
is scarcely met with at all. In " The Princess " of our poet-laureate
the fancy can not be said to be a serious or imitable one. Though the
sentiment of the "sweet girl-graduates with their golden hair " is this :

" Oh ! lift your natures up,
Embrace our aims : work out your freedom, girls ;
Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed.
Drink deep until the habits of the slave,
The sins of emptiness, gossip, and spite,
And slander die. Better not be at all
Than not be noble " —

yet the poet paints the sweetness so as altogether to overpower the
learnedness in the picture, and the Princess's ideal and purpose come to>
naught. And Lady Psyche's dream of likeness and equality is as far
as ever from being realized :

"Everywhere
Two heads in council, two beside the hearth,
Two in the tangled business of the world,
Two in the liberal offices of life,
Two plummets dropped for one to sound the abys3
- Of science and the secrets of the mind.
Musician, painter, sculptor, critic move;
And everywhere the broad and bounteous earth
Should bear a double growth of these rare souls,
Poets whose thoughts enrich the blood of the world."

Shakespeare's women are certainly not of the learned sort. Their
years of adolescence were not taken up in getting book-knowledge
exclusively. Their emotional nature was not dried up by the strain of
vol. xxiv. — \5

226 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

intellectual work in youth. Their constitutions were not spoiled by
study. They had fair faces, and womanly forms, and warm affections,
and strong, impulsive passions, and mother-wit, and keen discernment,
and most vigorous resolution, but nothing that we would call learning
— not one of them. Portia, who acted the most learned part of all
Shakespeare's women, vehemently describes herself as

" An unlessoned girl, unschooled, unpracticed."

George Eliot has created for us a whole host of young women, all
real, all true to nature. Herself a woman, and a genius of the highest
order ; penetrating, learned, accomplished, subtile, and with a power
of discriminating language unequaled in our generation ; a wife and
mother too — she was the best-fitted woman of the age unquestionably
to draw for us a picture of young womanhood, highly educated in
knowledge, up to the educationalist's ideal. "Where do you find such
a character in her writings ? Dorothea in " Middlemarch " had ex- .
actly the makings of the successful omnivorous young female students
of the present day ; intellectual, conscientious, hyper-conscientious —
as such young women so often are to their cost — M studious, her mind
was theoretic, and yearned after some lofty conceptions of the world.
. . . She was enamored of intensity and greatness." She was self-sac-
rificing to a fault. She was often ardent, and not in the least self -ad-
miring. Yet Dorothea is not highly educated in the modern sense.
Perhaps a modern educationalist would say that that was the reason
poor Dorothea made such a mess of it, and threw herself away first
on a selfish, shallow old brute, thinking he was a hero, and then on
the least interesting fellow in the book.

One of the finest studies of adolescence in the female sex, from the
mental side, is Gwendolen Harleth, in "Daniel Deronda." The pic-
ture is worthy of study by all persons who take an interest in human
nature. Gwendolen was neither good nor studious. She was idle in
learning, and she was selfish. She had a vast amount of subjective
egoism, tending toward objective dualism, resolute action from in-
stinct, a setting at defiance of calculation and reason, yet acting most
reasonably toward the end in view. She was full of sentimentality,
of inchoate religious instinct, of a desire for notice. Yet she was un-
deniably a fine young woman, and is a type of a large mass of the
young women whom our modern educationalists would like to set to
work for eight hours a day, from the age of thirteen to twenty, ac-
quiring book-learning. I confess I more agree with Hannah Flore's
notion of education for such a girl : " I call education not that which
smothers a woman with accomplishments, but that which tends to con-
solidate a firm and regular system of character, that which tends to
form a friend, a companion, and a wife. I call education not that
which is made up of shreds and patches, of useless arts, but that which
inculcates principles, polishes taste, regulates temper, cultivates reason,

FEMALE EDUCATION. 227

subdues the passions, directs the feelings, habituates to reflection, and
trains to self-denial — that which refers all actions, feelings, sentiments,
tastes, and passions to the love and fear of God." If to this we add
that which hardens the muscles, adds to the fat, quickens and makes
graceful the movements, hardens the bones, softens the skin, enriches
the blood, promotes but does not over-stimulate the bodily functions,
quickens and makes accurate the observation, increases the sense of
real beauty of all kinds, promotes the cheerfulness, and develops a
sense of universal well-being, we should have, in my opinion, the prin-
ciples on which an educational system should be founded.

George Eliot's Romola was in a sense a learned woman, brought
up in the midst of books, and in the atmosphere of culture. Yet she
took to love-making, marriage, self-denial, charity, and religion, and
deserted her books the moment her duty in them was done. She had
no innate love of book-learning ; most of what she had acquired seemed
to do her little good in her after-life. It was no guide to her in her
difficulties, it was no solace to her in disappointments, it was no resource
to her when everything else had failed. It had not taken hold of her
nature, because it was not on the great lines on which her nature was
constituted. She and her father were as much alike as a man and
woman can be. Yet to him his books were an occupation and a
delight which he loved, to her their study had been a self-denial all
through.

We all know what Thackeray's women were, and yet he stands
very high as a faithful student and expounder of human nature, as it
exists.

When we look at the sort of women again that these great mas-
ters of the study of human character made their heroes fall down and
worship, we certainly do not find that the schoolmaster had had much
to do with the creation of their attractiveness. Hamlet and Ophelia,
Adam Bede and Hetty, Deronda and Gwendolen, Lydgate and Rosa-
mond, are the common types of men above the common mold taking
to women of the unlearned if not quite uneducated type. The thought-
ful and scientific Lydgate said about pretty, shallow Rosamond : " She
is grace itself ; she is perfectly lovely and accomplished ; that is what
a woman ought to be : she ought to produce the effect of exquisite
music"; while he said about the stately, thoughtful Dorothea, "The
society of such women was about as relaxing as going from your work
to teach the second form, instead of reclining in a paradise, with sweet
laughs for bird-notes and blue eyes for a heaven."

But it may be said all this was wrong, the result of yielding to
unaided, unlearned Nature's lowest affinities, and that it turned out
badly for those men. If they had mated suitably, the world would
have been better, and they themselves would have been happier. But
the physiologist will not readily believe that Nature's mental affinities
can be wrong, any more than he can believe that the appetite is not

228 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

on the whole the best guide as to the kind and amount of food that is
good for us. When he finds in nature a marked masculine and femi-
nine type of being, of body and of mind, marked enough from birth,
but diverging widely from the beginning of the physiological era of
adolescence, each type tending toward a different ideal, and attaining
this at the end of that period ; and, recognizing these facts of nature,
he finds it most difficult to admit that the same type of education
should prevail in this momentous era, or that the same standard and
ideal of a completed education should be striven after for the two
sexes. And, when he finds that the great geniuses of literature have
created these types of young women as different from the masculine
type as the Apollo Belvedere is unlike the Venus de' Medici, he can
not but become strongly persuaded that his deductions from physio-
logical facts are true, and that they have been always instinctively
recognized by the wisest of mankind. If it can be shown that the
present tendency to over-educate the female sex in book-learning dm>
ing adolescence, and the mental work, confinement, etc., that this im-
plies tend to impair perfect health, to interfere with Nature's lines of
feminine development, to exhaust energy that is needed for other pur-
poses, and to diminish the chances of the permanence of the race, then
it is time that the physiological view in regard to education were put
in a plain way to the professional educator and to the parent.

♦•»

THE CHEMISTEY OF COOKEKY.

By W. MATTIEU WILLIAMS.

XVIII.

I FIND that Sir Henry Thompson, in a lecture delivered at the
Fisheries Exhibition, and now reprinted, has invaded my subject,
and has done this so well that I shall retaliate by annexing his sug-
gestion, which is that fish should be roasted. He says that this mode
of cooking fish should be general, since it is applicable to all varieties.
I fully agree with him, but go a little further in the same direction by
including, not only roasting in a Dutch or American oven before the
fire, but also in the side-ovens of kitcheners and in gas-ovens, which,
when used as I have explained, are roasters, i. e., they cook by radia-
tion, without any of the drying anticipated by Sir Henry.

The practical housewife will probably say that this is not new,
seeing that people who know what is good have long been in the habit
of enjoying mackerel and haddocks (especially Dublin Bay haddocks)
stuffed and baked, and cods' heads similarly treated. The Jews do
something of the kind with halibut's head, which they prize as the

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY. 229

greatest of all piscine delicacies. The John Dory is commonly stuffed
and cooked in an oven by those who understand his merits.

The excellence of Sir Henry Thompson's idea consists in its breadth
as applicable to all fish, on the basis of that fundamental principle of
scientific cookery on which I have so continually and variously in-
sisted, viz., the retention of the natural juices of the viands.

He recommends the placing of the fish entire, if of moderate size,
in a tin or plated copper dish adapted to the form and size of the fish,
but a little deeper than its thickness, so as to retain all the juices,
which by exposure to the heat will flow out ; the surface to be lightly
spread with butter and a morsel or two added, and the dish placed
before the fire in a Dutch or American oven, or the special appa-
ratus made by Burton, of Oxford Street, which was exhibited at the
lecture.

To this I may add that, if a closed oven be used, Rumf ord's device
of a false bottom, shown in Fig. 3, of No. 11 of this series, should be
adopted, which may be easily done by simply standing the above-
described fish-dish, with any kind of support to raise it a little, in a
larger tin tray or baking-dish, containing some water. The evapora-
tion of the water will prevent the drying up of the fish or of its natural
gravy ; and, if the oven ventilation is treated with the contempt I have
recommended, the fish, if thick, will be better cooked and more juicy
. than in an open-faced oven in front of the fire.

This reminds me of a method of cooking fish which, in the course
of my pedestrian travels in Italy, I have seen practiced in the rudest
of osterias, where my fellow-guests were carbonari (charcoal-burners)
wagoners, road-making navvies, etc. Their staple magro, or fast-day
material, is split and dried codfish imported from Norway, which in
appearance resembles the hides that are imported to the Bermondsey
tanneries. A piece is hacked out from one these, soaked for a while
in water, and carefully rolled in a piece of paper saturated with olive-
oil. A hole is then made in the white embers of the charcoal fire, the
paper parcel of fish inserted and carefully buried in ashes of se-
lected temperature. It comes out wonderfully well cooked, consider-
ing the nature of the raw material. Luxurious cookery en papillote is
conducted on the same principle, and especially applied to red mullets,
the paper being buttered and the sauce enveloped with the fish. In
all these cases the retention of the natural juices is the primary object.

I should say that Sir Henry Thompson directs, as a matter of
course, that the roasted fish should be served in the dish wherein it
was cooked. He suggests that " portions of fish, such as fillets, may
be treated as well as entire fish ; garnishes of all kinds, as shell-fish,
etc., may be added, flavoring also with fine herbs and condiments ac-
cording to taste." " Fillets of plaice or skate, with a slice or two of
bacon — the dish to be filled or garnished with some previously-boiled
haricots " — is wisely recommended as a savory meal for a poor man,

230 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

and one that is highly nutritious. A chemical analysis of sixpenny-
worth of such a combination would prove its nutritive value to be equal
to fully eighteenpennyworth of beefsteak.

Some people may be inclined to smile at what I am about to say,
viz., that such savory dishes, serving to vary the monotony of the
poor hard-working man's ordinary fare, afford considerable moral as
well as physical advantage.

An instructive experience of my own will illustrate this. When
wandering alone through Norway in 1856, I lost the track in crossing
the Kyolen f jeld, struggled on for twenty-three hours without food or
rest, and arrived in sorry plight at Lorn, a very wild region. After a
few hours' rest I pushed on to a still wilder region and still rougher
quarters, and continued thus to the great Jostedal table-land, an un-
broken glacier of five hundred square miles ; then descended the Jos-
tedal itself to its opening on the Sogne fjord — five days of extreme
hardship, with no other food than flatbrod (very coarse oatcake), and
bilberries gathered on the way, varied on one occasion with the luxury
of two raw turnips. Then I' reached a comparatively luxurious station
(Ronnei), where ham and egs and claret were obtainable. The first
glass of claret produced an effect that alarmed me — a craving for more
and for stronger drink, that was almost irresistible. I finished a bot-
tle of St. Julien, and nothing but a violent effort of will prevented me
from then ordering brandy.

I attribute this to the exhaustion consequent upon the excessive
work and insufficient unsavory food of the previous five days ; have
made many subsequent observations on the victims of alcohol, and
have no doubt that overwork and scanty, tasteless food are the primary
source of the craving for strong drink that so largely prevails with
such deplorable results among the class that is the most exposed to
such privation. I do not say that this is the only source of such
depraved appetite. It may also be engendered by the opposite ex-
treme of excessive luxurious pandering to general sensuality.

The practical inference suggested by this experience and these
observations is, that speech-making, pledge-signing, and blue-ribbon
missions can only effect temporary results, unless supplemented by
satisfying the natural appetite of hungry people by supplies of food
that is not only nutritious, but savory and varied. Such food need be
no more expensive than that which is commonly eaten by the poorest
of Englishmen, but it must be far better cooked.

Comparing the domestic economy of the poorer classes of our coun-
trymen with that of the corresponding classes in France and Italy
(with both of which I am well acquainted), I find that the raw ma-
terial of the dietary of the French and Italians is inferior to that of
the English, but a far better result is obtained by better cookery.
The Italian peasantry are better fed than the French. In the poor
osterias above referred to, not only the Friday salt fish, but all the

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY. 231

other viands, were incomparably better cooked than in corresponding
places in England, and the variety was greater than is common in
many middle-class houses. The ordinary supper of the "roughs"
above named was of three courses : first a minestra, i. e., a soup of
some kind, continually varied, or a savory dish of macaroni ; then a
ragout or savory stew of vegetables and meat, followed by an excel-
lent salad ; the beverage a flask of thin but genuine wine. When I
come to the subject of cheese, I will describe their mode of cooking
and using it.

My first walk through Italy extended from the Alps to Naples, and
from Messina to Syracuse. I thus spent nearly a year in Italy, during
a season of great abundance, and never saw a drunken Italian. A few
years after this I walked through a part of Lombardy, and found the
little osterias as bad as English beer-shops or low public-houses. It
was a period of scarcity and trouble ; " the three plagues," as they
called them — the potato-disease, the silk-worm fungus, and the grape-
disease — had brought about general privation. There was no wine at
all ; potato-spirit and coarse beer had taken its place. Monotonous
polenta, a sort of paste or porridge made from Indian-corn meal, to
which they give the contemptuous name of miserabile, was then the
general food, and much drunkenness was the natural consequence.

XIX.

Referring to No. 17 of this series (November " Monthly "), a cor-
respondent who has just returned from Norway, where he followed the
route of my last trip there, reminds me of the marvelous congregation
of sea-birds that assembles on some of the headlands of the Arctic
Ocean, and suggests that egg-oil might be obtained in large quantities
there. He quotes from the work of P. L. Simmonds on " Waste Prod-
ucts " the following : " In the Exhibition of 1862 the Russian Com-
mission showed egg-oil in large quantities and of various qualities, the
best so fine as to far excel olive-oil for cooking purposes " ; but it was
not sufficiently cheap for general use.

Among the places indicated by Mr. Grimwood Taylor, the most
remarkable is Sverholt Klubben, a grand headland between the North
Cape and Nord Kyn, rising precipitously from the sea to a height of
above one thousand feet. The face of the rock weathers perpendicu-
larly, forming a number of ledges about two or three feet above each
other, and extending laterally for more than a mile. On the two
occasions when I passed it, the whole of this amphitheatre was occu-
pied by a species of gull, the " kittiwake," perched on the ledges, their
white breasts showing like the shirt-fronts of an audience of a million
or two of male pygmies in evening dress. On blowing the steam-
whistle, the rock appeared to advance, and presently the sky was dark-
ened by a living cloud, and every other sound was extinguished by a
roar of wings and the harsh, wailing screams of a number of birds that

23 2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

I dare not estimate. The celebrated bird colony on the Bass Rock is
but a covey compared with this.

The inhabitants of the little human settlement in the Bay of Sver-
holt derive much of their subsistence from the eggs of these birds ;
but whether they could gather a few millions for oil-making, without
repeating the story of the goose and the golden eggs, is questionable.
The eider-ducks that inhabit some of the low mossy islands thereabout,
are guarded by strict legislative regulations during their incubation
period, lest they should emigrate, and the down-harvest be sacrificed.

I now come to the subject of stewing, more especially the stewing
of flesh food. Some of my readers may think that I ought to have
treated this in connection with the boiling of meat, as boiling and
stewing are commonly regarded as mere modifications of the same pro-
cess. According to my mode of regarding the subject, i. e., with ref-
erence to the object to be attained, these are opposite processes.

The object in the so-called " boiling " of, say, a leg of mutton is to
raise the temperature of the meat throughout just up to the cooking
temperature (see Nos. 3 and 4) in such a manner that it shall as nearly
as possible retain all its juices ; the hot water merely operating as a
vehicle or medium for conveying the heat.

In stewing nearly all this is reversed. The juices are to be ex-
tracted more or less completely, and the water is required to act as a
solvent as well as a heat-conveyer. Instead of the meat itself sur-
rounding and enveloping the juices as it should when boiled, roasted,
grilled, or fried, we demand in a stew that the juices shall surround
or envelop the meat. In some cases the separation of the juices is the
sole object, as in the preparation of certain soups and gravies, of which
" beef-tea " may be taken as a typical example. Extractum Carnis,
or " Liebig's Extract of Meat," is beef -tea (or mutton-tea) concentrated
by evaporation.

The juices of lean meat may be extracted very completely without
cooking the meat at all, merely by mincing it and then placing it in
cold water. Maceration is the proper name for this treatment. The
philosophy of this is interesting, and so little understood in the kitchen
that I must explain its rudiments.

If two liquids capable of mixing together, but of different densities,
be placed in the same vessel, the denser at the bottom, they will mix
together in defiance of gravitation, the heavy liquid rising and spread-
ing itself throughout the lighter, and the lighter descending and diffus-
ing itself through the heavier.

Thus, concentrated sulphuric acid (oil of vitriol), which has nearly
double the density of water, may be placed under water by pouring
water into a tall glass jar, and then carefully pouring the acid down a
funnel with a long tube, the bottom end of which touches the bottom
of the jar. At first the heavy liquid pushes up the lighter, and its
upper surface may be distinctly seen with that of the lighter resting

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY. 233

upon it. This is better shown if the water be colored by a blue tinct-
ure of litmus, which is reddened by the acid. A red stratum indicates
the boundaries of the two liquids. Gradually the reddening proceeds
upward and downward, the whole of the water changes from blue to
red, and the acid becomes tinged.

Graham worked for many years upon the determination of the
laws of this diffusion and the rates at which different liquids diffused
into each other. His method was to fill small jars of uniform size and
shape (about four ounces capacity) with the saline or other dense so-
lution, place upon the ground mouth of the jar a plate-glass cover,
then immerse it, when filled, in a cylindrical glass vessel containing
about twenty ounces of distilled water. The cover being very carefully
removed, diffusion was allowed to proceed for a given time, and then by
analysis the amount of transfer into the distilled water was determined.

I -must resist the temptation to expound the very interesting results
of these researches, merely stating that they prove this diffusion to be
no mere accidental mixing, but an action that proceeds with a regu-
larity reducible to simple mathematical laws. One curious fact I must
mention, viz., that, on comparing the solutions of a number of differ-
ent salts, those which crystallize in the same forms have similar rates
of diffusion. The law that bears the most directly upon cookery is
that "the quantity of any substance diffused from a solution of uni-
form strength increases as the temperature rises." The application
of this will be seen presently.

It may be supposed that, if the jar used in Graham's diffusion ex-
periments were tied over with a mechanically air-tight and water-tight
membrane, brine or other saline solution thus confined in the jar could
not diffuse itself into the pure water above and around it ; people
who are satisfied with anything that " stands to reason " would be quite
sure that a bladder which resists the passage of water, even when the
water is pressed up to the bursting-point, can not be permeable to a
most gentle and spontaneous flow of the same water. The true phi-
losopher, however, never trusts to any reasoning, not even mathemati-
cal demonstration, until its conclusions are verified by observations
and experiment. In this case all rational preconceptions or mathe-
matical calculations based upon the amount of attractive force exerted
between the particles of the different liquids are outraged by the facts.

If a stout, well-tied bladder that would burst rather than allow a
drop of water to be squeezed mechanically through it be partially
filled with a solution of common washing-soda, and then immersed in
distilled water, the soda will make its way out of the bladder by pass-
ing through its walls, and the pure water will go in at the same time ;
for if, after some time is allowed, the outer water be tested by dipping
into it a strip of red litmus-paper, it will be turned blue, showing the
presence of the alkali therein, and, if the contents of the bladder be
weighed or measured, they will be found to have increased by the in-

234 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

flow of fresh water. This inflow is called eridosmosis, and the outflow
of the solution is called exosmosis. If an India-rubber bottle be filled
with water and immersed in alcohol or ether, the endosmosis of the
spirit will be so powerfully exerted as to distend the bottle consid-
erably. If the bottle be filled with alcohol or ether and surrounded
by water, it will nearly empty itself.

The force exerted by this action is displayed by the rising of the
sap from the rootlets of a forest giant to the cells of its topmost leaves.
Not only plants, but animals also, are complex osmotic machines.
There is scarcely any vital function — if any at all — in which this os-
mosis does not play an important part. I have no doubt that the
mental effort I am at this moment exerting is largely dependent upon
the endosmosis and exosmosis that is proceeding through the delicate
membranes of some of the many miles of blood-vessels that ramify
throughout the gray matter of my brain. But I must wander no fur-
ther beyond the kitchen, having already said enough to indicate that
exosmosis is fundamental to the philosophy of beef -tea extraction, and
reserve further particulars for my next paper.

Postscript. — I feel bound to step aside from the proper subject of
these papers to make public acknowledgment of an act of honorable
generosity, especially as many hard things have been said concerning
American plagiarism of the work of British authors. As everybody
knows, we have no legal rights in America, and any publisher there
may appropriate as much of our work as he chooses. American legis-
lators are responsible for this. Nevertheless, I received, a short time
since, a letter from Mr. E. L. Youmans, of New York, inclosing a
check for £20, as an honorarium, in consideration of the fact that these
papers are being reprinted in " The Popular Science Monthly." Shortly
before this, a similar remittance was sent from another publishing firm
(Messrs. Funk & Wagnalls), who have reprinted " Science in Short
Chapters." These facts indicate that some American publishers have
larger organs of conscientiousness than the present majority of Ameri-
ican legislators.

I am told that another American publisher has issued another re-
print of " Chemistry of Cookery " without making any remittance ;
but, as Mr. Proctor would say, " this is a detail." — Knowledge.

■♦•♦•

VINOUS SUPERSTITIONS.

By Dr. TH. BODIN.

ALTHOUGH the world no longer believes in the gods, demi-gods,
and heroes with which the ancients and our pagan ancestors ani-
mated nearly every object, old-country people still retain a consider-
able relic of heathenism in the shape of myths of a host of spirits of

VINOUS SUPERSTITIONS. 235

nature which are all the time at work to produce prosperity and suc-
cess or destruction.

In Alsace, the eye of the traveler is gladdened by the view of the
picturesque vine-lands which stretch in almost unbroken succession
along the slopes of the Yosges and Jura Mountains, heavy with hand-
some clusters of grapes. We can hardly wonder that the country peo-
ple, feeling a similar delight, but one modified according to their dif-
ferent habit of thought, should attribute the prosperity of their vine-
crops to higher powers ; and it is easily explainable that in their
childish fancies they, half in earnest, half in humor, allow these genii
of old to continue to live and do their beneficent work. Especially
characteristic of these children of Bacchus, to which a variety of most
pleasant legends are attached, are prophecies respecting the success or
failure of the next vintage, predictions that make themselves known
by visible or audible signs.

Thus, in the spring, when the air is scented with the fragrance of
the blossoms, and everything points to an abundant vintage, the people
believe they can hear in the hill at Brunstatt the " Wigigerle " fid-
dling lustily to the accompaniment of ringing glasses and dancing.
If, however, the vintner's prospects for the year are dull, the smell of
the blossoms is only faint, and the attentive listener can only occa-
sionally hear the sound of the strings, while the hill seems empty and
desolate.

A pendant to the jolly " Wigigerle " (wine-fiddler) is the " White
Lady of Paulinus Castle " who haunts the region of Weissenburg.
She is believed to wander at night through the vines, and occasionally
to make her appearance in the day-time. In case the year is to be un-
prosperous, she shows herself rarely, closely veiled, bearing a bunch
of hidden keys, wearing a sad face, and weeping much ; but, if the
vintage is to be rich, she greets the vine-dressers cheerily, and rattles
her keys gayly as she passes through the gardens.

The Alsatians also regard as an infallible wine-oracle the cellar of
Arnsberg Castle, which belongs to the family of the Fesslers, a race of
sturdy drinkers who became extinct in the seventeenth century, and is
popularly called the Devil's Castle. The immense stocks of wine sup-
posed to lie in the deep and spacious caverns have not been touched
for centuries ; for the most industrious search has failed to discover a
door or any way by which an entrance to them can be forced. In
good seasons, a sweet odor of wine arises from the ground at the time
of the blooming of the vines, and diffuses itself around.

St. Hunna, formerly one of the richest ladies of Alsace, is honored
as the patron of the poor, thirsty topers of the town of Hunnasweihen,
in bad years. This pious woman, who was a friend and comforter of
the poor in the seventh century, sometimes condescended so far as to
wash the clothes of her maids, whence she got the name of the saintly
laundress. A copious spring, flowing through four outlets, has been

236 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

consecrated to her memory, and is known far and wide as the Hunna
Spring. It occasionally happens in years when wine is scarce, so the
story runs, that, when the people go to the spring of mornings and
evenings to water their horses and cattle, wine flows out of all the out-
lets ; and those who can boast that they have enjoyed this wine say
that it is better than any other.

A St. Morand is honored as the patron of the vintners of a dis-
trict near Worms, in consequence of a legend that the commune was
once blessed, in answer to his prayers, with an unusually abundant
harvest. Two portraits of him may be seen in the church at Stein-
bach, in one of which he is represented as holding a bunch of grapes
and pressing out the juice with his hand.

The property is attributed to several springs in Alsace, of flowing
only when the harvests are to be abundant.

According to the superstition in another region, if one will go to the
Geisbrunn of Freiburg, in Breisgau, at midnight on New Year's, he
will find a little man there, who in silence will give some very signifi-
cant tokens. If the year is to be a good one, he will bear three ears
of corn in one hand and three bunches of grapes in the other, and wTill
make friendly gestures. If the year is going to be bad, he will have
a sour face and empty hands.

The vineyard is surrounded, in Germany and other countries, by
numerous poetic superstitions. The Swabians say that the grapes will
receive a fine flavor if the vines are shaken on St. John's day. The
Bavarians have a proverb that, if one would have good wine, he must
write on his cask, " O taste and see that the Lord is good " (Psalm
xxxiv, 8) ; and the South-Germans have a proverb, "If one would
make good vinegar from wine, he must throw the names of three
witches into it."

In Switzerland, the country people freshen up their stale wine by
laying dead toads on the bung-holes of the casks. The ancient Ger-
mans were mindful of their gods at their feasts, when they strove to
distinguish themselves as great drinkers ; and the pious custom of
drinking to the health of their divinities was binding among them.
The North-Germans were accustomed at certain feasts to empty a cup
to Bragi, and by that act to assume a promise to emulate the bold
deeds of that god. Such promises were irrevocable. Bargains were
therefore bound by a kind of drink-offering in order to obtain the
favor of the gods. At the heir's-feast bumpers wTere drunk to the
memory of the departing one ; and on other occasions glasses were
emptied in honor of those who wrere absent. These customs, from
which our toasts appear to be derived, were not abolished in Christian
times : only the saints succeeded to the rights of the gods. St. Mar-
tin, it is said, at his own desire, took the place of Donar ; St. Gertrude
received the honors that had been paid to Freya ; and Njord and Frey
appear to have surrendered their functions to the first martyr of the

VINOUS SUPERSTITIONS. 237

Church, St. Stephen. At Freiburg the Johannites were accustomed to
hang a stone, representing one of those thrown at Stephen, to a silver
chain. Wine was poured upon the stone and then given to the faith-
ful to drink. Memorial drinks to St. Michael and St. John the Evan-
gelist were also very common. Departing guests and travelers were
accustomed to drink " John's blessing " as well as in memory of St.
Gertrude ; and a number of mythical stories are associated with these
draughts.

St. Gertrude is said to have drunk a St. John's draught with a
knight who had entered into a pact with the devil, and thereby to
have delivered him. Since St. Gertrude was the patron of sailors, and
her chapel at Bonn, near the Rhine, was much visited by seafaring
people, it is easy to explain why the draughts to her honor were drunk
in a glass shaped like a ship. It is still customary in some Roman
Catholic churches to bless a cup of wine on St. John the Evangelist's
day (the 27th of December), and commend to the people the memory
of the beloved disciple. These customs are not observed outside of
Germany. In Catholic Germany it is usual to celebrate a first festival
at the house with the wine (generally red wine) which has been blessed
at the church, and to give to the whole family to drink out of the same
cup ; a few drops are even poured out for the baby in the cradle. Part
of what is left is preserved, and part is poured into the cask, to impart
its blessing to what is there and turn all evil spells from it. Specu-
lative Swabian hosts often consecrate large quantities of wine for the
entertainment of their guests and neighbors ; and the popular fancy
prevails that, if such of this wine as has been kept over the whole
year is drunk on the annivesary of the day of its consecration, it will
bring recovery to the sick, and protection and strength to those who
are about to start on a journey. Engaged couples taste this wine at
their betrothals, when it is offered to them by the priest after having
blessed it. If one drinks it on the day it is consecrated, he is secured
for the whole year against poisoning, witchery, and lightning. It is
an old Bavarian custom for the father to drink a " John's blessing "
before departing on a journey, and then, swinging the cup backward
over his head, to cast a few drops on the ground. The " John's bless-
ing " on St. John the Baptist's day, June 24th, which the South-Ger-
man Protestants observe socially, without making a church festival of
it, is doubtless related to the Catholic custom.

The John's blessings have been referred to the cup drunk by the
disciples, or perhaps to the wedding at Cana of Galilee ; but we think
we have shown that they are derived from the old heathen thank-
offerings, and the sacramental wine has probably been also brought
within the scope of the usage by popular fancy. Many healing powers
are attached to this wine in some places, and it is sometimes called in
as the last and surest remedy in extreme cases. That industrious in-
vestigator of folk-lore, M. Toppen, says on this subject in his work on

238 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

the superstitions of the Masures, that " consecrated communion-wine
is used in all diseases as the most sovereign and last resort. The
Masures often ask their pastors for it. If they will not give it to
them, they go to the Catholic priests, who grant their requests without
hesitation. They frequently have the wine blessed at the Catholic con-
fessionals ; and some of them think that communion-wine from Catho-
lic churches is more efficacious than that from evangelical churches.
Nevertheless, Catholics sometimes go to evangelical pastors to get
their communion-wine." Herr C. G. Hintz, another writer on folk-
lore, mentions it as a time-honored custom in old Prussia to put a
bottle of wine on the altar, so that it may be blessed at the sacra-
mental service.

The beliefs on this subject are in some cases contradictory : thus,
while the Lauenburg peasant regards the communion-wine as a sov-
ereign cure, and calls in the priest when he finds the doctor too dear,
or that his remedies fail, the people of Oldenburg and East Prussia
put off the taking of the sick-bed communion as long as possible, for
fear that it will be followed by a speedy death. — Translated for the
Popular Science Monthly from Die Natur.

-♦•♦•♦-

MALARIA AND THE PEOGEESS OF MEDICINE *

THE attempt to estimate the successes of medicine on the grand
scale is met at the outset by a source of fallacy which can not
well be eliminated. Medicine has certainly a share, and it may be a
very large share, in the general lengthening of life, in the decrease of
pain and suffering, and in the increase of working-power ; but other
influences, besides the thought and endeavor of the medical profession,
have helped to bring about those results. A brief consideration of
malarial fever (including simple ague and the more deadly tropical
forms), of the causes that have made it less common at home, and
more amenable to treatment everywhere, and of the views entertained
about it, will serve to show how various are the forces that make for
improved well-being, and how checkered the medical record has been.
No single cause of premature death, of life-long misery, and of loss
of working-power, has ever equaled malaria. There is some reason
to think that it was from personal experience of the ague, and the
hepatic derangements consequent on it, that Descartes got his pro-
found conviction of ill-health being the greatest of all hindrances
to the wisdom and capability of the individual. There can, at least,
be hardly any question that malaria is, and always has been, the

* Abstracted from an article entitled " The Progress of Medicine," in the " Quarterly
Review " for July, 1883.

MALARIA AND THE PROGRESS OF MEDICINE. 239

largest single element in the miseries of mankind. Fortunately,
malarial fever has almost disappeared from Great Britain, and it has
hardly existed in some of our colonies, particularly the Australasian ;
it has decreased considerably in many parts of Northern Europe and
the United States. Again, there is a drug, cinchona-bark, with its
products, which has a great power over the course of the fever.
The cultivation of the cinchona-tree is now a great industry both in
the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, and whatever quinine or other
products of the bark can do for malarious sickness will be, at no
distant time, a benefit that may be shared by all but the very poor-
est and the races least accessible to civilization. Lastly, the symp-
toms, course, and complications of the intermittent and remittent fe-
vers which malaria causes are known with all the precision that can
be wished. What share, then, has medicine had in dealing with this
destroyer of human happiness in the past, and what is the attitude
of medicine toward malaria at present ?

The almost total extinction of malaria at home and its decrease
abroad have been brought about in the ordinary course of draining
and cultivating the soil, and by a wise attention to the planting or
conservation of trees. There is a characteristic passage at the end
of Ejngsley's novel " Here ward," in which he commemorates his hero
as the first of the new English "who, by the inspiration of God,
began to drain the fens." The draining of the fens and all such
achievements throughout the world have brought better health with
them, but neither the doctors nor even the sanitarians have been the
primary moving forces. Again, the medicinal uses of cinchona-bark
were known first to the indigenous inhabitants of the Peruvian Andes,
where the trees are native and where the ague is common ; and it was
the Jesuits who introduced it widely into Europe (1630) and the East.
The story of the reception of this remedy by the medical profession
has its unpleasant side. The arch-stupidities of the Paris faculty,
who still live for the amusement of the world in Moliere's comedies,
opposed it with their united weight. Court physicians in other Eu-
ropean capitals than Paris assailed it with abuse, and no one wrote
more nonsense about it than Gideon Harvey, the physician of Charles
II. The new remedy, apart from its merits, fell in with the views of
the Paracelsists, and disagreed with the views of the Galenists, and
was recommended or condemned accordingly. Even the great Stahl,
nearly a century after cinchona was first brought to Spain, would
have none of it, and, in his servitude to his theories, he even went so
far as to make use of Gideon Harvey's ignorant tirade against the
drug by reprinting it in German. As late as 1729, an excellent phy-
sician of Breslau, Kanold, whose writings on epidemics are still val-
uable for their comprehensive grasp, declared in his last illness (a
" pernicious quartan ") that he would sooner die than make use of a
remedy which went so direct against his principles ! The world, of

24o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

course, gave little heed to these inane disputations ; the value of
cinchona was beyond the power of the faculty either to discover or to
obscure. But, on behalf of the faculty, it remains to add that cin-
chona found powerful advocates within it from the first ; and it will
not surprise any one to be told that these were generally the men
whom medical history, on other grounds as well, has extolled or at
any rate saved from oblivion. Such were Sydenham and Morton in
London, Albertini in Bologna, Peyer in Schaffhausen, and Werlhof
in Hanover. The therapeutic position of cinchona was firmly estab-
lished by Torti's treatise on the treatment of periodical fevers, pub-
lished at Modena in 1709.

The next step in the relief of malarious sickness on the grand
scale was the extraction of the alkaloid quinine from the cinchona-
bark. The powdered bark was not only very unpalatable, but it was
cumbrous to carry and dispense, and, although the principle of the
remedy remained the same, it has proved of infinitely greater service in
the form of quinine, and in the form of the cheap alkaloidal mixture
known in Bengal as "quinetum." The first extraction of an alkaloid
was in the case of morphia, from opium, in 1805 ; the discoverer was
an apothecary of Hameln, who was rewarded rather better than the
celebrated piper of that town, for the French Academy of Sciences
voted him two thousand francs. Quinine was discovered in 1820 by
the French chemists Pelletier and Caventou. The sciences and arts
of botany and practical forestry, of chemistry and practical pharmacy,
are now all concerned in the production of this most invaluable of
remedies. The commerce of the world has taken cinchona in hand,
and there are now plantations of the trees not unworthy to be named
beside those of coffee and tea. The value of the crude bark imported
into England alone in 1882 was nearly two millions sterling. The
original and native cinchona region on the damp eastern slopes of the
Andes in Peru is still a source of wealth, and a still greater source of
wealth are the new plantations on the Andes in Bolivia. The Indian
Government has successfully cultivated the bark on a large scale in
the Nilghiri Hills in Madras, and more recently at Darjiling in the
Himalayas ; while a crowd of private planters have followed in the
same enterprise in Coorg, Travancore, and Ceylon. The Dutch Gov-
ernment, who were the pioneers of cinchona cultivation, have found the
climate and soil of Java well adapted for the species and varieties of
trees most rich in quinine. Jamaica is the latest field to which this
new and ever-increasing industry has extended.

How does quinine control, modify, or cut short an attack of ague ?
This is a question with which the commerce of the world can not grap-
ple, but only the medical profession ; and the truth requires it to be
said, that the medical profession knows little of the modus operandi
of quinine in ague. Sydenham, two hundred years ago, laid down the
two great rules for the administration of bark : to give it after the

MALARIA AND THE PROGRESS OF MEDICINE. 241

first paroxysm and in the subsequent intervals, and to continue its
use as a precaution against the recurrence of the fever. Little re-
mained to be added to these practical indications ; they were empiri-
cal, indeed — and they are empirical still. The profession is not even
sure whether quinine acts by breaking the recurrent habit of ague (as
an anti-periodic), or otherwise. There are also the most conflicting
statements as to whether the taking of quinine will ward off the at-
tack of ague in passing through a malarious locality ; there are a good
many reasons for believing that quinine has no preventive or anticipa-
tory action against the first onset of a remittent or intermittent fever,
but the professional advice will probably be that quinine taken as a
preventive can at least do no harm.

But it is when we leave the sphere of empirical experience, and
enter the physiological and pathological workshops of the profession,
that we realize most acutely how great is the disproportion, in this
matter of malaria, between the opportunities of medicine and its
achievements. Take, for example, the following sufficiently eclectic
statement on the physiological actions of quinine :

Quinia, CaoH^NaOa, one of the alkaloids of cinchona, in small doses ac-
celerates the heart's action in the warm-blooded animal ; in moderate doses it
slows it ; and in large doses it may arrest it, and cause convulsions and death.
Eesearch shows that its action is essentially upon the central nervous system.
It destroys all microscopic animal organisms, apparently killing vibrios, bacteria,
and amoebee ; but it seems to be without action on humble organisms belonging
to the vegetable kingdom. It arrests the movements of all kinds of protoplasm,
including those of the colorless corpuscles of the blood. It arrests fermentive
processes which depend on the presence of animal or vegetable organisms, but
it does not interfere with the action of digestive fluids. — (Quain's " Dictionary
of Medicine," p. 35.)

There is here something far everybody ; and, if we now go to the
pathological workshop, we shall discover the beautiful adaptation of
these varied actions of quinine to the various opinions that are enter-
tained of the malarious fevers over which the drug has so powerful an
influence. Is malarial fever a fermentive process, depending on the
presence of animal or vegetable organisms ? then quinine arrests such
processes. Is malarial fever caused by a profound disturbance of the
nervous mechanism which regulates the animal heat ? then the action
of quinine is " essentially upon the central nervous system." Nothing
could be more accommodating, and nothing more unsatisfactory.

The theoretical notions about malaria form an instructive page of
medical history. Until about 1823 it was always thought to be as-
sociated with marshes and swamps, but in that year Dr. William
Fergusson brought to England numerous proofs that it occurred
abundantly in elevated and rocky regions. Such evidences have gone
on accumulating, and it is now well known that malaria has no neces-
sary connection with the marsh. But the profession is still profoundly

VOL. XXIV. — \\

242 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

impressed with the belief that malaria is an actual or material poison-
ous substance. To Homer it was the arrows of Apollo in anger, to
the mediaeval folk-lore it was the mischief of elves and sprites ; and,
if scientific medicine does not now permit us to personify the malaria,
it teaches us at least to materialize it. Although the fevers which
malaria produces are quite unlike the fevers that are contagious or
communicable, the present scientific guides of the profession are re-
solved to find a material virus or poison as the cause of them. The
malarial poison was sought for, in the early days of chemistry, among
the various gases of the marsh, but the chemical search proved fruit-
less. "When the microscope came in, the miasm was diligently looked
for in the soil of malarious localities and in the vapors overhanging
them. From 1849 to the present year, some twenty different vege-
table organisms or their spores, of very various degrees of complexity)
have been described each in its turn as the malarious miasm and as
the specific cause of remittent and intermittent fevers ; and the quest
for a material substance assumed to be the cause of malarial fever is
regarded with much favor in the best scientific circles. Meanwhile a
body of opinion, which takes due account of all the manifold asso-
ciated circumstances of malaria throughout the world, has been form-
ing, and yearly growing in volume, that there is no malarious miasm
at all ; that " malaria," indeed, is a profound disorganization of the
nervous mechanism that presides over the temperature of the body ;
and that this upsetting of the heat-regulating center is likely to happen
when the body has been exposed during the day to extreme solar heat
and to fatigue, and exposed at sundown and in the night to the tropi-
cal or sub-tropical chill, which will be severe in proportion to the rapid
cooling of the ground and the amount of vapor condensed in the low-
est stratum of the air. There is no more beautiful mechanism in
nature than that which keeps man's internal heat always about 98°
day and night, summer and winter, in the Arctic regions or in the
tropics ; but even that most wonderful of all self -adapting pieces of
mechanism, if it be taxed too much, as by extremes of day and night
temperature, will get out of gear ; and a fever, still retaining some-
thing of the diurnal periodicity, will be the result. No one can read
the powerful criticism * of Surgeon-Major Oldham, of the Indian Medi-
cal Service, without discovering this rational explanation of malaria
to have the best of the facts and the best of the logic on its side.

The decision of this point of theory one way or another has the
most momentous issues, not so much for the treatment of malarious
fever as for its prevention. It is, in short, a question, on the one
hand, of common prudence in warm countries, more often moist than
arid, and more often level than mountainous, against exposure of the
body to the direct action of the sun's rays and to the nightly chill

* "What is Malaria? and why is it most intense in Hot Climates?" London, 1871,
8vo, pp. 186.

THE LOESS-DEPOSITS OF NORTHERN CHINA. 243

that follows ; or, on the other hand, of a fatalist doctrine of vegetable
spores or organisms of the lowest grade making ceaseless war upon
mankind. The world has a way of finding out the truth by its ex-
periences on the large scale. It settled the inane theoretical objec-
tions to the value of cinchona-bark, and it will probably form its own
opinion on the relative merits of the vegetable-spore theory of malaria
and the theory of exposure and climatic vicissitudes. It will be a
regrettable circumstance if in this matter the profession has to follow
public opinion instead of leading it.

■♦•♦•

THE LOESS-DEPOSITS OF NORTHERN CHINA.

Br FBEDEEICK W. WILLIAMS.

SCIENTISTS as well as economists and statesmen are turning with
a scrutiny, renewed as each year advances, toward the great re-
gion of middle Asia — a territory which, if it supplies society with im-
migrants much too thrifty for the tastes of our broader-minded Celtic
brethren, bids fair in many ways to furnish materials for scientific
research that can be compared in interest to no other portion of the
world's surface. Without delaying to mention here the recent travel-
ers who are rapidly lessening the bounds of that tract, still confessed
to be the least known area of the globe, it is our purpose to direct at-
tention to a geological phenomenon among the most important as well
as peculiar of any hitherto brought to light in this field of investiga-
tion : we mean the loess-beds covering a great portion of Northern
China.

The term loess, now generally accepted, has been used to designate
a tertiary deposit appearing in the Rhine Valley, along the Danube,
and in several isolated sections of Europe. Its formation has hereto-
fore been ascribed to glaciers, but its enormous extent and thickness
in China demand some other origin. The substance is a brownish-col-
ored earth, extremely porous, and, when dry, easily powdered between
the fingers, when it becomes an impalpable dust that may be rubbed
into the pores of the skin. Its particles are somewhat angular in shape,
the lumps varying from the size of a peanut to a foot in length, whose
appearance warrants the peculiarly appropriate Chinese name meaning
"ginger-stones." After washing, the stuff is readily disintegrated, and
spread far and wide by rivers during their times of flood. Mr. Kings-
mill, in the " Journal of the Geological Society " (London), states that
a number of specimens, which crumbled in the moist air of a Shanghai
summer, rearranged themselves afterward in the bottom of a drawer
in which they had been placed. Every atom of loess is perforated
by small tubes, usually very minute, circulating after the manner of

244 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

root-fibers, and lined with a thin coating of carbonate of lime. The
direction of these canals being always from above downward, cleavage
in the loess mass, irrespective of size, is invariably vertical, while, from
the same cause, water in falling upon a deposit of this material never
collects in the form of puddles or lakes on its surface, but sinks at
once to the local water-level.

The loess territory of China begins, at its eastern limit, with the
foot-hills of the great alluvial plain — roughly speaking, upon the line
drawn from Peking to Kaifung in Honan. From this rises a terrace
of from ninety to two hundred and fifty feet in height, consisting en-
tirely of loess ; and westward of it, in a nearly north and south line,
stretches the Tai-hang Shan, or dividing range between the alluvial
land and the hill-districts of Shansi. An almost uninterrupted loess-
covered country extends west of this line to Lake Koko-nor and head-
waters of the Yellow River. On the north the formation can be traced
from the vicinity of Kalgan, along the water-shed of the Mongolian
steppes, and into the desert beyond the Ala Shan range. Toward the
south its limits are less sharply defined ; though covering all the coun-
try of the Wei basin (in Shensi), none is found in Sz'chuen, due south
of this valley, but it appears in parts of Honan and Eastern Shantung.
Excepting occasional spurs and isolated spots, loess may be considered
as ending everywhere on the north side of the Yangtse Valley, and, to
convey a general notion, as covering the parallelogram between longi-
tudes 99° and 115° east, and latitudes 33° and 41° north. The district
within China Proper represents a territory half as large again as that
of the German Empire, while outside of the provinces there is reason
to believe that loess spreads far to the east and north, possibly in vary-
ing thicknesses quite across the desert. Baron von Richthofen ob-
served this deposit in Shansi to a height of 7,200 feet above the sea,
and supposes that it may occur at higher levels.

One of the most striking as well as important phenomena of this
formation is the perpendicular splitting of its mass — already referred
to — into sudden and multitudinous clefts that cut up the country in
every direction, and render observation as well as travel often exceed-
ingly difficult. The cliffs, caused by erosion, vary from cracks meas-
ured by inches to canons half a mile wide and hundreds of feet deep ;
they branch out in every direction, ramifying through the country after
the manner of tree-roots in the soil — from each root a rootlet, and from
these other small fibers — until the system of passages develops into a
labyrinth of far-reaching and intermingling lanes. Were the loess
throughout of the uniform structure seen in single clefts, such a region
would indeed be absolutely impassable, the vertical banks becoming
precipices of often more than a thousand feet. The fact, however, that
loess exhibits in every locality a terrace formation, renders its surface
not only habitable, but highly convenient for agricultural purposes ;
it has given rise, moreover, to the theory advanced by Kingsmill and

THE LOESS-DEPOSITS OF NORTHERN CHINA. 245

some others, of its stratification, and from this a proof of its origin as
a marine deposit.

But, since attention was first directed to this formation by Mr.
Pumpelly, in 1864, its structure has been more carefully examined by
other geologists, whose hypotheses are pretty generally discarded for
that of Baron von Richthofen. This gentleman, who may be consid-
ered facile princeps among foreign geologists who have visited China,
argues that these apparent layers of loess are due to external condi-
tions, as of rocks and debris sliding from surrounding hill-sides upon
the loess-dust as it sifted into the basin or valley, thus interrupting the
homogeneity of the gradually rising deposit. In the sides of gorges
near the mountains are seen layers of coarse debris which, in going
toward the valley-bottom, become finer, while the layers themselves
are thinner and separated by an increasing vertical distance ; along
these rubble-beds are numerous calcareous concretions which stand
upright. These are, then, the terrace-forming layers which, by their
resistance to the action of water, cause the broken chasms and step-
like contour of the loess regions. Each bank does, indeed, cleave ver-
tically, sometimes — since the erosion works from below — leaving an
overhanging bank ; but, meeting with this horizontal layer of marl-
stones, the abrasion is interrupted, and a ledge is made. Falling clods
upon such spaces are gradually spread over their surfaces by natural
action, converting them into rich fields. When seen from a height in
good seasons, these systems of terraces present an endless succession
of green fields and growing crops ; viewed from the deep cut of some
stream or road-bed, the traveler sees nothing but yellow walls of loam
and dusty tiers of loess-ridges. As may be readily imagined, a coun-
try of this nature exhibits many landscapes of unrivaled picturesque-
ness, especially when lofty crags, which some variation in the water-
course has left as giant guardsmen of fertile river-valleys, stand out
in bold relief against the green background of neighboring hills and a
fruitful alluvial bottom, or when an opening of some ascending pass
allows the eye to range over leagues of sharp-cut ridges and teeming
crops, the work of the careful cultivator.

The extreme ease with which loess is cut away tends at times to se-
riously embarrass traffic. Dust made by the cart-wheels on a highway
is taken up by strong winds during the dry season and blown over the
surrounding lands, much after the manner in which it was origioally
deposited here. This action, continued over centuries, and assisted by
occasional deluges of rain, which find a ready channel in the road-bed,
has ^hollowed the country routes into depressions of often fifty or a
hundred feet, where the passenger may ride for miles without obtain-
ing a glimpse of field or landscape. Lieutenant Kreitner, of the
Szechenyi exploring expedition (whose pleasant article on Thibet ap-
peared in " The Popular Science Monthly " for August, 1882) illus-
trates, by a personal experience when in Shansi, the difficulty and dan-

246 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

gcr of departing from the highway when in one of these deep cuts ;
after scrambling for miles along the broken loess above the road, he
only regained it when a further passage was cut off by a precipice on
the one side, while a jump of some thirty feet into the beaten track
was his only alternative upon the other.

Difficult as may be such a territory for roads and the purposes of
trade, its advantages to a farmer are manifold. Wherever this deposit
extends, there the husbandman has an assured harvest two and even
three times in a year. It is easily worked, exceedingly fertile, and
submits to constant tillage, with no other manure than a sprinkling of
its own loam dug from the nearest bank. But loess performs still anoth-
er service to its inhabitants. Caves made at the bases of its straight
clefts afford homes to millions of people in the northern provinces.
Choosing an escarpment where the consistency of the earth is great-
est, the natives cut for themselves rooms and houses, whose partition-
walls, cement, beds, and furniture are made in toto from the same loess.'
"Whole villages cluster together in a series of adjoining or superim-
posed chambers, some of which pierce the soil to a depth of often
more than two hundred feet. In costlier dwellings the terrace or suc-
cession of terraces thus perforated are faced with brick, as well as the
arching of rooms within. The advantages of such habitations consist
as well in imperviousness to changes of temperature without as in
their durability when constructed in properly selected places — many
loess dwellings outlasting six or seven generations. The capabilities
of defense in a country such as this, where an invading army must
inevitably become lost in the tangle of interlacing ways, and where
the defenders may always remain concealed, are very suggestive.

There remains, lastly, a peculiar property of loess which is perhaps
more important than all other features when measured by its man-
serving efficiency. This is the manner in which it brings forth crops
without the aid of manure. From a period more than two thousand
years before Christ, to the present day, the province of Shansi has
borne the name of "Granary of the Empire," while its fertile soil,
hwang-tu, or " yellow earth," is the origin of the imperial color. Spite
of this productiveness, which, in the fourteenth century, caused Friar
Odoric to admiringly call it "the second country in the world," its
present capacity for raising crops seems to be as great as ever. In
the nature of this substance lies the reason for this apparently inex-
haustible fecundity. Its remarkably porous structure must, indeed,
cause it to absorb the gases necessary to plant-life to a much greater
degree than other soils, but the stable production of those mineral
substances needful to the yearly succession of crops is in the ground
itself. The salts contained more or less in solution at the water-level
of the region are freed by the capillary action of the loess when rain-
water sinks through the spongy mass from above. Surface moisture,
following the downward direction of the tiny loess-tubes, establishes a

THE LOESS-DEPOSITS OF NORTHERN CHINA. 247

connection with the waters compressed below, when, owing to the law
of diffusion, the ingredients, being released, mix with the moisture of
the little canals, and are there taken from the lowest to the topmost
levels, permeating the ground and furnishing nourishment to the
plant-roots at the surface. It is on account of this curious action of
loess that a copious rainfall is more necessary in Northern China than
elsewhere, for with a dearth of rain the capillary communication from
above, below, and vice versa, is interrupted, and vegetation loses both
its moisture and manure. Drought and famine are consequently
synonymous terms here.

As to the origin of loess, Baron von Richthofen's theory is sub-
stantially as follows : The uniform composition of this material over
extended areas, coupled with the absence of stratification and of ma-
rine or fresh-water organic remains, renders impossible the hypothesis
that it is a water-deposit. On the other hand, it contains vast quan-
tities of land-shells and the vestiges of animals (mammalia) at every
level — both in remarkably perfect condition. Concluding, also, that
from the conformation of the neighboring mountain-chains and their
peculiar weathering, the glacial theory is inadmissible, he advances the
supposition that loess is a subaerial deposit, and that its fields are the
drained analogues of the steppe-basins of Central Asia. They date
from a geological era of great dryness, before the existence of the
Yellow and other rivers of the northern provinces. As the rocks and
hills of the highlands disintegrated, the sand was removed, not by
water-courses seaward, but by the high winds ranging over a treeless
desert landward, until the dust settled in the grass-covered districts of
what is at present China Proper. New vegetation was at once nour-
ished, while its roots were raised by the constantly arriving deposit ;
the decay of old roots produced the lime-lined canals which impart to
this material its peculiar characteristics. Any one who has observed
the terrible dust-storms of Northern China, when the air is filled with an
impalpable yellow powder, which leaves its coating upon everything,
and often extends in a fog-like cloud hundreds of miles to sea, will
understand the power of this action during many thousand centuries.
This deposition received the shells and bones of innumerable animals,
while the dissolved solutions contained in its bulk staid therein, or sat-
urated the water of small lakes. By the sinking of mountain-chains
in the south, rain-clouds emptied themselves over this region with
much greater frequency, and gradually the system became drained,
the erosion working backward from the coast, slowly cutting into one
basin after another. "With the sinking of its salts to lower levels, un-
exampled richness was added to the wonderful topography of this sin-
gular formation.

Mr. Pumpelly, while accepting this ingenious theory in place of
his own (that of a fresh-water lake deposit), adds that the supply of
loess might have been materially increased by the vast mers-de-glace

248 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY,

of High Asia and the Tien Shan, whose streams have for ages trans-
ported the products of glacial attrition into Central Asia and North-
western China. Again, he insists that Richthofen has not given im-
portance enough to the parting planes, wrongly considered by his
predecessors in the study of Chinese geology as planes of stratifi-
cation. " These,'' he says, " account for the marginal layers of debris
brought down from the mountains. And the continuous and more
abundant growth of grasses at one plane would produce a modifica-
tion of the soil structurally and chemically, which superincumbent
accumulations could never efface. It should seem probable that we
have herein, also, the explanation of the calcareous concretions which
abound along these planes ; for the greater amount of carbonic acid
generated by the slow decay of this vegetation would, by forming a
bicarbonate, give to the lime the mobility necessary to produce the
concretions."

It is hardly within the scope of this article to do more than present
in brief outline an exposition of the loess-theory that has made its
orginator already celebrated throughout Germany. Nor can we follow
Baron von Richthofen further into the extension of his postulate, where-
in one is scarcely surprised at finding a plausible and attractive appli-
cation of this idea of loess-formation to the entire Europe-Asiatic Con-
tinent, to the pampas of the South and prairies of the North American
world. While the three or four northwestern provinces of China
exhibit undoubtedly the strangest and most picturesque features of
this formation, its influence upon the climate of Central Asia, the
reactionary effect of this upon the surface configuration of the steppe-
lands, and thus on the historical and ethnographical development of
the cradle of the human race, are but some of the legitimate generali-
zations— if not necessary results — coming from this interesting phase
of nature.

•♦♦♦-

THE NATURAL SETTING OF CRYSTALS.

By J. B. CHOATE.

THE study of natural history has of late years been largely directed
to the observation of laws according to which the development
of the individual species and genus takes place. Although the vital
principle which determines the growth and the nature of the animal
or plant eludes the search of shrewd and practiced observers, yet the
modes in which that principle manifests itself are in many cases pretty
well understood. In numberless instances we have been shown the
purpose with which Nature works on unceasingly toward certain defi-
nite anticipated ends. It is this fixed intent of Nature, rationally and
hopefully pursued, which reveals the thought of the universe. The

SURFACE CHARACTERS OF THE PLANET MARS. 249

processes of growth and of change are evident enough to be familiar,
but it is the reason for these phenomena which so often makes them
miracles of wonder to the observer. Care, intelligence and skill will
everywhere be seen, but there is a marked distinction between the
growth that goes on under the supervision of an intelligence wholly-
external to the form which is brought into being, as in the case of a
crystal, and that development which is made according to instinctive
or conscious tendencies implanted in the germ.

Tree, shrub and grass show evidence of effort on the part of the
individual directed to quite obvious ends. The form assumed is in
every instance such as to enable the plant to resist the violence to
which it may be exposed. All the energies controlled by vital force
are directed to supplying wants felt or anticipated. The tree in its
growth develops strength where strength is needed, just as man by
exercise increases his muscular power. In the formation of crystals
another law predominates. It matters not whether these are safely
hidden away in the caverns of the earth, or are exposed to risk of
destruction upon its surface. They usually occur attached to one an-
other, or to the faces of the rock. In the latter case, such as have
unequal axes will be found so placed as to have their longest axes at
right angles to the surface to which they are attached, or, if the sur-
face be curved, this axis will be at right angles to the plane tangent to
the curve at that point. This arrangement will be seen most plainly
upon examination of a geode lined with quartz-crystals. It provides
for the setting of the largest number of crystals upon a given surface,
but puts them in the position of the least stable equilibrium quite un-
like the sturdy posture assumed by a tree deeply rooted to the soil,
and having its fibers most strongly interlaced in the region of its base.
This setting of crystals displays them to the best advantage, but it
leaves them more exposed to abrasion than would any other position,
and more likely to be removed from their place. No provision has
been made to guard against external violence, and in this may be
found a striking point of distinction between an animate and an inani-
mate entity.

-4~»~*-

SURFACE CHARACTERS OF THE PLANET MARS.*

SCHIAPARELLI continued his observations of the topography of
the planet Mars during its last opposition, i. e., from October 26,
1881, to the end. of February, 1882, and his results were communicated
in a preliminary report early in March to the Accademia dei Lincei, of
Rome.

Owing to the prevailing weather, his observations were restricted
* Translated for " The Popular Science Monthly" by Marcus Benjamin, Ph. B., F. C. S.

250 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

to fifty days — from the end of December to the beginning of Febru-
ary. Among these, sixteen evenings were remarkably favorable, so
much so that the greatest magnifying powers could be used.

It was therefore possible, notwithstanding the fact that the ap-
parent diameter of Mars was not over 16" (against 19" in 1877), to
obtain results which surpass all previous endeavors. Beginning with
the white polar sj)ots, Schiaparelli first mentions that the northern
polar spot was always more or less visible. During the months of
November and December it appeared separated into several branches
or masses, as was also the case in 1879. In the latter half of January
these branches began to amalgamate and form a regular, continuous,
and uniform calotte, the diameter of which reached about 50° at the
beginning of February, and then decreased in a distinctly noticeable
manner ; while, On the contrary, the southern polar spot remained
invisible during the entire period of the observations, even in January
and February, when the south pole entered the field of view 2°. From
this, in connection with the experience gained in 1879 relative to the
visibility of the spot, he concludes that eight months after the southern
solstice it had not yet attained a diameter of 20° — a diameter which,
according to the observations during the previous opposition, it gen-
erally attained to a few weeks before this solstice.

During the course of the observations, various white or whitish
spots made their appearance at the southern edge of the planet, greatly
resembling the polar spot, but after exact examination and measure-
ment proved to be one or the other of the well-known southern islands
of the planet, which appeared white around their edges in considera-
tion of a property peculiar to these localities.

The dark portion (ocean ?) which surrounds these islands did not
seem to possess this property ; and, in order to explain how the polar
spot, during the southern winter on Mars, can occupy a part of this
locality, it becomes necessary to make the assumption that at such
times this part undergoes such changes that it is enabled to appear of
a bright white color.

Similar white or whitish spots were observed at intervals at other
points of the yellow surface of the planet ; some of the better deter-
mined points, which had already been noticed in 1877 and 1879, were
also visible on this occasion, while others remained invisible. A num-
ber of white spots were observed, which, however, were only tempo-,
rary, particularly in the neighborhood of the northern polar calotte.
Emanating from this position, there often would be noticed white in-
clined stripes passing toward the equator of the planet ; the arrange-
ment of these seemed to be dependent upon the rotation of Mars —
other positions near the edge of the planet likewise presented a whitish
appearance.

A general dimming of the white spots which hid the configura-
tion of the planet was observed on the 18th of January, between

SURFACE CHARACTERS OF THE PLANET MARS. 251

the meridians of 40° and 120°. It extended only over the yellow-
portions, which are supposed to be continents, and often covered the
canals, but completely avoided the darker portions, which represent
the oceans and larger lakes. It was not a contiguous covering, but
consisting of white or whitish spots, which were irregularly distrib-
uted.

The atmosphere of Mars appears to have been more transparent
than during 1877. Not only the luminous and the opaque zone of the
rim were smaller, but in some parts of the planet the contrast between
the light and shade was more distinctly visible with an inclined illu-
mination, and so it w^as possible to more readily distinguish objects
at the edge of the planet than at the center.

During November the north pole advanced some 7° to 8° within
the circle of the visible hemisphere ; but the hope of being enabled to
examine the surface in the vicinity of this pole was unrealized on
account of the unfavorable weather. For this reason the limit of the
chart of 1881-82 does exceed 60° north latitude, and, hence, does not
extend much beyond the portions explored in 1879 ; but the parts
lying between 30° and 60° northern latitude could be more closely
examined. On this occasion also the lower end of the chart is limited
by a series of dark stripes which appear to be connected with the
northern ocean. The peculiar character of the surface of Mars can
not, however, be well explained until after the next opposition. It
was impossible to explore the southern ocean with exactness beyond
50° south, although all of the islands which had previously been recog-
nized were observed as white spots similar to the polar snow. All of
the smaller seas which branch off from the equator were very distinct
in their configuration. The continents and the interior lakes between
the bright equatorial zone and the south ocean could be drawn with
the greatest accuracy. A few changes in the appearance of particular
portions as compared with their shape in 1879 were noticed, and as
hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of surface, which were
formerly light, had in the mean while become dark, so on the other
hand many of the sections which previously were dark now became
luminous. These changes prove that the darkening principle which
produces them is due to something which is movable and extends over
the surface of the planet (for instance, water or some other liquid),
or perhaps something capable of being transmitted from place to
place (such as vegetation).

Not one of the old dark lines which have been called " canals "
was missing, and causes which in all probability were due to the sun
produced numerous phenomena, which in former oppositions were
only suspected. That brilliant, light-red color mixed with white,
which in 1877 occupied the whole of the equatorial zone and a large
part of it in 1879, was found in 1882 to be entirely absent. Undefined
shadows began to form in this luminous veil surrounded by stains of

252 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

an orange-yellow color ; these shadows become darker by degrees,
concentrate themselves and absorb bodies by changing into groups of
more or less black lines ; at the same time the orange color extends,
and finally, with but little exception, covers the whole of the so-called
continental zone.

The large areas of the so-called "Alcionia" ocean and gulf, which
in 1879 appeared to belong to the "ocean," resolved themselves into
complicated bunches of definite lines. Finally, one could see what we
have every reason to believe is the true aspect of the planet. Besides
this, we noticed the peculiar and unexpected phenomena of the doub-
ling of the canals, which will probably tend to considerably alter the
present views of the physical characters of the planet. This doubling
is clearly not an optical effect, dependent upon the increased optic
power, as is the case in the double stars ; nor is it produced by the
longitudinal division of a canal. It takes place under the following
circumstances : To the right or left of an existing line, without any
change in its direction or position, another parallel line is produced
which differs from the first in appearance and direction only in excep-
tional cases. Between the lines so produced, the distance varied
from 12° to 6° (350 to 700 kilometres). Among certain of the lines
doubling could only be suspected, but not observable at the small dis-
tance (5°) separating them. Sometimes a line was darker or broader
at two or more points, and the accompanying line would also show
this peculiar feature. The length of each pair may differ considerably,
and vary from 15° to 80°. Some were of a reddish-brown color, some-
what darker than the ground from which they could be distinguished ;
others, generally the finer ones, were very dark. The broader ones
formed true bands, the sides of which were perfectly parallel. They
followed (as far as could be judged without exact measurements) the
direction of the large circles of the planet, and only in a few cases
were they bent off toward the side. No irregularities could be ob-
served among them with the magnifying (417) power used. Certain
of them show such great regularity that they might be designated as
a series of parallel lines drawn by the aid of a ruler. In some cases,
several pairs would combine, one behind the other, and form a double
polygonal line ; with very definitely marked angles such a series would
occupy a great extent. This phenomenon of doubling appears to be
connected with certain epochs — and it takes place almost simultane-
ously over the entire surface of the planet, covered by the bright por-
tions (continents ?). Not a trace of these was observed in 1877 dur-
ing the weeks which followed the southern solstice of the planet. A
single isolated instance was noticed in 1879 on the 26th of December.
The appearance of this doubling was the more surprising, as a careful
examination on December 23d and 24th gave no cause for suspecting
any such change. During the last opposition, a reappearance of this
phenomenon was impatiently looked for, but it did not show itself for

SURFACE CHARACTERS OF THE PLANET MARS. 253

two months, and then later than was expected ; at first indistinct and
dim, but becoming more distinct on the following day. This was one
month after the autumnal equinox of Mars. The doubling continued
to be visible until after the end of February. On the 11th of January
another doubling had already made its appearance, but was not further
noticed because the canals which doubled were very irregular. Great,
therefore, was our surprise to find that, on the 19th of January, a canal
which passed through the center showed two straight parallel lines,
which, on repeated examination, were found to be true phenomena.
From this date the number of canals appearing doubled increased ;
even on the 24th of February when the apparent diameter of Mars had
been reduced to less than 10°, the doubling of the canals could be dis-
tinguished. In an aggregate (exclusive of a few cases which could
not be configured on account of the insufficient power of the telescope
to define such delicate cases), some twenty cases of doubling were
noticed, seventeen of which occurred in the course of one month, i. e.,
from January 19th to February 19th — the mean of the time corre-
sponding to about the end of the second month after the autumnal
equinox of the planet. In addition to these there were probably oth-
ers which made their appearance ; but, unfortunately, the unfavorable
weather and the increasing distance of the planet prevented a success-
ful following up of the further development of these highly important
phenomena. In a few cases it was possible to determine some pre-
monitory signs of the doubling.

On January 13th a very light and indefinite shadow began to
spread itself parallel to the canal known as "Ganges" ; on the 18th
and 19th these portions were covered with white spots, on the 20th
the Ganges appeared to be composed of two lines, but the phenomenon
was still doubtful ; on the 21st the doubling was distinct and remained
so until February 23d. Similar observations were made on other lines.

Everything leads to the conclusion that we have here a periodical
phenomenon, which is probably connected with the seasons of Mars.
If this be the case, we may hope to extend these observations during
the next opposition, when we shall be able to see the seasons of the
planet advanced about eighty days. This opposition will take place
January 1, 1884. The position of Mars on this date will be identical
with that on the 13th of February, 1882, and the apparent diameter
will be about 12,9/r, that is, pretty near the mean diameter which the
planet had during the finding of the above - described doublings.
Therefore there is reason to hope that these phenomena may again be
determined and confirmed by other observers. The desire to obtain
such information has been the main object of the foregoing communi-
cation.

254 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

THE NEW PROFESSION.

By HENRY GEEEE.

IT is but a few years since the practical student of electrical science
was limited to the single branch of telegraphy. His choice lay
between becoming a telegraph operator and a manufacturer of tele-
graph instruments. The telegraph operators form a numerous and in-
telligent body of men ; sharp competition exists among them, and for
a long time they had scarcely any chance of improving their position,
because until recently no other branch of electrical engineering was
open to them. But, during the last dozen years, great progress has
been made in various and new applications of electricity. Skilled
electrical engineers are few ; and any one, who has acquired a practical
knowledge of several branches of electricity, will find no difficulty in
keeping himself profitably employed.

Until lately, the young electrician's great desire was to qualify him-
self for submarine telegraphy. The work of testing and localizing
faults in cables is of a more scientific and interesting character than
work in other departments of telegraph engineering. The manufacture
of cables is also a subject for particular study, and a fair knowledge
of mechanical engineering may be gained by practice in it. Two of
the many different departments of electrical engineering, telephony
and electric lighting, are becoming especially important, and yet there
is great difficulty in finding competent electricians to accomplish the
work.

During a recent sojourn in Europe, I learned that not only young
men, but educated women also, were studying electrical engineering, and
that large fortunes have been made in it. The enormous extension of
the telegraphic system, and the wonderful advances made in electricity,
electric lighting, telephony, electrical cables, and railways, and in the
transmission of power, offer great advantages to persons seeking profit-
able employment. Telegraph engineering or electrical engineering is
a new profession. More than this, it is one which is not yet over-
crowded, and it is, therefore, undoubtedly an occupation which many
of our college graduates will adopt.

The ultimate value of the advances which have recently been made
in el ectricar science can not now be estimated. The great electrician,
Professor Clerk Maxwell, was asked shortly before his death, by a dis-
tinguished scientist, " What is the greatest scientific discovery of the
last quarter of a century ? " His reply was, " The discovery that the
Gramme machine is reversible." The ordinary electrician would have
called the telephone, the Faure accumulator, or the Edison electric
light, the greatest discovery, but Professor Maxwell's deep and philo-

THE NEW PROFESSION. 255

sophic mind perceived that in the fact he named, which to so many of
us might seem little more than a curious experiment, lay the principle
which, if rightly developed, would make practicable the transmission
of power.

If, now, we could call back this great electrical engineer, and ask
him what recent discovery came next in importance to this, what would
he reply ? His answer would be the discovery that " a voltaic battery
is reversible." The Gramme machine has given us means of trans-
mitting power of electricity. The later discovery enables us to store
up electrical energy as distinguished from electricity.

Electrical engineering, which embraces a knowledge of cables, teleg-
raphy, electric lighting, electrical measurement, transmission of power,
storage-batteries, and how to localize faults in cables, land lines, and
telephone lines, has thus become a subject of the first practical im-
portance.

A prominent department of the electrical engineer's work is the
localizing of faults in ocean-cables, which may be of five different
kinds: 1. Where the copper conductor makes a "perfect earth." 2.
Where the copper conductor is broken, and yet the insulation remains
unbroken. 3. Where an " imperfect earth " is made. 4. Faults aris-
ing from a hole in the gutta-percha sheath, making a connection be-
tween the conductor and the sea. 5. From the establishment of a
connection between the iron sheathing and the copper core, by a nail
or wire driven in.

The first kind of fault is easily located, because we know the re-
sistance of the cable when it is in perfect working order. If, for
instance, it has 10,000 ohms, Or units of resistance, a fault making a
perfect earth midway in the cable would give us 5,000 ohms resist-
ance. Or, we know how many ohms of resistance there are to a mile
of cable when it is in perfect working order, and, by the use of deli-
cate instruments and by mathematical calculations, we can easily lo-
cate the fault.

The location of the second class of faults, i. e., a complete break-
age of the conductor, naturally followed by a total cessation of all
communications between the two ends of the cable, may be detected
in several ways. The charge which the cable will contain is first
measured ; and, when the charge per mile is known, the amount actu-
ally observed will directly give the location of the faults; and the exact-
ness with which the position of the break can be determined is limited
only by the accuracy with which the relative charges can be compared.
Suppose, for instance, the discharge from a mile of the cable with
a given battery, and reflecting galvanometer, is represented by a de-
flection of ten divisions, and the discharge from a cable containing a
broken copper conductor is one hundred divisions, we know the fault
is about ten miles from the shore.

A fault of the fourth kind is located very readily. There is a

256 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

great fall in the insulation resistance, and a slight fall in the apparent
resistance of the copper conductor, between the two stations ; but
messages can be still transmitted, as a part only of the whole cur-
rent, inversely proportional to the resistance of the fault, escapes into
the ocean. If one office insulates the cable, and the other measures
the resistance, the fault acts like a fault that is caused by the fracture
of both the copper wire and the gutta-percha, but little of the copper
core being exposed.

The fifth kind of fault corresponds almost exactly in behavior
to a fault caused by fracture of the copper conductor and gutta-
percha, in which a considerable portion of the length of copper wire
remains exposed to the water. The resistance will vary still less ;
and there will be a total absence of the feeble currents which result
when the copper and iron of a cable are broken and separated by salt
water.

Submarine or ocean telegraphy holds a very prominent place in
electrical engineering, and the instruments used in it are interesting.
In instructing pupils a very curious apparatus is used. It is the arti-
ficial or dummy cable, consisting of a number of "resistance-coils,"
and condensers so arranged as to reproduce all the phenomena and
all the practical difficulties that are presented by a real ocean-cable.
With a good instructor, this piece of apparatus is of very great ser-
vice, inasmuch as all kinds of imperfections can be readily and cor-
rectly imitated in any part of the circuit.

Still greater interest, perhaps, attaches to the apparatus for show-
ing the retardation that a current experiences in traversing a long
cable. This apparatus consists of a series of "resistance-coils," "rheo-
stats," and condensers, having small receiving instruments at a dozen
different points in the circuit, representing as many different offices on
the line. The receiving instruments are similar to the mirror portion
of Sir William Thomson's mirror galvanometer. In this a ray of light
falls upon a very small mirror attached to a small magnet ; and this
rotates around a vertical axis when acted upon by a current that cir-
culates in a coil of wire. These magnets, with the mirrors attached^
moving one after the other, indicate the time taken in charging the
whole length of the circuit.

I. The Storage of Electricity. — Another princi]:>al branch of
electrical engineering, promising much in the near future, is the great
French discovery of the storage of electrical energy. It is among the
most important inventions of the last thirty years. The electrical
storage of energy must not be confounded with the storage of elec-
tricity. An electrical storage-battery is an apparatus for transform-
ing electricity ; in it electrical energy is no longer produced directly,
but changes its properties. A given source furnishes a certain vol-
ume or quantity of electricity, at a certain pressure or tension. In
certain instances, it may be important to increase one of these prop-

THE NEW PROFESSION. 25 7

erties at the expense of another, as in mechanics it is often re-
quired to transform speed into force or force into speed by means
of fly-wheels or driving-wheels. The apparatus which produces this
charge is called the electrical transformer. These machines can be
divided into two large classes : 1. As regards tension ; and, 2. As re-
gards quantity. The storage-batteries of Thomson, Plant e, d'Arson-
val, and Varley, belong to the quantity class. All these batteries have
a common use. They store electrical energy and give it out trans-
formed. Secondary couples are electrical accumulators, as well as
transformers.

II. The Electric Light. — It is clear that this wonderful applica-
tion of electricity is thus far only in its infancy, and that it must either
supplement or supplant gas-lighting in the near future. In it educated
persons of either sex may, after a thorough course of training, easily
find very remunerative employment in a fast-developing branch of the
new profession. With all the older professions overcrowded, an elec-
trical engineer's prospects are, to-day, undoubtedly bright, especially
if he has some knowledge of mechanics, though this is not absolutely
necessary. Very great impetus has, also, been given to electrical in-
dustries by the invention of the telephone, electrical storage-batteries,
fire-alarm telegraphs, district telegraphs, and the introduction of the
electric light into the domain of our domestic economy. In all these
branches there are more places than qualified persons to fill them.

III. Training for the New Profession. — The person who is
educated simply as a mechanical engineer, or simply as a telegraph
engineer, can not at once make himself useful in the wider range of
the new profession which has created itself. The requisites for an
electrical engineer are, theoretical and practical knowledge of phys-
ics, including mechanics and mathematics. The first questions to be
asked a parent, who desires his son to be an electrician, are : " Has your
son been studying physics at the ordinary school ? Has he ever made
any experiments himself, or does he see experiments made by the lec-
turer ? " Let this son commence his technical education at once, for
he can learn more of real science in the interval of rest, during his
technical education, than he will ever acquire if he devotes himself
to books. By a technical college we mean one in which a general
education in the application of science to industries is given to all the
students, and a special education in the applications of science to in-
dividual students.

Electrical engineering has thus a deeper interest for the parents
of America than they know. A knowledge of mechanical drawing and
designing is essential ; and new designs of instruments should be put
before the students for use and study, as it is important to cultivate
in them the powers of original thought and combination. Next to
machine designing and drawing, in the education of an electrical engi-
neer, is a practical knowledge of electricity. And by this I mean far
VOL. xxrv. — Vr

258 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

more than an ordinary acquaintance with the effects of glass electri-
cal machines, sealing-wax experiments, etc., etc. The knowledge must
be experimental, and it must be quantitative, not merely qualitative.
No person ever learned electricity from a book. If one wants to know
why a particular dynamo is more efficient than another, he must enter
on a course of professional education, like that of studying medicine
or reading law. Night after night, in England, many young men
come thirty miles to learn how the efficiency of an electric lamp, stor-
age-battery, or a dynamo-machine, is actually measured — how to ob-
tain experimentally the characteristic curves of dynamo-machines of
different speeds, calibrating galvanometers, testing magnets, etc.

It would not have been extremely difficult to give lectures on
electrical engineering twenty years ago, but the development of the
science now is so great that it would be an exceedingly laborious
matter to prepare a course on the subject without efficient apparatus.
Of the importance of such lectures there can be no doubt, and the time
will come when the principles, at least, of electrical engineering will be
taught in our schools. The new developments of the science and art
can hardly be exaggerated ; and while at one time scientific men were
of the opinion that the popular mind erred in supposing that elec-
tricity would supersede steam as a motive power, engines are now em-
ployed to produce power, while electricity affords us the very best
means yet discovered of distributing that power.

Electricity does not yet take the place of steam, but it takes the
place of cogs, wheels, belting, etc.

A word as to the time necessary to become an electrical engineer.
It is claimed by some that six months' study suffices to make a good
electrician ; but experience teaches us that a year and a half of as-
siduous work would not be by any means too much.

In conclusion, I may say that this is a profession suitable for
women of a scientific, studious, or inventive turn of mind. It is not
a profession requiring physical force, but rather keen abilities, good
mathematical and scientific training, and the special education of the
telegraph engineer.

I can not suggest a brighter prospect for young men, or for intel-
ligent and energetic young women, who wish to learn a profession,
than this art, which year by year is steadily assuming more and more
importance.

CONCENTRIC RINGS OF TREES. 259

CONCENTKIC KINGS OF TKEES.

By A. L. CHILD, M. D.

IN" the December number (1882) of the " Monthly," you published
an article prepared by me, on the "Annual Growth of Trees,"
which has been somewhat largely commented upon, in the periodicals
and press of the day, as also by the " American Congress of Forest-
ry " at St. Paul. I am glad to note this interest in the subject, as it
will cause more accurate observation of the facts in the case. As
many of my critics have apparently read only extracts from the arti-
cle, and have accordingly drawn very incorrect inferences as to my
viewsj I wish to restate some of the more important points, and the
evidence sustaining them.

In June of 1871 I planted a quantity of seed as it ripened and fell
from some red-maple trees. In 1873 I transplanted some of the trees
from these seeds, placing them on my city lots in Plattsmouth, Ne-
braska. In August, 1882, finding them too much crowded, I cut some
out, and, the concentric rings being very plain and distinct, I counted
them. From the day of planting the seed to the day of cutting the
trees was two months over eleven years.

On one, more distinctly marked (although there was but little
difference between them), I counted on one side of the heart forty
rings. Other sides were not so distinct ; but in no part were there
fewer than thirty-five. There was no guess-work about the age of
this tree. A daily record of meteorological events for the Smithso-
nian Institution and Signal- Office for over twenty years, and a life-long
habit of daily record of all important events, had led to much care
and caution in such matters. Hence, from my own record, I knew the
tree had but twelve years of growth ; and yet, as counted by myself
and many others, it had forty clear concentric rings.

Here permit me to quote a few lines from the original article,
which,, so far as I have seen, have been entirely ignored or overlooked
by all commentators : " I could select twelve more distinct ones (rings)
between which fainter and narrower, or sub-rings, appeared. Nine of
these apparently annual rings on one section were peculiarly distinct ;
much more than the sub-rings. But, of the remaining, it was difficult
to decide which were annual and which were not." When first cut,
and while the wood was green and the cells filled with sap, these
rings were very clear and plain ; but, as the water evaporated and the
wood contracted, they showed less plainly. I have a section of it now
before me, and I can not make out clearly over twenty-four, where,
when green, forty were clearly visible. This section was not at first
so distinctly marked as a section forwarded to Professor Cleveland

26o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Abbe, of the Signal-Office, at his request ; although that, when for-
warded, showed the rings much less conspicuously than when fresh
and green.

Mr. P. C. Smith, in the August (1883) "Monthly," supporting the
commonly received reliability of the rings, as an index to the age of
the tree, refers to certain disputed corners and lines marked by hacks
on trees, and the agreement of the number of the subsequent rings
with the record of the surveyor. This indicates an uncertainty in the
matter which is hardly receivable as scientific proof. If the record was
reliable, why question the hack ? If only for confirmatory evidence,
how identify the one hack among the many which on old lines invari-
ably accumulate in the vicinity *of disputed lines by many resurveys ?
Is it not a mere assumption that the rings do indicate a like num-
ber of years ; and that, as the record agreed with these rings, there-
fore, that hack was the one ? Mr. Smith says, " It will be very dif-
ficult to convince an old surveyor, or an old lawyer, who has tried
many of these land cases, that each concentric ring on an oak-tree, at
least, does not indicate a year's growth only of such tree." Well, I
am an old surveyor, having followed the business more or less for up-
ward of fifty years, and the evidence before me admits of but the one
possible conclusion ; and, had Mr. Smith or any other intelligent man
the same evidence, I am sure there could be no disagreement between
us on the subject.

The Hon. James J. Wilson, of Bethel, Vermont, an " old lawyer "
and late Senator in the State Legislature, writes me, under date of
August 15th, that at a trial in the District Court at Woodstock, Ver-
mont, on a disputed line based upon a cut on a hemlock-tree, a sec-
tion of the tree embracing the cut was produced in court, and the
rings outside the cut counted up from forty to fifty, while those on
the opposite side were only nine or ten ! The verdict of the court was,
that " the rings were not a sure indication of the age of the tree."

Hon. Robert W. Furness, late Governor of Nebraska, so well
known as a practical forester, has kindly furnished me with several
sections of trees of known age, from which I select the following : A
pig-hickory eleven years old, with sixteen distinct rings ; a green-ash
eight years old, with eleven very plain rings ; a Kentucky coffee-tree
ten years old, with fourteen very distinct rings, and, in addition to
these, twenty-one sub-rings ; a burr-oak ten years old, with twenty-
four equally distinct rings ; a black-walnut five years old, with twelve
rings. Governor Furness adds that he has a chestnut of four years,
with seven rings ; a peach of eight years, with six rings ; and a chest-
nut-oak of twenty-four years, with eighteen rings. He attended the
recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, at Minneapolis, Minnesota, and presented this question and
his specimens to the section on forestry. He reports that Professor
Budd, of the Iowa Agricultural College, presented also a specimen

CONCENTRIC RINGS OF TREES. 261

spruce from Puget's Sound, of known age, or nearly fifteen years old.
The section was twelve inches in length, and on one end had eighteen
rings and on the other end had only twelve. Commissioner Loring
expresses the opinion that " this settled the question, that rings at all
times could not be relied upon as an index of the age of trees."

Hon. J. T. Allan, of Omaha, superintendent of tree-planting for
the Union Pacific Railroad Company, in a recent letter says : " Any
intelligent man, who has given any attention to this matter of yearly
tree-growth, knows that the rings are no index of a tree's age. H. P.
Child, superintendent of the Kansas City stock-yards, shows me a
section of pine eight years old, with nineteen rings, and a soft maple
of nearly fourteen years, with sixteen very distinct rings, in addition
to which there are forty-seven less distinct sub-rings."

In conclusion, that the more distinct concentric rings of a tree ap-
proximate, or in some cases exactly agree, in number with the years of
the tree, no one, I presume, will deny ; but that in most and probably
nearly all trees, intermediate rings or sub-rings, generally less conspicu-
ous, yet often more distinct than the annual rings, exist, is equally cer-
tain : and I think the foregoing evidence is sufficient to induce those
who prefer truth to error to examine the facts of the case.

These sub-rings or additional rings are easily accounted for by sud-
den and more or less frequent changes of weather and requisite condi-
tions of growth — each check tending to solidify the newly-deposited
cambium, or forming layer ; and, as long intervals occur of extreme
drought or cold, or other unfavorable cause, the condensation produces
a more pronounced and distinct ring than the annual one. Query :
Has a tree grown in a conservatory, or place of unchanged conditions
of heat and moisture, any concentric rings ?

262

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

CORRESPONDENCE.

IIUMAN FOOT-PRINTS IN STRATIFIED
ROCK.
Messrs. Editors:

NEAR the mouth of the Little Cheyenne
River, in Dakota Territory, there is
a rock on which are some curious indenta-
tions. The rock lies on the north slope of
a bowlder-covered hill, and is itself an er-
ratic. It is about twelve feet long by seven
or eight feet wide, and rises above the sur-
face of the ground about eighteen inches.
Its edges are angular, its surface flat, and
it shows but little, if any, effect of ice-ac-
tion. It appears to be magnesian limestone,
and its size and whiteness make it a con-
spicuous object.

On the surface, near the southeast cor-
ner of it, is a perfect foot-print as though
made by the left, moccasined foot of a
woman, or boy of, say, fourteen years. The
toes are toward the north. The indentation
is about half an inch deep. About four
and a half feet in front of it and in line
with it, near the middle of the rock, is a
deeper indentation made with the right foot,
the heel being deeper than the rest of the
foot. And again, about five and a half feet
in front of this, and in line with both the
others, is a third foot-print, this time with
the left foot.

The three foot-prints are of the same
size, and are such as would apparently be
made by a person running rapidly. The
foot-print of the right foot is an inch deep
at the heel, and three quarters of an inch at
the ball. The third foot-print is about three
quarters of an inch in depth. In all three
the arch of the instep is well defined, and
the toes faintly indicated. The rock is hard,
and not of uniform texture, having vein-like
markings about a quarter of an inch wide
running through it, which, weathering hard-
er than the body of the rock, present slight-
ly raised surfaces. 27iis difference in the
vjeathering of the rock is the same in the bot-
tom of the foot-prints as on the surface of the
rock.

From Mr. Le Beau, a " squaw-man," who
has lived in that region for twenty-six years,
I learned that it is known to the Indians as
a " medicine "-rock, and that they worship
it. He says that none of the present In-
dians know anything of the origin of the
foot-prints. A town has been recently
started within half a mile of it, called
Waneta, and white children playing about
it have found numerous beads and other
trinkets, probably placed there as offerings.

I had heard of the rock several weeks

previous to my visit, and expected to find
either the work of nature with only a fan-
cied resemblance, or the rude sculpturing of
the Indians. The uniformity in size and
direction discredits the former view, as the
difference between the foot-prints seems to
make the latter doubtful ; and the possibility
of the foot-prints having been made when
the material of which the rock is composed
was in a soft state presents itself as the
best solution of the problem.

I trust that this communication may
lead to its investigation by those competent
to decide the matter.

Very truly yours,

Herbert P. Hubbell.
"WrNONA, Minnesota, September 10, 1883.

ASTHMA AND ITS TREATMENT.
Messrs. Editors :

Your " Monthly " for September con-
tains an article by Felix L. Oswald, M. D.,
on "Asthma." For many years I was a
martyr to that distressing complaint; and
know its character and symptoms from per-
sonal experience. Naturally, I have also
gathered, from others who were similarly
afflicted, results of their experience, to say
nothing of what I have read in medical
works on the subject. My own experience,
and that of all whom I have known, is so
different from what Dr. Oswald writes, that
I am impelled, for the sake of many who
may receive great injury, and perhaps even
lose their lives by following his extreme
doctrine, to write to you in criticism of what
he has written.

There are many errors of statement in
his article. He says "the most frequent
proximate cause is violent mental emotion —
fear, anxiety, and especially suppressed an-
ger." I do not dispute that any one of these
may cause asthma, but among the proximate
causes that are far more frequent are an
ordinary cold, a damp pillow, an ill-venti-
lated, stuffy room or berth, a, severe attack
of indigestion. Indeed, as an asthmatic at-
tack generally comes on in the early morn-
ing, the patient waking in a semi-nightmare
to find the attack already begun, it is after
a period of rest rather than passion or men-
tal excitement that it supervenes.

" Asthma," he says, " is a warm-ivcather
disease." Perhaps it may be with some.
There is a great variety in asthmatic cases.
Some are better in cities, some in the coun-
try. There are no two cases alike in all
their features. So far from asthma being a

CORRESP ONDENCE.

263

warm-weather disease, and " June being par
excellence the asthma-month of the year,"
my experience goes to show that the worst
months are those in which the vegetation is
decaying — September, October, and Novem-
ber.

Now, as to the remedy which our author
recommends — cold water. I would like to
apply his own language on a previous page
of his article to this, where he says : " Horse-
back-riding is an approved cure for epilep-
sy, but during the progress of the fit the
application of the specific might lead to
strange consequences. Yacht-sailing in a
storm would be a bad way of curing sea-
sickness, though it diminishes the danger of
future attacks."

So it is with cold water as a cure for
asthma. "A plunge-bath into a pond or
tub of water " would indeed be a terrible
remedy, for a person afflicted with a severe
asthmatic spasm. No person of adult years
in such a condition would think of such a
remedy, for its consequences might be fatal.
The shock of such treatment would infallibly
increase the spasm and greatly intensify the
suffering. The patient instinctively feels
this, and knows that he can endure only the
most soothing and gentle treatment. There-
fore there is no danger to any adult asth-
matic in reading such advice. But parents
or unskilled medical men might be misled
by this authoritative statement a3 to the cold-
water remedy, and might subject children
to it with a refinement of brutality which
they happily would be ignorant of, but which
Dr. Oswald certainly ought to know better
than to recommend.

Imagine the poor sufferer, propped in a
chair, livid and gasping for each imperfect
breath, unable to speak, fearful of the
slightest motion, a terrible strain pressing
on heart, brain, and nerves, and think of a
plunge cold bath in such a case. Yet our
Doctor says " it is the most reliable rem-
edy." Certainly he, for one, has not been
an asthmatic.

If this criticism has only the effect of
making parents or physicians hesitate before
adopting such cruel remedies with children
(there is no fear of adults permitting it),
my main purpose in writing it will be ful-
filled.

Our author also condemns, the use of
the ordinary . alleviations in asthmatic at-
tacks. There is some truth, doubtless, in
what he says on this subject. Still, they
are of the greatest value. A traveler, for
instance, who is free from asthma at home,
stop's at a close country inn, and contracts
an attack of asthma. Then the remedies
which are usually prescribed — perhaps stra-
monium, perhaps coffee, or perhaps niter-
paper fumes — relieve rapidly, and enable the
traveler to proceed, whereas without them
the spasm might last for days. These reme-

dies act as helps, and the system has a sur-
plus of strength sufficient to repair the
slight damage caused by them. They help
in the time of need. They act as brandy
does to a frozen mountaineer ; and, if a mis-
taken medical philosophy is going to deprive
the suffering asthmatic of these invaluable
aids and reliefs, it ought to be combated
and exposed. As well say that surgical
operations should be conducted without chlo-
roform or ether, because the effect of those
anaesthetics is harmful, as to say that the
blessed relief which nature's herbs provide
should not be used in case of an asthmatic
emergency.

Whatever may be Dr. Oswald's merits as
a physician, his paper on asthma, judged
from the standpoint of a campaigner in that
complaint, is not sufficiently correct or judi-
cious to be a safe guide for the physician
or the sufferer. W. B. Crosby.

New Yoke, September 15, 1S83.

Messrs. Editors :

From the symptoms described by Mr.
W. B. Crosby, I suspect that his affliction
is not chronic asthma, but the dyspnoea which
sometimes accompanies a latent tubercular
diathesis, and which, in its spasmodic form,
is generally aggravated by catarrh. Asthma,
like hay-fever, is chiefly a warm-weather dis-
ease; still, if Mr. Crosby's trouble is not
confined to the end of the year, I believe I
can reconcile his experience with my ob-
servation on the secondary causes of the
disorder, viz., that the symptoms often as-
cribed to the effect of a vegetable pollen
" are probably a consequence of the relax-
ing influence of the first warm weather, for
in midwinter a single warm day, following
upon a protracted frost, may produce symp-
toms exactly resembling those of a hay-
catarrh" ("Popular Science Monthly," p.
606). Your correspondent suspects a mor-
bific agency in the decay of the autumnal
vegetation, and, in America at least, the Oc-
tober frosts, when the falling leaves expose
a vast area of woodland-soil, are almost
yearly followed by a return of warm weath-
er. I make no doubt but annual asthmas
are often supplemented by Indian-summer
attacks. What Mr. Crosby says about the
causal connection of asthma and indiges-
tion was mentioned in other words on p.
610 (" Popular Science Monthly ") : " There
is a curious correlation between asthma and
close stools ; they come and go together."

Mr. Crosby is probably not less correct
in his statement that his asthmatic spasms
" generally come on in the early mornings,
the patient waking in a semi-nightmare to
find the attack already begun," and his
description does not materially differ from
mine, that, " after rolling and tossing about
till relieved by that form of sleep which the
Germans call • Ein-dammern ' — the patient

264

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

is almost sure to start up with a feeling of
strangulation" ("Popular Science Monthly,"
p. 611). But even in such cases the proxi-
mate cause can generally be traced to some
occurrence of the preceding day; indeed,
most sufferers from chronic asthma know
from the experience of their waking hours
what the next night may be expected to have
in store for them.

I do not suppose that your correspond-
ent, whose letters bespeak him an intelligent
observer, can be a dupe of the vulgar fal-
lacy which mistakes a low temperature for
the cause of " colds " and catarrhs ; still, it
is evident that he overrates the danger of
its employment as a " remedial agent." For
one life lost by the abuse of cold water, a
million have been lost by the abuse of drugs.
Dr. Carl Bock, whose manual of health,
"Das Buch vom gesunden und kranken Men-
schen," is a standard (though entirely non-
systemic) work on practical hygiene, recom-
mends a sponge or shower-bath among the
safest antispasmodics (c. "Angor pectoris,
or Asthma," p. 502). It is well known that
the paroxysms of yellow fever and cognate
diseases decrease the intoxicating effects of
alcoholic stimulants, and hydropathists have
repeatedly called attention to the fact that
under similar circumstances the dreaded
nervous shock of a cold douche is partly neu-
tralized by the conditions of the disease itself,
and acts only as a tonic in the best sense of
the word ; and, since Dr. Koch's discovery,
no modification of accepted medical theo-
ries has excited more attention than the
successful application of cold baths to the
treatment of typhoid fever. For a practi-
cal illustration of their efficacy in severe
cases of spasmodic asthma, I can refer Mr.
Crosby to the experience of two of my cor-
respondents, Mr. Otto Schreiner, of Jack-
sonville, Florida, and Dr. H. D. Warner, of
Reliance, Polk County, Tennessee. After
stating his personal experience, Dr. Warner
adds, " Priessnitz," the founder of hydropa-
thy," would become the patron-saint of asth-
ma-patients, if they could rid themselves of
the superstitious dread of cold water and give
the plan a fair trial."

Stramonium (vide Datura in "American
Cyclopaedia," or any medical or pharmaceuti-
cal compend) is one of the strongest narcotic
poisons, and in its physiological action re-
sembles belladonna and henbane, produc-
ing " dryness of the throat, active delirium,
dilatation of the pupils, and a rapid pulse.
Death may occur with coma and convul-
sions." And such remedies Mr. Crosby pro-
poses to apply to patients who " can endure
only the most soothing and gentle treat-
ment " ! It is true that the action of the
drug is somewhat modified by the abnormal
condition of the system; still, its after-ef-
fects are perceptible for days ; while those
of cold water are limited to the dread of j

direful consequences, and one or two test-
experiments will rarely fail to remove that
objection, which is, after all, only a special-
ized form of the same traditional fallacy
which in winter ascribes fatal consequences
to an open window, but risks the sickening
effluvium of an unventilated bedroom; which
in warm weather dreads a draught of cold
water, but trusts its life to the tender mer-
cies of the liquor-mixer. Besides, the asthe-
nia of an asthma-spasm is an eclipse, a tem-
porary paralysis, rather than an exhaustion
of the vital energies ; and the shiver of a cold
douche, instead of complicating the afflic-
tions of the patient, relieves them by break-
ing the spell of the obstruction. Of course,
neither stramonium nor cold water alone
can reach the cause of the disease, which
must be removed by an invigorating regi-
men— out - door life, wholesome food, and
persistent continence ; cold water, however,
is at least an adjuvant means to that end,
while the repeated use of narcotic drugs
never fails to impair the tone of the nerv-
ous system, and thus directly tends to per-
petuate an asthenic diathesis.*

But I fully agree with your correspond-
ent that asthma is the most capricious dis-
order of the human organism, and that its
study can never be exhausted. Most of his
observations can be readily reconciled with
the doctrine of my treatise ; but, even in as
far as they may represent the record of an
exceptional experience, I Consider them, on
the whole, a valuable contribution to the
pathology of the disease. .

F. L. Oswald.

ANIMAL FKIENDSHIPS.
Messrs. Editors :

An article on animal friendships, which
appeared not long since in " The Popular
Science Monthly," reminded me of a re-
markable instance that came under my own
observation a short time ago.

While on a visit to a farmer in a neigh-
boring county, I was surprised to see a
magnificent, full-grown wild - turkey wan-
dering around with the fowls in his barn-
yard. On watching the turkey, I was still
more surprised to notice that she followed
particularly a large rooster ; the two seemed
to be on excellent terms, and frequently
strayed off from the main flock together.
Inquiring of the owner, I learned the fol-
lowing facts : Two of his children found a
few wild-turkeys' eggs in the forest and
brought them home, placing them under a
domestic turkey, with other eggs, to hatch.
Three of the wild-turkey eggs hatched, and
two of the chicks lived to grow up, but soon

* " China tobacco " and niter are hardly less ob-
jectionable. Only three weeks apo Charles H. Cod-
man, the well-known liberal and political economist,
died from the effects of inhaling niter-fumes. ( Vide
p. 148 in Boston 'Index" of September 27, 1683.)

EDITOR'S TABLE.

265

betrayed an evident dislike for the domestic
turkeys, the one before mentioned showing
a warm regard for the rooster, which was
evidently reciprocated. When this one be-
came fully grown, the children traded it off
to a neighboring boy who resided about
three miles distant in the woods, but on the
following day the turkey appeared at its old

home and immediately sought out its friend
the rooster. It was returned to the neigh-
bor, who finally found it impossible to keep
his new possession, and so the bargain had
to be annulled, and rooster and turkey were
allowed to peacefully enjoy each other's
companionship. E. M. S.

Spbengfield, Missoukt, October 22, 1SS3.

EDITOR'S TABLE.

DEAD-LANGUAGE STUDIES NECESSA-
RILY A FAILURE.

~TT7"E last month cited conclusive
VV testimony that, as a matter of
fact, classical studies are a general and
notorious failure ; we now propose to
look a little into the causes of that fail-
ure. The partisans of the system have
a ready reason for so much of it as they
have not the assurance to deny. They
admit that the dead languages may
partially fail because they are poorly
taught.

It is significant that this complaint
of bad classical teaching has been made
for hundreds of years. The indictments
of the system on this score by eminent
men would fill "a big book. But why,
then, have not the sorely-needed re-
forms been carried out? The subject is
surely important enough, and has been
prominent enough to enforce attention
to it. It has occupied the scholarly
talent of generations ; yet, where the
system has been tried longest, the best
minds have still cried out against the
unbroken experience of failure, not-
withstanding all attempts to reform
the bad practices. Two hundred years
ago, the mode of studying the dead
languages was sharply condemned by
John Milton, who thus wrote : " We
do amiss to spend seven or eight years
in scraping together so much miserable
Greek and Latin as might be learned
otherwise easily and delightfully in one
year." Milton believed in reform, and
had the most sanguine hope from a bet-
ter system, which would do more even
for dunces than the prevailing method

could do for brighter minds, and he gives
to his expectation the following quaint
and vigorous expression : " I doubt not
that ye shall have more ado to drive
our dullest and laziest youth, our stocks
and stubs, from the infinite desire of
such a happy nurture, than we have
now to hale and drag our hopefullest
and choicest wits to that asinine feast
of sow-thistles and brambles which is
commonly set before them as the food
and entertainment of their tenderest
and most docible age." And, after a
couple of centuries of progress, what
is the outcome? We still hear every-
where that the dead languages fail, be-
cause they are taught by obsolete and
irrational methods, and it is stoutly
claimed that all we need is their refor-
mation.

But what mystery is there about
these languages that their study should
prove the great chronic scandalous fail-
ure of higher education, age after age?
There can be no reason in their consti-
tution or peculiarities that should neces-
sitate any such result. There has been
a thousand times more practice in teach-
ing them than in teaching any other
languages ; the work of learning them
is of the same kind as that of learning
other languages, and they are said,
moreover, to be the most perfect forms
of speech, and in that respect would
seem to have advantages over other
languages. There is nothing exception-
al in the processes of their study. The
meanings and relations of words have
simply to be acquired, so that they can
be used for the expression of thought.

266

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Dictionaries, grammars, literary models
abound, and experienced teachers su-
perabound. And yet, with all these
facilities, the study of dead languages
has been the one pre-eminent and his-
toric failure of the so-called liberal edu-
cation. There is more repulsiveness in
it and more hatred of it than any other
kind of study — mathematics not ex-
cepted. There have been more flogging,
bullying, and bribery resorted to as in-
centives to classical study than to all
other studies whatever. Both in Eng-
land and in Germany the system has
long maintained an exclusive ascenden-
cy by a barbaric discipline on the one
hand, and on the other by all kinds of
prizes, honors, and emoluments that
could stimulate selfish ambition, and
which have been jealously withheld
from modern studies. With all these
factitious stimulants to classical study,
its failure has been so notorious that we
can not attribute it to any accidental
defects in the modes of its teaching.
Nor can these defects be so readily re-
paired, for no possible reform in the
modes of studying the dead languages
can alter their relations to modern
thought. It is here that we find the
open secret of their failure.

Professor Cooke struck the key-
note of this discussion when he re-
marked, in his article on " The Greek
Question," in the last " Monthly " : "A
half-century has wholly changed the
relations of human knowledge," and
" the natural sciences have become the
chief factors of our modern civiliza-
tion." This change in the relations of
knowledge, by which the sciences have
become the great intellectual factors
of civilization, has necessarily brought
with it a corresponding revolution in
education. For the new knowledge did
not originate by the old methods of
study ; it came by new exercises of the
mind, as much contrasted with previous
habits as the greatness of its results is
contrasted with the barrenness of the
traditional scholarship. The old method

occupied itself mainly with the study
of language ; the new method passed
beyond language to the study of the
actual phenomena of nature. The old
method has for its end lingual accom-
plishments ; the new method, a real
knowledge of the characters and rela-
tions of natural things. The old method
trains the verbal memory, and the rea-
son, so far as it is exercised in transpos-
ing thought from one form of expres-
sion to another. The new method cul-
tivates the powers of observation and
the faculty of reasoning upon the objects
of experience so as to educate the judg-
ment in dealing with the problems of
life. The old method left uncultivated
whole tracts of the mind that are of
supreme importance in gaining a knowl-
edge of the actual properties and prin-
ciples of things which are fundament-
al in our progressive civilization ; the
new method begins with the systematic
cultivation of these neglected mental
powers. The old method has yielded to
the world long ago all that it is capable
of giving ; the new method has already
accomplished much, but it has as yet
yielded but comparatively little of what
it is capable of giving when it becomes
organized into a perfected system of edu-
cation. It is this new scientific method,
based in nature, fortified in the noblest
conquests of the human mind, and
full of promise in its future develop-
ment that has become the rival in these
days of the old system of dead-language
studies. They have failed because they
can not hold their ground against the
new competitor.

The classics are constantly defended
because of their boasted discipline, yet
they have declined because of the grow-
ing sense of the weakness and inferiority
of the mental cultivation they impart.
They are accomplishments for show,
rather than solid acquisitions for use.
The study of words, the chief scholarly
occupation, is mentally debilitating, be-
cause it leaves unexercised, or exercises
but very imperfectly, the most impor-

EDITOR'S TABLE.

267

tant faculties of the mind — those which
can only be aroused to vigorous action
by direct application to the facts of the

' phenomenal world. That classical stu-
dies fail here has been long conceded.
Dr. Whewell declares that " mere clas-
sical reading is a narrow and enfeebling
education," and Sydney Smith speaks
of " the safe and elegant imbecilities of
classical culture." A system charac-
terized by feebleness and imbecility in
its mental reactions is no preparation
for dealing with the stern problems of
modern life. More and more it is felt
to be out of place, and is consequently
neglected. No kind of culture degen-
erates sO readily into stupid mechani-
cal routine as that of language. Pro-
fessor Halford Vaughn thus character-
izes the effects upon the mind of our
excessive addition to lingual pursuits :
" There is no study that could prove
more successful in producing often
thorough idleness and vacancy of mind,
parrot - like repetition and sing - song

• knowledge, to the abeyance and de-
struction of the intellectual powers, as
well as to the loss and paralysis of
the outward senses, than our tradi-
tional study and idolatry of language."
Very properly may it be said that our
inordinate study of language is an idol-
atry of which the blind devotion to
Greek is but the fetichistic form. The
cause of the failure of the classics is,
therefore, not because a thousand years
of experience with them has failed to
give us good methods of study, but be-
cause, in the competition with modern
sciences, ' as Canon Farrar remarks,
" they have been weighed in the bal-
ance and found wanting."

We have, therefore, to regard the
educational failure of the dead lan-
guages as a result of the progress of the
human mind, and therefore as a normal
and inevitable thing. They hold their
position against the advancing knowl-
edge of the age through the power of tra-
dition, through the blind veneration of
things ancient, because they represent a

conventional culture, and are conserved
by old and wealthy institutions. There
is, besides, a good deal of money in the
classics, which is not to be overlooked
when we wish to account for the te-
nacity with which they are maintained.
Professor Gildersleeve, in a recent arti-
cle ''On Classics in Colleges," in the
" Princeton Review," takes a very hope-
ful view of their continued ascendency
because, among other reasons, " the vest-
ed interests of classical study are, even
from a mercantile point of view, enor-
mous. Not only teachers, but book-
makers, have a heavy stake in the for-
tunes of the classics, and the capital
involved in them reminds us of the
pecuniary hold of paganism in the early
Christian centuries." Through the op-
eration of such causes, the classics will
undoubtedly linger long in the uni-
versities, but that they must yield to
the pressure of modern knowledge is
inevitable ; and the indications that
they are yielding are apparent on every
hand.

But if the failure of dead-language
studies be thus necessary for the causes
assigned, can they then be said to suc-
ceed, even if the student accomplishes
everything proposed ? Is it so entirely
clear that he who faithfully masters
them is not worse off than he who
slurs and neglects them ? The presi-
dents of our colleges tell us that the stu-
dents of Latin and Greek actually suc-
ceed, even when they seem to fail ; but
may it not be said with more truth that
they fail even when they seem most to
succeed, so that it is hardly a para-
dox to say the greater the success the
greater the failure? If classical studies
are behind the age and out of place,
then the greater the proficiency the
worse the displacement. The hope is
on the idlers at the tails of their classes,
as they stand a chance of learning some-
thing else, while the poor victim of clas-
sical infatuation,with his cultivated con-
tempt of everything useful, comes out
the most pitiable of all failures. Hap-

268

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

pily wo see in this country but very
few of the blooming specimens of what
the system can do, because our classical
standards in the colleges are not high,
and because the pressure of other sub-
jects is not to be entirely resisted. But
observation gives abundant assurance
that no man is so disqualified for any de-
sirable use, so irremediably helpless in
the struggles of actual life, as he who has
attained to the high classical ideal, and
made himself at home in the literatures
of Greece and Borne. The following
sketch of a successful university prod-
uct appeared a few years ago in the
London " Times " :

" Common things are quite as much
neglected and despised in the education
of the rich as in that of the poor. It is
wonderful how little a young' gentle-
man may know when he has taken his
university degrees, especially if he has
been industrious, and has stuck to his
studies. He may really spend a long
time in looking for somebody more ig-
norant than himself. If he talks with
the driver of the stage-coach, that lands
him at his father's door, he finds he
knows nothing of horses. If he falls
into conversation with a gardener, he
knows nothing of plants or flowers. If
he walks into the fields, he does not
know the difference between barley,
rye, and wheat ; between rape and tur-
nips ; between lucern and sainfoin ; be-
tween natural and artificial grass. If
he goes into a carpenter's yard, he does
not know one wood from another. If
he comes across an attorney, he has no
idea of the difference between common
and statute law, and is wholly in the
dark as to those securities of personal
and political liberty on which we pride
ourselves. ■ If he talks with a county
magistrate, he finds his only idea of the
office is, that the gentleman is a sort
of English sheik, as the mayor of the
neighboring borough is a sort of cadi.
If he strolls into any workshop, or place
of manufacture, it is always to find his
level, and that a level far below the

present company. If he dines out, and
as a youth of proved talents, and per-
haps university honors, is expected to
be literary,, his literature is confined to
a few popular novels — the novels of the
last century, or even of the last genera-
tion— history and poetry having been'
almost studiously omitted in his educa-
tion. The girl who has never stirred
from home, and whose education has
been economized, not to say neglected,
in order to send her own brother to col-
lege, knows vastly more of those things
than he does. The same exposure
awaits him wherever he goes, and when-
ever he has the audacity to open his
mouth. At sea he is a landlubber, in
the country a cockney, in town a green-
horn, in science an ignoramus, in busi-
ness a simpleton, in pleasure a milksop
— everywhere out of his element, every-
where at sea, in the clouds, adrift, or by
whatever word utter ignorance and in-
capacity are to be described. In soci-
ety and in the work of life he finds
himself beaten by the youth whom at
college he despised as frivolous or ab-
horred as profligate. He is ordained,
and takes charge of a parish, only to be
laughed at by the farmers, the trades-
people, and even the old women, for he
can hardly talk of religion without be-
traying a want of common sense."

Have we not here delineated the
natural outcome of a method of instruc-
tion which, despising utility and dis-
paraging modern knowledge, would, if
strictly carried out, multiply incapa-
bles on every hand? Classical stud-
ies are theoretically predominant in
most of our higher institutions of edu-
cation. Could they be "successful," as
it is maintained they may be and ought
to be — that is, could they be pursued
with the thoroughness necessary to gain
the advantages claimed for them — what
other effect would follow than to fill the
community with weaklings, imbeciles,
and good-for-nothings, of which the
" Times " has portrayed for us a typical
example? Such a "success" of the

EDITOR'S TABLE.

269

classics would stop the progress of
knowledge, and arrest the advance of
civilization. The failure of dead-lan-
guage studies is therefore a salutary
result in the course of nature — a ne-
cessity, a blessing, and an occasion of
thankfulness, rather than of regret and
lamentation.

QUEER DEFENSES OF THE CLASSICS.

They played it rather rough on Lord
Coleridge the other day in calling him
out on the classical question at Yale
College. To he sure, it was a great
temptation to exploit so illustrious a
man in behalf of a declining cause, es-
pecially just now when it is understood
that they are somewhat sore at that
venerable seat of learning at being pil-
loried as fetich-worshipers, on account
of their devotion to dead languages. It
looked a little like a put-up job, as
President Porter called up the subject
in his pleasant little opening speech,
and Lord Coleridge acknowledged that
he had been posted that very morning
with reference to Mr. Adams's address
attacking the curriculum for which
Yale is especially distinguished. But
it was a little cruel not to have al-
lowed his lordship more time, so that
he might at least have refrained from
giving away his whole case. Lord
Coleridge was reported as saying: "I
have done many foolish things in my
life, and wasted many hours of precious
time ; but one thing I have done which
I would do over again, and the hours I
spent at it are the hours which I have
spent most profitably, and the knowl-
edge thus gained I have found the most
useful, and practically useful. From
the time I left Oxford I have made it a
religion, so far as I Could, never to let
a day pass without reading some Latin
and Greek, and I can tell you that, so
far as my course may be deemed a suc-
cessful one, I deliberately assert, main-
tain, and believe, that what little suc-
cess has been granted to me in life has

been materially aided by the constant
study of the classics, which it has been
my delight and privilege all my life to
persevere in. This is not said for the
sake of controversy ; still less is it said
to an audience of American university
young men for the purpose of appear-
ing eccentric ; but it is said because I
believe it to be true, and I will tell
you why. Statement, thought, arrange-
ment,however men may struggle against
them, have an influence upon them, and
public men, however they may dislike
it, are forced to admit that, conditions
being equal, the man who can state any-
thing best, who can pursue an argument
more closely, who can give the richest
and most felicitous illustrations, and
who can command some kind of beauty
of diction, will have the advantage over
his contemporaries. And if at the bar
or in the senate anything has been done
which has been conspicuously better
than the work of other men, it has, in
almost every case, been the result of
high education. I say high education,
not necessarily classical, because every
man can not have it. The greatest
orator of my country at this moment,
as he himself has often said, has ' only
a smack of it.' "

But for the gravity of the occasion,
and the dignity of those who figured in
its proceedings, we should say that this
was a little funny, and might query
whether the noble lord had not been
misreported in citing the greatest orator
of England in connection with classical
education. But there can be no mis-
take, for his lordship again remarks,
"The man who has influenced his con-
temporaries the most is, generally speak-
ing, the man of highest education"
and he had previously said, " If John
Bright comes here, you will know what
English speaking is — you will know
what English oratory is." Since the
celebrated case of Balaam, who was
sent for to prophesy one way, and,
when it came to the pinch, went back
on his employers, and prophesied in ex-

270

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

actly the opposite way, there has been
no more conspicuous instance of incal-
culable waywardness in mental opera-
tions than was here furnished by the
Chief-Justice of England. He might as
well have broken into a eulogy of Na-
poleon Bonaparte before the Peace So-
ciety as to have named John Bright in
Yale College in connection with dead-
language studies. He was expected to
applaud the ancient classical scholar-
ship as the supreme incomparable means
of bringing the human mind up to its
highest power ; and he did this by quot-
ing a man as the most commanding
orator of England who knew nothing
about ancient scholarship, and who has
achieved his distinction entirely by the
study of the English classics. He came
to eulogize the dead languages, arid gave
super-eminence to a man who knew
nothing of either, and had devoted him-
self exclusively to the mastery of his
vernacular speech. Lord Coleridge rep-
resented the intellectual accomplish-
ments that give the highest advantage in
the bar and the senate as fourfold. The
highest education is exemplified by (1)
"the man who can state anything best " ;
(2), " who can pursue an argument more
closely " ; (3), " who can give the rich-
est and most felicitous illustrations " ;
and (4), " who can command some
beauty of diction " ; and he then pointed
to the man of all England who possesses
the traits in the highest degree, and
who is confessedly only a smatterer in
Latin and Greek. He commended clas-
sical education, but he referred to an-
other education, not classical, which
yields still higher results. Certainly,
if the Yale boys turn this memorable
occasion to its highest uses, they will
be incited to tread in the path followed
by the most distinguished orator of Eng-
land, and, wasting little time upon the
dead languages, will concentrate their
main efforts in gaining a skillful and
powerful control of the living lan-
guage in which all their work is to be
done.

The case of John Bright turns the
tables upon the classicists. His example,
like that of many other of our strongest
men, proves the advantage of not squan-
dering mental force over a wide field
of lingual study. If the native speech,
as an instrument of expression, is to be
perfected, it must become an object
of systematic, undivided cultivation.
This is a dictate of common sense, and
has been long understood. We dissi-
pate our energies upon foreign tongues,
and it is still as true as it was in the
time of Dryden, that " the properties
and delicacies of the English are known
to few." The mediaevals studied Latin
because they had to make use of it.
All learning was in Latin, and the lan-
guage had to be acquired for practical
purposes. Melanchthon, in 1528, made
a report on churches and schools which
became the basis in Saxony of a re-
formed education independent of Rome,
and the example was followed in other
German states. In this report it is
recommended that "the children be
taught Latin only, not German, Greek,
or Hebrew. Plurality of tongues does
them more harm than good.'1'' In the
very nature of the case, our craze for
foreign languages, living and dead, must
be at the expense of a perfected Eng-
lish. It has been well said that " the
idea of training upon a foreign language
had grown up in modern times. The
Greeks did not train upon Persian or
Scythian ; they knew no language but
their own." This is not only a fact ot
profound significance, but it is a crush-
ing answer to the modern polyglot su-
perstition. Everybody is recommended
to study Greek because the language is
so beautiful and perfect. Obviously the
true lesson is that the Greeks made it
so because they were shut up in it, and
could give their whole power to its im-
provement. Granting the unapproach-
able perfection of Greek literature, and
that the Greeks surpassed the world in
philosophical acuteness, the invincible
fact remains that they expended no ef-

LITERARY NOTICES.

271

fort in the study of foreign languages,
and common sense declares that it was
because of it. In his defense of the

' wholesale study of language, iD the

, St. Andrew's address, Mr. Mill en-
countered this perplexing considera-
tion, and his treatment of it was hard-
ly more adroit than Lord Coleridge's
reference to Mr. Bright. Having point-
ed out the numberless advantages of
a knowledge of many languages, and
then having to explain how the Greeks
succeeded so remarkably without any
such knowledge, he is driven to the
shift of suggesting that these Greeks
were a very wonderful people. He
says, " I hardly know any greater proof
of the extraordinary genius of the

- Greeks, than that they were able to
make such brilliant achievements in ab-
stract thought, knowing as they did no
language but their own." From which
we are to infer that if these clever
Greeks could have had a couple of
dead languages to train on, and three

* or four living languages to expand on,
their achievements would have been
simply prodigious! Another illustra-
tion of the power of fetich-worship to
pervert the logical intellect.

On the whole, we can not think the
Yale devotees have made much by try-
ing to play off the Lord Chief -Justice
of England against Mr. Adams on the
classical question. They are very much
in agreement. Mr. Adams said that
he had forgotten his Latin and Greek ;
Lord Coleridge says that by calling
in the aid of religion he has been able
to hold on to his classical acquisitions.
But Mr. Adams was before him, as
shown by the title of his address, in
recognizing the peculiar function of
religion in the case.

"We owe thanks to our classical
friends for keeping the question in a
lively condition. They have had much
to say about the German experience
with classical and scientific studies ; we
will see how much they make by that
next month.

LITERARY NOTICES.

What Social Classes owe to Each Other.
By William Graham Sumner, Professor
of Political and Social Science in Yale
College. New York : Harper & Brothers.
Pp. 169. Price, 60 cents.

This little volume has exceptional claims
upon the attention of thinking people. It
is not of the current order of social science
literature, but is rather a trenchant protest
against its prevailing spirit, and an able
attempt to substitute the scientific for the
sentimental mode of studying the relations
of men in society. Professor Sumner finds
a very loose state of thinking in regard to
social obligations, their grounds, and their
extent, what people owe to each other, and
what they expect from each other, and he
shows very clearly that from erroneous views
upon these subjects spring a large number
of the worst evils of the social state.

The general object of beings who recog-
nize evil as something to be avoided, and
good as something to be sought, and who
look forward to ends to be secured and
work for the accomplishment of these ends,
is undoubtedly to make things better, but
how to do this it is by no means so easy to
determine. The most conflicting projects
are offered for the attainment of the end,
and the discords of opinion as to what
things are socially best show that ignorance,
prejudice and passion have still a great
deal to do with the subject. In any treat-
ment of it, therefore, that can become in-
structive and helpful, the first thing is to
get at the facts and call things by their right
name. Professor Sumner has this unques-
tionable merit, that he refuses to be misled
by words, and insists upon stripping off the
illusions in which the subject is shrouded,
and getting at the real things represented.
This is not an agreeable task. It requires
some courage to encounter an ignorant pub-
lic sentiment which appropriates to itself
the whole terminology of charity, benevo-
lence, and sympathy for the poor and weak,
and denounces as cold and hard-hearted all
who do not share its sentimental views upon
social questions. Professor Sumner comes in
for a liberal amount of reprobation, the "Xew
York Tribune," for example, saying that
his book is characterized by "an insolent

272

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

dogmatism," and its critic declares that he
"can not resist the feeling that our profess-
or has a great contempt for the poor."

Frofessor Sumner is charged with con-
travening alike the dictates of Christianity
and the impulses of humanity in the views
he presents, but such a charge is clearly
groundless. For, if anything is established
by the widest experience, it is that Christian
philanthropy and benevolent impulse re-
quire a good deal better guidance than they
have hitherto had. Instinctive sympathy is
not enough, and it is simply notorious that
indiscriminate charity does more harm than
good. The more the subject is looked into,
the greater is the accumulation of proof
that benevolence and generosity, if not ex-
ercised with intelligent caution, work wide-
spread mischievous effects. What we need,
therefore, is a clearer understanding of the
principles of the subject ; and he who helps
us to these may claim to be the most truly
Christian and humane, because he shows us
how to secure the most permanently benefi-
cent ends. In spite of the literary cant about
" Gradgrind," and the " dismal science,"
what we want most urgently are facts and
their rational interpretations. Professor
Sumner has been accused of an unfeeling
indifference to the trials of the helpless and
unfortunate, and of recommending the hard
and selfish policy of looking out for one's
self and neglecting those who need assist-
ance. But this is a wholly unjust impu-
tation. What he demands is simply that
aid shall be given with a good deal mo<re
discrimination than is customary, and only
where the giver is certain that he will not
make matters worse by his charity. He
never says that men in society owe nothing
to each other, but he is very decided in the
conviction that no class owes to another
class that which will injure it. What they
owe to each other are mutual guarantees of
the opportunity to earn, possess, and enjoy,
and do the best for themselves without in-
terference or impediment. He says :

" The only help which is generally expe-
dient, even within the limits of the private
and personal relations of two persons to
each other, is that which consists in help-
ing a man to help himself. This always
consists in opening the chances. A man of
assured position can, by an effort which is

of no appreciable importance to him, give
aid which is of incalculable value to a man
who is all ready to make his own career, if
he can only get a chance." But " the aid
which helps a man to help himself is not
in the least akin to the aid which is given in
charity."

But it is best to let Professor Sumner
speak more fully for himself, and we accord-
ingly give some extracts from his book in an-
other part of the " Monthly." We have to
apologize to the author for the fragmentary
representation of his thoughts, but the read-
er can repair that by getting the book.

First Annual Report of the Board of
Control of the New York State Ex-
periment Station. For 1882. Pp. 156.

The grounds of the station are situated
near Geneva, and embrace one hundred and
twenty- five acres. The object of the institu-
tion is understood to be to ascertain, verify,
and group facts the knowledge of which shall
assist the farmer in carrying on his busi-
ness. Its duties also comprise the dissemi-
nation of information ; and for this pur-
pose the director has published weekly bul-
letins of the progress of the experiments
which were sent to newspapers, to the direct-
ors of other stations, and to men identified
with agricultural progress. Special effort
has been made to instruct visitors, and every
intelligent visitor has brought information
of value to the station. The investigations
have had a practical rather than a theoret-
ically-scientific bearing. As represented in
the report, they have had a wide scope, and
involve an immense number of details.

Fifth Annual Report of the State Board
of Health of the State of Connecti-
cut. Hartford : Case, Lockwood &
Brainard Company. Pp. 128.

The report is for the fiscal year ending
November 30, 1882. It includes several
valuable papers on subjects of theoretical
and practical sanitation. Among the most
interesting topics discussed is that of the
progress of epidemic and intermittent fever
in Connecticut and other parts of New Eng-
land, concerning which Dr. G. H.Wilson con-
tributes a very suggestive paper, and the
secretary's report embodies many valuable
facts.

LITERARY NOTICES.

273

Annual Report of the Board of Regents
of the Smithsonian Institution, for
the Year 1881. Washington : Govern-
ment Printing-Office. Pp. 837.

The scale and magnitude of the work
accomplished by the Institution have been
greatly increased in comparison with the
work of previous years, while the expendi-
tures have not been augmented. The build-
ing for the National Museum has been com-
pleted and occupied, and a large proportion
of its material has been provisionally ar-
ranged for instructive display. Suitable ac-
commodations have been provided within
it for the chemical laboratory. A consid-
erable number of original researches have
been undertaken under the direction of the
Institution, among the most important of
which were, perhaps, those in Alaska. The
twenty-third volume of the " Contributions
to Knowledge " has been published, and
contains six treatises; and the twentieth
and twenty-first volumes of the " Miscel-
laneous Contributions " contain three parts
or memoirs each. A valuable work has been
done by the Ethnological Bureau, under the
direction of Major Powell, particularly in
the line of Mr. Cushing's investigations
among the Zunis, and Mr. James Steven-
son's among other Pueblo tribes. Other sci-
entific enterprises with which the Institu-
tion is allied are noticed ; and the report-
volume itself embodies the results of a
considerable amount of research in meteor-
ology and allied subjects, astronomy, phys-
ics, chemistry, botany, zoology, and anthro-
pology, with numerous special papers in the
last-mentioned subject.

God and Creation. By Robert Reid How-
ison. Richmond, Virginia : West, John-
ston & Co. Pp. 578.

The author of this work is a Presbyterian
clergyman of Richmond, Virginia, who here
deals with scientific as well as theological
questions, bringing to aid him in his task
the results of the thoughts and studies of
years. Starting with the principle that be-
lief in Eternal Being is a necessary result
of human experience and of all thought on
the origin of things, the question arises
what is this Eternal Being ? To the author
it is not solely matter or solely spirit or
mind, but — and this is what it is the avowed

vol. xxiv. — 18 .

purpose of the book to maintain — it " con-
sists in God, the Eternal Spirit, or Mind, im-
manent in and working upon eternal mat-
ter, and bringing out of it, in time, the best
results that perfect wisdom, benevolence,
and power can produce." This at once
brings the doctrines of materialism into the
discussion. " But as materialism necessarily
denies the existence of a spiritual and per-
sonal God, and asserts itself as a rival and
conflicting system of faith, of course its ad-
vocates can not be overthrown by appeal to
the authority of Scripture. ... If met at
all, they must be met on the ground of un-
revealed knowledge." A summary of the
history of materialism and the materialists,
from Democritus down, is given, and the
conclusion is expressed that " Darwin, Hux-
ley, Spencer, and Tyndall, have not ad-
vanced a step nearer to the construction of
the universe without the aid of a spiritual
intelligence than Lucretius did in his poem."
The attempt is next made to show that the
doctrine of creation out of nothing is not
found in any of the canonical books of the
Bible, nor in any authoritative Christian
creed or confession of faith of a date older
than a. d. 1500 ; and the idea of a creation
in six days is dismissed as untenable. The
atomic theory of the constitution of matter
is reviewed, and declared not competent to
account for the phenomena, and a counter-
hypothesis is advanced, which is called the
nomian theory, or the hypothesis of law,
the substance of which is that " God is the
Eternal Power, Force, and Cause, in the
universe." The rest of the book is mainly
theological, and the conclusion is reached,
agreeably to the philosophies of Kant and
Hamilton, that " a science of ontology in
its full meaning is impossible to man," or
that, though we know that spirit w, and
that matter is, we do not know, and proba-
bly never will know, what is the essence
either of spirit or of matter."

A New School Dictionary of the English
Language: On the Basis of the Latest
Edition of the Unabridged Dictionary of
Joseph E. Worcester, LL. D. Philadel-
phia : J. B. Lippincott & Co. Pp. 390.
Price, 90 cents.

The former edition of Worcester's " Ele-
mentary Dictionary " was published in 1835,
and was revised and enlarged in 1860. So

274

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

many changes have been made of late in
our language that it has been deemed ex-
pedient to supersede the old work by this
essentially new one. Besides the vocabu-
lary proper, it contains tables of words and
phrases from foreign languages ; of pro-
nunciation of biographical, mythological,
and geographical names ; of abbreviations
used in writing and printing ; and of weights
and measures, the metric system, foreign
coins, etc.

Historical Studies. Edited by Titus Mun-
son Coan. New York : G. P. Putnam's
Sons. Pp. 205. Price, 25 cents.

This is the fourth number of Messrs.
Putnam's " Topics of the Time " series, and
includes five essays, viz. : " Village Life in
Norfolk Six Hundred Years ago," by the
Rev. Dr. Augustus Jessopp; "Siena," by
Samuel James Cappar ; " A Few . Words
about the Eighteenth Century," by Fred-
eric Harrison ; " France and England in
1793," by Oscar Browning; and "General
Chanzy," from " Temple Bar."

The Factors of Civilization, Real and As-
sumed ; considered in their Relation to
Vice, Misery, Happiness, Unhappiness,
and Progress. Atlanta, Georgia : James
P. Harrison & Co. Vol. i., Pp. 347.

The second volume of this work, in which
were considered the unhappiness arising
from poverty and that arising from uncon-
genial pursuits and labor, was published
some months ago, when in our review of it
(see the "Monthly" for March, 1883, p.
711) we indicated the general character and
scope of the work as a whole. In the pres-
ent volume, which, though following the oth-
er in the order of time, is intended to pre-
cede it in logical connection, are discussed
the unhappiness due to erroneous theologi-
cal conceptions and doctrines ; that arising
from bad forms of government ; and that
arising from ignorance. Much attention is
given to the doctrines of Mr. Henry George.

A History of the New York State Teach-
ers' Association. With Sketches of its
Presidents and Prominent Members. By
Hylaxd C. Kirk. New York : E. L. Kel-
logg & Co. Pp. 175.

This book aims to give an accurate ac-
count of such matters in the history of the
Association as seem to be of the most im-

portance, and of such as would present the
work of the teachers in the advancement of
education in the State. Summaries are given
of the proceedings of each of the thirty
seven meetings of the Association. Many of
the biographical sketches are accompanied
with portraits of their subjects, which, unless
the artist's or the printer's work were bet-
ter done, had better been omitted.

Verbal Pitfalls. A Manual of 1,500 Words
commonly misused. By C. W. Bardeen.
Syracuse, New York: C. W. Bardeen.
Pp. 223. Price, 75 cents.

This work is intended to include all the
words the use of which has been questioned
by the numerous verbal critics whose works
are current, to collate the verdicts of the dif-
ferent authorities, and estimate, where it is
practicable, the weight to be attached to
their views. A strictly alphabetical arrange-
ment is adopted ; and the indication is given,
by distinctions in type, at the head of each
article, whether the word in question is in-
defensible or in dispute, or whether it may
be regarded as legitimate.

Astronomy. By Simon Newcomb, LL. D.,
and Edward S. H olden, M. A. New
York : Henry Holt & Co. Pp. 338. Price,
$1.40.

The present treatise is a condensed edi-
tion of the larger " Astronomy " of the same
authors, from which some of the less essen-
tial details of practical astronomy and most
of the mathematical formulas have been
omitted. Some of the space thus gained
has been utilized in giving a fuller discus-
sion of the more elementary parts of the sub-
ject, and in treating the fundamental prin-
ciples from various points of view.

Finland : Its Forests and Forest Man-
agement. Compiled by John Croumbie
Brown, LL. D. Edinburgh: Oliver &
Boyd ; Montreal : Dawson Brothers. Pp.
290.

Dr. Brown has undertaken, as rapidly
as his means will allow, to publish a kind of
library of forestry, to which this is the third
contribution. The other two volumes, re-
lating to forestry in England and in France,
have already been noticed in our pages.
The object sought in the publications is to
produce popular technical treatises which

LITERARY NOTICES.

275

may be useful to students of forest science
who have not access to the works quoted, by
statins views that have been advanced and
have required attention, and by citing state-
ments bearing upon them in such form as
to place readers in a position to work out
for themselves the solution of problems
raised. Much of the information was col-
lected by the author during a journey in
Finland and Scandinavia.

God out and Man in : or, Replies to Rob-
ert G. Ingersoll. By W. H. Platt,
D. D., LL. D., Rector of St. Paul's Church,
Rochester, New York. Rochester : Steel
& Avery. Pp. 320.

As the title of this book sufficiently in-
dicates, .it is a polemic on the various issues
between infidelity and Christianity, and is
lively and interesting, and as decisive as such
works usually are. It is, of course, not a sys-
tematic treatise in defense of Christianity,
but takes up many objections that are urged
by unbelievers. The form of the discussion
favor3 explicitness of treatment, and is at-
tractive to the reader. Various of Mr. In-
gersoll's statements, put forth in his books
and in his published lectures, are taken up
as texts, and commented upon and replied
to generally briefly, but sometimes with am-
plification. Dr. Platt is familiar with the
recent forms of controversy which have
arisen through the progress of science and
the later aspects of philosophy, and he
makes free and effective use of the argu-
ments and concessions of eminent repre-
sentatives of what is called the agnostic or
materialistic school. The attention which
he has given to this aspect of modern reli-
gious controversy enables bim to handle it
with unusual ability, and imparts to his vol-
ume perhaps its strongest claim to the read-
er's attention.

A CORRECTION.

In our notice of Spencer's " Cyclopaedia
of Descriptive Sociology," which appeared in
the October " Monthly," there occurs a mis-
leading statement which it is desirable to
rectify. Part III of that work, devoted to
"Types of Lowest Races, Negritto Races,
and Malayo-Polynesian Races," carelessly
represents that the Negritto races and the
Malayo-Polynesian races were specified as
races meant by the title " Types of Lowest

Races." This is incorrect. The title is
meant to indicate three separate groups, of
which " Types of the Lowest Races," includ-
ing Fuegians, Veddahs, and Damans, consti-
tute only the first. The other groups do
not fall within this category; the Malayo-
Polynesians, various of them, being quite
high races both in type and civilization. It
is desirable to avoid error and confusion in
this important gradation.

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.

The Classification, Training1, and Education of
the Feeble - Minded, Imbecile, and Idiotic. By
Charles H. Stanley Davis, M.D. New York: E.
Steiger & Co. Pp. 46.

Variations in Nature. By Thomas Meehan.
Salem Press, Salem, Mass. Pp. 14.

Bureau of Education Circular : Proceedings of
the Department of Superintendence, American Edu-
cational Association, 1SS3. Washington : Govern-
ment Printing-Office. Pp. 81.

A Physician's Sermon to Young Men. By Will-
iam Pratt. New York: M. L. Holbrook & Co.
Pp. 48. 25 cents.

Das Studium der Staatwissensehaften in Amer-
ika (The Study of the Political Sciences in America).
By Dr. E. J. James. Jena: Gustav Fischer. Pp.
26.

The North-Atlantic Cyclones of August, 1883.
By Lieutenant W. H. H. Southerland. U. S. Navy.
Washington : Government Printing-Office. Pp. 22.

Transactions of the New York Academy of Sci-
ences, December. 1882, and January, 1883. Pp. 36.
The same, February and March, 18S3. Pp. 32.
Editor, Alexis A. Juhen, School of Mines, Columbia
College, New York.

Programme of Studies, No. 10 Gramercy Park,
New York. Pp. 20.

Some Researches after Haemoglobin. By Robert
Saunders Henry, A. M., M. D., Charleston, W. Ya.
Pp. 7.

Quarterly Report, Bureau of Statistics, Treasury
Department, relative to Imports, Exports, Immi-
gration, and Navigation. For Three Months ending
June 30, 1S83. Washington : Government Printing-
Office. Pp. 112.

Incineration. By John D. Beugless. New
York Cremation Society. Pp. 16.

On the Present Status of the Eccentricity The-
ory of Glacial Climate, pp. 8, and On the Origin and
Hade of Normal Faults, pp. 5. By W. J. McGee.

Ueber das galvanische Verhalten der Amalgame
des Zinkes und des Cadmiums (On the Galvanic Be-
havior of the Amalgams of Zinc and of Cadmium).
By William L. Robb, A. B. Berlin : Gustav Schade.
Pp. 31.

The Sun changes its Position in Space. By Au-
gust Tischner. Leipzig : Gustav Fock. Pp. 37.

Evolution of the American Trotting-Horse. By
Francis E. Nipher. Pp. 6.

Notes on American Earthquakes. By Professor
C. G. Rockwood, Jr., Ph. D., Princeton, N. J. Pp. 8.

Description of a New Hydrobiinoid Gasteropod
from the Mountain Lakes of the Sierra Nevada. By
Robert E. C. Stearns. Pp. 6.

Cholera a Disease of the Nervous System. By
John Chapman, M. D. London : J. & A. Churchill.
Pp. 16.

Latitude, Longitude, and Time. By J. Anthony
Bassett. Syracuse, N. Y. : C. W. Bardeen. Pp. 42.
25 cents.

276

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Horses: their Feed and their Feet. By C. E.
Page, M. D. New York : Fowler & Wells. Pp.
150. 50 cents.

Dime Question - Books : Grammar, pp. 87 ;
Arithmetic, pp. 82 ; Geography, pp. 40. Syracuse,
N. Y. : 0. W. Bardeen. 10 cents each.

United States Salary List and the Civil Service
Law, Rules and Regulations. Washington, D. C. :
Henry N. Copp. Pp. 141. 85 cents.

Prison Labor. Some Considerations in Favor of
maintaining the Present System. By John S. Per-
ry. Albany : Weed, Parsons & Co. Pp. 128.

The Treatment of Wounds as based on Evolu-
tionary- Laws. By C. Pitfield Mitchell. New York :
J. H. Vail & Co. Pp. 29. 50 cents.

The Mounds of the Mississippi Valley Histori-
cally Considered. By Lucien Carr, Cambridge,
Mass. Pp. 10T.

Transactions of the Medical and Chirurgical Fac-
ulty of the State of Maryland, April, 1883. Balti-
more : Isaac Friedenwald. Pp. 802.

Apercu sur la Theorie de PE volution (Summary
of the Theory of Evolution). By Dr. Ladislao Net-
to. Rio de Janeiro : Le Messager du Bresil. Pp. 22.

Questoes Hygienicas (Hygienic Questions): Ani-
mal Mephitism. The Sewers of Rio de Janeiro and
their Influence on the Public Health. Some Hygi-
enic Counsels to the People. By Dr. Joao Pires Fa-
rinha. Rio de Janeiro : TypographiaNacional. Pp.
54.

Die Physik im Dienste der Wissenschaft, der
Kunst, und des practischen Lebens (Physics in the
Service of Science, Art, and Practical Life). By Dr.
G. Krebs. Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke. Part I.
Pp.112. 2 marks.

Beyond the Sunrise : Observations of Two Trav-
elers. New York : John W. Lovell Company. Pp.
237. 20 cents.

King's Hand - Book of Boston. Cambridge,
Mass. : Moses King. Pp. 360. $1.

Ancient Egypt in the Light of Modern Discov-
eries. Bv Professor H. 8. Osborn, LL. D. Cincin-
nati : Robert Clarke & Co. Pp. 232. $1.25.

The Handy Book of Object-Lessons. By J.
Walker. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.
Pp. 129. $1.25.

Sea-Sickness: Its Cause, Nature, and Preven-
tion. By William H. Hudson. Boston : S. E.
Cassino&Co. Pp.147. $1.25.

Chemistry : General, Medical, and Pharmaceu-
tical. By John Attfield, F. R. S. Philadelphia :
Henry C. Lea's Son & Co. Pp. 727. $3.

History and Uses of Limestones aud Marbles.
By S. M. Burnham. Boston : S. E. Cassino & Co.
Pp. 392. $6. Illustrated.

Natural Philosophv. By Isaac Sharplcss, Sc. D„
and G. M. Phillips, A*. M. Philadelphia: J. B. Lip-
pincott & Co. Pp. 342.

A Natural History Reader, for School and Home.
Compiled and arranged by James Johonnot. New
York : D. Appleton & Co. Pp. 414. $1.25. Illus-
trated.

Animal Life. By E. Perceval Wright, M. A.,
M. D. London, Paris, and New York : Cassell, Pet-
ter, Galpin & Co. Pp. 618. $2.50. Illustrated.

Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission.
Vol. i, 1881, pp. 466 ; vol. ii, 1882, pp. 467. Wash-
ington : Government Printing -Office.

The English Grammar of William Cobbett. Re-
vised and annotated by Alfred Ayres. New York :
IX Appleton & Co. Pp. 254. $1.

United States Geographical and Geological Sur-
vey of the Territories: Wyoming and Idaho. By
F. V. Hayden. Part I, pp. 809; Part II, pp. 508;
both with numerous Plates. Also a volume of
Maps and Panoramas. Washington : Government
Printing-Office.

Mineral Resources of the United States. By
Albert Williams, Jr. Washington : Government
Printing-Office. Pp. S13.

The Law of Heredity. A Study of the Cause
of Variation and the Origin of Living Organisms.
By W. K. Brooks, Associate in Biology, Johns
Hopkins University. Baltimore: John Murphy &
Co. 18S8. Pp. 836.

Cumulative Method for Learning German. By
Adolph Dreyspring. New York : D. Appleton &
Co. Pp. 253. $1.50.

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

Glacial Theories at the American Asso-
ciation.— Topics connected with the glacial
theory received much discussion at the Min-
neapolis meeting of the American Associa-
tion. In his paper on " The Life History
of the Niagara River," Mr. Julius Pohlman
held that the falls had no part in excavat-
ing the gorge below the whirlpool ; but that,
Lake Ontario subsiding slowly, no waterfall
was formed at its entrance, and the lower
part of the gorge was worn out by the river
as a rapid in an old shallow valley, till
at the whirlpool this path met the ancient
river-valley, while it was along that valley
only that the falls receded to their present
site. In a paper on " Glacial Canons," W.
J. McGee, of Salt Lake City, suggested that
the formation of the canons could be ac-
counted for by presuming that typical water-
cut canons were temporarily occupied by
glacial ice, which would convert them from
a V into a U shape, and that their features
do not " necessarily imply extensive glacial
excavation, or indicate that glaciers are su-
perlatively energetic engines of erosion."
In his paper on the extent, character, and
teachings of the ancient glaciation of North
America, Professor Newberry maintained
that — 1. Glaciers covered most of the ele-
vated portions of the mountain-belts in the
far West as far south as the thirty -sixth par-
allel, and in the eastern half of the conti-
nent to the fortieth parallel of latitude. 2.
The ancient glaciers, which occupied the
area above described, were not produced by
local causes, but were evidences of a general
climatic condition. 3. They could not have
been the effect of a warm climate and an
abundant precipitation of moisture, but
were results of a general depression of tem-
perature. Having stated his objections to
the iceberg theory, Professor Newberry add-
ed that " the record of the ice period on
our continent is far more impressive and
extensive than it has been represented. The
phenomena were due to an extraneous and

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

277

cosmical cause, not to anything local or even
telluric. The question here passes from
the geologist, and must be addressed to the
astronomer." In another paper, on " The
Eroding Power of Ice," Professor Newberry
reiterated these views, and maintained, be-
sides, in answer to objections, that " ice has
a great, though unmeasured and perhaps
immeasurable, eroding power ; and that, in
regions which they have occupied, glaciers
have been always important and often pre-
ponderating agents in effecting geological
changes." He supported his views with
citations from his own extended studies of
glacial action in the Alps and in many dif-
ferent regions of the United States and
Canada. G. F. Wright, of Oberlin, Ohio,
pointed out, in a paper on the " Result of
Explorations of the Glacial Boundary be-
tween New Jersey and Illinois," that " the
signs of glaciation cease where there is no
barrier to account for their cessation, and
where no barrier ever could have existed,
such as must be supposed if the so-called
glacial phenomena are the product of float-
To the question, Why is the bound-

ing ice

ary of the glacial area so crooked ? the au-
thor replied, assigning, as a principal cause,
aside from differences of level, the proba-
bility that unequal amounts of snow fell
over different regions of the north, and this
snow became very unevenly extended in
its subsequent flow over the surface. A
little reflection, he added, " will show that
the glacial theory will not make extravagant
suppositions as to the amount of ice re-
quired." In the general discussions of the
subject, Dr. Dawson objected to the loose
significance with which the term "moraine"
has been used, and especially to the defini-
tion of it as " detrital matter heaped up by
the forcible mechanical action of ice " ; and
pointed out that such a definition would cer-
tainly include work which was not per-
formed by land-glaciers. Major Powell
called attention to the fact that wholly dif-
ferent agencies,, each acting in its own way,
produced a class of geological features that
wentr under the general name of " terraces."
We have sea-beach terraces, lake-shore ter-
races, and yet another class of terraces ex-
ceedingly common in the Rocky and Cascade
Mountains, due to a different cause from
the others.

Parental Rights and the Gens among
the Omahas. — Alice C. Fletcher, of New
York, gave, at the recent meeting of the
American Association, a paper on the laws
and privileges of the gens, among the Oma-
ha Indians. A child who has lost its fa-
ther or mother is considered an orphan.
Its particular place is gone, and it passes
into the gens. If it is the father who dies,
the mother loses all maternal rights. Each
child, unless of very tender age, will be sep-
arated from the mother, and will go into
the family of some one of the father's rela-
tives. It may thereafter be claimed as his
own child by the male head of the family
to which it has been allotted. This separa-
tion of her children from a widow is per-
manent. She usually marries again, and in
that event is not burdened with her off-
spring by previous husbands ; but, if she
remains unmarried, she is expected to work
for the family that has adopted her chil-
dren, rather than for the children them-
selves. The women are not wanting in af-
fection for the children of whom they are
bereft ; but the separation is looked upon
as a matter of course, and none of the in-
terested parties regard it as a grievance, or
even as a hardship.

Tarantula-Bites and the Dancing-Cnre«

— The tarantula, that gigantic spider of sup-
posed very poisonous qualities, is native in
Italy, and in the neighborhood of Tarento,
whence its name is derived. Its bite and
sting have been supposed to be extremely
painful, and to produce a periodical de-
rangement, manifesting itself in various
ways. The affected persons were fabled to
be attacked with a kind of compulsion to
dance, which was called, after its cause,
tarantismus ; and real benefit, in the shape
of a dilution of the poison, and a weakening
of its effects, was supposed to accrue from
subjecting the bitten person to a violent
exercise of dancing. The doctors regarded
the tarantismus as a kind of hypochondria,
to which the women of Southern Italy were
peculiarly subject, and some had prescrip-
tions of particular kinds of music and spe-
cial dances for its cure. Some held that
different kinds of music should be pre-
scribed to different persons, according to
their character and temperament. Possi-

278

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

bly, however, a play upon names is con-
nected with these conditions ; and the dance
called the tarantella, which is in great favor
in Italy, may have derived its name in the
same way as the great spider, simply from
the fact that it is indigenous to the Taren-
tine province. The tarantula insect will
bite, like any spider, when it is trodden
upon ; but that its bite is more dangerous
than the sting of the hornet has not been
proved. It is still customary in Apulia to
make one dance who thinks he has been
bitten by a tarantula. Waldemar Kaden
relates that he was disturbed once by the
noise of music and dancing, and that look-
ing out he saw a youth, who was supposed
to have been bitten while asleep in the
field, going through the performance. The
poor fellow was in the center of a circle of
persons of all ages, held by the collar and
arms by a strong peasant, and compelled
to make the motions whether he would or
not, while the crowd kept him excited with
their shouts and clapping. The great point
to be gained was to make him sweat, and,
when this was brought about, the crowd
rejoiced and gave him a glass of wine. The
only mark on the youth was a red spot on
the forehead that might have been a scratch.
He had never seen a tarantula, and felt no
pain or uneasiness, and was out at play an
hour after the dance. Eerr Kaden inquired
of the people how many of them had been
tarantolati. Not one of them had ever seen
a tarantula, but they had all danced ! — Die
Natur.

The British Association. — The meeting
of the British Association for 1883 was held
at Southport, beginning September 19th.
The President for the year was Professor
Cayley, whose address on the " Obligations
of Mathematics to Philosophy, and to Ques-
tions of Common Life," though it may have
been to minds trained in mathematical modes
of thought an admirable presentation of the
subject, was far too abstruse to be capable
of popular adaptation. Professor Ray Lan-
kester opened the Biological Section with
an address, urging greater liberality on the
part of the state in encouraging the prose-
cution of biological studies. He drew a
comparison decidedly unfavorable to Eng-
land with what is done in this line on the

Continent, especially in Germany, and,
dwelling on the practical utility of such
studies, declared that forty new biological
institutes, requiring a capital sum of about
two millions sterling, were needed in Eng-
land. The section suggested the founda-
tion of a marine laboratory at some point
on the British coast, as a suitable object to
which the surplus of funds anticipated from
the Fisheries Exhibition could be applied.
Dr. Gladstone's address in the Chemical Sec-
tion was on "The Elements," and covered
the history of the theories that have pre-
vailed and the knowledge that has been
gained on the subject ; and showed that
we have much yet to learn upon it. Among
the more important papers read in this sec-
tion was that of Professor A. W. William-
son, " On the Constitution of Matter." Pro-
fessor W. C. Williamson, as Vice-President,
gave in the Geological Section " a clear and
concise exposition" of our present knowl-
edge of the carboniferous flora. By the
doctrine of evolution, there must have ex-
isted prior to the Devonian period, when the
cryptogams were flourishing in wonderful
grandeur, and distributed all over the earth,
a vast succession of forms of vegetable life ;
yet hardly a vestige of this pre-Devonian
flora has been unearthed ; and it is clear
that we are not yet in a position to construct
a genealogical tree of the vegetable king-
dom. Colonel Godwin- Austen addressed the
Geological Section on the orography and
geology of the Himalaya Mountain system ;
and Mr. Trelawney Saunders explained the
scheme for connecting the Mediterranean
with the Red Sea by means of a navigable
canal through the valley of the Jordan. A
communication was received in this section
from Mr. Stanley, advising the establish-
ment of a British protectorate over the Con-
go. Mr. Pengelly, of the Anthropological
Section, having the discoveries in Kent's
Cavern as his subject, adduced new evi-
dence in favor of the belief in glacial or
even pre-glacial man. Professor Hcnrici,
in the Mathematical Section, spoke of the
position of the study of geometry in Eng-
land. In the Mechanical Section, Mr. Brun-
lees, engineer, traced the growth of mechan-
ical appliances for the construction and
working of railways and docks. In his
address he referred to the assistance Mrs.

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

279

Roebling had given her husband during the
construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, which
he characterizes as " honorable to the indi-
vidual woman, to the energetic nation to
which she belongs, and to the better half
of the human race." In the Statistical Sec-
tion was presented the final report of the
Anthropometric Committee, which has been
for several years engaged in collecting evi-
dence as to the stature and other physical
characteristics of the inhabitants of the Brit-
ish Isles. The evening lectures were on
" Recent Researches on the Distance of the
Sun," by Professor R. S. Ball ; " Galvani
and Animal Electricity," by Professor Mc-
Kendrick, of Glasgow ; and " Telephones,"
by Sir F. Bramwell. The next meeting of
the Association will be held in Montreal,
and the meeting for 1885 in Aberdeen.

The Stndy of our Sidereal System. —

In his address before the American Associ-
ation, on " The German Survey of the North-
ern Heavens," Professor William A. Rogers
defined the present condition of knowledge
regarding the proper motions of the stars
and of the solar system in space. Struve
concluded several years ago that the solar
system was moving in a direction toward
a point in the constellation Hercules, and
Madler has indicated Alcyone in the Pleia-
des as the probable center of the greater sys-
tem of which it forms a part ; but, " Biot
in 1812, Bessel in 1818, and Airy in 1860,
reached the conclusion that the certainty of
the movement of the solar system toward
a given point in the heavens could not be
affirmed. ... It must always be kept in
mind that the quantities with which we
must deal in this investigation are exceed-
ingly minute, and that the accidental errors
of observation are at any time liable to
lead to illusory results. ... It can not be
affirmed that there is a sidereal system in
the sense in which we speak of the solar
system. . . . Admitting that the solar sys-
tem is moving through space, can we at the
present moment even determine whether
that motion is rectilinear or curved, to say
nothing of the laws which govern it ? " The
questions connected with these points, if
solved at all, must be solved by a critical
study of observations of precision accumu-
lated at widely separated epochs of time.

The first step in the solution has been taken
in the systematic survey of the northern
heavens undertaken by the \_Astronomische\
Gesellschaft, and in the survey of the south-
ern heavens at Cordova by Dr. Gould. " The
year 1875 is the epoch about which are
grouped the data which, combined with simi-
lar data for an epoch not earlier than 1950,
will go far toward clearing up the doubts
which now rest upon the question of the
direction and the amount of the solar mo-
tion in space; and it can not be doubted
that our knowledge of the laws which con-
nect the sidereal with the solar system will
be largely increased through this investiga-
tion."

Ideas about Fossils. — Professor August
Quenstedt gives in his "Petrefacten Kunde "
a review of the hypotheses that have been
advanced at different times concerning the
nature and origin of fossils, and of the slow
processes by which the true theory of the
subject has been reached. The views of
the ancients were crude enough, but among
them were some more intelligent and nearer
to the truth than any that were held during
the middle ages. The crude speculations
of the latter period survived down to an
age of greater scientific enlightenment ; and
the time is not extremely remote when be-
lemnites were regarded as thunderbolts, and
other fossils were looked upon as sports of
Nature, or as efforts of Nature to prepare in
the bosom of the earth the material forms
of bodies preliminary to their receiving the
breath of life. At a later period the belief
arose that the fossils were once actually liv-
ing creatures, and had been destroyed by
the flood; and, as recently as 1828, Buck-
land supported such a view in his " Reli-
quae Diluvianae." This author was one of
the earliest cave-hunters, and believed that
the bones found in the caves were those
which had been washed into them by the
Noachian deluge. With such views having
held a footing in our own century, we have
little right to be amused at those who, in
the age of Scheuchzer and Leibnitz, thought
the bones of the gigantic salamander (Sala-
mandra gigantea) were the remains of an
old human Binner destroyed in the flood.
Even Leibnitz had no doubt that the re-
mains of a mammoth which were found

28o

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

near Quedlinburg belonged to the unicorn
of the Bible. Because the Bible assigned
extremely long terms of life to the antedilu-
vian patriarchs, popular belief ascribed a
gigantic size to the ancestors of the present
human race ; and parts of huge fossil skele-
tons were occasionally preserved in the
churches as relics. Such a belief was al-
ready so extensive, even in the time of
Empedocles, n. c. 450, that a mass of hip-
popotamus - bones found in Sicily was de-
clared by the learned of the day to be the
remains of the giants who fought against
the gods. The Mohammedans believed that
Adam was as tall as a palm-tree, or about
sixty feet, and found a mound of corre-
sponding size in Syria to answer for his
grave. The academician, Henrien, in 1718,
described Adam as thirty-eight and a half
metres and Eve as thirty-seven metres high,
and herein did not greatly disagree -with St.
Augustine. The former world was long be-
lieved to have been constructed on a much
more gigantic scale than the present ; and
the opinion that the old order of things and
organisms was vastly different from the ex-
isting one, and was subverted by a tremen-
dous revolution, prevailed quite generally,
till Lamarck and Cuvier pointed out the
way to a more consistent theory.

Defective Hearing in Sehool-Childrcn. —

Dr. Gelle, a French physician, has recently
published an important paper on defects of
hearing among school-children. Dr. Weil,
of Stuttgart, a year or two ago expressed the
opinion that about thirty per cent of the chil-
dren in commercial schools, and ten per cent
of well-to-do school children, hear but im-
perfectly. Dr. Gelle, from the examination
of fourteen hundred cases of deafness in
schools, fixes the proportion of children thus
affected at about twenty or twenty-five per
cent of the whole number. The deficiency
is most obvious in the case of the consonant-
sounds, the very ones most essential to the
understanding of what is said. Dr. Gelle
observes that the range of hearing for a giv-
en sound diminishes outside the class-room,
or even in a covered yard ; that mistakes
-cease or diminish as the distance of the
teacher from the pupil is lessened ; and that
deafness increases with age. To make the
-conditions convenient for the hearing of the

pupil, the teacher should take pains to place
himself in the most favorable position and
to articulate distinctly, and the size of the
class-room should be adjusted according
to the laws which limit the range of the
most distinct hearing to about twenty-three
or twenty-seven feet. The scholars, having
been previously examined with reference to
their hearing, should be arranged so as to
place those most deficient in this respect
nearest to the teacher.

Significance of the Aboriginal Mounds.
— In the discussions of the Anthropologi-
cal Section of the American Association, re-
specting the mounds, Dr. S. D. Peet divided
those structures into five classes, as follows:
1. Emblematic mounds, built by hunters
who worshiped animals. 2. Burial-mounds,
a class mostly represented in Michigan, Illi-
nois, and Minnesota. 3. Mounds which are
probably the remains of the stockades of
an agricultural people. 4. Village mounds
— the remains of villages, and their high
places for worship. 5. The peculiar mounds
of the Pueblos and Aztecs. The emblematic
mounds, having the forms of animals hunt-
ed, served a useful as well as a religious
I purpose, and were used as screens from be-
hind which to shoot the animals that would
pass along the game-drives between them.
Of their religious significance, Dr. Peet's
theory is, that the animals were supposed
to be scattered about to guard the central
sacrifice or altar mound. He has been led
to this belief by observing that the altar-
mounds are nearly always situated on high
ground, overlooking a river, while the em-
blematic mounds are so disposed around the
altar-mounds as to suggest the notion of
guarding the latter.

The Singing-Sands of Manchester, Mas-
sachusetts.— A. A. Julien and Dr. H. C.
Bolton presented a paper to the American
Association, on the sands of the singing-
beach, at Manchester, Massachusetts. On
the beach, fcldspathic rocks are intersected
by numerous dikes of igneous rocks. The
sonorous phenomenon is confined to par-
ticular parts of the sand, and is exhibited
in areas to which closely contiguous ones
arc silent. The sound is produced by press-
ure, and may be likened to a subdued

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

281

crushing of low intensity and pitch, not
metallic or crackling. It occurs when the
sand is pressed by ordinary walking, in-
creases with sudden pressure of the foot
upon the sand, and is perceptible upon
mere stirring by the hand, or even plunging
one finger and removing it suddenly. It
can be intensified by dragging wood on the
beach. Somewhat similar phenomena have
been observed in sands at various other
places. The authors explain the phenomena
upon the hypothesis that the sand, instead
of being, as ordinarily, composed of round-
ed particles, is made up of grains with flat
and angular surfaces. In the present in-
stance, the plane surface of feldspar is ap-
parent in many of the grains. Probably a
certain proportion of quartz and feldspar
grains is adapted to give the sound, while
less or more of either component would
fail of the result. It is concluded that the
sound is produced either by the intermix-
ture of grains having cleavage-planes, or of
grains with minute cavities.

Use and Abuse of Check-Reins. — Bear-
ing-reins, or check-reins, in the harness of
horses, are useful and advantageous in their
places and when rightly adjusted, but the
instances in which they simply torture the
animals that have to endure them are more
conspicuous. In crowded streets, with high-
mettled horses that run freely up to their
bits, a well-fitted bearing-rein gives the
driver a more thorough control of the ani-
mal that is valuable in avoiding collisions.
A bolting horse, says the "Pall Mall Ga-
zette," endeavors to get his head well down,
so as to extend his neck, and thereby obtain
a stronger purchase against the restraint of
the reins ; and if he is restrained by a bear-
ing-rein, so that he can not lower his head
below the level to which he would require
to carry it for ordinary equilibrium in
draught, his powers of bolting are greatly
circumscribed, and if he is not excessively
borne up he is not conscious that the rein
is restraining him, and his powers of
draught are not cramped. The fashion of
coachmen is, however, to pull the bearing-
rein up so tight that the horse's neck is
cramped, and the animal is thrown into an
unnatural and painful position, and is de-
prived of much of his power to draw the

load that is intrusted to him. His feelinsr
must be much the same as that of a man
would be whose head was pulled back so
that he would have to stand for hours look-
ing up at the sky without being able to
turn his eyes away, and had while in such
a position to draw a baby-carriage. The
fact that the adjustment of the rein is
painful can be recognized from the unnatu-
ral attitude of the horse's neck, and from
his fretfully tossing his head every few
minutes to relieve himself, and shake off
the foam from his jaws. " This tossing of
the head and flecking of flanks, brisket, and
harness with foam, seem to the coachman
and to the upracticed observer to be pict-
uresque, and characteristic of high cour-
age ; to the experienced eye they betray
that the animal is not only inconvenienced
but is also pained by his position." Be-
sides this annoyance, the animal thus tight-
ly checked, being unable to throw the head
reasonably forward when feeling his collar,
can not utilize his natural powers of
draught, and, in default of them, has to
draw from the lateral purchase of his limbs
instead of from his height, and thereby un-
duly to tire his muscles and joints and strain
them ; and, if he stumbles, the danger of
his falling is increased. The instinct of a
horse in stumbling is to let his head drop
to a certain point where it helps to restore
equilibrium. A rein adjusted to catch the
head at that point would be helpful, but
the common tight reins prevent its drop-
ping at all, and thereby augment the inse-
curity of the horse.

Cultivation of the Date-Palm.— Dates

are cultivated profitably in two oases of the
Algerian Sahara. At the oasis of Rir, where
the conditions are most favorable, an un-
failing supply of water is obtained by arte-
sian wells from a depth of about two hun-
dred feet. The use of these wells has been
known to the natives from time immemorial,
but has been facilitated, and the number of
them has consequently increased since the
introduction of improved systems of boring
by the French. Sixty-four of the wells had
been bored by the French in 1878, furnish-
ing an average of more than 1,500 quarts
of water each a minute. They vary among
themselves greatly in capacity, one of them

282

THE POPULAR SCIEXCE J10XTHLY.

being rated at 4,S00 and another at 20
quarts a minute. At the averaged rate of
supply, each of the wells should furnish
water enough to sustain 15,000 palm-trees,
representing a plantation of 425 acres.
Each tree, if thriving, well manured, and
cared for, will bear from one hundred to
one hundred and twenty - five pounds of
dates ; raised by the quantity and without
manure or particular attention, the average
crop per tree is thirty-five or forty pounds,
and this is worth about sixty cents. It is
not a matter of very great expense to start
a plantation of dates. A lot of five or six
hundred acres, on which 30,000 trees may
be planted, can be bought for about five
hundred dollars; the wells will cost eight
hundred dollars apiece ; the trees cost
about thirty cents apiece ; and M. Jus esti-
mates the whole expense of stocking an oasis
with 10,000 trees at about $4,000. The trees
are expected to bear a crop in the fifth year
after planting. The cost might be greater and
the time of waiting longer than is calculated,
as will often probably turn out to be the
case, and the enterprise still be a profitable
one, especially as the expense of the outlay,
it is thought, may be nearly covered by the
barley that may be raised with the aid of
the winter rains. The care of the young
trees is intrusted to tenant farmers, who
take half the barley and a sixth of the
dates. When the plantation has come into
bearing, it will return, if all is prosperous,
375,000 pounds of dates, worth $6,000
gross, of which the proprietor receives
$4,800, or a few hundred dollars more than
his estimated first outlay. The prospect
has proved flattering enough to attract the
attention of a few capitalists who have
started several plantations near Ourlana, in
the center of the oasis.

The Poisonous Principle of Bnlbs.—

Professor Husemann remarked several years
ago that a certain class of poisons was gen-
erally diffused in plants of the families
LWiacecB and AmarylUdcoe. His view has
been confirmed by the results of later re-
searches. Gerrard has extracted from the
tulip a poison called tulipin, the nitrate of
which, according to Sydney Ringer, has the
power of stopping the contraction of the
heart, with many of the properties of vera-

trin. Professor Warden, of Calcutta, has
extracted from a lily of India a very poi-
sonous principle (superbin), which appears
to be identical with the scillitoxin of the
squill, and a very small dose of which killed
a grown cat. The presence of the poison-
ous principle in bulbs, on which many plants
are more dependent for propagation than
on the seed, has an important bearing on
the perpetuity of species by its agency in
preserving them from the attacks of ani-
mals which would be likely to destroy them
by eating them. "While the poisons are
comparatively harmless to men, they are
peculiarly deadly to the rodentia ; and it is
from the depredations of animals of this
class that bulbs would be most likely to
suffer.

Seope and Talue of Anthropological
Stndies. — Professor Otis A. Mason, in his
address before the Anthropological Section
of the American Association, on the H Scope
and Value of Anthropological Studies," an-
swers the inquiry as to what benefit the world
has derived from the cultivation of that
science : First, every study is improved by
study, and, if " the proper study of mankind
is man," it is eminently important that that
should be improved and pursued scientifi-
cally. Secondly, the value of a study must
be estimated by its effects upon human
weal ; and are not the questions agitated by
anthropologists connected with human wel-
fare ? " Do thev not relate to the bodv, mind,

* mil

and speech of man, to the races of mankind,
their arts, amusements, social needs, politi-
cal organizations, religion, and dispersion
over the earth ? For instance, the French
in Africa, the British in India, and our own
citizens in malarious and fever-laden re-
gions, have they not learned from loss of
treasure, ruined health, and the shadow of
death, that there is a law of nature which
can not be transgressed with impunity ? It
is the same with sociology and religion.
The pages of history glow with the narra-
tives of crusades against alleged wrongs,
which were in reality campaigns against the

' sacred laws of nature. Social svstems, which
I
had required centuries to crystallize, have

' been shattered in some effort to bend them

' to some new order of things. Arts and in.

J dustries planted in uncongenial soil, at great

POPULAR MISCELLANY,

283

expense, have brought ruin upon their pa-
trons, who had not studied the intricate laws
of development. . . . The better knowledge
of races and race peculiarities has revolu-
tionized and humanized the theories of abo-
rigines. The doctrine of extermination, for-
merly thought to be the only legitimate re-
sult of colonization, has become as odious
as it is illogical. The inductive study of
mind has hardly begun ; but how much more
successfully and rapidly will education and
the development of the species progress
when the teacher and the legislator can pro-
ceed at once from diagnosis to safe pre-
scription, when natural selection and human
legislation shall cooperate in the more speedy
survival of the fittest " ! A third benefit
of the study is the opportunity which the
science affords for the exercise of every tal-
ent, even the highest. It is possible for
every craft to prosecute its researches and
make its contributions on the subject.

The Big Trees of Turkistan. — Accord-
ing to ancient accounts, the mountains of
Turkistan were formerly covered with large
and handsome forests. Now, the absence
of trees and the savage nudity of the moun-
tain-slopes are what most strike the traveler
in that country. The denudation would, per-
haps, have been complete by this time if the
Russian Government had not interposed to
prevent further waste ; and the restoration
of the forests is at present under considera-
tion by a commission. The growth of plants
in as hot a climate as that of Turkistan is
very rapid. Trees at Samarcand and Tash-
kend have been known to make growths by
measure in a single year of from fifteen to
nearly twenty feet, and a corresponding de-
velopment in thickness. Nevertheless, fine
trees are very rare, though a few exist of ex-
traordinary size. They are generally found
near some holy place or overshadowing some
mosque or hermit's retreat, where they owe
their preservation to the respect in which
the natives hold the shrines to which they
appertain. The Sartes of Tashkend tell of
an arbor-vitse, in the inclosure of one of the
mosques of their town, which is nearly six
feet and a half in diameter and five thou-
sand years old. A French traveler has
measured mulberrv-trees at Oursrout and at
Salavad that were more than sixteen feet in

circumference at the height of the shoulder,
but they did not seem to grow proportion-
ately in height. These trees were all in
religious places, and were accompanied by
plane-trees of equal size. The latter tree is
occasionally found of really wonderful di-
mensions. Madame 0. Fedtchenko made a
drawing of one which was six feet four
inches in diameter, the interior of which
had been converted into a little medrcsseh.
It was growing on a saint's tomb, not far
from Samarcand. A plane-tree in the Tajik
village of Sairub is twenty-seven feet and a
half in circumference at the height of the
shoulder. It has been protected from the
wash of rains by a barrier of stones, and
its hollow trunk has been formed into a
square room and fitted up as the village
school-house. Near it is another twenty-six
paces in circumference at the base. The
people say that these trees were planted by
Ali. Of a group of old plane-trees at Cho-
jakend, east of Tashkend, the largest is a
rotten and hollow old stump, looking like
the ruin of a giant wall, from which six
vigorous lateral trees have shot up. The
whole plant is forty-eight paces in circum-
ference at the base, and the hollow of the
principal trunk is nine metres, or more than
twenty-seven feet, in diameter. A party of
a dozen tourists from Tashkend once had a
feast in the inside of this stump, and were
not cramped for room. — La Nature.

Anthropology and Philanthropy. — Pro-
fessor Otis T. Mason, in his American Asso-
ciation address on the " Scope and Value of
Anthropological Studies," speaking of their
value to philanthropy, says : " "With what
admiration do we read of the devotion of
those missionaries who have suffered the
loss of all things in their propagandist zeal !
Science has her missionaries as well as re-
ligion, and the scientific study of peoples
has notably modified the methods of the
Christian missionary. The conviction that
savage races are in possession of our fam-
ily records, that they are our elder kindred,
wrinkled and weather-beaten, mayhap, but
yet worthy of our highest respect, has revolu-
tionized men's thoughts and feelings respect-
ing them. The Bureau of Ethnology has its
missionaries among many of the tribes in
our domain, no longer bent on their destruc-

284

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

tion, but treating them with the greatest
consideration, in order to win their confi-
dence, to get down to their level, to think
their thoughts, to eharm from them the
Bibylline secrets. It sounds something like
the old Jesuit relations to hear of Mr. Crush-
ing at Zuiii eating vile food, wearing savage
costume, worshiping Nature-gods, subject-
ing himself to long fastings and vigils, com-
mitting to memory dreary rituals, standing
between disarmed Indians and their white
enemies on every hand, in order to save
their contributions to the early history of
mankind. You will recall the fact that an
honorable senator more than a year ago
offered, as an argument against sudden
disruption of tiibal affinities, an elaborate
scheme of the Wyandotte Confederacy."

Farming in Japan. — According to the
report of Consul Van Buren, the Japanese
farmer holds in public opinion and estima-
tion an exalted position. He is owner of
the soil he tills, is generally represented by
members of his class as officers in the agri-
cultural villages, and has electoral rights
which are in some instances exclusive. His
position has been raised, and his privileges
have been increased, during the last two
years. A considerable percentage of the
land-owners are able to employ laborers, and
are thus not themselves tied to labor ; but
the farm-work allows no rest, for in the
mild climate the hardier crops may be raised
in the winter as well as others in the sum-
mer. Almost every farmer can read, write
and keep his farm accounts. He sends his
sons to school, and his daughters are taught
needlework and music at home. The labor
on the farm is all mere hand-work ; a plow
is seldom seen, but a kind of long-toothed
harrow is sometimes used to follow the mat-
tock. The laborers are treated with great
kindness. Those engaged in the cultivation
of tea, silk, and sugar, need more skill than
the others, and arc paid higher wages. They
live almost entirely on vegetable food, re-
fraining from the use of meat by virtue of re-
ligion, custom, popular prejudice, and neces-
sity. Their clothing is extremely light, and
does not cost more than about four dollars a
year. Several holidays are allowed each year
for religious festivals and family celebra-
tions, and the laborers generally have small

gardens attached to their cottages. Women
and children are employed in tea-picking,
and in the lighter and in-door operations of
silk-culture, and are paid for skill. The
labor employed on the cotton plantations is
not skilled, and is paid for at low rates. A
farming population of 15,500,000 is engaged
on 12,000,000 acres of land, giving about
three quarters of an acre to each person.
The tillage is of the most thorough order.
Two crops are raised each year, so that the
producing capacity of the land is double
what it appears to be.

Animal Plagnes. — Mr. George Fleming,
in his recent work on "Animal Plagues,"
remarks that no description of disease, suffi-
ciently exact to be identified with the type
of which pleuro pneumonia is an example,
is found till about two hundred years ago.
Even then, the earliest record suggesting
that disease is of a doubtful character. It
dates from 1613, when there had been a
course of years marked by phenomenal dis-
turbances, mildew, and blight. Oxen and
cows died in great numbers from a pulmonary
phthisis that appears to have been brought
on in part by severe cold after intense heat.
Men also were attacked with dysentery and
malignant fevers. In 1713, again, a " cattle-
plague," distinctly so described, raged over
Europe, and wild creatures suffered with the
tame. In 1725 a wet and chilly year of
blight was followed by an exceedingly dry
and hot one ; honey-dew and rust were abun-
dant on the crops and foliage ; a great mor-
tality prevailed among cattle ; while the deer
perished in numbers, and even the fish suf-
fered. In 1769, after a rainy year and a
bad harvest, a lung-disease, called murie in
Franche-Comte, raged among the cattle and
horses in the north of France ; but it appears
to have been less virulent than genuine bo-
vine contagious pleuro-pneumonia. About
1779 the last-named disease, now thoroughly
ascertained and distinguished from other
cattle-plagues, appeared in Upper Silesia
and Istria ; then, after holding its ground
there for many years, it spread to Bavaria.
It was carried into France during the wars
of the French Revolution, into Italy in 1815,
and into Holland and Belgium in 1 827. Hav-
ing established itself upon the Continent, it
was introduced into England in 1841, when

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

285

Liverpool and other ports at which diseased
animals were landed became centers of con-
tagion. The history of this disease is only
one example out of many in the list of mala-
dies to which animals are liable. The study
of Mr. Fleming's histories induces the con-
viction that hardly a creature in any way
connected with man, or coming under our
observation, is free from liability to hosts
of plagues, or has not its full share of spe-
cial or common troubles. Mr. Fleming's
work is published in England.

Wind-Sounds in the Desert. — The trav-
elers' tales of sounds like the ringing of
bells, which they have heard in deserts and
lonely places, are familiar. Some of them
are too well substantiated to admit of seri-
ous dispute. Among them is that of the
noises heard at the Gebel Nakus, in the
Sinaitic Peninsula, which the Arabs say pro-
ceed from a convent of damned monks;
the musical cliffs of the Orinoco, told of by
Humboldt ; and the sounds which the French
savants Jollois and Devilliers declare they
heard at sunrise at Karnak, Egypt, and de-
. scribed as comparable to the ancient fable
of the vocal Memnon. The sounds are not
always or exactly like the ringing of a bell ;
sometimes they resemble the music of a
string, and may be generally described as of
an intermediate character between the two
classes. A characteristic of the sounds is,
that no one can discern where they come
from. M. Emile Sorel, Jils, in order to deter-
mine their origin, has made some successful
experiments in reproducing them artificially.
Taking his gun into an open field, he placed
it at an angle of 45° against the wind, when
it gave forth a sound. Then moving it
around, he caused it to utter the exact tone
he sought. The sound could not be local-
ized. Addressing a peasant, he asked him,
" Do you hear my gun ? " u Pardon, mon-
sieur, it is the bells of ," A similar

answer was got from every one whose at-
tention was called to the noise. It was be-
lieved to come from about two miles and a
half *to the windward. M. Sorel believes
this experiment authorizes the hypothesis
that the ringing is the result of the blowing
of the wind over a slope at the foot of
which is something that may act as a reso-
nator. What is done on a small scale in a

gun may be done on a large scale in nature,
on the face of a mountain or a rock which
is backed by a valley or a ravine, or which
is itself elastic enough to give the resonant
effect. The sounds are apparently not as
readily given when the vibrating surfaces
and media are moist.

Artificial Drying of Fodders. — A prac-
tical, economical apparatus for artificially
drying fodder-crops might be the means of
effecting immense savings to farmers in bad
seasons for hay-making. Mr. William A.
Gibbs has described before the British So-
ciety of Arts two such apparatuses which,
he claims, accomplish the object at a cost
that makes their use profitable. His own
apparatus, which he has spent many years
in perfecting, is in its primitive and simplest
form a stove or furnace for burning coke,
to which is attached a fan for blowing the
hot air resulting from the combustion — of
a temperature that may rise to 520° —
through the wet grass. An exposure of
from four to six minutes is sufficient to con-
vert each lot of grass — the proportion of
which is adapted to the force of the blast —
into hay. This has been developed into a
machine of eleven tons weight " which, when
in action, eats up a one-horse load of coke,
draws off ten to fifteen tons of water, and
converts twenty great cart-loads of wet rub-
bish into good stack-hay in a single day's
work." The perfected machine has a sys-
tem of giant forks and flat iron plates, kept
in rapid action, through which the wet grass
is shaken down in successive stages while it
is permeated through and through with the
hot air. Another process, the invention of
Mr. Neilson, is for cooling hay in the stack,
and uses the heat which is developed in the
natural process of "heating," to dry the
whole. A hole six inches in diameter is
bored through the stack to the point at
which the greatest heat is developed, and a
fan fixed at the outlet of the hole is made
to draw off the heat from that point and
promote the ventilation and drying of the
whole mass. Mr. Gibbs believes that these
processes are about equal in value, and that
their value is real. He also described a
" sheaf -tube " for drying sheaves of wheat.
It is " like a gun-barrel open at both ends,
and about eighteen inches long ; such tubes

286

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

as these are stuck into sockets all over a
plate-iron floor, at just such a distance
apart as will enable a wheat-sheaf to be
comfortably spiked upon each tube. The
floor, with its small forest of tubes, is laid,
air-tight, upon a dwarf foundation wall of
about two bricks high, with a partition down
its center. The hot-blast is then blown into
the closed space thus formed between the
ground and the tube floor, and rises through
the tubes into the sheaves just where they
are wettest, viz., at the band. A simple
shunting valve directs the hot air first under
one half of the floor, and then under the
other, so that, while the sheaves on one half
are drying, the others may be lifted off and
replaced with more wet sheaves."

Fogginess of Malaysian Ideas. — Mr. D.

D. Daly, who has been engaged in surveys of
the native states of the Malay Peninsula, says
that the natives show an almost total lack
of notions of definite points, and have only
the vaguest ideas with reference to the de-
termination of boundaries. " The boundary
of our state," said one, " extends as far as
the meeting of the fresh water, with the salt
water of the river " ; or, " If you wash your
head before starting, it will not be dry be-
fore you reach the place " ; or, " The bound-
ary may be determined on the river, as far
as the sound of a gun may be heard from
this hill." The shot might be fired from a
smooth-bore or from a twelve-pounder, or
a gale of wind might carry the report far-
ther than was contemplated. Such ambigu-
ous phrases were calculated to mislead, but
they were essentially Malaysian in their
generality.

Electricity from Gas. — A German pro-
fessor, Dr. Von Marx, has shown that more
light can be obtained from a given quantity
of gas by burning it in a gas-motor which
drives a dynamo-machine, than by burning
it in the ordinary burner. His estimate is
based on the following calculations : A gas-
motor will consume on the average thirty-
seven cubic feet of gas per hour for each
horse-power. An argand burner, giving a
light equal to eighteen candles, will consume
five and a half cubic feet per hour, so that
the amount of light obtained by burning
thirty-seven cubic feet of gas in an argand

burner will equal one hundred and twenty
candles. In the Swan system of electric
lighting, the light obtained from each horse-
power (or by burning thirty-seven cubic feet
of gas) is stated to be equal to one hundred
and fifty candles. The light obtained by
the Edison lamp he gives as between one
and two hundred candles. Mr. Lungren, in
his paper in the September number of " The
Popular Science Monthly," estimates that
eight lamps can be maintained for each
actual horse-power, and if we make each
lamp equal eighteen candles, we have a total
of one hundred and forty-four candles per
horse-power, a gain of twenty per cent over
the use of an argand burner. When the.
Jablochkoff candle is used, the results are
much higher, each horse-power yielding a
light equivalent to four hundred and seventy- '
two candles ; while other arc systems run
four or five times as high. In showing that
more light is obtained by burning thirty-
seven feet of gas in a gas-motor than by
burning it in an argand burner, Professor
Von Marx does not prove that it would be
economical to do so, for the margin, taken
as twenty per cent, is not sufficient to cover
the cost of converting gas into electricity,
so to speak. That the latent energy pent
up in illuminating gas should produce more
light when converted into electricity, not-
withstanding the loss at each stage of the
operation, than when burned directly, is ex-
plained by the fact that the larger part of
the energy of burning gas is manifest in the
form of heat, the lesser part in the form of
light. In electricity we have just the oppo-
site conditions.

Transparent Points in Leaves. — M.

Theodore Bokorny has published a prize
essay in the University of Munich on the
"Transparent Points in Leaves." These
points, which are quite common in some
plants, mark the places where a group of
cells, containing resin or an ethereal oil, has
been collected. One of the most familiar in-
stances of this kind is that of the St.-John's-
wort (Hypericum perforatum), in which me-
diaeval superstition imagined a connection
between the lucid spots and the wounds of
Christ, and assigned a healing virtue to the
plant. In other cases the points in ques-
tion are caused by cells with a slimy coat-

NOTES.

287

ing which produce secretions of slime, or by
the presence of cells containing crystals of
oxalate of lime. The operation of these

> agencies is associated with the action of se-
cretory organs, or glandular processes, caus-
ing a tendency of particular substances to
certain points. The cells forming the trans-
parent points probably have some particu-
lar significance in connection with the life
of the leaf, for their occurrence is so uni-
form in particular species that they become
distinguishing marks by which the species
is known. So, also, the presence of raphides-
cells (cells containing needle-shaped crystals
of oxalate of lime) is constant in some fam-
ilies, as in the Dioscoreas, smilaxes, and Tac-
cacece, although the transparent points are
rarely observed in their leaves. Cells con-
taining resin or ethereal oil are constant in
at least three species of pepper, and in all
of the Monimiacece. Interior glands, with
brown radiating crystals of resinous sub-

. stance, are characteristic of the Myrsiniece,
and are wanting in only a few species. The
anatomical structure which leads to the pro-
duction of these points evidently has some
systematic importance, and should not be
overlooked in the determination of the char-
acteristics of the different groups.

NOTES.

In Dr. Pyburn's article on "A Home-made
Telescope," in the last (November) number
of the " Monthly," page 86, seven lines from
the bottom, the diameter of the thirty-inch
roller is given as " two and five eighths
inches " ; it should read " one and five eighths
inch."

Professor Baird announces the final
solution of the problem of the culture of
oysters from artificially impregnated eggs.
The Government station at Stockton, Mary-
land, had in September last many millions
of young oysters three quarters of an inch
in diameter, which had been hatched from
eggs artificially impregnated forty-six days
before. Oyster's had already been artifi-
cially impregnated by Dr. Brooks, but the
practical difficulty existed of preventing the
young oysters, which could pass through the
meshes of the most closely woven fabrics,
from escaping.

Our Educational Bureau is circulating
an excellent paper from an address given to
school-teachers in Switzerland on how nat-
ural science should be taught. The object,
it says, should be, not to fill the mind with

facts, but to bring all the scholars, includ-
ing the slowest ones, to discover and observe
facts for themselves. Books should be lit-
tle used, and nothing about an object should
be taught without the object being before
the class. The next lessons should be in
describing the facts observed, with the help
of drawing, if possible. Plants should be
chosen first, then animals of different class-
es, then minerals, with observations of me-
chanical and afterward of chemical effects
upon them. But the bare making of collec-
tions should not be particularly encouraged.

The "United States Hay Fever Asso-
ciation" held its tenth annual meeting at
Bethlehem, New Hampshire, during the last
week in August. The speeches made and
the experiences related indicate that the
cause and specific cure for the uncomfort-
able disease in question are yet to be found.
A particular preparation which has been
much recommended was, by nearly general
consent, pronounced of no value as a reme-
dy. Much information regarding the mal-
ady had been gathered by Dr. Geddings.

The lowering of the freezing-point of
water by increased pressure is frequently
illustrated by the experiment of Bottomley,
which consists in throwing across a cake of
ice a wire weighted heavily at both ends.
The wire slowly sinks through the cake, the
ice melting beneath it and freezing above
it. Professor Guthrie, at a meeting of the
Physical Society in London, has stated his
belief that the wire conducts heat to the ice
from the atmosphere, and that therefore
the experiment does not illustrate the fact
above mentioned. A silk cord weighted to
the same amount as a wire will not cut
through a block of ice.

The death is recorded of Hermann Mtil-
ler, of Lippstadt, one of the most industri-
ous and distinguished scientific investigators
of the day. His specialty was the fertiliza-
tion of flowers by insects, in which subject
he was regarded by naturalists as the high-
est authority. He was the author of two
books on the subject, " Die Bef ruchtung der
Blumen durch Insecten " (" The Fertilization
of Flowers by Insects "), recently translated
into English, and " Alpenblumen, ihre Be-
f ruchtung durch Insecten" ("Alpine Flowers,
their Fertilization by Insects ") ; of an article
in Schenk's " Handbuch der Botanie," and of
frequent contributions to the German peri-
odical " Kosmos."

Ernest Ingersoll observes, in the
" American Naturalist," that if we judge by
the standard of their possessing a conven-
ient currency, the American Indians must be
ranked high among barbarians in point of
advance toward civilization. They had in
their wampum a regular money of recog-
nized value. It marked an advance upon

288

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

the African cowry, for, while the latter was
simply a shell with a hole in it, wampum
was a manufactured article, made with a
degree of patient labor which was included
in estimating the value given to it. That
to which the most value was attached was
made from the dark part of clam-shells.
An inferior M coinage " was made from the
white parts of the shells, and from peri-
winkle-shells. The value of wampum was
almost as well defined as that of our own
money, and regular tests were in use for
judging of it. Shell money was also used
by the Indians of the Pacific slope ; and
Mr. Ingersoll describes three kinds of it, all
somewhat different from genuine wampum.

Mr. Ernest Hart, Chairman of the Lon-
don Smoke Abatement Institute, remarks
that at the recent exhibition by that society
improvements in the construction of open
fire-places were shown by which common
bituminous coal can be consumed in a prac-
tically smokeless manner. Simple methods
of underfeeding were exhibited which proved
to be productive of admirable result's both
in respect to economy of fuel and reduction
of smoke from ordinary coal. Mr. Hart
recommends as an elementary measure of
economy the use of equal quantities of coke
and coal mixed. He has great expectations
of the realization of Dr. Siemens's projects
for using gas as a heating agent.

The French Academy of Sciences has
had a discussion about busts. It was in-
vited to witness the progress of the bust
of Leverrier, and express an opinion as to
the quality of the resemblance and the
work. M. Bertrand took the opportunity
to speak of the scandalous badness of some
of the busts in the hall of the Academy,
particularly of those of Delaunay and Claude
Bernard, which, he said, were mere carica-
tures, and to advice that they be turned out
at once ; and M. Dumas remarked that sev-
eral of the busts were in reality only fit to
be used for making carbonic acid.

Mr. Cromwell Fleetwood Varlet, F.
R. S., an English engineer distinguished for
his work in connection with electric tele-
graphs, died September 2d. He devised a
method of locating distant faults in land
telegraphic wires, and was associated with
other engineers in devising the first really
successful Atlantic cable.

The curious question has been raised in
England whether the recent decline in the
death-rate has actually added to the average
length of useful life, or whether its bene-
fits have not chiefly been spent in relatively
unimportant prolongations of the lives of
children and of the aged. It has been an-
swered by Mr. Noel A. Humphreys, after a
new examination of the returns of mor-
tality, and the compilation of new life-tables.

ne finds that the average expectation of
life of males at birth has been raised from
3991 years, as it was fixed in Dr. Farr's
tables, to 41 92 years by the new tables, or
has been increased by two years, or five per
cent ; and that the expectation of females
has been raised from 40*86 years to 43*56
years, or by 2'70 years, or nearly 1 per cent.

Charles F. Parses, Curator of the Acad-
emy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia,
died September 7th, after a long illness. He
had considerable distinction as one of the
leading botanists of America, and had paid
special attention to the botany of New Jer-
sey.

Professor C. Y. Riley, in a paper read
at the American Association recommends
emulsions of petroleum to be applied to
plants as insecticides. A soap emulsion of
twenty parts of scraped bar-soap, ten parts
of water, thirty parts of kerosene, and one
part of fir-balsam, is stable enough for all .
practical purposes, but milk emulsions are
better. One or two parts of refined kero-
sene to one part of sour milk is quite satis-
factory. It must be churned till a butter
is formed, which is thoroughly stable, and
will keep indefinitely in closed vessels, and
may be diluted at pleasure with water when
needed for use. An emulsion of gum from
the root of Zamia inter/) if oM a, of Florida,
has proved useful. The diluted emulsion,
of strength varying according to the plants
and insects to which it is applied, should
be finely spraved upon the insects to be
killed.

Science has furnished another victim to
African sickness in the person of Mr. Will-
iam Alexander Forbes, Prosector to the
Zoological Society of London, whose death
on the Niger River has been reported. He
made an excursion to the forests of Pernam-
buco, Brazil, in 1880, afterward passed some
time in the United States, and started from
England for Africa and the eastern tropics,
in July, 1882. His published works consist
chiefly of about sixty papers in the " Pro-
ceedings of the Zoological Society " and the
"Ibis."

M. Engelman has been studying the man-
ner in which the movements of the lower
organisms are influenced by light. He finds
that light may act in three ways : 1. Direct-
ly, by a modification of the exchanges of
gases ; 2. By modifications of the sensation
of respiratory necessities, and, 3. By means
of a specific special process corresponding
probably in some sort to our luminous per-
ception.

Mr. Thomas Plant, a life long student
of meteorology, died in Birmingham, Eng-
land, about the 1st of September. His regu-
lar records of the weather and associated
phenomena are complete for forty-six years.

ETIENNE GEOPFROY SAINT-HILAIRE.

THE

POPULAR SCIENCE
MONTHLY.

JANUARY, 1884.

THE CLASSICAL QUESTION IN GERMANY.

Br EDMUND J. JAMES, Ph. D.,

PROFESSOR OF FINANCE AND ADMINISTRATION IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA.

THE struggle between the adherents of the old classical curriculum
and the representatives of modern culture has nowhere been car-
ried on with more bitterness than in Germany. In no other land have
the respective antagonists shown more narrowness and bigotry, or been
less inclined to allow their opponents the possession of common sense
or pure motives.

The representatives of the classics, intrenched behind a strong wall
of tradition and usage, were from the first in the enjoyment of all the
honors and privileges. They were supported by the mighty power
of a public sentiment which had been begotten at a time when the
classics and mathematics formed the only subjects worthy of serious
study, and had been nourished by a long line of illustrious men whose
only school-education had been a training in Latin, Greek, and geom-
etry. They were upheld by the powerful force of a government
which made the acquisition of such an education the condition of all its
favors. They looked down, therefore, naturally enough, with a certain
contempt and' loathing upon those rude materialists who insisted that
there was something in the modern world worthy of serious study.
The other party, on the contrary, driven to extremes by the bigotry
and obstinacy of their opponents, were compelled to make war to the
death, by denying all virtue of any sort to a classical training. They
insisted on purely modern subjects as opposed to classics, on a multi-
plicity of branches in preference to a few, on technical education for
particular callings instead of a liberal training for good living.

But in the course of events we find both parties in that country
receding from their extreme positions and gradually approaching each

VOL. XXIV. — 19 \

290 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

other. We find the " classicists " agreeing that the study of modern
languages may also be made valuable ; that modern literature is adorned
with names which rival in luster the greatest of the Greek or Roman.
They give up slowly more and more of that valuable time formerly
spent in conning Greek and Latin grammars, or in learning to write
Greek and Latin verses, or to talk a jargon which they dignify by the
name of classical Latin, to the study of French, Italian, Spanish, Ger-
man, and English. They allow the elements of the natural sciences
one after another, to creep in, and even grant some hours a week to
modern history. They still devote the most of their attention, how-
ever, to Latin and Greek, and justify their course by the claim that the
shortest road to modern literature is through Athens and Rome ; that
modern languages are so intimately connected with the classics that,
after mastering the latter, the acquisition of French, English, Italian,
and Spanish, is a matter for leisure hours, a mere after-dinner amuse-
ment ; that the nomenclature of the modern sciences is so largely
Greek that time would be saved in learning them by first mastering
Homer, Xenophon, and Plato ; that modern history is only the second
chapter of the world's history, and can be rightly understood only
after learning what goes before.

Their most thoughtful opponents have also given up many of the
claims advanced by their prototypes. They allow that there is a vast
difference between knowledge and power ; that a mass of undigested
facts in the memory is as depressing for the mind as a mass of undi-
gested food in the "stomach is for the brain. They, or at least the
most advanced among them, allow that the old humanists followed
sound pedagogical principles in selecting but few subjects, and in
lingering over them long enough to secure that mental power and
grasp which come from the detailed and long-continued study of
any great branch of human knowledge. They grant that the second-
ary schools should give a liberal education, in the sense of an education
which shall prepare the students, not for the particular calling which
they may afterward take up, but for right and intelligent living, in
any sphere to which circumstances may call them. They maintain,
however, that for the purposes of such an education modern subjects
are as good as or better than ancient ; that French and English, if
properly taught, can afford, so far as is desirable, the same kind of
mental discipline as that obtained from Latin and Greek ; that mod-
ern literature embraces classics as worthy of detailed and continuous
study as ancient literature ; that the proper study of the modern sci-
ences develops certain faculties with a completeness of which no other
instrument is capable ; that modern history offers subjects as worthy
of labor, as fruitful in results, as anything which ancient times can
afford.

The objective points of the contest have also changed in the course
of time. The old philanthropinists demanded the total abolition of all

THE CLASSICAL QUESTION IN GERMANY. 291

classical study as a waste of time. The classical party of that period
resisted the introduction of any studies but Latin, Greek, and mathe-
matics. The " modernists " of to-day demand the abolition of Greek
as a required study in a liberal course. Many of them, indeed, would
like to send Latin the same road. The modern " classicists " are on
the defensive, and constantly grant more concessions, or see them
wrested from them.

This discussion, which in one form or another has appeared in every
civilized nation, has been everywhere marked by bitterness and pre-
judice, and has resulted in a slowly-growing victory for modern cul-
ture. The question has attracted renewed and wide attention in this
country of late, owing to Mr. Charles Francis Adams's attack upon
the requisition of Greek as a part of the course in Harvard College.
The old weapons on both sides have been again brought out and bur-
nished, and made to do valiant service in the good cause. The result
of the criticism and counter-criticism has been to demonstrate pretty
. clearly that, however we may feel about it, the fact is, that the cause of
the "modernists" is gaining ground. President Porter, in a rejoinder
to Mr. Adams, in the " Princeton Review " for September last, re-
marks, in substance, that the proposition to drop Greek from the list
of required studies was somewhat " hesitatingly urged many years ago
by the adventurous and sanguine President of Harvard College." If
.the writer is not greatly mistaken, President Eliot did not only urge
it years ago, but has vigorously and persistently urged it ever since,
and it is probably only a question of time when his policy will be
adopted, whether urged by him or by some one else.

The discussion as to the relative merits of the classics and other
subjects, as constituents of a liberal course of study, has always been
marked by a great deference to authority. The assertions of eminent
men, as to the advantage or disadvantage to them of the classical
course which they pursued while young, always play a prominent
part. The testimony of eminent educators, as to their observation of
the effect that a study of the classics seemed to have on the minds
and hearts of their pupils, is quoted and requoted. The tradition
and usages of hundreds of years are strongly appealed to in order to
show the superiority of the one system over the other.

The present discussion in our American press has been no excep-
tion to the rule. But, in addition to the regular authorities which are
quoted on all occasions, a new witness has been appealed to in this
controversy, whose testimony on the question is regarded by many as
decisive and final. This is the experience of the Germans, embodied
in what is known as the "Berlin Report," and which has been widely
urged as an authoritative answer to Mr. Adams's argument. It seems
to be supposed that this thorough-going people have entered into the
subject experimentally and on an extensive scale, with a view of set-
tling it effectually. They have made, it is asserted, a fair trial of

z92 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

these two systems of education, and, having weighed both in the "bal-
ance, they have found the modern system wanting to such a degree
that they have concluded to discard it forever. There seems to be
wide-spread misconception about this German experiment, and the
conclusions drawn from it are so unwarrantable that a review of the
main features of the case may be useful in correcting erroneous im-
pressions.

As is well known, there are two classes of schools in Germany
which prepare boys for the university — the Gymnasien (gymnasia)
and the Mealschulen (real schools). The former are the classical
schools, whose curriculum consists in the main of Latin, Greek, and
mathematics, and graduation from which confers the right to enter
any department of the university. The real schools are institutions
whose course of study embraces less Latin than the former, and no
Greek, the place of the latter being represented partly by more of
the modern languages and partly by natural science. The gymnasia
are old schools, being the legitimate successors of the schools which
dated from the revival of letters. The real schools are products of
the modern spirit, and, although dating from about 1740, they did
not acquire a recognized standing until late in this century. The
earliest of these schools were the answer to the demand for " prac-
tical " education in the narrowest sense of that term. It was not
until 1859 that the Government of Prussia fully recognized them.
In that year, the schools passing under that name were classified, ac-
cording to length of course, into first, second, and third class. The
course of the first class was made of the same length as that of the
gymnasium — that of the other classes was shorter. From that year
the friends of the real schools demanded that graduates of schools
of the first class should be admitted to the universities. Their claims
excited at first only a smile of derision, but so vigorously did they
push matters that the Government, in 1869, was persuaded to take the
first move in the case by asking the faculties of the various Prussian
universities for their opinions on the subject. This called out a series
of reports which were very strong against admission. It is curious
that in this series of reports language was used from which we might
infer that the universities had already tried the experiment ; as when
it is asserted in one report that the gymnasium students soon overtake
real-school students even in natural science — that at a time when real-
school graduates were not admitted to the universities. The Gov-
ernment decided, however, to admit the real-school students to certain
branches, which it did by the order of December 7, 1870.

Until 1871, then, the graduates of real schools were not admitted
to any department of the universities in Prussia as candidates for a
degree. In that year they were allowed to matriculate in the univer-
sity for the study of modern languages, mathematics, and natural sci-
ence. After an experience of about eight years, on the 18th of De-

THE CLASSICAL QUESTION IN GERMANY. 293

cember, 1879, Professor Droysen, of the University of Berlin, moved
that the faculty of that institution request the Government to recon-
sider its policy in regard to the admission of real-school students to
the philosophical faculty. After some discussion, Professor Hiibner,
the dean of the faculty, was requested to ask the various professors
for statements of their experience with the two classes of students.
These statements were laid before the faculty, and the most important
being incorporated in the form of a report, were sent in, March, 1880,
to the Government, with the petition that the latter would reconsider
the whole matter — the real object of the report being to move the
Government to rescind the order of December 7, 1870. These were
not the first statements on the question, for the Minister of Public In-
struction had already, a short time before, made inquiries of many
leading professors in the various universities as to their experience in
the matter since 1871. The most of them held views similar to those
of the Berlin professors. The set of statements, with the petition
above referred to, constitutes the " Berlin Report," and, on account of
its formal and authoritative character, has excited world-wide atten-
tion and discussion.

These reports are now quoted by many as a final settlement of the
much-disputed question between the " classicists " and the " modern-
ists," and by many more as expressing the judgment of educated
Germany, at least, on the subject. Thus, President Porter, in the
article above mentioned says : "The question of the superiority of
a classical to a modern training has of late been subjected to a practi-
cal trial on an extensive scale, by a comparison of the results of the
gymnasial curriculum and that of the Realschule, as a preparation
for a university course and indirectly for civil administration. In
most of the German states — in Prussia pre-eminently — an attendance
upon the university course, with a certificate of fidelity and a suc-
cession of satisfactory examinations, had been the essential prerequi-
sites to many of the most desirable official positions in civil life. To
admission to all the privileges of the university an attendance upon
the gymnasium with the classical curriculum was an essential prerequi-
site, carrying with it the consequence that to all the higher posts of
civil life a course of classical study, including Greek and Latin, had till
recently been a conditio sine qua non. The JRealschulen, which gave
a shorter and a more scientific and popular course, in which Greek was
not included, and the Latin was scanty, furnish an example of a mod-
ernist education. It was very natural that this condition of things
should be felt to be inequitable by the teachers and pujDils of these
schools, and that an earnest movement should be made to set it aside.
In several of the states it was successful. In Prussia, against strong
conviction to the contrary, it was allowed for a term of years by way
of experiment, that the * modernists ' (the Abiturienten der Realschulen)
should enter the university and enjoy all its privileges. When this

294 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

term had expired, elaborate reports were called for from the leading
instructors in all the universities, of their judgment as to the proved
capacity and success of the students who had attended upon their
classes, from each of the two preparatory institutions with their sepa-
rate curricula. With but few exceptions the reports were decidedly
in favor of the classical curriculum as giving a better training even
to the students of the mathematical and physical sciences."

"We wish to call attention here to the fact that President Por-
ter's first sentence, though evidently without any intention on his part,
is misleading. He says that "the question of the superiority of a
classical to a modern training has of late been subjected to a prac-
tical trial." Not at all ; but simply the question of the relative supe-
riority of the graduates of the German gymnasia and real schools,
as they exist to-day in Germany, as indeed President Porter himself
states in the next to the last sentence quoted above. This last is a
very different question, indeed, from the former. The one is, so to
speak, concrete ; the other, abstract. The professors were not asked
for their opinions as to whether a classical is better than a modern
training, but is the gymnasiast, as you know him from the existing
schools, better fitted for your work than the real scholar who during
the last eight years has attended the university ?

If it should appear upon examination that the curricula of the
real schools are not what is demanded bv the most thoughtful " mod-
ernists," that the teachers are not, as a class, equal to those in the
gymnasia, that the pupils are, as a whole, inferior in natural ability,
that the real schools are not fostered by the Government to the same
extent as the classical schools, it will be evident to every one that the
significance of the Berlin report for the real question at issue— viz.,
classics at their best vs. modern subjects at their best on an equal foot-
ing in every respect — becomes very slight.

As appears from what we have said above, President Porter is
mistaken when he says that the graduates of the real schools were ad-
mitted to all the privileges of the university. They were only admit-
ted to certain branches in one faculty, viz., the philosophical faculty.
They were not, however, admitted for a definite number of years, as
President Porter states, but for an indefinite period. The ministerial
regulation admitting them says nothing whatever of any number of
years for which it is valid. It holds good until supplanted by one
prohibiting the admission of real-school students, and there is no sign
that such a regulation will ever be made.

To begin with, then, all this quoting of the Berlin and similar
reports in favor of retaining Greek as a required study in our liberal
curricula is aside from the point, since that report was made on a very
different subject. The attempt to apply conclusions on concrete ques-
tions in one country to concrete questions in another is at all times a
misleading and often a dangerous procedure.

THE CLASSICAL QUESTION IN GERMANY. 295

Now as to the report itself, it may fairly be objected by the real-
school men that the real schools have not had a fair trial, that the pe-
riod of probation has been so brief that any report made now, whether
favorable or unfavorable, must be regarded as premature and at best
merely provisional. The real schools of the first class are not yet
twenty-five years old. The regulation admitting their graduates to
partial university privileges bears date, as said above, of December 7,
1870. In less than ten years they were expected to win a place by the
side of their rivals, which even their bitter opponents (for the profess-
ors who made the reports were all graduates of the gymnasia) should
acknowledge to be an equal one, and if they should not succeed in do-
ing this they were to be condemned as unable to fit boys properly for
the university. Further, they were expected to do this with almost
no aid from the Government, while their rivals were largely supported
by contributions from the state. How just this complaint is may be
seen from the reports of government aid accorded in Prussia to these
two classes of schools. In the year 1869 the Government contributed
714,148 thalers out of a total expenditure of 2,851,253 thalers for gym-
nasia ; and in 1874, 1,319,990 thalers out of a total of 4,385,940 tha-
lers for the same purpose. In the former year the real schools of the
first class cost 666,368 thalers, of which the Government contributed
15,558 thalers. In the latter year the respective sums stood 1,251,921
and 97,421 thalers. It thus appears that the Government paid in 1869
nearly forty-six times as much toward supporting gymnasia as it did
toward supporting real schools, and in 1874 over thirteen times as much.
In 1869 it paid over twenty-five per cent of the total expense of all
gymnasia, and less than three per cent of that of the real schools ; in 1874
the respective rates stood over thirty per cent and less than eight per
cent. It will thus be seen that the Government has proceeded on the
plan of allowing the real schools to pay their own way. The wonder
is, that they have such good results to show for their work under such
circumstances. It should be also considered in this connection that
the proper equipment of a real school, with first-class apparatus, etc.,
costs much more than that of a gymnasium. Another fact should
be borne in mind, that owing to this lack of support the number of such
schools is much smaller than that of the gymnasia, and they have con-
sequently not had so extensive a field to draw from as the latter. An-
other important point must be mentioned in this connection. Up to
1871 the graduates of the real school passed immediately into active
life instead of attending a higher institution of learning. The matter
and methods of the school had, therefore, exclusive reference to that
fact, and under the new system they must have time to modify and
adapt themselves to the altered circumstances. Any practical teacher
will appreciate the importance of this consideration. These are some
of the objections which the defenders of the real schools have to urge
against any unfavorable report made at this stage of the work. Against

296 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

this particular series of reports, made in the manner in which they
were, they have still more serious objections, which we shall notice
later.

Turning aside now to another phase of the subject, let us see
whether any influences have been at work which tend to give the gym-
nasia a better class of material to work with. If the boys who enter
the gymnasia are decidedly superior in ability to those entering the
real schools, we shall have a partial explanation of the better results
achieved by the former.

The first point to be mentioned in this connection is that the tra-
ditions of Germany are classical. For decades and decades nearly
every prominent man in law, medicine, theology, teaching, and (so far
as nobility has not been accepted as a substitute for education) in the
civil and military service of the country, has enjoyed the benefits of a
classical education, if for no other reasons, simply because he was obliged
to " enjoy " them as a condition of entering these careers. We all
know how easily we associate two things which we always see together,
in the relation of cause and effect. And so this eminence and culture
which, owing largely to the artificial pressure we have mentioned,
have for years and years in Germany been found in connection with a
more or less complete knowledge of Latin and Greek, have come to be
associated with the latter as effect from a cause. The sign has come
to be largely accepted in place of the thing signified. It can not have
escaped the observation of any reflective person who has ever lived in
Germany, that there is a very wide social chasm in that country
between the so-called liberally educated (die Studirten) and those who
have not pursued such courses. There is, so to speak, an educational
hierarchy, and the only path to it lies through the gymnasium. As in
all hierarchies, so in this, there is an immense amount of Pharisaism,
a touch-me-not and a come-not-near-with-unholy-hands kind of spirit
which looks down on everything not of its type as something infinitely
lower. The Studirter looks down, not only on the merchant or the
artisan, but also upon the Vblksschullehrer (common-school teacher)
with a calm sense of superiority and a provoking self-conceit — no
matter how successful the career of the latter may have been. A
small professor in a small university, of small ability and still less suc-
cess, commiserates the most successful common-school teacher because
he has not studied Latin and Greek ; and we must add that the latter
envies the former, taking the sign (Latin and Greek) for the thing sig-
nified (culture). No Studirter thinks of seriously discussing any ques-
tion with a Non-studirter, but disposes of all difficult objections by
the crushing answer that his opponent is an ungebildeter Mensch.

The artisan or merchant sees that no amount of culture derived from
the study of modern subjects, or in the pursuit of his calling, or from
the vigorous contact with active life, can secure for him a social recog-
nition or equality with the Gelehrter / the common-school teacher sees

THE CLASSICAL QUESTION IN GERMANY. 297

that no career of public service in his sphere, however useful or suc-
cessful, can secure entrance for him into that charmed circle of the
Gelehrtenthum, and silently resolves that his boy must have a different
chance from that which he has had. Of the force which this tradi-
tional influence exerts no one can form an adequate idea who has not
had the opportunity of associating intimately with the various classes
of the people ; for, although a similar spirit may be met in America,
it is of such small influence as hardly to be discernible.

A classical education has, then, come to be the proper thing in
Germany for every aspiring man. It is a stamp of gentility, an ab-
solute essential to high social position and influence. Every parent
desires to give it to his boy, if for no other reason, simply on account
of this different social position which it confers upon him. To give
him this education he must send him to the gymnasium.

But there is another and still more powerful influence at work
to secure the attendance at the classical schools. We have already
corrected President Porter's statement that the graduates of the real
schools are admitted to all the privileges of the university. They
are not allowed to enter the law, medical, or theological facul-
ties, and their privileges in the philosophical faculty are practically
limited to the study of natural science, mathematics, and modern
languages. That is to say, if a father wishes to keep open to his son
when he becomes twenty years of age the choice of the learned pro-
fessions, and the possibility of obtaining any of the higher positions
of the civil service, he must put him through the gymnasium in the
first place.

Of course, under such circumstances, all professional men desire
their boys to follow one of the learned professions, and send them
consequently to a gymnasium. During an extensive tour in Germany
last summer, the writer had the opportunity of meeting a large num-
ber of university and other professional men. In answer to the ques-
tion which was quite regularly asked, " What school do your boys at-
tend ? " they replied, almost without exception : " The gymnasium, of
course ; we send them to the real school only wThen they are too
stupid or too lazy to keep up in the gymnasium." Thus the educated
and intelligent classes send their boys, who, to some extent at least,
have inherited their intelligence and ability, to the gymnasium. Those
members of the mercantile or artisan class, who have bright boys
from whom they hope much, strain every nerve to support them at
the school which forms the sole avenue to all government honors and
social position.

t)o we not find here the explanation we are seeking ? Is not this
the secret why the boys who graduate from the gymnasium are as
a class superior to those who finish a real-school course ? They are
the brighter boys of the community ; they are, as a rule, of educated
blood, from homes where education and refinement prevail, and life

298 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

within which is of itself an education, where they find wise and dis-
criminating assistance in their studies, and encouragement and incite-
ment to effort.

But the case is not by any means fully stated. The gymnasium
not only gets better material to work upon than its rival, but it has
also a superior corps of teachers. The writer was told by a gentleman
who was a graduate of a real school, and who had been a teacher
in one for some time, but had afterward made up the Greek and
Latin of a gymnasium course in order to qualify himself for teaching
in a gymnasium, that no teacher of ability and enterprise would re-
main in a real school any longer than he was obliged to remain there.
"There is no career in that line of work," said he, " and only block-
heads and lazy hides {Dummkbpfe unci Faulpelze) stay in it." Of
course, that was a great exaggeration, and yet it contained an element
of truth, viz., that a process of selection is going on between these
two schools, not only in regard to pupils, but also in regard to teach-,
ers, and the gymnasium has its pick of both.

The reason is not far to seek. It is to be found in the higher so-
cial position which tradition assigns to the office of gymnasial teacher,
and the better career which the Government opens to it. How idle, in
the face of all these facts, is the assertion that the Berlin report
has settled the question between the real school and the gymnasium,
or that it is of paramount significance in the deeper question of clas-
sical against modern training !

To get a fair idea of the significance of this report, let one imagine
the state of things which would exist in this country if the law of the
land had for generations permitted no one to practice law or medicine, or
enter the ministry or the civil service, or become a teacher in our higher
schools and colleges, wTho had not first completed the classical course
in an average college, and then attended a professional school for three
years. Suppose that, after such a law had been enforced for a century,
a proposition were made to allow such scientific schools as could spring
up under those circumstances to present their students for certain sub-
ordinate places in the civil service and in the academic career. Can
there be any doubt that the adherents of the classical culture would
point with pride to the fact that every eminent professional man for
several generations had been the graduates of classical schools, and
would make that a reason, as they do now in Germany, for refusing
to admit any man with a different education to the practice of those
professions'? "Would they not dwell on the great danger to the na-
tional civilization which would arise from the fact that an element of
discord would be introduced into the culture of the people by educat-
ing the young along two widely different lines ? *

* This argument plays a large part in the German defense of a single school and a
single course in preparation for all higher professions. " Our education," says one, "is
homogeneous. Let the real school carry its point, and a hopeless and fatal element of

THE CLASSICAL QUESTION IN GERMANY. 299

Would not our professors complain, as does one in Berlin, that
they could not make so many references to Greece and Rome in their
lectures, since some of their bearers would not understand them?

Let us suppose further that the above proposition should be ac-
cepted, and that after eight years a committee of the opponents of the
measure should be called upon to express their opinions as to the re-
sults of the experiment. Could their report be considered as settling
anything between the two opposing parties — the defenders and oppo-
nents of classical culture ? Could the statement of these witnesses,
that the students who, under such conditions, came from the scientific
schools were not fully equal to those coming from the classicals chools,
be regarded as forever disposing of the claims of modern culture?
The answer to this question can hardly be doubtful. And yet those
who quote the Berlin report, as settling this much-vexed question,
must maintain that such a report as the imaginary one above de-
scribed would be satisfactory and conclusive.

We have thus far proceeded upon the assumption that the Berlin
and similar reports were prepared by unprejudiced men, after a careful
and detailed examination of the records made by the graduates of
these two schools, and uninfluenced by extraneous considerations. We
are compelled to believe, however, after a somewhat detailed investi-
gation, that no one of these assumptions is true.

The men who were asked for their opinions on this subject were
almost, if not absolutely, without exception graduates of the gym-
nasia. That lay, of course, in the nature of the case. Real-school
graduates could not enter the universities until the spring of 1871.
Allowing four years for the average length of time spent in the uni-
versities, the first real-school men were graduated in 1875, and in 1879
the first of these reports was prepared. As the candidates for admis-
sion to the university faculty must study one year more before enter-
ing the lowest grade of academic positions, and as promotions are very
slow in Prussia, it would be a very rare thing for a graduate of 1875
to have reached a professorial chair by 1879. Those who made these
reports were therefore men from rival schools, men imbued with preju-
dice in favor of the preparatory curriculum which they themselves
had completed, men entirely under the sway of the traditional feeling
in regard to the classics, and, of course, inclined to look with disfavor
upon real-school men as representing a movement which questions the
worth of classical culture. It is a well-known fact that there is usually
a strong tendency for a man to attribute his general success in life to
the particular things which he did, or left undone, and that it is an
easy thing to regard an incidental as an essential. The worthy Ger-
man professors are no exception to the rule. Many of them were so
strongly convinced of the superiority of classical to modern training

antagonism will be introduced into our national life, and oui higher scholarship, that
fairest flower of our civilization, will perish from the earth ! "

3oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

that they went out of their way to declare that a study of Latin and
Greek is absolutely essential to high excellence in any department of
intellectual effort !

All these reports, both those of 1869 and those of later years,
so far as they were made by the faculties, were as a rule drafted
by volunteers in the faculty, and some rabidly classical man gener- ,
ally offered to do the work. When his report was laid before the
faculty, many voted for it, or refrained from voting against it, for
the simple reason that they did not have time to offer such modifi-
cations as they would like to have seen made in the language or
matter of the report. Thus, the writer was told by one professor
in a university which sent in a very strong report in favor of the
gymnasiasts as against the real-school graduates : " Professor So-
and-so " (mentioning his name — one well known in Germany) " drew
up our report. He is perfectly crazy on the subject, but there was
no one else to do it, and after he submitted it we did not want to do
such an ungracious thing as reject a service which nobody else would
undertake. I voted for his report, though I should have been glad to
have a much more moderate and judicial report than the one we sent
in." It thus appears that these reports were prepared by men who
were not only graduates of the gymnasium, but who were also, in some
cases at least, regarded by their own friends as extremists. Add to
this the fact that there were no representatives of the real schools in the
reporting board who might have called attention to exaggerations or
misstatements, whether intentional or unintentional, and it is pretty
clear that these reports can not be called judicial, either in their form
or spirit, but partake largely of the character of advocates' pleas.

It would be fair to suppose, however, that these men would at
least examine the facts in the case as to how these real-school gradu-
ates turned out in after-life, before making a report on their compara-
tive ability. But even this supposition turns out to be an unfounded
one. As is well known, there is no general system of recitation and
record-keeping in German universities, such as we have in our Ameri-
can colleges. The professor has, therefore, as a rule, no means of
judging of a student's attainments. There are no examinations except
the final one for a doctor's degree. The only institution bearing a
resemblance to our recitation is the Seminar, a voluntary organization
which many students never enter, and which varies greatly in char-
acter, according to the temperament of the professor in charge or to
the subject-matter discussed. Being at times a society for the train-
ing of the members in the power of independent investigation and
research, it becomes often a mere " quiz," or indeed but little more
than a two hours' lecture on the part of the leader. With the excep-
tion of those students who enter the Seminar , the professor has no
means of judging of the ability or training of the university students.
The only test, therefore, is the record of such students in the final

THE CLASSICAL QUESTION IN GERMANY. 301

university examinations for a degree, which comparatively few stu-
dents ever attempt, their record in the state examinations which nearly
all try, and the final and decisive test of practical life and its demands.

Now, it is a pretty plain fact that the professors who made these
reports did not take the trouble to investigate the results of these
various tests, since it was reserved for a director of a real school to
collect the first reliable and comprehensive statistics on the subject,
and that after these reports were j)repared. The data were furnished
by the reports of the universities as to the number of degrees granted
to real-school graduates, by the reports of government examiners as to
standing attained in the public examinations of such students, and,
finally, by the reports from the present positions and sphere of labor
of all real-school graduates who had taken degrees from the universi-
ties, or who had passed into the ranks of teachers without trying the
university examination. We have not room to introduce the statistics
here. Suffice it to say that they make a very good showing for real-
school graduates. The point that interests us most in this immediate
connection is, that these facts were not ascertained or considered by
the university professors who reported on this subject.

The same gentleman who collected these statistics tells a well-
authenticated story of Professor Hanstein, of the University of Bonn,
which very well illustrates the fairness, deliberation, and investigation
which preceded and accompanied these reports. Upon receiving the
notice asking for his written opinion, he remarked to his assistant :
" So we have to commit ourselves in writing again, do we ? Of course,
the gymnasia students are superior." "But, Herr Professor," ob-
jected his assistant, "Mr. X , who recently took his degree in

natural science, passed summa cum laude, and he is a real-school

graduate." "Yes ; well, he's an exception." "And Herr Dr. , the

Privatdocent here in Bonn, is also from a real school." "He's an ex-
ception too," answered Hanstein. " And a few weeks ago," continued
his assistant, " one of our real-school students passed his teacher's ex-
amination in chemistry and natural history No. 1." " Exceptions —
all exceptions ! " replied the professor. " Yes, but, Herr Professor,
there are only seven or eight of us real-school men altogether here in
Bonn." " We ? Are you a real-school graduate ? " " Yes, sir." " Well,
you are the biggest exception of all." And, with that, he turned and
left the room. The story, which is vouched for, needs no comment.

There is still another point to be considered. The practical object
of these reports, as some professors conceived it, was to ascertain
whether the faculties were in favor of excluding real-school students
from the universities, and indeed the language of the request justified
that view. Some voted for the reports, therefore, because they
thought that the attendance at the universities is too large, and that
the exclusion of real-school graduates offers a convenient means of
getting rid of the surplus students. The writer visited twelve out of

-02 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

j

the twenty-one German universities, during the last semester, in order
to ascertain what is doing in the various departments in which he
takes special interest. Everywhere the question was asked of univer-
sity professors, "Do you think that too many are studying at the
universities?" Almost uniformly the answer was returned, "There
is no doubt about it." A few figures will make clear how rapidly of >
late years the number of students has increased. During the five
years ending 1SG1, for every 100,000 inhabitants in Germany there
were, on an average, thirty-two students in the universities. During
the year 1881-'82 there were fifty-one students for the same number
of inhabitants. Of these in the former period eight were enrolled in
the philosophical faculty (the only faculty to which real-school stu-
dents are admitted) ; in the latter period 20*7. That is, in a little
more than twenty years the number of students in the philosophical
faculty per 100,000 inhabitants has more than doubled. The average
for the five years ending 1881 was eighteen, and the proportion is still
increasing. This enormous increase in the number of students excites
the gravest apprehension, and is characterized by thinking men as a
sad state of affairs.

It may seem somewhat ludicrous to us to hear of an over-produc-
tion of educated men. A German professor gave the key to the rid-
dle, in a remark to the writer, that Germany is fostering the growth
of an intellectual proletary — i. e., a class of professionally educated
men for whom there is no room in the professions, and who are too
proud to go into business of any sort. This state of affairs can not be
fully appreciated without going further into detail than the limits of
this article allow. Suffice it to sav that the German universities are

4/

essentially professional schools. A man who enters such an institu-
tion intends to be a lawyer, a physician, a minister, teacher, professor,
or member of the civil service of the country, and he receives there
his professional training. It is easy to see that there can be an over-
production in each and all of these fields. In this country such a state
of things is easily remedied. If a man finds he has no chance to suc-
ceed as a lawyer, a year or two will turn him out a physician. If he
fails in that, he can try theology, or he may go into business of some
sort, or anybody can go into politics. In Germany the case is widely
different. The Government demands such a long preliminary train-
ing and such intense and laborious effort in preparation, that, by the
time a man finds there is no place for him in the profession he has
chosen, his elasticity has gone, and there is no desire or ability to try
anything else. To take up another profession he has become too old,
and to go into mercantile or industrial life he is forbidden by his
ideas of social position and scholarly dignity. To such a man two
courses are open — to drag out a bare existence, with many wants
which his education has developed, but which he has no means of
gratifying, or — to commit suicide. Many take the latter alternative,

THE CLASSICAL QUESTION IN GERMANY. 303

and the enormous increase in suicides during the last few years is one
of the saddest and most striking phenomena of German society, high

and low.

That there is an over-production in the professional fields nearly
all German thinkers agree. How can it be helped ? The Government
has lately called the attention of parents and teachers to the fact that
the higher administrative positions in the civil service are all provided
for, and that all vacancies for years to come can be filled from the
present candidates. The opponents of the real schools now come for-
ward and say : " We can help the matter very easily. Shut out real-
school graduates from the philosophical faculty and there will be room
enough for the surplus students of law and medicine to find careers."
Some professors voted for exclusion because they thought that the
shutting out of real-school students would meet this rajndly-growing
evil of over-production in professional spheres.

We think enough has been advanced to prove — 1. That the Berlin
report has little bearing on the question we are discussing in this
country as to the respective merits of classical and modern training,
for the simple fact that it was on an altogether different point. 2.
That as to the particular subject, in regard to which it was prepared,
it can lay no claim to be considered final, because it was made prema-
turely, at a time when the institution judged could, by the very nature
of the case, have had no fair trial, and because it was made by preju-
diced parties without sufficient investigation, and influenced by con-
siderations which should have had nothing to do with the decision.

As a matter of fact, the opinion seems to be quite general in Ger-
many that the real schools are bound to go forward to new struggles
and to new conquests. They have lost none of the ground which
they have ever won ; they are gaining new ground every day. It is a
mere question of time when the medical schools will be opened to
them, and some even dare hope that the law schools must yield also.
They may suffer temporary reverses, but they are sure to win in the
long run. One significant fact may be noted, which is beginning to
tell in their favor. The men in Germany who have made the deepest
and longest studies in the science of education are assuming a more
favorable attitude toward the real schools.

The writer recently visited Professor Masius, who holds a chair
of Pedagogics in the University of Leipsic. He ~vas for years the
director of a gymnasium, then of a real school of the first rank, and
then for years a member of the Ministry for Public Instruction in
Saxony. On being asked what his position on the question of real
school vs. the gymnasium is, he replied : " If you mean to ask me,
whether the real-school graduates I get in my work are the equals of
the gymnasium graduates, I should say, no ! If you mean whether
our real schools, as they are, afford as good a liberal training as the
gymnasia, I should say, no ! If you mean whether a real-school, as fully

3o4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

equipped in regard to teachers and apparatus as an ordinary gymna-
sium, and with a simplified course of study, could give a liberal train-
ing equal to that afforded by the gymnasium, I should reply, I do not
know, as the experiment has never been tried ; but I am inclined to
think it could."

The most advanced thinkers on pedagogics are coming to agree .
that the subject taught has much less to do with its value as a dis-
ciplinary and liberalizing study than the method of teaching it. Arith-
metic may be so taught as to afford a much better training in lan-
guage than half of our Latin and Greek teaching affords. There is a
certain convertibility in the possible subjects in a curriculum with
regard to liberalizing effects which is often lost sight of, but which
our best thinkers on the science of education are more and more in-
clined to emphasize.

It has been already remarked that it is a dangerous procedure to
apply concrete conclusions in one country to concrete conditions in
another. The quoting of German authority in favor of a gymnasium
course in order to bolster up the classical course of an average American
college is a good instance in point. The German gymnasium gives nine
hours a week for five years, and eight hours a week for four years more,
to the study of Latin — i. e., seventy-seven hours a week for one year.
It devotes to Greek seven hours a week for four years, and six hours a
week for two years more — i. e., forty hours a week for one year, or to
both languages the equivalent of one hundred and seventeen hours a
week for one year. It will be stating it beyond the truth to put the
time devoted to Latin in our average American college up to the close
of the sophomore year at five hours a week for six years — i. e., thirty
hours a week for one year, and to the Greek at five hours a week for
five years — i. e., twenty-five hours a week for one year, or to both
together the equivalent of fifty-five hours a week for one year. The
German gymnasium thus gives more than twice as many hours to
Latin and Greek as the average American college course. Now, the
leading German authorities who favor a gymnasium course have re-
peatedly opposed lessening the amount of time devoted to these two
subjects, and have expressed their opinion to the effect that any con-
siderable reduction in the number of hours w^ould be equivalent to
depriving the course of all its value — i. e., so far from approving our
classical curriculum, they unite in asserting that it is worth nothing
whatever !

A part of President Porter's argument in the article already re-
ferred to proceeds on the assumption that the average college boy
acquires enough Latin and Greek to be able to read it easily. What-
ever may have been true in President Porter's college-days, the fact
must appear evident to any one who has ever visited the sophomore
classes in Greek in our American colleges, that the average boy does
not acquire ability to translate even such an easy author as Xenophon

THE CLASSICAL QUESTION IN GERMANY. 305

or Homer without difficulty — not even in Yale College ; and the boy
who takes up a Greek author and reads him for the pleasure that
, he derives from the thought is an avis vara indeed. It is the writer's
opinion, based upon considerable investigation and comparison of notes
with Greek teachers, both in America and Germany, that it is impossi-
ble for the average boy who spends the average amount of time on his
Greek up to the close of his sophomore year to acquire the power of
reading it easily. It is a universally admitted fact in Germany that
the gymnasiast, who spends so much more time and labor than the
American college boy, never acquires this power; and it is as true of
the former as it is of the latter that the last day of his school-life is
the last day of his Greek reading, with the exception of those follow-
ing a profession which calls for a knowledge of the Greek, such as the
philologists, philosophers, and clergymen.

One other point is worthy of notice. President Porter attempts
to show that the main reason for unsatisfactory results in Greek study
is the bad teaching of Greek which prevailed long ago, and which he
hints has almost disappeared. That the teaching of Greek is now
superior to what it was a generation ago we are very ready to believe,
but it can hardly be said that there is any greater agreement among
teachers as to the proper object of Greek study and the advantages to
be derived from it. A visit to several of our leading colleges last
* winter, and conversation with the professors and instructors in Greek,
revealed to the writer the very greatest differences of opinion, not only
among the various colleges, but even among the representatives of that
study within the same college. It is evident that the teachers who
believe that the most important object to be attained is the ability to
read Greek at sight, and to understand it without having to translate
it, will pursue a very different method from those who see in the " in-
cidental training " in grammar, logic, philology, etc., the chief benefit
from Greek study. And yet the writer recently found these two
opposite views held by two men in the same department of one of our
leading colleges, the one of whom had one division of the sophomore
class and the other the second division. It is hardly necessary to say
that, however much the second may have benefited his class, the first
did not get his division to read Greek at sight.

The writer does not wish to be misunderstood. He is making no
attack on the study of Greek. He remembers well the keen pleasure
and, as he thinks, profit with which he pursued the study of Greek
under an exceptionally able series of teachers, and his viris illustrissi-
mis summas gratias agit, semperque habebit. But he realizes well the
great importance of these educational questions, and that many of
them can never be settled except by actual experiment. It is of the
highest importance that all things should be fairly tried, and that
held fast which is good. It is demanded in the interests of society
that modern education have a fair chance by the side of classical edu-

TOL. XXIV. — 20 x

3o6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

cation. That chance it has, as yet, nowhere had. Our colleges, so
far as they have admitted scientific students, have allowed them to
come in with a very inferior preparation. The French and German,
and for that matter the English, too, in most of our colleges, are mere
child's play, where they are not broad and ridiculous farces, the butt
of students and professors alike. Let some of our colleges inaugurate
the reform : lay out a "modern " course for admission and for college
on the same general principle as the classical course — few subjects,
but long-continued and detailed study in each of them — and insist on
as thorough and vigorous work as they do in their Latin and Greek,
and then, after a fair trial, compare results. The friends of " mod-
ern " education are willing to abide by the outcome. In the mean
time it will be wise for the classicists to avoid quoting reports that
have nothing to do with the question, and appealing to authority
which, upon investigation, turns out to be squarely on the other side
of the point in dispute.

+•»■

EAELY COLONISTS OF THE SWISS LAKES.

By F. A. FOREL.

THE depression of the waters of the Lakes of Neufchatel, Morat,
and Bienne, which the Swiss Confederation has been having exe-
cuted during the last ten years, has been a most fortunate event for
archaeologists ; and with pick in hand, and on a relatively new ground,
they have been able to recover hosts of treasures from the buried
ruins of the lake-villages. The few scattered relics which they had
succeeded in fishing up out of the water with tongs and drags have
been multiplied into immense proportions since the hunters have been
able to work upon the solid land that has been reclaimed from the
edges of the favored lakes. By thousands and thousands the relics
of human industry have been heaped up in the archaeological collec-
tions, and the knowledge of the curious civilization of the early in-
habitants of Switzerland has made, by the aid of these facts, very
interesting progress. We need only cite, in proof of this, the very
important memoir which Professor Theophile Studer has recently
published in the "Bulletin" of the Society of Naturalists of Bern.
Taking up, after M. L. Rutimeyer, of Basel, the study of the bones
found in the archaeological deposit of the palafittes (a term designat-
ing a wooden construction built on piles), and making use of the im-
mense material collected from the stations of the Lake of Bienne, he
has drawn from them most interesting details respecting the variations
of the animal population during the different periods of these prehis-
torical ages, and respecting the progress of the domestication of the
races useful to man.

EARLY COLONISTS OF THE SWISS LAKES. 307

A comprehensive account of the present condition of our knowl-
edge of human industry in the lake epoch is furnished in the book just
published by Dr. Victor Gross on " The Proto-Helvetians, or the Ear-
lier Colonists of the Borders of the Lakes of Bienne and Neufchatel "

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(" Xes JProtohelvetes, ou les premiers colons des bords des lacs de Bienne
et de NeuchateV). The author, a practicing physician at La Neuve-
ville, on the shore of the Lake of Bienne, has had the good fortune to
become possessed of products of all the special excavations made upon

3o8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

that lake, and of a good part of the finds of the Lake of Neufchatel,
so that he has been able to form a collection unequaled in its richness,
in the number of the specimens, and in the rarity of the pieces, fre-
quently unique, that he has accumulated.

Wishing to give the scientific world a share in the enjoyment of
these treasures, he has published in a beautiful quarto volume descrip-
tions of the principal results of his researches, illustrated by photo-
graphic plates, in thirty-three of which are represented more than nine
hundred and iifty of the more important pieces. I do not hesitate to
6tyle Dr. Gross's the finest known collection in prehistoric archaeology,
for while the series in some large museums may be more numerous
than those of Dr. Gross, the latter have the superiority over all the
others of relating to a single civilization, in different ages of its de-
velopment, and to the same people in all the details of its intimate life
with an incomparable luxury of illustration. The ruins of each one
of our lake-villages may be compared to a Pompeii on a small scale.
Let us suppose fifty Pompeiis, the destruction of which took place, one
after another, during the ages from the primitive times of Roman
history to the end of the decline of the empire, and we may be able
to calculate what treasures of documents we might find in them where-
with to restore the history of industry, of art, and of civilization in
ancient Italy.

The study of the larger collections of Swiss antiquities gives us
a very clear impression of the wealth of the lacustrine populations,
especially of the period known as the fine bronze age. We see in them
universally evidences of abundant resources, and in no case of pov-
erty. The inhabitants of the palcifittes had at their disposal mechani-
cal means, probably simple, but sufficient to fix in the ground the thou-
sands and tens of thousands of piles on which they built their villages
Having an agriculture, and raising cattle, they were only exceptionally
obliged to have recourse for food-supplies to the more primitive art of
the chase. An extensive commerce brought them metals, amber, glass
beads, and worked objects of foreign origin. A pure taste raised their
artisans to the dignity of real artists. The reader who observes in Dr.
Gross's plates the remarkable elegance of the designs of arms, of tools
and ornaments of bronze, and of potter's work, like those represented
in Fig. 2 (Nos. 1, 3, 4, and 10), can not deny that the civilization of
the Swiss lake-dwellers was rich and flourishing.

The mass of metal they possessed was considerable ; and, having
regard to the innumerable pices of bronze found at some of the sta-
tions, I believe it will not be wrong to assert that in proportion to the
population they had a weight of bronze at their disposal nearly equal
to the weight of iron, aside from the heavy castings of the large agri-
cultural machines, to be found in any of the most prosperous existing
villages of the country. A figure will give an idea of this abundance
and richness. M. Gross has made an account of the bronze pieces

EARLY COLONISTS OF THE SWISS LAKES. 309

Fig. 2.— Articles from the Prehistoric Collection of Dr. Victor Gross.

1. Bronze sword-handle (station of Morigen).

2. Ornamented ear-drops (Auvernier).

3. Cup in hammered bronze (Corcelettes).

4. Clay vase, with incrustations from lamella? of tiu.

5. Comb of yew-wood (Fenil).

6. Bronze ear-drops (Auvernier).

v. Mold in sandstone, forming one of the shells of a mold for two knives and twenty-seven
rings (M5ri<ren);

8. Hair-pin (Estavayer).

9, 10. Bronze knives (Auvernier).
11, 12. Ear-drops of deer-horn.

3io THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

taken from the Lakes of Bienne and Neufchatel, and makes the number
19,600, more than 5,000 of which are in his own collection.

The wealth of the Proto-IIelvetians, as Dr. Gross happily calls them,
so manifest in the bronze age, was also as real, though less evident,
in the stone age. I come to this conclusion from the presence in
the ruins of that period of some classes of objects that could have
reached the country only by means of a very extensive commerce.
Amber was brought to them from the shores of the Baltic Sea, and
rare stones of very precious qualities, from which they made their cut-
ting-tools, came to them fronrstill farther ; nephrite, a handsome stone,
clear, green, and semi-transparent, was brought to them from Turkis-
tan, or Southern Siberia ; gray jade-stone came from Burmah ; and
chloromela?iite, a black stone with yellow streaks, also probably came
from Asia, but from beds that are still unknown. The lake period
was of long duration, and included the whole time in which man rose
by successive steps from the primitive stages of civilization in which he
was not yet acquainted with metals to the higher stages, when he
became acquainted with bronze and then with iron. Whatever a cer-
tain German school may say about it, the existence of a bronze age
intermediate between the stone age and the iron age is demonstrated.
That such a progressive and continuous development took place is
proved with strong evidence from the archaeological study of the prod-
ucts of human industry, and appears definitely in the study of the
bones of animals gathered in the ruins of the lake-stations. In this
respect, the conclusions of M. Studer are as affirmative and demonstra-
tive as were twenty years ago those of M. Riitimeyer.

Dr. Gross distinguishes three successive periods in the stone age :
A primitive, earlier period, making a poor showing of coarse potteries
and imperfectly worked stones, with no nephrite or other stones of
foreign origin. The station of Chavannes, near La Neuveville, is re-
garded by him as the type of that remote age. A second period ex-
hibits the civilization of the stone age in all its glory. The stone
instruments are finely cut, exotic stones are abundant, and the potter's
art has reached an advanced degree of perfection. Locras and Latri-
gen represent this age on the Lake of Bienne. A third period bears
evidence of the introduction of metals. The general character of the
civilization remains the same as in the preceding age, with the same
styles of pottery and the same abundance of stone implements. But
the first tools of metal have been imported. At Finels, on the Lake of
Bienne, we find copper worked in a manner still quite primitive ; and
at Morigen, in the station of Les Roseaux, we have bronze in the form
of very simple hatchets. After this came the fine age of bronze, with
its magnificent development of civilization ; then, later, iron appeared.

Bronze, the metal chiefly in use in the finest age of the lake civili-
zation, is not indigenous. Neither copper nor tin, the metals which
alloyed with each other in proper proportions constitute this metal, is

THE MORALITY OF HAPPINESS. 311

found in the Swiss plain nor in the Jura. It is true that copper min-
erals exist in some of the valleys of the Alps, but it is very probable
that the ancient lake-dwellers received the metal from more distant
countries where the mines were more easily worked. With respect
to tin, it is at any rate certain that the nearest beds are in Saxony, in
Cornwall, and in Spain. It has long been debated whether these
metals, tin, copper, and bronze, were brought to Switzerland already
worked, or were cast on the spot ; whether there was a local, native
industry, or the arms, instruments, and ornaments were brought, hav-
ing been already wrought out in foreign lands. It is now possible to
answer the question. Some of the articles were imported already
manufactured, for they evidently exhibit types of foreign industry.
A superb vase of cast bronze and a fibula from Corcelettes, on the
Lake of Neufchatel, are preserved in the Museum of Lausanne, the
form and ornamentation of which are manifestly Scandinavian. Other
pieces, more numerous, recall forms of the south of France or of Italy.
On the other hand, ingots or pigs of unworked metal are very rare in
our finds. There was, however, also a local industry ; and the lake-
dwellers knew how to cast and hammer bronze in their own villages.
We have proof of this in a relatively considerable number of molds
deposited in the Swiss museums, among others at Lausanne, at Ge-
neva, and in Dr. Gross's collection. In the plates illustrating the last
collection are figured no less than three bronze molds, two of which
are double, eight clay valves or fragments of molds, and seventeen
molds or fragments in molasse (Fig. 2, No. 7). Sometimes one of
the stone molds served for the casting of several objects ; and the
seventeen molds of Dr. Gross contain the matrices for seventy-two
different pieces. Besides these molds, castings of bronze hammers,
anvils, shears, and punches, complete the outfit of the founder, and
demonstrate that his industry was indeed practiced on the spot.
Whether the founder was a native, and established where he worked,
or whether, like the tinkers of our own days, he was a foreigner and a
wanderer, is a question to which a definite answer can not be returned.
— Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from La Nature.

■+•+-

- THE MOKALITY OF HAPPINESS.

Br THOMAS FOSTEE.
III. — THE EVOLUTION OF CONDUCT.

AS structures are evolved, so are the functions which structures
subserve. And as the functions of the body are evolved, so
are those combinations of bodily actions evolved which we include
under the general term conduct.

3i2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

We are considering the functions of the body when we are in-
quiring into such actions of the various structures internal and exter-
nal as involve internal processes, simple or complex. But, when we
begin to consider combinations of actions externally manifested, we
are dealing with conduct — except only in the case of such actions as
are independent of control.

But at the outset of the evolution of conduct even this distinction
is scarcely to be recognized. Every external combination of actions
is in the lower types of animal life a part of conduct — at least of such
conduct as is possible in the lowest orders of creatures. Evolution of
conduct begins with the gradual development of purpose where at first
actions were random and aimless. The Amoeba wanders from place
to place, not by the action of limbs, but by a process which may be
called diffluence. In so doing it may come into the neighborhood of
objects fit to form its food ; these it in wraps, and absorbing what is
digestible rejects the rest. Or its wanderings may lead it into the
way of some creature by which it is itself absorbed and digested.
There may be some higher law than chance guiding the movements
of such creatures ; but so far as can be judged this is not the case.
In other words there is but the suspicion of something like conduct in
the actions of the Amoeba. Among other creatures belonging to the
same kingdom, but higher in type, we find actions so much better
adjusted, that, though even yet we can not recognize such evidence of
purpose as enables us to describe their actions as conduct, we yet see
in their adjustment to certain ends the development of something akin
to conduct. The actions seem guided by what mimics purpose if it is
not purpose itself.

Now, we note that with the improved adjustment of actions comes
an increase in the average duration of life, or rather in the proportion
of this average to the length of life possible among these several
creatures.

So when we pass to higher and higher orders of animals, we find
in every case among the lower types irregular and seemingly purpose-
less actions, while among the higher we find actions better adjusted
to the surroundings. And, again, we note that, where the combination
of actions, or what we may now call the conduct, is not adjusted to
the environment, the creatures' chances of life are small, great num-
bers dying for each whose life approaches the average duration. An
improved adjustment of conduct to environment increases the chances
of survival, many attaining and some passing the average of longevity
in their particular type or order.

Now, structural development is guided by the fitness or unfitness
of particular proportions in such and such structures for the great life-
struggle in which all animal life is constantly engaged ; and functional
development is guided by the corresponding fitness or unfitness of such
and such functional activities. Just as certainly the development of

THE MORALITY OF HAPPINESS. 313

conduct in all orders of living creatures is guided by the fitness or
unfitness of such and such combinations of external actions for the
constant life-contest.

We might find illustrations of this in every kingdom, sub-king-
dom, order, and type, of animal life. Let us, however, content our-
selves by noting it in man.

In the lower races of man as at present existing, and in still greater
degree among the lower races when the human race as a whole was
lower, we see that the adjustments of external actions to obtain food,
to provide shelter against animate and inanimate enemies, and other-
wise to support or to defend life, are imperfect and irregular. The
savage of the lowest type is constantly exposed to the risk of losing
his life either through hunger or cold, or through storm, or from at-
tacks against which he has not made adequate provision. He neither
foresees nor remembers, and his conduct is correspondingly aimless
and irregular. The least provident, or rather the most improvident,
perish in greatest numbers. Hence there is an evolution of conduct
from irregularity and aimlessness by slow degrees toward the regular-
ity and adaptation of aims to ends, seen in advancing civilization.
The ill-adjusted conduct which diminishes the chances of life dies out
in the struggle for life, to make way for the better-adjusted conduct
by which the chances of life are increased. The process is as certain
in its action as the process of structural evolution. In either process
we see multitudinous individual exceptions. Luck plays its part in
individual cases ; but inexorable law claims its customary rule over
averages. In the long run conduct best adapted and adjusted to
environment is developed at the expense of conduct less suitable to the
surroundings.

With man, as with all orders of animals, conduct which tends to
increase the duration of life prevails over conduct having an opposite
tendency. Wherefore, remembering the ever-varying conditions un-
der which life is passed, the evolution of conduct means not only the
development of well-adjusted actions, but the elaboration of conduct
to correspond with those diverse and multitudinous conditions.

To these considerations we may add that the evolution of conduct
not only tends necessarily to increased length of life (necessarily, be-
cause shortening of life means the diminution of such conduct as
tends to shorten life), but it results in increased breadth of life, and
(in the highest animal) in increased depth of life also. It is manifest
that, in the elaboration of activities by which length of life is increased,
breadth of life is increased pari passu. For these activities maybe
said 'to constitute breadth of life. Passing over the numerous illustra-
tions which might be drawn from the lower orders of animal life, we
recognize in man a vast increase in the breadth of life as we pass
from the limited orders of activity constituting the life of the savage
to the multiplied and complex activities involved in civilized life. In-

3 14 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

creased depth of life we recognize only (but we recognize it clearly)
in the most advanced races of that animal which not only thinks and
reasons but reflects.

We find, then, that the evolution of conduct is not only accom-
panied by increased fullness of life, but is to be estimated by such in-
crease. We do not say that that conduct is good in relation to the
individual which increases and that conduct bad which diminishes the
fullness of individual life in the individual. We assert, for the present,
only what observation shows — that conduct of the former kind is
favored (other things equal), and therefore developed, in the life-
struggle, while conduct of the latter sort tends to disappear as evolu-
tion proceeds.

Thus far we have only considered conduct in relation to individual
life. We have still to consider the evolution of conduct as related to
the life of the species.

In considering the evolution of structures and functions we have
not only to consider the influence of the struggle for inidvidual exist-
ence, but also the effects of the contest in which each race as a whole
is engaged — and to do this we have to consider, first, those circum-
stances which affect the propagation of the race ; secondly, the relation
of the individuals of the race to their fellows ; thirdly, the relations of
the race as a whole to other races. Something akin to this must be
done in considering the evolution of conduct. We have seen how
modes of conduct which favor the continued existence of the individu-
al are developed at the expense of modes of conduct having an oppo-
site tendency. These last die out, because the individuals of the race
who act in these ways die out. But it is obvious that conduct will be
equally apt to die out which tends to prevent or limit the adequate
renewal of the race from generation to generation. It is equally ob-
vious that whatever conduct causes contests (whether for life or sub-
sistence) within the race or species, tends to the elimination of mem-
bers of the race, and so diminishes the chances of the race in the
struggle for existence with other races. Lastly, the relations of a race
to surrounding races are manifestly of importance in the evolution of
conduct, seeing that conduct will equally tend to be diminished
whether it is unfavorable to the existence of the race in which it is
prevalent, or simply unfavorable to the separate existence of an indi-
vidual member of the race.

Now, with regard to conduct affecting the propagation of a race,
we find that, like conduct affecting individual life, it has been devel-
oped from what can hardly be called conduct at all in the lowest
grades of life to fully developed conduct, with elaborate adaptation of
means to ends in the highest. In the lowest forms of life, propagation
proceeds by mere division and subdivision, not depending so far as can
be judged on any power of controlling the process, which such creat-
ures may possess. In fact, the Protozoa multiply by dividing. We

THE MORALITY OF HAPPINESS. 315

have to pass over many grades of life before we reach such imperfect
care for propagation of the race as we find among those orders of fish
in which the male keeps watch and ward over the eggs. Still higher
' must we pass before we find any trace of affection for the young, and
higher yet before we see care given to feed and protect and keep the
young till they are able to provide for themselves.

This brings us in fact very near to the human race, which, in its
lowest races, is distinguished from other animals chiefly by the length
of time during which it feeds, protects, and trains its young. In the
higher human races all these processes are conducted with greater care
and elaboration ; more varied wants are considered and attended to,
more elaborately varied means are used for the purpose. It is easily
seen how such conduct by aiding the development of the race aids the
development of the conduct itself by wThich that result is favored.
Among those members of a race in whom the proper race-propagating
conduct is not adequately shown, propagation proceeds less effectively
— which is the same as saying that, relatively, such conduct itself must
be diminishing.

This conclusion is not inconsistent, as at first sight it might appear,
with the fact that mere numerical increase of propagation, though it
means increase in quantity of life, is not always or even generally a
proof of the growth of the race in what may be called race-vitality.
Here as elsewhere adaptation of means to ends has to be considered,
and that kind of conduct by which such adaptation is secured has the
best chances of development in the long run. Let us, for instance,
take an illustration from civilized life : An early marriage between two
persons, careless alike of present duties and future difficulties, seems at
first to tend directly to the increase of carelessness and thoughtless-
ness ; for from such a union there will probably come into existence
more than the average number of offspring, repeating in greater or
less degree the weak characters of their parents : the totality of life
characterized by undesirable qualities and conduct will thus be in-
creased, and increased in a greater ratio than the totality of prudent,
steady, and thoughtful life, Ly a well-considered union and well-judged
conduct thereafter. Yet in the long run the result proves usually
otherwise. (We consider only average results.) The larger number of
offspring of inferior qualities receive less care and inferior training ; so
that for them there is greater probability either of early death or of de-
fective adult life. The parents suffer also in the struggle thus brought
on them, for which they are ill-fitted. A diminished amount of life is
likely to result, and (taking the average of many cases) probably does
result ; wThile certainly there is diminished life-quality. Hence results
a correspondingly diminished amount and influence of the inferior
kind of conduct shown by thoughtlessness or carelessness about life's
duties. On the other hand, the well-judged and not too hasty union
of two care-taking persons, though it may add a smaller number of

3i6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

individual lives to the life of the race, adds better and more enduring
life, life more likely to maintain and sustain the qualities of the par-
ents, giving therefore to these qualities in the race at once more sta-
bility and wider influence. In other words, the qualities best suited
for the propagation of the race, and best suited for the race, will on
the average be developed, while qualities having opposite tendencies
will either be eliminated, or though they may remain will occupy a
lower place and have diminished influence on the fortunes of the race
— a circumstance tending of itself still further to their eventual elimi-
nation.

But, within a race and in the relations of the race to other races,
there are causes which influence the evolution of conduct. Members
of a race fight out the contest for existence not alone but more or
less in the presence of their fellows and in the presence of members of
other races. Each individual in providing for his own wants or for
his own defense affects more or less others, either of his own race or
of other races, in their efforts to defend or sustain their lives. Very
often, as Mr. Herbert Spencer quaintly puts it, "a successful adjust-
ment by one creature involves an unsuccessful adjustment made by
another creature, either of the same kind or of a different kind." The
lion and the lamb, for instance, already anticipate the millennium ;
but the lion adjusts matters so much more successfully than the lamb
as to take the outside place ; the lamb lies down with the lion, but —
inside. Among all races, herbivorous as well as carnivorous, similar
relations exist. The more vigorous get the better food, food which
the weaker contend for in vain or have to resign, when obtained, to
superior strength. Within one and the same race there is still the same
law. The stronger monopolize, if they can, the feeding-grounds of
the race. The weaker, whether originally so, or become so through
age or disease, succumb in greater numbers than the stronger in the
struggle for existence. Only, while the death of those weak through
age does not affect the evolution of the race, the greater mortality
among those originally weaker than the rest modifies the race-quali-
ties.

In these contests conduct plays an important part. Unnecessary
contests involve unnecessary risks. That conduct must prevail best
in the long run, and therefore that conduct must eventually be evolved
and developed, by which adjustments for the advantage of one creat-
ure do not needlessly interfere with adjustments for the advantage of
other creatures. If we imagine a carnivorous animal carefully limit-
ing his search for animal food to his requirements, not killing where
there was no occasion, and keeping carefully all food he had once
obtained, we see that his chances in the life-struggle would be better
than those of a carnivore of the same race who killed whenever he
got the chance. It would be more the interest of other creatures (as
for instance those who wanted the same sort of food) to eliminate

THE MORALITY OF HAPPINESS. 317

the carnivore of the latter sort, than to remove the more prudent
member of the race. In the long run this would tell even among the
flower animals. But, as we approach the relations of men to men and
men to animals, we see more obviously how conduct in which the in-
terests or the wants of others are considered is safer in the long run,
more conducive (in hundreds of ways more or less complex) to pro-
longed existence, than conduct in which those interests and wants are
neglected. Hence there will be a tendency, acting slowly but surely,
to the evolution of conduct of the former kind. More of those whose
conduct is of that character, or approaches that character, will sur-
vive in each generation, than of those whose conduct is of an opposite
character. The difference may be slight, and therefore the effect in
a single generation, or even in several, may also be slight ; but in the
long run the law must tell. Conduct of the sort least advantageous
will tend to die out, because those showing it will have relatively infe-
rior life-chances.

Mr. Spencer seems to me to leave his argument a little incomplete
just here. For, though he shows that conduct avoiding harm to
others, in all races, must tend to make the totality of life larger, this
in reality is insufficient. He is dealing with the evolution of conduct.
Now, to take a concrete example, those of the hawk tribe who left
little birds alone, except when they had no other way to keep them-
selves alive but by capturing and killing them, would help to increase
the totality of life, by leaving more birds to propagate their kind than
would be left if a more wholesale slaughter were carried out. But
this of itself would not tend to develop that moderation of hawk
character which we have imagined. The creatures helped in the life-
struggle would not be the hawks (so far as this particular increase in
the totality of life was concerned), but the small birds ; and the only
kind of moderation or considerateness encouraged would be shown in
a lessening of that extreme diffidence, that desire to withdraw them-
selves wholly from hawk society, which we recognize among small
birds. But if it be shown that the more wildly rapacious hawks stand
a greater chance of being destroyed than those of a more moderate
character, then we see that such moderation and steadiness of charac-
ter are likely to be developed and finally established as a character-
istic of the more enduring races of hawks. And similarly in other
such cases. .

It is, however, in the development of conduct in the higher races
only, that this comparatively elaborate law of evolution is clearly rec-
ognized. Among savage races we still see apparent exceptions to
the operation of the rule. Individuals and classes and races distin-
guished by ferocity and utter disregard of the "adjustments" of
others, whether of their own race or of different races, seem to thrive
well enough, better even than the more moderate and considerate.
Forces really are at work tending to eliminate the more violent and

3i8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

greedy ; but they are not obvious. As society advances, however,
even this seeming success of the rapacious is found to diminish, though
as yet there has been no race or society from which it has been actu-
ally eliminated. Conduct which is imperfect, conduct characterized
by antagonisms between groups and antagonisms between members
of the same group, tends to be more and more reduced in amount, by
the failure or by the elimination of those who exhibit such conduct.
What is regarded as gallant daring in one generation is scorned as
ferocity in a later one, resisted as rapacious wrong-doing yet later,
and later still is eliminated either by death or nearly as effectually
(when indirect as well as direct consequences are considered) by im-
prisonment.*

As violence dies out, and as war diminishes — which usually is but
violence manifested on a larger scale — the kind of conduct toward
which processes of evolution appear to tend, "that perfect adjustment
of acts to ends in maintaining individual life and rearing new indi-
viduals, which is effected by each without hindering others from effect-
ing like perfect adjustments," will be approached. How nearly it will
ever be attained by any human race — quien sabe ?

One further consideration, and we have done with the evolution
of conduct, the right understanding of which is essential to the scien-
tific study of conduct. The members of a society, while attending to
adjustments necessary for their wants or interests, may not merely
leave others free to make their adjustments also, but may help them
in so doing. It is very obvious that conduct thus directed must tend
to be developed. As Mr. Spencer says, such conduct facilitates the
making of adjustments by each, and so increases the totality of the
adjustments made, and serves to render the lives of all more complete.
But besides this (as he should also have shown, since it is an essential
part of the evolution argument), it tends to its own increase : for,
being essentially mutual, conduct of this kind is a favorable factor in
the life-struggle.

We have next to consider what, seeing thus the laws according to
which conduct is evolved, we are to regard as good conduct and bad
conduct.

* Many overlook the bearing of imprisonment on the evolution of conduct — its in-
fluence (when long terms arc considered) in diminishing the numerical increase of
particular types of character, and therefore in diminishing the quantity of particular
forms of conduct.

FEMALE EDUCATION, 319

FEMALE EDUCATION FKOM A MEDICAL POINT OF

VIEW*

By T. S. CLOUSTON, M. D.

AS the result of my inquiries among pupils and teachers in the
advanced schools for young ladies, I find that about five or six
hours of actual school- work, and from two to four hours of preparation
at home, may be taken as the time that is each day occupied in educa-
tion. Many of the ambitious, clever girls, in order to take high places
and prizes, work far longer than the time I have mentioned in prepar-
ing at home, especially if the musical practicing is taken into account.
At certain times of the year, before examination, some of these girls will
work twelve and fourteen hours a day, and take no exercise to speak
of, and but little fresh air. For those who attend the day-schools a
somewhat solemn walk to and from school is the chief means the body
has of keeping healthy at all. To satisfy the requirements of the
brain, and the blood, and the muscles, and the digestion, and the nu-
trition, and the general growth, we have a girl getting up at seven
o'clock in the dark winter morning, dressing, eating a hasty breakfast
(as if that was a secondary matter that was too unimportant to waste
much time over), having a revise of some special subject learned the
night before, walking to school in perhaps thin-soled boots, and doing
the most physiologically profitable thing of the day in the chat and
gossip on the way. School and lessons from nine o'clock till two or
three, or four often, in questionably aired, overheated, and dull class-
rooms, with not a bright bit of paint or color in them to counteract the
sunless gloom of our Scotch winter weather. Who ever saw a class-
room in a school where taste had been exercised in the decoration and
painting ? In my opinion our school-rooms should be made at least
as nice as our drawing-rooms. Then the walk home, a hurried dinner,
a little rest, and to work till nine or ten o'clock at night in gas-light.
That is the sort of life, and these are the conditions, under which we
expect not only prodigies of learning in all the sciences, but sweet
tempers and sweetly healthful bodies to be developed. That is the
actual treatment to which thousands of our girls are subjected during
the most momentous period of their lives, physiologically ; when the
growth of the body is being completed, its symmetry and perfection
are being reached, when the latent energies for a life's work are being
or should be accumulating, and when a certain amount of joy and fun
and play is Nature's best aid to health of body and mind.

There is another class of young women who have even a harder lot
in many cases, and these are the pupil-teachers in the board-schools.

* The second of two lectures delivered at the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh,
November, 1882.

320 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Their work is, in some cases, simply continuous all day, and part of it
is irksome, uninteresting drudgery ; their homes are often far from
being cheerful, and their food far from being very abundant. I know
as a fact that the lives of some of our female pupil-teachers are such
that as melancholy a " Song of the School " could be sung of them as
Hood's " Song of the Shirt."

In both these cases — the scholars in the higher class of girls' schools
and the female pupil-teachers — the range of subjects to be learned at
the same time is often enormous. Six, seven, eight, nine, and even
ten different subjects, all being learned at once, is no uncommon thing !
I am glad to say that this is being corrected in the best schools, and
only four or five subjects are allowed to be taught at the same time.
This is surely enough.

If I had a school to construct on ideal principles, I should have it
placed on the north side of a large space of ground. I should have it
one story only, and every class-room lofty, and with roof-lights to let
in as much as possible of our scanty Scotch sunlight. I should have
the walls of the class-room painted in light, cheerful, tasteful colors, to
produce a cheering effect on the minds of the pupils. I should have
big, open fireplaces to cheer and to ventilate the rooms, I should
have, as an essential adjunct, a great room, where gymnastics, romp-
ing, dancing, and play should all have full scope, when the weather
did not admit of the girls going out. I should not restrain romping
and play, even in girls of eighteen, between classes. Girls between
thirteen and twenty will romp well, if they are in health, and there is
no pressure put on them that it is not the thing for them to do. I
should not have more than four hours of good hard work at school,
and two of preparation at home. The fact is, that our scholars lose
the benefit for their health of the best part of our Scotch winter days,
the forenoon, when we sometimes have both sunshine and dryness in
the air. By the time school is over, the day is done.

One of the practices most energetically relied on in the higher class
of girls' schools is that of the competition of one scholar with another.
In some of them this competition is terrific. It extends to every sub-
ject ; it becomes so keen as to put each girl who is in the foremost
rank in a fever-heat of emulation before the examinations. In some
cases it overmasters every other feeling for the time being. No doubt,
from the schoolmaster's point of view, it is the very thing he wants.
In his professional enthusiasm he aims at the highest mental result.
He is not professionally interested in the health or the special nervous
constitution of his girls ; he does not regard them as each one a medico-
psychological entity and problem. I don't say this by way of re-
proach. All good men try to attain the highest result in their special
departments. The educator has no means of knowing the constitution
and hereditary weakness of his girls — that the mother of one died of
consumption, that the father of another was insane, that neuralgia is

FEMALE EDUCATION. 321

hereditary in the family of a third, that one has been nervous, another
had convulsions when a baby, another has been threatened with water
in the head, etc. His own education and training have not taught
him to notice or know the meaning of narrow chests, or great thin-
ness, or stooping shoulders, or very big heads, or quick, jerky move-
ments, or dilated pupils, or want of appetite, or headaches, or irrita-
bility, or back-aches, or disinclination to bodily exertion. But all these
things exist in abundance in every big school, and the girls handi-
capped in that way are set into competition with those who are strong
and free from risks. It is the most nervous, excitable, and highly
strung girls who throw themselves into the school competition most
keenly. And they, of course, are just the most liable to be injured by
it. All good observers say the intensity of feeling displayed in girls'
competitions is greater than among lads, and that there is far more
apt to arise a personal animus. Girls don't take a beating so quietly
as boys. Their moral constitution, while in some ways stronger than
that of boys, especially at that age, suffers more from any disturbing
cause. The whole thing takes greater hold of them — is more real. It
is more boys' nature to fight and forget, and take defeat calmly.
Girls, I believe, suffer, when the competition in schools is too keen, in
their tenderness of feeling and in their charity. They tend to attrib-
ute unfairness of motive to their teachers far more than boys, just
because their affective nature is and should be stronger than their rea-
soning power. A man's idea of the perfection of feminine nature is,
that it always has some self-denial and much generosity in it. Now,
these keen school competitions admit in theory of no such notions of
self-denial or generosity, though both are common enough in individ-
ual cases. An ideal woman should rejoice as much in sympathy with
the winner of the first place as if she had won it herself. Men cer-
tainly don't, in their hearts, like to see girls competing keenly with
each other for anything.

Young women at adolescence are apt to have in large degree the
feminine power of taking it out of themselves for a time, more than
they are able to bear for long. It is this power which enables a mother
to watch a sick child for weeks without almost any sleep, and without
feeling much sense of fatigue at the time. Now, when this power is
called up for months for such a purpose as school competition — the
feelings being stimulated by rivalry with others, and by the enthusi-
asm of that age, during a period of life when the body is undeveloped,
and should be rapidly growing, and all these functions and faculties
maturing — it is perverted from the real use that Nature meant it for,
and the results can not fail to be bad. At that age girls are not only
enthusiastic in perception and reception, but they are often very con-
scientious, and apply their ideas of right and wrong to things that
have no ethical relationship. They are, in fact, hyper-conscientious,
and make themselves unhappy about school deficiencies, for which

VOL. XXIV. — 21 x

322

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

they are not in the least responsible. I have known girls cry bitterly
because an accident or headache prevented them preparing their les-
sons for the morrow, and blame themselves severely about it. It is
not uncommon for our Scotch girls, at least, to think it is some derelic-
tion of duty and sin on their part that prevents them from attaining a
high place at school. The whole process of education, as it exists in
some schools, with its competition, long hours of work, short hours of
recreation, enthusiasm for work, and conscientiousness in the doing of
it, takes up all the available energy of the girl. There is little left for
joyous feeling and enjoyment of life for its own sake. The sources of
vital energy in the brain are not sufficiently replenished by fresh air
and the frolic natural to the age. Blood is not formed in sufficient
amount, and pale cheeks and flabby muscles are the result. Nature
can not get material and force to build up the form toward the fair
woman's ideal, and, therefore, personal beauty and grace of movement
are not attained to the extent they should be. As for a store of en-
ergy being laid up, as it should be at that age, for the future, for
woman's work of the future, for motherhood, for the race of the
future, how can it be, when every available energy is taken up in this
educative process ?

The methods of education are nowadays made far more pleasant
for a pupil than they were formerly. Every art and device is now
adopted to make it attractive and interesting. That, no doubt, is in
the right direction, and it has resulted from a closer study of the men-
tal nature of pupils. But it is attended with this danger, that, being
more attractive, it can be pushed further and more hurtfully to the
constitution, by the aid of the pupils, as it were. Its very seductive-
ness and interest, like the tempting courses of a feast, tend toward
dangerous surfeiting.

It must be remembered that, in many respects, the female organism
is far more delicate than that of men. This is especially so at adoles-
cence. The machine is less tough, and breaks down at slighter causes.
It has more calls on it. It needs more careful management. It is not
steady in its action, but irregular. It is not fitted for the regular
grind that the man can keep up. Having beauty and harmony as two
of its great ideal aims, its strength is not so great. Having to lay up
more for the future, it can't expend so much in the present. Sensi-
tiveness always implies delicacy, and in many cases instability in
nature. .Even suppose it is granted that it was a good thing for a
woman that her brain should contain all the book-knowledge that
many modern educationalists demand, this good thing might be al-
together counterbalanced if the labor of acquiring it stopped one inch
of growth, or diminished the joy and organic satisfaction of life one
iota. If the men of the future were to suffer and be degenerate
through it in the faintest degree, then it would be radically bad.

There is one most unaccountable want in very many girls' schools

FEMALE EDUCATION. 323

in our cities. If boys need play, fresh air, games, muscular develop-
ment, I have no hesitation in saying that girls need them all to the
extent applicable to their constitution and strength still more. For
boys will have them to some extent. If you don't give a boy a play-
ground he will play on the street, which is better than no play. Now,
the exigency of public opinion will not allow our young ladies to
amuse themselves on the streets ; and, if not, how are they to get the
fresh air and muscular exercise that are absolutely necessary for their
health and proper development ? You can not starve a girl's life of
these things without doing her harm, any more than you can with im-
punity keep her on a short allowance of food. A girls' school without
a play-ground, a gymnasium, or public park near, I look on as a garden
without sunshine, or a boat with one oar. It is deficient and one-
sided ; it is a machine for production without sufficient provision for
the renovation of wear and tear. Mind can't grow except by growth
of brain ; brain can't grow but through good food, fresh air, work,
and rest, in proper proportion. The blood will not renew itself prop-
erly in youth but by brisk circulation, and this can only be got by
exercise in the fresh air. The muscles won't grow and harden but by
having plenty of good blood and exercise. The fat, that most essen-
. tial concomitant of female adolescence, won't form in the proper way,
except the blood is rich. Fat is to the body what fun is to the mind,
an indication of spare power that is boiling over and available for
future use. I don't mean an excessive amount of fat ; I mean that
amount that gives roundness, plumpness, and beauty. This little esti-
mated substance is, with form, the great source of female beauty.
Without it, form can not make a perfect woman ; without it, a young
woman can not be said to be really in health ; without it, the body
generally has, in most instances, too little spare energy to resist and
to recover from disease. Therefore, a proper amount of fat should,
in its way, be as much looked to in a young woman as intellectual
power or keen feeling. The right sort of fat, firm and smooth, gives
the lines of beauty and the idea of softness and health to woman. But
to the physiologist its great value and importance are as an index of
good nutrition and a reserve of spare material, not needed for work
just now, but called up in any illness. When anything is both a
beauty and a strength, it should not be decried or spoken disrespect-
fully of. I knew a man — not a lunatic — who always said it was his
highest ambition to be fat. Certainly there are many more foolish
wishes for our growing adolescent girls than that they should all be
fat. It is just because this seems to be incompatible with the work in
some of our modern city high-class schools, that I think that work
must be conducted to some extent on wrong principles.

I am no educationalist, and may be accused of speaking about
what I am ignorant of, if I suggest that too many things are taught
at the same time, and too little time is taken for the whole process.

324 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Think of an undeveloped brain getting up book-knowledge on ten
different subjects all the same day, and this going on day after day
for years ! It is altogether contrary to the principles of a sound
psychology to imagine that any sort of mental process, worthy of the
name of thinking, can take place in that brain while that is going on.
The natural tendency of a good brain at that age to be inquisitive
and receptive is glutted to more than satiety. The natural process of
building up a fabric of mental completeness by having each new fact
and observation looked at in different ways, and having it suggest
other facts and ideas, and then settle down as a part of the regular fur-
niture of the mind, can not possibly go on where new facts are shov-
eled in by the hundred day by day. The effect of this is bad on
boys, but is worse on girls, because it is more alien to their mental
constitution. The effect on them of this unnatural process is to ex-
haust the nervous power at the time, and to leave the brain afterward
filled with useless things that are soon forgotten and pass away ; as
Goethe said about professional men : they labor under a great disad-
vantage in not being allowed to be ignorant of what is to them use-
less. The vital energies and nervous power that had thus been thrown
away should have gone toward a feminine equipment of a healthy,
well-developed body, a mind built up and stored with knowledge that
had a relation to its own nature and to the wants of its future life,
affections not attenuated by scholastic routine, and a cheerfulness that
is only compatible with good health. The cramming up of the dry
facts of those many subjects is in most cases a weariness and pain,
while the intelligent study of one third of them, selected on account
of their fitness to the mental constitution of the learner, or her prob-
able requirements in future life, might be a pleasure and a lasting
profit. I would strongly advise parents occasionally to take their
daughters' night tasks and do them themselves. It is far more im-
portant to extend female education till after twenty years of age than
male education.

While education is going on, a regular periodic testing of the
bodily growth and condition should also be carried out in the case of
every girl. Her rate of growth should be marked by a notch on a stick
every quarter. As regularly as the school fees are paid her weight
should be taken, the color of her cheeks and lips should be looked at
and noted, her appetite and digestion should be looked to, her habits
of activity or otherwise should be observed, her power of sleeping
should be noticed, the mode of growth should be observed — e. g.,
whether her chest is expanding, whether her shoulders are sloping or
stooping, whether she is soft or firm in the flesh, etc. Her general
mental condition, whether she is frolicsome or irritable, enthusiastic
or sluggish, selfish and grudging, or not, is of great moment as an in-
dex of the general brain-condition. Of course, anything like disorder
of health, or pain, or sleeplessness, or want of appetite, or pallor, or

FEMALE EDUCATION. 325

thinness, should be at once attended to before it goes too far. The
great thing is to stop the beginnings of evil. If a girl has grown a
couple of inches a year, then depend upon it she should not study
hard, Nature has enough to do in such a case to firm up the body in
proportion to its bulk. You want not only growth, but activity, grace
of movement, alertness, strength. You won't have these if the girl
goes on studying hard while she is growing fast.* If growth and in-
crease in weight stop too soon, a wise parent will send off her daughter
to the country to run to grass for a time, to see if mental inactivity
will restore the body-growth. If she is getting thin, let her live out
in the open air, instead of in a school, till her appetite becomes raven-
ous, and she puts on flesh.

There are three considerations that ought certainly to determine
the mode, kind, and amount of the education given to any youth or
maiden/ These are — 1. The hereditary constitution of the brain, in-
cluding both its strong and weak points ; 2. The actual ascertainable
-mental and bodily qualities and capacities and special tendencies of
the child ; and, 3. The purposes in life that he or she is destined to
accomplish. It is owing to our backward physiological knowledge
alone that the two former have not hitherto been taken into account,
as they ought to have been, by doctors, parents, and teachers. In re-
gard to heredity, when we know its laws more fully in human beings,
.we shall be able, by influences brought to bear on development and by
appropriate conditions of life, greatly to counteract weak points, and
to make strong ones available for the purposes of life. We are now
able to do so to a considerable extent in the animal kingdom. Man
has for his own purposes developed breeds of carrier-pigeons, race-
horses, pointer-dogs, etc. We shall not be able to control the heredity
of human beings as we can that of the lower animals, but we can apply
conditions of life in a scientific manner for our aims. And, even in
regard to the mode in which marriages are arranged, a medico-psy-
chologist can not for a moment admit that young persons of either
sex fall in love and assort themselves on no scientific principles. The
sympathies and affinities of sex are just as much subject to law as any
other part of nature. We doctors have much occasion to know that
persons of a nervous heredity and disposition are extremely apt to fall
in love with and marry each other. The way in which nervousness of
all sorts is thus increased is extraordinary. The educators do their
best to foster this tendency in the maidens by brain-forcing. The
brilliancy of the results at the time are certainly very tempting.

* On October 1st I weighed and measured three children of one family, two boys and a
girl, on their return to school after the holidays, and on November 30th I again did so.
The boys had each gained four pounds in weight and grown half an inch, the girl had
neither gained nor grown. The boys had had lots of play in the open air between les-
sons, the girl had been five hours each day continuously in school. The boys' class-
rooms had been built for a school, the girl's class-rooms were in a small private house.

326 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

It may be that it will be for the advantage of the world deliber-
ately to develop different kinds of men and women in the future.
We may get better general results by having brain specialties fostered.
We may thus have some families of special aesthetic power, some of
mechanical genius, and some of enduring muscular work, just as we
have pointers, greyhounds, and sheep-dogs. But even then it would,
be more than ever necessary to see that the special strong point did
not override and interfere with the general nutritive power and vital
energy. In training a greyhound, however anxious the trainer is to
get speed, he takes care that the dog is very well nourished while he
grows, and he never develops his speed till the growth is nearly done,
and the bones are set. He doesn't all the time he is growing run the
animal every day. He knows that would spoil the general strength,
and shorten the period of greatest activity.

The development of special strong points during the process of the
education of children I believe to be of vast importance to the race,
but it must be done in accordance with Nature's general laws that gov-
ern the development of the organism as a whole. The special educa-
tion must be accompanied by the general development. It must not
be pushed to the extent that it absorbs energy needed for other pur-
poses. I can imagine no more interesting or important problem in
education than the successful cultivation of specialties. It is quite
certain that as yet it has not been solved or even studied to any ex-
tent. If you hear of a young lady now who is very musical, you
usually find she has so much music added to the grammar and the
French and German. It is as important in education to know what
things to omit as to know what things to press. It is enough to make
one despair of the inherent reasonableness of human nature to think
of the amount of time and toil that are given in Edinburgh to the
learning of things for which there is no inherent capacity in the learn-
ers ; things that go against the intellectual grain, that are learned
poorly and with much difficulty, against Nature ; and are forgotten at
once, in accordance with Nature's laws. Think of the girls who toil
at music, who have no inherent musical capacity ; of the time that is
taken in committing to memory rules of grammar, and doing parsing,
the real meaning of which the girls' brains could not comprehend, if
they lived till they were ninety ; of the labor and sorrow given to ac-
quire languages, by girls whom Nature meant only to speak their
mother-tongue ; of the futile attempts to take those past the rule of
three, whom Nature intended to stop at simple division. The sad thing
is that we all know each of those girls could do something or other
very well and to some purpose in after-life, if we could only hit on
what it is.

I don't want to frighten any one unduly by the list of bodily and
mental diseases and defects that are in some cases attributable to wrong
methods of education that I am about to refer to. I would beg every

FEMALE EDUCATION. 327

one who hears me to keep in mind that the worst of such things are
the exception. No process of attempted educational stimulation will
do much harm to very many brains, fortunately as I think. Their in-
herent stability — which, by-the-way, parents and teachers will igno-
rantly call stupidity or want of application — sometimes preserves them
from being forced into work inconsistent with their bent and capacity.
Who does not know dozens of fine girls — capable, practical, intelligent,
affectionate, lively — who never could be made scholars of, and yet who
know more that will be useful to them than some of the first prize-
women ? They never ran any risk of suffering from over-education,
their only risk was badly ventilated school-rooms and want of scope
for play. It is very difficult, I know, to treat of the professional as-
pect of a question popularly without producing misconceptions. If a
case of consumption from ill-ventilated school-rooms is referred to,
many people jump to the conclusion that all girls are in danger of con-
sumption. Nothing could be more absurd. The fact is that, if we
and our families were thoroughly healthy in original constitution, the
educationalists and their present over-enthusiastic methods would not
hurt our daughters so very much, perhaps, at least permanently. Na-
ture would call a halt with sufficient distinctness before much harm
was done, and then the wondrous recuperative power of that time of
life would soon put matters right again. It is because few persons
nowadays have faultless constitutions, and few families are altogether
free from tendencies to some disease or other, that one needs to be
now more careful of the constitutions of the mothers of the next gen-
eration.

The first bodily defect to which I shall refer, as the result of over-
stimulation of brain, is what we doctors call ancemia, or in other words
bloodlessness. The girls look pale about the lips, and have no rosy
cheeks. This is manifestly most common in school-girls. Any one
can see it.

The next faulty bodily condition that may be caused by wrong
methods of education is that of stunted growth. I have seen girls, the
daughters of well-grown parents, who simply stopped growing too
soon. They are more or less dwarfish specimens of their kind, this be-
ing caused, as I believe, by the vital and nervous force being appro-
priated by the mental part of the brain in learning its tasks, and by the
conditions of life in the school-rooms not being good, the air bad, in-
sufficient play-hours, no play-ground, no play-room, no walking in the
fresh air and sunshine. I have seen other girls who grew tall enough,
but wouldn't fatten. They remained thin and scrawny. Now, this is
not what a woman should be at any age if it can be helped.

The next condition sometimes produced is best described by the
word nervousness. That is a condition of mind and body in which
there is want of stability and fixity, undue excitability, bodily restless-
ness, want of solidity and calmness of constitution, ungrounded fears,

328 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

deficient power of self-control, over-sensitiveness in all directions, and
a very great many other unpleasant things, far too numerous to men-
tion here. This nervousness is commonly hereditary, but may be
greatly aggravated or counteracted by the conditions of life, especially
in youth. Such a constitution is a great curse to a woman, and ren-
ders her liable to many diseases. It means a brain wanting in reserve
or surplus energy. Such a brain is like a galvanic battery that does
not work steadily, but gives out too much power at one time, then sud-
denly is exhausted, and is always needing replenishing. There can be
but little doubt that the tendency of our modern life is toward the de-
velopment of the nervous type of constitution, or diathesis. American
physicians and socialists are unanimous that this constitution is very
common in their country. I think there can be little doubt that, if we
wish our descendants to multiply and cover the earth, we should try by
all means and counteract this tendency to the nervous constitution in a
morbid degree. It is most hereditary in all its forms. There are few
families among the educated classes nowadays free from some taint
of it, and it is easily increased. In the families that are now free there
is much risk of its being developed in the period of adolescence in the
girls, through the present system of education. All our modern ways
of looking at life help to develop nerves in a bad sense. The ideal of
man and woman has changed from strength to culture, from body to
brain. The great brawny-muscled man, who knows nothing of sick-
ness, but has few ideas, is looked down on ; the rosy mother of a dozen
healthy children, who has .no taste for books, is little thought of. It
may be that the time will come when such people will be more highly
appreciated. Out of the nervous diathesis may arise all the forms of
nervous disease, when their exciting causes are put in operation.

Strongly connected with nervousness is the tendency to suffer
from pain without any actual disease being present to account for
it ; that is, to be the subject of headaches and neuralgias. Head-
ache is the most common thing suffered by school-girls, and originated
by the conditions of school-life. Dr. Truchler found that in Darm-
stadt, Paris, and Nuremburg, one third of the pupils in the schools
suffered more or less from headaches. I think we should find this
proportion in our advanced girls' schools in Edinburgh. He concludes
that it is caused by the intellectual exertion, combined with bad air,
with the annoyances and excitements and worries, the wasting and
rasping anxieties of school-life. Nothing is so terrible as severe neu-
ralgia, and beyond a doubt girls acquire it often enough by the condi-
tions of school-life. Headaches in a school-girl usually mean exhausted
nerve-power through overwork, over-excitement, over-anxiety, or bad
air. Rest, a good laugh, or a country walk, will usually cure it readily
enough to begin with. But to become subject to headaches is a very
serious matter, and all such nervous diseases have a nasty tendency to
recur, to become periodic, to be set up by the same causes, to become

FEMALE EDUCATION. 329

an organic habit of the body. For any woman to become liable to
severe neuralgia is a most terrible thing. It means that while it lasts
life is not worth having. It paralyzes the power to work, it deprives
her of the power to enjoy anything, it tends toward irritability of
temper, it tempts to the use of narcotics and stimulants.

There is but little doubt that a tendency to take stimulants to ex-
cess, a morbid craving for alcohol, or drugs that have something like
the same effect, goes with the nervousness engendered by school-life.
A healthy brain in a healthy body should have no inordinate craving
for stimulants. Some of the worst examples I have seen of a craving
for stimulants or opium, having become uncontrollable and a real dis-
ease, have been in our highly - educated ladies. Tea sometimes is
craved for, and taken to excess in such cases.

The most important effect of all I can not very well enter on in
detail, for it relates to woman's highest function, that of motherhood.
But that this is affected, and most seriously, by over-education in bad
methods and under bad conditions, no physician will deny. If the
end of mind-culture is to be that its victim is to suffer in a more ter-
rible way from mother Eve's primal curse, and is to have fewer off-
spring, and those she has are to be of a puny kind, the risk will be
recognized by all thoughtful persons as too severe to be deliberately
run for our daughters. Perfect health is a priceless blessing to all,
but it means even more to women than to men. The cheerfulness and
vivacity that are their special characteristic, seem to exist not for
themselves alone, but for their families as well, and those are, gen-
erally speaking, wanting if the health is bad. Woman is gifted with
the power not only of bearing her own share of ills, but of helping to
bear those of others. She can't do so in the same degree if she is not
in health. She is a plant more difficult to rear than man in our state
of society. More care has to be taken of her to mature and consoli-
date all her organs and functions. Once fully formed as a woman,
she can then stand much, but she is specially liable to the effects of
adverse conditions during her development. The full bloom of her
perfection as the tender mother, the never-tiring nurse of a large fam-
ily of children, can not be attained if she has been stunted in her full
development in any way. Whether she is an actual mother or not,
she is infinitely the better for having the full capacity of motherhood.
Be she teacher, scholar, or lady of fortune, she will be happier and do
her work far better, if she has all the qualities of motherhood. They
influence body and mind ; any process of education that lessens them
deprives the world of means of happiness. It stunts the woman and
robs the world. No intellectual results, no culture, no mental eleva-
tion, can make up to the world for the loss of any perceptible degree
of motherhood ; and, as an actual fact, physicians find that over-edu-
cation by bad methods and under bad conditions has this effect.

The first appearance of the conditions called hysteria is usually

330 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

coincident with adolescence, and is undoubtedly caused in many in-
stances by subtile disturbances of the health, due to prolonged school-
hours. This is a most troublesome disease, and most varied in its
manifestations. In nothing is the connection between mind and
body, between function and feeling, better seen than in certain hys-
terical conditions. You have a splendidly educated girl according .
to the modern standard, with a physique that seems very fairly de-
veloped, just showing by certain subtile indications that the mental
portion of the brain has been made too dominant. You have this
girl prostrated in what seems the most mysterious way by hysteria,
in one of its hundred forms. You can't actually say what is wrong,
but you know that, if she had been brought up in the country, with
moderate schooling, and four or five hours a day in the open air, there
would not have occurred anything of the kind. It may result from
idleness just as it does from over-brain- work, the one being as much
contrary to the laws of nature as the other. It is an illustration of
the fact that you may have effects produced by wrong methods of
education that are not to be detected till they break out in actual
disease. If the seeds of disease or the conditions that tend to it are
laid by any system of training, it is nearly as bad as actual visible
disease. Sometimes it is said about the girls in a school, " Just look
at them, are they not fairly healthy for town girls who are working
hard ? " But one of the dangers is that we may not be able to see
the beginnings of evil, and only by sad experience afterward find that
they were there.

The last kinds of disease to which I shall refer as being a direct or
indirect result, in some cases, of over-study under bad conditions, are
inflammation of the brain and its membranes, and insanity — the for-
mer of which all physicians have often enough seen to be the direct
result of over-study ; while the latter may be regarded, in its essential
nature, as the acme of all nervous diseases. In it, that highest portion
of the brain that ministers directly to mind is disordered, that very
portion that in over-education has been forced and crammed with
book-knowledge. Mental disease is not common till toward the end
of the period of adolescence, but the conditions that lead up to it are
common enough before then. The mere acquiring knowledge seldom
causes insanity. Its causes in youth are all the conditions of life that
accompany over-education, as well as the brain - forcing itself, the
want of fresh air, the poor bodily development, the poverty of blood,
the deranged undeveloped bodily functions. Insanity in early youth
always arises out of some nervous weakness in ancestry. It may not
be mental disease itself — for a tendency to neuralgia or drunkenness,
or mere nervousness in ancestors, may become insanity in the off-
spring, if wrong conditions of life are in operation. But it is often
just the children of highly nervous parents — perhaps subject to " nerv-
ous depression" — who are quick, precocious, and educable in book-

FEMALE EDUCATION. 331

knowledge to a very high degree. They get pushed to their bent,
and with all this they have little craving for fresh air and romping.
They are often over-conscientious and most receptive. In fact, they
are the very young women that delight the heart of the teacher, and
sometimes carry off all the prizes at the end of a school session. The
treatment of the teacher and the physician would be exactly opposite
for such cases. The physician would take such brains to put them to
grass for two or three generations — would scarcely educate them at
all in the ordinary sense — would send them to grow up almost unin-
structed in the country, cultivating blood, bone, muscle, and doing
mechanical work alone. That would be the only salvation for such
brains. But then we should perhaps miss having a genius once in a
century. We should have our Chattertons working as joiners in the
country, instead of writing poetry and committing suicide in town
garrets." I could adduce many lamentable examples, from my own
experience, of most brilliant school careers ending in insanity. If I
had written down the fierce apostrophe of a young lady of twenty on
her entry into the asylum at Morningside, at the end of a school career
of unexampled success, the reading of it would do more to frighten
the ambitious parents of such children from hastening their daughters
forward at school too fast than all the scientific protests we doctors
can make. She was well aware of the cause of her illness, and with
-passionate eloquence enumerated the consequences of her losing her
reason.

It is not very long since a pupil-teacher, who had been working all
winter about ten hours a day in teaching and preparation, and had
taken no exercise or fresh air at all, after suffering for a while from
headaches and confusion of mind, threw herself into a pond. She
told me afterward that the harder she worked the more confused she
got, then she got depressed, and then lost her self-control.

There can be no doubt that too hard school- work in young women
during the adolescent period tends to bring out hereditary, nervous,
and other weaknesses. The great natural protection against these is
sound health and general bodily vigor in a frame that has been brought
carefully to full maturity, harmonious and healthy in all its functions.
This law is found to prevail in regard to nervous hereditary weak-
nesses, that the stronger and more direct the tendency, the earlier in
life such weakness is apt to show itself. If we can postpone it, we
can frequently avert it altogether.

Of the chief purely mental results of a brain-education higher than
the whole organization can bear, one is unquestionably a certain change
in the natural mental type of woman. I shall be asked, of course, What
is the natural female psychical type ? Is it to be found in the unedu-
cated women of the East, or among the uncultivated classes of the West ?
Without going into argument, I may say that I should be willing to
take the general character of womanliness pervading all the various

332 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

types of young women created for us by the writers of genius, to whom
I referred in my first lecture. That type is physiologically, as well as
psychologically, true to nature. It is absolutely necessary as a com-
plement to the masculine type of mind. Both are incomplete by them-
selves. The world can not do without them both ; they correspond
to the bodily organization of each sex. Now, if the education process
for the female is to be just on the lines of that for the male, if the
mold into which the brain of each is to fit is to be the same type — and
there is no question of emasculating the male type — then, undoubt-
edly, in the result, we must expect to find a change in the female type
of mind. Very many competent observers say that this is actually
very apparent in some of the school-girls of the present day. The un-
ceasing grind at book-knowledge, from thirteen to twenty, has actually
warped the woman's nature, and stunted some of her most character-
istic qualities. She is, no doubt, cultured, but then she is unsympa-
thetic ; learned, but not self-denying. The nameless graces and
charms of manner have not been evoked as much as they might have
been. Softness is deficient. It takes much to alter the female type
of mind, but a few generations of masculine education will go far to
make some change. If the main aims and ambitions of many women
are other than to be loved, admired, helped, and helpful, to be good
wives and mothers with quiverfuls of children, to be self-sacrificing,
and to be the centers of home-life, then those women will have under-
gone a change from the present feminine type of mind. But we must
comfort ourselves with Lord Bacon's reflection, that " Nature is often
hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished."

American experience in the education of young women has been
very instructive. The natural intelligence, the form of government,
and the stimulating climate, have all united in making the standard of
education very high for women as well as for young men. The na-
tional hurry has tended to make them do much in as short a time as
possible too. In the Eastern States — especially Massachusetts — the
schools for girls have for many years been most highly elaborated.
At first the effects were not much noticed, or they were attributed to
the climate, or to the hurry of life, or to the national fondness for
pastry ; but soon the American physicians sounded the alarm about
the way the New England girls were being educated. They pointed
out that during education a high pressure was kept up in girls that no
constitutions could stand without risk. They pointed to the thinness
and the nervousness of American young women. Oliver Wendell
Holmes directed attention to the " American female constitution,
which collapses just in the middle third of life, and comes out vulcan-
ized India-rubber, if it happens to live through the period when health
and strength are most wanted." It was shown how small the fami-
lies of educated American native-born women were, as compared with
those of their German and English sisters, and with the Irish living

FEMALE EDUCATION. 333

among themselves. Dr. Clarke, in his most instructive book, " Sex in
Education ; or, a Fail* Chance for Girls," pointed out to the Ameri-
can people the risks of forcing young women's brains, and the actual
consequences that American physicians found to have resulted from
that process. After pointing out that, as a matter of fact, girls in
American schools work seven or eight hours a day, he says : " Ex-
perience teaches that a healthy and growing boy may spend six hours
of force daily on his studies, and leave sufficient margin for physical
growth. A girl can not spend more than four, or, in occasional in-
stances, five hours of force daily upon her studies, and leave sufficient
margin for the general physical growth that she must make in common
with a boy, and also for her own development." In Dr. Beard's book
on " American Nervousness : its Causes and Consequences," he says
that, as the result of a large number of circulars sent to schools, the
replies were sufficient to clearly show that " nearly everything about
the conduct of the schools was wrong, unphysiological and unpsycho-
logical, and that they were conducted so as to make very sad and sor-
rowing the lives of those who were forced to attend them. It was
clear that the teachers and managers of these schools knew nothing of
and cared nothing for those matters relating to education that are of
the highest importance, and that the routine of the schools was such
as would have been devised by some evil one who wished to take ven-
geance on the race and the nation. . . . Everything pushed in an un-
scientific and distressing manner, nature violated at every step, endless
reciting and lecturing and striving to be first — such are the female
schools of America at this hour. The first signs of ascension as of
declension in nations are seen in women. As the foliage of delicate
plants first shows the early warmth of spring and the earliest frosts of
autumn, so the impressible, susceptive organization of woman appreci-
ates and exhibits far sooner than that of man the manifestation of
national progress or decay."

It must be distinctly understood that my facts and arguments only
apply to the young woman of average type and of average strength.
There are plenty of individual examples, where there is naturally so
much brain and strength that a very high kind of general masculine
education can be given from thirteen to twenty without impairing
the development. In such brains there is room for much learning
and much affection and many charms. The reasoning power, the
muscles, the fat, and the affections may be all equally developed in
them.

It may be too, I am not prepared to deny it, that an education may
be good for the individual in many cases, opening up sources of intel-
lectual happiness, that is bad for the race. On the other hand, there
is some truth in Beard's aphorism, that " ignorance is power as well as
joy " to many men and women.

From a scientific point of view, I am well aware that the weak

334 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

point of my argument is, that it is not founded on any basis of collated
statistical facts. I have said to you, "I and many other physicians
and physiologists have seen many undoubted instances of girls being
hurt by over-education under bad conditions," but we can not say that
out of every hundred girls such a percentage do suffer. We have not
the facts to enable us to do so. I hope such facts will be recorded in
the future, and may be all the more likely to be observed and recorded
through attention being directed to the matter. I am well aware, too,
that teachers are not most to blame for any bad results that are to
be attributed to the present system of over-educating girls. Parents
and the spirit of the time are more culpable than teachers. The lat-
ter are the public's servants, and must do the public's bidding. They
are expected to work " The Code " energetically, to earn large grants,
to make bricks without much straw in many cases, to turn out omnis-
cient governesses and teachers in a few short sessions. Parents cry
out to them about their children, " They are idle," if the whole evening
is not taken up with lesson-learning, or if the animal spirits are too
high or the holidays too long. I could tell some sad tales of brain
break-down in overworked teachers, male and female, if that were not
beyond the scope of this lecture.

I went last July to see the examination and distribution of prizes in
a very large city school for young ladies. While the young girls there
were very many of them fresh in complexion and plump, I must say
that the majority of the girls above thirteen seemed to me jaded, and
pale, and unduly thin. I did not see a dozen pairs of rosy cheeks in a
hundred of them. To my eye, many of them bore very evident signs
of over-brain-work and deficient physical energy. They didn't look
joyous and full of animal glee, as girls at that age should look. Like
Dr. John Brown's terrier, " life was too full of seriousness " to them.
Two Sundays after, I was in a country kirk in the far north, where
modern educational systems are as yet unknown, and I contrasted the
appearance of the farmers' daughters there with that of the prize-win-
ners in the city school. The difference was absolutely astounding. I
only wish I could convey the impression I received in both cases from
a critical doctor's survey of both sets of girls. If the one set exem-
plified health, robustness, organic happiness, strength, resistive power
against disease, and potential motherhood, then, beyond a doubt, the
other set did not fully do so. The question of the future is, How can
we get, or how much can we get of, the intelligence and book-culture
of the latter, combined with the health of the former ? The health
we must have, for it is requisite for the life of the race ; the culture
we must have in such degree as is consistent with the health.

THE CONTROL OF CIRCUMSTANCES. 335

THE CCMTKOL OF CIECUMSTANCES.

By WILLIAM A. EDDY.

IN" a previous article, we noticed that even circumstances which
seem to result in accumulations involving vast lapses of time are
seen to be temporary when considered with relation to very great
and to us inconceivable periods. The stability is apparent only, and
is due to our limited grasp of duration. The study of averages is
valuable as showing the proportion of control attainable through
knowledge of the limit of variation in certain kinds of events. It
would require something like omnipresent intelligence to cope with
the enormous variability in all events, so that were it not for the per-
ception "of identity, repetition, the law of probability, we would be as
completely helpless in regard to circumstances as many claim we are.
In extending this question of averages, demonstrating the illusion of
chance, we see that the appliances of science and intelligence must
lessen helplessness and misery with every coming century, although,
owing to limitation of the individual, the control can never be any-
thing like complete. It is important that we form right ideas of the
control possible, so that we be neither like Don Quixote, who thought
•his power almost without limit, nor like a fatalist who resigns himself
to the current of events. In the history of progress, we see that dur-
ing centuries some suffering might have been escaped by a more com-
plete knowledge of causes, as well as by better intellectual training
resulting in more foresight. The delayed relief was and is due to
crude methods of scientific thought and experiment, lack of that in-
sight or flash of analogy by which all great truths are discovered.
The power to group and combine complex results, shown by the most
advanced minds when working under favorable conditions, is hardly
sufficient for even a vague understanding of the development of dis-
eased conditions. The mind is led step by step toward the truth, by
means of scientific experiments. At last, Pasteur and others disclose
the laws which account for some kinds of progressive destruction in
the movements of organic or inorganic particles.

As we begin to comprehend vaguely the laws of events, and the
importance of action as an element of modifying power — as we stand
back and include a great number of incidents in our generalization —
we see more relation between action and result. The direct impor-
tance of objective action, its immediate interest for us, is in consider-
ing the proportion of control which we can exert. This is one of the
most complicated problems, because special thwartings conceal the
control when we look from the " near point of view of daily life."
Several years of experience are required to demonstrate the propor-
tion of truth in the well-known business maxim that it is better to

336 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

avoid joining fortunes with an unlucky man. Much of the misfortune
is in the man's quality ; for we say of the successful man that, if a
given project fails, he still has something in reserve. He has fore-
seen and provided for failure, and has great power of readjusting his
vocation in an emergency. Besides an accumulation of money, which
he has thrown up as an embankment between himself and disaster, he
has an even stronger reserve force in his knowledge of human nature,
his address, and his strength of character. In this sense the average
indicates that prolonged effort results in control. He reaches a point
in after-years when the special event conforms to his effort easily.

But we must not overlook the conditions that limit success. There
is a margin of uncertainty in the fact that the successful man is seen
to suffer from temporary calamities, which clearly are not due to his
action or inaction. We find an outward influence completely beyond
his control. The fact that it can be conquered by perseverance and
knowledge does not lessen its irresistible force in the present. The
outer forces, largely social but not less powerful than those of organi-
zation and physical law, do not respond to his efforts — seem arrayed
against him, or turn unexpectedly in his favor. It thus appears that
the question of control might easily result in endless debate, because
each side — the triumph of circumstances or of human will and perse-
verance— includes part of the truth. While admitting that the tend-
ency is persistently in favor of effort, we yet find a positive conclu-
sion impossible to hold. The control, even under favorable condi-
tions, is incomplete. It is true we can not express this with even
relative accuracy, yet a rough idea of the truth may be given by a
statement of arithmetical proportion as applied to a large number of
men having successful qualities — such as knowledge of human nature
and perseverance. The proportion of control will seem much greater
if we consider the effect upon a given calling or condition toward
which the effort tends. When a person starts in life with one object
— say, that of making money — and uses every available means to ac-
complish his purpose, saving and constantly watching the public wants
with the intention of supplying them, working night and day at a
sacrifice of social recreation, the average, we may say, is as high as
ninety per cent that he will succeed. Many wrill put the possibility
of failure at much less than ten per cent ; but if the question be care-
fully considered, it will be admitted that sickness and other causes
may make inroads upon prosperity, so that of a hundred persons with
such qualities, ten might fail after a given lapse of time, owing to con-
ditions beyond their control.

While noticing the proportion of failure which may result in spite
of prolonged effort, we must not omit the immense differences due
to the qualities with which men are born. This is the most important
of all the conditions considered. After deducting a large number of
exceptions, we would doubtless still find the balance heavily in favor

THE CONTROL OF CIRCUMSTANCES. 337

of the children of efficient parents. It therefore follows that, althouo-h
we can not trace the control absolutely to effort in the individual, we
can still find a part of the difference accounted for in the efforts of a
line of ancestors, or in parents whose special aptitudes, perhaps at-
tained directly by work, are united with magnifying effect in one of
their children.* If we go back of the effective qualities of men, we
encounter the unfathomable fact of the persistence of force ; for the
most important characteristic of these effective qualities is a certain
mechanical motive power. It may be possible to definitely separate
the force in men into the presence or absence of different kinds of it
in a line of ancestors, but ultimately we are obliged to say that the
first impulse took place for the same reason that the earth persists in
its course round the sun, or for the same reason that motion appears
to be an inevitable attribute of matter. Of course this is not account-
ing for it. It is simply reducing the question to a point of fact be-
yond which further investigation is apparently useless. In estimating
our power of control, the right method is to start with the qualities
existing, or latent, and then proceed to their effects. We may say,
with Herbert Spencer, that special forms of thought-force were built up
through processes of action and adjustment, but, as involved or noticed
in his conclusions, this only dissolves the existing special manifestations
of force into a general but at the same time unaccountable force.
- While the enormous magnitudes and forces in nature remind us
of our helplessness, it is yet clear that the tendency to master distant
facts is constantly stimulated by natural phenomena. We ought not
to be discouraged by the fact that exceptional events are not always
classified or reduced to order by us — their connection is often lost,
owing to our limited grasp of duration — nor by the truth that as nat-
ural phenomena recede from us we are more conscious of problems
beyond the circumstances or surroundings which we partly control.
Many apparent disconnections gradually lead us away from the series
close at hand. The heavenly bodies, for example, manifest so much
variation in movement and brightness, that men are led to undertake
increasingly difficult or more delicate tasks of calculation, as in esti-
mating the distances of a Centauri, Sirius, Vega, and other stars.
Another result is, that attempts are made to form at least a theoretical
idea of the physical conditions of suns and planets through knowledge
attained by means of the spectroscope. The conclusions thus reached
are necessarily imperfect because based upon fragmentary data, but
the mental tendency to inquire is with scientific minds inevitable, be-
cause there are always appearing, with every increase of telescopic
power, other stars beyond those last discovered.

It thus appears that while the high aims of Plato and Aristotle find

* A certain artist seems to have inherited his father's habit of keen observation and
his mother's mechanieal ingenuity. Very often, however, these characteristics can not
be definitely traced back.

vol. xxiv. — 22 x

338 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

justification in the idea that effort is taught by nature, even when a
definite result is invisible, yet the teachings of physical causation show
that it is vain to expect an escape from some material trammels. We
see the vibration of two apparently opposing social forces, in which
the high and more intelligent force is slowly gaining the ascendency
by a process of adaptation, so that the physical force is becoming a
source of power to men instead of fear. Emerson's conclusion, like
that of Kant, is two-sided — that the principle of mind is manifested to
us through material action. This holds true aside from Kant's " Forms
of Thought " on one hand, or Herbert Spencer's relations between par-
ticles on the other. We can not have the unalloyed mind-power or
control usually wished for, because our demands are unreasonable in
the sense that we would dispense with the necessary and lower condi-
tions upon which the higher depend, and thus thrust out causation,
which is the principle of combination or order by which error and
absurdity could be escaped if the relations between events were com-
pletely mastered. This mastery of physical power represents an ideal
condition in which the mind is no longer enslaved by forces that seem
material or mechanical.

In closing with a general view of this subject, we encounter the fol-
lowing contradiction : During a long period we see that fortunes and
reputations grow by means of industry, and that a high percentage of
the men having these industrious qualities accomplish their purpose.
On the other hand, it is obvious that many of the physiological phe-
nomena of the human body, the varying limitation of thought in
individuals, and especialy the universe of matter, are not appreciably
influenced by our actions or ideas. The idea of possible control nar-
rows from a solar system to a planet, to a particular part of planetary
surface, to a special series, of effects, and to special kinds of callings.
The arguer can truthfully claim that we have no control, and hold his
position by referring to the material universe and the development of
mankind ; but particular kinds of effort when so considered undermine
his argument as applied to immediate results of actions. In arguing
on the other side, he can maintain as truthfully, to put the same idea
in different form, that the control is almost complete, but he must
apply his argument to special and restricted conditions.

It has been denied that we can trace with certainty any manifesta-
tion of law in circumstances ; that there is a fatal error in conclusions
regarding the inevitableness of causation or law ; that there is no per-
ceptible law, because everything shows a margin of variation which
may reach inconceivable results in the course of ages. Law, as under-
stood by a member of the Theosophical Society, means the exact repe-
tition of previous conditions, owing to vast averages and inconceivably
great lapses of time.* The argument as to whether phenomena are

* This definition of law was advanced by one of the younger members of the society.
It may not fairly represent the views of all the members.

THE CONTROL OF CIRCUMSTANCES. 339

exactly repeated is apparently of no consequence, as long as average
results are known. The notion of infinite variation, as thus implied,
is defective because the identity underlying the variation is omitted.
It is fair to assume that identity will keep pace with variation, and that
the margin of variation must always involve continuity, or a further
illustration of the order or law manifested by the phenomena con-
sidered. The history of science shows that the new relations do not
render absurd the verified conclusions of reason, though much is added
that has to be classified and as far as possible reduced to a reasonable
basis. In fact, the variations are seen to verify the known sequences
instead of lessening their certainty. We may therefore assume that
vast, far-reaching forces, or forms of force now unknown, will never
even seem to interfere with the obvious and seemingly necessary laws
manifested by known phenomena. Such interference of unknown laws
would be, as far as we could perceive, a break in continuity, or causa-
tion, and. the inflow of obvious absurdity. From this point starts the
root of superstition ; for persons without perception of the causation
underlying all action endow the unknown forces with power to pro-
duce effects at variance with the simplest forms of sequence, the dis-
turbance of which would at once render void the human intellect. Are
we to believe that gloves were sent from Bombay to London in an in-
stant, thus setting aside one of the first laws of matter learned in
childhood ? If such monstrous phenomena occur, then it is useless to
think that we can trace method in circumstances.

All the evidence so far collected indicates that actions and results
are related, and we are thus encouraged by the thought that no work
is wasted — that it must stand to the credit of the worker. When the
effect upon others is not discernible, we can be sure that the advantage
still exists as latent force of character. The value of work remains
good in spite of vicissitudes. This may seem trite, but we must re-
member that the relation between work and effect is constantly ob-
served in a partial light, so that people are likely to be either fatalists
like Micawber, or to look upon a special failure as inexcusable and as
a certain indication of quality. It has been the object of this outline
of so complicated a question to modify these opposing views, to en-
courage effort, to emphasize the rational perception of the continuity
or order pervading events, and to put aside as far as possible the fear-
ful possibilities with which some endow the mysterious power every-
where manifested in nature. As long as we feel conscious that the
unknowable reality can never involve anything irrational, ill-fitting the
harmony and grandeur of the sidereal universe, we feel that ideas may
lessen the burdens of men, widen their thought, and teach them that
these persistent effects following causes may be depended upon with
entire trust. Meantime the progress of men in intelligence, toward a
certain degree of happiness, continues. One of the principal factors of
this advancement is that all should sincerely express personal convic-

34o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

tion. The decline of intelligence and of our power to control circum-
stances may be conceived as beginning when old ideas are advocated
merely because the first impression is that they are plausible, and par-
ticularly when certain books, purely intellectual, are avoided merely
because the reader fears to find something unanswerable and convinc-
ing. By all means let us have free trade in ideas, from the theory of
materialization advanced by Robert Dale Owen at one extreme to the
scientific exactness of Herbert Spencer at the other. Let there be no
protection of ideas, and let each one maintain its hold by virtue of its
truth and power. Owing to the varying tendencies and views of men,
the truth overlooked by one may be seen by another, so that if we en-
courage the expression of peculiar combinations or combining powers
in minds, much suffering arising from our lack of knowledge may be
escaped. Those who do not realize the value of ideas ought to reflect
that, largely owing to our want of ingenuity and perception, we are
still in the main at the mercy of particles in ways which could be
spared us if we knew or had discovered more, or had more control of
the onward march of the closely knit network of events and influences
that make up our short lives. Lack of observation in a trifling mat-
ter, or short-sighted heed to the convenience of the present hour, may
restrict the possible development of the finest powers, and so the de-
velopment of intelligence, by widening these limits, indirectly as well
as directly, may add to the power of men in a steadily increasing pro-
portion. Those who do not see the helping power of science, or at
least the promise of it, ought to remember that every omission to use
the best intelligence in themselves, or to encourage it in others, results
in a continuance of the amount of pain and disappointment now exist-
ing, which can only be lessened by the general development of intel-
ligence, and by the use of the increasingly difficult and more subtile
researches of men of science.

-+•+-

RELIGIOUS RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT.*

By HEEBEET SPENCEE.

TNLIKE the ordinary consciousness, the religious consciousness is

v-J concerned with that which lies beyond the sphere of sense. A

brute thinks only of things which can be touched, seen, heard, tasted,

etc. ; and the like is true of the untaught child, the deaf-mute, and

the lowest savage. But the developing man has thoughts about ex-

* This article will eventually form the closing chapter of " Ecclesiastical Institutions "
— Part VI of " The Principles of Sociology." The statements concerning matters of fact
in the first part of it are based on the contents of preceding chapters. Evidence for near-
ly all of them, however, may also be found in Part I of " The Principles of Sociology,"
already published.

RELIGIOUS RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT. 341

istences which he regards as usually inaudible, intangible, invisible ;
and yet which he regards as operative upon him. What suggests this
notion of agencies transcending perception ? How do these ideas con-
cerning the supernatural evolve out of ideas concerning the natural ?
The transition can not be sudden ; and an account of the genesis of
religion must begin by describing the steps through which the transi-
tion takes place.

The ghost-theory exhibits these steps quite clearly. We are shown
that the mental differentiation of invisible and intangible beings from
visible and tangible beings progresses slowly and unobtrusively. In
the fact that the other-self, supposed to wander in dreams, is believed
to have actually done and seen whatever was dreamed, in the fact that
the other-self when going away at death, but expected presently to re-
turn, is conceived as a double equally material with the original, we
see that the supernatural agent in its primitive form diverges very little
from the natural agent — is simply the original man with some add-
ed powers of going about secretly and doing good or evil. And the
fact that, when the double of the dead man ceases to be dreamed about
by those who knew him, his non-appearance in dreams is held to im-
ply that he is finally dead, shows that these earliest supernatural agents
have but a temporary existence : the first tendencies to a permanent
consciousness of the supernatural prove abortive.

In many cases no higher degree of differentiation is reached. The
ghost-population, recruited by deaths on the one side, but on the other
side losing its members as they cease to be recollected and dreamed
about, does not increase ; and no individuals included in it come to be
recognized through successive generations as established supernatural
powers. Thus the Unkulunkulu, or old-old one, of the Zooloos, the
father of the race, is regarded as finally or completely dead, and
there is propitiation only of ghosts of more recent date. But where
circumstances favor the continuance of sacrifices at graves, witnessed
by members of each new generation who are told about the dead and
transmit the tradition, there eventually arises the conception of a per-
manently-existing ghost or spirit. A more marked contrast in thought
between supernatural beings and natural beings is thus established.
There simultaneously results a great increase in the number of these
supposed supernatural beings, since the aggregate of them is now
continually added to ; and there is a strengthening tendency to think
of them as everywhere around, and as causing all unusual occur-
rences.

Differences among the ascribed powers of ghosts soon arise. They
naturally follow from the observed differences among the powers of
the living individuals. Hence it results that while the propitiations
of ordinary ghosts are made only by their descendants, it comes occa-
sionally to be thought prudent to propitiate also the ghosts of the
more dreaded individuals, even though they have no claims of blood.

342 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Quite early there thus begin those grades of supernatural beings which
eventually become so strongly marked.

Habitual wars, which more than all other causes initiate these first
differentiations, go on to initiate further and more decided ones. For,
with those compoundings of small social aggregates into greater ones,
and recompounding of these into still greater, which war effects, there,
of course, with the multiplying gradations of power among living
men, arises the conception of multiplying gradations of power among
their ghosts. Thus in course of time are formed the conceptions of
the great ghosts or gods, the more numerous secondary ghosts, or
demi-gods, and so on downward — a pantheon : there being still, how-
ever, no essential distinction of kind ; as we see in the calling of or-
dinary ghosts manes-gods by the Romans and elohim by the Hebrews.
Moreover, repeating as the other life in the other world does, the life
in this world, in its needs, occupations, and social organization, there
arises not only a differentiation of grades among supernatural beings
in respect of their powers, but also in respect of their characters and
kinds of activity. There come to be local gods, and gods reigning
over this or that order of phenomena ; there come to be good and
evil spirits of various qualities ; and where there has been by con-
quest a superposing of societies one upon another, each having its
own system of ghost-derived beliefs, there results an involved com-
bination of such beliefs, constituting a mythology.

Of course, ghosts primarily being doubles like the originals in all
things, and gods (when not the living members of a conquering race)
being doubles of the more powerful men, it results that they, too,
are originally no less human than ordinary ghosts in their physical
characters, their passions, and their intelligences. Like the doubles
of the ordinary dead, they are supposed to consume the flesh, blood,
bread, wine, given to them : at first literally, and later in a more
spiritual way by consuming the essences of them. They not only ap-
pear as visible and tangible persons, but they enter into conflicts with
men, are wounded, suffer pain : the sole distinction being that they
have miraculous powers of healing and consequent immortality.
Here, indeed, there needs a qualification ; for not only do various peo-
ples hold that the gods die a first death (as naturally happens where
they are the members of a conquering race, called gods because of
their superiority), but, as in the case of Pan, it is supposed, even
among the cultured, that there is a second and final death of a god,
like that second and final death of a ghost supposed among existing
savages. With advancing civilization the divergence of the supernat-
ural being from the natural being becomes more decided. There is
nothing to check the gradual dematerialization of the ghost and of
the god ; and this dematerialization is insensibly furthered in the ef-
fort to reach consistent ideas of supernatural action : the god ceases
to be tangible, and later he ceases to be visible or audible. Along

RELIGIOUS RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT. 343

with this differentiation of physical attributes from those of humanity-
there goes on more slowly the differentiation of mental attributes.
The god of the savage, represented as having intelligence scarcely if
at all greater than that of the living man, is deluded with ease.
Even the gods of the semi-civilized are deceived, make mistakes, re-
pent of their plans ; and only in course of time does there arise the
conception of unlimited vision and universal knowledge. The emo-
tional nature simultaneously undergoes a parallel transformation.
The grosser passions, originally conspicuous and carefully ministered
to by devotees, gradually fade, leaving only the passions less related
to corporal satisfactions ; and eventually these, too, become partially
dehumanized.

These ascribed characters of deities are continually adapted and re-
adapted to the needs of the social state. During the militant phase of
activity, the chief god is conceived as holding insubordination the
greatest crime, as implacable in anger, as merciless in punishment ;
and any alleged attributes of a milder kind occupy but small space in
the social consciousness. But, where militancy declines and the harsh
despotic form of government appropriate to it is gradually qualified
by the form appropriate to industrialism, the foreground of the reli-
gious consciousness is increasingly filled with those ascribed traits of
the divine nature which are congruous with the ethics of peace : di-
vine love, divine forgiveness, divine mercy, are now the characteristics
enlarged upon.

To perceive clearly the effects of mental progress and changing
social life, thus stated in the abstract, we must glance at them in the
concrete. If, without foregone conclusions, we contemplate the tra-
ditions, records, and monuments, of the Egyptians, we see that out of
their primitive ideas of gods, brute or human, there were evolved
spiritualized ideas of gods, and finally of a god ; until the priesthoods
of later times, repudiating the earlier ideas, described them as corrup-
tions : being swayed by the universal tendency to regard the first state
as the highest — a tendency traceable down to the theories of existing
theologians and mythologists. Again, if, putting aside speculations,
and not asking what historical value the " Iliad " may have, we take
it simply as indicating the early Greek notion of Zeus, and compare
this with the notion contained in the Platonic dialogues, we see that
Greek civilization had greatly modified (in the better minds, at least)
the purely anthropomorphic conception of him : the lower human at-
tributes being dropped and the higher ones transfigured. Similarly,
if we contrast the Hebrew God described in primitive traditions, man-
like in appearance, appetites, and emotions, with the Hebrew God as
characterized by the prophets, there is shown a widening range of
power along with a nature increasingly remote from that of man.
And, on passing to the conceptions of him which are now entertained,
we are made aware of an extreme transfiguration. By a convenient

344 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

obliviousness, a deity who in early times is represented as hardening
men's hearts so that they may commit punishable acts, and as employ-
ing a lying spirit to deceive them, comes to be mostly thought of as
an embodiment of virtues transcending the highest we can imagine.

Thus, recognizing the fact that in the primitive human mind there
exists neither religious idea nor religious sentiment, we find that, in
the course of social evolution and the evolution of intelligence accom-
panying it, there are generated both the ideas and sentiments which
we distinguish as religious, and that, through a process of causation
clearly traceable, they traverse those stages which have brought them,
among civilized races, to their present forms.

And now what may we infer will be the evolution of religious
ideas and sentiments throughout the future ? On the one hand, it
is irrational to suppose that the changes which have brought the
religious consciousness to its present form will suddenly cease. On
the other hand, it is irrational to suppose that the religious conscious-
ness, naturally generated as we have seen, will disappear and leave an
unfilled gap. Manifestly it must undergo further changes ; and, how-
ever much changed, it must continue to exist. What, then, are the
transformations to be expected ? If we reduce the process above de-
lineated to its lowest terms, we shall see our way to an answer.

As pointed out in " First Principles," § 96, Evolution is throughout
its course habitually modified by that Dissolution which eventually
undoes it : the changes which become manifest being usually but the
differential results of opposing tendencies toward integration and dis-
integration. Rightly to understand the genesis and decay of religious
systems, and the probable future of those now existing, we must take
this truth into account. During those earlier changes by which there
is created a hierarchy of gods, demi-gods, manes-gods, and spirits of
various kinds and ranks, Evolution goes on with but little qualification.
The consolidated mythology produced, while growing in the mass of
supernatural beings composing it, assumes increased definiteness in the
arrangement of its parts and the attributes of its members. But the
antagonist Dissolution eventually gains predominance. The spreading
recognition of natural causation conflicts with this mythological evo-
lution, and insensibly weakens those of its beliefs which are most at
variance with advancing knowledge. Demons and the secondary di-
vinities presiding over divisions of Nature become less thought of as
the phenomena ascribed to them are more commonly observed to follow
a constant order, and hence these minor components of the mythology
slowly dissolve away. At the same time, with growing supremacy
of the great god heading the hierarchy, there goes increasing ascrip-
tion to him of actions which were before distributed among numerous
supernatural beings : there is integration of power. While in propor-
tion as there arises the consequent conception of an omnipotent and

RELIGIOUS RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT. 345

omnipresent deity, there is a gradual fading of his alleged human at-
tributes : dissolution begins to affect the supreme personality in re-
spect of ascribed form and nature.

Already, as we have seen, this process has in the more advanced
societies, and especially among their higher members, gone to the ex-
tent of merging all minor supernatural powers in one supernatural
power ; and already this one supernatural power has, by what Mr.
Fiske aptly calls deanthropomorphization, lost the grosser attributes
of humanity. If things hereafter are to follow the same general course
as heretofore, we must infer that this dropping of human attributes
will continue. Let us ask what positive changes are hence to be ex-
pected.

Two factors must unite in producing them. There is the develop-
ment of those higher sentiments which no longer tolerate the ascrip-
tion of inferior sentiments to a divinity ; and there is the intellectual
development which causes dissatisfaction with the crude interpreta-
tions previously accepted. Of course, in pointing out the effects of
these factors, I must name some which are familiar ; but it is needful
to glance at these along with others.

The cruelty of a Feejeean god, who, represented as devouring the
souls of the dead, may be supposed to inflict torture during the pro-
cess, is small compared with the cruelty of a god who condemns men
to tortures which are eternal ; and the ascription of this cruelty, though
habitual in ecclesiastical formulas, occasionally occurring in sermons,
and still sometimes pictorially illustrated, is becoming so intolerable
to the better-natured that, while some theologians distinctly deny it,
others quietly drop it out of their teachings. Clearly, this change
can not cease until the beliefs in hell and damnation disappear. Dis-
appearance of them will be aided by an increasing repugnance to in-
justice. The visiting on Adam's descendants, through hundreds of
generations, dreadful penalties for a small transgression which they
did not commit ; the damning of all men who do not avail themselves
of an alleged mode of obtaining forgiveness, which most men have
never heard of ; and the effecting a reconciliation by sacrifice of one
who was perfectly innocent — are modes of action which, ascribed to a
human ruler, would call forth expressions of abhorrence ; and the
ascription of them to the Ultimate Cause of things, even now felt to
be full of difficulties, must become impossible. So, too, must die out
the belief that a Power present in innumerable worlds throughout in-
finite space, and who during millions of years of the earth's earlier
existence needed no honoring by its inhabitants, should be seized with
a craving for praise, and, having created mankind, should be angry
with them if they do not perpetually tell him how great he is. Men
will by-and-by refuse to imply a trait of character which is the reverse
of worshipful.

346 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY,

Similarly with the logical incongruities more and more conspicuous
to growing intelligence. Passing over the familiar difficulties that
sundry of the implied divine traits are in contradiction with the divine
attributes otherwise ascribed — that a god who repents of what he has
done must be lacking either in power or in foresight ; that his anger
presupposes an occurrence which has been contrary to intention, and
so indicates defect of means — we come to the deeper difficulty that
such emotions, in common with all emotions, can exist only in a con-
sciousness which is limited. Every emotion has its antecedent ideas,
and antecedent ideas are habitually supposed to occur in God : he is
represented as seeing and hearing this or the other, and as being emo-
tionally affected thereby. That is to say, the conception of a divinity
possessing these traits of character necessarily continues anthropo-
morphic ; not only in the sense that the emotions ascribed are like
those of human beings, but also in the sense that they form parts of a
consciousness which, like the human consciousness, is formed of suc-
cessive states. And such a conception of the divine consciousness is
irreconcilable both with the unchangeableness otherwise alleged and
with the omniscience otherwise alleged. For a consciousness consti-
tuted of ideas and feelings caused by objects and occurrences can
not be simultaneously occupied with all objects and all occurrences
throughout the universe. To believe in a divine consciousness, men
must refrain from thinking what is meant by consciousness — must
stop short with verbal propositions ; and propositions which they are
debarred from rendering into thoughts will more and more fail to sat-
isfy them. Of course, like difficulties present themselves when the will
of God is spoken of. So long as we refrain from giving a definite
meaning to the word will, we may say that it is possessed by the Cause
of All Things, as readily as we may say that love of approbation
is possessed by a circle ; but, when from the words we pass to the
thoughts they stand for, we find that we can no more unite in con-
sciousness the terms of the one proposition than we can those of the
other. Whoever conceives any other will than his own must do so in
terms of his own will, which is the sole will directly known to him —
all other wills being only inferred. But will, as each is conscious of it,
presupposes a motive — a prompting desire of some kind : absolute in-
difference excludes the conception of will. Moreover, will, as imply-
ing a prompting desire, connotes some end contemplated as one to be
achieved, and ceases with the achievement of it : some other will, re-
ferring so some other end, taking its place. That is to say, will, like
emotion, necessarily supposes a series of states of consciousness. The
conception of a divine will, derived from that of the human will, in-
volves, like it, localization in space and time : the willing of each end,
excluding from consciousness for an interval the willing of other
ends, and therefore being inconsistent with that omnipresent activity
which simultaneously works out an infinity of ends. It is the same

RELIGIOUS RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT. 347

with the ascription of intelligence. Not to dwell on the seriality and
limitation implied as before, we may note that intelligence, as alone
conceivable by us, presupposes existences independent of it and object-
ive to it. It is carried on in terms of changes primarily wrought by
alien activities — the impressions generated by things beyond conscious-
ness, and the ideas derived from such impressions. To speak of an
intelligence which exists in the absence of all such alien activities is
to use a meaningless word. 1 If, to the corollary that the First Cause,
considered as intelligent, must be continually affected by independent
objective activities, it is replied that these have become such by act
of creation, and were previously included in the First Cause, then the
reply is that in such case the First Cause could, before this creation,
have had nothing to generate in it such changes as those constituting
what we call intelligence, and must therefore have been unintelligent
at the time when intelligence was most called for. Hence it is clear
that the intelligence ascribed answers in no respect to that which we
know by the name. It is intelligence out of which all the characters
constituting it have vanished.

These and other difficulties, some of which are often discussed but
never disposed of, must force men hereafter to drop the higher an-
thropomorphic characters given to the First Cause, as they have long
since dropped the lower. The conception which has been enlarging
from the beginning must go on enlarging, until, by disappearance of
its limits, it becomes a consciousness which transcends the forms of
distinct thought, though it forever remains a consciousness.

" But how can such a final consciousness of the Unknowable, thus
tacitly alleged to be true, be reached by successive modifications of a
conception which was utterly untrue ? The ghost-theory of the savage
is baseless. The material double of a dead man in which he believes
never had any existence. And if by gradual dematerialization of
this double was produced the conception of the supernatural agent
in general — if the conception of a deity, formed by the dropping of
some human attributes and transfiguration of others, resulted from con-
tinuance of this process — is not the developed and purified conception
reached by pushing the process to its limit a fiction also? Surely,
if the primitive belief was absolutely false, all derived beliefs must be
absolutely false."

This objection looks fatal ; and it would be fatal were its premise
valid. Unexpected as it will be to most readers, the answer here to
be made is that at the outset a germ of truth was contained in the
primitive conception — the truth, namely, that the power which mani-
fests itself in consciousness is but a differently-conditioned form of the
power which manifests itself beyond consciousness.

Every voluntary act yields to the primitive man proof of a source
of energy within him. Not that he thinks about his internal expe-

348 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

riences ; but in these experiences this notion lies latent. When pro-
ducing motion in his limbs, and through them motion in other things,
he is aware of the accompanying feeling of effort. And this sense
of effort which is the antecedent of changes directly produced by
him becomes the conceived antecedent of changes not produced by
him — furnishes him with a term of thought by which to represent the
genesis of these objective changes. At first this idea of muscular
force as anteceding unusual events around him carries with it the
whole assemblage of associated ideas. He thinks of the implied effort
as an effort exercised by a being wholly like himself. In course of
time these doubles of the dead, supposed to be workers of all but the
most familiar changes, are modified in conception. Besides becoming
less grossly material, some of them are developed into larger person-
alities presiding over classes of phenomena which, being comparatively
regular in their order, foster the idea of beings who, while far more
powerful than men, are less variable in their modes of action. So
that the idea of force as exercised by such beings comes to be less
associated with the idea of a human ghost. Further advances, by
which minor supernatural agents become merged in one general agent,
and by which the personality of this general agent is rendered vague
while becoming widely extended, tend still further to dissociate the
notion of objective force from the force known as such in conscious-
ness ; and the dissociation reaches its extreme in the thoughts of the
man of science, who interj)rets in terms of force not only the visible
changes of sensible bodies, but all physical changes whatever, even up
to the undulations of the ethereal medium. Nevertheless, this force
(be it force under that statical form by which matter resists, or under
that dynamical form distinguished as energy) is to the last thought
of in terms of that internal energy which he is conscious of as muscu-
lar effort. He is compelled to symbolize objective force in terms of
subjective force, from lack of any other symbol.

See now the implications. That internal energy which in the ex-
periences of the primitive man was always the immediate antecedent
of changes wrought by him — that energy which, when interpreting
external changes, he thought of along with those attributes of a human
personality connected with it in himself — is the same energy which,
freed from anthropomorphic accompaniments, is now figured as the
cause of all external phenomena. The last stage reached is recognition
of the truth that force as it exists beyond consciousness can not be
like what we know as force within consciousness ; and that yet, as
either is capable of generating the other, they must be different modes
of the same. Consequently, the final outcome of that speculation com-
menced by the primitive man is, that the Power manifested through-
out the universe distinguished as material is the same Power which
in ourselves wells up under the form of consciousness.

It is untrue, then, that the foregoing argument proposes to evolve

RELIGIOUS RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT. 349

a true belief from a belief which was wholly false. Contrariwise, the
ultimate form of the religious consciousness is the final development
of a consciousness which at the outset contained a germ of truth ob-
scured by multitudinous errors.

Those who think that science is dissipating religious beliefs and
sentiments seem unaware that whatever of mystery is taken from the
old interpretation is added to the new. Or, rather, we may say that
transference from the one to the other is accompanied by increase ;
since, for an explanation which has a seeming feasibility, it substitutes
an explanation which, carrying us back only a certain distance, there
leaves us in presence of the avowedly inexplicable.

Under one of its aspects scientific progress is a gradual transfigura-
tion of Nature. Where ordinary perception saw perfect simplicity it
reveals great complexity ; where there seemed absolute inertness it
discloses intense activity ; and in what appears mere vacancy it finds
a marvelous play of forces. Each generation of physicists discovers,
in so-called " brute matter," powers which, but a few years before, the
most instructed physicists would have thought incredible ; as instance
the ability of a mere iron plate to take up the complicated aerial vibra-
tions produced by articulate speech, which, all translated into multitu-
dinous and varied electric pulses, are retranslated a thousand miles
off by another iron plate and again heard as articulate speech. When
the explorer of Nature sees that, quiescent as they appear, surrounding
solid bodies are thus sensitive to forces which are infinitesimal in their
amounts — when the spectroscope proves to him that molecules on the
earth pulsate in harmony with molecules in the stars — when there is
forced on him the inference that every point in space thrills with an
infinity of vibrations passing through it in all directions — the concep-
tion to which he tends is much less that of a universe of dead matter
than that of a universe everywhere alive : alive, if not in the restricted
sense, still in a general sense.

This transfiguration, which the inquiries of physicists continually
increase, is aided by that other transfiguration resulting from meta-
physical inquiries. Subjective analysis compels us to admit that our
scientific interpretations of the phenomena which objects present are
expressed in terms of our own variously-combined sensations and ideas
— are expressed, that is, in elements belonging to consciousness, which
are but symbols of the something beyond consciousness. Though
analysis afterward reinstates our primitive beliefs, to the extent of
showing that behind every group of phenomenal manifestations there
is always a nexus, which is the reality that remains fixed amid appear-
ances which are variable, yet we are shown that this nexus of reality
is forever inaccessible to consciousness. And when, once more, we
remember that the activities constituting consciousness, being rigorous-
ly bounded, can not bring in among themselves the activities beyond

35© THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

the bounds, which therefore seem unconscious, though production of
either by the other seems to imply that they are of the same essential
nature, this necessity we are under to think of the external energy in
terms of the internal energy gives rather a spiritualistic than a ma-
terialistic aspect to the universe ; further thought, however, obliging
us to recognize the truth that a conception given in phenomenal mani-
festations of this ultimate energy can in no wise show us what it is.

AVhile the beliefs to which analytic science thus leads are such as
do not destroy the object-matter of religion, but simply transfigure it,
science under its concrete forms enlarges the sphere for religious senti-
ment. From the very beginning the progress of knowledge has been
accompanied by an increasing capacity for wonder. Among savages,
the lowest are the least surprised when shown remarkable products of
civilized art, astonishing the traveler by their indifference. And so
little of the marvelous do they perceive in the grandest phenomena
of Nature that any inquiries concerning them they regard as childish
trifling. This contrast in mental attitude between the lowest human
beings and the higher human beings around us is paralleled by the
contrasts among the grades of these higher human beings themselves.
It is not the rustic, nor the artisan, nor the trader, who sees something
more than a mere matter of course in the hatching of a chick ; but it
is the biologist, who, pushing to the uttermost his analysis of vital phe-
nomena, reaches his greatest perplexity when a speck of protoplasm
under the microscope shows him life in its simplest form, and makes
him feel that however he formulates its processes the actual play of
forces remains unimaginable. Neither in the ordinary tourist nor in
the deer-stalker cHmbing the mountains above him does a Highland
glen rouse ideas beyond those of sport or of the picturesque ; but it
may, and often does, in the geologist. He, observing that the glacier-
rounded rock he sits on has lost by weathering but half an inch of its
surface since a time far more remote than the beginnings of human
civilization, and then trying to conceive the slow denudation which
has cut out the whole valley, has thoughts of time and of power to
which they are strangers — thoughts which, already utterly inadequate
to their objects, he feels to be still more futile on noting the contorted
beds of gneiss around, which tell him of a time, immeasurably more
remote, when far beneath the earth's surface they were in a half-
melted state, and again tell him of a time, immensely exceeding this
in remoteness, when their components were sand and mud on the shores
of an ancient sea. Nor is it in the primitive peoples who supposed that
the heavens rested on the mountain-tops, any more than in the modern
inheritors of their cosmogony who repeat that "the heavens declare
the glory of God," that we find the largest conceptions of the universe
or the greatest amount of wonder excited by contemplation of it.
Rather, it is in the astronomer, who sees in the sun a mass so vast
that even into one of his spots our earth might be plunged without

THE IGUANODON. 351

touching its edges ; and who by every finer telescope is shown an in-
creased multitude of such suns, many of them far larger.

Hereafter as heretofore, higher faculty and deeper insight will raise
rather than lower this sentiment. At present the most powerful and
most instructed intellect has neither the knowledge nor the capacity
required for symbolizing in thought the totality of things. Occupied
with one or other division of Nature, the man of science usually does
not know enough of the other divisions even to rudely conceive the
extent and complexity of their phenomena ; and, supposing him to
have adequate knowledge of each, yet he is unable to think of them
as a whole. Wider and more complex intellect may hereafter help
him to form a vague consciousness of them in their totality. We may
say that just as an undeveloped musical faculty, able only to appreciate
a simple melody, can not grasp the variously-entangled passages and
harmonies of a symphony, which in the minds of composer and con-
ductor are unified into involved musical effects awakening far greater
feeling than is possible to the musically uncultured, so, by future
more evolved intelligences, the course of things now apprehensible
only in parts may be apprehensible all together, with an accompanying
feeling as much beyond that of the present cultured man as his feel-
ing is beyond that of the savage.

And this feeling is not likely to be decreased but increased by that
analysis of knowledge which, while forcing him to agnosticism, yet con-
tinually prompts him to imagine some solution of the Great Enigma
which he knows can not be solved. Especially must this be so when
he remembers that the very notions, beginning and end, cause and
purpose, are relative notions belonging to human thought, which are
probably inapplicable to the ultimate reality transcending human
thought, and when, though suspecting that explanation is a word
without meaning when applied to this ultimate reality, he yet feels
compelled to think there must be an explanation.

But, amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious the
more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute cer-
tainty, that he is ever in presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy,
from which all things proceed.

■»♦»■■

THE IGUANODON.

THE iguanodon was discovered by Dr. Man tell, in the Weald en of
England, in 1822, and has since figured in geological books as
one of the largest and most remarkable of the animals whose former
existence is revealed in the fossil beds of past ages. It is described
in the second edition of Dana's " Geology " as " an herbivorous dino-
saur of the Wealden. It was thirty feet long, and of great bulk, and

352

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

had the habit of a hippopotamus. The femur, or thigh-bone, in a
large individual, was about thirty-three inches long, and the humerus
nineteen inches. The teeth were flat, and had a serrated cutting edge
like the teeth of the iguana ; and hence the name, signifying iguana-
like teeth / many of them, from old animals, are worn off short." Le
Conte's " Geology " also says that " the animal takes its name from the
form of its teeth, which are much like those of the iguana, a living
herbivorous reptile, although in other respects there is little aflinity."
Figs. 1 and 2 show respectively the tooth of an iguanodon, and a sec-
tion of the jaw of the iguana, for comparison.

Fig. 1.— Tooth of an Iguanodon.

Fig. 2.— Section or Jaw of an Iguana. (After Buckland.)

Le Conte adds : " But the difference in size between the living and
the extinct reptile is enormous. The iguana is from four to six feet
long ; the iguanodon was certainly thirty feet, perhaps fifty or sixty
feet long, and of bulk several times greater than that of an elephant.
A thigh-bone has been found fifty-six inches long, twenty-two inches
in circumference at the shaft, and forty-two inches at the condyle.
Its habits are supposed to have been something like those of a hippo-
potamus. Like this animal, it wallowed in the mud, and fed on the
rank herbage of marshy grounds." The article " Iguanodon," in the
" American Cyclopaedia," in the course of its technical description of
the bones of the animal that had been identified, suggests that the

TEE IGUANODON, 353

thighs " must have supported the heavy body in a manner like that
of the large pachyderms," and states that the animal stood higher on
its le«-s than any existing saurian, and was terrestrial in its habits.
Dr. Mantell was of the opinion that the iguanodon had a nasal integu-
mental horn. We reproduce in Fig. 3 a picture of the reptile restored,
according to the ideas prevailing among geologists ten years ago, in
contrast with a view of the actual skeleton set up in the museum at
Brussels, as an illustration of the danger of making too hasty general-
izations from too few or too imperfectly understood data.

Fitt. 3.— Iguanodon.

A new and very considerable deposit of remains of iguanodons,
from one of the nearly complete skeletons of which the present re-
construction of the animal has been made, was discovered in 1878 at
the coal-mines of Bernissart, between Mons and Tournay, in Belgium,
close to the French frontier. They occur there, like the English fos-
sils, in the Wealden or lower cretaceous strata, or morts-ter rains (dead
layers), as the workmen call them, that overlie the coal-beds, and which
have to be penetrated for about twelve hundred feet before the coal
is reached. The discovery was made by M. Fages, director-general
of the Bernissart Mining Company, and specimens of the bones were
sent to Professor P. J. Van Beneden, who identified them as belong-
ing to the iguanodon. The task of removing the fossils was attended
with much difficulty, for they were charged with iron pyrites, the de-
composition of which caused them to crumble as soon as they were
exposed to the air. It was undertaken and accomplished successfully
by M. Depauw, superintendent of the workshops of the museum at
Brussels. He adopted the habits of the miners, and spent three
years in the excavations, personally superintending the removal of
every specimen. By subjecting them to a gelatine-bath and envelop-
ing every piece, previous to removal, with a casing of plaster, he got
them all out whole. The remains were then again examined by Pro-
vol. xxiv. — 23

354 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

fessor Dupont, director of the museum, and again shown to be those
of the iguanodon.

For the past two years the bones have been under the steady in-
vestigation of M. L. Dollo, a former pupil of Professor Giard, of
Lille, who has published four papers giving accounts of his observa-
tions, and is expected, when he gets through with his work, to publish
an exhaustive treatise on the subject. He thinks he has the skeletons,
or parts of them, of twenty-three individuals, two of which belong to
MantelPs species (Iguanodon Mantelli)y and twenty-one to the species
Iguanodon Bernissartensis. One of the specimens has been restored
and mounted by M. Depauw, and set up in a glass chamber in the
court of the museum. It is nearly complete, only a few phalanges
and other minor details being wanting, while, on account of the im-
possibility of detaching the bones, most of them have been mounted
still joined to one another, and fastened to the matrix as they were
taken from the mine. The figure has, of course, for this reason a
little stiffness, but not enough to attract the attention of the merely
casual observer, and stands, in the natural attitude of progression of
the animal on land, erect on its hind-limbs, with the top of its snout
fourteen feet two inches from the ground, and covering, from the tip
of the tail to a point immediately under the tip of the snout, a length
of twenty-three feet nine inches.

The iguanodon belongs to the sub-class of dinosaurians and the
order Ornithopoda, or bird-footed. Among the special characteristics
of the family of the iguanodons are a single row of teeth, three func-
tional digits on the foot, and two symmetrical sternal plates. The
last, which Professor Marsh, from his studies of specimens in the Brit-
ish Museum, regarded as clavicles, and traced in them a point of struct-
ural resemblance with birds, are declared by M. Dollo, from speci-
mens at Bernissart, in which they are preserved in their natural rela-
tions, to be sternal, while no clavicles are found. There are, how-
ever, says Mr. H. N. Moseley, in " Nature," abundance of other points
in the skeleton of the iguanodon "in which the remarkable resem-
blances between the Ornithopoda and birds indicated by Professor
Huxley, more than twelve years ago, are borne out in a most remark-
able manner. . . . First of all, there seems to be little doubt possible
that the iguanodons walked, as he pointed out, on their hind-limbs
erect, like birds, in somewhat the attitude of the accompanying figure
(see Fig. 4). Several different lines of coincidence, as M. Dollo points
out, tend to prove this. Firstly, the remarkable resemblances be-
tween the structure of the pelvis and the posterior limbs of birds, and
the corresponding parts in the iguanodons. The points of resem-
blance of the ilium and ischium, pointed out by Professor Huxley, are
fully confirmed by the Bernissart specimens. . . . The actual pubis
is very large in the iguanodon, as will be seen in the figure, and pro-
jects forward and outward, forming an obtuse angle with the post-

THE IGUANODON. 355

pubis. . . . The post-pubis is long and slender, and directed backward
alongside the ischium, as in birds, for a considerable distance beyond
the ischial tuberosity. . . . M. Dollo is inclined to follow Professor
Marsh in identifying the dinosaurian pubis with the pectineal process
of birds, a conclusion which receives most interesting support in the
valuable memoir recently published by Miss Alice Johnson, of Cam-
bridge, on " The Development of the Pelvic Girdle in the Chick," in
which it is shown that in the embryo fowl the cartilaginous represent-
ative of the pectineal process is at first much larger and more promi-
nent in proportion to the dimensions of the pelvis than subsequently,
and becomes gradually reduced as development proceeds. The pecul-
iar form of the pelvis is, no doubt, directly connected with the mus-
cular arrangements concerned in the erect posture, originated probably
in the dinosaurians and transmitted to birds, in which it has been
improved upon by the elimination, almost complete, of the original
pubis through disuse."

The fore-limbs are considerably shorter than the hinder ones, and
are massive and strong ; and this difference in structure is cited as
further though not conclusive evidence of the animal's having main-
tained an erect position. As further evidence in the same direction,
and of the approach of the type of structure to that of birds, are
mentioned the reduction of the volume of the head and thorax as
compared with that of reptiles and the position of a large mass of the
viscera behind the hip-joint, as in birds, whereby, with the aid of the
long tail, the balancing of the head and fore-part of the body was more
easily secured. The dorsal spines of the vertebrae are connected with
a set of ossified ligaments binding the whole dorso-lumbar region into
a rigid mass — another peculiarity in which the structure is strikingly
like that of birds. The fore-limbs of the animal have five and the
hind-limbs four claws, or toes, leaving a three-toed track. Here, again,
is another and probably the most decisive proof that the iguanodon
walked on its hind-limbs only. The feet have been compared by M.
Dollo with the tridactyl Wealden foot-prints — which the iguanodon
only among known Wealden dinosaurians could have made — and have
been found to fit accurately. " If the animal had walked on all-fours,"
Mr. Moseley remarks, "it is impossible but that pentadactyl im-
pressions should have occurred with the tridactyl, but such is not the
case. Long series of the tridactyl prints are found without a trace of
pentadactyl marks. The arrangement of the tridactyl tracks shows
that the iguanodon walked on its hind-feet, and did not spring,
like a kangaroo, with the aid of its tail. This merely dragged lightly
behind, and has left no impression in connection with the foot-tracks."
The first finger, or thumb, constitutes a large horny spur, the remains
of which when first found were supposed to be the nose-horns of
Mantell's ideal. According to M. Dollo's description, the head is rela-
tively small, and very much compressed from side to side. The nos-

356

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

trils are spacious, and chambered in their anterior region ; the orbits
are of moderate size and elongated along the vertical. The temporal
fossa is limited above and below by a bony arch, a disposition which
is otherwise found among living lizards only in the Hatteria. The

Fio. 4.— Iguanodon Bernissaktensis.— (At the Brussels Royal Museum of Natural History. Re-
stored and mounted by M. L. F. Depauw.)

Head : a, left nostril ; b. left orbit ; c, left temporal fossa. Vertebral column : d, cervical region ;
e. dorso-lumbar reL'ion ; /, sacral region: g, caudal region; h% left scapula; i, left coracoid ;
k. left humerus ; I, left ulna ; m, left radius ; n, sternum ; o, left ilium ; p, left pubis ; q, left
post-pubis ; r, left ischium ; «, left femur ; t. left tibia ; V. left fibula ; v, third trochanter. I, IT,
III, IV, V, digits; X, diagrammatic transverse section of the body betweeu the fore and hind
limbs.

DEFECTIVE EYE-SIGHT. 357

distal extremities of both jaws are without teeth ; while there are
ninety-two teeth in the hinder parts of the jaws, and these, as with
other reptiles, were replaced by new ones as fast as they wore out.
The skin was smooth, or covered only with epidermic scales. Some
observers believe they have found in the foot-prints evidences that a
slight web existed between the toes. M. Dollo has drawn a conjectural
outline of the body of the iguanodou, which is represented in our large
cut. Leaving out the long tail, its general shape is that of a duck.
The sectional view, represented by X in the cut, indicates that the
animal was relatively very narrow and sharp-keeled, like a clipper-ship.
The tail, shaped like that of a crocodile, was probably a powerful
swimming organ, like that of the duck. The neck was comparatively
slender and capable of very free movements. The animal was an in-
habitant of marshes — so far as is known, of fresh- water marshes only
— and probably fed largely on ferns, abundance of which were found
with the Bernissart specimens.

A multitude of other treasures besides the iguanodons were found
at Bernissart, and are awaiting careful examination. Among them
are crocodiles, in which two new genera have been defined ; turtles,
which have given one new genus ; and " a vast quantity of fishes."

■+++-

DEFECTIVE EYE-SIGHT.

By SAMUEL YOKKE AT LEE.

DETERIORATION of the eye has been, for many years, a topic
of complaint — not only in the United States, but in Europe. In
Germany, after a careful examination of the pupils in a public school,
a surgeon has reported that the proportion of normal-sighted children
is gradually less as the ages of the subjects advance : being thirty-
six per cent in the primary classes to ninety per cent in the highest
classes. Another German investigator reports that, from an examina-
tion embracing ten thousand children, it was found that the number
of short-sighted in the elementary classes was from five to eleven per
cent ; in the higher school for girls, the proportion was from ten to
twenty-four per cent ; in the Mealschulen, it was between twenty and
forty per cent ; in the gymnasia, between thirty and fifty per cent ;
and in the highest classes of all, between thirty-five and eighty-eight
per cent. In an examination of six hundred students of theology
at Tubingen, it was found that seventy-nine per cent suffered from
myopia.

Similar examinations made in the schools of France and of Eng-
land exhibit similar results, showing that the organ of sight grows
weaker as the term of study grows longer. In the United States,

358 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

examination proves the same facts. In Philadelphia, a committee of
physicians of the Medical Society examined, with the ophthalmoscope,
the eyes of four thousand children in the public schools, and their
report exhibits similar conclusions. In San Francisco, the Depart-
ment Superintendent of the Public Schools asserts that, of the pupils
who enter the public schools at the eighth grade, and work their way
up to the high-school, fully forty per cent are afflicted with one or
another form of myopia. Dr. Agnew shows, in a recent report on the
progress of near-sightedness in this country, that "our school-rooms
are the factors most directly influential in the gradual and increasing
development of a race of spectacle-using people." Dr. Derby, Dr.
Seguin, and many other scientific philanthropic gentlemen, have ut-
tered similar opinions. Professor Calhoun, of the Atlanta Medical
College, says, on this subject, that in the interior of the eye there is
an elastic muscle, called the ciliary muscle (circumscribing that aper-
ture through which light is conveyed to the retina), by which the
sight is graduated to different distances. In a normal eye, the con-
tractions and expansions of this muscle are not noticed by us ; but in
a near-sighted or over-sighted eye these changes are violent and some-
times painful ; and, eventually, the action of this muscle is spasmodic
and so weakened that the sight is permanently injured. Near-sighted-
ness, he remarks, seldom begins until the sixth year, when children
commence using the eye on school-books. There are records of the
examinations of the eyes of forty-five thousand school-children, of all
ages and grades, white and colored, and it has been proved that near-
sightedness increases, from class to class, until, in the highest grades,
it has actually been developed in as many as sixty or seventy per cent
of all the scholars. I saw, lately, in the " Baltimore Sun," that a stu-
dious little girl in a public school in that city was struck with blind-
ness at her desk, just after finishing her reading-lesson.

The causes to which this deterioration of eye-sight has been attrib-
uted are alleged to be cross-lights from opposite windows, light shin-
ing directly on the face, insufficient light, small types, and to the
position of the desk, forcing the scholar to bend over and bring the
eyes too close to the book or writing-paper, etc.

But, were all these defects remedied, the integrity of the eye would
not be restored nor its deterioration prevented. The chief causes of
the evil would still remain. These are the colors of the paper and ink.
White paper and black ink are ruining the eye-sight of all reading
nations. The " rays of the sun," says Lord Bacon, " are reflected by a
white body, and are absorbed by a black one." No one dissents from
this opinion ; but, despite these indications of nature and of philoso-
phy, we print our books and write our letters in direct opposition to
the suggestions of optical science.

When we read a book printed in the existing mode, we do not see
the letters, which, being black, are non-reflective. The shapes reach

DEFECTIVE EYESIGHT. 359

the retina, but they are not received by a spontaneous, direct action of
that organ. The white surface of the paper is reflected, but the let-
ters are detected only by a discriminative effort of the optic nerves.
This effort annoys the nerves, and, when long continued, exhausts their
susceptibility. The human eye can not long sustain the broad glare of
a white surface without injury. The author of " Spanish Vistas," in
" Harper's Magazine," says of Cartagena that " blind people seem to be
numerous there, a fact which may be owing to the excessive dazzle of
the sunlight and the absence of verdure." Mr. Seward, in his tour
around the world, observed that " in Egypt ophthalmia is universal,"
attributing it to the same " excessive dazzle " of the wide areas of
white sand ; and the British soldiers, in the late campaign in that
country, exhibited symptoms of the same disease. In the Smithsonian
Report for 1877 it is stated, in a paper on " Color-Blindness," that
" M. Chevreul has produced 14,420 distinguishable tints of the ele-
mentary colors, from which the paper-manufacturers could select col-
ors more agreeable to the eye than the dazzling white, so weakening
and lacerating to the nerves of that delicate organ." We know, too,
that the Esquimaux, wandering over their snowy plains, and the Arabs,
roving over their sandy deserts, are afflicted with inflammation of the
eyes, which often results in blindness. I once rode for hours over a
Western snow-covered prairie, and experienced the wearisome and irri-
tating glare ; and, had my ride been continued longer, I might have
found myself in the condition of the gentleman described in the
" Cheyenne (Wyoming Territory) Leader," of April 17th ult., as fol-
lows : " Ex-Governor John W. Hoyt was brought home in yesterday's
coach from the north suffering from snow-blindness. He left Cheyenne
on Thursday, and on Friday traveled all day over the snow while the
sun shone brightly upon it. The Governor suffered greatly from pain
in the eyes in the evening, and at length became totally blind. He
has not been able to use his eye-sight since. His physician, Dr. Gray,
expresses the belief that the Governor will recover his sight, but
must be kept in a dark room for a week." Lieutenant Danenhower,
who lost the use of one of his eyes from the reflection of light from
ice and snow in the Arctic Expedition of 1881, is a notable illustration
of this subject.

From all these authorities and instances it does not seem unrea-
sonable to substitute some other than the universal color of our paper.
What color shall it be ? Nature and science declare that it should be
green. Green grass covers the ground, and green leaves are our cano-
py, and no color is so grateful to the eye. Plutarch said, in Demosthe-
nes, " it is universally acknowledged that we are not to abandon the
unhappy to their sorrows, but to endeavor to console them by rational
discourses, or by turning their attention to more agreeable objects — in
the same manner as we desire those who have weak eyes to turn them
from bright or dazzling colors to green or to others of a softer kind."

360 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

And, in his life of Pericles, he says that " green is best suited to the
eye by its beauty and agreeableness, and at the same time it refreshes
and strengthens the sight." From an old anonymous volume entitled
" The Gentleman and Lady instructed," published in London in 1759,
I extract the following : " Some authors argue for a providence, from
the earth being covered with green rather than with any other color,
as being such a right mixture of light and shade that it comforts and
strengthens instead of weakening or grieving the eye, and they ex-
plain it in this manner : All colors that are more luminous than green
overpower and dissipate the animal spirits which are employed in the
sight ; whereas those that are more obscure do not sufficiently exer-
cise the animal spirits ; but the rays which produce in us the idea of
green fall upon the eye in such a due proportion that they give the
animal spirits their proper play, and, by keeping up the struggle in a
just balance, excite a very pleasing and agreeable sensation. But,"
says the author, "be the cause what it will, we know that its effect is
certain." Richerand, the celebrated French physiologist, says, in his
chapter on " Sensations " : " Green is the softest of colors, the most per-
manently grateful ; that which least fatigues the eyes, and on which
they will the longest and most willingly repose. Accordingly, Nature
has been profuse of green in the coloring of all plants, and she has, in
some sort, dyed of this color the greater part of the surface of the
globe." Dr. Thomas Dick, in his work " On the Improvement of So-
ciety by the Diffusion of Knowledge," remarks, page 206, section 6 :
" As the eye is constructed of the most delicate substances, and is one
of the most admirable pieces of mechanism connected with our frame,
so the Creator has arranged the world in such a manner as to afford it
the most varied and delightful gratification. By means of the solar
light, which is exactly adapted to the structure of this organ, thou-
sands of objects of diversified beauty and sublimity are presented to
the view. It opens before us the mountains, the vales, the woods, the
lawns, the brooks and rivers, the fertile plains and flowery fields,
adorned with every hue, the expanse of ocean, and the glories of the
firmament ; and, as the eye would be dazzled were a deep red color
or a brilliant white to be spread over the face of Nature, the Divine
Goodness has clothed the heavens with bkte, and the earth with green
— the two colors which are the least fatiguing and the most pleasing
to the organs of sight ; and, at the same time, one of these colors is
diversified by a thousand delicate shades, which produce a delightful
variety on the landscape of the world."

Dr. Phene, in a paper read recently by him before a scientific so-
ciety in Edinburgh, advised the planting of trees in cities ; among the
beneficial results of which he mentions " the relief to the optic nerve
through the eye resting on objects of a green color, and that, as the
power of sight is strengthened and sustained by green glasses, a similar
advantage would be gained by the presence of the green foliage in the

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY. 361

streets." And, finally, that profound philosopher, Swedenborg, says
in his " True Christian Religion ": " What would color be if only white
were given and no black ? The quality of the intermediate colors,
from any other source, is but imperfect. What is sense without rela-
tion ? and what is relation but things opposite ? Is not the sight of
the eye darkened by white alone, and enlivened by green, a color in-
wardly deriving something from black ? "

These authorities and facts are entitled to serious consideration.
They are all demonstrative of the positive injury, laceration, and de-
struction of the sight by the reflective dazzle of white ; and to what
else can we attribute the steadily increasing myopia of the children
in our schools ? Why not reform it altogether ? Let our books be
printed on green paper, and let our printers use red, yellow, or white
ink for the noxious black. The reform would be revolutionary, and
the interests of the trade would be at first hostile to the change. For
thousands of years, from papyrus to superfine glittering note-paper,
our eyes have been exposed to the deleterious influences of black and
white. The change to green, yellow, and red, or to some other agree-
able reflective tints, is eventually certain to take place. Science and
common sense will compel it. The substitution can not, probably, be
sudden nor immediate, for the stationery world must be turned up-
side down in the process : old school-books, blank-books, and writing-
books and inks, must be displaced ; and publishers and paper-manufac-
turers will have to adapt their measures to the new dispensation. But,
when it is consummated, everybody will rejoice, except the spectacle-
makers. The eyes of the scholar and of the student will no longer be
wearied with the myopian contrast of black and white, but strength-
ened and refreshed by congenial colors ; and to pore over the pages of
a book would be no more fatiguing to the eyes than gazing on a ver-
dant prairie decorated with variously tinted flowers.

■♦•»

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY.

By W. MATTIEU WILLIAMS.

XX.

IN my last I described generally the diffusion of liquids, and the ac-
tions to which the names of endosmosis and exosmosis have been
given. It is easily seen that in extracting the juices of meat by im-
mersion in water the work is done by these two agencies. This is the
case, whether the extraction is effected by maceration (immersion in
cold water) or by stewing.

Some of these juices, as already explained, exist between the fibers
of the meat, others are within those fibers or cells, enveloped in the

362 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

sheath or cell-membrane. It is evident that the loose or free juices
will be extracted by simple diffusion ; those enveloped in membranes
by exosmosis through the membrane. The result must be the same in
both cases : the meat will be permeated by the water, and the sur-
rounding water will be permeated by the juices that originally existed
within the meat. As the rate of diffusion — other conditions being
equal — is proportionate to the extent of the surfaces of the diverse
liquids that are exposed to each other, and, as the rate of osmosis is
similarly proportioned to the exposure of membrane, it is evident that
the cutting-up of the meat will assist the extraction of its juices by the
creation of fresh surfaces ; hence the well-known advantage of minc-
ing in the making of beef -tea.

It is interesting to observe the condition of lean meat that has thus
been minced and exposed for a few hours to these actions by immer-
sion in cold water. On removing and straining such minced meat it
will be found to have lost its color, and if it is now cooked it is insipid,
and even nauseous if eaten in any quantity. It has been given to dogs
and cats and pigs ; these, after eating a little, refuse to take more,
and, when supplied with this juiceless meat alone, they languish, be-
come emaciated, and die of starvation if the experiment is continued.
Experiments of this kind contributed to the fallacious conclusions de-
scribed in No. 6 of this series. Although the meat from which the
juices are thus completely extracted is quite worthless alone, and meat
from which they are partially extracted is nearly worthless alone,
either of them becomes valuable when eaten with the juices. The
stewed beef of the Frenchman would deserve the contempt bestowed
upon it by the prejudiced Englishman if it were eaten as the English-
man eats his roast beef ; but when preceded by a potage containing
the juices of the beef it is quite as nutritious as if roasted, and more
easily digested.

Graham found that increase of temperature increased the rate of
diffusion of liquids, and in accordance with this the extraction of the
juices of meat is effected more rapidly by warm than by cold water,
but there is a limit to this advantage, as will be easily understood by
referring back to No. 3, in which are described the conditions of coagu-
lation of one of these juices — viz., the albumen, which at the tem-
perature of 134° Fahr. begins to show signs of losing its fluidity ; at
160° becomes a semi-opaque jelly ; and at the boiling-point of water
is a rather tough solid, which, if kept at this temperature, shrinks, and
becomes harder and harder, tougher and tougher, till it attains a con-
sistence comparable to that of horn tempered with gutta-percha.

I have spoken of beef -tea, or JExtractum Camis (Liebig's Extract
of Meat), as an extreme case of extracting the juices of meat, and
must now explain the difference between this and the juices of an or-
dinary stew. Supposing the juices of the meat to be extracted by
maceration in cold water, and the broth thus obtained to be heated in

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY. 363

order to alter its raw flavor, a scum will be seen to rise upon the sur-
face ; this is carefully removed in the manufacture of Liebig's extract
or the preparation of beef -tea for an invalid, but in thus skimming we
remove a highly-nutritious constituent — viz., the albumen which has
coagulated during the heating. The pure beef -tea, or Extractum Car-
nis, contains only the creatine, creatinine, the soluble phosphates, the
lactic acid, and other non-coagulable saline constituents, that are
rather stimulating than nutritious, and which, properly speaking, are
not digested at all — i. e., they are not converted into chyme in the
stomach, do not pass through the pylorus into the duodenum, etc., but,
instead of this, their dilute solution passes, like the water we drink,
directly into the blood by endosmosis through the delicate membrane
of that marvelous network of microscopic blood-vessels which is spread
over the surface of every one of the myriads of little upstanding fila-
ments which, by their aggregation, constitute the villous or velvet coat
of the stomach. In some states of prostration, where the blood is in-
sufficiently supplied with these juices, this endosmosis is like pouring
new life into the body, but it is not what is required for the normal
sustenance of the healthy body.

For ordinary food, all the nutritious constituents should be re-
tained, either in the meat itself, or in its liquid surrounding. Regard-
ing it theoretically, I should demand the retention of the albumen in
the meat, and insist upon its remaining there in the condition of tender
semi-solidity, corresponding to the white of an egg when perfectly
cooked, as described in No. 4. Also that the gelatine and fibrine be
softened by sufficient digestion in hot water, and that the saline juices
(those constituting beef -tea) be partially extracted. I say " partial-
ly," because their complete extraction, as in the case of the macerated
mince-meat, would too completely rob the meat of its sapidity. How,
then, may these theoretical desiderata be attained ?

It is evident from the principles already expounded that cold ex-
traction takes out the albumen, therefore this must be avoided ; also
that boiling water will harden the albumen to leathery consistence.
This may be shown experimentally by subjecting an ordinary beef-
steak to the action of boiling water for about half an hour. It will
come out in the abominable condition too often obtained by English
cooks when they make an attempt at stewing — an unknown art to the
majority of them. Such an ill-used morsel defies the efforts of or-
dinary human jaws, and is curiously curled and distorted. This tough-
ening and curling is a result of the coagulation, hardening, and shrink-
age of the albumen, as described in No. 3.

It is evident, therefore, that in stewing, neither cold water nor
boiling water should be used, but water at the temperature at which
albumen just begins to coagulate — i. e., about 134°, or between this
and 160° as the extreme. But here we encounter a serious difficulty.
How is the unscientific cook to determine and maintain this tempera-

364 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ture ? If you tell her that the water must not boil, she shifts her stew-
pan to the side of the fire, where it shall only simmer, and she firmly
believes that such simmering water has a lower temperature than
water that is boiling violently over the fire. " It stands to reason "
that it must be so, and, if the experimental philosopher appeals to fact
and the evidence of the thermometer, he is a " theorist."

The French cook escapes this simmering delusion by her common
use of the bain-marie or " water-bath," as we call it in the labora-
tory, where it is also largely used for " digesting " at temperatures be-
low 212°. This is simply a vessel immersed in an outer vessel of water.
The water in the outer vessel may boil, but that in the inner vessel can
not, as its evaporation keeps it below the temperature of the water
from which its heat is derived. A carpenter's glue-pot is a very good
and compact form of water-bath, and I recommend the introduction
of this apparatus into kitchens where a better apparatus is not obtaina-
ble. Some iron-mongers keep in stock a form of water-bath which they
call a "niilk-scalder." This resembles the glue-pot, but has an inner
vessel of earthenware, which is, of course, a great improvement upon
the carpenter's device, as it may be so easily cleaned.

One of the incidental advantages of the bain-marie is that the
stewing may be performed in earthenware or even glass vessels, seeing
that they are not directly exposed to the fire. Other forms of such
double vessels are obtainable at the best iron-mongers'. I have lately
seen a very neat apparatus of this kind, called " Dolby's Extractor."
This consists of an earthenware vessel that rests on a ledge, and thus
hangs in an outer tin-plate vessel ; but, instead of water, there is an
air-space surrounding the earthenware pot. A top screws over this,
and the whole stands in an ordinary saucepan of water. The heat is
thus very slowly and steadily communicated through an air-bath, and
it makes excellent beef-tea ; but, being closed, the evaporation does
not keep down the temperature sufficiently to fulfill the above-named
conditions for perfect stewing. At temperatures below the boiling-
point evaporation proceeds superficially, and the rate of evaporation at
a given temperature is proportionate to the surface exposed, irrespect-
ive of the total quantity of water ; therefore, the shallower the inner
vessel of the bain-marie, and the greater its upper outspread, the
lower will be the temperature of its liquid contents when its sides and
bottom are heated by boiling water. The water in a basin-shaped in-
ner vessel will have a lower temperature than that in a vessel of simi-
lar depth, Avith upright sides, and exposing an equal water-surface. A
good water-bath for stewing may be extemporized by using a common
pudding-basin (I mean one with projecting rim, as used for tying
down the pudding-cloth), and selecting a saucepan just big enough
for this to drop into, and rest upon its rim. Put the meat, etc., to be
stewed into the basin, pour hot water over them, and hot water into
the saucepan, so that the basin shall be in a water-bath ; then let this

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY. 365

outer water simmer — very gently, so as not to jump the basin with its
steam. Stew thus for about double the time usually prescribed in
English cookery-books, and compare the result with similar materials
stewed in boiling or " simmering " water.

XXI.

In my last I explained the hardening effect of boiling water on
meat, and the consequent necessity of keeping down the temperature
considerably below the boiling-point in order to obtain a tender and
full-flavored stew. Some further explanation is necessary, as it is
quite possible to obtain what commonly passes for tenderness by a
very flagrant violation of the principles there expounded. This is
done on a large scale and in extreme degree in the preparation of
ordinary Australian tinned meat. A number of tins are filled with
the meat, and soldered down close, all but a small pin-hole. They are
then placed in a bath charged with a saline substance, such as chloride
of zinc, which has a higher boiling-point than water. This is heated
up to its boiling-point, and consequently the water which is in the tins
with the meat boils vigorously, and a jet of steam mixed with air
blows from the pin-hole. When all the air is expelled and the jet is
of pure steam only (a difference detected at once by the trained ex-
pert), the tin is removed, and a little melted solder skillfully dropped
on the hole to seal the tin hermetically. An examination of one of
these tins will show this final soldering with — in some — a flap below
to prevent any solder from falling in among the meat. The object of
this is to exclude all air, for, if only a very small quantity remains,
oxidation and putrefaction speedily ensue, as shown by a bulging of
the tins instead of the partial collapse that should occur when the
steam condenses, the display of which collapse is an indication of good
quality of the contents.

By " good quality " I mean good of its kind ; but, as everybody
knows who has tried beef and mutton thus prepared, it is not satis-
factory. The preservation from putrefactive decomposition is per-
fectly successful, and all the original constituents of the meat are
there. It is apparently tender, but practically tough — i. e., it falls to
pieces at a mere touch of the knife, but these fragments offer to the
teeth a peculiar resistance to proper masticatory comminution. I may
describe their condition as one of pertinacious fibrosity. The fibers
separate, but there they are as stubborn fibers still.

This is a very serious matter, for, were it otherwise, the great prob-
lem of supplying our dense population with an abundance of cheap
animal food would have been solved about twenty years ago. As it
is, the plain tinned-meat enterprise has not developed to any important
extent beyond affording a variation with salt junk on board ship.

What is the rationale of this defect ? Beyond the general state-
ment that the meat is " overdone," I have met with no attempt at

3 66 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

explanation ; but am not, therefore, disposed to give up the riddle
without attempting a solution.

Reverting to what I have already said concerning the action of
heat on the constituents of flesh, it is evident that in the first place the
long exposure to the boiling-point must harden the albumen. Syntonin,
or muscle-jibrine, the material of the ultimate contractile fibers of the
muscle, is coagulated by boiling water, and further hardened by con-
tinuous boiling, in the same manner as albumen. Thus, the muscle-
fibers themselves and the lubricating liquor * in which they are im-
bedded must be simultaneously toughened by the method above
described, and this explains the pertinacious fibrosity of the result.

But how is the apjDarent tenderness, the facile separation of the
fibers of the same meat, produced ? A little further examination of
the anatomy and chemistry of muscle will, I think, explain this quite
satisfactorily. The ultimate fibers of the muscles are enveloped in a
very delicate membrane ; a bundle of these is again enveloped in a
somewhat stronger membrane {areolar tissue) ; and a number of these
bundles or fasciculi are further enveloped in a j)roportionally stronger
sheath of similar membrane. All these binding membranes are mainly
composed of gelatine, or the substance which (as explained in No. 5)
produces gelatine when boiled. The boiling that is necessary to drive
out all the air from the tins is sufficient to dissolve this, and effect that
easy separability of the muscular fibers, or fasciculi of fibers, that gives
to such overcooked meat its fictitious tenderness.

I have entered into these anatomical and chemical details because
it is only by understanding them that the difference between true ten-
derness and spurious tenderness of stewed meat can be soundly under-
stood, especially in this country, where stewed meats are despised be-
cause scientific stewing is practically and generally an unknown art.
Ask an English cook the difference between boiled beef or mutton and
stewed beef or mutton, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred her
reply will be to the effect that stewed meat is that which has been
boiled or simmered for a longer time than the boiled meat.

She proceeds, in accordance with this definition, when making an
Irish stew or similar dish, by " simmering " at 212° until, by the coag-
ulation and hardening of the albumen and syntonin, a leathery mass is
obtained ; then she continues the simmering until the gelatine of the
areolar tissue is dissolved, and the toughened fibers separate or become
readily separable. Having achieved this disintegration, she supposes
the meat to be tender, the fact being that the fibers individually are
tougher than they were at the leathery stage. The mischief is not
limited to the destruction of the flavor of the meat, but includes the

* I have ventured to ascribe this lubricating function to the albumen which envelops
the fibers, though doubtful whether it is quite orthodox to do so. Its identity in compo-
sition with the synovial liquor of the joints and the necessity for such lubricant justify
this supposition. It may act as a nutrient fluid at the same time.

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY. 367

destruction of the nutritive value of its solid portion by rendering it
all indigestible, with the exception of the gelatine which is dissolved
in the gravy. This exception should be duly noted, inasmuch as it is
the one redeeming feature of such proceeding that renders it fairly
well adapted for the cookery of such meat as cow-heels, sheep's trot-
ters, calves'-heads, shins of beef, knuckles of veal, and other viands
which consist mainly of membranous, tendinous, or integumentary
matter composed of gelatine. To treat the prime parts of good beef
or mutton in this manner is to perpetrate a domestic atrocity.

I am not yet able to record the result of stewing a sirloin of beef
in accordance with the scientific principles expounded in my last.
Have no hopes of being able to do so until I can spare time to stand
by the kitchen fire with thermometer in hand from beginning to end
of the process, or have constructed a stewing-pot, big enough for the
purpose, so arranged that its contents can not possibly by any effort
of ingenious perversity be raised above 180°. The domestic super-
stition concerning simmering is so wide-spread and inveterate that
every normally-constituted cook stubbornly believes that simmering
water is of much lower temperature than boiling water, and there-
fore any amount of instruction or injunctions for the maintenance of
a heat below boiling will be stubbornly translated into an order for
" gentle simmering," a quarter of an hour of which would spoil the
sirloin.

I may, however, mention an experiment that I have made lately.
I killed a superannuated hen — more than six years old, but otherwise
in very good condition. Cooked in the ordinary way she would have
been uneatably tough. Instead of being thus cooked, she was gently
stewed about four hours. I can not guarantee to the maintenance
of the theoretical temperature, having suspicion of some simmering.
After this she was left in the water until it cooled, and on the follow-
ing day was roasted in the usual manner, i. e., in a roasting-oven. The
result was excellent ; as tender as a full-grown chicken roasted in the
ordinary way, and of quite equal flavor, in spite of the very good broth
obtained by the preliminary stewing. This surprised me. I antici-
pated the softening of the tendons and ligaments, but supposed that
the extraction of the juices would have spoiled the flavor. It must
have diluted it, and that so much remained was probably due to the
fact that an old fowl is more fully flavored than a young chicken.
The usual farmhouse method of cooking old hens is to stew them
simply ; the rule in the midlands being one hour in the pot for every
year of age. The feature of the above experiment was the supple-
mentary roasting. As the laying season is now coming to an end, old
hens will soon be a drug in the market, and those among my readers
who have not a hen-roost of their own will oblige their poulterers by
ordering a hen that is warranted to be four years old or upward. If
he deals fairly he will supply a specimen upon which they may repeat

3 68 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

my experiment, very cheaply. It offers the double economy of utiliz-
ing a nearly waste product and obtaining chicken-broth and roast fowl
simultaneously.

One of the great advantages of stewing is that it affords a means
of obtaining a savory and very wholesome dish at a minimum of cost.
A small piece of meat may be stewed with a large quantity of vege-
tables, the juice of the meat savoring the whole. Besides this, it costs
far less fuel than roasting.

The wife of the French or Swiss landed proprietor, i. e., the peasant,
cooks the family dinner with less than a tenth of the expenditure of
fuel used in England for the preparation of an inferior meal. A little
charcoal under her bain-marie does it all. The economy of time cor-
responds to the economy of fuel, for the mixture of viands required
for the stew once put into the pot is left to itself until dinner-time, or
at most an occasional stirring of fresh charcoal into the embers is all
that is demanded. — Knowledge.

-♦♦♦-

CATCHING COLD.

By C. E. PAGE, M. D.

" She caught her death o' cold, taking gruel out of a damp basin." — Old Story.

THERE has always been more or less of mystery connected with the
disorder popularly called " a cold." A close observer, in study-
ing this question, will find :

1. That, while persons of all ages, sexes, occupations, social posi-
tions, and in all conditions of general health — from the delicate infant
and the frail consumptive to the most robust man — have colds, say
to-day, from the slightest causes, often enough, indeed, when utterly
at a loss to account for the attack ; next month, or next week, perhaps,
the same individuals — the frail and delicate ones, even — may pass
through severe exposures to wet and cold, even to the point of being
chilled through and through, without producing a symptom of this
disorder.

2. Every day throughout the year we see evidences of the disease ;
to the last individual in any community none escape altogether, a large
proportion are affected several times, and individuals there are who
rarely pass an entire month without some of the symptoms ; while
others, notably children and infants who are fed every hour or two,
are almost constant sufferers from nasal catarrh, difficult breathing
(" snuffles "), and general malaise, and are peculiarly subject to acute
attacks.

3. Whenever it happens that an unusually large proportion of the
people are attacked at about the same time, the disease is popularly

CATCHING COLD. 369

attributed to the influence of an " influenza-wave " ; but this theory
seems to me utterly untenable, else a still larger proportion would be
thus affected, and the disease would, in general, be confined to such
periods ; whereas very many escape at such times, only, alas ! to fall
victims to the disorder during the finest season of the year, when the
weather is the mildest and most charming and the temperature most
uniform. Indeed, some of the severest " attacks " are observed at
such times, and the disease is far more prevalent during a season of
steady hot weather in summer than during a period of steady cold
weather in winter ! But it is during a warm spell in midwinter, after
the world has for quite a period of intense cold been confined within-
doors, that " everybody has a cold " !

4. While the disease under consideration is no respecter of persons,
but is as universal as the dietetic habits of the people are uniform,
there is one class, viz., vegetarians, who are very much less subject to
it, often passing the entire year without an attack, or, if attacked, are
less seriously affected, and recover more speedily than others about
them. Individuals, indeed, there are, living still more abstemiously,
and paying proper regard to the ventilation of their dwellings, who
fitver have a cold, though half the town may be sick with the disease :
the " wave " never touches even the hem of their garments.

5. Members of this class, however, upon resuming their former
practices as to diet, returning to the " mixed " diet and three meals a
day, also resume the habit of " catching cold " ; indeed, a visit of a few
weeks, in a family of " good livers," especially if the latter are " air-
haters " also, will often produce an attack.

Personally, though a life-long sufferer from the disease in various
forms, from the " snuffles " of infancy to the " hay-fever " of adult
age, together with occasional attacks of neuralgia, rheumatism, throat
and lung affections, etc., I now find it impossible to excite any of the
" well-known symptoms," or, in fact, any form of disease, though sub-
jecting myself to what many would consider the most suicidal prac-
tices in the matter of exposure to the elements, so long as I live upon
a frugal diet, chiefly cereals and fruit, served plainly — nominally two
meals a day ; holding myself ready, however, to " skip " a meal when
necessary, i. e., whenever any of the symptoms of indigestion, as acid
stomach, flatulence, pressure in the region of the lungs or stomach, etc.,
warn me of having carried the pleasures of the table a trifle beyond
the needs of the organism.

I have, in my efforts to " catch " cold, submitted myself to ex-
posures that to the minds of most 'people would appear of a suicidal!
character, wearing low shoes and walking in snow and slop until* both
socks and shoes were saturated, sitting an hour in that condition and
going to bed without warming my feet ; removing flannel under-gar-
ments in midwinter on the approach of colder weather, and attending
to out-door affairs without the overcoat habitually worn ; sleeping witb
tol. xxiv. — 24

370 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

a current of air blowing directly on my head and shoulders ; sitting
entirely naked in a draught, on a very cold, damp night in the fall, for
fifteen minutes before getting into bed ; wearing cotton night-shirt
and sleeping under light bed-covers on the night following the use of
flannel gown and heavy-weight bedclothes ; rising from bed on a cold,
rainy morning, and sitting naked for an hour, writing, and then put-
ting on shirt and trousers only, the shirt almost saturated with rain
and the trousers quite damp, from hanging by the window — these and
similar experiments I have tried repeatedly, but without catching cold :
I become cold, and become warm again, that is all.*

On the other hand, changing the nature of my experiments, go-
ing back to my old habits as to diet — the indulgence of what we call
a " generous " diet — the universal mixed diet of the people, viz., fish,
flesh, fowl, with the hot, stimulating, and greasy condiments almost
invariably associated with this class of food, together with pastry, pud-
dings, and sauces, coffee, etc. — I have found no difficulty in accumulat-
ing a " cold," and within a reasonable length of time — the time de-
pending upon the degree of my over-indulgence as to frequency and
amount — although, now, a part of the programme consisted in taking
the most extreme care to avoid everything in the way of " exposures,"
as this term is commonly applied — keeping the feet dry and warm,
paying the utmost attention to wraps, etc., etc. Indeed, my own ex-
perience and observation satisfy me of the truth, and furnish ample
explanation for it, of the oft-expressed opinion that those people who
wrap the most and take the most care in such respects are the greatest
sufferers from " colds " ; and, theoretically, this would be the logical
deduction from a consideration of the simple facts taught even in the
primary text-books on physiology : certainly, the less clothing one
wears and the more he is exposed to cold, the nearer he is carried,
metaphorically speaking, to the polar regions, where surfeit-fever is
unknown ! Said an observing friend to me, " I am apt to catch cold
when I put on my winter flannels — why is it ? " My explanation was
satisfactory to him, for he was a bright man; but, in general, it is difficult
for people to comprehend the fact or the principle involved therein. f

* Accidents often cause worse exposures than any I have enumerated above, without
exciting this disorder : for example, upon the occasion of a shipwreck on a bleak, Northern
coast, in winter, not one of the stranded mariners or passengers would have " a cold " in
consequence. Indeed, a sufficient degree of exposure to hunger and cold would tend to
N cure " every case of this disorder that previously existed on shipboard ; and if the ex-
posure should not extend beyond measure — beyond the power of endurance of an indi-
vidual or the entire group — no sickness of any sort would result.

f For the past two winters the writer has worn no under-flannels. He removed them
in midwinter (1881-'82) as a part of the treatment for "a cold!" The balance of the
curative regimen consisted in a quick sponge-bath, succeeded by an air-bath with friction
for fifteen minutes in a cool room, abstaining from food for the entire day, though the
appetite was craving, engaging in active exercise in the open air. By night the feverish
symptoms had disappeared, the oppressed lungs were relieved, hoarseness scarcely notice-
able— in a word, convalescence established.

CATCHING COLD. 37i

In the course of my experiments, whenever I have fed my cold
as far as I wished or dared to go, I have, in every instance, ban-
ished the disease by entirely abstaining from food for a time ; I have
never known this remedy (if applied at the very onset) to fail of
"breaking up" a common cold in twenty-four to forty- eight hours,
whatever the age, sex, or occupation of the patient. However we
may differ as to the origin of the disorder, whenever I can prevail
upon a sufferer to try this remedy, we come to be of one opinion as to
what will most surely and speedily " cure " it.

Of course the size of the " dose " must bear some relation to the
severity of the case : * On the first appearance of the disease — the
symptoms of a slight cold, so familiar to all — skipping a single meal, in
the case of a person who takes but two meals a day habitually, or two
meals, in the case of a three-mealer, will sometimes suffice, if the suc-
ceeding meals be very moderate ones. I have usually, in my experimen-
tation, been satisfied to "turn " at the " one-meal buoy," not often being
obliged to abstain longer than twenty-four hours. When, however, I
have chosen to prolong the experiment by continuing to eat heartily,
as is the custom with people in general at such times, I have found
my experience identical with theirs : the symptoms would increase in
severity, and to nasal catarrh, headache, slight feverishness, and lan-
guor, would be added sore-throat, perhaps, with pressure at the lungs,
hoarseness, increased fever, and entire indisposition for exertion. In
this case, two, perhaps three days' fasting would be required, with a
little extra sponging of the skin, to completely restore the balance.
Out-door air is desirable, and — when not demanding too great effort —
exercise. Air-baths, when there is much feverishness of the skin, are
comforting and curative. The practice of holding doicn the bed-
clothes, in case of fever and delirium, lest the burning body " catch
cold," and of stinting the supply of fresh air for the same reason, is
no less irrational than to withhold water or to offer food.

Years of study and observation have forced me to the conclusion
that the disease which manifests the symptoms popularly supposed to
indicate that a cold has been caught is to all intents and purposes a

* In the " Boston Journal of Chemistry," February, 1882, I reported a case of con-
sumption (the patient, seventy years old, had been declining for three years, and was
helpless in bed) cured by a forty-three days' fast. He had been a great sufferer ; but his
cough and pains gradually disappeared during the first two weeks. Within four months
thereafter, on a fruit-and-bread diet, he had regained his normal weight and strength.

A bad case of malarial fever, the past summer, yielded to a twelve days' fast, and
nothing else. Another patient suffering from rheumatism, with night-sweats, fasted thir-
teen days, obtaining great relief. His night-sweats ceased the fourth day.

Dr. Wood, Professor of Chemistry in Bishop's College, Montreal, reports for the
Canada " Medical Record " forty-seven cases of acute articular rheumatism cured by fast-
ing— time required, from four to eight days — and a recent letter assures me that this
remedy is still successful with him. He consequently has come to regard rheumatism as
" a phase of indigestion."

372 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

filth-disease, arises largely from indigestion, and forms the basis, so to
say, or is in fact the first stage of all the so-called filth-diseases.
Whatever interferes with digestion or depuration, or depraves the
vital organism in any manner, produces an impure condition of the
body — a condition of disease ; and a continuance of disease-producing
habits must inevitably result in periodical or occasional " eruptions,"
the severity of which will depend upon the degree of one's transgression.
Among the causes of this impure bodily condition are (1) impure
food,* (2) excess in diet, and (3) impure air. Our homes, oftices,
shops, halls, court-houses, churches, and, with rare exceptions, all liv-
ing-rooms, private or public, are insufficiently or not at all ventilated ;
and, except while in the open air, a very large proportion of our
people, in all the walks of life, habitually breathe an atmosphere viti-
ated by being breathed over and over again ; they are starving for
want of oxygen, and are being poisoned by carbonic acid. In default
of sufficient oxygen the best of food can not be transformed into pure
blood — there will always be a corresponding indigestion ; nor can the
carbonic acid be eliminated freely in an impure atmosphere. We
have, then, serious " interference with digestion and depuration,"
whenever we remain even for a single hour of the twenty-four in an
" in-door " atmosphere, i. e., an atmosphere that is not in tolerably free
communication with the great body of air without. The only offset
for restriction in oxygen is restriction in diet and exercise ; but a com-
bination of this character would produce enfeeblement of the system,
though if a proper balance were maintained there would arise no
febrile symptoms such as we are considering. We have plenty of
people living in unventilated rooms who, so far as exercise is concerned^
live a well-balanced life ; but seldom do these, any more than the
robust and active, practice any sort of voluntary restriction as to
quality or quantity of food — nausea and lack of appetite being the
only safeguards. Persons of this class are great sufferers from colds.
Impure air, although a prevailing source of disease, is not abso-
lutely essential in provoking this disorder ; an unwholesome diet alone
being sufficient. In none of my own experiments have I suffered any
restriction in the matter of pure air. But for this depraved condition
— this chronic state of impurity — that I have undertaken to describe

* Under this head I am led to class all foods eaten unnaturally, as (1) farinaceous
dishes (the mushes, soft bread, etc.), that on account of their mode of preparation and
dressing can not be insalivated ; and (2) flesh-food that is " well masticated " or taken
in the form of hash. It has been demonstrated (by experiments on dogs) that carnivo-
rous animals fed on hashed meat suffer from indigestion, while, if they are allowed to
swallow their meat as they like, in chunks, it is all digested. In repeated experiments
upon myself, I find that a moderate ration of meat, swallowed in pieces of convenient
size, occasions no disturbance, while the same quantity chewed fine, or taken in the form
of hash, is not well borne. The point is, that while minced meat passes out of the stom-
ach before being dissolved by the gastric juice, large pieces remain to be gradually
dissolved. There is no demand for the chemical action of saliva on this class of foods.

CATCHING COLD. 373

and account for, such sicknesses as croup, diphtheria, pneumonia,
measles, scarlet, typhus, typhoid,* rheumatic, " malarial," and other

fevers.

I have already remarked that the condition of disease produced by
an unhygienic mode of living, relating chiefly to food and air, and
whose occasional ebullitions are observed in the " well-known symp-
toms of cold," forms the basis of most sicknesses by whatever name
they are known. " I catched cold in the first place, and kept adding
to it, some way, I couldn't tell how, and finally it settled on my kid-
neys " (or lungs, throat, face, limbs, or whatever organ or locality
seems especially affected). As the nearest to a panacea for all the
physical ills of life, I would offer this : Take care of the colds and the
fevers will take care of themselves. Whatever may be the origin of
disease, or whatever may give rise to its manifestations, whenever
these manifestations or symptoms are said to indicate a cold, the con-
dition, as every intelligent physician well knows, is that of fever : the
thermometer placed under the tongue shows at once that the tempera-
ture is above the normal. The patient may, usually does, have periods
of chilliness ; his first noticeable symptom is, very likely, a chill ; and
if at such a moment he happens to feel a puff of fresh air on his cheek
he thinks that was the moment when he caught his cold ! Possibly
he might have been feeling a little too warm, and that "draught" f
did the business for him ! Chills and fever, speaking in popular
phrase (in reality it is all fever), indicate blood-poison, always. In its
earliest stage, the patient, being perhaps wholly unaware of his condi-
tion, feels "too warm," and throws off coat or shawl ; pretty soon he
feels the reaction — the chill — and, thinking he has done a careless
thing in removing the garment, replaces it ; too late, alas ! he has
already caught cold !

It is noteworthy as a curious yet easily explicable fact," says the
Lancet," "that few persons take cold who are not either self-con-
sciously careful or fearful of the consequences of exposure." J It is

* It is held by some that typhoid fever and some other diseases depend upon the in-
troduction of germs of the disease from without the organism. u No seed, no crop,"
remarks a friend, and adds : " These germs do not always lodge, or, if they do, may not
grow ; but they may. Not all the thistle-seeds take root and grow." To which I reply,
that neither thistles nor any other undesirable weeds ever " get the start " of a good gar-
dener ; and that, of all antagonists to obnoxious or undesirable " weeds," the vital organ-
ism, under the influence of rational personal hygiene, is the most alert and efficient.
— none of these, or at least but seldom, could get a foothold.

f Whenever a patient comes to me with " a cold," complaining of a draught, I usually
ask, " A ' draught ' of what — pure air or impure food ? " The answer, in the absence of
certain physiological knowledge, is sure to be a blank stare of helpless ignorance as to
my meaning.

\ Former patients comfort me with such remarks as these : " Your colds-theory has
given me a new lease of life ; " " How thankful I am for being rid of my old fear of cold
air ! " "I date my first real improvement from the hour when you induced me to throw
off my dread of cold," etc. " Now that I know what it is," writes a bright Southern lady,

11

374 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

not, however, that these over-careful people catch cold from fear, but
rather that their cowardice keeps them in-doors too much, or incites
them to " muffling " themselves when they do go out — they quake from
fear of " night-air," " draughts," and so cheat themselves of health-
producing influences. Lacking active exercise and fresh air, or swel-
tering with an excess of clothing, they must suffer from indigestion.
That is, though they may eat as much, or more, they can not digest as
much as the fearless person who dresses light, pays no heed to the
weather, spends considerable time out-doors every day, and, because
of this, can not and will not remain in " stuffy " rooms.

The " fresh-air idiot " seldom takes cold. " That may be," says the
timid, blood-poisoned, chilly man, " but he causes every one else to,
with the open doors and windows." There is a grain of truth, if not
of sense, in this assertion ; for the pure air in contact with the skin, and
in the lungs, of those who are most in need of it — who are filled up, so
to say, with the impurities of indigestion and deficient depuration — the
constipated air-haters — gives the needed stimulus, or, rather, so aug-
ments the vital powers that " the reconstructive process is initiated,
and thus apparently the disease itself, but there is a wide difference
between a proximate and an original cause. A man may be too tired
to sleep and too weak to be sick. Bleeding, for the time being, may
* break up ' an inflammatory disease — the system has to regain some
little strength before it can resume the work of reconstruction. The
vital energy of a person breathing the stagnant air of an unventilated
stove-room is often inadequate to the task of undertaking a restorative
process — though the respiratory organs, clogged with phlegm and all
kinds of impurities, may be sadly in need of relief. But, during a
sleigh-ride, or a few hours' sleep before a window left open by acci-
dent, the bracing influence of the fresh air revives the drooping vital-
ity, and Nature avails herself of the chance to begin repairs — the
lungs reveal their diseased condition, i. e., they proceed to rid them-
selves of the accumulated impurities.

"For," continues Oswald,* "rightly interpreted, the external symp-
toms of disease constitute a restorative process that can not be brought
to a satisfactory issue till the cause of the evil is removed. So that,
in fact, the air-hater confounds the cause of his recovery with the
cause of his disease. Benjamin Franklin, " whose wisdom was of that
rare kind which does not grow old," expressed his conviction of the
fact that "the causes of * colds' are totally independent of wet and
even of cold." f Dr. Herring remarks of a family of friends, " They
all invariably had ' colds in the head ' the next day after dining on
roast goose ! "

" I seldom catch cold, and, when I do, it gets away again right soon ! " I am compelled
to admit that all this is more profitable for patients than for the practitioner.

* " Physical Education," by F. L. Oswald, M. D. ; New York, D. Appleton & Co.

f "Essays," p. 216.

CATCHING COLD. 375

" The immediate effects of a displacement of blood from the sur-
face, and its determination to the internal organs, are not," says the
" Lancet," " as was once supposed, sufficient to produce the sort of con-
gestion that issues in inflammations. If it were so, an inflammatory con-
dition would be the common characteristic of our bodily state. When
the vascular system is healthy, and that part of the nervous apparatus by
which the caliber of the vessels is controlled performs its proper func-
tions normally, any disturbance of equilibrium in the circulatory sys-
tem which may have been produced by external cold will be quickly
adjusted. Most of the sensations of cold or heat," continues the " Lan-
cet," " which are experienced by the hypersensitive have no external
cause." They have, however, an internal cause which I have endeav-
ored to point out and account for, as well as indicate the natural
remedy. A " chilly " person is a sick person, and is in a state predis-
posing him to an " attack " — a natural kill-or-cure sickness — whenever
external conditions are favorable. But no amount of transient cold,
or wet, or draughts, can alone originate the symptoms of " a cold " ;
the predisposing cause must of necessity exist, or the effects will be of
a wholly different character : temporary discomfort — suffering, per-
haps— and, at the worst (if the exposure be of a severe nature, as in
the case of a feeble person), a lowering of the general health. Short
of the point of freezing to death, or of exposure so severe as to render
reaction impossible, the person will get cold and — get warm again, that
is all.

There is a maxim worthy of all acceptation : " If you stuff a cold
you will have to starve a fever." Unfortunately abbreviated to "stuff
a cold and starve a fever," and utterly misinterpreted, a deal of mis-
chief has been done, for which the only compensation evident to my
mind is this : those who have accepted the first division of the command
have gorged themselves conscientiously ! They have taken allopathic
doses of a homoeopathic remedy — similia similibus curantur — with a
vengeance ! But when the incipient fever became well established did
these superobedient children of Nature obey the second injunction?
No, and with good reason, apparently — the first prescription proving a
failure (?), they did not dare to try the second ! Now and then, how-
ever, it has been tried, either because of the courage or exceptional
intelligence on the part of the patient or his physician, and with uni-
form good results. Where the " fasting-cure " is applied in extenso,
with appropriate water and air baths, sunshine, and perfect ventilation,
the worst forms of fever rarely have a " run " of ten days — three or
four days will often suffice to insure convalescence ; whereas, under the
milk-and-brandy, beef -tea, and tonic treatment, and " eating little and
often," the flames are fed until the patients are burned to skeletons, and
a large percentage fatally.

I think I should be justified, in the estimation of most people, in
saying that mankind are by nature, or at least from custom, if not

376 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

gourmands, certainly prone to over-indulgence in diet. I find, in con-
versing with rational people — and most people are rational to this de-
gree— that they are quite willing to subscribe to this much : " With-
out doubt we eat too much, and indulge in many dishes of an un-
wholesome nature." There are, to be sure, many persons who call
themselves small eaters, and who do, in fact, eat very little food ;
such would be inclined to take issue, and upon apparently good grounds,
with the assertion that their colds could spring from overeating. But
we must bear in mind that " excess in diet " is a relative phrase ; the
quantity of food, if we regard a physiological diet, must be propor-
tioned to — 1. The amount of labor performed, or exercise taken ; 2.
The degree of cold endured ; 3. The amount of oxygen taken into
the blood ; i. e., the purity of the air habitually breathed, since all
these circumstances affect the needs of the organism for nutriment,
and therefore the amount of the digestive fluids that can possibly be
secreted from the blood by the appropriate glands of the stomach,
liver, pancreas, and intestines. Moreover, it must relate to the pres-
ent physical condition of the individual : for example, the man who
has recently been purified by a "cold," may carry off, without ex-
periencing serious indisposition, a dinner of a dozen courses (curses,
as Dr. Abernethy used to call them), either one of which would alone
suffice to produce a violent " attack " of indigestion in the case of his
neighbor who might be approaching, or already standing on, the " dead-
line " ; but a succession of such indulgences, or continuance of the
prevailing mode of living, will ere long again bring him to the end of
his tether, so to say — to the brink of the surfeit-precipice upon which
so many habitually live — to that condition of the system wherein a
single dish of the most wholesome food constitutes an excess. In such
a case the form of the disorder will depend upon various circumstances,
as the constitution, temperament, or " diathesis " of the individual, the
kind of food eaten, amount, etc. — headache, nausea, colic " cramps," or
cholera-morbus (in the South, during the heated term, genuine cholera
or yellow fever) ; or it may excite the symptoms of that initial fever
popularly called a cold. Many people eat little, simply because it is
physically impossible for them to eat much. Nausea or lack of appetite
prevents them, not from overeating, but from eating a large amount.
Such people habitually overeat. Even the small quantity swallowed, in
face of Nature's protest, lack of relish, is relatively a greater excess
than the huge dinner eaten by a " good feeder " when in condition.
Hence, their frequent efforts to eat (every five or six hours, or oftener),
especially in view of the kind of food necessary to " tempt the appe-
tite," prevent a ready return to a normal condition — prohibit a natural
appetite, i. e., a relish for plain food. For all such patients I would
direct, first, a rest for the stomach (and thus a respite for all the vis-
cera concerned in digestion, and relief for the excretories as well), and
then attention to the due nutrition of the body, not the tickling of the

THE SOURCE OF MUSCULAR ENERGY. 377

palate merely or mainly. "Fasting, fresh air, and exercise, is Na-
ture's panacea," says Dr. Oswald ; and so, in practice, I have found it
for a wide range of " diseases " that nothing else can reach. If we
aoree that disease results, mainly, from the breathing of impure air,
the use of unnatural food or excess, and often deficient exercise, then
it would seem to follow that ease must depend upon a reform in these
particulars. In all my experience with sick people I have never known
of the restoration of a single patient to fairly robust health in the ab-
sence of such reform. I have rarely known a person to become sick
except as the direct result of some degree of fear of pure air, and fear-
lessness regarding the influence of impure food. Whatever else may
have contributed to the production of his disease, it is seldom, indeed,
that these may not be truly regarded as the principal causes. Nature's
preventive and curative agents may be summed up thus : Pure air,
appropriate food, exercise (active or passive as the case may require),
skin-cleanliness, with proper ventilation of the surface of the body,
i. e., through the use of non-sweltering garments, supplemented by
rational exposure of the entire surface of the body to the air, by means
of air-baths, sunshine in the home and " sunshine in the heart " — with
these, and only these, all curable cases will go on to certain recovery.
Without them no medication will avaiL

♦•»

THE SOUECE OF MTTSCULAK ENEKGY.

Br J. M. STILLMAN, Ph. B.

^V1"EW and valuable scientific discoveries and inventions are not slow
-i-N at the present time in making their way from the closets and
laboratories of the investigators or discoverers to popular recognition.
It is somewhat otherwise with the gradual development of knowledge
on subjects once thought to have been tolerably clearly understood and
of no immediate practical value. The gradual modifications which take
place in generally accepted theories by the slowly accumulating results
of the labor of many investigators are, to be sure, appreciated by the
special student in the particular department of knowledge concerned,
but are slower in meeting with public recognition. It thus happens
that teachers and books, not dealing as a specialty with the subject
involved, often adopt and repeat as authoritative views and theories
which, by the specialists in those branches, have either been aban-
doned or brought seriously into question. Nor is it to be otherwise
expected. Chroniclers are quick to seize upon and distribute the news
of brilliant or startling discoveries or inventions, but those are fewer
who will track patiently the slowly accumulating evidence of many
workers, appreciate the bearing of their work, and produce it in a

378 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

form in which it can be appreciated by those non-specialists most in-
terested in the subject involved.

It is thus, to a certain extent, with the subject of the source of
muscular power in the animal organism. It is needless to specify in
this particular. Text-books and popular articles touching on the sub-
ject are continually asserting, as apparently unquestioned, theories
which at the present time are either exploded or very much in doubt.
It would seem, therefore, not without value to attempt, as far as prac-
ticable in a popular or semi-popular article, a general statement of the
present condition of the theories on the source of muscular power,
and of the main points of the evidence which tends to support these
theories.

The general acceptance of the law of the conservation and corre-
lation of physical forces had at once an important influence in direct-
ing attention to the source of muscular force. The idea was readily
taken up that this form of force is at the expense of heat, which is
produced by the oxidation of carbon and hydrogen in the body, the
necessary oxygen being conveyed by the arterial blood to the mus-
cular tissue. In other words, the somewhat trite comparison of the
human body and the muscular system to an engine, which consumes
just so much fuel to produce so much force, has pretty clearly formu-
lated the idea as generally accepted. And so far as it goes the com-
parison is not bad.

When, however, we pass beyond this somewhat vague simile to
an examination of the more intimate nature of these various processes,
we find the questions raised are not so generally understood. Accept-
ing that the muscular force is produced by the ultimate oxidation of
carbon and hydrogen to carbonic-acid gas and water respectively, the
next questions that suggest themselves are : " What is the immediate
source of this carbon and hydrogen — the fuel material for muscular
force ? " and " What is the real nature of these processes which we
call briefly oxidation ? " The endeavors to answer these questions
have given rise to many discussions and disputes, which are, even at
the present day, by no means concluded.

Before taking up the discussion of the theories advanced to answer
these questions, it will not be out of place to review very briefly the
composition of the muscles and their general relations to the circula-
tion— only in so far, however, as is necessary for a clear comprehension
of the evidence and arguments involved in the discussion.

A muscle is essentially a collection of lengthened cells held together
by a connective tissue. Each cell consists of a delicate cell-wall or
membrane containing a fluid or semi-fluid mass of living (protoplasmic)
matter. This gelatinous substance possesses the power of contrac-
tion under the stimulus of excitations of various kinds — nervous im-
pulse, electricity, heat — and the cell becomes thereby shortened. This
process, taking place simultaneously in all the cells of a given muscle

THE SOURCE OF MUSCULAR ENERGY. 379

under the influence of the same exciting cause, is what exerts the
power of the contracting muscle. The intensity of this shortening or
contracting power has been approximately measured — e. g., by ascer-
taining experimentally the weight necessary to prevent a muscle from
contracting under excitation.* The muscles are supplied with blood
by the fine ramifications of the arteries, and the blood is conducted
away again by the ramifications of the veins, the arterial blood los-
ing oxygen and taking up carbonic acid during its passage, as is the
case in the other tissues also.

Regarding the composition of the muscular tissue, it may be simply
noted that the tissue itself is composed mainly of albuminoid material
(cell-contents) and of the substance of the connective tissue, which is,
like the albuminoids, composed mainly of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen,
and nitrogen, and in much the same proportions. Besides this, the
blood and lymph permeate the muscular tissue throughout, and cer-
tain non-nitrogenous substances, mainly glycogen, a substance resem-
bling starch or dextrine in composition and properties, are stored up
in the muscular tissue, and always found to be present. Certain other
simple compounds containing nitrogen are also present, and are con-
sidered to be decomposition products of the more complex albuminoids.
When the muscular contraction takes place, mechanical force may be
exerted which is produced at the expense of the force stored up as
potential chemical energy in the materials which serve as the fuel ma-
terial. This potential energy is set free or rendered active by the
chemical processes which there take place, and appears as work, as
sensible heat, or as electrical disturbances.

Before we inquire as to the nature of these chemical processes, it
will be of advantage to glance briefly at the results of important in-
vestigations which have been made on this subject, as these form the
only safe data by which we may judge of the tenability of any theory.
It would be out of place here to attempt a full reference to the mass
of investigations and experiments which have been published, and
which bear on the topic under discussion. f We shall therefore simply
notice the principal facts which have been established as the results
of those investigations, and which are most pertinent to the matter in
hand.

The experimental researches on this subject may be classified under
four heads : 1. The examination of the muscular tissue itself before

* This value has been found in man at about 6,000 to 8,000 grammes per square cen-
timetre of cross-section of muscle (85 to 114 pounds per square inch) for the maximum
for voluntary contraction. It is of course evident that the intensity of the force exerted
varies with the kind and degree of excitation, so that too much dependence must not be
placed on any particular values thus obtained. They simply give an approximate value
for ordinary muscular activity.

f Quite full references may be found in the excellent and quite recent text-books of
F. Hoppe-Seyler, u Physiologische Chemie," and of A. Gamgee, " Physiological Chemistry
of the Animal Body."

380 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

and after muscular action. 2. The examination and comparison of the
blood coming to the muscle, and that leaving it, during rest and exer-
tion. 3. The examination of the gases given off or absorbed by the
active muscle after excision from the animal, and under the influence
of artificial irritation. 4. The influence of continuous muscular exer-
tion on the respired gases and on the waste products of excretion.

1. With regard to the changes in the muscular tissue, it has been
noticed that the proportion of water in the muscles is increased or the
proportion of solids diminished by work, the amount of substances
soluble in water is diminished and the amount soluble in alcohol in-
creased ; and particularly that glycogen disappears and sugar is in-
creased (the latter probably as a product of fermentation at the expense
of the glycogen).

2. Changes produced in the blood are for the most part difficult to
trace with certainty ; but, it has been observed that the blood coming
from the active muscle contains more carbonic acid and less oxygen
than that coming from the resting muscle ; and, further, that the car-
bonic acid is increased in greater proportion than the oxygen is dimin-
ished. We shall recur to this later.

3. Investigations into the changes which occur in gaseous atmos-
pheres surrounding an excised muscle made to contract under the influ-
ence of electricity are interesting and instructive. G. Liebig found that
the excised muscle gave off carbonic acid and took up oxygen, but
that muscular contraction took place also when the surrounding atmos
phere contained no oxygen, carbonic acid being given off, however,
in this latter case also. Later observers confirmed these observations,
and Matteucci considered, from his experiments in the same direction,
that the carbonic acid was not produced at the expense of the oxygen
of the surrounding atmosphere, but from oxygen held in some form
of combination in the muscular tissue itself. Herrmann found that a
portion even of the oxygen absorbed from the air was absorbed in
consequence of incipient putrefactions.

4. Investigations under the fourth head, as to the effect of mus-
cular exertion on the general relations of respiration and excretion,
have been very elaborate and very numerous. Pettenkofer and Voit,
Ludwig and Sczelkow, and others, have investigated the relations of
carbonic acid and water given off to food and oxygen consumed as in-
fluenced by muscular exertion. Their investigations have shown that
the oxygen consumed and carbonic acid and water given off are largely
increased by muscular exertion. This had been noticed as a general
fact by Lavoisier a half-century or so earlier, but the experiments of
the above-named investigators were carried on with a care and thor-
oughness which left little to be wished for in that direction.

Whether the subject of the experiment be kept on a constant diet
during both work and repose, or whether it be allowed to eat and drink
according to desire, or even if no food be permitted during the experi-

THE SOURCE OF MUSCULAR ENERGY. 381

ment, the general fact remains the same, that the quantities of carbonic
acid and water eliminated during work are much greater than during
rest, in many cases the ratio being as high as two to one. It is also
found that the oxygen taken up, though increased during muscular
exercise, is not increased in proportion to the carbonic acid eliminated.
The result is, that the ratio of the volume of oxygen consumed to the
volume of carbonic acid eliminated, which is normally somewhat less
than unity, tends to approach unity during muscular work. It should
be here remarked that investigations dealing with total respired gases,
although doubtless in the main reliable, are not without certain de-
fects. If we could be certain that muscular exercise left all other
organic functions unaffected, we could safely attribute the observed
changes to the muscular contraction alone. But such is probably not
the case. The functions of organs are influenced by the activity of
others, and hence the changes noticed in products of elimination or in
the consumption of oxygen can not with safety be attributed solely to
the muscular work performed, as these substances are consumed or
produced by the combined activity of all the living tissues of the or-
ganism. Hence the value of the corroborative testimony of the other
methods of investigation noticed above.

The influence of muscular exertion on the elimination of nitrogen
has also received much attention, inasmuch as the nitrogen eliminated
(mainly in the form of urea by the kidneys) may be taken as a measure
of the amount of nitrogenous food or tissue decomposed in the organ-
ism. The influence, then, of muscular exertion on the excretion of
nitrogen is of importance as showing also its influence on the decom-
position of albuminoids (foods or tissues). The results of the numer-
ous investigations on this subject have been somewhat at variance.
Many have found no material increase in the elimination of nitrogen
during muscular exertion ; others find a slight increase, but not suffi-
cient to indicate any immediate relation of the nitrogen eliminated to
the work performed. Passing over the work of earlier investigators,
we will consider briefly the results of some of the later investigators.
Voit was one of the first to make careful and exact experiments ex-
tending over a considerable period of time, and he determined that
the increase in elimination of nitrogen during muscular exertion is
very slight ; that it bears no constant relation to the work done, and is
more influenced by diet than by work. Fick and Wislicenus made an
ascent of the Faulhorn in the Alps, with the purpose of determining
the possibility or impossibility of albuminoids being the fuel-material
for muscular power. They estimated the mechanical work necessary
to raise their own bodies through the vertical distance to which they
ascended. They then calculated the amount of albuminoids necessary
to produce so much force by its combustion. They determined experi-
mentally the amount of nitrogen in their excreta during the period of
the ascent, and, having taken no nitrogenous food during that period,

382 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

they were enabled to estimate what relation the albuminoid decompo-
sition bore to the amount necessary to supply the power for the ascent.
By this method they demonstrated that the whole amount of albumi-
noid material decomposed during the ascent, even if completely oxid-
ized to carbonic acid, water, and nitrogen (instead of yielding its nitro-
gen in the form of urea, as is actually the case), would produce less than
half the force necessary to raise their bodies through the vertical height
to which they ascended. Thus it is shown that the amount of force
represented by the actual decomposition of albuminoids during work
is by no means adequate to account for the work done, even supposing
that all the nitrogenous material decomposed in the body went for that
purpose, and that no other muscular work were performed during the
ascent than the mere lifting of such a weight to the given height.
Both these suppositions are evidently incorrect, as the nitrogen is elimi-
nated in almost equal quantities when no voluntary muscular action is
exerted, and the muscular work, voluntary and involuntary (lungs,
heart, etc.), on such a trip, would evidently far exceed that necessary
for the simple elevation of a dead weight to a specified height.

Experiments conducted by Dr. Parkes on two soldiers proved that
a small increase of nitrogen elimination was produced, and also, that
this increased elimination of nitrogen may extend for many days after
the exercise has ceased.

Dr. Austin Flint, Jr., in an elaborate and thorough investigation on
the pedestrian Weston, found a decided increase in the nitrogen elimi-
nated during work ; also, a decided increase in the ratio of nitrogen
eliminated to that taken in with the food. The value of his results is
somewhat impaired for our present purpose, in so far as they relate to
the influence of muscular exertion simply, because the condition of the
subject during the working period was not such as was favorable for
a fair test. His appetite fell off ; he slept poorly ; was extremely nerv-
ous and irritable much of the time ; became at times much exhausted
and prostrated even to nausea. When the influence of the nervous
state and of an exhausted condition on the functions is taken into ac-
count, it will be evident that deductions as to the effect of muscular
exertion alone would in this instance be open to doubt. Dr. Pavy's
experiments on the same pedestrian indicated also an increase in the
nitrogen elimination, but only a slight increase as compared with
Dr. Flint's results.

What, then, seems tolerably certain is, that muscular exertion in-
creases the nitrogen elimination but slightly, and perhaps only very
slightly, so long as the muscular system is moderately exercised and not
overtaxed. And, indeed, the pertinent question here would seem to be,
" Is the normal muscular action accompanied with any elimination of
nitrogen showing a decided relation of the work done to the nitrogen
eliminated ? " and not " Is the excessive and exhaustive exertion of the
muscles accompanied with any increase of nitrogen elimination ? "

THE SOURCE OF MUSCULAR ENERGY. 383

Having thus glanced at some of the more important experimental
results bearing on this subject, let us return to the consideration of
the two questions previously enunciated. First, then, " What is the
fuel-material for muscular force ? is it albuminoid and nitrogenous, or
is it non-nitrogenous ? " That it is not essentially nitrogenous will ap-
pear from the experiments last described, for if such were the case we
should find nitrogen eliminated in much greater quantities during mus-
cular work than during rest, which is not the case. The material which
supplies the force by its decomposition must, then, be mainly non-nitro-
genous. Here, again, are various possibilities. Fats, sugars, glycogen,
are all non-nitrogenous, and we have next to inquire whether the fuel-
material be fats, sugars, or glycogen. The facts above stated of the
constant occurrence of glycogen in the muscular tissues, and its dis-
appearance in part during muscular exercise, suggest at once the pos-
sibility of this substance being a fuel-material. We shall obtain light
on this question from the facts regarding the influence of muscular
exertion on the ratio of the volume of carbonic acid expired to that of
the oxygen taken up. The three principal classes of foods consumed
in the animal body are the fats, carbohydrates (starch, sugars, glyco-
gen, etc.), and nitrogenous substances. For the present purpose it
may be considered that the fats and carbohydrates are ultimately con-
verted into carbonic acid and water, and that the nitrogenous sub-
stances are ultimately converted into carbonic acid, water, and urea.
The nitrogenous foods are usually subdivided into albuminoids proper,
and substances not albuminoids. All these nitrogenous substances are
composed mainly of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, and
usually also sulphur, in proportions which vary with different sub-
stances, but within very narrow limits. For the sake of simplicity,
therefore, it will be permissible to take a certain average composition
to represent the entire class, and the deductions will apply with suffi-
cient accuracy to the nitrogenous foods as a body. For the sake of
easy comparison we may also represent this average composition by a
formula which may be considered as representative of the class ; e. g.,
CU3HJ56N3804eS. If we now consider this to be oxidized to carbonic
acid, water, and urea (and the sulphur to be oxidized to S03, as would
be the case in the formation of a sulphate), we might represent the pro-
cess by the following equation :

C14,H,2eN38046S -i- 2990 = 124CO, + 75H30 + 19CON3H4 + SO,.

Albuminoids, etc Urea.

This would give 248 volumes COa produced for 299 volumes of
oxygen taken up, or a ratio of §-£f = 0*83.

If we consider the fats, and take stearine as a fair example of this
class, we should have for such an equation —

C67Hno°6 + 1630 = 57CO, + 55H30.

Stearine.

or the ratio of volumes of carbonic acid and oxygen would be -fj-|-

384 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

— 0'70. Other natural fat3 would give results differing little from
this ratio.

The carbohydrates, on the other hand, contain relatively more oxy-
gen than the other classes of foods, and contain hydrogen and oxygen
in just such proportions as exist in water. Hence by their oxidation
just enough oxygen must be consumed to convert the carbon to car-
bonic-acid gas, e. g. :

CflH10O6 + 120 = 6COa + 5H30.

Glycogen.

C6H1206 + 120 = 6Ca0 + 5H.0.

Grape-sugar.

The ratio is hence 1 for all this class, since the carbonic acid formed
is equal to the volume of the additional oxygen consumed. It follows,
then, that the oxidation in the organism of carbohydrates would tend

CO

to cause the ratio — — - to approach unity. The extensive investiga-

Os

tions of Regnault and Reiset on small animals have shown that with
carbohydrate food the ratio does approach unity, sometimes almost
attaining it, though of course it is impossible to eliminate entirely the
decomposition of fats and albuminoids in the organism, and hence the
ratio is kept below that figure.

So, also, as we have seen above, the tendency of muscular exertion
is to increase this ratio and cause it to approach unity. The evidence,
then, seems to point with tolerable conclusiveness to the fact that the
immediate fuel-material is mainly non-nitrogenous and carbohydrate
in its character.* To what extent this supply of carbohydrates is de-
rived from the glycogen of the muscles, to what extent from sugars
absorbed from digestion, or produced from the glycogen of the liver,
is not yet established with sufficient accuracy, though the participa-
tion of the muscle-glycogen is hard to doubt.

We have said the immediate fuel-material is apparently carbohy-
drates, for the possibility still remains that this carbohydrate material
may itself be in part derived from albuminoids. It is certain that the
liver-glycogen is in great part, possibly entirely, derived from albu-
minoids. Parke's experiments, above mentioned, showing a continu-
ous elimination of increased quantities of nitrogen in the form of urea

* It will, T think, be evident that the widely entertained theory of Herrmann, regard-
ing the chemical processes taking place during muscular action, is not contradicted by the
considerations here advanced. According to this theory, a complex nitrogenous substance
of the muscular tissue is decomposed during muscular activity with evolution of carbonic
acid, and other non-nitrogenous residues, together with a simpler nitrogenous substance
which is supposed again to unite with other (non-nitrogenous) matter to form the origi-
nal compound, which may be again decomposed during contraction. This still leaves the
non-nitrogenous matter the fuel-material, but assumes it to be stored up in the form of a
combination with a complex nitrogenous substance which then yields it again in the form
of carbonic acid and water. This theory lies too far in the field of speculation for its
discussion to come within the scope of the present article.

THE SOURCE OF MUSCULAR ENERGY. 385

for days after continued muscular exertion, would be in harmony with
such an origin, as they might indicate a gradual replacement of glyco-
gen consumed, at the expense of albuminoid material with elimination
of urea as a a waste product. Sugars (grape-sugar and maltose) ab-
sorbed from digestion or formed from liver-glycogen, are doubtless
consumed in the tissues and organs and assist in producing animal
heat. Whether muscular tissue consumes these sugars in greater quan-
tity than other tissues it is difficult to say with certainty.

We come now to the second question as to the nature of this de-
composition to which we have alluded as oxidation. This question is
still contested. The older theory is that the oxygen, taken up by the
blood, is given up in the form of active oxygen, or ozone, and by its
energetic oxidizing power burns up or oxidizes the carbon and hydro-
gen of the fuel-material, with formation of carbonic acid and water.

The newer theory is that the decomposition processes are essen-
tially fermentative in their character ; that under the influence of
appropriate ferments the substances combine with water, splitting up
into simpler and simpler products with evolution of heat or force, as
is the case with all fermentative changes. The oxygen present in the
arterial blood gives these processes the character of fermentative
changes in the presence of oxygen ; secondary oxidation takes place,
as in putrefaction in presence of air, the final products being mainly
carbonic acid and water, as also is the case in putrefactive processes.

Some of the objections raised to the older theory are that we know
of no similar changes produced by ozone in watery solutions, such as
exist in the animal organism ; that the oxygen obtained from the arte-
rial blood under the air-pump contains no ozone. Also certain com-
pounds are found in the blood and tissues which are essentially deox-
idized products, which could not be supposed to exist in the presence
of ozone, but the presence of which accords with the supposed fermen-
tative character of the processes (Hoppe-Seyler). The fact that the
evolution of carbonic acid from the contracting muscle is in great part
independent of the presence of oxygen at the time would harmonize
also with such a fermentative character of the changes, as carbonic
acid is the product of many fermentative changes out of the presence
of oxygen, as, for example, of the alcoholic fermentation of sugar.
Matteucci's supposed storing up of oxygen in some form of combina-
tion in the tissues would then be interpreted rather as the storing up
of fermentable substances (like glycogen) rich in oxygen. The com-
bustion theory, on the other hand, would seem to demand that the evo-
lution of carbonic acid and consumption of oxygen should be simul-
taneous, which is apparently contradicted by the experiments of G.
Liebig, Matteucci, and others above mentioned. It would exceed our
limits to enter more fully into a discussion of these two opposing
theories. The conflict between them is still in progress, and new evi-
dence is constantly accumulating. Both theories agree in this, that

TOL. XXIY. — 25

3 86 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

the material which by its decomposition produces the force for mus-
cular work is finally decomposed, with evolution mainly of carbonic
acid and water. They differ in their views of the nature of the process
and the steps by which these ultimate products are obtained.

We have here endeavored to show briefly what has been gained in
comparatively recent times by the growth of knowledge in regard to
the source of muscular power. Let us attempt a brief summary of the
main points brought forward in the preceding discussion : 1. The
source of muscular energy is in the chemical decomposition of certain
substances, which is accompanied with a release of energy. 2. The
muscular contraction produces a greatly increased production of car-
bonic acid and water, and an increased consumption of oxygen, in the
general respiration. To what extent this is due to the mere muscular
contraction, to what extent to the influence of muscular exercise on
other functions, is difficult to estimate with certainty. 3. The ex-
cised muscle, when caused to contract, gives off carbonic acid, and this
action is in great part independent of a simultaneous absorption of
oxygen. 4. The blood coming from the contracting muscle con-
tains more carbonic acid and less oxygen than that coming from the
resting muscle, and less oxygen than that coming to the contracting
muscle. 5. The ratio of carbonic acid given off to oxygen taken
up is increased by muscular exertion. 6. The nitrogen elimination
is but slightly increased during muscular exertion. No considerable
amount of nitrogenous muscular tissue is consumed. 7. The imme-
diate fuel-material is mainly non-nitrogenous and carbohydrate in its
character, probably in part at least derived from the muscle-glyco-
gen, and perhaps from some other substances stored in some manner
in the muscular tissue, possibly also to some extent from sugars con-
veyed to the tissues by the blood. 8. It is not certain to what
extent this glycogen or other non-nitrogenous fuel-material is derived
from nitrogenous or albuminoid material during rest or repose of the
muscles, but such an origin, for a portion at least of the fuel-material,
has some evidence in its favor. 9. The nature of the decomposi-
tion of this fuel-material is as yet an unsettled matter. The older
theory of direct oxidation has been to a great extent replaced by the
more modern theory of fermentative decomposition, i. e., splitting up
by combination with water into simpler products with an accompany-
ing release of energy, and this process followed by secondary oxida-
tions exerted by the oxygen of the blood. Satisfactory experimental
evidence for deciding with respect to these theories as yet fails us.

In conclusion, it is well, however, to recollect that at best the ques-
tions touched upon are but secondary to the more fundamental question
upon which no investigation has as yet thrown even the most dim and
feeble light, viz., " What is muscular force ? " It seems impossible
to conceive how a collection of cells with thin, elastic walls, and filled
with a fluid or semi-fluid mass, can contract in such a way as to mani-

IDIOSYNCRASY. 387

fest the power familiar to us as muscular force. We are here brought
face to face with the same difficulties that meet us whenever we at-
tempt to explore the mysterious physics and chemistry of living mat-
ter. The attempts which have been made to account for the peculiar
selective power of the living cells of the rootlets of plants, to explain
the selective action of the gland-cells of the kidneys which act partly
according to laws of transudation and diffusion, and partly in opposi-
tion to those laws, have given us no satisfaction on those points. And
it is the same with regard to the essential functions of other living
tissues — all are carried on under the influence of the peculiar and un-
comprehended properties of living matter.

We have gained, and are constantly gaining, valuable knowledge
as to very many of the processes taking place in the living body, but
as to the processes which take place in the truly living cells of gland,
muscle, brain, or nerve, we are in almost complete darkness. At the
doors of these most refined and mysterious of Nature's laboratories, we
must lay down our rude tools and methods, and confess to ourselves
that " thus far and no farther " may we hope to press our eager search
for truth.

■»•♦•

IDIOSYNCRASY.

By Professor GEANT ALLEN

EVERY man is, in the true Greek sense of the term, an idiosyn-
crasy. He is a syncrasis, because he derives all his attributes,
physical or mental, from two parents, or four grandparents, or eight
great-grandparents, and so forth. But at the same time he is an idio-
syncrasis, because that particular mixture is eminently unlikely ever
to have occurred before, or ever to occur again, even in his own broth-
ers or sisters. That he is and can be at birth nothing more than such
a crasis, that he can not conceivably contain anything more, on the
mental side at least, than was contained in his antecedents, is the
thesis which this paper sets out to maintain.

Take a thousand red beans and a thousand white beans ; shake
them all up in a bag together for five minutes, and then pour them
out in a square space on a billiard-table just big enough to contain
them in a layer one deep. Each time you do so, your product will be
the same in general outline and appearance : it will be a quadrangular
figure composed of beans, having throughout the same approximate
thickness. But it will be a mixture of red beans and white in a cer-
tain order ; and the chances against the same order occurring twice
will be very great indeed. Make the beans ten thousand of each so
as to cover the table ten deep, and the chance of getting the same
order twice decreases proportionately. Make them a hundred thou-

3 88 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

sand each, and it becomes infinitesimal. You have practically each
time not only a synerasis but an idio-syncrasis as well.

Now, a human being is the product of innumerable elements,
derived directly from two parents, and indirectly from an infinity of
earlier ancestors ; elements not of two orders only, but of infinite or-
ders ; combined together, apparently, not on the principle of both con-
tributing equally to each part, but of a sort of struggle between the
two for the mastery in each part. Here, elements derived from the
father's side seem to carry the day ; there, again, elements derived
from the mother's side gain the victory ; and yonder, once more, a
compromise has been arrived at between the two, so that the offspring
in that particular part is a mean of his paternal and maternal antece-
dents. Under such circumstances, absolute equality of result in any
two cases is almost inconceivable. It would imply absolute equality
of conditions between myriads of jarring and adverse elements, such
as we never actually find in nature, and such as we can hardly believe
possible under any actual concrete circumstances.

The case of twins comes nearer to such exact equality of condi-
tions than any other with which we are acquainted. Here, the vary-
ing health and vigor of the two parents, or the difference between their
respective functional activities at two given times, are reduced to a
minimum ; and we get in many instances a very close similarity in-
deed. Yet even among twins, the offspring of the same father and
mother, produced at the same moment of time, there are always at
least some differences, mental and physical ; while the differences are
occasionally very great. A competent observer, who knew the Siamese
twins, informed me that differences of disposition were quite marked
in their case, where training and after-circumstances could have had
little or nothing to do with them, inasmuch as both must have been
subjected to all but absolutely identical conditions of life throughout.
One was described as taciturn and morose, the other as lively and
good-humored. Whether anything of the same sort has been noticed
in the pair of negro girls called the Two-headed Nightingale, I do
not know, but, to judge from their photographs, there would seem to
be some distinct physical diversities in height and feature. We can
only account for these diversities in twins generally by supposing that
in that intimate intermixture of elements derived from one or other
parent, which we have learned from Darwin, Spencer, and Galton, takes
place in every impregnation of an ovum, slightly different results have
occurred in one case and in the other. To use Darwin's phraseology,
some gemmules of the paternal side have here ousted some gemmules
of the maternal side, or vice versa ; to use Mr. Spencer's (which to
my judgment seems preferable), the polarities of one physiological
unit have here carried the day over those of another.

But why under such nearly identical conditions should there be
such diversity of result ? Let us answer the question by another :

IDIOSYNCRASY. 389

Why, with a thousand red and a thousand white balls, shaken togeth-
er with an equal energy by a machine (if you will), and poured out
on our billiard-table, should there be a similar diversity ? The fact
is, you can not get absolute identity of conditions in any two cases.
Imagine yourself mixing two fluids together with a spoon, as regularly
as you choose ; can you possibly make the currents in the two exactly
alike twice running ? And here in the case of humanity you have not
to deal with simple red beans or with simple fluids, but with very com-
plex gemmules or very complex physiological units.

If even in twins we can not expect perfect similarity, still less can
we expect it in mere ordinary brothers and sisters. Here, innumerable
minor physiological conditions of either parent may affect the result
in infinite ways. Not, indeed, that there is any sufficient reason for
supposing passing states of health and so forth directly to impress
themselves upon the heredity of the offspring ; but one can readily
understand that, in a process which is essentially a mixture of ele-
ments, small varieties of external circumstances may vastly alter the
nature of the result. Shake the bag of beans once, and you get one
arrangement ; shake it once more, and you get another and very dif-
ferent one. To this extent, and to this extent only, as it seems to me,
chance in the true sense enters into the composition of an individual-
ity. The possible elements which may go to make up the mental con-
stitution of any person are (as I shall try to show) strictly limited to
all those elements, actual or latent, which exist in the two persons of
his parents ; but the particular mixture of those elements which will
come out in him — the number to be selected and the number to be
rejected out of all the possible combinations — will depend upon that
minute interaction of small physical causes, working unseen, which we
properly designate by the convenient name of chance. In this sense,
it is not a chance that William Jones, the son of two English parents,
is born an Englishman in physique and mental peculiarities, rather
than a Chinese or a negro ; nor is it a chance that he is born essentially
a compound of his ancestors on the Jones side and on the Brown side,
but it is a chance that he is born a boy rather than a girl ; and it is
a chance that he is born himself rather than his brother John or his
brother Thomas. If we knew all, we could point out exactly why this
result and not any other result occurred just there and then ; but, as
we do not know all, we fairly say that the result is in so far a chance
one. And, even if we knew all, we should still be justified in using
the same language, for it marks a real difference in causation. Will-
iam Jones is an Englishman and a Jones-Brown strictly in virtue of
his being the son of Henry Jones and Mary Brown ; but so are all his
brothers and (mutatis mutandis) his sisters too. He is himself, and
not one of hi3 brothers or his sisters, in virtue of certain minute mo-
lecular arrangements, occurring between certain elements for the most
part essentially identical with the elements which went to make up

39o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

the other members of his family. To be metaphorical once more, one
may say that a Robinson differs from a Jones because he is a mixture
of brown peas and white peas ; whereas one Jones differs from another
in being a particular mixture of red beans and black beans, differently
arranged in each case.

Next after the similarity between brothers and sisters or other
blood-relations, we may expect to find the similarity between the off-
spring of the same class in the same community, similarly situated :
and this the more so in proportion to the average identity of their
several lives. For example, one would naturally expect that our own
agricultural laborers, all engaged in much the same sort of work and
surrounded by much the same sort of objects, would produce by in-
termarriage very similar children. Still more would this be the case
among very homogeneous savages, such as the Esquimaux or the South
American Indians. And where the identity of pursuits is very great
on both sides, and in all individuals, as among the Fuegians, the Ved-
dahs, the Andamanese, we should expect to find a great likeness of
physique and character between all the offspring.

Conversely, where marriages take place between persons of differ-
ent races, or very differently situated, we may look for great differ-
ences between the offspring, especially when compared with those of
marriages between relatively homogeneous persons. Under such cir-
cumstances, the children tend more or less, though very irregularly,
to present a mean between the two parents. Thus, to take the most
obvious instance, the average mulatto is half-way as a rule between
the negro and the European, physically at least, though, for various
reasons to be considered hereafter, it often happens that he is more
than the equal in intelligence of the average white. But even in the
same family of mulattoes great differences exist between the children.
Some will be darker, others lighter ; some will be curlier-headed, others
straighter-haired ; some will have prognathous faces and depressed
noses, others will have more regular features and more prominent
noses. So far as my observation goes, too, it does not always happen
that the most European physical type has the most European mind:
on the contrary, high intelligence often accompanies a very African
physique, while English features may be concomitant with a truly
negro incapacity for logical reasoning, generalization, or elementary
mathematical ideas. It seems as though in each part there was a
struggle for supremacy between the two types : and the one type may
apparently carry the day in certain external peculiarities, while the
other type carries the day in the more intimate arrangements of the
nervous system. At the same time, I can not myself doubt that there
must be a very intimate connection between every one of the sense-
organs and the brain ; and I can hardly believe that prognathism and
other like physical peculiarities do not imply various correlated nerv-
ous facts of great psychological importance. Though, in the result-

IDIOSYNCRASY. 39i

ing compromise between the two diverse heredities, the one seems
largely to prevail over the other in certain parts, yet it is difficult to
suppose that there is not a minute interrelation between all the parts :
and perhaps the significant fact that every mulatto, though darker or
lighter, is at least brown, not purely black or purely white, gives us
the best key to the true nature of the situation.

So far, I have been tacitly but intentionally taking for granted the
very principle which I set out to prove, in order fully to put the reader
in possession of the required point of view. The question now arises,
Where in this series of events is there room for any fresh element to
come in ? Can any man ever be anything other than what some of
his ancestors have been before him ? And, if not, how is progress or
mental improvement possible? That men have as a matter of fact
risen from a lower to a higher intellectual position is patent. That
some races have outstripped other races is equally clear. And that
some individual men have surpassed their fellows of the same race and
time is also obvious. How are we to account for these facts without
admitting that new elements do at sundry times creep in by chance, in
the false and unphilosophical sense of the word ? How can we get ad-
vance unless we admit that exceptional children may be born from
time to time with brains of exceptional functional value, wholly un-
caused by antecedents in any way ?

The answer to this question is really one of the most important in
the whole history of mankind. For on the solution of the apparent
paradox thus propounded depend two or three most fundamental ques-
tions. It is by this means alone that we can account, first, for the exist-
ence of great races like the Greeks or the Jews. It is by this means
alone that we can account, secondly, for genius in individuals. And
it is by this means alone that we can account, thirdly, for the possi-
bility of general progress in the race. It is surprising, therefore, that
the question has so little engaged the attention of evolutionary psy-
chologists at the present day.

There are only two conceivable ways in which any increment of
brain-power can ever have arisen in any individual. The one is the
Darwinian way, by "spontaneous variation" — that is to say, by varia-
tions due to minute physical circumstances affecting the individual in
the germ. The other is the Spencerian way, by functional increment
— that is to say, by the effect of increased use and constant exposure
to varying circumstances during conscious life. I venture to think
that the first way, if we look it clearly in the face, will be seen to be
practically unthinkable : and that we have therefore no alternative but
to accept the second. Deeply as I feel the general importance of Dar-
win's theory of " spontaneous variation " (using the words in the sense
in which he always used them), it seems to me that that theory can
not properly be applied to the genesis of a nervous system, or of any
part of a nervous system, and that in this case we must rather come

392 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

back to the genesis worked out by Mr. Herbert Spencer in the part of
his " Principles of Psychology " entitled " Physical Synthesis."

For let us for a moment try to imagine a nervous system being
produced, or increased in value, by natural selection of spontaneous
variations alone, without the aid of functional variations at all. It is
easy to see that an animal or a plant may vary indefinitely here or
there in color, or in hardness of skin, or in woodiness of tissues, and
so forth ; and it is easy to see that among these truly " accidental "
variations * some may be better adapted to their particular environ-
ment than others. But can we imagine, say, an eye to be produced by
a series of such individual accidents ? I do not say a human eye, but
a simple pigment cell, with a nerve given off from it to a ganglion as
in the case of the Amphioxus f And if we can imagine this (which I
can not), can we imagine a child being born into the world, gifted, I
do not say with innumerable faculties never possessed by his ancestors,
but with a single nerve-cell or nerve-fiber more than they possessed ?
Just let us look at what a palpable absurdity this notion implies.

Here is William Jones's head, containing an average human brain,
developed on the same pattern as his father's brain (or as his father's
in part and his mother's in part) : and here in a particular spot in a
particular convolution of it, by a combination of mere physical cir-
cumstances, has arisen a totally new and hitherto non-existent nerve-
cell. Clearly, this is an acquisition to the race, by way of spontaneous
variation. But what is the functional use of this new nerve-cell?
What physical circumstance decides whether it is to answer to a new
movement in the left little finger, or to a single creative element in the
composition of a future fugue ? Let us grant a little more : let us
suppose the surrounding cells are all concerned in the appreciation of
color, or in the manipulation of numbers. Will the new cell in the
first case answer to a new and hitherto undiscovered color or to a fur-
ther aesthetic pleasure in an existent color, or to a higher synthesis into
which colors enter as elements ; or what in the second case will be its
mathematical value ? Again, what good will it be without a whole
network of connecting fibers which will link it to percipient structures
in the eye on the one hand, and to all the various higher layers in the
stratified hierarchy of color-thought elements or number-dealing ele-
ments on the other hand ? Granted that one man in a hundred was
born with one such new cell in his brain, and (setting aside the ques-
tion how the cell comes to have any function at all) what are the

* It is a great pity that to this day one is always obliged to employ this useful terra
with a caution in the way of quotation-marks, in order to avoid a supposed philosophical
scholar's-matc from sixth-form critics. " Accidental " in biology means, of course, " pro-
duced by causes lying outside the previous vital history of the race " ; in a word, " indi-
vidual." Among such accidental variations survival of the fittest preserves a few. But
it is annoying that one can never use so transparent a phrase without being informed
magisterially by a lofty reviewer that the word accidental is unphilosophical, and that
nothing ever happens in nature without a cause.

IDIOSYNCRASY. 393

chances that that cell would be so connected with other cells elsewhere
as to make any part of an organized brain ? Can we imagine a new
cell so imported, connected in rational manners with hundreds of other
cells, in any other way than by a miracle ? Which is only a different
form of saying, can we imagine it at all ?

But here, again, is something more than William Jones's head ;
here is, let us say, a great poet's, or a great philosopher's, or a great
mathematician's head ; and here are the upholders of spontaneous va-
riation asking us to believe, not that one cell within it thus spontane-
ously varied in the right direction, but that a vast number of cells and
fibers all varied simultaneously and symmetrically, so as to produce a
harmonious and working whole, capable of giving us Othello, or the
Evolution Theory, or the Differential Calculus. Why, the thing is
clearly impossible — impossible, that is to say, as a result of "acci-
dental " physical causes. We might just conceivably imagine one or
two fibers made to connect one or two hitherto unconnected nerve-
cells, though even here the probability that the nerve-cells so connected
were of heterogeneous orders would be far greater than the probability
that they were of homogeneous orders ; we could much more readily
imagine such connections resulting in a potentiality for believing that
a lobster's tail was a blue hope of raspberry watches than in a poten-
tiality for believing that water was composed of hydrogen and oxy-
gen, or that propositions in A were not convertible. But we certainly
can not imagine a whole network of such fibers to spring up by spon-
taneous variation in a human brain, and yet to produce an organized
result. If spontaneous variation ever works in this way, its product
must surely be either an idiot or a raving madman. To believe the
opposite is too much like believing in Mr. Crosse's electrical Acariy
which were developed de novo, out of inorganic material, in a dirty
galvanic battery, and yet possessed all the limbs and organs of degen-
erate spiders. It is asking us once more to accept a still greater mir-
acle than the first.

But such miracles, it is urged, do take place elsewhere in nature.
For example, an almond-tree, let us say, once produced a peach-bear-
ing branch by bud-variation. Hence it has been inferred that the
peach is a spontaneous variation on the central almond theme. Yet
peaches are in color, fleshiness, sweetness, and perfume, true fruits,
adapted to the fruity method of dispersion, by means of attracting
birds ; whereas the almond is a nut, with the usual nutty peculiarities
of green and brown color, dryness, absence of sweet juice, and so
forth. In this case, then, it would seem that bud-variation imme-
diately produced a variety adapted to a different environment in ever
so many distinct ways. Well, I have introduced this case, just be-
cause it illustrates the very impossibility of such a supposition. For
it seems pretty clear that if peaches have grown at one act from al-
monds, then this must really be a case of reversion ; the almond must

394 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

itself be a dried-up form of a still earlier peach ; and this will be
equally true even if all the existing peaches can be shown to be de-
scended from nut-like almonds. For the almond is a plum by family ;
and all the other plums have juicy fruits ; while one of them, the apri-
cot, closely approaches the almond-peach group in most of its char-
acters. Seeing, then, that the almond must almost certainly be de-
scended from juicy fruit-bearing ancestors, nothing is more natural
than that under altered circumstances it should revert, per saltum, to a
juicy peach. But to suppose that the peach type was originally de-
veloped per saltum from an almond is to suppose that it varied at once
in several separate ways, all equally and correlatively adapted to a
particular mode of dispersion. It is to suppose that accident could do
in a minute what we have every reason to believe can only be done
by infinitesimal variations and infinite selection.

But if the naturalist can not imagine the production of a peach de
novo out of an almond at a single jump, how can he imagine the pro-
duction of a new thinking element in a human brain ? How can he
suppose that the accidental introduction of one more little bit of mat-
ter into that vast organized labyrinth — a mighty maze, but not without
a very definite and regular plan — can have any kind of intelligible
relation to the complicated system of cross-connections and superim-
posed directive departments which make it up ? And if it be objected
that the view taken above of the constitution of the brain is wooden
and mechanical, I Avould answer that it is certainly absurdly diagram-
matic and inadequate, but that it is so far right in that it insists upon
making believers in spontaneous variation try to realize their own un-
thinkable attitude. As to materialism, surely it is more profoundly
materialistic to suppose that mere physical causes, operating on the
germ, can determine minute physical and material changes in the
brain, which will in turn make the individuality what it is to be, than
to suppose that all brains are what they are in virtue of antecedent
function. The one creed makes the man depend mainly upon the
accidents of molecular physics in a colliding germ-cell and sperm-
cell ; the other creed makes him depend mainly upon the doings and
gains of his ancestors, as modified and altered by himself.

And now let us look at this second creed, in order to see how far
it surpasses its rival in comprehensibility, concinnity, and power of
explaining all the phenomena. If it be true that all nerve-increment
and especially all brain-increment is functionally produced, we can
easily understand why each new cell or fiber should stand in its true
and due relation to all the rest. It will have been evolved in the
course of doing its own work, and it will be necessarily adapted to it
because the act of working has brought it into being. There will be no
doubt whether the new cell governs the peculiar action of the left little
finger in performing that amusing conjuring trick, or is, on the con-
trary, connected with the perception of orange-red, because the cell

IDIOSYNCRASY. 395

was actually differentiated (say out of pre-existing neuroglia, though
that is a hypothetical matter of detail) in the very act of performing
the trick in question. There will be no doubt whether the new fibers
are related to the arithmetical faculty or to the Sanskrit verbs, because
they were actually rendered possible as nervous tracks in the act of
learning decimal fractions. It is true, we may admit to the utmost
the intense complexity of the existing brain, and the vast number of
its elements involved in even the simplest muscular adjustment or the
simplest visual perception. Nobody feels the necessity for admitting
such complexity more fully than myself. One may allow with M.
Ribot that every act of thought must be conceived rather as a vast
dynamical tremor, affecting a wide plexus of very diverse nerve-ele-
ments, than as a single function in a single cell or fiber. One may
acknowledge that what one ought really to picture to one's self (at the
present stage of human evolution) is not so much the genesis of a new
cell for governing the little finger, or of a new fiber for understand-
ing a fact in decimal fractions, as the habituating an immense series of
cells and fibers, perhaps in various parts of the brain, to thrill together
in unison on the occurrence of a single cue. But let us thus purify
and dematerialize our conception as far as we like, we must neverthe-
less come back at last to the fact that every gain implies a modifica-
tion in structure, and that this modification in structure, if it is to
have any functional meaning and value whatsoever, must be function-
ally brought about.

That such functional modifications are forever taking place in all
of us is a matter of common observation, as evidenced by psychological
facts. We are always seeing something which adds to our total stock
of memories ; we are always learning and doing something new. The
vast majority of these experiences are similar in kind to those already
passed through by our ancestors ; they add nothing to the inheritance
of the race. To use a familiar phrase in a slightly new and narrower
sense, they do not help to build up " forms of thought " ; though they
leave physical traces on the individual, they do not so far affect the
underlying organization of the brain as to make the development of
after-brains somewhat different from previous ones. But there are
certain functional activities which do tend so to alter the development
of after-brains ; certain novel or sustained activities which apparently
result in the production of new correlated brain-elements or brain-
connections, hereditarily transmissible as increased potentialities of
similar activity in the offspring. If this is not so, then there is no
meaning at all in the facts collected by Mr. Galton, or, indeed, for the
matter of that, in the common facts of human experience as to heredi-
tary transmission of faculties for acquired pursuits of any sort. If
the children of acrobats make the best tumblers, if the descendants
of musical families make the best singers and composers, if a great
thinker or a great painter is usually produced by the convergence of

396 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

two lines of thinkers or artists, then the general truth of this principle
is abundantly clear.

Supposing such small functionally - produced modifications to be
always taking place, it will be obvious that they must take place
most in the most differentiated societies, and least in the least differ-
entiated. A race of hunting savages will perform a certain number
of routine acts, which will be for the most part the same for all mem-
bers of the tribe, and will remain pretty much the same from genera-
tion to generation. In the particular direction of hunting and fishing,
the cleverness at last attained will be very remarkable ; but in most
other directions there will be little excellence and still less variety.
On the other hand, in a tribe which is also made a trading and navi-
gating one by the accident of a maritime position, a new set of activi-
ties will be specially cultivated, and will give rise to new functional
modifications in a different direction. Suppose some of the tribe, in
this latter case, to be mainly inland cultivators and hunters, while
others of the tribe are mainly seaboard traders or pirates, then each
of these sections will tend to develop certain special hereditary brain-
modifications of its own. But if a man of the inland section marries
a woman of the maritime section, or vice versa, then the offspring will
tend to reproduce more or less the structural peculiarities of both
parents. And here comes in an important corollary. For though,
under such circumstances, the children may none of them fully repro-
duce all the brain-gains of their father's line, nor all the brain-gains
of their mother's line, they will yet on the average reproduce a fair
share of the former and a fair share of the latter. Accordingly, they
will usually turn out, on the whole, persons of higher general brain-
power than either ancestral series ; they will partially unite the strong
points of both.

It seems to me that this principle is one of very great importance.
From it we can deduce the conclusion that in any complex society
many children represent directly a convergence of two unlike lines of
descent, and indirectly a convergence of innumerable unlike lines, with
corresponding gain to the species. Two parents, possessing distinct
points of advantage of their own, produce children, some of whom
resemble rather the one, and some the other ; but many of whom will
at least tend to resemble both in their stronger points. Of course, one
must allow much for the idiosyncrasis as well as for the crasis. This
child may fall below both its parents in most things ; that child may
reproduce the weakest elements of both ; yonder other child may at-
tain the average or may surpass them in everything. But, on the
whole, the principle of convergence seems to imply that in a fairly
complex society there will always be an average of mental improve-
ment from generation to generation, due to the constant intercrossing
of brains specially improved in particular directions. This improve-
ment will, it need hardly be said, be increased and favored by natural

IDIOSYNCRASY. 397

selection ; but it will itself form the basis of favorable variations
without which natural selection can do nothing. It seems to me easy
to understand how survival of the fittest may result in progress, start-
ing from such functionally - produced gains : but impossible to un-
derstand how it could result in progress if it had to start from
mere accidental structural increments due to spontaneous variation
alone.

Thus it becomes clear why certain countries have by mere geo-
graphical position necessarily produced certain high types of human
intelligence, while in certain other countries the race has never pro-
gressed beyond a very low level. There are places like Central
Africa, where the physical conditions do not tend to produce any
great diversity of occupation ; and here the general average of intelli-
gence does not tend to rise high. On the other hand, there are places,
like Greece, Italy, the West European peninsulas and islands, where
the physical conditions tend to differentiate the population into many
groups, agricultural, mercantile, sea-faring, military, naval, and profes-
sional ; and here the general average of intelligence tends to rise very
high indeed. Of course, one must allow much influence to the time-
element ; for every such increase in differentiation involves yet further
increases in the sequel, and brings the social organism, or parts of it,
into contact with new environments. The iEgsean is not now of the
same importance in this respect as during the days when coasting
voyages from island to island were the utmost possible stretch of
navigation : the science acquired there has widened the sphere of
navigation itself, first to the entire Mediterranean, then to the open
Atlantic, finally to all the oceans of the whole earth. But in principle
it has always seemed to me (as against the really accidental view
advocated by Mr. Bagehot) that the "philosophy of history," the
general stream of human development, could be traced throughout to
perfectly definite physical causes of this sort. Mr. Bagehot, basing
himself on the pure Darwinian theory of spontaneous variations, be-
lieved that the differences between races of men were due to mere
minute physical sports in their nervous constitution : it appears to me
rather that they are due to the action of a definite environment, thus
effecting a differentiation of circumstances, and in many cases calling
into constant functional activity the highest existing faculties of the
various social units in the most diverse ways. We may not thus
(though vide post) be able to account for the particular character and
genius of a Pericles, an Aristotle, a Hannibal, a Csesar, a Newton, or
a Goethe ; but we can thus at least account for the general average of
intelligence which made Greece, or Carthage, or Rome, or England,
or Germany, capable of producing such an individual, as a slight vari-
ation on the common type, due to the convergence of separately rich
and varied lines of descent. The real illuminating point is this — that
such men do arise from time to time among the most intelligent na-

398 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

tions, and that they do not arise among the Australian black-fellows,
the Digger Indians, or the Andaman-Islanders.

And now, how far can we account on these principles for the ex-
istence of the individual genius ? Well, here we must begin by clear-
ing the ground of a great initial fallacy. Genius, as a rule, has made
quite too much of itself. Having had the field all to itself, it has
never been tired of drawing a hard and fast line between itself and
mere talent. Nevertheless, from the psychological point of view, noth-
ing is plainer than the fact that genius differs from mere talent only
by the very slightest excess of natural gifts in a special direction.
True, that small amount of superiority makes all the difference in our
judgment of the finished work : we say, this is a great poem, while
that is a pretty trifle ; this is a grand scientific generalization, while
that is a painstaking piece of laboratory analysis ; this is a magnifi-
cent work of art, while that is a very creditable little bit of landscape-
painting. But, in the brain and hands of the performer, what infi-
nitely minute structural modifications must underlie these seemingly
vast differences of effect ! And even in ourselves, the critics, how
minute are the shades of feeling which make us give the palm to the
one work and withhold it from the other ! How many peojDle are
really competent to judge in any way of the differences between this
poem and that, between this oratorio and that, between this picture
and that ? And what is this but to say that the differences are in
themselves extremely small and almost elusive?

Now, in a country like Italy, say, where for many ages many men
have continually painted pictures of the nymphs and the satyrs, or of
the Madonna and of St. Sebastian ; where little chapels have studded
the land, from age to age, with votive tablets to Venus Genitrix or to
Our Lady of the Sea ; where countless generations of workmen have
decorated the walls of Pompeii or covered the vulgarest ceilings of
Florence and Genoa with hasty frescoes — in such a country there is
developed among all the people a general high average of artistic exe-
cution, utterly impossible in a country like Scotland, where there has
hardly ever been any indigenous spontaneous art at all to speak of.
And when an Italian man of an artistic family, having inherited from
his ancestors certain relatively high artistic endowments, marries an
Italian woman of another artistic family, similarly but perhaps some-
what differently endowed, there is at least a possibility, not to say a
probability, that their children, or some or one of them, will develop
great artistic power. True, we can not follow the minute working of
the erasis : we can not say why Paolo is an artist of the highest type,
while Luigi is merely a fair colorist, and Gianbattista is a respectable
copyist of the old masters. But at least we can say that all three
are painters after a fashion, in virtue of their common artistic descent ;
and that Paolo is a great painter because he unites in himself, more
than either of the others, the respective merits of the two ancestral

IDIOSYNCRASY. 399

lines. After all, we common mortals, if we practiced all our lifetime,
could not turn out as good a sketch as Gianbattista's first water-color.

In the same way, in a Greece where every god had his temple,
every temple its statue, every house its shrine, and every shrine its
little deities — in a Greece where marble was what brick is in London,
and where artistic stone-cutters were as common as carpenters here —
we can understand why a Phidias was a possible product, and why a
Phidias-admiring public was a foregone conclusion. So, too, we can
understand why among ourselves so many artists should come from
the only real native schools of decorative handicraft — the workshops
of Birmingham, Manchester, and London. We can see why musical
talent should arise most in Germany and Italy, or among the Jews,
or in our own case among the Welsh and in the cathedral towns. We
can see why a Watt is not born in the Tyrol ; why a Stephenson does
not come from Dolgelly ; why America produces more Edisons, and
Bells, and Morses, and Fultons than she produces Schillers, or Mozarts,
or Michael Angelos. The convergences which go to produce a great
mechanician are more frequent in countries where mechanics are much
practiced than they are in the Western Hebrides or in the British West
Indies. The Quakers do not turn out many great generals, and the
kings of Dahomey are not likely to beget distinguished philanthropists.

Of course, there are some hard cases to understand — hard for the
most part, I believe, because we do not know enough about the vari-
ous convergent lines which have gone to produce the particular phe-
nomenon. Here and there, a great man seems to spring suddenly and
unexpectedly from the dead level of absolute mediocrity. But then,
we do not know how much mediocrity in different lines may have
gone to make up his complex individuality ; and we do not know how
much of what seems mediocrity may really have been fairly high tal-
ent. So many men are never discovered. Let me take a few slight
examples from our own time, which may help to illustrate the slight-
ness of the chances that make all the difference in our superficial judg-
ments ; and, if I take them from very recent cases, I think the readers
of " Mind " will not misunderstand my object ; for it is almost impos-
sible to recover the facts from remoter periods.

Carlyle, in spite of his spleen, was no bad judge of intelligence ;
and Carlyle thought Erasmus Darwin, the younger, an abler man than
his brother Charles, the author of " The Origin of Species." Probably
nobody else would agree with Carlyle ; people seldom do ; but at any
rate it is clear that Erasmus Darwin must have been a man very high
above the average in intellect, doubtless inheriting the same general
tendencies which are inherent in the whole of that distinguished fam-
ily. Yet, if it had not been for his brother, probably the world at
large would never have heard of him. Again, supposing he had had
no brother, but had married and had children, all of whom achieved
celebrity, we might have inquired in vain whence these children came

4oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

by their ability. Once more, take Charles Darwin himself. He was
nearly if not quite fifty before he published " The Origin of Species."
It was a mere chance that with his feeble health he lived on to com-
plete that great work. Suppose he had died at forty, how would he
have been remembered ? Chiefly as the author of a clever book of
scientific travels, and of a monograph on the fossil acorn-barnacles. In
a world of such mere accidents as these, who shall say that an appar-
ently negative instance proves anything ?

Take another and somewhat different case — the Tennyson family.
Here we have three brothers, all with more or less poetical tempera-
ment, and all marked by much the same minute peculiarities in cast of
thought and turn of expression. Only two, however, I believe, have
published or at least have acknowledged their verses ; and of these
two alone — Alfred Tennyson and Charles Tennyson Turner — has one
a right to speak publicly. When the " Poems by Two Brothers " ap-
peared, who could have said which of the two was destined to turn
out a great poet ? And in the after-event, who can say what little
difference of circumstances may have made the one into a clergyman
and the other into a professional versifier ? If Charles Turner had
cultivated his muse as assiduously as the laureate, would he have pro-
duced equal results ? What little twist set the one, with Tennysonian
love of form carried to the length of a passion, upon the writing of
exquisite sonnets alone, while it set the other upon " In Memori-
am," and " Maud," and " The Princess," and the " Morte d'Arthur " ?
What little extra encouragement on the part of a reviewer may have
impelled the more successful poet to fresh efforts ; what professional
distractions or religious scruples may have held back the less illustri-
ous parson ? And yet, who can read Charles Tennyson Turner's son-
nets without feeling that though the idiosyncrasis is not exactly the
same, the crasis itself is at bottom identical ? Compare the sonnets
with the work of any one among the imitators — the men who " all
can raise the flower now, for all have got the seed," and what a dif-
ference ! The imitator is all servile copy ism in form, with no real
underlying identity of matter ; the brother is only half a Tennyson
in mere externals, but is still own brother in the most intimate turns
of thought and feeling.

After such cases as these, do we need any explanation of the sud-
den apparition of a Carlyle, a Burns, a Shakespeare, a Dickens, from
out the ranks of the people themselves ? To me it seems not. Are
there not pithiness and sternness and ability enough in the Lowland
peasantry to account for the occasional production, out of thousands
of casts at the dice, of such a convergence as that which gave us the
old man at Ecclefechan who " had sic names for things and bodies,"
and his two able sons, of whom the more strangely compounded was
Thomas Carlyle ? Is there not in another type of Scotch peasant
enough of pathos and literary power and bonhomie to account for an

IDIOSYNCRASY. 4oi

occasional convergence which will give us either the old popular-song-
writers, or Burns himself, or on a slightly lower level such a woman
as Janet Hamilton ? Again, the case of Dickens looks at first sight
somewhat more difficult ; but then one may remember that, as far as
general mental power went, Dickens was nowhere. He was a pure
artist in a special and very restricted line ; he possessed a peculiar
faculty for describing queer and original people in a queer and origi-
nal way. Doubtless this faculty was in him so fully developed that
it rose to the rank of genius in its own line ; but the line was by no
means an exalted one. In such a case, who can say what quaint little
combinations of ordinary elements went to make up the power that
amused and delighted us so much ? Are there not thousands of
people in our midst who possess just the same faculty in a less de-
gree— people who, without depth or brilliancy in other respects, can
raise a laugh, by their clever caricatures of the habits and conversa-
tion of their friends ? Throw in the merest side-twist of comical ex-
aggeration and a grain of plot-forming capacity into such a raconteur,
and you get the framework for the genius of Dickens. Of genius of
that sort, indeed, more than of any other, one may fairly say that it
differs only by a hair's breadth from humorous mediocrity. It is
otherwise, I believe, with really deep philosophical or scientific power.
Grasp, insight, luminousness, breadth ; the capacity for dealing with
the abstract ideas of mathematics, of logic, of metaphysics ; the power
of seeing or formulating great generalizations — these things, if I read
the lives of thinkers aright, come only from a convergence of able and
powerful stocks. It takes three generations, they say, to make a gen-
tleman ; surely it takes many generations of trained intelligence on
both sides to make a philosopher.

At the same time, it must be remembered that a convergence even
of two mediocre strains may produce comparatively high results, pro-
vided the endowments of the two strains be complementary or supple-
mentary to one another. To this cause may perhaps be attributed the
general high level of intelligence displayed by half-breeds — even half-
breeds with a lower race. I have already alluded to the intellectual
superiority of mulattoes, a large proportion of whom appear to me
(and to some other observers) considerably above the average of either
Europeans or negroes. And this is not surprising when we recollect
that the negro brain, though relatively inferior, must almost neces-
sarily be highly cultivated in some particular directions, where the
European brain is comparatively deficient. If, then, a mulatto child
inherits in fair degrees the quick perceptive faculties and intuitions of
his mother, and the higher reasoning faculties and forethought of his
father, he is likely on the average to be better equipped in inherited
potentialities than either.* Similarly, one may take it for granted

* Darwin has somewhere noted that half-breeds with lower races appear to be on the
whole often morally inferior to either parent race ; and he has suggested that this inferiority
tol. xxiv. — 26

402 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

that each great European nationality has some strong points not
equally shared by the others ; and it is a trite observation that inter-
marriages between members of such nationalities tend to produce an
unusually high level of general intelligence. In Ireland, the mixed
French families, sprung from intermarriages with refugees, have long
been noticed in this respect ; at Norwich and throughout the eastern
counties, the mixed descendants of the Huguenots (such as the Mar-
tineaus and others) have been equally distinguished. Perhaps one
might even point out an exceptional amount of intellectual power in
the more mixed Celtic and Teutonic regions of Britain — the border-
lands of the two races — notably at Aberdeen and in Devonshire. But
the most remarkable and least dubious instance is that of the mixed
offspring of Jews and Christians. Here we start with a pure race of
unusual intellectual vigor and power, the Jews long thrown by circum-
stances into an environment which has brought out many of their
faculties in a very high degree. They are the oldest civilized race
now remaining on the earth ; they are artistic, musical, literary, ex-
ceptionally philosophic, and hereditarily cultivated. Even by marriage
among themselves they naturally produce a very large proportion of
remarkable men. But when they marry out with Christian women —
in other words, with women of the European race — the special Aryan
traits seem to blend with the Semitic in a very notable and powerful
mixture. I have not space to give illustrations, but the list that can
be compiled of distinguished persons of half- Jewish blood is something
simply extraordinary, especially when one remembers the compara-
tively small sum-total of such intermarriages. Indeed, the difficulty
would probably be to find a single person of mixed Jewish race who
was not at least above the average in intellect and in plasticity of
thought.

Finally, it seems to me that unless we accept the view here con-
tended for, that all increments of brain-power are functionally pro-
duced, the whole history of human development ought to present the
appearance of a continuous chaos. Granted this principle, we can
understand why a Phidias appeared in Greece, a Raffaelle in Italy, a
Watt in Britain ; without it, we can not understand why they should
not all have appeared in Iceland or in New Guinea just as well. If
mere physical circumstances affecting germs and sperm-cells can pro-
may be due to reversion to an earlier and still more savage type of humanity. Without
expressing any opinion on the question of fact (a delicate one to decide), I fancy another
explanation fits more simply : namely, that as morals are a comparatively recent and
unstable acquisition even in the best and highest, they do not crop up in the half-breed ;
and the union of relatively high European intelligence with relatively low savage ethics
may easily produce what seems at least to be a very brutal and diabolical nature. Surely
there can be nothing worse in any savage than such abnormal products of our own civil-
ization as Peace the murderer, or as the man Thomasson who attempted to blow up an
Atlantic steamer by a piece of dynamite clock-work for the sake of obtaining the insur-
ance.

£TIENNE GEOFFROY SAINT-HILAIRE. 403

duce miraculous and really uncaused new developments of structure
and function — can make a genius spring from nobodies, and a philoso-
pher grow at one leap out of two common strains, of the earth, earthy
— then we can see no reason why there should not be great families,
great epochs, great outbursts in any one place as well as another.
But if all increments are functionally acquired, then we can understand
why this environment produces races of sculptors, that environment
races of poets, yonder environment races of traders, or thinkers, or
soldiers, or mechanicians. The first hypothesis is one that throws no
light at all upon any of the facts ; the second hypothesis is one that
explains them all with transparent lucidity. — Mind.

♦«♦

ETIENNE GEOFFKOY SAINT-HILAIRE.

THE name of £tiexne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaiee is most inti-
mately associated with the establishment of the doctrine of the
unity of the organic plan of the animal kingdom. This great natu-
ralist was born at fitampes, France, April 15, 1772, and died in Paris,
June 9, 1844. He came of an honorable family, of only a moderate
fortune, another branch of which had given three members to the
Academy of Sciences. His father, Jean Gerard Geoffroy, an attorney
and magistrate, designed him for the ecclesiastical profession. So>
after having taken his primary studies at home, he obtained a bursar-
ship in the college of Navarre, and, about 1788, a canonry and a bene-
fice at fitampes. Everything thus promised well for his ecclesiastical
advancement ; but he felt drawn toward the natural sciences by an
irresistible taste, which the experimental lessons in physics of Brisson
had contributed to develop. On leaving the college, he asked per-
mission of his father to remain in Paris, to attend the courses of the
College cle France and the Jardin des Plantes. The father consented,
and toward the end of 1790 the young man became a bachelor-in-law.
He went no further in this profession, but sought in medicine a calling
more congenial to his tastes, without remaining faithful to that. He
entered the college of Cardinal-Lemoine as a pensionnaire, where he
attracted the notice of Lhomond and Haiiy, who were teaching there.
Daubenton, whose lectures in the Jardin des Plantes he was attending,
remarked him among his pupils, invited him to his house, charged him
with commissions relative to the lectures, and intrusted to him the
determination of some of the objects in the collections of the Jardin.
The French Revolution was now (1792) raging furiously, and all
the professors in the college were arrested on the 13th of August for
the crime of being priests. Haiiy was released on the next day,
through the most active exertions of Geoffroy, and Lhomond was
delivered by one of his former pupils. The other priests were detained

4o4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

in the prison of Saint-Firmin, near Geoffroy's residence ; and he, on
the 2d of September, getting access to the prison under a disguise,
signified to them that he intended to help them escape. " No," said
the Abbe de Keranran, "we will not leave our brethren, for that
would only make their destruction more certain." Geoffroy, however,
got a ladder, and took it after nightfall to the corner of the prison-
wall which he had designated, and waited for eight hours before the
first priest appeared. One of the prisoners hurt his foot in jumping,
and our hero carried him in his arms to a neighboring yard. Twelve
of the priests had been rescued, when one of the guards fired a gun,
the shot from which went through Geoffroy's clothes, and aroused him
to the fact, which he had not noticed, that the sun had risen. He
then returned home ; but, though he had arranged to meet the priests
afterward, he was not destined to see them again ; and, when he went
to the appointed rendezvous, he found himself alone. Exhausted by his
efforts, Geoffroy hurried home to Etampes, where he fell dangerously
ill, but was brought back to health under the salubrious influence of the
fresh country air. Haiiy's letters to him at this time attest the affec-
tion which existed between the master and his pupil. In one of them
the great mineralogist wrote (October 6, 1792) : " Your letter reached
me just as I was going out to dinner ; it was like a delicate dessert,
of which I immediately gave a part to M. Lhomond ; we were never
so happy at the table except when you were really with us " — and
then he advises Geoffroy to suspend for a while, for the sake of the
restoration of his health, the hard study of crystallography, and attach
himself to plants, " which present themselves under a more graceful
mien and speak a more intelligible language. A course in botany is
all pure hygiene." Geoffroy resumed his studies in Paris in Novem-
ber, and in March following, at the request of Daubenton and on the
nomination of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, he was appointed sub-keeper
and assistant demonstrator in the Natural History cabinet of the Jar-
din des Plantes. On the reorganization of the Jardin des Plantes as
the Museum of Natural History, in June, 1793, he was named to the
chair of Zoology of Vertebrated Animals. He hesitated to accept
the position because his studies had been in mineralogy, but Daubenton
persuaded him to do so. Immediately after his installation, he began
the foundation of the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes, beginning
with three itinerant collections of animals that had been confiscated
by the police and taken to the museum. Of what he accomplished in
this department he has written : " When I began to direct my studies
to the natural history of animals, that science had not been encouraged
at Paris. It had never been made a branch of instruction, and I did
not expect that I should shortly be made the first one to treat it in a
public course. Established in the year II (1793-94) as Professor of the
Natural History of Mammalia and Birds, I became also an administrator
in the museums of the collections of these classes. There were then

fiTIENNE GEOFFROT SAINT-RILAIRE. 405

only a few quadrupeds in the national collection. My duty was to try
to increase the number. I entered into correspondence with the prin-
cipal naturalists, I was powerfully seconded by their zeal, and the col-
lection of viviparous quadrupeds or mammals is now the richest of
that class in existence. I have likewise greatly enriched the collection
of birds. Finally, I have made the collections useful to young natu-
ralists by making rigorous determinations of the animals intrusted to
my administration."

The course was opened in May, 1794, and in the following Decem-
ber Geoffroy read to the Society of Natural History an essay on the
aye-aye, in the introduction to which, criticising the views of Bonnet
on the scale of beings, he attacked a theory that was but slightly dif-
ferent from the one which he himself afterward adopted.

In 1795 the Abbe Tessier had found in Normandy a youth who
was strongly interested in natural history, and gave an account of him
to Geoffroy, to which the young man added a communication describ-
ing some of his researches. Geoffroy wrote back to the youth : " Come
to Paris without delay ; come, assume the place of another Linnaeus,
and become another founder of natural history." The youth came,
and thus was opened the career of the illustrious Georges Cuvier. He
and Geoffroy became fast friends, and together composed five mem-
oirs, of which one, on the classification of mammalia, contained the
theory of the subordination of characters, fundamental to Cuvier's
system. In a memoir on the Makis, or Madagascar monkeys, pub-
lished a year afterward by Geoffroy alone, appears the principle of
unity of composition, to which the author afterward related all com-
parative anatomy. The minds of the two friends had already begun
to diverge toward opposite systems.

In 1798 Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire were invited to accompa-
ny Bonaparte on his expedition to Egypt. Cuvier declined, Geoffroy
went. There he was one of the members of the scientific commission
that explored the Delta, and of the Commission of Seven for the or-
ganization of the Institute of Egypt, which distinguished itself by its
archaeological labors. He made in succession journeys through the
Delta, to Upper Egypt, and to the Red Sea. After his return from
the Cataracts, at the end of 1799, he established himself at Suez, and
began a collection of the fishes of the Red Sea.

On the evacuation of Egypt by the French, the scientific party
were confined to Alexandria, where, amid all the perils of the siege,
Geoffroy continued his scientific investigations and his examinations of
the electrical fishes of the Nile. When the city was given up, no res-
ervation was made of the collections, but Geoffroy managed to save
them. General Hutchinson demanded a strict execution of the terms
of surrender, and sent Hamilton to enforce them upon Geoffroy's
treasures. " No," said Geoffroy, " we shall not obey the orders ; your
army can not get in here for two days : we will take that time to burn

4o6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

our cabinets, and then you can do with our persons as you please.
Yes," he added, to the astonished officer, " we shall do it. You are
seeking for fame. Depend upon it, history will give it to you, for
you also will have burned an Alexandrian library." These bold words
were reported to Hutchinson, and he rescinded the order for seizing
the collections.

Returning to France in 1802 with the magnificent zoological and
zootomical collections thus literally saved from the fire, Geoffroy pro-
ceeded to classify them and prepare the description of them for the
grand work on the expedition to Egypt, and began the series of mono-
graphs that served as the point of departure and as supports for his
system of natural philosophy. He was already outlining his theory
of unity of composition, in memoirs which, aside from novelty and
elevation of ideas, contained, according to Cuvier, " facts very curious
and generally new, and added much to the knowledge of naturalists
and anatomists on the interior organization of fishes." These memoirs
secured the author's admission to the Academy of Sciences in Septem-
ber, 1807.

In 1808 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was charged with a scientific mission
to Portugal, then occupied by a French army under Junot. He was
exposed to many perils in passing through Spain, where the people
were restive against the French invasion, and was held a prisoner for
several months at Merida. He used his influence with Junot, an old
comrade of his in Egypt, to make the condition of the Portuguese
more easy under military rule, and took away from the country many
cases of mineralogical specimens, plants, and animals, including Bra-
zilian ones, but in turn enriched the museum at Lisbon with a valu-
able cabinet of minerals from Paris, and set in order the collections
there, which had hitherto been only the object of an unintelligent cu-
riosity ; and, by his tact and reputation for a general benevolent dis-
position, he managed to keep what he had acquired from Portugal
when the French were obliged to give up everything else they had
taken from foreign nations.

In 1809 Geoffroy was appointed Professor of Zoology in the Fac-
ulty of Sciences at Paris, and toward the end of the year he began a
course of instruction which was destined to have a great influence
upon his hearers and on himself. " From this moment," says M. Du-
mas, " his thought, sustained by the respectful attention of distin-
guished pupils, and particularly by their philosophical studies, sprang
more freely into the fields of abstraction, and succeeded in fixing those
laws of organization to which his name will continue to be always at-
tached, and which he had long perceived. Till then anatomical phi-
losophy, as he conceived it, had no existence ; it was with us and for
us that he founded that doctrine, endeavoring every year to overcome
new difficulties, fortifying his convictions with new proofs, and con-
firming himself in his views by their success, even while they were yet

tTIENNE GEOFFROT SAINT-HILAIRE. 407

new." Sickness in 1812, and the disasters of the country in 1813-'14,
interrupted his scientific work. In 1815 he was chosen a represeDtative
by the electors of Etampes, and performed the functions of his office
with credit, till the Restoration put an end to them. Restored to sci-
ence, he expounded his system in a work entitled " Philosophic Ana-
tomique " (" Anatomical Philosophy "), the first volume of which, treat-
ing of the respiratory organs and skeletons of vertebrates, appeared in
1818. The second volume, devoted to researches on human monstrosi-
ties, was published in 1822. The dominant feature of these two vol-
umes was the principle of unity of composition. This principle was
not entirely new to science. It had been glanced at by Aristotle,
Pierre Belon, Newton, Buffon, and Vicq-d'Azyr ; but it remained for
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire to create a theory embodying the views which
they had only mentioned sporadically.

Previous to him, naturalists, giving more particular attention to
human anatomy, recognizing only forms, and regarding each new form
as a new organ, had multiplied details infinitely without discovering
any general law. " The first step toward rising to the ideal type of
a vertebrate animal," says M. Flourens, in his eulogy before the Acad-
emy, " was to get free from every preconception in favor of human
anatomy, as the only means of being able to regard the organs under
their more general conditions, aside from the merely relative consider-
ations of form, volume, and use." Geoffroy was convinced that iden-
tities can bear only upon relations, and had in this rule, which he
called the principle of connections, an infallible guide through all
metamorphoses, capable of unmasking the most strangely disguised
affinities. Thus, whenever two parts agreed in having similar relations
and dependencies, they were analogous. With this precept, Geoffroy
was able to declare that the materials found in one family exist in all
the others, and to proclaim his law of unity as a law of nature. In his
second volume he extended the application of his principle to the for-
mations called monstrosities, which he declared were not original
anomalies, but simply cases of abnormal or of incomplete development
of some particular part.

As long as the principle of unity was applied simply to vertebrates
it was incontestable, and excited no contradiction ; but when Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire began to extend it to invertebrates he encountered a vig-
orous adversary in Cuvier, whose work it had been to emphasize the dis-
tinctions between the groups which his former patron was trying to re-
duce to unity. When Geoffroy, in 1820, brought the articulates under
his general type, Cuvier uttered words of impatience and disapproval ;
but, when in 1830 he proposed to include the mollusks, the long latent
contention broke out. " Never," says M. Flourens, "did a more vital
controversy divide adversaries more resolute, more firm, or who had
by long preparation provided themselves with more resources for the
combat, and (if I may say it) more learnedly prepared not to agree."

4o8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

The division spread and extended to all countries where any thought
was given to the subjects under debate. Geoffroy was highly ap-
plauded by Goethe, who declared the discussion a very important one
for science, and made it the subject of the last lines he ever wrote.
The controversy was resumed in 1832, and terminated only with the
death of Cuvier. Geoffroy sometimes appeared overcome by the
ability and brilliancy of his antagonist, but he never gave up, and
time has rendered its verdict that, on the essential points, he was not
in the wrong.

The Revolution of July occurred in the midst of the discussions in
the Academy, and Geoffroy, who sympathized with the popular move-
ment, again distinguished himself, as he had done in the previous
Revolution, by an act of hospitality to the clergy, in giving shelter to
the Archbishop of Paris, who was in danger of violence.

When Cuvier died, every one hastened to sound the praises of
the genius of the great anatomist. Geoffroy ventured upon a criticism
of his views on fossil remains and regarding the revolutions of the
globe, and was accused of attacking the fame of his late antagonist.
Deeply wounded at so unjust an imputation, he gave up the work that
had provoked it, saying : " It would perhaps be best to have courage
or wisdom enough to pay no attention to such objections. But the
question now concerns one of the glories of France, the first zoologist
of our age. It is for posterity, if it deigns to concern itself with the
strifes of this period, to do justice to my adversaries and myself."
He was stricken with blindness in July, 1840, and with paralysis a few
months afterward. He endured the infirmities of old age with great
resignation, and preserved to the last the serenity of a good man and
a great mind — or, as Edgar Quinet remarks of him, " he approached
unveiled truth with a cheerful face, and descended without fear into
eternal knowledge."

The list of the works of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire would be a very
full one if all were included. Besides the larger works which he com-
posed, or in the composition of which he was associated, the catalogue
of the principal only of the papers he presented to learned societies
occupies a full page in the " Biographie Generale." His most im-
portant publications are the " Philosophic Anatomique " (2 vols., 1818-
1820), which contains the exposition of his theory ; " Principles de la
Philosophic Zoologique " (" Principles of Zoological Philosophy,"
1830), which gives a synopsis of his discussions with Cuvier ; " Etudes
Progressives d'un Naturalist " (" Progressive Studies of a Naturalist,"
1835) ; " Notions de Philosophic Naturelle " (" Ideas of Natural Phi-
losophy," 1835) ; and, in conjunction with Frederic Cuvier, " Histoire
Naturel des Mammiferes," ("Natural History of Mammals," 3 vols.,
1820-1842). Among the best works about him are the " Life," by his
son Isidore ; the " Eulogy," by M. Flourens ; and a sketch in the ap-
pendix to De Quatrefages's " Rambles of a Naturalist."

CORRESP ONDENCE.

409

CORRESPONDENCE.

SCIENCE IN CLASSICAL SCHOOLS.

PROFESSOR COOKE, in his remarks on
" The Greek Question," does injustice to
the best classical schools in express terms,
and his statements ought not to pass unchal-
lenged. Classical culture as preparatory for
any of the " learned " professions, literary or
scientific, needs no defense. But Professor
Cooke, if he knew the facts, should not
have held up foreign universities as wholly
successful in the change he proposes. He
should not have said that "among others
the University of Berlin, which stands in
the very front rank, has already conceded,
to what we may call the new culture, all
that can reasonably be asked." Is it not
true that these concessions were made
against the unanimous protest of all the
faculties ; that, after earnest comparison of
the progress of scholars from the Real-
schulen and the Gymnasia, the scientific
professors are unanimous in their demand
that classical training shall be restored even
for those intending to enter scientific pro-
fessions ?

Professor Cooke, mentioning by name
certain well-known classical schools, tells
us that "the attempt to introduce some sci-
ence requisitions into the admission exami-
nations has been an utter failure " ; that
" the science requisitions have been simply
crammed, and the result has been worse
than useless " ; that " it has, in most cases,
given a distaste for the whole subject";
that "true science-teaching is utterly for-
eign to all their methods " ; that " the small
amount of study of natural science which
we have forced upon them has proved to
be a wretched failure, and the sooner this
hindrance is got out of their way the bet-
ter " ; that it is hopeless to look for any
change in the classical schools. These are
heavy charges, if true ; but do they repre-
sent the facts ?

Harvard College was among the first to
shake off old methods, and to introduce a
system of examinations which should dis-
tinguish between those applicants who had
been crammed and those who had been
taught. Her professors have showed them-
selves able to set papers in all branches,
which proved those admitted worthy to join
her classes. Professor Cooke would prob-
ably not admit that his colleagues in the
scientific departments have been behind
their classical associates in this respect.
What, then, has been the record of the
Roxbury Latin School in the six years that

boys have been presented in Physics?
Though every boy has been allowed to try
the examinations in Physics, even if we
judged him deficient, only two have been
rejected out of above eighty presented. In
one year, out of fifteen boys presented, six-
teen honors were taken in subjects purely
scientific, viz., seven in Prescribed Mathe-
matics, two in Prescribed Physics, one in
Prescribed and Elective Physics, and six in
French.

It is certain that many of those eighty
boys have not been crammed, and that few
of them have gained "a distaste for the
whole subject." For, though the time for
the subject has been limited, and the appa-
ratus meager, I have seen them eagerly
making apparatus to illustrate their lessons,
and discussing, at every opportunity, dis-
puted points. In one instance three boys
worked for weeks on a machine to prove
their teacher in the wrong, while nearly the
whole class enthusiastically supported their
mates with sincere but mistaken conviction.

Perhaps one ought to speak modestly
about true science-teaching being foreign
to all his methods, but I will say that the
trustees, taking advantage of a slight change
made necessary by the rejection of Arnott
as a standard of preparation, and of a fine
addition to our building, have fitted up a
working laboratory for our physics, and
have furnished suitable apparatus. Then
every boy of my present class, aided only
by a paper giving directions for manipula-
tion, is performing every experiment for
himself, is putting his questions to Nature,
recording and interpreting the phenomena
observed.

We do not regard the study of science
as forced upon us. For years before any
science was required a good portion of two
years was given, and still is given, to the
study of botany, though our boys are not
presented in that subject. And the authori-
ties of this school are so thoroughly in sym-
pathy with the advancement of science
that, whether physics shall be required by
Harvard or not, more and not less time is
likely to be given to its study in the future.

With centuries of testimony for the
" old classical culture," testimony unshaken
by repeated assaults, of course the social
prestige of our classical schools and univer-
sities holds its own. Of course, parents
wish their sons fitted for and trained by
classical colleges. Of course, "nine, at
least, out of every ten, offer maximums in
classics," and continue as they have begun.

410

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

But, when Harvard is ready to remove
Greek from the list of prescribed subjects,
I believe that many classical schools will be
found liberal enough to give pupils every
opportunity to replace its study with Ger-
man, mathematics, and science, taught by
men both competent and sincere.

George F. Forbes,
Master in Roxbury Latin School.
Roxbuby, Mass., November 14, 18S8.

THE HOME-MADE TELESCOPE.
Messrs. Editors :

While reading the very useful article in
the November issue of the " Monthly," by
Dr. George Pyburn, on "A Home-made
Telescope," it occurred to me that my own
experience in that direction, not covered by
Dr. Pyburn's article, might prove acceptable
to some of your readers. In constructing
my telescope I made the tube of paper and
paste substantially as described by Dr. Py-
burn, finishing with shellac-varnish as a
protection against moisture. The three-inch
object-glass cost about twenty-five dollars,
which is nearly the total outlay for the in-
strument, as I use for eye-pieces those be-
longing to my microscope. As these range
from a two-inch to a four-inch, I get a fair
astronomical telescope with powers from
twentv-five to two hundred diameters, af-
fording satisfactory views of the more in-
teresting celestial objects. For viewing the
sun, a light box open on one side is at-
tached to the tube, containing a sheet of
white paper on which the image of the sun
is received at a distance of nine or ten inches
from the eye-piece. The stand is unskill-
fully constructed of wood, but, as the instru-
ment is supported at two points, it is steady.
It is of convenient height for an observer in
a sitting posture, the object-end of the tele-
scope being made to swing. When in use
the telescope is strapped in a kind of long
trough made by nailing two strips of boards
together. This support is bolted at the end
next the observer to an axle having a ver-
tical motion. It has a horizontal motion on
the bolt. The end of the support toward
the object is given a vertical motion from
horizontal to perpendicular by a lever run-
ning through a mortice in the stand, and
working on a pin in the mortice. A rod
jointed on the lower end of the lever is al-
ways in reach of the observer with which to
manipulate it. The top of the lever is fitted
with a long horizontal roller, on which a
roller placed under the telescope - support
rests at right angles. The rollers crossing
each other at right angles, smooth and
steady motion is had both vertically and
horizontally. Such a stand may be made in
a day. George W. Morehouse.

Wayland, New Yoek, October 29, 1883.

INSECTS AS CAEEIEES OF DISEASE.
Messrs. Editors :

Although not prepared to accept en-
tirely the theory so ably presented by Dr.
King, in the September number of your
magazine, as to the mosquital origin of ma-
laria, I believe in the power of insects to
transmit and disseminate infectious diseases.
The active agency of mosquitoes and other
insects in the spread of yellow fever has
never been fully appreciated, and it is to be
hoped that the attention of the boards of
health in the localities liable to this terrible
scourge will be directed to this source of
danger, and that they will establish cordons
of fires as well as men around infected dis-
tricts. However, my object in writing this
is merely to add further testimony as to the
fact of insects carrying disease.

The interior counties of the Southern
States are infested by a minute fly, a lit-
tle larger than the sand-fly of the coast,
but without the sting of the latter. They
are called gnats or black gnats, and are
exceedingly troublesome, from their habit
of flying into the ears and eyes of both
men and animals. They also gather upon
any running sore or abrasion of the skin,
and, though they do not bite or sting, they
are very irritating. When they get into
the eye they cause a very sharp pain, and,
though immediately killed by the secre-
tions, the eye feels the effects for some
hours after. It has been observed that
during the seasons when these gnats are
most plentiful the disease known as sore-
eyes is most common and severe.

Not being a physician, I do not know
the name of the disease, but it is very con-
tagious, and usually affects an entire family
when once introduced into it. The lids of
the eye become irritated and swollen, and the
entire ball is red and inflamed. Some per-
sons have lost the sight of one or both eyes
from it, and its effects are felt for months
after recovery. The intimate relation ex-
isting between this disease and the gnats is
so well recognized that the negroes say it is
caused by the gnats laying their eggs in the
eye. This, of course, is improbable, but
points clearly to them as the real cause in
some way. I do not think the irritation
arising from their getting into the eye is
the origin of the trouble, because the dis-
ease does not always or even generally fol-
low as a matter of course ; but I do think
that the germs are carried upon the legs or
wings of the gnats, and that, when one so
charged touches or gets into the eye, the
germ or bacteria is deposited, and from that
the disease is developed.

Of course, there are other ways of trans-
mitting the disease, but the most active
agent is undoubtedly the gnat, since after
it disappears the disease ceases to spread,
and gradually loses its character as an epi-

CORRESP ONDENCE.

411

demic. If through your published articles
intelligent observation is directed toward
the dangers inherent in our insect pests,
and means are discovered to avert them,
you will deserve the undying gratitude of
suffering humanity.

Respectfully, A. G. Boardman.
Macon, Geobgia, September 22, 1883.

TIDAL ANOMALIES.

Messrs. Editors :

Professor R. W. McFarland (" Pooular
Science Monthly," volume xii, page 106),
after demonstrating, as a result of Professor
Schneider's theory, a great inequality in the
daily range of the tides, confidently asks,
" Do your New York tides play such tricks ? "

However it may be with the New York
tides I will not undertake to say, but there
are numerous localities upon the globe where
the tides do play such or at least similar
" tricks," seemingly at variance with estab-
lished theories, and in some places these
"tricks" appear to be contrary to all our
preconceived notions of hydrodynamics.
Thus, at the entrances of the various United
States ports in the Gulf of Mexico, the tides
either exhibit a great inequality in their
daily range, or but one flood and ebb tide
occurs in the course of the twenty-five hours
usually occupied by the two tides. The one-
tide phenomenon is again met with among
the Philippine Islands; while tides exhib-
iting considerable daily inequality in their
range are met with in numerous other places.

That part of the St. George's Channel
called the Irish Sea included between the
fifty-third and fifty-fifth parallel of latitude
contains a body of water covering an area of
about ten thousand square miles, inclosed
on all sides, except at the two entrances,
north and south of Ireland. Throughout
this entire body of water the time of high
water is nearly simultaneous, the difference
nowhere exceeding an hour. Here the aver-
age mean range of the tides is not less, prob-
ably, than twenty feet. The water to sup-
ply and exhaust this broad area of unusually
large range of tides has to pass in and out
at the two entrances simultaneously with
the rise and fall of the water in the Irish Sea.

Now, the puzzling thing about these tides
i3, owing to the time of high water at the
two entrances being about five hours earlier
than in the Irish Sea, at least two thirds of
all this water passing in and out of the St.
George's Channel has the appearance of
running from a lower to a higher level.
Here the tides exhibit another curious freak
in the distribution of their range. On the
east coast of Ireland, between Wexford and
Wicklow Head, for some distance there are
no rise and fall to the tides ; while directly
on the opposite side of the channel, on the
coast of Wales, the mean range is not less
than fifteen feet.

But this anomaly of the water appar-
ently running up-hill, as exhibited by the
tides, will be found more clearly marked at
the Strait of Gibraltar, where the motion of
the tidal wave is easterly, and the easterly
tidal stream begins at high water, and the
westerly tidal stream begins at low water.
The same phenomenon is met with again
at the Strait of San Bernardino, Philippine
Islands, and also on our own coast, in Mar-
tha's Vineyard Sound, where the motion of
the tidal wave is westerly, and the westerly
tidal stream begins at high water. At Cook's
Strait, New Zealand, the motion of the tidal
wave is westerly, and the westerly stream
begins at half flood.

These are only a few of the more clearly
marked of the many anomalies that have
come under my observation while endeav-
oring, as a navigator, to make myself ac-
quainted with the concrete phenomena of
the tides.

In the absence of a better explanation
of these anomalies, I offer the following hy-
pothesis : That the established theory of the
tides is substantially correct ; but, that the
primary tidal tcave is in the liquid portion of
the earth beneath the solid {though to a greater
or less extent flexible) crust ; and that the
tidal phenomenon as it reveals itself to us is
a secondary tidal, undxdalory motion, deriv-
ing its impulse from, and is complicated by,
the variable flexibility of the solid crust be-
tween the two liquid portions of the earth.

George W. Grim (Bark Coryphene).
Yokohama, Japan.

ELEPHANTS' TEICKS.
Messrs. Editors:

The following extract from an old edi-
tion of the " Arabian Nights " (Edinburgh,
1772), may be of interest, showing as it
does that at an early date elephants were
trained to perform tricks which excite the
curiosity if not the wonder of the spectators
in the modern shows. It is from the story of
" Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Pari-Banou " :

" But what the Prince Houssain most of
all admired was the ingenious address and
invention of some Indians, to make a large
elephant stand with his four feet on a post
which was fixed into the earth, and stood
out of it above two feet, and beat time with
his trunk to the music. Beside this there
was another elephant as big as this and no
less surprising; which being set upon a
board which was laid across a strong rail
about ten feet high, with a great weight at
the other end which balanced him, kept time
by the motions of his body and trunk as
well as the other elephant, and both in the
presence of the king and his whole court."

When this story was written I do not
know, as this edition gives no notes as to
the original sources of the stories.

Respectfully, Davis L. James.
Cincinnati, October 6, 1833.

412

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY,

EDITOR'S TABLE.

" CnURCn-AXD-STATE" FUNCTION OF
DEAD LANGUAGES.

THE partisans of classical studies
had a Godsend a couple of years
ago, in the shape of a report emanat-
ing from the professors of the Univer-
sity of Berlin, and corroborated by the
action of other universities, which it
was claimed ended the controversy on
the question of modern against classical
studies. It was represented that the
Germans had tried out the issue in the
fairest way, and on an extensive scale.
They had two systems of schools which
prepared young men for the universities
— one the gymnasiums, devoted mainly
to classical studies ; and the other the
real schools, modern in origin, and de-
voted chiefly to modern and scientific
studies : and it was said that, after an
ample trial of the two modes of mental
preparation, the unanimous verdict of
the faculty, including the scientific pro-
fessors, was in favor of the classical
preparation as superior to the scientific
preparation of the young men. The
statement as it appeared was very tell-
ing. The New York " Evening Post "
gave an account of the report soon aft-
er its appearance, and said : " It will
hardly fail to be regarded as the most
powerful plea ever made in behalf of
classical studies," and Mr. Charles Fran-
cis Adams, Jr., has been reproached
from all the classical quarters for ven-
turing to open his mouth in criticism
of our dead-language studies after the
German universities had given to the
world their conclusive judgment upon
the question.

We confess to having had no little
distrust of the case as it was thus pre-
sented. It was sufficiently obvious at
the time that we were not in possession
of all the facts necessary to form an
intelligent opinion on its merits. We
know enough of the spirit and tactics

of the classical party, in this country
and in England, to justify some suspi-
cion of the impartiality of their proceed-
ings in Germany, and we accordingly
deferred any discussion of the Berlin
report until more information should
become available for the purpose. Many
questions arose of decisive significance
to which answers could not be obtained,
and it seemed futile to debate a ques-
tion while in the dark regarding its
most important conditions.

But the information wanted is now
forthcoming, and it well pays for wait-
ing. An American gentleman, both in-
terested in the subject and very com-
petent to investigate it, himself a culti-
vated classical scholar and educated in
Germany, has made the subject a mat-
ter of special and careful inquiry, and
gives the result in the opening article
of the present "Monthly." He has been
in Germany during the past year, ex-
pressly to study certain aspects of its
university system, and has visited a large
number of its great educational institu-
tions, and conversed with many of the
professors in relation to the nature and
actual significance of the real-school
controversy, and tbe action that has
been taken upon the subject. The Ber-
lin report is also itself published in
English by Ginn & Heath, of Boston,
so that both sides of the case are now
open to all who care about the ques-
tion. Those who read the paper of Pro-
fessor James — and none can afford to
pass it by — will find that the uses to
which that report has been put in this
country are entirely unjustifiable. It
turns out, as we suspected, that there
is a good deal more to be taken into
consideration than has been represent-
ed, and that the German document is a
thoroughly one-sided affair.

We have to remember, in the first
place, that partisanship on this question

EDITOR'S TABLE.

413

runs very high in Germany, and that
the reports against the real schools were
all written hy prejudiced classical ex-
tremists. It turns out, moreover, that
the whole question was decided upon in
advance, and with the greatest empha-
sis, before the experiment had been tried
to test the preparation of the real-
school graduates, and that from the out-
set the problem was not that of the
progressive principles of higher educa-
tion, as we understand it in this coun-
try, but a question of national politics
in relation to the policy of the univer-
sities. The historic ascendency of dead
languages, as against the rising claims
of science, is to be maintained in Ger-
many for state reasons. This is no
mere inference, but the bluntly de-
clared position. When the matter was
first broached, in 1869, of admitting
the real - school graduates to the uni-
versities, the Philosophical Faculty of
the Berlin University protested ve-
hemently against the contemplated ac-
tion on the grounds here stated. They
said : " While the university has no
reason to withhold its advantages, it
must not, in its desire to make the
higher education accessible to the great-
est possible number, forget its peculiar
purpose and its historical task. Its du-
ty is to fit the youth for the service of
state and church." Again: "The fac-
ulty are compelled ... to utter a warn-
ing against the surrender of that which
has been till now the common basis of
training of all the higher public func-
tionaries, and which, if it be once given
up, can never be regained." And still
further: aThe Philosophical Faculty can
not give their consent to such a move-
ment. They are convinced that no suf-
ficient compensation is given in the real-
schule for the lack of classical educa-
tion. They fear that so decided a low-
ering of standards would be accompanied
by weighty consequences, especially in
such a state as Prussia." And finally,
"The faculty, therefore, believe they
owe it to the university and to the
state to declare themselves in the most

positive manner against a more exten-
sive admission of Realschuler."

These statements give us the key of
the celebrated " Berlin Report." A des-
potic paternal government has church-
and-state reasons for maintaining a
dead-language culture as a national pol-
icy. The whole vast machinery of edu-
cation in that empire is run in subor-
dination to the ideal of government —
a military despotism, and, to discipline
a community into thorough subjection
to this ideal, centuries of history prove
that there is nothing equal to the dead
languages and classical studies. Hence
the traditions must be maintained in
their full rigor, the existing faculties
must not be divided, science must not
be suffered to take a coequal place with
the other faculties, or to become an in-
dependent power in the universities ;
in short, no rival system of organized
higher education, based upon modern
ideas, must be tolerated.

The whole question was thus pre-
judged and predetermined, and no ex-
periment that could possibly be made
under the Bismarckian regime would be
allowed to disturb the foregone church-
and-state conclusion of the Berlin Philo-
sophical Faculty. The real-school grad-
uates were, however, admitted to the
university, and after ten years it was,
of course, reported by the same faculty
that the policy pronounced bad at the
outset was bad at the end. The real-
school graduates were declared failures,
as they must have been failures by the
church - and - state standards assumed,
whatever their proficiency. That the
teaching in the real schools was inferior
to that in the gymnasiums was allowed
no weight; that the gymnasiums were
pets of the Government and the real
schools neglected was of no importance,
that the brightest youths and the best
stock of Germany crowded into the
gymnasiums, leaving the lower grades
to the real schools, amounted to noth-
ing; and that the system of study in
the real schools had not been shaped as a
preparation for higher university work,

4H

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

as was the fact with the gymnasiums,
counted for naught. It was only said
that the graduates of the gymnasiums
beat the graduates of the real schools,
when tested side by side in the university.
We venture to think that " the most
powerful plea ever made in behalf of
classical studies," when viewed in the
light of Professor James's exposition,
will be seen to disclose the customary
weakness of all the defenses of the
classical superstition, besides being for
imperative considerations wholly inap-
plicable in this country.

LEARNING ONE LANGUAGE BY STUDY-
ING OTHERS.

That fine classical scholar, and ac-
complished master of both prose and
poetic English, Walter Savage Landor,
in his " Letters to an Author," observed,
" If we wish to write well, we must keep
our Greek and Latin out of sight." We
shall not undertake to say what or how
much Landor meant by this remark,
but he could not have signified less than
that the influence of those dead lan-
guages maybe bad upon an author who
strives to attain a high standard in his
native tongue. The implication is that
the vernacular must be itself and inde-
pendently cultivated without interfer-
ence from foreign influences. Obvious-
ly skill and perfection in any art can
only come from careful study and pa-
tient practice of that art, and not by
studying any other art. The acquire-
ment of a language for its highest pur-
poses, to become a powerful and perfect
instrument for the expression of thought
in any of the nobler forms of literature,
is the most transcendent of the arts, and
the utmost excellence in it is not to be
achieved through the study of anoth-
er language. Genius, perseverance, and
an everlasting apprenticeship are re-
quired to develop even partially the re-
sources of any vernacular tongue, and,
by the laws of all human effort and hu-
man success, there must be undivided
concentration upon the instrument to
be mastered. The Greeks, as we have

before had occasion to state, were shut
up to this condition, and, by not scatter-
ing their efforts upon other languages,
carried their own to a high degree of
perfection. But in these times, when
there is such a passion to become fa-
miliar with many languages, there is a
corresponding neglect of the vernacular,
and no end of crude, incompetent writ-
ing is the result. We are told perpet-
ually that perfection in English is to be
achieved through familiarity with the
ancient classical models ; or, in other
words, to get the completest command
of our own speech, it is necessary first
to know the Greek and Latin languages.
This stereotyped dictum is equally a
violation of common sense, out of har-
mony with the open facts, and in the
teeth of weighty authority. It is sim-
ply notorious that a great number of
the finest masters of English in differ-
ent departments of literature knew little
or nothing of Greek and Latin, and ac-
quired their proficiency in English by
the direct cultivation of it. And that
competent classical scholars may be,
and often are, incompetent in English,
is strongly affirmed by many who have
the best opportunities of knowing. An
able English scholar, Mr. Dasent, who
had large experience as an examiner of
classical students, says : " I have known
young men who write very good Latin
prose indeed, and very good Latin verse.
I know what good Latin prose and Lat-
in verse is, and I have known the same
young men utterly incapable of writing
a letter or a decent essay in their own
language." And, again : " I think I
know good writing when I see it, and
I must say that some who had great
classical reputation have been the worst
English writers I have known. I have
observed this over and over again. I
have known men recommended solely
in consequence of their university repu-
tation, and I have found that they have
been signal failures in English writing —
splendid scholars, but utterly incapable
of expressing themselves in their own
tongue. They have no choice of words,

EDITOR'S TABLE.

415

and very often have a heavy, cumbrous
way of expressing themselves."

But the most striking exemplifica-
tion of this principle on a grand scale
is probably now to be found in Ger-
many. From the article of Professor
James we gather that the dead-language
superstition holds on in that country
with the greatest inveteracy. Dead
languages are the center and pivot of
the national system of education, main-
tained with unrelenting tenacity in all
the favorite government institutions of
culture, the trade-mark of social posi-
tion, and the gateways to all honor and
emolument. In the official preparatory
schools, the gymnasia, twice as much
time and labor are given to Latin and
Greek as in our own colleges. Cer-
tainly here, if anywhere, we should ob-
serve the general reflex advantages upon
the vernacular speech of life-long in-
tercourse of the cultivated German mind
with the classical masterpieces. If the
study of dead languages can perfect a
living language, then surely the Ger-
man language should have become the
world's model in every desirable attri-
bute, and German books should be
taken as the world's standards of the
finest lingual achievement. If the vir-
tues of grinding in Latin and Greek are
so great as they are alleged to be, Ger-
man writing should be the type of lu-
cidity, elegance, conciseness, and force
of expression. But such are not the
characters for which the German writ-
ers are usually distinguished. They are
the worst expositors in the world, and
the national habit is so careless and
slovenly that it is recognized even by
some German writers themselves as a
national reproach. Professor Helm-
holtz translated a series of works into
German, among other reasons for the
avowed purpose of doing something to
raise the standard of clearness and sim-
plicity in the use of the German lan-
guage. These works, offered as exem-
plars, were not from the treasures of
Latin and Greek, but were from a liv-
ing language, the English, and by a

writer, Professor Tyndall, who had at-
tained his remarkable mastery of the
native tongue by the critical study of
it, and not by the study of dead lan-
guages. The following extract from an
editorial in " Science " of October 5th
sufficiently illustrates the literary hab-
its and general state of mind of a people
trained beyond any other people in the
old languages of Greece and Kome :

In German scientific writings the excellence
of the matter usually contrasts vividly with
the defective style and presentation. Indeed,
the Germans, despite the superiority of their
modern literature, are awkward writers, and
too often slovenly in literary composition.
Conciseness and clearness are good qualities,
which may assuredly be attained by the ex-
penditure of thought and pains; but these
the German investigator seems unwilling, in
many cases, to bestow upon his pen-work,
but follows the easier plan of great diffuse-
ness. Besides this, another delect is not un-
common— the ill-considered arrangement of
the matter. This occurs in all degrees, from
a well-nigh incredible confusion (to be some-
times found even in elaborate and important
essays) to a slightly illogical order. In this
regard, a curious and not infrequent variety
of this fault deserves mention. According
to the headings of the chapters or sections,
the division of topics is perfect; but under
each head the matters are tumbled together
as if a clerk was contented to stuff his papers
in anyhow, if only he crammed them into
the right pigeon-hole. Speaking broadly,
the German mind lacks conspicuously the
habits of clearness and order. There have
been celebrated exceptions, but they were in-
dividual. The nation regards itself as having
a decidedly philosophical bent, meaning a
facility at taking broad and profound views
of the known. We venture to contradict this
opinion, doing it advisedly. Their profundi-
ty is mysticism, their breadth vagueness, yet
a good philosopher must think clearly. It is
a remarkable but little-heeded fact, that Ger-
many has not contributed her share to the
generalizations of science ; she has produced
no Linn£, Darwin, Lyell, Lavoisier, or Des-
cartes, each of whom bequeathed to posterity
a new realm of knowledge, although she has
given to the world grand results by the ac-
cumulated achievements of her investigators.
The German's imperfect sense of humor is
another obstacle which besets him on every
path. He is cut off from the perception of
some absurdity, like that of Kant's neume-
non, for instance. One can not explain this

4i 6

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

to him ; it were easier to explain a shadow to
the sun, who always sees the lighted side.
To state the whole epigrammatically, German
science is the professional investigation of
detail, slowly attaining generalization.

LITERARY NOTICES.

The Law of Heredity. A Study of the
Cause of Variation, and the Origin of
Living Organisms. By W. K. Brooks,
Associate in Biology, Johns Hopkins
University. Baltimore : John Murphy
& Co. Pp. 336.

This work combines in a very unusual
degree the two traits that are so rarely
found to coexist in scientific books : it is
both original and independent in its views
and is at the same time a most lucid and
popular presentation of its subject. While
the work is as far as possible from being
a compilation, and will be sure to take its
place as a valuable contribution to philo-
sophic biology, the author has, nevertheless,
given us such a survey of the general sub-
ject as will prove interesting and instructive
to all readers. We needed a good expo-
sition of the nature and present condition
of the fundamental problems of heredity,
and we here have it by one who has labored
systematically and effectively in the direc-
tion of their solution ; and what is perhaps
still more to the purpose, we have it in the
light of a new and advanced theory of the
subject of extreme interest, and which will
probably prove a permanent and valuable
contribution to the inquiry.

Dr. Brooks devotes his first chapter to
the question, "What is heredity ? "—and
he gives his readers a vivid idea of the
marvels which it involves. Of course, peo-
ple who have no real or accurate knowl-
edge on the subject of life arc but ill pre-
pared to appreciate its subtilties, and our
author observes that such people are apt
to " regard an adult animal with feel-
ings similar to those with which an in-
telligent savage might regard a telephone
or a steamboat. ... A dog with all the
powers and faculties which enable him to fill
his place as man's companion is a wonder
almost beyond our powers of expression ;
but we find in his body the machinery of
muscles and brains, digestive, respiratory,
and circulatory organs, eyes, ears, etc., which
adapts him to his place ; and study has

taught us enough about the action of this
machinery to assure us that greater knowl-
edge would show us in the structure of the
dog an explanation of all that fits the dog
for this life — an explanation as satisfactory
as that which a savage might reach in the
case of the steamboat by studying its anat-
omy. . . . Let our savage find, however,
while studying an iron steamboat, that
small masses of iron without structure, so
far as the means at his command allow him
to examine and decide, are from time to
time broken off and thrown overboard, and
that each of these contains in itself the
power to build up all the machinery and
appliances of a perfect steamboat. The
wonderful thing now is, not the adaptation
of wonderful machinery to produce wonder-
ful results, but the production of wonderful
results without any discoverable mechanism ;
and this is, in outline, the problem which is
brought before the mind of the naturalist
by the word heredity. ... In the mind of
the naturalist the word calls up the greatest
of all the wonders of the material universe :
the existence in a simple, unorganized egg,
of a power to produce a definite adult ani-
mal with all its characteristics, even down
to the slightest accidental peculiarity of its
parents — a power to reproduce in it all their
habits and instincts, and even the slightest
trick of speech or action."

Dr. Brooks then proceeds to state va-
rious other striking and subtile phenomena
involved in heredity, and then intimates
that, notwithstanding their refinement and
obscurity, they are unquestionably capable
of being cleared up so as to be as fully un-
derstood as other scientific laws. He says :
" We may not be able as yet to penetrate
its secrets to their utmost depths, but I
hope to 6how that observation and reflec-
tion do enable us to discover some of the
laws upon which heredity depends, and do
furnish us with at least a partial solution
of the problem ; that we have every reason
to hope that in time its hidden causes will
all be made clear, and that its only mystery
is that which it shares with all the phe-
nomena of the universe."

Chapter II, on the " History of the The-
ory of Heredity," is of extreme interest.
He traces the most notable speculations
upon the subject that have been made in
past times, and points out their inadequacy

LITERARY NOTICES.

417

both from defective knowledge and from
erroneous views of the nature of life, and
shows that no explanations of the phe-
nomena could be at all satisfactory until
biology had fully accepted and broadly
planted itself upon the evolution hypothe-
sis. Dr. Brooks's summary in this chapter
of the fundamental facts that have been
established in this field of inquiry, and
which he presents as requisites of a theory
of heredity, is very discriminating and help-
ful in the prosecution of the inquiry. In
Chapter III the same line of historic analy-
sis is pursued more closely, and the author
is here brought to the consideration of Dar-
win's theory of pangenesis, one of the latest
forms of the explanation of hereditary phe-
nomena. Dr. Brooks finds the hypothe-
sis of Darwin to be unsatisfactory, in that
it does not recognize such a difference in
the functions of the reproductive elements
of the opposite sexes as the facts require
and now seem to warrant. And, after his
review of the various theories that have
been thus far offered, our author then pro-
ceeds to the main thesis of his work, which
is the establishment of a new theory of
heredity based upon the different powers
and functions of the respective reproductive
elements.

It will not be possible here to give any
full or satisfactory acccunt of Dr. Brooks's
theory as elaborated and illustrated in the
volume before us, nor will it be so necessary
to the readers of the "Monthly," as Yol.
XV of this magazine contains two articles
upon the subject by the author representing
his views, and exemplifying some of their
higher applications. It may be stated, how-
ever, that while Darwin holds that male and
female give equal elements in their com-
bined offspring, Dr. Brooks maintains that
they are not only different, but that the
difference rises to the import of a general
law. While the function of the female is
conservative, or to preserve and hand on
all the parts that belong to the race — all
that has been acquired, with little or no
tendency to vary from the race type — on the
other hand, the male, leading a more varied
and adventurous life, stamps the tendency
to variation, the impulses to higher de-
velopment, upon the common product of
organization. There is more than plausi-
vol. xxiv. — 27

bility, more even than probability, in this
idea, and those who look critically into the
evidence adduced by the author can hardly
fail to recognize that he has seized upon an
important principle in this field of investi-
gation.

The English Grammar op William Cob-
bett. Carefully revised and annotated
by Alfred Ayres. New York : D. Aj>
pleton & Co. Pp. 254.

" ; Cobbett's Grammar,' " says the edi-
tor of this edition, "is probably the most
readable grnmmar ever written. For the
purposes of self-education it is unrivaled."
This is probably because it is not strictly a
grammar according to the common ideas of
a grammatical text-book, but is rather a
series of familiar, practical letters on the
use of the English language. Technicalities
are absent, and paradigms are rare, and
given only in illustration of the discussions
of the text. The editor's work has been
chiefly to call attention to the points in
which Cobbett's teachings differ from what
is now considered the best usage, a matter
in which changes may have occurred or
more strict distinctions have been estab-
lished since the first edition of the " Gram-
mar" was published in 1818; to note the
few errors of diction to be found in the let-
ters ; and to emphasize a more discriminat-
ing use of the relative pronouns than is
customary in English literature. The last is
a point on which the editor appears to set
much store. The rule he announces on the
subject is that " who and which are prop-
erly the co-ordinating relative pronouns, and
that is properly the restrictive relative pro-
noun. Whenever a clause restricts, limits,
defines, qualifies the antecedent — i. e., when-
ever it is adjectival — explanatory in its
functions — it should be introduced with the
relative pronoun that, and not with which,
nor with who or whom. . . . Who and
which are the proper co-ordinating relatives
to use when the antecedent is completely
expressed without the help of the clause in-
troduced by the relative." The rule seems
to be a useful one, other things being equal ;
but as we read the thats which the editor
has inserted in brackets after Cobbett's
who's and which's wherever he judges the
change should be made in accordance with
his rule, and as we observe in other places,

418

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

we find it will not do to establish the maxim
as obligatory, but that it must be made very
often to yield in favor of euphony or consid-
erations of grace in style. One of the most
commendable features in the present edition
is its complete and excellently arranged
index.

Das Studium der Staatswissenschaften in
Amerika (The Study of the Political Sci-
ences in America). By Dr. E. J. James.
Jena : Gustav Fischer. Pp. 26.

The substance of this publication was
originally contributed by the author, a pro-
fessor in the University of Pennsylvania, to
the " Jahrbucher fur Nationalokonomie und
Statistik." It comprises a clear review of
the present condition of the teaching of po-
litical economy and other branches relating
to public polity and administration in the
colleges of the United States, with specific
notices of the courses in those institutions
in which more particular attention is given
to it.

Twelfth Annual Report of the United
States Geological and Geographical
Survey of the Territories. By F. V.
Hayden. Washington : Government
Printing-Office. Part I. Pp. 809, with
154 Plates. Part II. Pp. 503, with
80 Plates and 1*7 Maps.

These volumes and the accompanying
portfolio constitute the final report of the
Hayden Survey, and cover the work done in
1878 and until the close of the existence of
the survey, June 30, 1879. The first part
includes the reports of Dr. C. A. White on
Geology and Paleontology, and of Professor
A. S. Packard, Jr., and R. W. Schufeldt on
Zoology. The second part relates to the
Yellowstone National Park, and comprises
the "Geology" of that region, by W. H.
Holmes; "The Thermal Springs," by Dr.
A. C. Peale; and the "Topography," by
Henry Gannett, E. M.

Sea-Sickness : Its Cause, Nature, and Pre-
vention without Medicine or Change in
Diet. By William H. Hudson. Bos-
ton: S. E. Cassino. Pp. 147. Price,
$1.25.

Sea-sickness is regarded in this treatise

as the result of offenses against gravity,

aggravated by attempts to resist them. The

irregular motions of the ship are constantly

displacing the center and the direction of
gravity of the body and its parts, while the
muscular efforts made to counteract those
efforts produce other shocks. Consequent-
ly, the system becomes thoroughly disorgan-
ized. The remedy recommended is to sub-
mit to the conditions. Secure a complete
relaxation of the muscles, and there will be,
it is asserted, no trouble.

Cumulative Method for learning Ger-
man. By Adolphe Dreyspring. New
York: D. Appleton & Co. Pp. 253.
$1.50.

The theory on which Mr. Dreyspring has
worked is that of repetition. His aim is to
teach the student German by the same kind
of process as that by which a native learns
it, and so to drill him that he shall know
when a phrase is formed aright, not by hav-
ing to go through the painful process of a
grammatical analysis, but simply because it
" sounds right." The method is then gen-
erally oral and conversational. The first
stumbling-block the student in German has
to meet is the " chaos," as the author well
styles it, of genders. Mr. Dreyspring meets
it by drilling the pupil in series of exercises
on single words in connection with the arti-
cles and pronouns and some adjectives. By
the time he has pronounced the word in a
dozen or twenty recurrences with the adjec-
tival terminations, er, e, or es, that may be
appropriate to the so-called gender of the
word marking as many adjectives, he will be
very apt to have gained the power of detect-
ing a wrong use at once by its sounding
wrong. Drills governed by this idea are
supplemented by exercises and reading-les-
sons, with a stock of words that is con-
sidered ample for the practical wants of
every-day life and conversation ; and when,
the author believes, " by constant and ever-
varying repetitions, these words are fully
mastered, the student will possess a thorough
knowledge of the practical framework of the
language."

Questoes Hygienicas (Hygienic Questions).

By Dr. Joao Pires Farinha. Rio de

Janeiro: Typographia Nacional. Pp.

54.

Dr. Farinha is physician to the houses
of detention and correction in Rio de Ja-
neiro. The pamphlet before us is a collec-

LITERARY NOTICES.

419

tion of articles which he has contributed to
the "Uniao Medica" and the "Jornal do
Commercio " of that city, on such subjects
as " Animal Emanations," " The Sewers of
Rio de Janeiro and their Influence upon the
Public Health," and " Popular Counsels on
Matters of Hygiene."

Dangers to Health : A Pictorial Guide to
Domestic Sanitary Defects. By T. Prid-
gin Teale, M. A'., Surgeon to the Gen-
eral Infirmary at Leeds. Fourth edition.
New York : D. Appleton & Co. Pp. 163.
Price, $3.

A most vivid presentation of the ills
which follow in the track of the botching
plumber and drain-builder is this by Dr.
Teale. Convinced that pictures are more
effective than words, the author depicts in
seventy plates various faults of sewerage,
most of them actual cases, and accompanies
each with a few paragraphs of explanation
or history. The course of sewer-gas is indi-
cated by blue arrows, and the flow, the leak-
age, and infiltration of sewage are also repre-
sented in blue. Among the faults described
are untrapped waste and overflow pipes
passing directly into a soil-pipe, traps emp-
tied by evaporation or by the flow of water
past their outlets, drain-pipes of poor quali-
ty or badly joined, and drains running up-
hill. A particularly striking group of pict-
ures, entitled " How People drink Sewage,"
shows the danger to be expected from drains
passing near or over wells. Among the in-
teresting histories is the following : " Enteric
(typhoid) fever broke out in a gentleman's
house, from which it spread into the village.
On examination I found that the water-
closet was in the center of the house, and
that the soil-pipe discharged into a common
stone drain running under a tiled entrance-
hall. This drain was almost without fall,
so much so that it had become blocked, and
the sewage had found its way under the
flooring of the passage and rooms. It goes
to a man's heart to take up a tiled hall in
order to inspect a drain. Moral — the drain
ought never to have been placed under the
hall." Some twenty additional defects are
noted without plates, and methods for de-
tecting the escape of sewer-gas are given.
The book contains also some hints on venti-
lating houses and carriages.

History and Uses of Limestones and Mar-
bles. By S. M. Burnham. Boston :
S. E. Cassino & Co. Pp. 392, with Forty-
eight Chromo-lithographs.

The modest aim of the author of this
book has been, in the absence of any work
exclusively devoted to limestones and mar-
bles known to him, to present the facts and
speculations of original writers " so selected
and arranged as to illustrate the value of
limestones in some departments of geology,
but more especially their use in the me-
chanic and fine arts, and their history in
civilization." These stones are so abun-
dant and so diversified, their uses are so mul-
tifarious, and they play so important a part
m every field, that there is certainly room
and use for a book of this kind. Mr. Burn-
ham does not claim that he has entirely
filled the vacant place. That would be
more than it were possible for one compiler
to do at a first effort. But he has made a
creditable attempt, and has produced a book
embodying a large amount of authentic in-
formation concerning limestones in all parts
of the globe, and their uses in all periods of
history. The first chapters are devoted to
a scientific consideration of limestones, de-
scribing the different classes, the fossils so
abundant in them, and of which many of
them are so largely composed, and the gen-
eral divisions of geological time. The
more particular account of the several
classes of limestones and marbles follows,
beginning with those of the United States,
which are grouped by " regions " — Atlantic,
Mississippi, and the Rocky Mountains and
Pacific coast. Other limestones are classi-
fied and described as those of British Ameri-
ca, the West India Islands, Mexico, and South
America. European stones are similarly
described, by countries, as well as those of
Asia, Australia, and Africa. The descrip-
tion of the Grecian marbles is accompanied
with a few remarks on their application in
Greek art; and in the later chapters are
given accounts of the " Antique Marbles,"
" Antique Alabasters, Serpentines, Basalts,
Granites, and Porphyries," " Antique Stones
and "Works of Art in Modern Rome," and
"Antique Stones used to decorate Roman
Churches." The appendix gives tabular
views of the " Age and Locality of the Prin-
cipal Limestones," "French Marbles," and

420

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

11 Marbles of Great Britain and Ireland,
Germany, etc." The chromolithographs
give clear and brilliant representations of
the color and grain of some of the finer
European, African, antique, and American
stones.

MrSTER ALTITALIENISCHER LEINENSTICKEREI

(Patterns of Old Italian Linen-Embroid-
ery). Collected by Frieda Lipperheide.
First Part. Pp. 32, with 30 Plates.
Second Part. Pp. 36, with 30 Plates.
Berlin: Franz Lipperheide. Price, six
marks each part.

The custom of embroidering articles of
household linen with designs in colored silk
or wool went nearly out of vogue in the last
century, but still survives in parts of Italy,
and traces of it may be found elsewhere.
An- attempt is now made to revive it and
commend it. The publication in the Berlin
" Modenwelt," and afterward in books, of a
collection of patterns of old German em-
broideries revealed a richness in beautiful
specimens of art of this kind that the world
was not aware it possessed. The publisher
might have supplemented his collection with
another, as large, of additional patterns,
in the same style, but he has preferred to
vary it by presenting a second one in a dis-
tinct style, the old Italian. In the German
embroideries, the figure is brought out in
stitch-work, while the ground is left in plain
linen. In the older Italian work the oppo-
site motive generally prevails, and it is the
figure that is left plain, and is embroidered
around ; yet there are variations, and both
styles may sometimes be found in the same
piece. The Italian patterns are gracefully
drawn, evenly parceled off, and always con-
ventionalized and wholly ornamental. Some
of them may be ultimately of Grecian ori-
gin, but they all come to the collectors
from Italy. They seem to have enjoyed an
extensive diffusion, for works in Italian
stitch may be found among nearly all na-
tionalities ; and we are given in these vol-
umes, besides the Italian and Grecian de-
signs proper, Moroccan, Persian, and Span-
ish-Moorish groups, all congenial in motive,
but having each traits and beauties peculiar
to themselves. The designs reproduced by
Frau Lipperheide are taken from authen-
ticated specimens of from the sixteenth to
the eighteenth centuries, or from Italian

pattern-books of the sixteenth century. The
letterpress preceding the plates furnishes
full, clearly illustrated instructions for exe-
cuting the work in the various stitches.

THE BERLIN REPORT.

The Question of a Division of the Philo-
sophical Faculty. Inaugural Address
on assuming the Rectorship of the Uni-
versity of Berlin. Delivered in the Aula
of the University, on October 15, 1880,
by Dr. August Wilhelm Hofmann, Pro-
fessor of Chemistry. Second edition,
with an Appendix containing Two Opin-
ions on the Admission to the University
of Graduates of Realschulen, presented
to his Excellency the Royal Minister of
Public Instruction, by the Philosophical
Faculty of the Royal Frederick William
University, in the Years 1869 and 1880.
Boston : Ginn, Heath & Co. 1883. Pp.
11.

This is the somewhat formidable title
under which the celebrated " Berlin Report "
on classical and scientific education appears
in English. The first part of it, embracing
thirty-five pages, consists of the elaborate
inaugural address of Dr. Hofmann, delivered
October 15, 1880, devoted to a general dis-
cussion of the policy of dividing the Philo-
sophical Faculty of the German universities
so as to create a new faculty of the natural
sciences. Dr. Hofmann opposes this on va-
rious grounds, and then passes to the ques-
tion as to the admission for graduates of the
real schools to the university, which he re-
sists, and which is also a part of the gen-
eral question of the unity of the Philosophi-
cal Faculty. Following the address is the
opinion of the Philosophical Faculty of the
Berlin University, given in 1869, against the
proposed admission of the real-school grad-
uates, and then comes the adverse report
of the same faculty, made in 1880, after
the real-school students had been admitted.
The remainder of the appendix consists of
notes and extracts from various authorities
confirmatory of the views taken in the re-
ports. The pamphlet contains a preface by
John Williams White, of Harvard College,
giving various interesting explanations. As
the subject is one of considerable promi-
nence just now, the appearance of this doc-
ument in an English form will be helpful
in the discussion, and will be welcomed by
many readers.

LITERARY NOTICES.

421

Bulletin of the United States Fish Com-
mission. Vol. I, for 1881, pp. 466;
Vol. II, for 1882, pp. 467. Washington :
Government Printing-Office.

The "Bulletin" is now published by
the authority of an act of Congress, in two
forms, a part of the edition being distrib-
uted signature by signature as the matter is
collected and put in type, while the other
part is bound up at the end of the year in
an annual volume. Two classes of readers
are thus accommodated — those who wish to
get the matter as fast as it appears, as news,
and those who prefer to have it in permanent
form, in bound volumes. The two volumes
now before us, being the first published
under the new system, contain numerous
articles on a variety of subjects relating
to the description, propagation, catching,
habits, and care of fish, the value of which
is both scientific and practical ; of American
and of foreign origin ; and original, relating
to the home observations of the agents or
direct correspondents of the commission, or
selected from an extensive range of living
ichthyological literature, and the reports of
other countries. We regret the absence of
an adequate classified index to the volumes.
A copious general alphabetical index is
given, and an index by authors, and they
should not be dispensed with ; but, in a
work marked by the fullness of matter that
characterizes these volumes, another index
seems to be needed, giving the titles of ar-
ticles.

Animal Life: Being the Natural His-
tory of Animals. By E. Perceval
Wright, M. D. London, Paris, and New
York : Cassel, Petter, Galpin & Co. Pp.
618. $2.50.

The author of this attractive work is
Professor of Botany in the University of
Dublin. He has prepared his book espe-
cially in view of " that class of readers who,
while they take an intelligent interest in
the study of natural history, have but little
taste for the technical details which would
naturally form the bulk of a scientific man-
ual on the subject. With this view, nearly
two thirds of the contents have been devoted
to the mammals and birds. Nevertheless, the
other classes have not been neglected, but
a fair degree of consideration is given to
the reptiles, fishes, insects, mollusks, and

the lower divisions of the animal kingdom.
The book has grown to its present form out
of the series of lectures on zoology which
Dr. Wright delivered several years ago to
the natural history classes of his univer-
sity, and the matter of it, enriched with
copious citations from travelers distin-
guished for their researches in natural his-
tory, has been systematized and reduced to
its present comprehensive and connected
form, under advantages which only long-
maturing thought can confer, and which a
book prepared to meet a present demand
can not so well enjoy. The systematic
method is faithfully followed, and the ani-
mals are described by classes, orders, fami-
lies, and the other related groups, in regular
order, with the scientific distinctions care-
fully noted, so that a clear view is given of
all that comes within the scope of the work.
The adaptation of the style to the mind not
familiar with technical language, the beauty
of the broad pages with their clean paper,
sharp type, and the profusion of appropri-
ate and excellently executed illustrations,
make the work eminently pleasant and suit-
able to the family and to general readers,
and one which should attract all the young,
who have any taste in that direction, to the
study of natural history.

Mineral Resources of the United States.
By Albert Williams, Jr. Washing-
ton: Government Printing-Office. Pp.
813.

This volume represents one of the di-
visions of the United States Geological Sur-
vey under the direction of the Hon. J. W.
Powell. It is intended to furnish an ac-
count of every mineral, whether a metallic
ore, a useful salt, a building material, or a
fertilizer, that is economically mined in the
United States, with notes of the localities
where they are found, and estimates of the
production and trade value of the stuff.

Ueber das galvanische Yerhalten der
Amalgame des Zinkes und des Cad-
miums (On the Galvanic Behavior of the
Amalgams of Zinc and of Cadmium).
By William L. Robb, A. B. Berlin :
Gustav Schade. Pp. 30.
This is the inaugural dissertation by the
author, an American student, on receiving
at the University of Berlin, in August last,
the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

422

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

The Physician's Visiting List for 1884.

Philadelphia : P. Blakiston & Co. Price,

$1.

This, as the title implies, is a sort of
annual hand-book or note-book for doctors,
which now reappears in the thirty-third year
of its publication. It is in a compact and
convenient form, and is arranged for twenty-
five patients weekly. Its dose -table has
been revised to accord with the late changes
in the Pharmacopoeia, and has a list ap-
pended with suggestions for their exhibition.
There are several other tables for ready
reference, and aids for calculation, and the
leaves for addresses, memoranda, etc., are
arranged upon a plan at once simple and
comprehensive. There are more advertise-
ments included than it seems necessary for
a physician to carry round in his pocket.

The Handy Book of Object - Lessons.
From a Teacher's Note-Book. By J.
Walker. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippin-
cott & Co. Pp. 129. $1.25.

This work is intended as an aid to
teachers, in furnishing them with material
for their lessons, and suggestions as to the
way it may be used. The matter is ruled
into two columns — one, headed " Matter,"
containing the information to be imparted,
while the other, headed "Method," is in-
tended, not to be dogmatically adhered to,
but to furnish what may serve as specimens
of the various expedients to which teachers
may resort. Two series of lessons are fur-
nished. In the first series are given lessons
on the animal, vegetable, and mineral king-
doms, and, in the second series, lessons on
physiology, physical geography, and manu-
factures; besides which, each series con-
tains a department of "Miscellaneous " les-
sons.

King's Hand-Book of Boston. Cambridge,
Mass. : Moses King. Pp. 360. $1.

This work is designed to describe every
noteworthy feature and institution of Bos-
ton. The subjects are systematically ar-
ranged, beginning with a sketch of the his-
tory of the city, after which are described
the " Arteries," the " Arms " (railroads,
steamers, etc.), the " Hotels and Restau-
rants," the " Public Buildings," and so on,
through the list. The matter is periodically
revised, so as to bring the successive edi-

tions of the book up to the time of their
issue. The whole furnishes a comprehen-
sive and useful account of a very interest-
ing city, presented in the best typographical
style, with illustrations worthy of their sub-
ject.

PUBLICATIONS EECEIVED.

Johns Hopkins University. Studies from the
Biological Laboratory. Professors H. Newell Mar-
tin and W. K. Brooks, editors. Vol. II, No. 3.
Baltimore : N. Murray. Pp. 96.

The Geology and Topography of Iowa in a Sani-
tary Point of View. By P. J. Farnsworth, M. D.
Pp. 12. Typhoid Fever of America : Its Nature,
Causes, and Prevention. By E. J. Farquharson,
M. D. Pp. 12. Hospitals for Contagious Diseases,
and their Proper Location. By E. J. Farquharson,
M.D. Pp. 12. Ventilation. By Justin M. Hull,
M. D. Pp. 48. All published at Des Moines, Iowa,
by the Iowa State Board of Health.

The Oyster Epicure. New Tork: White,
Stokes & Allen. Pp. 61. 80 cents.

English as She is Spoke. "Her Seconds Part."
New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 56. 20
cents.

The Antipyretic Treatment of Typhoid Fever.
By G. C. Smythe, M. D., Indianapolis, Ind. Pp.
24.

Annual Eeport of the Kansas City Public Schools,
1882-'83. Kansas City, Mo. : Eamsey, Millett &
Hudson. Pp. 157.

The Despotism of "Words in Eelation to Sci-
ence. By Orpheus Everts, M. D., College Hill,
Ohio. Pp. 8.

An Examination of Some Controverted Points on
the Physiology of the Voice. By T. "Wesley Mills,
London. Pp. 28.

Description of a Kevolving Astigmatic Disk. By
Charles A. Oliver, M. D., Philadelphia. Pp. 7.

Ocean Grove Camp-Meeting Association. Four-
teenth Annual Eeport. Ocean Grove, N. J. Pp.
76.

Experimental and Inductive Chemistry. Pro-
spectus and Proof-sheets. By Charles E. Dreyer,
Fort Wayne, Ind. Pp. 32.

Chicago Astronomical Society and Dearborn Ob-
servatory Eeports, 18S3. Chicago : Knight & Leon-
ard. Pp. 15.

University of Georgia, Medical College, Closing
Exercises. Pp. 4.

The Treatment of Wounds, as based on Evolu-
tionary Laws. By 0. Pitfield Mitchel. New York :
J. H. Vail & Co. Pp. 29. 50 cents.

" Scandinavia : A Monthly Journal,11 29 N. Clark
Street, Chicago. Pp. 24. 20 cents ; $3 a year.

Diccionario Tecnol6gico : Ingles-Espanol y Es-
panol-Ingles. (Technological Dictionary : English-
Spanish and Spanish-English.) By Nestor Ponce
de Leon. In Twelve Parts. New York : N. Ponce
de Leon. Pp. 48 each part. 50 cents each.

Historical Essay on the Art of Bookbinding. By
H. P. DuBois. New York : Brad street Press.
Pp. 42.

The Evolutionary Significance of Human Char-
acter. By Professor E. D. Cope. Pp. 12.

State Asylum for Insane Criminals. Twenty-
third Annual Eeport. Auburn, N. Y. : W. J.
Moses. Pp. 40.

Calendar of American History, 1884. By Delia
W. Lyman. New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons.
865 Leaflets and Index. $1.

Directory to the Charitable and Beneficent So-
cieties and Institutions of the City of New York.
New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 169.

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

423

Felicitas. A Komance. By Felix Dahn. New
York: William 8. Gottsberger. Pp. 208.

Explosive Materials. By M. P. E. Bertholet.
New York : D. Van Nostrand. Pp. ISO. 50 cents.

Wonders of Plant-Life under the Microscope.
By Sophie Bledsoe Herrick. New York : G. P.
Putnam's Sons. Pp. 248. $1.50.

A Hand-Book of Hygiene and Sanitary Science.
By George Wilson. Philadelphia : P. Blakiston,
Son & Co. Pp.510. $2.75.

Manual of Chemistry, Physical and Inorganic.
By Henry Watts, F. K. S. Philadelphia: P.
Blakiston, Son & Co. Pp. 595. $2.25.

The Organs of Speech. By G. H. von Meyer.
New York : D. Appleton & Co. Pp. 349.

Queen Victoria. Her Girlhood and Woman-
hood. By Grace Greenwood. New York : John
E. Anderson & Henry S. Allen. Pp. 401.

The Human Body. By H. Newell Martin,
D. Sc. New York : Henry Holt & Co. Pp. 355.
$1.50.

Text-Book of Popular Astronomy. By William
G. Peck, Ph. B. New York : A. S. Barnes & Co.
Pp. 330.

Zoology. By A. 8. Packard, Jr. Now York:
Henry Holt & Co. Pp. 334. $1.40.

Destructive Influence of the Tariff. By J.
Schoenhof. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
Pp. 112.

World-Life, or Comparative Geolosry. By Al-
exander Winchell, LL. D. Chicago : S. C. Griggs
& Co. Pp. 642. $2.50.

Dangers to Health. A Pictorial Guide to Do-
mestic Sanitary Defects By T. Pridgin Teale.
New York : D. Appleton & Co. Pp. 172.

History of the Literature of the Scandinavian
North. By Frederik Winkel Horn, Ph. D. Chi-
cago : S. C. Griggs & Co. Pp. 507. $3.50.

The Natural Genesis. By Gerald Massey. New
York: Scribner & Welford. 2 vols. Pp. 552, 535.

Eeport of the Commissioner of Fish and Fisher-
ies, 1860. Washington : Government Printing-Office.
Pp. 1060, with Plates.

A Practical Treatise on Materia Medica and
Therapeutics. By Roberts Bartholow. New York:
D. Appleton & Co. Pp. 738.

Eeport of the Commissioner of Education, 1881.
Pp. 840.

Cruise of the Eevenue Steamer Corwin in Alas-
ka and the Northwest Arctic Ocean in 1881. Notes
and Memoranda. Washington : Government Print-
ing-Office. Pp. 120, with Plates.

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

Origin of the Eastern End of Lake Erie.

— Mr. Julius Pohlman, starting with the
hypothesis that the beds of the Great Lakes
were excavated by water in pre-glacial times,
has sought for the river which washed out
the eastern end of Lake Erie. The discov-
ery of the many large pre-glacial rivers, in
Pennsylvania and Ohio, running into the
lake-basin, explains well enough how the
erosion in general has taken place. " But the
most easterly of these ancient water-courses
yet discovered, the Alleghany, which ran
northerly past Dunkirk, does not account for
the forty miles of lake-valley between that
place and Buffalo, and another pre-glacial

river emptying into the lake-basin near
Buffalo was necessary to complete the river
system which occupied and excavated the
valley of Lake Erie." The maps of the
lake survey show that there are no indica-
tions of rocks on the shore of the lake be-
tween the southern limit of the city of Buf-
falo and the Horseshoe Reef of the Niagara
River, and that the land is low and level for
some distance back. The northern and
eastern parts of the city and the bed of
Buffalo Creek are underlain by a reef of
corniferous limestone, which gradually as-
cends toward the north. Testings that have
been made during the course of excavations
for canals, of the depth of this rockless land,
show that no rock can be found at a less
depth than eighty feet below the surface.
This probable fact points to the bed, and
indicates the depth of the ancient river which
we are seeking for. That river could not
go north or east, on account of the out-
cropping corniferous limestone, but " it must
have taken a westerly course through the
soft shales of the Devonian epoch ; and if
we trace an imaginary line along the deep-
est portion of the eastern end of the lake
from this ancient valley, in a direction a
little southerly of west, we can connect our
pre-glacial river with the ancient outlet of
the river system of the Erie Valley opposite
Dunkirk, and have a fair explanation of the
origin of the eastern end of Lake Erie."

The New Standards of Time.— On the

7th of October a number of the railroads
of the New England States, and on the
18th of November nearly all the impor-
tant railroads of the Atlantic slope and
the Mississippi Valley, adopted a new sys-
tem of time-standards for the movement of
their trains. The object of the change
was to secure a more simple and harmoni-
ous way of calculating the time at the dif-
ferent stations on East and West lines.
Under the time-system previously prevailing,
the managers of each railroad endeavored
to conform to the local time of the most
important stations on its line. The result
of this method of accommodation was that
seventy-five different standards of time,
varying apparently at hap-hazard from each
other, were used in operating the railroads
of the United States ; and it was only with

424

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

extreme difficulty that the traveler between
the East and the West could keep an ac-
count of the hour. The new system which
has been adopted contemplates the estab-
lishment, for the whole United States, of
four principal meridians, distant from each
other exactly one hour of solar time, to the
nearest one of which the local time of every
point in the country shall be referred. These
meridians are selected so as to bear an ex-
act relation, in even hours, with the me-
ridian of Greenwich, whence most of the
world computes its longitude. "Eastern
time," to which the hour from Maine to
Florida and in the region of the lower lakes
is adjusted, conforms to the time of the sev-
enty - fifth meridian, which is five hours
slower than Greenwich time. Its region
begins at 67-$-° longitude, or as near there
as is convenient, and ends at or about 82|°.
West of this is the region of Central time,
which is governed by the time at the nine-
tieth meridian, and extends to longitude
97^°, including the Mississippi and Missouri
Valleys, the upper lakes and Texas. The
next division will conform to the one hun-
dred and fifth meridian, and will include
the Eocky Mountain region ; and the next,
for the Pacific coast, to the one hundred
and twentieth meridian. To the east of the
" Eastern time " region of the United States
the maritime British provinces are expected
to set their clocks by the time of the six-
tieth meridian, one hour ahead of any part
of the United States. As the clocks in the
United States have for many years been
practically regulated by the railroads, it will
probably not be long before the whole
country, and every interest in it, will be com-
puting its hours so as to conform with the
new standards. The movement of which
this is the first and a very important prac-
tical step was begun in 1875 by the Ameri-
can Metrological Society, and is designed
to embrace the whole world. It has been
approved, in principle at least, by numerous
learned societies and international associa-
tions. The complete scheme involves the
division of the whole earth into time-sec-
tions of 15° of longitude, or one hour each,
with standards of time determined at every
fifteenth meridian ; the establishment of a
point where for the purposes of the month-
ly calendar the day shall end and the next

day begin, at the one hundred and eightieth
meridian from Greenwich ; and a number-
ing, for scientific purposes at least, of the
hours of the day from one to twenty-four
without interruption.

Greek in the Colleges.— The "Boston
Globe " says that " the Phi Beta Kappa ad-
dress of Charles Francis Adams, Jr., is
bearing fruit sooner and more plentifully
than even he could have expected. The
meeting of college presidents from nearly
all the New England colleges, held in Bos-
ton the other evening for the purpose of
discussing the question, indicated a very
general agreement with the less sweeping
of his propositions. A number of the gen-
tlemen were ready to make a beginning of
reform. Mr. Adams touched a fuse that
was all ready to go off." This presents the
case about as it is. The colleges were all
represented at the meeting by the modern-
language men, who naturally argued the
claims of their department with earnest-
ness. President Porter, of Yale, was absent,
but President Robinson, of Brown, who was
present, believes in the ancient languages
for a foundation ; and Presidents Bartlett, of
Dartmouth, Carter, of Williams, and proba-
bly Seelye, of Amherst, are rather conserva-
tive in this matter. President Eliot, of Har-
vard, on the other hand, means to give an
A. M. ultimately without regard to Greek.
He hopes neither to require it in college
nor in preparation, but to make modern
languages an equivalent. Yale, too, pro-
poses to require either French or German
for examination, and will probably lessen
its requirements of the ancient languages
in order to make the preliminary work no
more severe than now. The fact is, that
Mr. Adams drew the attention of the coun-
try to a subject which had been receiving
much consideration in the colleges, and his
address will do much to hasten action in re-
gard to the study of the ancient languages.
President Eliot plans a revolution in this
matter, while the other colleges will all give
more attention to modern languages. At
Williams, President Carter means in time
to make German a required study running
through sophomore year, leaving it optional
the rest of the course. — Springfield Repub-
lican.

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

425

The March of Fever and Ague. — Dr. G.

H. Wilson, of Meriden, Connecticut, review-
ing the history of epidemic intermittent
fever in Connecticut and other parts of New
England, traces in it the evidence of a regu-
lar progress in a particular direction, and by
successive advances from year to year. The
advance appears to be "independent of any
known or recognized influence, whether at-
mospheric, telluric, magnetic, or climatic,
and through the most diverse conditions of
surface, soil, humidity, and temperature,
general and local." The direction of the
movement appears to be toward the north-
east ; and in its invasion of Connecticut
" the ague crossed, diagonally but decided-
ly, every one of our main rivers. Starting
on the coast, west of the Housatonic, it
crossed its valley the next year, but did
not ascend it more than about fifteen miles
in as many years. It next crossed the Nau-
gatuck, within five miles of its mouth.
The Quinepiac it first reached and crossed
in South Meriden, sixteen miles from East
Haven; the Connecticut at Middletown,
twenty-five miles from the Sound ; and the
tributaries of the Thames in Coventry, forty
miles from the sea." In Rhode Island, also,
it entered at Westerly and passed through
the State to the northeast, leaving the south-
east and northwest parts unaffected. The
northeast course was pursued during fifteen
years, or till 1875, when the malarial influ-
ence had reached Windsor, on the Connect-
icut. After that time, the radiation, or
lateral spread of the disease, became more
decided, and it finally covered every town
in the State, passing the line of Massachu-
setts at Agawam in 1878. In the next four
years it had attacked all the towns in West-
ern Massachusetts, and a few scattered over
the eastern part of that State, and had in-
vaded Vermont and New Hampshire, as
well as Rhode Island. " It is not too much
to suppose that it came over from Long
Island and New Jersey, and possibly far-
ther south, as well as from the same region
over Westchester County ; that its front
extends from the Hudson on the west to
Buzzard's Bay on the east; that it has
moved a hundred miles north and east, and
still reaches out its favors to those belated
north-men and down-Easters who have hith-
erto mocked us."

Hygiene in Schools. — An article on this
subject in " The Sanitary Record," by John
W. Tripe, M. D., contains the following:
" Children are now taught, in public, ele-
mentary, and other schools, a number of facts
concerning the rivers, mountains, coasts,
etc., of foreign countries, and many other
things which do not immediately concern
them, while the merest outlines of the rela-
tions existing between the blood and the
various organs of the body, and of the
changes occurring therein, rarely form any
part of their education. It is not necessary
to tell children about the size of the liver,
the average weight and muscular power of
the heart, the diameter and length of the
great vessels of the body, the structure of
the eye, or any other similar facts ; but
surely it would be better for children, at
any rate in the advanced classes, to be taught
as to the action of fermented liquors on the
system, and on the organs by which they
are excreted from the body, the injurious-
ness of excesses in eating and drinking, and
such like facts, than commit to memory a
mass of information which they forget al-
most as soon as learned. They would also
be the better for being instructed in the
relations that exist between health and the
social habits and customs of those among
whom they will pass their lives. They might
also be told the reasons why high-heeled
boots, constricted waists, unwashed skins,
accumulations of refuse, and many other
things, are injurious to health as well as
opposed to comfort."

How Bnzzards find their Prey. — On

the debated question as to the particular
sense by which turkey-vultures are directed
to their prey from great distances, Mr. Sam-
uel N. Rhoads brings strong evidence in the
" American Naturalist " in favor of the
sense of smell. In digging some sweet-po-
tatoes, he partly uncovered a spot where a
horse and cow had been buried some years
before. In a few hours afterward the spot
became the center over which buzzards hov-
ered by scores, during the whole of the fol-
lowing day, and less numerously for several
days afterward. It was a strangely inter-
esting spectacle, he says, " to behold them
swoop within a few feet of the horse-hades,
and rise again with slow, reluctant flaps,

426

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

indicative of disappointment, then return to
deliberately ■ beat ' and • quarter ' the ground
aerially speaking, with all the tact and per-
severing sagacity of their canine compeers."
Gosse relates an instance that occurred in
Jamaica, where vultures circled around a
house in which some meat had been allowed
to spoil, though they could detect nothing
by sight. The smelling power which ena-
bles them thus to detect their prey must
be very delicate ; for Mr. Rhoads could not
detect any taint in the atmosphere while he
was working over the burial-place. Doubt-
less the birds also use their eyes, but these
instances prove that the olfactory sense
alone is sufficient to guide them.

Pond-Mad as a Diarrhoea-Breeder. —

A fact is related in the report of the State
Board of Health of Connecticut that illus-
trates the effect upon health of exposing
the bottom of a pond. A small village in
the town of Union was situated close upon
the borders of a pond that was drawn down
entirely during the summer and fall, for
several years in succession, in order to get
the water from another pond lying above it
and communicating with it. "When the pond
was first drawn down, while the decaying
materials at its bottom, which probably ex-
tended over twenty or thirty acres at least,
were drying, offensive odors were complained
of, and it was stated that they caused nausea
and vomiting ; and diarrheal and dysenteric
troubles were stated to be unusually fre-
quent. But no cases of malaria were re-
ported as having originated in any part of
the town. Several large ponds between
Palmer, Massachusetts, and Union, have been
completely drawn down and had their beds
exposed, without any cases of malaria being
known to have originated in the region.

Pigs as Wine-Bibbers. — Mr. W. Mattieu
Williams says that he once witnessed a dis-
play of drunkenness among three hundred
pigs, which had been given a barrel of
spoiled elderberry-wine all at once with
their swill. " Their behavior was intensely
human, exhibiting all the usual manifesta-
tions of jolly good-fellowship, including that
advanced stage where a group were rolling
over each other and grunting affectionately
in tones that were distinctly expressive of

swearing good-fellowship all around. Their
reeling and staggering, and the expression
of their features, all indicated that alcohol
had the same effect on pigs as on men ;
that under its influence both stood precisely
on the same zoological level." He quotes
also MM. Dujardin-Beaumetz and Audig6's
account to the French Academy of Sciences
of their experiments during three years on
the effects of alcoholic diet on pigs. " Eight-
een of these animals were treated sumptu-
ously, according to old-fashioned notions of
hospitality, by mixing various alcohols with
their food, in proportions about correspond-
ing to a modest half -pint of wine at dinner.
The alcohols that we drink in wine, malt-
liquors, whisky, hollands, brandy, etc., in-
variably produced sleep, prostration, and
general lassitude, while absinthe (included
as another variety of alcohol) produced an
excitation resembling epilepsy. Some of
the animals died from the effects of alco-
holic poison. The survivors were killed,
and subjected to post-mortem examination.
All were found to be injured, but the mis-
chief was greatest when crude spirit was
used, less when it was carefully redistilled
and purified.

Food-Fishes of Lake Erie. — In a paper
read before the Buffalo Naturalists' Field
Club it is stated that Lake Erie and the
Niagara River furnish thirty-seven market-
able varieties of fish. But their numbers
are becoming rapidly reduced in those wa-
ters, owing in great measure to so many
fish being taken when they are full of roe.
Some fish spawn late in the fall ; the east-
ern salmon, salmon-trout, whitefish, brook-
trout, and lake-herring, belong to this class,
but the majority spawn in April, May, or
early June. Black bass choose a place for
their spawn-beds where the water is shal-
low and the bottom is a sandy gravel. They
leave their winter quarters in deep water a
month or six weeks previous to spawning.
The eggs hatch in from one to two weeks,
according to the temperature. Bass are
very prolific, yielding fully one fourth their
weight of spawn. The bass and the mus-
kallonge {Esox nobilior) are the recognized
jjame-fish of the lakes. Whitefish do not
take the bait readily, but are caught in gill-
nets, and can be taken in great numbers

POPULAR MISCELLANY,

427

just at the time they are ready to spawn.
They average three and a half pounds in
weight, though some are taken weighing ten
to eighteen pounds. Sturgeon average fifty
pounds, but occasionally one is caught that
weighs a hundred pounds or over. Fish
differ greatly in rapidity of growth. Some
grow in one, two, or three years to a definite
size, and then growth seems to be arrested.
Such fish are short-lived. Other kinds,
which slowly and steadily increase in size,
attain a great age. Pike have been known
to be over a hundred years old. There is
some confusion as to the names pike and
pickerel. In England, where there is but
one species of Esoz, a young pike is called a
pickerel. The pike of our Great Lakes is
the true pike (E. lucius). The pickerel (E.
reticulatus) is more common in small lakes
and ponds. An easy way to distinguish them
is to look at the gill-covers. If they are en-
tirely covered with scales, it is a pickerel ;
but, if the lower half of the opercula is bare
of scales, it is a pike.

Karen Funeral- Weddings. — Among the
Shan Karens of Farther India, funerals are
made the occasions of grand wedding fes-
tivals, in which all the marriageable young
men and women of the village are prvileged
to participate. As it is not always conven-
ient to hold these interesting ceremonies
at the exact time when a villager may die,
it is customary to deposit the corpse of the
deceased in some temporary resting-place,
or to burn it and preserve the ashes till
the times and the marriage-market are more
favorable to giving it obsequies worthy of
its former estate. Consequently, six months,
or a year, or more, may frequently pass be-
fore the memory of the dead Karen re-
ceives the honor which is its due. When
a good time for weddings comes, the re-
mains are taken from their temporary rest-
ing-place and set upon a platform or mat
which has been prepared for them, and the
eligible bachelors and marriageable young
women of the neighborhood having been
invited to come and compete in a marrying-
match, arrange themselves, dressed in their
gayest, in two choirs on opposite sides of
them. The "funeral service" is then be-
gun with a chorus of the men celebrating
the beauties of the Karen maidens in gen-

eral. The girls respond in their drawling
falsetto, "calmly accepting the eulogy of
their graces." These overtures are usually
set pieces, handed down from antiquity, or
taken and translated from some popular
Burmese play. Next, the bachelors, each
in his turn, beginning usually, for the sake
of peace, with the most muscular one, " de-
liver themselves of love-stricken solos," di-
rected by name to the several damsels whom
they have chosen ; if one of them is rejected,
he waits till his turn comes again, and ad-
dresses, if he sees fit, some other girl. The
girls receive the proposals in perfect self-
possession, and respond to them in phrases
like those with which they have been ad-
dressed, the models of which have come
down from the old times. All the praise
the maiden has received, she appropriates
as only her just due, and continuing, she
declares that it is a shameful thing not to
be married, but that it is worse to be di-
vorced afterward, " to be like a dress that
has been washed," but that she will do what
she is bid. If the girl rejects the address,
she may do so in a tone indicating that she
does not consider she has been praised
enough, or with some such indirect phrase
as " Come to me when the full moon ap-
pears on the first day of the month ; come
dressed in clothes that have never been
stitched. Dress and come before you wake.
Eat your rice before it is cooked, and come
before daylight." Rejections, however, sel-
dom occur, except when some young man
makes a mistake and applies to a girl who
is known to be reserving herself for another.
The " funeral service " goes on in this way
till it is plain that no more alliances can be
made, when it is closed, all the crockery
that belonged to the deceased is broken,
and the body is permanently buried. The
matches thus made are binding, and no
other way of making them is in favor ; and,
if any preliminary private courting takes
place, it is subsidiary to the funereal occa-
sion.

Steel-Iron. — Professor M. Keil has pro-
duced a composite material of iron and
steel in which the valuable qualities of the
two substances are combined, and the com-
bination is made available for a variety of
uses. The principle of his process is ex-

428

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

emplified in a cast-iron mold divided cen-
trally by a thin sheet of iron, on one side
of which sheet fluid iron is poured, and on
the other side fluid steel. The dividing
plate should be thick enough to prevent the
glowing masses on either side from burning
through it, and yet so thin that those masses
and it shall become thoroughly welded to-
gether. The combination has been pro-
duced in five shapes : steel by the side of
iron ; steel between two layers of iron ; iron
between two layers of steel ; a core of steel
with the surrounding shell of iron ; and a
core of iron with the surrounding shell of
steel. This steel-iron may be used for a
great variety of purposes in which the hard
qualities of steel, enabling it to resist wear
and tear, or adapting it to cutting pur-
poses, need to be backed by a tougher ma-
terial competent to resist strains and great
vibration.

Hedgehogs and their History. — Profess-
or Grant Allen, writing in an English paper
of the structure and habits of the hedge-
hog, observes that the curious spines the
animal wears on his back are a feature very
apt to recur among animals of different
classes the world over, which are much ex-
posed to carnivorous enemies. The porcu-
pine, a rodent in no way related to the
hedgehog, and the Australian echidna, al-
lied to the ornithorhynchus, have precisely
similar spines. " The fact is, almost all
surviving members of very low and early
groups are extremely likely to have such
peculiar spiny or armor-plated bodies, be-
cause only those which happened to be so
protected have managed to escape the per-
sistent attention of a million generations of
vermin-eating carnivores. Hence they are
apt to be either prickly, as in these in-
stances, or else protected by a regular cov-
ering of bone-like hardness, as in the ar-
madillo, the poyou, the pangolin, and the
scaly ant-eaters. The spines of the hedge-
hog are in reality very hard, bristly hairs,
specially developed for purposes of defense.
Of course, however, he did not get these
most effective chevaux-de-frise all at a sin-
gle blow. They are the result of slow and
constant modification in a long line of an-
cestors, and not a few intermediate forms
are still in existence to show us, either di-

rectly or by analogy, the fashion in which
the defensive prickles were originally
evolved. The bulau, of Sumatra, has a few
stout bristly hairs scattered among the fur
of its back, and gives the first indication of
a tendency toward the production of spines.
It can not, however, roll itself up into a
ball, like the hedgehog. The tanrec, of
Madagascar, is covered with a mixture of
hairs, bristles, and true spines; while an-
other animal of the same island still more
closely approaches the hedgehog in the
greater spininess of its body and in the pos-
session of the power of rolling itself up.
" Finally, we get in Europe and Asia sev-
eral kinds of genuine, fully developed hedge-
hogs, of which our own English specimen
here in the ditch is a typical example. It
is not often that all the intermediate stages
between two distinct animal types have been
so well preserved for us by nature as in this
interesting instance."

Science in Brazil. — M. de Quatrefages
recently improved the occasion of presenting
to the French Academy of Sciences a num-
ber of documents from the Brazilian muse-
um at Rio Janeiro, to speak in praise of the
scientific progress that has been made in that
country under the wise encouragement of
the Emperor Dom Pedro II. The govern-
ment, societies, municipalities, and a host of
individuals, are rivaling one another in their
zeal for the multiplication of educational
establishments and for endowing them as
richly as possible. Nearly one sixth of the
revenue of the country is applied to pur-
poses of public instruction. The first four
volumes of the archives of the National Mu-
seum are marked by many valuable essays,
among which were spoken of, as particularly
deserving attention, the studies of Dr. Pizzar-
ro on a curious batrachian, and of M. Fred-
erick Muller on insects ; of M. Lacerda on
the poison of different snakes and of a toad ;
the anthropological labors of MM. Lacerta
and Peixoto on the tribe of the Botocudos,
and on some skulls found in ancient funeral
urns ; and a memoir by M. Ladislau Netto
regarding American origins and migrations.
The last study is based upon the strange
custom, which is observed in a large num-
ber of tribes from the extreme northwestern
part of the continent to Brazil, of boring the

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

429

lower lip and hanging from it ornaments of
different forms and natures. A paper also
appears in this volume by M. Fireira Penna
on the ceramios of Para, low tumuli, which
are wholly composed of urns or other ves-
sels of terra - cotta, laid together and ar-
ranged in beds. The recent Brazilian An-
thropological Exhibition, which was very
successful, is to be followed by another, in
which it is hoped the whole American Con-
tinent will be represented.

Magnetism of a Great City. — Mr. Rich-
ard Jeffries, in his essays on " Nature near
London," remarks upon the way in which
the magnetism of London is a force in its
remotest suburbs, and the influence of the
mighty city is felt in its most rural environ-
ments. "In the shadiest lane," he says,
" in the still pine-woods, on the hills of
purple heath, after brief contemplation
there arose a restlessness, a feeling that it
was essential to be moving. In no grassy
mead was there a nook where I could stretch
myself in slumberous ease and watch the
swallows ever wheeling, wheeling in the sky.
The something wanting in the fields was the
absolute quiet, peace, and rest which dwell
in the meadows, and under the trees, and
on the hill-tops in the country." The inev-
itable end of every foot-path round about
London is London ; the proximity of the
immense city induces a mental, a nerve
restlessness ; and, as you sit and dream, you
can not dream for long, for something plucks
at the mind with constant reminder u that
the inland hills, and meads, and valleys, are
like Sindbad's ocean, but that London is like
the magnetic mountain which draws all ships
to it."

Bacteria and Cholera. — Dr. Koch, of
the German Cholera Commission, has
made a report of the commission's exami-
nations of cholera cases in Egypt. The dis-
ease was on the decline when the commis-
sion began its work, and this may partly
account for the unsatisfactory character of
the results. Twelve unquestionable cholera
patients were examined, and autopsies were
held on the bodies of ten persons who had
died of cholera. No micro-organisms were
found in the blood of the patients, and
but few in the matters vomited up, but a

considerable number were found in the
dejections. In the autopsies, no infectious
organic matter, except a few probably ac-
cidental bacteria in the lungs, was noticed
in the lungs, the spleen, the kidneys, or the
liver. A well-determined species of bac-
teria was, however, found in the walls of
the intestines, and in some cases had pene-
trated to the tubular glands of the mucous
coat, and provoked an irritation there, and
had even reached the deeper layers of the
mucous coat, and sometimes the muscular
coat. It seemed evident that they had a
connection with cholera, but whether as
cause or merely as an accompaniment or
result was still uncertain. To test this
question, inoculations were made upon mice
and monkeys, and a few dogs and chickens,
and the bacterial poison was administered
to some of the animals, but without effect
in producing symptoms of cholera ; although
in a few of the cases septic affections fol-
lowed. The results actually obtained, how-
ever, seem to Dr. Koch to afford a good
reason why the experiments should be con-
tinued.

Superstitions about Infants. — Dr. H.

Ploss remarks, in his book (in German) on
" The Child in the Customs and Usages of
Peoples," that the birth of a child impresses
its relatives with the feeling that they are
brought into the immediate presence of one
of the mysterious powers of Nature, whose
kindness in conferring the gift is acknowl-
edged, and whose favor is invoked with ob-
servances in which feasts and offerings near-
ly always have a place ; and the ceremonies
observed on such occasions, and the toys
that are given the child, have frequently
an ingenious, sometimes an educational
significance. The natural process of birth
is brought, in the imagination of the people,
into relation with hidden or supernatural
causes : by many tribes it is supposed to be
superintended by particular divinities ; and
the dangers and diseases to which the child
is subject are ascribed to similar mysterious
agencies. The accidents of pregnancy, the
cries and calls, the influence of the evil-eye,
the substitution of a changeling for the
child, the ill-omened significance attached to
certain acts, form a stock of superstitions
deeply impressed in the popular imagina-

43°

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

tion. From the search for supernatural
means of driving away the evil spirits sup-
posed to be working harm to the child have
arisen very curious and wide-spread doc-
trines which are of great value in the history
of customs. The little being who has come
into the world is not always believed to be
pure, and to have a clear right to existence.
Many peoples regard it as " unclean " and
not to be touched for a certain time. Others
require it to be expressly recognized by the
father ; and some give the parents a right
to expose or kill it immediately. Among
most people it is considered essential to per-
form some kind of ceremony for formally
adopting the child into the family and so-
ciety. Such ceremonies are generally dietetic,
or relate to washing and bathing, anoint-
ing the skin, giving the first food, circum-
cision, putting on clothing, or cutting the
hair, and are observed as important mys-
teries favorable to bodily endurance and
mental vigor. Here we approach the tran-
sition from the instinctive hygiene of popu-
lar customs to religious ceremonies. Sur-
vivals of the notions here pointed to are
traced by Herr Ploss among popular cus-
toms that have not yet died out in the more
retired districts of Europe.

Use of Salt. — Among other follies of the
day, some indiscreet persons are objecting
to the use of salt, and propose to do without
it. Nothing could be more absurd. Com-
mon salt is the most widely-distributed sub-
stance in the body ; it exists in every fluid
and in every solid ; and not only is it every-
where present, but in almost every part it
constitutes the largest portion of the ash
when any tissue is burned. In particular, it
is a constant constituent of the blood, and
it maintains in it a proportion that is almost
wholly independent of the quantity that is
consumed with the food. The blood will
take up so much and no more, however
much we may take with our food ; and, on
the other hand, if none be given, the blood
parts with its natural quantity slowly and un-
willingly. Under ordinary circumstances, a
healthy man loses daily about twelve grains
by one channel or the other, and, if he is to
maintain his health, that quantity must be
introduced. Common salt is of immense
importance in the processes ministering to

the nutrition of the body, for not only is it
the chief salt in the gastric juice, and essen-
tial for the formation of bile, and may hence
be reasonably regarded as of high value in
digestion, but it is an important agent in
promoting the processes of diffusion, and
therefore of absorption. Direct experiment
has shown that it promotes the decomposi-
tion of albumen in the body, acting, proba-
bly, by increasing the activity of the trans-
mission of fluids from cell to cell. Nothing
can demonstrate its value better than the
fact that, if albumen without salt is intro-
duced into the intestine of an animal, no
portion of it is absorbed, while it all quickly
disappears if salt be added. If any further
evidence were required, it would be found
in the powerful instinct which impels ani-
mals to obtain salt. Buffaloes will travel
for miles to reach a " salt-lick " ; and the
value of salt in improving the nutrition and
the aspect of horses aud cattle is well known
to every farmer. The popular notion that
the use of salt prevents the development of
worms in the intestine has a foundation in
fact, for salt is fatal to the small thread-
worms, and prevents their reproduction by
improving the general tone and the charac-
ter of the secretions of the alimentary canal.
The conclusion, therefore, is obvious that
salt, being wholesome, and indeed necessary,
should be taken in moderate quantities, and
that abstention from it is likely to be inju-
rious.— Lancet.

Intelligence of a Turret-Spider. — The

nest of the Tarentula arenicola, or Ameri-
can turret-spider, is a vertical tube, extend-
ing twelve or more inches into the ground,
and projecting half an inch to an inch above
the surface. The projecting portion, or tur-
ret, is in the form of a pentagon, more or
less regular, and is built up of bits of grass
and straw, small twigs, etc., cemented with
mud, like a miniature old-fashioned chim-
ney. The upper part of the tube has a thin
lining of web-silk. A nest was exhibited
by Vice-President H. C. McCook, D. D., at a
meeting of the Academy of Natural Sciences,
of Philadelphia, which, during its journey
from Vineland, New Jersey, where it was
found, had been plugged at top and bottom
with cotton. Upon the arrival of the nest
in Philadelphia, the plug guarding the en-

NOTES.

43i

trance had been removed, but the other had
been forgotten. The spider, which still in-
habited the tube, immediately began remov-
ing the cotton from the lower end, and cast
some of it out. But guided, apparently by
its sense of touch, to the knowledge that
the soft fibers would be an excellent mate-
rial with which to line ita tube, it speedily
put in a cotton padding for about four inches
downward from the opening. Dr. McCook
pointed out the very manifest inference that
the spider must, for the first time, have come
in contact with such a material as cotton, and
had immediately utilized its new experience
by adding the soft fiber to the ordinary silken
lining.

NOTES.

The Franklin Institute will open an In-
ternational Exhibition of Electricity and
Electrical Appliances in Philadelphia, on
the 2d day of September next. By a spe-
cial act of Congress, all articles " imported
solely for exhibition " on this occasion will
be admitted free of duty ; but, if they are
sold or withdrawn for consumption, the reg-
ular duties must be paid upon them.

Victor-Alexandre Puiseux, a French
astronomer, died in September last. He
was the author of numerous memoirs on
astronomical subjects to the Academy of
Sciences, and had been occupied very indus-
triously with calculations based upon the
transits of Venus of 1874 and 1882.

Dr. J. B. Sutton, of Middlesex Hospital,
in a communication to the "Lancet," dis-
proves the current opinion that monkeys
die chiefly from tubercle. Having been per-
mitted to attend the post-mortem examina-
tions of animals dying in the Zoological
Gardens, Regent's Park, he personally in-
spected the remains of ninety-three monk-
eys. Of this number, three were found
to have died of tubercle, twenty-two of
bronchitis, three of lobar pneumonia, seven
of lobular pneumonia, one of septic pneu-
monia, twenty-three of other diseases, in-
cluding three of scrofula and four of typhoid
fever,. while in thirty-four cases no lesion
was met with sufficient to explain the deaths
of the creatures.

Dr. Conrad Bursian, a distinguished
German philologist, died on the 21st of Sep-
tember, having just a few days before fin-
ished his great work on the " History of Phi-
lology." He had been a professor succes-
sively in the Universities of Leipsic, Tubin-
gen, Zurich, and Munich, and was a member
of several learned societies.

M. Chevreul, the " dean " of the French
Academy of Sciences, reached his ninety-
eighth year on the last day of August, and
was still physically vigorous and fresh of
heart. The President of the Academy, in
taking notice of the fact, remarked : " M.
Chevreul has belonged to the Academy
which he has so much honored by his labors
for fifty-seven years ; and he would, in fact,
have counted it sixty-seven years, if by an
extremely rare sentiment of generosity he
had not allowed himself to be passed over
in 1816, to give place to a chemist (M.
Proust) whom he called his master."

Statisticians have pronounced the Uni-
ted States to be not only potentially but
actually richer than the United Kingdom.
Counting the houses, furniture, manufac-
tures, railways, shipping, bullion, lands, cat-
tle, crops, investments, and roads, it is esti-
mated that there is a grand total in the
United States of $49,770,000,000. Great
Britain is credited with something less than
$40,000,000,000, or nearly $10,000,000,000
less than the United States. The wealth per
inhabitant in Great Britain is estimated at
$1,160, and in the United States at $995.
With regard to the remuneration of labor,
assuming the produce of labor to be 100, in
Great Britain 56 parts go to the laborer, 21
to capital, and 23 to government. In France
41 parts go to labor, 36 to capital, and 23
to government. In the United States 72
parts go to labor, 23 to capital, and five to
: government. — London Times.

M. Joseph - Antoine - Ferdinand Pla-
teau, an eminent physicist and emeritus
professor at the University of Ghent, died
September 15th, in his eighty-second year.

M. A. Milne-Edwards reports that he
met with great success near Teneriffe on
his deep-sea expedition in the steamer Talis-
man. The dredging apparatus is strong
enough to bring up rocks weighing a hun-
dred kilogrammes from the depth of a thou-
sand metres. The collections promise to be
immense, greater than it will be possible to
bring home. Among the species gathered
are crustaceans of forms resembling those
of the Antilles, curious fishes with luminous
organs, crinoids, asterias, strange holuthu-
rians, numerous sponges, and mollusks, ex-
hibiting a novel mingling of African with
Mediterranean and Polar forms. On the
Island of Branco, which had never been
scientifically visited before, the expedition
found large lizards, such as are not known to
occur anywhere else, and which appear to
have a good living of herbaceous food, al-
though the island is nearly destitute of
vegetation.

Dr. J. Lawrence Smith, of Louisville,
Kentucky, died on the 12th of October last,
in the sixty-fifth year of his age. He had dis-

432

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

tinguished himself by many valuable chemi-
cal researches and publications respecting
them, particularly by his investigations into
the composition and nature of meteoric
stones. A portrait and sketch of Dr. Smith
were given in " The Popular Science Month-
ly" for December, 1874.

Mr. Morgan J. Roberts tells in " Na-
ture " of a collie-dog owned by him which
was accustomed to go with him fishing, and
took great interest in the business. She
learned that there existed a close connec-
tion between the bobbing and final disap-
pearance of the float and the pulling up of
a fish, and would become very much excited
whenever she saw the float in agitation. On
one occasion when her master was away
from the rods, observing a float disappear-
ing, she uttered one or two sharp yelps, and,
her master failing to come, herself seized
the rod, and, " backing " with it, attempted
to pull the line from the water. The hook
held " a goodly eel."

Professor Oswald Heer, the distin-
guished Swiss paleontologist and botanist,
died at Lausanne, September 27th. He was
director of the Botanical Garden at Zurich,
and editor of the Swiss " Journal of Agri-
culture and Horticulture " ; and was the au-
thor of the "Urwelt der Schweitz " (" Primi-
tive World of Switzerland "), which has been
translated into many foreign languages ; of
a work on Swiss Coleoptera ; and, in con-
nection with Hegetschweiler, of the " Flora
of Switzerland."

Millemaine is the name of a new cereal
which has been introduced into South Caro-
lina, from Colombia, South America. It is
allied to sorghum and Guinea corn, and has
the merit of an almost unlimited capacity to
endure drought. Cakes made from the
meal have been described as better than
corn - cakes, and the grain has been pro-
nounced by the chemist of the Savannah
Guano Company superior in food qualities
to wheat.

M. Alfred Niaudet, who died in Octo-
ber last, is pronounced by " La Nature " to
have been the person who, more than any
other one, contributed to the development
in France of the industries dependent on
electricity. He did valuable service to the
country in his special line during the Franco-
Prussian War, and, besides numerous papers
on dynamo-electric machines, telephony, and
telegraphy, was the author of two works
that are authorities on electric piles and
dynamo-electric motors.

TriE death is reported of M. F. S. Cloez,
an industrious French chemist, who assisted
M. Chevreul some thirty-six years ago, and
was afterward Professor of Physics in the
School of the Fine Arts. He was author of
several memoirs of considerable value.

According to Dr. Sach, of Buenos
Ayres, there is no danger of an exhaustion
of the quinine-supply. The experimental
plantations in Java and the Island of Re-
union have been very successful ; and, be-
sides these nurseries, the trees have been
cultivated in Bolivia by the million for ten
years. At three places in the last-named
country, taken as they come, the number of
trees growing is given, severally, at 70,000,
200,000, and^3,500,000.

Dr. Charles William Siemens, the dis-
tinguished engineer and electrician, died in
London, November 20th, of rupture of the
heart. He was born in Lenthe, Hanover,
in 1823, and has given the world the re-
generative gas-furnace, with an improved
process for making steel ; has been greatly
instrumental in the extension of telegraphic
cables, and has produced a series of valua-
ble improvements in the saving and utiliza-
tion of heat and in applications of elec-
tricity.

M. Jules Carret has found, by com-
paring the statistics of conscripts furnished
from a certain region of France during ten
years of the first empire with those for
1872-'79, that in every commune an in-
crease is apparent in the average height of
the inhabitants. If this is established, the
fact will tend to contradict Broca's view
that stature is almost wholly a matter of
ethnic heredity, and to show that improve-
ment in the conditions of life has something
to do with it.

With the death of M. Louis Breguet,
which took place suddenly on the 27th of
October, is " effaced for the moment," says
M. Blanchard, President of the French
Academy of Sciences, " a name celebrated
in the mechanic arts from the eighteenth
century." He was the grandson and busi-
ness successor of Abraham Breguet, who
founded the watch-making house of that
name in 1780, and was the father of the late
Antoine Breguet, of the "Revue Scienti-
fique." He was himself distinguished for
services in the applications of electricity
and in the advancement of telegraphy, and
was a member of several learned societies.
He was sixty-nine years old.

A way has been found for utilizing the
bodies of animals that have died of anthrax.
They are treated with sulphuric acid, and
then converted into superphosphates. The
germs are destroyed during the process.

Dr. John L. Le Conte, one of the most
eminent American entomologists, died at
his home in Philadelphia, November 15th.
He presided at the Hartford meeting of the
American Association in 1874. A portrait
and sketch of him were given in " The Popu-
lar Science Monthly" for September, 1874.

CHARLES WILLIAM SIEMENS.

THE

POPULAR SCIENCE
MONTHLY.

FEBRUARY, 1884.

THE NEW TOEYISM.

By HEEBEET SPENCEB.

MOST of those who now pass as Liberals, are Tories of a new
type. This is a paradox which I propose to justify. That I
may justify it, I must first point out what the two political parties
originally were ; and I must then ask the reader to bear with me while
I remind him of facts he is familiar with, that I may impress on him
the intrinsic natures of Toryism and Liberalism properly so called.

Dating back to an earlier period than their names, these two po-
litical parties at first stood respectively for two opposed types of social
organization, broadly distinguishable as the militant and the indus-
trial— types which are characterized, the one by the regime status,
almost universal in ancient days, and the other characterized by the
regime of contract, which has become general in modern days, chiefly
among the Western nations, and especially among ourselves and the
Americans. If, instead of using the word " co-operation " in a limited
sense, we use it in its widest sense, as describing the combined activi-
ties of citizens under whatever system of regulation, then these two
are definable as the system of compulsory co-operation and the system
of voluntary co-operation. The typical structure of the one we see
in an army formed of conscripts, in which the units in their several
grades have to fulfill commands under pain of death, and receive food
and clothing and pay arbitrarily apportioned ; while the typical struct-
ure of the other we see in a body of producers or distributors, who
severally agree to specified salaries and wages in return for specified
services, and may at will, after due notice, leave the organization if
they do not like it.

During social evolution in England, the distinction between these
two fundamentally-opposed forms of co-operation made its appearance
vol. xxiv. — 28

434 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

gradually ; but long before the names Tory and Whig came into use,
the parties were becoming traceable, and their connections with mili-
tancy and industrialism respectively were vaguely shown. The truth
is familiar that here, as elsewhere, it was habitually by town-popula-
tions, formed of workers and traders accustomed to co-operate under
contract, that resistances were made to that coercive rule which char-
acterizes co-operation under status. While conversely, support of co-
operation under status, arising from, and adjusted to, chronic warfare,
came from rural districts, originally peopled by military chiefs and
their dependents, which retained the primitive ideas and traditions.
Moreover, this contrast in political leanings, shown before Whig and
Tory principles became clearly distinguished, continued to be shown
afterward. At the period of the Revolution, " while the villages and
smaller towns were monopolized by Tories, the larger cities, the manu-
facturing districts, and the ports of commerce, formed the strongholds
of the Whigs " ; and that, spite of exceptions, the like general relation
still exists, needs no proving.

Such were the natures of the two parties as indicated by their ori-
gins. Observe, now, how their natures were indicated by their early
doctrines and deeds. Whiggism began with resistance to Charles II
and his cabal, in their efforts to re-establish unchecked monarchical
power. The Whigs " regarded the monarchy as a civil institution,
established by the nation for the benefit of all its members " ; while
with the Tories " the monarch was the delegate of Heaven." And these
doctrines involved the beliefs, the one that subjection of citizen to
ruler was conditional, and the other that it was unconditional. De-
scribing Whig and Tory as conceived at the end of the seventeenth
century, some fifty years before he wrote his " Dissertation on Par-
ties," Bolingbroke says :

The power and majesty of the people, an original contract, the authority and
independency of Parliaments, liberty, resistance, exclusion, abdication, deposi-
tion; these were ideas associated, at that time, to the idea of a Whig, and sup-
posed by every Whig to be incommunicable, and inconsistent with the idea of a
Tory.

Divine, hereditary, indefeasible right, lineal succession, passive-obedience,
prerogative, non-resistance, slavery, nay, and sometimes popery too, were asso-
ciated in many minds to the idea of a Tory, and deemed incommunicable and
inconsistent, in the same manner, with the idea of a Whig ("Dissertation on
Parties," p. 5).

And if we compare these descriptions, we see that in the one party
there was a desire to resist and decrease the coercive power of the ruler
over the subject, and in the other party to maintain or increase his
coercive power. This distinction in their aims — a distinction which
transcends in meaning and importance all other political distinctions —
was displayed in their early doings. Whig principles were exempli-
fied in the Habeas Corpus Act, and in the measure by which judges

THE NEW TORYISM. 435

were made independent of the Crown ; in defeat of the Non-Resisting
Test Bill, which proposed for legislators and officials a compulsory
oath, that they would in no case resist the king by arms ; and later,
they were exemplified in the Bill of Rights, framed to secure subjects
against monarchical aggressions. These acts had the same intrinsic
nature. The principle of compulsory co-operation throughout social
life was weakened by them, and the principle of voluntary co-opera-
tion strengthened. That at a subsequent period the policy of the
party had the same general tendency is well shown by a remark of
Mr. Green concerning the period of Whig power after the death of
Anne :

Before the fifty years of their rule had passed, Englishmen had forgotten
that it was possible to persecute for differences of religion, or to put down the
liberty of the press, or to tamper with the administration of justice, or to rule
without a Parliament (Green, 705).

And now, passing over the war-period which closed the last cen-
tury and began this, during which the extension of individual freedom
previously gained was lost, and the retrograde movement toward the
social type proper to militancy was shown by all kinds of coercive
measures, from those which took by force the persons and property
of citizens for war purposes to those which suppressed public meetings
and sought to gag the press, let us recall the general characters of
those changes effected by Whigs, or Liberals, after the re-establishment
of peace permitted revival of the industrialism regime, and return to
its appropriate type of structure. Under growing Whig influence
there came repeal of the laws which forbade combination among
artisans as well as of those which interfered with their freedom of
traveling. There was the measure by which, under Whig pressure,
Dissenters were allowed to believe as they pleased without suffering
certain civil penalties ; and there was the Whig measure, carried by
Tories from compulsion, which enabled Catholics to profess their re-
ligion without losing part of their civil freedom. The area of liberty
was extended by acts which forbade the buying of negroes and the
holding them in bondage. The political serfdom of the unrepresented
was narrowed in area, both by the Reform Bill and the Municipal
Reform Bill ; so that, both generally and locally, the many were less
under the coercion of a few. Later came diminution and removal of
restraints on the buying of foreign commodities and the employment
of foreign vessels ; ^nd later still the removal of those burdens on the
press, which were originally imposed to hinder the diffusion of opinion.
And of all these changes it is unquestionable that, whether made or
not by Liberals themselves, they were made in conformity with the
principles professed and urged by Liberals.

But why do I enumerate facts so well known to all ? Simply be-
cause, as intimated at the outset, it seems needful to remind every-

436 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

body what Liberalism was in the past, that they may perceive its
unlikeness to the so-called Liberalism of the present. It would be
inexcusable to name these various measures for the purpose of point-
ing out the character common to them, were it not that in our day
men have forgotten their common character. They do not remember
that in one or other way all these truly Liberal changes diminished
compulsory co-operation throughout social life and increased voluntary
co-operation. They have forgotten that, in one direction or other,
they diminished the range of governmental authority, and increased
the area within which each citizen may act unchecked. They have
lost sight of the truth that in past times Liberalism habitually stood
for individual freedom versus state coercion.

And now comes the inquiry, How is it that Liberals have lost
sight of this ? How is it that Liberalism, getting more and more into
power, has grown more and more coercive in its legislation ? How is
it that, either directly through its own majorities or indirectly through
aid given in such cases to the majorities of its opponents, Liberalism
has, to an increasing extent, adopted the policy of dictating the actions
of citizens, and, by consequence, diminishing the range throughout
which their actions remain free ? How are we to explain this spread-
ing confusion of thought which has led it, in pursuit of what appears
to be public good, to invert the method by which in earlier days it
achieved public good ?

Unaccountable as at first sight this unconscious change of policy
seems, we shall find that it has arisen quite naturally. Given the un-
analytical thought ordinarily brought to bear on political matters, and
under existing conditions, nothing else was to be expected. To make
this clear, some parenthetic explanations are needful.

From the lowest to the highest creatures, intelligence progresses by
acts of discriminations ; and it continues so to progress among men,
from the most ignorant to the most cultured. To class rightly — to
put in the same group things which are of essentially the same natures,
and in other groups things of natures essentially different — is the fun-
damental condition to right guidance of actions. Beginning with rudi-
mentary vision, which gives warning that some large opaque body is
passing near (just as closed eyes turned to the window, perceiving the
shade caused by a hand put before them, tell us of something moving
in front), the advance is to developed vision, which, by exactly-appre-
ciated combinations of forms, colors, and motions, identifies objects at
great distances as prey or enemies of this or that kind, and so makes
possible adjustments of conduct for securing food or evading death.
That progressing perception of differences and consequent greater cor-
rectness of classing constitutes under one of its chief aspects the de-
velopment of mind, is equally seen when we pass from the relatively
simple physical vision to the relatively complex intellectual vision —

THE NEW TORYISM. 437

the vision through the agency of which things previously grouped by
certain external resemblances or by certain extrinsic circumstances
come to be more truly grouped in conformity with their intrinsic
structures or natures. Undeveloped intellectual vision is just as indis-
criminating and erroneous in its classings as undeveloped physical vis-
ion. Instance the early arrangement of plants under the heads trees,
shrubs, and herbs : size, the most conspicuous trait, being the ground
of distinction, and the assemblages formed being such as united many
plants extremely unlike in their natures, and separated others that are
near akin. Or still better, take the popular classification which puts
together under the same general name fish and shell-fish, and under
the sub-name, shell-fish, puts together crustaceans and mollusks ; nay,
which goes further, and regards as fish the cetacean mammals. Partly
because of the likeness in their modes of life as inhabiting the water,
and partly because of some general resemblance in their tastes, creat-
ures that are in their essential natures far more widely separated than
a fish is from a bird, are grouped under the same class and under the
same sub-class.

Now, the general truth thus exemplified holds throughout those
higher ranges of intellectual vision concerned with things not present-
able to the senses, and, among others, such things as political institu-
tions and political measures. For among these, too, we shall find that
the results of inadequate intellectual faculty, or inadequate culture of
it, or both, are erroneous classings and consequent erroneous conclu-
sions. Indeed, the liability to error is here much greater, since the
things with which the intellect is concerned do not admit of examina-
tion in the same easy way. You can not touch or see a political insti-
tution : it can be known only by an effort of constructive imagination.
Neither can you apprehend by physical perception a political measure :
this still more requires a process of mental representation by which its
elements are put together in thought, and the essential nature of the
combination conceived. Here, therefore, still more than in the cases
above named, defective intellectual vision is shown in grouping by
external characters or extrinsic circumstances. How institutions are
wrongly classed from this cause, we see in the common notion that
the Roman Republic was a popular form of government. Look into
the early ideas of the French revolutionists who aimed at an ideal state
of freedom, and you find that the institutions and doings of the Ro-
mans were their models ; and even now an historian might be named
who instances the corruptions of the Roman Republic as showing us
what popular government leads to. Yet the resemblance between the
institutions of the Romans and free institutions properly so called was
less than that between a shark and a porpoise — a resemblance of gen-
eral external form accompanying widely different internal structures.
For the Roman Government was that of a small oligarchy within a
larger oligarchy, the members of each being unchecked autocrats. A

438 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

society in which the only men who had political power, and were in a
qualified sense free, were so many petty despots, holding not only
slaves and dependents but even children in the same absolute bondage
as they held their cattle, is, in its intrinsic nature, more nearly allied
to an ordinary despotism than it is to a society of citizens politically
equal.

Passing now to our special question, we may understand the kind
of confusion in which Liberalism has lost itself, and the origin of
those mistaken classings of political measures which have misled it —
classings, as we shall see, by conspicuous external traits instead of
by internal natures. For what, in the popular apprehension and in
the apprehension of those who effected them, were the changes made
by Liberals in the past ? They were abolitions of grievances suffered
by the people, or by portions of them : this was the common trait of
them which most impressed itself on men's minds. They were miti-
gations of evils which had directly or indirectly been felt by large
classes of citizens, as causes of misery or as hindrances to happiness.
And since in the minds of most a rectified evil is equivalent to an
achieved good, these measures came to be thought of as so many posi-
tive benefits ; and the welfare of the many came to be conceived alike
by Liberal statesmen and Liberal voters as the aim of Liberalism.
Hence the confusion. The gaining of a popular good being the ex-
ternal conspicuous trait common to Liberal measures in earlier days
(then in each case gained by a relaxation of restraints), it has hap-
pened that popular good has come to be sought by Liberals, not as an
end to be indirectly gained by such relaxations, but as the end to be
directly gained. And, seeking to gain it directly, they have used meth-
ods intrinsically opposed to those originally used.

And now, having seen how this reversal of policy has arisen (or par-
tial reversal, I should say, for the recent Burials Act, and the efforts to
remove all remaining religious inequalities, show continuance of the
original policy in certain directions), let us proceed to contemplate the
extent to which it has been carried during recent times, and the still
greater extent to which the future will see it carried if current ideas
and feelings continue to predominate.

Before proceeding, it may be well to say that no reflections are
intended on the motives which have prompted one after another of
these various restraints and dictations. These motives were doubtless
in nearly all cases good. It must be admitted that the restrictions,
placed by an act of 1870 on the employment of women and children
in Turkey-red dye-works, were, in intention, no less philanthropic than
those of Edward VI, which prescribed the minimum time for which a
journeyman should be retained. Without question, the Seed Supply
(Ireland) Act of 1880, which empowered guardians to buy seed for
poor tenants, and then to see it properly planted, was moved by a de-

THE NEW TORYISM. 439

sire for public welfare no less great than that which in 1533 prescribed
the number of sheep a tenant might keep, or that of 1597, which com-
manded that decayed houses of husbandry should be rebuilt. Nobody
will dispute that the various measures of late years taken for restrict-
ing the sale of intoxicating liquors, have been taken as much with a
view to public morals as were the measures taken of old for checking
the evils of luxury, as, for instance, in the fourteenth century, when
diet as well as dress was restricted. Every one must see that the edicts
issued by Henry VIII, to prevent the lower classes from playing dice,
cards, bowls, etc., were not more prompted by desire for popular wel-
fare than were the acts passed of late to check gambling.

Further, it is no part of my present purpose to question the wisdom
of these modern interferences, which Conservatives and Liberals vie
with one another in multiplying, any more than the wisdom of those
ancient ones which they in many cases resemble. We will not here
consider whether the plans of late adopted for preserving the lives of
sailors are or are not more judicious than that sweeping Scotch measure
which, in the middle of the fifteenth century, prohibited vessels from
sailing during the winter. For the present, it shall remain an open
question whether there is a better warrant for giving the police pow-
ers to search certain provision-dealers' premises for unfit food than
there was for the law of Edward III, under which innkeepers at sea-
ports were sworn to search their guests to prevent the exportation of
money or plate. We will assume that there is no less wisdom in that
clause of the Canal-boat Act, which forbids an owner to gratuitously
board the children of the boatmen, than there was in the Spitalfields
Acts, which up to 1824, for the benefit of the aritsans, forbade the
manufacturers to fix their factories more than ten miles from the
Royal Exchange.

We exclude, then, these questions of philanthropic motive and wise
judgment, taking both of them for granted, and have here to con-
cern ourselves solely with the compulsory nature of the measures
which, for good or evil, as the case may be, have been put in force
during periods of Liberal ascendency.

To bring the illustrations within compass, let us commence with
1860, under the second administration of Lord Palmerston. In that
year, the restrictions of the Factory Act were extended to bleaching
and dyeing works ; authority was given to provide analysts to be paid
out of local rates ; there was an act providing for inspection of gas-
works, as well as for fixing quality and limits of price ; there was the
act which, in addition to further mine-inspection, made it penal to
employ boys under twelve unable to read and write ; and there were
further provisions for cheap locomotion on railways. In 1861 oc-
curred an extension of the compulsory provisions of the Factory Act
to lace-works ; power was given to poor-law guardians, etc., to enforce
vaccination ; local boards were authorized to make improvements in

44Q THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

private property, and charge to the owner ; and certain locally-formed
bodies had given them power of taxing the locality for rural drainage
and irrigation works, and for supplying water to cattle. In 1862 an
act was passed for restricting the employment of women and children
in open-air bleaching, and an act for making illegal a coal-mine with
a single shaft, or with shafts separated by less than a specified space.
In 1863 came the extension of compulsory vaccination to Scotland,
and also to Ireland ; there came the empowering of certain boards to
take from rate-payers money to employ and pay those out of work ;
there came the empowering of town authorities to take possession of
neglected ornamental spaces, and rate the inhabitants for their sup-
port ; and there came the Bakehouses Regulation Act, wThich, besides
specifying minimum age of employes occupied between certain hours,
prescribed periodical lime-washing, three coats of paint when painted,
and washing with hot water and soap at least once in six months.
Of compulsory legislation dating from 1864, may be named an exten-
sion of the Factory Act to various additional trades, including regula-
tions for cleansing and ventilation, and specifying of certain employes
in match-works that they might not take meals on the premises except
in the wood-cutting places. Also there were passed the Chimney-
sweepers Act, the act for further regulating public-house closing, the
act for compulsory testing of cables and anchors, and the Contagious
Diseases Act, which last gave the police, in specified places, powers
which, in respect of certain classes of women, abolished sundry of
those safeguards to individual freedom established in past times. The
year 1865 witnessed further provision for the reception and temporary
relief of wanderers at the cost of rate-payers ; and another public-house
closing act containing sixty-four amendments. Then, under the min-
istry of Lord John Russell, in 1866, have to be named an act to
regulate cattle-sheds, etc., in Scotland, giving local authorities power
to inspect sanitary condition, and fix number of cattle ; an act forcing
hop-growers to label their bags with the year and place of growth, and
the true weight, and giving police power of inspection ; an act to
facilitate the building of lodging-houses in Ireland, and providing for
regulation of the inmates ; a Public Health Act, under which there is
registration of lodging-houses and limitation of occupants, wTith in-
spection and directions for lime-washing, etc. ; and a Public Libraries
Act, giving local powers by which a majority can tax a minority for
their books.

Passing now to the legislation under the first ministry of Mr. Glad-
stone, we have, in 1870, the establishment of state-telegraphy, with
the accompanying interdict on telegraphing by any other agency ; we
have inspection, not only of endowed schools but of registered private
schools, and dismissal, without appeal, of teachers and officials not ap-
proved ; we have a law authorizing the Board of Public Works to give
compensation for landlord's improvements ; we have the act which

THE NEW TORYISM. 441

enables the Education Department to provide school-boards, purchase
sites for schools, provide free schools supported by local rates, and
enabling school-boards to pay a child's fees, to compel parents to send
their children, etc., etc. ; we have a further Factories and Workshops
Act, making, among other restrictions, some on the employment of
women and children in fruit-preserving and fish-curing works. In
1871 we meet with an amended Merchant Shipping Act, directing
officers of the Board of Trade to record the draught of sea-going ves-
sels leaving port ; there is another Factory and Workshops Act, mak-
ing further restrictions ; there is a Peddlers' Act, inflicting penalties
for hawking without a certificate, and limiting the police-district with-
in which the certificate holds, as well as giving the police power to
6earch peddlers' packs ; and there are further measures for enforcing
vaccination. The year 1872 had, among other acts, one which makes
it illegal to take for hire more than one child to nurse, unless in a
house registered by authorities, who prescribe the number of infants
to be received ; it had a Licensing Act, interdicting sale of spirits to
those under sixteen ; and it had another Merchant Shipping Act, estab-
lishing an annual survey of passenger-vessels, as well as an interdict
against pilots who are not licensed. Then, in 1875, was passed the
Agricultural Children's Act, which made it illegal for a farmer to em-
ploy a child who has no certificate of elementary education ; and there
was passed a Merchant Shipping Act, requiring, on each vessel, a scale
showing draught, requiring examination of officers, and prescribing the
number of boats and life-preservers. Turn now to Liberal law-making
under the present ministry. We have, in 1880, a law which forbids
conditional advance-notes in payment of sailors' wages ; and also a law
which dictates certain arrangements for the safe carriage of grain-car-
goes. In 1881 comes legislation to prevent* trawling over clam-beds
and bait-beds, and an interdict making it impossible to buy a glass of
beer on Sunday in Wales. In 1882 corn-factors were required, under
a penalty of twenty pounds, to furnish for publication a weekly return
of their transactions ; municipal bodies were enabled to levy rates for
electric lighting ; further exactions from rate-payers were authorized
for facilitating more accessible baths and wash-houses ; and local au-
thorities were empowered to make by-laws for securing the decent
lodging of persons engaged in hop-picking, or picking fruit and vege-
tables. Then, finally, of such legislation during the last session may
be named the Cheap Trains Act, which, partly by taxing the nation to
the extent of £400,000 a year (in the shape of relinquished passenger
duty), and partly at the cost of railway-proprietors, still further cheap-
ens traveling for workmen : the Board of Trade, through the Railway
Commissioners, being empowered to insure sufficiently good and fre-
quent accommodation. Again, there is the act which, under penalty
of ten pounds for disobedience, forbids the payment of wages to work-
men at or within public-houses ; there is another Factory and Work-

442 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

shops Act, commanding inspection of white-lead works and bake-
houses, regulating times of employment in both, and prescribing in
detail some constructions for the last, which are to be kept in a con-
dition satisfactory to the inspectors.

But we are far from forming an adequate conception if we look
only at the compulsory legislation which has actually been established
of late years. We must look also at that which is advocated, and
which threatens to be far more sweeping in range and stringent in
character. We have lately had a cabinet minister, one of the most
advanced Liberals, so called, who pooh-poohs the plans of the late Gov-
ernment for improving industrial dwellings as so much " tinkering " ;
and contends for effectual coercion to be exercised over owners of
small houses, over land-owners, and over rate-payers. Here is another
cabinet minister who, addressing his constituents, speaks slightingly of
the doings of philanthropic societies and religious bodies to help the
poor, and (apparently ignoring the Poor Law) says that " the whole of
the people of this country ought to look upon this work as being their
own work " ; that is to say, some wholesale government measure is
called for. Here, again, is a radical member of Parliament, who leads
a large and powerful body, aiming, with annually-increasing promise
of success, to enforce sobriety by giving to local majorities power to
prevent freedom of exchange in respect of certain commodities. There
is a rising demand, too, that education shall be made gratis for all : the
payment of school-fees is beginning to be denounced as a wrong — the
state must take the whole burden. Moreover, it is proposed by many
that the state, regarded as an undoubtedly competent judge of what
constitutes good education for the poor, shall undertake also to pre-
scribe good education for the middle classes — shall stamp the children
of these, too, after a state pattern, concerning the goodness of which
they have no more doubt than the Chinese had when they fixed theirs.
Then there is the "endowment of research," of late energetically urged.
Already the Government gives every year the sum of many thousand
pounds for this purpose, to be distributed through the Royal Society ;
and, in the absence of those who have much interest in resisting, the
pressure of the interested, backed by those they easily persuade, may
by-and-by establish that paid " priesthood of science " long ago advo-
cated by Sir David Brewster. Once more, plausible proposals are made
that there should be organized a system of compulsory insurance, by
which men during their early lives shall be forced to provide for the
time when they will be incapacitated.

Nor docs enumeration of these further measures of coercive rule,
looming upon us near at hand or in the distance, complete the ac-
count. Nothing more than cursory allusion has yet been made to that
accompanying compulsion which takes the form of increased taxation,
general and local. Partly for defraying the costs of carrying out
those ever-multiplying coercive measures, each of which requires an

THE NEW TORYISM. 443

additional staff of officers, and partly to meet the outlay for new pub-
lic institutions, such as board-schools, free libraries, public museums,
baths and wash-houses, recreation-grounds, etc., local rates are year
after year increased, as the general taxation is increased by grants to
the departments of science and art, etc. Every one of these involves
further coercion — restricts still more the free action of the citizen.
For the implied address accompanying every additional exaction is :
" Hitherto you have been free to spend this portion of your earnings
in any way which pleased you ; hereafter you shall not so spend it,
but we will spend it for the general benefit." Thus, either directly
or indirectly, and in most cases both at once, the citizen is, at each
further stage in the growth of this compulsory legislation, deprived
in one or other way of some liberty which he previously had.

Such, then, are the doings of the party which claims the name of
Liberal, and which calls itself Liberal as being the advocate of ex-
tended freedom.

I doubt not that many a so-called Liberal will have read the pre-
ceding section with impatience, wanting, as he does, to point out an
immense oversight which he thinks destroys the validity of the argu-
ment. " You forget," he wishes to say, " the fundamental difference
between the power which, in the past, established those restraints that
Liberalism abolished, and the power which, in the present, establishes
the restraints you call anti-Liberal. You forget that the one was an
irresponsible power, while the other is a responsible power. You for-
get that, if by the recent legislation of Liberals people are variously
regulated, the body which regulates them is of their own creating,
and has their warrant for its acts."

My answer is, that I have not forgotten this difference, but am
prepared to contend that the difference is in large measure irrelevant
to the issue.

In the first place, the real issue is whether the lives of citizens are
more interfered with than they were ; not the nature of the agency
which interferes with them. Take a simpler case. A member of a
trades-union has joined others in establishing an organization of a
purely representative character. By it he is compelled to turn out
if a majority so decide ; he is forbidden to accept work save under
the conditions they dictate ; he is prevented from profiting by his
superior ability or energy to the extent he might do were it not for
their interdict. And he can not disobey without abandoning those
pecuniary benefits of the organization for which he has subscribed,
and bringing on himself the persecution, and perhaps violence, of his
fellows. Is he any the less coerced because the body coercing him
is one which he had an equal voice with the rest in forming ?

In the second place, if it be objected that the analogy is faulty,
since the governing body of a nation, to which, as protector of the

444 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

national life and interests, all must submit under penalty of social
disorganization, has a far higher authority over citizens than the gov-
ernment of any private organization can have over its members ; then
the reply is that, granting the difference, the answer made continues
valid. If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their
liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves ? If people by a ple-
biscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the
despotism was of their own making ? Are the coercive edicts issued
by him to be regarded as legitimate because they are the ultimate
outcome of their own votes ? As well might it be argued that the
savage who breaks a spear in another's presence that he may so be-
come bondsman to him, still retains his liberty because he freely chose
his master.

Finally, if any — not without marks of irritation, as I can imagine —
protest against this reasoning, and say that there is no true parallelism
between the relation of people to government where an irresponsible
single ruler has been permanently elected, and the relation where a
responsible representative body is maintained, and from time to time
re-elected, then there comes the ultimate reply — an altogether hetero-
dox reply — by which most will be greatly astonished. This reply is,
that these multitudinous restraining acts are not defensible on the
ground that they proceed from a popularly chosen body ; for that the
authority of a popularly chosen body is no more to be regarded' as an
unlimited authority than the authority of a monarch ; and that as true
Liberalism in the past disputed the assumption of a monarch's unlim-
ited authority, so true Liberalism in the present will dispute the as-
sumption of unlimited parliamentary authority. Of this, however,
more anon. Here I merely indicate it as an ultimate answer.

Meanwhile it suffices to point out that until recently, just as of old,
true Liberalism was shown by its acts to be moving toward the theory
of a limited parliamentary authority. All these abolitions of the re-
straints over religious beliefs and observances, over exchange and tran-
sit, over trade combinations and the traveling of artisans, over the
publication of opinions, theological or political, etc., etc., were tacit
recognitions of the propriety for limitation. In the same way that the
final abandonment of sumptuary laws, of laws forbidding this or that
kind of amusement, of laws dictating modes of farming, and many
others of like meddling nature, which took place in early days, was an
implied admission that the state ought not to interfere in such mat-
ters ; so were those removals of hindrances to individual activities of
one or other kind, which the Liberalism of the last generation effected,
practical confessions that in these directions, too, the sphere of govern-
mental action should be narrowed. And this recognition of the pro-
priety of narrowing governmental action was a preparation for nar-
rowing it in theory. One of the most familiar political truths is that,
in the course of social evolution, usage precedes law, and that, when

THE NEW TORYISM. 445

usage has become well established, it becomes law by receiving au-
thoritative recognition and defined form. Manifestly, then, Liberalism
in the past, by its practice of limitation, was preparing the way for the
principle of limitation.

But, returning from these more general considerations to the special
question, I emphasize the reply that the liberty which a citizen enjoys
is to be measured, not by the nature of the governmental machinery
he lives under, whether representative or other, but by the number
and degree of the restraints it imposes on him ; and that, whether this
machinery is or is not one which he has shared in making, its actions
are not of the kind proper to Liberalism if they increase such restraints
beyond those which are needful for preventing him from directly or
indirectly aggressing on his fellows — needful, that is, for maintaining
the liberties of his fellows against his invasions of them ; restraints
which are, therefore, to be distinguished as negatively coercive, not
positively coercive.

I doubt not, however, that the Liberal, and still more the sub-
species Radical, who more than any other in these latter days seems
under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is
warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able, will con-
tinue to protest. Knowing that his aim is popular benefit of some
kind, to be achieved in some way, and believing that the Tory is, con-
trariwise, prompted by class-interest and the desire to maintain class-
power, he will regard it as palpably absurd to group him as one of
the same genus — will scorn, as mere chop-logic, the reasoning used to
prove this.

Perhaps an analogy will help him to see its validity. If, away in
the far East, where personal government is the only form of govern-
ment known, he heard from the inhabitants the account of a struggle
by which they had deposed a cruel and vicious despot, and put in
his place one whose acts proved his desire for their welfare — if, after
listening to their self-gratulations, he told them that they had not es-
sentially changed the nature of their government, he would greatly
astonish them ; and probably he would have difficulty in making them
understand that the substitution of a benevolent despot for a malevo-
lent despot still left the government a despotism. Similarly with Tory-
ism as rightly conceived. Standing as it does for coercion by the
state versus the freedom of the individual, Toryism remains Toryism,
whether it extends this coercion for selfish or unselfish reasons. As
certainly as the despot remains a despot, whether his motives are good
or bad, so certainly does the Tory remain a Tory, whether he has
egoistic or altruistic motives for using state-power to restrict indi-
vidual liberty, beyond the degree required for maintaining the liber-
ties of other individuals. The altruistic Tory as well as the egoistic
Tory belongs to the genus Tory, though he forms a new species of the
genus. And both stand in distinct contrast with the Liberal as defined

446 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

in the days when Liberals were rightly so called, and when the defini-
tion was, " one who advocates greater freedom from restraint, espe-
cially in political institutions."

Thus, then, is justified the paradox I set out with. As we have
seen, Toryism and Liberalism originally emerged, the one from mili-
tancy, and the other from industrialism. The one stood for the regime
of status, and the other for the regime of contract — the one for that
system of compulsory co-operation which accompanies the legal ine-
quality of classes, and the other for that voluntary co-operation which
accompanies their legal equality ; and beyond all question the early
acts of the two parties were respectively for the maintenance of agen-
cies which effect this compulsory co-operation, and for the diminution
of them. Manifestly the implication is that, in so far as it has been
extending the system of compulsion, what is now called Liberalism is
a new form of Toryism.

How truly this is so, we shall see still more clearly on looking at
the facts the other side upward, which we will presently do.

-<>+*-

COLLEGE ATHLETICS.

By EUGENE L. EICHAEDS,

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF MATHEMATICS IN YALE COLLEGE.

I. ADVANTAGES.

YERY few persons will dissent from the proposition that stu-
dents should exercise their bodies. If called upon to state the
amount and kind of exercise needed, most people would be at a loss to
prescribe these particulars, and would content themselves with the
usual generalities about its being essential to health ; that it should be
so regulated as to be recreative, but not so excessive as to be exhaust-
ing. There are numbers of intelligent men who, even assenting to
these generalities, never wake to the real truth of them till a violated
law of nature inflicts its penalty in their own ill health. However, we
must assume that we shall have the assent of sensible people if we
start with two principles : first, that young men who study need exer-
cise ; and, second, that exercise, to be beneficial, should be regular and
systematic. If we can show that college athletics supply this need to
quite a large body of students, and supply it regularly and systemati-
cally, we may secure a patient consideration of their good effects long
enough to add a discussion of their accompanying evils. In this dis-
cussion we hope to prove that the evils have been exaggerated ; that
they are not so great as would be the evils of a college-life without a
system of athletics ; and, lastly, that such evils as do inhere in the
present system are capable of remedy.

COLLEGE ATHLETICS. 447

In order to give foundation and strength to our belief in the bene-
fits of physical exercise, let us consider what it does, and how really-
necessary it is. Though we admit the truth of all the wise sayings
with regard to a " sane mind in a sound body," we are yet too apt to re-
gard the sound body as a mere accident of inheritance or environment.
So we read the proposition as an hypothetical one, viz., " If the body is
sound, the mind will be sane." Few but physicians read it as indicat-
ing a connection between body and mind, by means of which we can
make, or help to make, a good healthy brain by making a good sound
body. In the fact that the brain always seems to direct the body, we
are prone to forget that the body carries the brain and feeds it with
its own life. If the body has good blood, the brain will have good
blood also. If the body does not furnish good material, the brain will
do, according to its capacity, poor work, or will not work at all. That
many men of weak bodies have done good brain-work in their day is
true, but many such men have been hindered from doing better work
by physical weakness. Moreover, can any man say that the work
done would not have been greater or better if the men doing it had
had better bodies ? After the body has attained maturity, most men
recognize the connection and sympathy between mind and body. Dur-
ing the time of growth, however, this interdependence is often taken
into small account.

There are two kinds of brain- work — one which we may very prop-
erly call body brain-work, and the other mind brain- work.* Most
people, including a great many educators of youth, consider mind
brain-work to be the only kind of brain-work. But body brain-work
is quite as essential to the healthy existence of the brain, and really
comes first in the order of brain-growth. The child, too young to
know anything except its bodily wants, and conscious of them only
when the denial of them causes pain, develops brain every time it
makes a will-directed effort to grasp the thing it wants. The move-
ment of its hand is as necessary to the development of its brain as the
guidance and government of the brain are to the growth of the hand.
What is true of the hand is true of the other bodily organs whose mo-
tion is under the control of the will. They and the brain are devel-
oped by reciprocal action. Interfere with this body brain-work in
childhood, or at any period of growth, either by repressing it or by
diverting from it too much vital energy to mind brain-work, such as
is involved in the acquisition of knowledge, and you not only stunt
the body, but also enfeeble the brain, by depriving both of their proper
growth. The worst feature of such interference, at such a time, is
that the evil then done can not be remedied, and the power lost to
body and brain can never be regained.

Care to guard against this interference is all the more necessary in
cases in which the brain is large or sensitive. Now, will any man say

* Dr. Clarke, " Building of a Brain."

448 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

that at the time of life when young men come to our American colleges,
when, in fact, all their bodily organs are approaching maturity, this
body brain-work ought to cease, or can, without danger, be neglected ?
Is it not most essential that at this very period the reciprocal action
between body and brain should be steadily maintained, in order that
both should be able to endure the strain put upon them by the various
stimulants of thought and feeling to be found in college-life ? The
great pressure brought to bear upon them is toward conscious cerebra-
tion. Acquisitions of knowledge, scholarships, the ambitious desires of
parents, and prizes, all incite them to neglect body brain-work, under
the mistaken impression that time given to that is time lost to the
other. Many a fine scholar has left college with great honors, to ex-
perience in his subsequent career the serious results of the mistake
made in college, and has discovered, often too late, that a vigorous
body to carry his brain is more essential to success in life than a
well-trained brain full of knowledge but lacking a strong body from
which to draw its nourishment and strength.

Again, exercise, to be beneficial, should be regular and systematic.
To be most beneficial it should be in the open air. The oxygena-
tion of the blood is not the least important effect of exercise. In con-
sequence of the reciprocal action of mind and body, to be as bene-
ficial as possible it should be accompanied by mental occupation. The
mind should be interested in the exercise while the body is engaged.
How shall all these requisites of the best kind of exercise be secured ?
First, a regularly set time for exercise ; next, a fixed amount of time
devoted to it ; then a place where the lungs should breathe fresh air ;
and, lastly, a kind of exercise which should engage the mind as well
as the body. By the present system of college athletics these requi-
sites are met, if not perfectly, at least as well as it is possible for them
to be met. If the millennium had come, and all men, and especially
young men, would do right, without any compulsion, and simply be-
cause it is the only thing to do, we might come to a settlement of these
important particulars of exercise for our students. The regularity of
the exercise, and the amount of time devoted to it, could easily be ar-
ranged. There could be no question as to the expediency of taking it
in the open air. But how secure the co-operation of the mind ? How
make bodily exercise interesting, so that a man will desire to take it
and will take it with gladness, not making a burden of it, and not
considering it as a duty merely ? That is the real problem to solve,
when we set ourselves to the task of prescribing the right kind of
exercise. Very few can be induced to exercise from a sense of duty.
The majority go without it till they suffer illness from the want of it,
and then prefer a doctor's remedies to Nature's. Here athletics accom-
plish the greatest good. They do furnish a mental stimulus. They
set up an object to be striven for, and an ideal of strength or skill.
The object is honor — honor of no great worth, perhaps, but still honor

COLLEGE ATHLETICS. 449

to the student-mind. In boating, the object is a victory over a crew
of a rival class or a rival college. In lacrosse, base-ball, and foot-ball,
besides working for the ultimate object of the championship, the mind
of the player has continual occupation in the game itself. To secure
a victory in any of these sports, good brains in the players contribute
quite as much as good muscles. In fact, it is the skilled muscles
rightly directed by good brains which win, and not the players most
skilled in the use of their muscles. Mind as well as body has to be
considered by the successful captains in the selection of their men.
Then there are minor considerations which keep students in steady
training, and help to induce more men to work than finally appear in
the great contests, such, for instance, as the ambition to secure an
office or position in one of the university organizations, and thus an
honorable standing as a college man. These various considerations
not only accompany the men into the field or at the oar, but also,
when they are prevented from taking out-door practice, send them
into the gynmasium to prepare for the later work.

The following brief account of the exercise taken by the students is
offered in ordar to insure a better understanding of the system of col-
lege athletic :

Almost as soon as the college opens in the fall, the various class
nines begin their games for the college championship. At the same time
the class crews, the foot-ball and lacrosse teams put their men into
training. This means regular exercise in the open air from four to six
weeks for about one hundred and forty men. Quite as many more are
benefited, some by actual participation in the games, in order to fur-
nish opponents to the teams in practice, and others by training for
the Athletic Association contests. After the class base-ball champion-
ship is decided, and the Athletic Association meetings have terminated,
fewer men exercise. The interest of the college then centers in the
Foot-ball Elevens, one selected from the whole university, and the
other from the freshman classes of the academic and scientific depart-
ments. To give these teams practice, all the college is urged to go to
the field and play against them ; and though, of course, the invitation
is not accepted as extensively as it is given, yet it does induce quite a
large number of men to exercise. But this is not the only good effect
of the existence of these teams. Catching the enthusiasm of the sport,
often the men of different dormitories and of different eating-clubs
send out teams for matches. The foot-ball season terminates at the
thanksgiving recess. The two or three weeks intervening between
this recess and the winter examinations see very little exercise taken
by the students, except by the few who regularly use the gymnasium.
Immediately on the opening of the winter term activity in athletics
manifests itself again. The captain of the University Crew, the cap^
tain of the University Base-ball Nine, the captains of the different
class crews, and the captain of the Freshman Base-ball Nine,, call
vol. xxiv. — 29

45o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

for men who wish to try for positions on these organizations. The
candidates are put into regular training in the gymnasium, while the
season prevents exercise out-of-doors. Nearly a hundred men come
forward, who are actually in training for at least one hour a day.
They are required to live rightly in all respects. Each man is bound
to avoid excesses of all kinds. The force of a public opinion created
by the sight of these men attending to their physical development,
and living according to laws and rules, acts upon the college world to
encourage regularity of life and obedience to authority. It is a moral
power in the community. As soon as the season permits, the men are
sent out-of-doors. The crews take their seats in the boats. The nines
take their positions in the field. The spring regatta terminates the
practice of the class crews, but, as that event occurs about three weeks
before the June examinations, and five weeks before the close of the
college year, it does not leave the young men a long time without ex-
ercise. The University, Consolidated, and Freshman Nines, the La-
crosse Team, and the University Crew (with sometimes a second eight),
continue their practice much longer, some of them stopping work
only after the close of the college year.

Now, it may be said that the writer has only shown that regular
exercise has been secured during a few weeks of the first term to one
hundred and forty men at the most, and during the whole winter term
to one hundred men ; and in the spring and summer to one hundred
men part of the term, and to half that number during the whole of
the term. Granted. But there are other organizations which induce
men to exercise. The Athletic Association has already been men-
tioned. This gives three exhibitions ; one during the winter or early
spring in the gymnasium, and two in the open air, one in the summer
and one in the fall. The Dunham Rowing Club has a membership of
forty-four men. Then there are canoe clubs, tennis clubs, and gun
clubs. It would be putting the estimate too low to say that at least
half of the undergraduate members of the academic and scientific de-
partments get quite a regular amount of systematic out-door exercise
from, or in consequence of, the present system of college athletics.
This activity, too, has been mainly the outgrowth of the attention
given to boating and to base-ball. They had the first regular organi-
zations, and the others have taken pattern from them. It is no argu-
ment against the system that all the members of the university do
not take advantage of it. The need of exercise is met, and oppor-
tunities for regular and systematic exercise are given, with induce-
ments to take it, which do act upon at least half of the membership of
the two departments most in need of it. The system might do more
good if time were set apart by the various Faculties for the purpose of
encouraging exercise, but in considering the system it must be borne
in mind that it has grown up in a continual struggle for existence ;
and, until within a few years, without either help from graduates or

COLLEGE ATHLETICS. 451

favor from the college authorities. But, in view of the good already
done by it as a voluntary system proceeding from the students them-
selves, no candid man can maintain that it should be put aside without
a fair consideration of its merits. In addition to those already men-
tioned, we claim for it the following advantages :

1. The college is sending out a better breed of men. College ath-
letics send their healthy influence into the schools, and in them conse-
quently increased attention is given to physical development. Thus
the material coming from the schools is improved. In college this
material is better preserved and better developed under the present
system of athletics. More well-trained minds in more forceful bodies
are graduated from college than in former years. What President
Eliot says on this subject is as applicable to Yale as to Harvard : " It
is agreed on all hands that the increased attention given to physical
exercise and athletic sports within the past twenty-five years has been,
on the whole, of great advantage to the university ; that the average
physique of the mass of students has been sensibly improved, the dis-
cipline of the college been made easier and more effective, the work
of many zealous students been done with greater safety, and the ideal
student been transformed from a stooping, weak, and sickly youth,
into one well-formed, robust, and healthy."

2. The system of college athletics gives opportunity for the devel-
opment of certain qualities of mind and character not all provided for
in the college curriculum, but qualities nevertheless quite as essential
to true success in life as ripe scholarship or literary culture. Courage,
resolution, and perseverance are required in all the men who excel in
athletic sports. The faculty for organization, executive power, the
qualities which enable men to control and lead other men, and again
those other qualities by which men yield faithful obedience to recog-
nized authority, are all called into action in every boat-race, in every
ball contest, and through all the preliminary training. In athletics
the college world is a little republic of young men with authority for
government delegated to presidents, captains, and commodores, and
loyally supported by the resources and bodies of the governed. Is the
system not worth something as a means of preparation for the respon-
sibilities of life in the larger republic outside the campus ?

3. The system is conducive to the good order of the college. It
conduces to good order in furnishing occupation for the physically ac-
tive. There are men in every class who seem to require some outlet for
their superabundant animal life. Before the day of athletics, such men
supplied the class bullies in fights between town and gown, and were
busy at night in gate-stealing and in other pranks now gone out of
fashion. A number of them were dissipated men, and had to diversify
the monotony of their class-room life by a spree and a row. Many such
men, under the present system, find occupation for all this activity in
regular training. A man who goes into training can not go on sprees,

452 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

and must economize and systematize his time in order to both study
and train. Having steadied their nerves by hard work of the muscles,
many such men settle down to study and often make fair scholars.
Any instructor who has kept track of the ways of college during
the past fifteen years can not fail to be struck by the decreasing
number of the really great disorders, by the mildness of those which
remain, and by the increasing regard on the part of the students
for college authority, college property, and for the rights of fellow-
students.

The system is conducive to the good order of the college, because
it furnishes a healthy, interesting topic of conversation out of study-
hours. Dr. McCosh has been reported to be alarmed by the very ab-
sorbing nature of this topic of conversation. The reporter makes him
say, " When one walks across the campus, the conversation he over-
hears bears no relation to the science and knowledge which we come
here to pursue, but it is this game and that game, this record and that
record." Does the gentleman suppose that, if there were no athletics,
members of the college who meet one another on the campus would
fall into conversation on the absorbing questions of science and knowl-
edge ? The college world is like the world in general, in that its in-
habitants, when off duty, find their recreation in talking of other sub-
jects than those of regular business. The campus is the place where
the students discuss other themes than those of the class-room, for the
reason that they come together on the campus for diversion. They
rightly regard the study and the lecture-room as the places in which
the themes of knowledge and science are properly considered. It is
not to be expected, neither would it be wise nor desirable, that young
men should spend all their time in thinking and talking of their stud-
ies. Since they must have something else for their leisure hours, it is
well for them to have some such healthy topics of conversation as the
athletic sports furnish. They naturally seek some excitement with
which to vary the monotony of recitations and lectures. Their manly
contests supply this want, and prevent many a man from looking to
dissipation and disorder as reliefs from the daily drudgery of the study
and the class-room.

Again, the system conduces to good order in its effects upon class-
feeling. It acts upon this class-feeling in two ways : first, in the con-
tests between class organizations furnishing a safety-valve for it ; and,
second, in the university organizations tending to moderate it. The
esprit de corps of a class is not bad in itself. It often furnishes
a motive to combined action which can be made powerful for good.
In the contests between the class organizations, and in all the athletic
exhibitions of the college, there are legitimate opportunities for the
free play and development of this feeling. But it is possible for
it to become excessive, so that a class, as a body, may have a danger-
ous feeling of actual enmity to another class. It is this excessive

COLLEGE ATHLETICS. 453

class - feeling which is the active power in the disorders between
classes. It is at this point that the influence of the university organiza-
tions acts as a check. Since these organizations are composed of men
of all classes, it is impossible for all college to be enthusiastic for its
crew, team, or nine, without a common sympathy binding all the classes
together. Moreover, it is observable that the time of the year when the
athletic contests are not absorbing the attention of the college is the
very time when the disorders between classes and the persecutions of
freshmen are most prevalent. Besides, the captains of the university
organizations command their men to keep out of disorders, because
they know that they might lose their services if these men came under
the discipline of the college authorities. The writer has seen the cap-
tain of the University Foot-ball Eleven personally restraining his men
from participation in a " rush." Formerly it was the strong men who
incited and took the chief part in disorders. Now all their interests
and all their efforts are against them.

4. The system furnishes to instructors an opportunity of meeting
their pupils as men interested in a common good, without the chilling
reserve of the recitation-room. It does not require a great effort to
be a spectator of their contests. An interest in the contestants is a
very natural result of witnessing their struggles. The college officer
who gives a little of his time even to the boys' play soon finds his
sympathies widen, and, by learning from actual observation how young
men feel and think, becomes able to deal more wisely with those under
his charge, from a fuller knowledge of them.

5. The power of the athletic contests to awaken enthusiasm ought
not to be held of small account. The tendency of academic life is
toward dry intellectualism. However desirable such a tendency may
be for those who are training to be investigators, there can be no ques-
tion that it is lamentable for a young man to begin life without
enthusiasm. It is not too much to say that in many a student, while
passing from freshman to the end of senior year, this spirit would
die for lack of culture were it not for athletics. There is training for
it in every contest witnessed. These contests affect graduates as
well as undergraduates, and go far toward accounting for the warm
interest which the alumni of all of the larger colleges feel in their
Alma Mater.

6. The system of athletics, by its intercollegiate contests, brings
the students into a wider world. They are no longer " home-keeping
youths," "with homely wits." They measure themselves by other
standards than those they find in the limits of their own campus.

In the next paper the writer proposes to discuss the accompanying
evils of the present system of college athletics, and to present some
statistics bearing upon the general subject.

454 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

THE EEMEDIES OF NATUEE.

By FELIX L. OSWALD, M. D.
NERVOUS MALADIES.

HYGIENIC pathology, or the plan of curing the disorders of the
human organism by the aid of the remedial agencies of Nature,
is founded on the fact that disease is not only a wholly abnormal con-
dition, but that, within the years allotted to the individuals of our
species, there is a strong healthward tendency in the constitution of
the human system, which tendency does not fail to assert itself as soon
as the predisposing cause of the disorder has been removed. In the
treatment of consumption and scrofula, the principles of this theory
have been generally recognized ; but I believe that their application to
the nervous diseases {asthenia, neurosis, chlorosis, hysteria, nervous
debility) is destined to effect a still greater reform in the present sys-
tem of therapeutics.

The study of biology is largely a study of hereditary influences.
In the form and structure, in all the peculiar life-habits of each or-
ganic being, we can trace the outcome of ancestral transmissions, and,
as a general rule, the persistence of such peculiarities corresponds to
the length of time during which the influence of their causes was
impressed upon the character of the species. The period of artificial
civilization, even if considered as coeval with the era of recorded his-
tory, is but a moment compared with the ages during which man-like
creatures, the ancestors of our domestic animals and the prototypes of
our cultivated plants, existed in the warmer zones of our planet. After
six thousand years of cultivation on parched hill-sides, the vine is still
by preference a tree-shade plant. After many thousand generations
of cats have been fed and petted in daytime and neglected after dark,
puss is still a night-prowler. Barn-yard fowl have still a predilection
for thorny jungles, and in the plains of Russia the descendants of the
mountain-goat climb wood-piles and cottage-roofs. In the constitution
of all organic beings there is a tendency to revert to the original life-
habits of the species. Biologists have long recognized the significance
of that law, but its hygienic importance has hardly begun to be under-
stood. For it implies not less than this : That the vital functions of
every living being are performed more easily and more vigorously
under the conditions to which the constitution of its organism was
originally adapted. A swamp-boa may subsist for years in a dry
board cage ; eagles have been chained to a post for a quarter of a cen-
tury, and lost the gloss of their feathers, their vigor, their courage,
though not their lives. No drugs would cure the ailments of such
captives ; but restore them to their native haunts, and see how fast

TEE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 455

they will regain their native vigor ! Their infirmities could not have
been traced to any single cause, but were due to the combined influ-
ence of numerous unnatural conditions.

A similar combination of abnormal circumstances causes thousands
of the perplexing complaints known as nervous diseases — nervous de-
bility, languor, want of vital vigor. The introduction of narcotic
drinks is no sufficient explanation for the present increase of such dis-
orders. Prince Piickler-Muskau describes an iron-fisted Arab chieftain
of Southern Tunis who, in his eightieth year, could manipulate a bow
that would have nonplused the champions of our archery clubs, who
undertook an expedition that kept him in the saddle for three days
and two nights, and who could abstain from food for the same length
of time, but always traveled with a skinful of moist coffee-paste,
which he sucked and chewed like tobacco. West China mountaineers,
able to contest the prize of any weight-lifting match or wrestling-bout,
and of otherwise most abstemious habits, can not subsist without a daily
dose of the national beverage. No sensible person would maintain
that such people owe their vigor to their narcotic tipples ; no patholo-
gist would deny that it deprives them of part of their strength, but
that its use alone could cause the premature decrepitude of millions of
Indo-Germanic invalids would be an equally untenable assertion. It
is merely an additional factor in the multitude of unnatural habits
that make up the misery of our modern modes of life.

That our primogenitors passed their days among trees is one of
the few points on which Moses and Darwin agree ; whether four
handers or frugivorous two-handers, they certainly were forest-creat-
ures, and breathed an air saturated with elements of which the atmos-
phere of our tenement barracks is more devoid than the briny breeze
of the ocean. Our lungs suffer for it ; but not our lungs alone. Be-
sides being the best pulmonary pabulum, oxygen is a nerve-tonic ; a
forester, a hunter, a Swiss shepherd-boy, in a state of tubercular con-
sumption, would be less exceptional phenomena than in a state of nerv-
ous fretfulness. A constitutional kind of good-humor sweetens the
hardships of the overtaxed peasantry of Southern Europe, as its ab-
sence certainly aggravates the misery of our factory-slaves. And it
would be a mistake to suppose that only summer air can exercise this
nerve-soothing influence. Let a chlorotic girl take a sleigh-ride on a
cold, clear winter day, or through a snow-storm ; let her skate ; give
her a chance to get an hour's out-door exercise even on drizzly or
frosty days. The north wind may white-freeze her ear-tips, but it will
restore the color of her cheeks, it will restore her appetite, her energy,
and her buoyant spirits. Those whom necessity compels to limit their
out-door rambles to the half-mile between home and shop, should let
the night make up for the shortcomings of the day, and sleep — in dry
weather, at least — in the draught of a wide-open window. Only a first
experiment of that sort will necessitate the addition of a night-cap to

456 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

one's bedclothing ; and even nervous ladies will resist the temptation
to cover up their faces, if they find how soon the wonted morning
languor gives way to the influence of Nature's restorative. Those
who dislike to risk the discomfort of initiation before ascertaining the
value of the remedy can make another test-experiment : After a sum-
mer excursion, when fatigue and early rising enable anybody to sleep
soundly in an open tent, the first few nights after returning home will
be a favorable time for defying the night air superstition and sleep-
ing, perhaps with slight qualms of the old prejudice, but without the
least bodily discomfort, on a balcony or in an open hall, with open
windows on all sides. After a week, transfer the couch to the old air-
tight bedroom, and note the result : All the next forenoon a queer feel-
ing of discomfort, as after a prolonged exposure to the fumes of a
smoky kitchen, will illustrate the difference between natural and un-
natural modes of life. To persons who have thus emancipated them-
selves frcm the delusions of the night-air dread, the atmosphere of a
close bedroom is oppressive enough to spoil the night's rest and bring
on a relapse of many of the distressing concomitants of nervous in-
somnia. A slight elevation of the window-sash will remedy the evil,
and we might expatiate upon the correlation between the nerve-centers
and the respiratory apparatus of the human body, but the plain ulti-
mate reason is that the organism has been restored to an essential ele-
ment of its original existence.

Jacob Engel has a story of a splenetic student who composed his
own funeral dirge, with a lugubrious list of the sorrows from which he
anticipated demise would liberate his soul. On discovering the lyric,
his father ordered him to excavate a gravel-bank for a family vault,
as none of his relatives could be expected to survive his untimely
fate. The prescription proved a success, and a few weeks later Herac-
litus Junior was caught writing sonnets to the hired girl. Want of
exercise is, indeed, a most fruitful cause of nervous maladies. Our
Darwinian relatives, creatures so similar to us in the structure of every
muscle, every joint and sinew of their bodies, are the most 'restless
habitants of the woods. " It makes one dizzy to watch the evolutions
of the long-armed gibbons," Victor Jacquemont writes from the Ner-
budda ; " the first one I saw made me think that he was suffering
from an acute attack of St. Vitus's fits, but I have found out that it
is a chronic disease. They keep moving while the sun is in sight."
Savages alternate their wigwam holiday with periods of prodigious
exertion, and an occasional mountain tour would atone for a good
many days of city life, but hardly for weeks of sedentary occupation.
Without at least one hour per day of active out-door exercise, no na-
tive strength of constitution can resist the morbific influences of stag-
nant humors. Of the immortal soul's dependence upon the conditions
of the body there are few stranger illustrations than the psychic influ-
ence of narcotic drugs. A mere indigestion can temporarily meta-

THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 457

morphose the character of the patient, and all manner of symptoms
ascribed to "heart-disease," aneurism, intestinal parasites, spinal or
cerebral affections, are often simply due to depraved humors and their
reaction on the nervous system. By increasing the action of the circu-
latory system, physical exercise promotes the elimination of such humors,
with their whole train of morbid consequences — chlorosis, tantrums,
troubled dreams, and the nervous affections j:>roper ; restlessness and
want of vital energy. What amounts of " tonic " nostrums — keeping
their promise of restoring the vigor of the system by producing a fever-
energy — would be thrown in the gutter, if the patient could be per-
suaded to try the receipt of Jacob Engel ! " When I reflect on the
immunity of hard-working people from the effects of wrong and
over feeding," says Dr. Boerhaave, "I can not help thinking that most
of our fashionable diseases might be cured mechanically instead of
chemically, by climbing a bitterwood-tree, or chopping it down, if
you like, rather than swallowing a decoction of its disgusting leaves."
For male patients, gardening, in all its branches, is about as fashiona-
ble as the said diseases, and no liberal man would shrink from the ex-
pense of a board fence, if it would induce his drug-poisoned wife to
try her hand at turf -spading, or, as a last resort, at hoeing, or even a
bit of wheelbarrow- work. Lawn-tennis will not answer the occasion.
There is no need of going to extremes and exhausting the little re-
maining strength of the patient, but without a certain amount of
fatigue the specific fails to operate, and experience will show that
labor with a practical purpose — gardening, boat-rowing, or amateur
carpentering — enables people to beguile themselves into a far greater
amount of hard work than the drill-master of a gymnasium could get
them to undergo. Besides the potential energy that turns hardships
into play-work, athletes have the further advantage of a greater dis-
ease-resisting capacity. Their constitution does not yield to every
trifling accident ; their nerves can stand the wear and tear of ordinary
excitements ; a little change in the weather does not disturb their sleep ;
they can digest more than other people. Any kind of exercise that
tends to strengthen — not a special set cf muscles, but the muscular
system in general — has a proportionate influence on the general vigor
of the nervous organism, and thereby on its pathological power of re-
sistance.

For nervous children my first prescription would be — the open
woods and a merry playmate ; for the chlorotic affections of their
elder comrades — some diverting, but withal fatiguing, form of man-
ual labor. In the minds of too many parents there is a vague notion
that rough work brutalizes the character. The truth is, that it regu-
lates its defects : it calms the temper, it affords an outlet to things
that would otherwise vent themselves in fretfulness and ugly passions.
Most school-teachers know that city children are more fidgety, more
irritable and mischievous than their village comrades ; and the most

458 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

placid females of the genus homo are found among the well-fed but
hard-working housewives of German Pennsylvania.

That hard work in the factory does not lead to the same result is
due to the contrast between fresh and foul air ; but also to the differ-
ence between sunshine and artificial twilight. Light is a chief source
of vital energy, and every deduction from the proper share of that
natural stimulus of the organic process is sure to tell upon the well-
being of every living organism. See the difference between the vege-
tation of the south side and the north side of the same mountain-range,
the gradations in the stunted appearance of hot-house plants, house-
plants, and cellar-plants, the achromatism and strange deformities of
animals inhabiting the waters of underground rivers. The direct rays
of the sun seem to exercise many of the effects which the manufactur-
ers of " electric brushes " ascribe to the use of their contrivances. In
ancient Rome special sun-bathing houses were used as a specific for a
form of asthenia, which was then more frequent than premature de-
bility— the infirmity of extreme old age. In winter-time white-haired
invalids, stripped to the waist, basked for hours under the glass-roof
of a solarium which excluded the chill winds, but admitted the light
from all sides, and the same remedy would prove even more effective
in the treatment of chlorosis — properly a twilight-disease, and due to
the same causes that rob a cellar-plant of its color and vigor. A board
fence may fail to remove the fear of peeping Toms, but on sequestered
mountain-meadows, warmed by a July sun, or better yet on the beach
of a lonely sea-shore, the patient may while away an hour in the cos-
tume of the Nereids ; or, after the manner of the sensible Brazilians,
children may at safe hours be permitted to turn a leafy garden into
paradise. Persons of highly limited means can utilize the elevation of
their garrets, and use a half-screened window-corner as a solarium,
for hours together. The expectation of disastrous consequences will
be as surely disappointed as the dread of the night air. " Colds " are
not taken in that way. The hairy coat which may, or may not, have
covered the bodies of our prehistoric forefathers, did not interfere with
the beneficial action of the solar rays, and it is not the least among the
disadvantages of our artificial modes of life, that this benefit is now
limited to one tenth, or, in the case of a muffled- up lady of fashion, to
one per cent, of the cutaneous surface.

The diet should be sparing, but not to the degree of being astrin-
gent, for chronic constipation and nervousness are almost invariable
concomitants. There are many appetizing vegetable articles of diet
of which a liberal quantum can be eaten without exceeding the needs
of the organism ; but here, more than elsewhere, it is of paramount
importance to remember the chief rule of the peptic catechism : not
to eat till we have leisure to digest. Vertigo, myopsis (visions of
floating specks clouding the eye-sight), palpitation of the heart, and
the indescribable irritations and discomforts of the sufferers from

THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 459

nervous disorders, can frequently be traced to the influence of after-
dinner work — work, perhaps, requiring severe mental application,
though the brain aches for rest — while about a million of American
school-teachers and counting-house drudges still aggravate their
misery by the use of tonic bitters in the United States, and of ginger-
drops and chile, Colorado in South America. Narcotic drinks are an
equally fruitful source of nervous affections, and tea, the chief culprit,
is too often mistaken for a liberator. A cup of " good, strong tea "
relieves a nervous headache in exactly the same manner that medi-
cated whiskey relieves the distress of a torpid liver, and the fact that
the abnormal excitement is regularly followed by a depressing reaction
would not undeceive the victim of the stimulant-delusion, if the repe-
tition of the stimulation-process were not sure to impair the efficacy
of the tonic, unless the dose is steadily increased. Only after that in-
crease has in vain been carried to an alarming extent, the patient is
apt to look for a less delusive remedy. And yet the sudden discon-
tinuance of a long-wonted tonic will at first aggravate the distress to
a degree that would overtax the endurance of most persons, and the
trials of the transition period should therefore be mitigated by the in-
fluence of some healthy stimulus — the diversion of a journey, or of
an exciting and very pleasant occupation. Indigestible made dishes
should also be carefully avoided, and the gratitude of suffering thou-
sands— both nurses and patients — awaits the philanthropist who shall
give us a treatise on the art of preparing an appetizing dinner without
the use of the frying-pan. Nervous people are extremely fastidious,
especially in the choice of their solid food, and doubly so after the
interdict of their favorite liquids, yet a single plateful of fried and
spiced viands may bring on a relapse of the unhappiest symptoms,
with the attendant mental affections of the poor followers of Epicurus
who " would be perfect gentlemen if it were not for their tantrums."
Spleen is a disorder of the nerves, rather than of the brain, and a
large complexus of nerve-organs is situated in the close proximity of
the stomach. The eel-stews of Mohammed II kept the whole empire
in a state of nervous excitement, and one of the meat-pies which King
Philip failed to digest caused the revolt of the Netherlands. If hired
girls had a vote in the matter, ladies of a certain temper would be re-
stricted to a diet of attractive vegetables.

Everything that tends to exhaust the vital resources of the body
disposes it to nervous disorders. Sexual excesses, therefore, contribute
a large share to the debilitating influences of civilized life. Hysterical
affections may sometimes result from the unsatisfied cravings of the
sexual passion, but chiefly because the suppression of that instinct
often leads to its perversion. There is such a thing as mental incon-
tinence ; the writings of hysterical nuns, for instance, abound with
erotic effusions. And, while spinsters and widows are often strong-
minded to an unsexing degree, the most pitifully nervous women are

460 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

found among the wives of the wretches who consider a marriage-con-
tract a license for illimited venery. For girls of a chlorotic disposi-
tion, a prurient literature does what sewer-gas would do for a con-
sumptive— though idleness will find other means to supply the want
of dime-novels. In such cases, out-door work is worth all the medi-
cines of the drug-market.

A quiet country home is the best refuge from the sufferings of that
dreary form of nervous disorders that result from the reaction of deep
mental wounds — disappointed hope, reverses of fortune, or the loss of
a favorite child. Seasons make no difference ; the very hardships of
rustic life often act as a balm in such afflictions. After the death of
his only son, Goethe sought solace among the pines of the Thuringian
forest, like Shenstone in his Ainsford solitude, and Petrarch in his
hermitage of Vaucluse. " A sick man," says old Burton, " sits upon
a green bank, and, when the dog-star parcheth the plains and dries
up the rivers, he lies in a shady bower, fronde sub arborea ferventia
tempered astra, and feeds his eyes with a variety of objects, herbs,
trees, to comfort his misery — or takes a boat on a pleasant evening,
and rows upon the waters, which Plutarch so much applauds, iElian
admires, upon the river Pineus — in those Thessalian fields, beset with
green bays, where birds so sweetly sing that passengers, enchanted, as
it were, with their heavenly music, omnium laborum et curarum obli-
viscantur, forget forthwith all labors, care, and grief." Especially if
the passenger can be persuaded to row his own boat, and to dismiss
the delusion that the night-mists of his Pineus have to be counter-
acted with a bottle of alcoholic bitters.

In the homes of the poor, nervous afflictions are sometimes the re-
sult of insufficient sleep. After a sleepless night, the attempt to en-
gage in labor of an exacting kind will lead to a fever of fidgets and
nervous twitchings, and the same consequences may result from the
habit of rising every morning before Nature admits that the gain of
the night has quite equalized the expenses of the foregoing day. But
it is a true saying that we are not nourished by what we eat, but by
what we digest, and that an indigestible meal is as bad as a fast-day.
Nervous people should remember that unquiet slee]) is not much bet-
ter than sleeplessness, and that the blessing of a good night's rest can
be enjoyed only in a well-ventilated bedroom. With the largest pos-
sible supply of fresh air by day and by night, with sunshine, out-door
exercise, and healthy food, the most obstinate nervous disorders can
be gradually overcome ; the impediments yield, till the river of life
flows with an unobstructed current : the body has been restored to
the conditions of existence for which its organism was originally
adapted.

DANGEROUS KEROSENE AND ITS DETECTION. 461

DANGEEOUS KEROSENE AND THE METHODS FOE

ITS DETECTION.

By Dr. JOHN T. STODDAED,

PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY IN SMITH COLLEGE.

KEROSENE, in virtue of its cheapness and the brilliant light it
gives, has found its way into almost every house. And yet fre-
quent and often horrible accidents prove that much of the oil now
sold is of a most dangerous character. It is the recognized duty of
the State to render the sale of such oil impossible by proper inspec-
tion. Almost daily reports of loss of property and life, as the result
of the use of unsafe kerosene, show, however, that this official control
fails to effect its object. This may be due, in a measure, to the un-
doubted negligence of cities and towns to appoint competent inspect-
ors— if, indeed, any appointment is made — or to the carelessness of
the inspectors ; but of greater importance even than this are the low
standards adopted, and the unreliability of the tests which are used to
determine the character of the oil.

It is the object of this paper to consider the conditions of safety
in an oil used for illuminating and heating purposes, and to give a
brief sketch of the principal methods which have been proposed for
determining this important point.

Petroleum, from which kerosene is prepared, is, as is generally
known, a mixture of a large number of intimately related compounds of
widely differing volatility. Some are gaseous, and escape in this form
as the petroleum issues from the ground, while others form the solid
paraffine. The middle portions of the crude oil are separated from the
more and less volatile compounds by distillation, and after a further
process of purification go into the market as kerosene. The entire
removal of the lighter and more volatile portions, which are known as
naphtha and benzine, is of the utmost importance, for it is in their pres-
ence that the danger lies. Alone, they are easily ignited, and alone
or mixed even in small proportion with kerosene, they readily emit
vapors which are inflammable and which with air form an explosive
mixture.

An oil is safe only when it will not yield these dangerous vapors
at any temperature which it is liable to assume. This temperature
depends obviously (1) upon that of the place where the oil is kept
or used, and (2) upon the influence of the heat of the burning wick in
warming the oil in the reservoir of the lamp. As the result of care-
fully conducted experiments with lamps of different patterns, it has
been found* that the maximum increase of temperature of the oil

* " Zeitschrift fur anal. Chem.," xxi, 332.

462 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

in a burning lamp is some 16° Fahr. (9° C). Before the lamp is
lighted the oil in it will in most cases have the temperature of the
air about it. Our rooms in summer often have a temperature of 90°
Fahr., and reach 100° Fahr. in a few exceptional days, while in win-
ter the oil assumes even a higher temperature than this when the lamp
is placed — as it often is — near a stove or an open fire.

Hence, it is plain that the lowest temperature at which an oil may-
evolve inflammable vapors and be considered safe must be put at 116°
Fahr., or better still at 120° Fahr.

What, now, are the means for determining the temperature at
which these vapors appear, and thus for deciding upon the safety or
danger of an oil ? It seems at first thought a simple and certain mat-
ter. Put a little oil in a cup and suspend a thermometer in it ; warm
it slowly, and, as the temperature rises from degree to degree, pass a
lighted match just above its surface. Presently the match will cause
a tiny explosion. This indicates that the dangerous vapors are ap-
pearing, and the thermometer now gives the so-called flashing-point
of this oil. Go on heating and testing as before, and at last the oil
will take fire and continue burning by itself. The mercury is now at
the burning-point. But repeat the experiment with fresh samples of
the same oil, and you will find that a trifling variation in the conditions
will alter the flashing-point to a wonderful extent. The quantity of
oil used for the test, the rate of heating, and the range of temperature
through which the oil is heated, the distance above the surface at which
the match passes — each and all have a marked influence on the deter-
mination.

The burning-point — ov fire-test, as it is often misleadingly called —
is of little value ; for not only does it always lie above the flashing-
point — which is the real danger-point — but it bears no simple relation
to the latter, so that its determination gives really no clew to the tem-
perature at which the oil becomes unsafe.

The unreliability of this simple method of testing and the im-
portance of the problem have called forth numerous suggestions for
improvement. Within the last fifteen years no fewer than twenty-five
different instruments have been proposed, presenting as many more or
less widely modified forms of the simple cup-tester indicated above.
The most essential variations are (1) in the size and form of the oil-
holder or cup, which in some apparatus is open, in others partly or
wholly closed ; (2) in the dimensions of the water-bath — which is in-
variably employed in all as the best means for communicating a slow
and uniform increase of temperature to the oil ; (3) in the means used
for igniting the vapor — a burning match, waxed thread, small gas-jet,
electric spark, or little oil-lamp standing on the cover of the oil-cup
being the chief devices for this purpose.

But, notwithstanding all the ingenuity displayed, and the elaborate
and costly apparatus to which it has in some instances given birth, we

DANGEROUS KEROSENE AND ITS DETECTION. 463

find Engler and Haass,* at the close of a careful investigation into the
reliability of petroleum-testers, in which all the more promising meth-
ods were laboriously examined and compared, laying down these gen-
eral principles, which are to be observed in the construction and use
of this class of testers :

1. The quantity of oil must be the same in all experiments. — In
the Saybolt tester, for instance, which was adopted in 1879 by the
New York Produce Exchange (chiefly, however, for the purpose of
determining the burning-point), variations of one millimetre, or about
one twenty-fifth of an inch, in the height of the oil, cause differences
of some degrees in the flashing-point.

2. The oil must be heated slowly and uniformly.

3. The temperature of the oil at the beginning of the test must be
at least 18° Fahr. (10° C.) below its flashing-point (which is approxi-
mately determined by a preliminary test). Hence, a low-grade oil,
which flashes not far from the air temperature, must be cooled down
before an accurate determination can be made.

4. The size and intensity of the flame or spark used to produce the
flash must remain unchanged in all tests. Increase in size or intensity
lowers the flashing-point.

5. The distance of the flash-flame or spark from the surface of the
oil must be the same in all tests. The flashing-point is lowered by
decreasing this distance. Care must be taken that this distance is not
so small that a local evolution of vapor from the surface occurs.

6. The time during which the flame or spark acts must be reduced
to a minimum, increase in the time causing a sensible lowering of the
flashing-point.

7. On account of the practical purpose for which the tests are
made, the conditions under which the vapor is formed in the tester
should correspond as closely as possible to those which determine its
formation and explosion in lamps, etc.

Comment upon methods which depend for trustworthy results
upon such a formidable array of conditions is hardly necessary ; the
best apparatus must be electrical and costly, and even then unreliable
except in the hands of an expert. We are not surprised to find Mr.
A. H. Elliott, in his report of a similar investigation ordered by the
New York State Board of Health, giving as his general conclusion :
" Of all the apparatus examined, not one can be called perfectly
satisfactory. ... Of the electric testers it may be stated, that any
advantage obtained from the use of electricity is more than over-
come by the trouble necessary to maintain the galvanic battery and
induction-coil." But, even if the performance of some of these in-
struments is such as to yield concordant results, when all the precau-
tions are carefully heeded, these results can have only a relative sig-
nificance, and agreement of different testers can only be secured by

* "Zeitschrift fur anal. Chem.," xx, 1.

464

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

selecting one with its manipulation as an arbitrary standard, and adopt-
ing conditions in the others which shall give corresponding results.
Nor can it be affirmed that all the conditions under which explosions
in lamps are liable to occur are provided for in any single instrument

Fia. 1. — The Satbolt Tester.

of this class. The oil-reservoirs of our lamps differ much in size and
shape, and hence have different capacities. Moreover, the quantity of
oil, its surface, and the amount of air in the reservoir with which the
vapor mingles, are constantly changing while the lamp is in use and
the danger greatest. Again, it is not alone in quietly burning lamps
that accidents occur. Probably half are due to upsetting or breaking,
and the oil, which would have been safe otherwise, gives rise to ex-
plosion or flames under these more dangerous circumstances.

If it is important to test the oil, it certainly is wise to employ, if
possible, a test which shall indicate the lowest temperature at which,
under any conditions, inflammable vapors can be evolved, and not to
trust to a method which merely proves an oil safe under certain arbi-
trary conditions.

Besides these instruments which aim at a direct determination of
the temperature at which an oil becomes dangerous, others have been
proposed in which the character of the oil is tested in an indirect
manner, by finding the elastic force or tension of its vapor at a given
temperature. The tension is measured by the height of the column
of water which it sustains. By comparing the tension which any oil
gives in this apparatus with that of some kerosene which has been se-
lected as a standard, the quality of the former is ascertained — a higher
tension indicating a more dangerous oil. It is plain that the reliabil-

DANGEROUS KEROSENE AND ITS DETECTION. 465

ity of this method depends upon the assumption that a definite re-
lation exists between vapor-tension and flashing - point in all kero-
senes. It has, however, been shown in the most conclusive manner,
that this is not the case.* Four different oils, which all had a flash-
ing-point of 28*5° to 29*5° C, as determined by one of the most
trustworthy of the testers before described, were found to give, at
28° C, vapor-tensions of 75, 104, 118, and 168 millimetres (of water) ;
and, at 40° C, tensions of 126, 149, 165, and 201 millimetres. Fur-
ther, seven different kerosenes gave, when tested by the two meth-
ods, the following results :

OIL.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Flashing-point. . . .
Tension at 35° C. .

25° C.

95mm.

26° C.

160mm.

26° C.
201mm.

28° C.
73mm.

30° C.
45mm.

44° C.
13mm.

48° C.
5mm.

It thus appears that the results obtained by the measurement of the
vapor-tension are quite worthless as indications of the dangerous char-
acter of kerosene, and the method must be regarded as far less reliable
than even the imperfect ways of testing which have been already dis-
cussed.

The uncertainties of the foregoing methods are entirely avoided
by a distillation test, which also enables one to decide the quality of
the oil as an illuminating material, and thus gives the fullest informa-
tion in regard to its nature.f The oil is separated by the distillation
into three fractions : a light oil distilling below 150° C. ; illuminating
oil coming over between 150° and 270° C. ; and a heavy oil which
boils above 270° C. The first fractional distillate represents the dan-
gerous constituents, and should not exceed, according to Bielstein, five
per cent of the whole. The heavy oil affects the freedom with which
the kerosene burns in a lamp, and, in American kerosene, should not
form more than fifteen per cent of the oil. The operation must be
conducted with care, in a flask provided with a dephlegmator, and the
fractions, as well as the original sample, must be weighed. These cir-
cumstances are likely to prevent the general adoption of a method
which is otherwise so simple and satisfactory, and kerosene will prob-
ably be tested in the future, as now, by the determination of its flash-
ing-point.

In 1879 Victor Meyer J suggested a principle by which the mini-
mum, or, as he called it, " true or absolute " flashing-point, could be de-
termined. It is to saturate air tcith oil-vapor at the test-temperature.
His method is simply this : A glass cylinder of about 200 c. c. capacity
is partly filled with oil, stoppered with a cork through which a ther-

* Englcr and Haass, loc. cit. f " Zeitschrift fur anal. Chem.," xxii, 313.

\ Wagner's " Jahresbericht," 1879, 1175.
vol. xxiv. — 30

466

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

mometer passes, and heated by plunging into warm water ; when the
temperature is reached at which the test is to be made, the cylinder is
briskly shaken, the stopper removed, and a small flame introduced.
Flashing-points obtained by this plan are considerably lower than
those given by the methods which have been discussed, and are found,
moreover, to be largely independent of the conditions so essential to
success in the latter.

Haass * has described an elaborate and clever apparatus based on
the same principle, and differing essentially from Meyer's only in the
substitution of an electric spark, at a fixed distance from the surface
of the oil, for the flame which the latter employed. In both of these
methods the flashing-point depends upon the time allowed between the
shaking and testing, Haass recommending an interval of one minute
after the bubbles have disappeared from the surface of the oil, in
order to permit the suspended oil-particles to settle. The shaking,
which must be repeated from degree to degree, is a troublesome feat-
ure of these methods, and, though Meyer's apparatus is certainly sim-
ple and inexpensive enough, that of Haass is difficult of construction,
electrical, and costly. The general principle of these methods is, how-
ever, without question the correct one for obtaining a minimum (and
approximately " absolute ") flashing-point, and it is to L. Liebermann f
that we owe the suggestion of an ingenious and successful plan for

Fig. 2.— Liebermann's Tester.

avoiding the difficulties mentioned above. In Liebermann's method
the saturation of air with vapor is accomplished by forcing an air-
current through the oil as it is warmed from degree to degree ; and
the test made by bringing a small flame to the mouth of the oil-holder
at the same instant.

It has, however, been shown that the intermittent current of air
which is recommended gives somewhat irregular results, and that more
concordant flashing-points are obtained by letting a continuous current

* "Chem. Industrie," 1880, 123, and " Zeitschrift fur anal. Chem.," xx, 29.
f " Zeitschrift fur anal. Chem.," xxi, 321.

DANGEROUS KEROSENE AND ITS DETECTION. 467

run through the oil for at least one minute before the flash occurs. It
may perhaps seem, at first thought, that a continuous current of air
would dilute the vapor to such an extent that the flashing-point must
be materially raised, and that this effect must be more marked as the
velocity of the current is increased. This is, however, not the case.
On the contrary, while a slow, continuous current raises the flashing-
point appreciably, a sufficiently rapid one gives nearly the same results
as the intermittent method ; nor does any further increase in the ve-
locity alter the flashing-point to a sensible extent. It has indeed been
found that a large dilution of kerosene-vapor with air is necessary to
furnish the conditions for the most violent explosion ; and these con-
ditions are also those for the readiest flash by this method of testing.
The most explosive mixture, according to Chandler, is formed by nine
parts of air to one of vapor. The passage of a large quantity of air
through the oil tends, of course, to make the flashing-point higher, by
carrying away with it the more volatile portions which determine the
flash, and this effect is greater when the quantity of oil is small and the
air-current long continued. It is, consequently, necessary in the em-
ployment of this method to know the minimum quantity of oil and the
maximum duration of air-current which will permit concordant results.
These limits have been ascertained in a recent investigation,* the
results or which are given a little further on.

A tester of still simpler construction than that of Liebermann has also
been proposed. f It consists, as shown in the cut, of a glass cylinder,
closed at one end by a cork, through which
a small bent tube, d, c, b, passes. Just with-
in the cork the end of this tube contracts to
a small orifice. The other end of the tube
connects with a small bellows, or other source
of slightly compressed air, the flow of which
can be regulated by the pinch-cock e.

Experiments made with cylinders of dif-
ferent dimensions have shown that the best
results are obtained when the diameter is
between 2*5 and 4 c. m. The length (if only
great enough to allow at least the minimum
quantity of oil to be used) makes no differ-
ence. Cylinders of the same diameter but
of different lengths, when filled with oil to
within the same distance from the top, all give the same flashing-point.
Change in length in such cases is simply equivalent to change in the
quantity of oil employed in the test, and it has been proved that the
quantity of oil does not affect the determination when it is above a cer-
tain minimum.

* " American Chemical Journal," vi, No 1.
f Ibid , iv, No. 4, 285, and " Ber. d. Deutschen chem. Gesell.," xv, 2555.

FIG. 3.

468 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY,

The distance of the oil, or rather of the foam into which the sur-
face is broken by the air-current, from the top of the cylinder, how-
ever, makes a considerable difference in the results — the flashing-point
falling as this distance is decreased, until at about 5 to 6 c. m. it
reaches a minimum.

These considerations lead to the following statements and direc-
tions for the use of this method :

1. The oil-cylinder should have a diameter of 2*5 to 4 c. m. It
may be of any convenient length, provided it holds, when filled, for
the test not less than 50 c. c. of oil. With a diameter of 25 c. m.,
the length should be at least 16 c. m. ; with a diameter of 3 cm.,
the least length should be 13 c. m. A good tester may be made
from the chimney of a student-lamp, by cutting off the lower part,
a little above the contraction. (Glass is easily cut by filing a deep
notch at one point, and letting a little gas-flame play slowly back
and forth across it in the line of the proposed section, until a crack
springs quite through the glass ; this crack can then be led in any
desired direction by keeping the little flame just ahead of it on the
glass.) The whole chimney may also serve as an oil-cylinder by
corking the large end. The irregularity of shape at the bottom does
not affect the results ; but the length makes it rather inconvenient by
requiring a correspondingly deep water-bath.

2. The cylinder is filled with oil to a point such that, when the
air-current is running, the top of the foam is 4 or 6 c. m. below the
mouth.

3. The oil is heated by means of a water-bath, into which the
cylinder is plunged to the level of the oil. The temperature of the
oil should not rise faster than two degrees a minute.

4. Air is forced through the oil with such velocity that about (and
not less than) 1 c. m. foam is maintained on the surface, and a flash-
jet brought to the mouth of the cylinder every half degree, or oftener
in the vicinity of the flashing-point. The approach of the flashing-
point is announced by the appearance of a faint blue halo of burning
vapor around the flash-jet ; this finally detaches itself and runs down
to the surface of the oil, and the reading of the thermometer at this
instant gives a trial flashing-point, which may be a little too high if
the air-current has been running too long, or not long enough.

The test is now repeated with a fresh sample of the oil, and the
air-current started in full strength not less than one nor more than
three or four minutes before the flash occurs. It is a good plan, how-
ever, to let a very slow current of air bubble through the oil from the
time that the tester is put in the water-bath, so as to secure regularity
in the heating of the oil.

A very good flash-jet is a little gas-flame from the tip of a blow-
pipe, or glass tube drawn out to a point.

The advantages of this method are :

THE MORALITY OF HAPPINESS. 469

1. Simplicity of apparatus. It can be made in a few moments by
any one who can bend a glass tube.

2. Simplicity of manipulation. A manufacturer, asked to try it,
obtained concordant and accurate results at the first trial.

3. Trustworthiness of the results, which are independent of arbitrary
conditions, and have a significance wholly wanting in methods based
upon other principles. The flashing-point determined is the lowest.

The lowest flashing-point for illuminating oils in New York is
fixed by law at 100° Fahr., and this is as determined by a modification
of the Wisconsin tester, an instrument which demands all the precau-
tions so emphatically given by Engler and Haass. In Massachusetts,
method and flashing-point are apparently both left to the wisdom and
discretion of the inspector.

And yet we have seen that 116° Fahr. is the very lowest flashing-
point consistent with safety, and this should mean the minimum flash-
ing-point determined by some fully reliable method. We must not
be misled in this matter by the statement that our best kerosenes are
" 150° or 160° test " oils ; for this has reference, not to the flashing-
point, but to the fire-test, or burning-point, which, as has already been
shown, gives little indication of the character of an oil. The best oils
soldi flash at about 109° Fahr., while the cheaper grades have much
lower flashing-points — at least as low as 85° Fahr.

We need not be surprised, then, at the numerous accidents ; they
will not diminish until a much more efficient and intelligent system of
inspection is enforced than now. We are far too much inclined to
take our risk, even in the midst of constant warnings ; we leave our
kerosene to the ignorant and careless handling of our servants ; we
buy, perhaps, a cheaper grade from motives of economy, only to find
that the oil in which we thoughtlessly trusted has occasioned loss of
property, horrible suffering, or even death.

As long as unsafe kerosene is offered for sale, we may be sure
purchasers will be found. The only safe way is to banish the dan-
gerous stuff from the market.

-4~»~*-

THE MOKALITY OF HAPPINESS.

By THOMAS FOSTER.
IV. EIGHT AND WRONG.

IN its scientific aspect, then, as indicated by processes of evolution,
conduct is good in proportion as it tends to increase the quantity
and the fullness of life, bad in proportion as it exerts a contrary influ-
ence. Conduct may tend to increase life in its fullness directly or
indirectly, proximately or remotely ; and again conduct may in one

470 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

aspect increase, while in another aspect it may diminish, the fullness
and quantity of life : but our definition of good and bad conduct is
not affected by such considerations. Just as a knife may be a good
knife for cutting bread, and a bad knife for cutting wood, just as a
business transaction may be good in relation to some immediate pur-
pose, yet bad when remoter effects are considered, so can we truly
apply to conduct the terms good and bad in reference to one set of
considerations, even though we may have to invert the terms when
conduct is considered in reference to another set of considerations.
But always, in its scientific aspect, conduct is to be regarded as good
where it increases life or the fullness of life, and bad where it tends
the contrary way.

"When we separate conduct ethically indifferent from conduct in
its strict ethical aspect, it is convenient to substitute for the words
good and bad the words right and wrong. But the change is slighter
than at first sight it appears. Indeed, the more carefully the question
of Tightness or wrongness — the question of duty — is considered, the
more thoroughly does the kind of conduct judged to be morally in-
different merge into that which we regard as praiseworthy or cen-
surable.

Taking first those parts of conduct which relate directly to the
quantity or to the fullness of individual life, we find that while the
terms good and bad are freely applied to them, and even the terms
right and wrong, they are, for the most part, regarded as morally
indifferent. When we say you ought to do this or to refrain from
that, the idea of duty is often not really present, so long as the act
in question relates to a man's own life or its fullness. Even when we
use words of praise or censure in relation to such acts, they do not
imply that a moral obligation has been discharged or neglected. The
reason doubtless is that, as a rule, men need little encouragement to
look after those parts of their conduct which affect themselves and
their own interests. For it may be observed that where it is likely
there may be want of due care or wisdom in such matters, there we
find distinct exceptions to the general rule just indicated. So far as
quantity and fullness of life are concerned, the man who crosses a
crowded thoroughfare carelessly, he who neglects his business, and he
who wears insufficient or unsuitable clothes in cold and wet weather,
act with as little propriety in their adjustments as is shown by the
man who steadily drinks intoxicating liquors. But while none preach
such duties as caution in street-crossing, prudence and energy in busi-
ness, and care about clothing, at least as duties morally obligatory,
quite a number of persons preach against steady and heavy drinking
as against a moral offense. The Bible, indeed, does not, though it has
many a word of advice against wine-bibbing ; yet even in the Bible
we find evidence of the early existence of total abstainers, and it is al-
together unlikely that those ancient Blue-Ribbonists omitted to recog-

THE MORALITY OF HAPPINESS. 471

nize sinfulness in all who did not share their views and follow their
practices. Here we find evidence of the law of moral philosophy that
a system of ethics, with recognition of moral rightness and wrongness,
only begins to be formed where the best conduct (so far as fullness
of life is concerned) runs the chance, for whatever reason, of being
neglected, and inferior conduct followed. In this case, the best con-
duct is apt to be neglected because the increased fullness of life to
which it conduces is more remote than the temporary increase of life
fullness to which inferior conduct tends.

Yet, speaking generally, it may be said that, as Mr. Herbert Spencer
puts it : "The ethical judgments we pass on self -regarding acts are
ordinarily little emphasized ; partly because the promptings of the
self-regarding desires, generally strong enough, do not need moral
enforcement, and partly because the promptings of the other self-
regarding desires, less strong, and often overridden, do need moral
enforcement."

When we turn to the life-regarding actions of the second class,
those which relate to the rearing of offspring, we no longer find the
words good and bad, right and wrong, used with doubtful meaning.
Here the question of duty is clearly recognized. The conduct of par-
ents, who, by neglecting to provide for their children's wants in in-
fancy, diminish their chances of full and active life, or of life itself,
is called bad and wrong not solely or chiefly because it is not favor-
able to the increase of life, but as open to moral censure. In like
manner, men blame as really wrong, not merely unwise or ill-adjusted,
such conduct as tends to make the physical and mental training of
children imperfect or inadequate.

Still clearer, however, is the use of the words right and wrong as
applied to conduct by which men influence in various ways the lives
of their fellows. Here the adjustments suitable for increasing the full-
ness of individual life, or for fostering the lives of offspring (alike in
quantity and fullness), are often inconsistent with the corresponding
adjustments of others. The development by evolution of conduct
tending to the advancement of individual lives or lives of offspring
would of itself tend constantly to acts inconsistent with the well-being
or even with the existence of others, were it not for the development
(also brought about, as we have seen, by processes of evolution) of
conduct tending to the increase of the quantity and fullness of life
in the community. But there arises a constant conflict between tend-
encies to opposite lines of conduct. It is so essential for the welfare
of the community that tendencies to advance the life interests of self
and children should be in due subordination (which is not the same
thing, be it noticed, as complete subordination) to tendencies leading
to the furtherance of the fullness of life in others, that rules of con-
duct toward others than self or children have to be emphatic and per-
emptory in tone. Hence it is, as Mr. Spencer justly remarks, that the

472 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

words good and bad have come to be specially associated with acts
which (respectively) further the complete living of others and acts
which obstruct their complete living.

We approach now the heart of the matter. We have seen how
conduct has been evolved in the various races of living creatures, from
the lowest to man the highest. We have learned how closely related
are men's ideas of good and bad to that which is the chief end of all
conduct — the preservation and extension of life. And we have found
that while the conception of Tightness and wrongness is not very
marked in relation to conduct affecting self -life, it becomes clear and
obvious in relation to conduct affecting the life of offspring, and at-
tains its greatest definiteness and as it were emphasis in its application
to conduct affecting the lives of others. Where the rules determining
right and wrong in regard to the life of self, of offspring, and of oth-
ers, come into conflict, as they must until social relations become per-
fect, the right in regard to self mostly gives way to right in regard to
offspring, and both usually give way to right in regard to the rest of
humankind. But in Mr. Spencer's words (I quote them with empha-
sis, because he has been so preposterously and indeed wickedly charged
with teaching a very different doctrine) " the conduct called good rises
to the conduct conceived as best, when it fulfills all three classes of
ends at the same time."

But now the vital question of all comes before us.

We conceive as good or bad such conduct as conduces or the re-
verse to life and the fullness of life, in self and others. But is conduct
of the one kind really good or conduct of the other kind really bad ?
Though good or bad with reference to that particular end, and though
held to be right or wrong because that end is actually in view among
men, may not conduct be differently judged when the nature of that
end is considered ? In other words, the question comes before us, Is life
worth living ? We need not take either the optimist view, according
to which life is very good, or the pessimist view, according to which
it is very bad. But each one of us from his experience as regards his
own life, and from his observation (often most misleading, however)
on the lives of others, may be led to hold that on the whole life is
good, or that on the whole it is bad. Of course, in the very theory of
the evolution of conduct, or rather in the series of observed facts
demonstrating the evolution of conduct, we see that life and the full-
ness of life are fought for throughout nature as if they were good.
In the highest race the love of life in self, which assumes that the life
of others also is good, has attained its highest expression. " Every-
thing that a man has he will give for his life," is a rule established
rather than shaken by exceptions and the attention directed to such
exceptions. Yet the mere fact that life is fought for by all, and that
the struggle for life has been so potent a factor in the development of
life, does not in itself prove life to be an actual good. Death comes

THE MORALITY OF HAPPINESS. 473

not alone. To creatures full of life death comes in company with
pain and suffering. It may be these which move all living creatures to
struggle for life, and not mere fear of death.

Now, to the question, Is life worth living? it would be impos-
sible to give an answer that would suit all. Probably there have not
been two human beings since the world was made who, could they
express their precise opinion on this point, would give precisely the
same answer. Many whose whole lives have been full of sorrow and
trouble, who have had occasion many times to say that man was born
to sorrow, would yet, even taking survey of their own sad lives, say —
life is sweet. That many whose own lives have been bitter enough,
think yet that life is sweet, is shown by this, that among them have
been found those who have done most to foster the lives of others.
But many of them would say that life is sweet, speaking even from
their own experience of life. And on the other hand many who are
held by those around them to have had little sorrow, who from child-
hood to old age have scarce ever known pain or suffering, who have
had more than their fill of the pleasures of life, and have escaped the
usual share of life's afflictions, would speak of life as dull and dreary
if not bitter. It has been indeed from such men that the doubting
cry has come, Is life worth living ? Men of more varied experience
would give other answers to that vain question. All answers, indeed
must be as idle as the question itself. Yet most men would give the
answer which says most for the pleasantness of life — that, as a whole,
life is neither bitter nor sweet, neither sharp nor cloying, but that it
"has all the charm in bitter-sweetness found."

We are not concerned, however, to inquire what is the true answer
to the question, Is life worth living ? Though it is clear that if life is
not worth living the observed action of evolution has been unfortunate,
and the resulting laws of conduct are a mistake, while the reverse
must be held if on the whole life is well worth living, yet, so far as our
subject of inquiry is concerned, it matters not which view we take.
That which is common to both views is all we have to consider. The
man who holds that life is worth livinsr, so thinks because he believes
that the pleasures of life on the whole outweigh its pains and sorrows.
The man who holds that life is not worth living does so because he
thinks that the pains and sorrows of life outweigh its pleasures. So
much is true independently of all ideas as to what are the real pleas-
ures or the real pains of life, or whether life here is most to be con-
sidered or chiefly a future life with pleasures or pains far greater in
intensity and in duration than any known here.

"Where or what the chief pleasures or pains of life may be, when
or how long endured, in no sort affects the conclusion that life is to be
considered worth living or the reverse according as happiness outvies
misery or misery happiness, and that therefore the Tightness or wrong-
ness of conduct must be judged not by its direct action on life and the

474 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

fullness of life but by its indirect influence in increasing or diminishing
the totality of happiness. To quote again the words of the great teach-
er who is so often misquoted and so much misunderstood :

" There is no escape from the admission that in calling good the
conduct which subserves life, and bad the conduct which hinders or
destroys it, and in so implying that life is a blessing and not a curse,
we are inevitably asserting that conduct is good or bad according as
its total" effects are pleasurable or painful." — Knowledge,

♦•»•

THE AUEOEA BOEEALIS.

By M. ANTOINE De SAPOETA.

HOW can we describe, how can an artist paint, the aurora borealis ?
We of temperate climates are not strangers to the phenomena ;
we know something of the arcs and radiating streaks of various-colored
light which frequently adorn our northern skies ; and we are occasion-
ally permitted to witness exhibitions in which the whole heavens shine
with their marvelous glow. Yet travelers from the far North say that
we can have no conception of the wonderful splendor of the phenome-
na as witnessed within the Polar Circle, and that nothing but the
actual sight can convey an adequate idea of it.

The aurora borealis was well known to the ancients. The Greeks,
discovering graceful symbols in everything, thought it was the glory
of the Olympian gods holding council in a sky illuminated for the
occasion. The Romans, on the other hand, always looking for unlucky
omens, were in dread of it. Pliny, following Aristotle and Seneca,
speaks of celestial fires that tinged the sky with a blood-red, of beams
of light, of openings yawning in the starry vault, of fantastic lights
that changed night into day ; and he took care not to omit the politi-
cal events that accompanied such manifestations, without, however,
affirming that the phenomena were the cause of the catastrophes that
attended or followed them.

* I have ventured to emphasize this word (though the emphasis is not necessary for
the ordinarily attentive), simply because so many have either actually misunderstood Mr.
Spencer's saying here, or else have pretended to do so. The word emphasized makes the
saying not only true, but (as it was intended to be) obviously true. Mr. Spencer is here
purposely stating a truism, or what ought to be a truism. No matter what a man's doc-
trine in religious matters may be, no matter what his views as to a future state, the say-
ing above quoted is absolutely true. It is true in small matters as well as in great. By
overlooking the word " total," or by treating the saying as though for the word " total "
the word " immediate " might honestly be substituted, the saying expresses what Carlyle
contemptuously called pig-philosophy; but Spencer's actual saying is about as remote
from pig-philosophy as any teaching well could be. It inculcates a philosophy more truly
regardful of self than the sheerest egoism, more justly and beneficently regardful of others
than the purest altruism.

THE AURORA BOREALIS. 475

At troubled seasoDS in antiquity and the middle ages, in times of
war, famine, or epidemic, the only sentiment the aurora excited was
that of fear, and the people thought they could see in the sky rivers
of blood, armies clashing, and infantry and cavalry engaging in mys-
terious combats. Now, except among a few superstitious or unin-
formed persons, the phenomena are witnessed with simple curiosity
by some, with indifference by others.

A thousand years after Gregory of Tours, who gave the meteor
the name it now bears, Gassendi first examined it with a scientific
eye, and definitively baptized it on the 12th of September, 1621. The
terms " polar light " and " northern light," which have been proposed
by various physicists, have never prevailed ; the bishop and the phi-
losopher have triumphed. From the beginning of the eighteenth cen-
tury, observations became more numerous, and theories and scientific
discussions began to appear. The subject even tempted the poets. To
say nothing of the Abbe Delille, an Italian Jesuit, Father Noceti, sung
the aurora in Latin verse. Frazier, in 1712, first witnessed a southern
aurora.

It is affirmed that the aurora was not common in Scandinavia
and Holland previous to about 1716, after which it began to appear
more frequently. Whether this be so or not, the attention of several
Swedish, Dutch, and French investigators was fixed upon it. Celsius,
the designer of the centigrade thermometer, remarked the curious dis-
tractions to which compass-needles were occasionally subject, without
visible cause ; studying the perturbations more closely, he had no diffi-
culty in assuring himself (1741) that they coincided with the appear-
ance of the aurora borealis. Hjorter, another Swede, made the same
observation at about the same time.

The question whether auroras are of cosmic origin, or whether they
proceed from purely terrestrial influences, which still provokes dis-
cussion, has from the beginning divided the learned into two parties.
Mairan maintained the extra-terrestrial character of the meteor, while
the contrary opinion found a supporter in Musschenbroek, the inventor
of the Leyden-jar.

Musschenbroek, still evidently under the influence of old middle-
age prejudices, gave out the following hypothesis : Near both poles,
and at a little distance beneath the surface of the globe, are immense
reservoirs of phosphorescent matter. Whenever a fissure is formed
reaching to them, the substances, readily volatile, escape and illumi-
nate the atmosphere with their glow. The frequency of auroras in
particular years was explained by supposing a subterranean cavern to
have been opened. When the pocket was exhausted, the phenomenon
would of course be at an end for some time. So, after the exhaustion
of the provisions of phosphorescent stuff accumulated in a particular
region, the meteors would necessarily cease to show themselves, not to
appear again till after a long time, during which the matter would ac-

476 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY,

cumulate again. It was thought that years of dry weather were years
of maxima of auroras, and it seemed natural to suppose that moisture
would hinder exhalations. Extensive efforts were made, without suc-
cess, by studying the properties of the recently discovered phospho-
rescent substances, to determine the nature of the stuff that thus shone
in space. Previous to this, an explanation of the phenomenon had
been suggested by supposing a fermentation of gross exhalations from
the earth's surface which were driven toward the pole and there
took fire.

Quite different from this was Mairan's theory ; and the reading of
his book, " Traite physique et historique de l'aurore boreale " (" A
Physical and Historical Treatise on the Aurora Borealis "), which ap-
peared in 1733, is still indispensable, after a hundred and fifty years,
to any person wishing to study the meteor to-day. Rejecting the
ideas outlined above, and another curious hypothesis, that the rays of
the sun were reflected from the polar ice, and sent back to the observer
from the concave surface of the upper strata of the atmosphere, he
had recourse to the zodiacal light which had been observed by Cassini
some fifty years before. While some explained this phenomenon by
supposing a ring of light concentric with the sun, and surrounding it
without touching it, others, and Mairan among the number, considered
it a prolongation of the solar atmosphere, accumulated chiefly in the
plane of the ecliptic or of the solar equator, and extending beyond the
orbit of Venus. Emanations from the sun, or rather the corona that
surrounds it, according to Mairan, strike our atmosphere and illumi-
nate our globe. Then, must we suppose that the zodiacal light shines
of itself ? That is not necessary, says Mairan. A chemical combina-
tion, an essentially luminous precipitate, results from the mixture that
takes place in the upper regions of the atmosphere.* This supposition
is hazardous, and Mairan seems to be a little too fast. It is, however,
indisputable that then, as now, auroras were more frequent in March
and September, or the months when the zodiacal light is brightest.
It is also worthy of remark that Angstrom, in 1867, and Respighi,
in 1872, found in the spectrum of the zodiacal light a green ray
identical with a line of the same color characteristic of the aurora
borealis.

Mairan found a redoubtable antagonist in the celebrated mathe-
matician Euler, who did not admit the hypothesis of an immense solar
atmosphere, and believed only in the existence of a ring. He invented,
in explanation of the meteor, a somewhat obscure theory, according to
which the subtile and rarefied portions of the air were driven away
from the surface of the globe, and the particles, having become lumi-

* Mairan observes that, the centrifugal force being less toward the poles than at
the equator, the parts of the globe at the tropics will repel the foreign matter, and it will
accumulate toward the high latitudes. Hence there will be few auroras except in the
frigid and temperate zones ; and this is the case.

THE AURORA BOREALIS. 477

nous (he does not say how), gave rise, at some distance from the earth,
to the phenomena of the aurora.*

A large library would hardly be sufficient to hold all the memoirs
and notices that have been published during the past sixty years on
the subject of the aurora borealis, to say nothing of the numerous trea-
tises on physics, meteorology, and astronomy which have devoted one
or more chapters to it. Some authors have limited themselves to the
simple description of what they have perceived, or to a mere exposi-
tion of their theories, while others have done more. Alexander von
Humboldt has drawn in his " Cosmos " an excellent outline of the
ideas which science entertained on the subject in his time ; and the
" Popular Astronomy " of Arago contains valuable details, well classi-
fied and arranged, on the same question.

About 1850, M. de La Rive, a Genevese physicist, endeavored to
found a definite theory of the aurora borealis, and with this view ar-
tificially reproduced the phenomenon with considerable success. A
prime point, which is still far removed from being fixed, is the approxi-
mate height of the meteor above the ground. Sometimes two ob-
servers, in the neighborhood of a thousand miles apart, will affirm that
they have seen the same aurora at the same time and under the same
aspect ; at other times, the phenomenon is visible only within a radius
of a few leagues. Mairan, basing his calculations on data that are not
without value, concluded an elevation of two or three hundred leagues ;
Bravais proposed one hundred and fifty kilometres as a mean value.
Other authors have supposed that the highest flashes soar to an eleva-
tion of eight hundred kilometres.

M. de La Hive has made a table of all former data, and represents
that the aurorae boreales, very low in reality, hardly pass beyond the
zone of clouds. They have been perceived (by Parry) projected on
the flanks of mountains. Contradictions of this view are also not want-
ing. In support of his opinion that the meteor is low in height, M. de
La Rive cites the well-established cases in which sounds have been
heard during the manifestations. Sometimes a sulphurous odor has
been perceived. The crackling occasioned sometimes by slow electric
discharges and the odor of electrified oxygen or ozone are quite analo-
gous. Explorers and aeronauts have pretended, according to M. de La
Rive, to have gone through the aurora or through the mist that gives
rise to it.

Arago had conceived the electric nature of the meteor, and assumed
to predict its appearance by consulting the compass. Other facts,
proving a connection between auroras and magnetic phenomena, are
abundant. Jessan, in 1878, sailing on the Venus, relates that during
a fine aurora all the compasses of the vessel were disordered, and they

* In this Euler made use of Newton's corpuscular theory of light, though he was an
adversary of it.

4;3 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

went out of their way.* Under similar circumstances, Matteucci ob-
served the iron of the Tuscan telegraphic apparatus to be so strongly
magnetized that the entire service between Florence and Pisa was
interrupted. In the United States, when the like conditions are pre-
vailing, the telegraphers work their instruments without the batteries.

The beautiful arcs of light which are observed in the polar regions
have their culminating point on the magnetic meridian, as the vertical
plane denned by the jjoints of a horizontal magnetic needle is called.
Bravais thought these arcs, or the circles of which they form part,
were concentric with the magnetic axis of the globe, or with the
straight line uniting the two magnetic poles and passing through
the center of the earth. The arcs, then, do not coincide "with the
geographical parallels, a fact which the earlier observers had already
perceived. The magnetic pole is, moreover, not immovable, but its
position may vary during a century several degrees in longitude or
latitude.

The aurorae boreales certainly appear to be connected with a par-
ticular condition of the atmosphere, and M. de La Rive finds in this a
confirmation of his theory. Nearly all the observers agree that cirro-
stratus clouds accompany or precede the phenomena, and are frequently
seen within the dark segment. Hardly less invariable is the simulta-
neous presence in the air of hosts of fine, transparent, microscopic
needles of ice, that favor the formation of lunar halos before the au-
rora itself breaks out. The essential points of M. de La Rive's theory
are that the earth is charged with negative fluid, and the same is the
case with the strata of air very near the soil. The upper regions of
the atmosphere are, on the other hand, positively electrified. This
double fact, the result of certain experiments, is not denied by any
one. The two electricities of opposite polarity, accumulated near the
tropics in enormous masses, are combined at the poles, where the air,
less moist, is a better conductor. The polar discharges produce inces-
sant calls of fluid, if we may use such an expression, and currents of
electricity are constantly departing from the equator toward the poles,
one kind traveling through the rarefied gases of the upper strata, and
the other kind through the ground. It is from the phenomenon of re-
composition, favored by the presence of infinitesimal vesicles of air, of
imperceptible snow-crystals, and of little icy needles, that proceeds the
meteor of which we are trying to present the history.

M. de La Rive satisfied himself of the sufficiency of his theory by
an experiment. Tubes were inserted opposite to each other into the
sides of a glass bottle. The air within the bottle was exhausted by
means of one of the tubes, while in the other one was fixed a rod of
iron projecting on the outside, and having its other end prolonged to

* Nevertheless, if the observer is within the circle formed by the aurora, its action on
the needle is almost nothing. This fact has been noticed more than once.

THE AURORA BOREALIS. 479

the middle of the bottle. The iron was covered with an insulating
material, except at the end, and over that was a copper ring, connected
with an electrical machine. The copper was then charged with posi-
tive electricity, and the iron, having been put in communication with
the soil, was negatively electrified by induction. The two electricities
combined in the rarefied atmosphere of the bottle, forming a luminous
sheaf, like that of the lights in the Geissler tubes ; but, when the iron
was magnetized, a corona or concentric aureole, whence radiated brill-
iant jets, was formed around its free end. As a little reflection will
show, the iron represented the earth and the terrestrial magnet ; the
copper, the upper strata of air ; and the free end of the magnetized
rod, the polar regions.

The fact mentioned by Mairan, that auroras are most frequently
seen during the equinoctial months, March and September, is easily
explained on M. de La Rive's theory. March corresponds with a
period of increasing heat in the tropical part of the northern hemi-
sphere, while September coincides with the time when fogs are con-
densed from vapors near the pole. In the one case, an excess of
electricity is developed ; in the other, a more ready combination of the
two fluids. Perhaps the supposed eleven-years period, corresponding
with the sun-spot period, may be explained in a similar way. There
may also be secular variations in the prevalence of the phenomenon,
but too little time has passed since careful observations have been
made for their law to be as yet apprehended.

In the last months of 1878, M. Nordenskjold, who was wintering
in Berhing Strait, remarked on clear nights, when the moonlight was
not too strong, the presence of a feebly luminous arc, with its crest
toward the north-northeast. Regular in form and curvature, this
arc rested on a segment of a circle which was itself limited by the
horizon, and covered about 90°, or a quarter of the horizon. Its
lower limit was quite clearly marked on the dark segment, probably
by contrast, but its outer outline was less distinct, and it was hard to
measure its thickness exactly ; but that was estimated at about five
degrees. The light of the arc was calm and uniform, without any
appearance of rays, but dull enough, as we have said, and displayed
nothing comparable to the draperies, the brilliant flashes, and the
streaks of the Scandinavian auroras. M. ISTordenskjold observed it from
day to day, taking notice of all the special features he could remark,
and came to the following conclusions : Above the surface of the
earth, at a distance of about four hundred kilometres, is situated a
permanent, or nearly permanent, luminous corona, which encircles the
entire globe without its direction coinciding with that of the parallels,
for its center does not correspond with the north pole, but with the
magnetic pole.

So our globe has, by this theory, a ring like Saturn's, but with
some differences. The ring of the latter planet is around its equator.

480 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Our ring, incomparably smaller, covers only a narrow zone of the polar
regions, the center of which is at a considerable distance from the
pole. The inhabitants of Saturn's equator — if there are any — look out
upon a ribbon very wide in the vertical but very narrow in the hori-
zontal direction. On the other hand, an observer in the high latitudes
of Asia or America stands in the presence of a corona of little thick-
ness, but relatively extensive ; that is, the development of our ring is
nearly parallel to the part of the terrestrial surface dominated by it,
and which it would overshadow if it were opaque.

To this theory the objection may be offered, that no one before
M. Nordenskjold has remarked the meteor in question, while many
should have done so if it is permanent. An observer standing near
the auroral pole should perceive a luminous circle completely envelop-
ing the horizon. M. Nordenskjold replies to this by saying that the
luminous arc is only a residuum of more brilliant and more complex
phenomena ; we can hardly hope to see it except in years when auro-
ras are weak, or years of minima, of which the year 1878-'79 was one.
Most commonly the accessory masks the principal, much in the same
way that we can not see the foundations of a house while the building
is standing. The light of the ring is so weak that not only the day
and the twilight, but simple moonlight makes it invisible. If the sky
is charged with frost, it will all disappear, and even the presence of
too much vapor in the air extinguishes it. The observer must, then,
be favored with dry and cold weather. If the temperature is above
the freezing-point, it is useless to look for the corona. The coasts of
Norway, moist with the breezes from the Gulf Stream, are badly situ-
ated to give views of it. Nearly all other regions where it could be
perceived are dismal solitudes. In the second place, a spectator situ-
ated near the auroral poles would see nothing, for the horizon would
hide the meteor from him in the same way that a Saturnian, who
never left the high polar regions of his planet, would not be aware of
the existence of his ring. Our observer, leaving the auroral pole, and
going toward the magnetic south, would finally distinguish in that
direction an arc gradually rising above the horizon. An entire circle
of considerable width is dominated — that is the word — by the corona,
which is then near the zenith ; but, although the meteor may be nearer
the ground at that point than anywhere else, it is not visible there, for
it is too thin to be seen, looking at it vertically. Outside of this latter
zone, another zone, concentric with it, enjoys the sight of the arc, now
situated obliquely in the direction of the magnetic north. Further
on, the arc, grazing the horizon, ceases to be visible ; some time be-
fore reaching this point, in fact, it is hidden by the mists that gather
in the horizon, as well as by the density of the atmosphere which the
visual rays have to traverse. M. Nordenskjold would not have been
able to see it if it had been only half as luminous.

The meteor is relatively stationary, but is not rigorously motionless.

THE AURORA BOREALIS. 481

Besides the slow variations of its radius and its thickness, besides the
oscillations which displace its center movements, the laws of which are
worth studying, the luminous arc rises, falls, and fades away for in-
tervals of some hours. Its light, generally uniform, is heightened by
" knots of light " that play from one end to the other. Sometimes a
second arc is formed parallel to the first ; according to M. Norden-
skjold, this is nearly always concentric with the usual arc and situated
in the same plane with it, but farther from the surface. Sometimes,
also, the two arcs amalgamate, and a vertically flattened aurora results.
Not rarely, supplementary arcs intervene, and frequently luminous
rays play between the two arcs and into the undefined exterior space.
If, now, we imagine the phenomena growing more complicated and
becoming irregular, with the arcs rising above the horizon and the
rays multiplying, shooting through the curves in such a way as to
illuminate the vacant space, and extending themselves out toward the
magnetic south in somewhat oblique directions, we have the common
aurora borealis passably explained. Within the projection of the
corona, toward the magnetic pole, is a zone where we may observe
the auroras in a southerly direction, and, still nearer to that pole, the
meteor only rarely illuminates the horizon. A few travelers, Dr.
Hayes, for example, noticed this fact some time ago. The zone
of no auroras embraces a circle having a radius of about eight de-
grees.

The labors of M. Lenstrom, in Lapland, are of particular interest,
because they constitute a direct and definite proof of the electrical
nature of the aurora borealis. They go further than those of M. de
La Rive, for the Swedish observer, instead of operating in his labora-
tory, has succeeded in reproducing the meteor itself in the open air,
and has compelled it to manifest itself, as Franklin forced the light-
ning to come down from the sky, so that he could examine it scien-
tifically. We must not forget, furthermore, that it is a very meri-
torious thing to work in a cold of twenty degrees below zero, with a
strong wind blowing and the frost all the time clogging the apparatus,
having to be constantly on the watch, and enjoying no better shelter
than a charcoal-burner's hut.

Not satisfied with provoking artificial auroras, the Finnish expe-
dition, of which M. Lenstrom was a part, has collected a number of
important data relative to the free manifestation of the phenomenon.
The observations were made at Sodankyla (lat. 67° N., long. 27° E.),
and Kultala (lat. 78° 30' N., long. 27° E.), Lapland, in November and
December, 1882. In the former place " the polar aurora appeared fre-
quently of a very great intensity, but did not exhibit much variation.
It generally began with a faint arc in the north, which shortly de-
veloped into an arc with rays and sometimes into draperies extending
from the east to the west, most frequently a little toward the north.
But little change of color took place ; nearly always a pale-yellow
vol. xxrv. — SI

482 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

tint, lightly washed with green, was shown. Although the meteor
was not visible continuously, there was often observed in the spectro-
scope, and even quite high above the horizon, the characteristic band of
the auroras without the eye perceiving any trace of their light. Since
this fact was remarked even when there was no snow, it could not be
attributed to reflected auroral flashes. Moreover, the observers not
rarely saw during the nights a light yellowish, diffuse, and phosphores-
cent light that illuminated the horizon and paled the stars. The effect
produced was compared to that of the moon half veiled by clouds. M.
Lenstrom and his associates attempted, on the 8th of December, 1882,
to measure the height of an auroral arc above the surface of the earth.
They divided themselves into two groups, and took with a theodolite the
angular distance from the crest of the arc to the horizon. The two sta-
tions were four and a half kilometres apart on the same magnetic me-
ridian, and correspondence was had during the observations by a tele-
graphic wire previously arranged for the purpose. They endeavored to
look in concert at the same point of the meteor, but, after reiterated es-
says, they recognized that any particular ray visible to one party could
not be seen by the other. The results of the views were irreconcilable,
for the angle obtained was greater for the southern post than for the
northern one, although the latter post was, a priori ', nearer to the me-
teor. M. Lenstrom concluded from this, as M. de La Rive had done,
that every observer sees his own aurora the same as every one sees his
own rainbow, and that the phenomenon is produced at the height of only
a few thousand metres. He also calls attention to the results obtained
in Greenland by the engineer Fritze, which lead, in certain cases at
least, to numbers twenty times as small. During the Swedish Polar
Expedition of 1868, faint flashes or phosphorescent lights were remarked
around the summits of the mountains. This fact, with which M. Len-
strom did not become acquainted till 1871, related as it was to some of
the descriptions given by other travelers, decided him to try to pro-
voke or facilitate the appearance of the meteor by artificial means.
The first attempts date from 1871, and, like those that followed them,
were made in Lapland. The enterprise being successful from the first,
the experiments were resumed' during the Finnish Polar Expedition
of 1882, and were renewed twice on two different peaks, called re-
spectively Oratunturi and Pietarintunturi. Oratunturi, rising more
than five hundred metres above the level of the sea, is situated in lati-
tude 67° 21', near the village of Sodankyla. Near the topmost height
of the mountain was placed a long copper wire, 60 bent upon itself as
to form a series of squares within squares, having a total surface of
nine hundred square metres, supported by insulated posts. Tin points
or nibs bristled out from this connecting net at distances of half a
metre apart, and the whole was connected by an insulated wire running
along on stakes with a galvanometer fixed in a cabin at the foot of the
peak. The galvanometer was connected with the earth by the other ex-

THE AURORA BOREALIS.

483

tremity of its own circuit.* Nearly every night after the installation of
the apparatus, a yellow-white light illuminated the points without any-
thing like it appearing on the heights in the neighborhood, while the
needle of the galvanometer by its motions betrayed the passage of an
electric current. The light was analyzed in the spectroscope, and gave
the greenish-yellow ray that characterizes the aurora borealis. The

* 0'

z

•

i
i

•

I
i

m

I

•

i

•

i

m

X-

1

,

i

L

i

m

I

•

1

•

1

ly

i

l

intensity of the glow and the deviations of the needle, moreover,
varied continually. In the mean time the hoar-frost which was de-
posited on the wires quickly destroyed the insulation, and rendered an
experiment of any duration almost impossible. The numbness of the
fingers of the operators, induced by the cold, added to the difficulties
of the study.

The apparatus afterward set up on Pietarintunturi, in more than
78° of latitude, was disposed in an almost identical manner, except that
the surface furnished with points was a half less ; but, M. Lenstrum
remarks, the proximity to the " maximum zone " of auroras compen-
sated for this inferiority. On the 29th of December an " auroral ray "
made its appearance above the net, which it dominated vertically from
a height of one hundred and twenty metres.

The difficulties of the question of the exact origin and nature of
the auroral phenomena have not been solved yet ; but we have good
reason to believe that a long approach has been made in the recent ex-
periments toward a solution, and grounds to believe that science will
soon remove them all ; and we shall no longer be able to repeat what
Haiiy, less than a hundred years ago, said on the same subject, " It is
not always what has been known longest that is best." — Translated for
the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue des Deux Mondes.

* Professor Lenstrom's apparatus is represented in the figure. The wire begins at 0,
and connection with the galvanometer is made from the inner end. The letter i indicates
an insulator.

484 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

DEFENSES OF THE LESSER ANIMALS.

By Pbofessob L. GLASEE.

ALL organic beings are, in the course of their lives, subject to a
series of dangers and destructive influences arising from the
conditions of climate and temperature, and from the competition of
their fellow-beings, the universality and power of which are well illus-
trated in Darwin's phrase, "the struggle for existence." Yet all creat-
ures are adjusted with most wonderful art and adaptation to the con-
ditions of their existence and the state of the world around them.
Among these adaptations are the means given to the most helpless
animal existences for securing themselves against the depredations of
their enemies. It is proper to observe, in considering this subject, that
the protection enjoyed by the lower animal organisms is not absolute
and individual, but that it is generally effective principally for the
preservation of the species against destruction. For where peculiar
means of protection are given to one creature, corresponding means
for overcoming it are often given to another, its enemy. To the pro-
tective sharp sight of the rodents and birds are opposed the equally
sharp sight of the fox and the long range of vision of the hawk. It
is only in averaging the mass of such animals that we find they are
secured as a whole against danger, while numerous individuals are
overtaken by their enemies.

Some of the higher animals illustrate the manner in which Nature
contrives to furnish special measures of precaution for its little-gifted,
unalert, unarmed, and helpless creatures. The absence of teeth in the
edentates is offset by shields or scale-armor ; helpless beetles are fur-
nished with hard wing-cases ; the pheasants, quails, and larks of the
fields are hidden from the keen vision of birds of prey by their earthy
color, birds of the river and sea-shore by their resemblance in color to
the sand and shingle.

Protection is required by the lower animals chiefly against the
weather and against parasites and other external enemies. Frequently
the place of their abode is their only and ordinarily a sufficient pro-
tection, as is the case with earth-worms and burrowing larvae, wood-
worms and fruit-borers. But such animals appear to be afflicted with
particular enemies peculiarly fitted to hunt them out in their other-
wise secure fortresses — in the shape of moles, mole-crickets, long-nosed
hedgehogs, shrew-mice, and swine, hook-billed lapwings, and sharp-
ton gued woodpeckers. Frequently, also, each animal is defended by
some special relation peculiar to its species. Insects, which in their
comparatively brief state of maturity are secured by their powers of
flight, have to be guarded, in their three previous conditions of eggf
larva, and pupa, against hosts of enemies to which they would other-

DEFENSES OF THE LESSER ANIMALS. 485

wise be an easy prey and a palatable food. In the condition of the
apparently lifeless and really helpless egg, they are covered by their
obscurity and littleness, or by being deposited in holes and cracks, or
covered with slime or hairy or silken veils and cocoons, under which
they escape all but the sharpest search and rare accidents.

More curious are the many-sided and diversified means provided
for the security of the young insect during the helpless larval condi-
tion. In this state, when it is destitute of eyes and wings, it is either
furnished with hairy bristles or spiny envelopes, like those of numer-
ous caterpillars, or with covers composed of fine chips, bud-scales, or
other fragments, compactly woven together with a few threads of silk ;
or else it is screened from the sun and from parasites and birds by a
plaster of mud. A group of insects, described sometimes as sack- weav-
ers or sack-moths, make a kind of sack or pocket out of fragments of
leaves and splinters, within which they perfect their growth. The
case-moths make thick and close-fitting garments for their bodies, out
of leaves loosely strung together, within which they hang, head down-
ward, from the skeletons of the leaves they have attacked, undistin-
guishable to birds and parasites from a long bud-scale or from a dry
splinter ; and clothes-moths conceal themselves in similar cases made
from the hair-dust or wool of the fabrics of which they have taken pos-
session. Some beetles envelop themselves and go through their changes
in balls of earth within which they inclose themselves. The larvae
of one group protect themselves by a kind of foam which they manu-
facture from the juice of the plants they suck. The woolly aphides are
well cared for with the great tufts of wool with which they are pro-
vided, under the cover of which they suck the juices of plants and
bring forth their multitudinous offspring, which given to the winds,
the same hairy envelopes serve them as sails on which they are borne
afar to new plantations. A species that feeds on the ash-tree takes
possession of the galls that form upon it, and can not be removed with-
out taking off the whole limb, for birds will not attack insects thus
protected. These and other aphides, which are particularly injurious
to fruit-trees, are so carefully protected against the ordinary attacks
of external enemies that man is left to contend against them alone.
The bark-lice or scale-insects are particularly difficult to reach, and
seem to multiply in perfect security against all ordinary attacks.

A whole series of gall-insects provide security for their posterity
by colonizing them in the swellings or knots that are produced on the
trees wherever they sting the bark and lay their eggs. The larvae, con-
tinuing to irritate the tissues of the tree, cause the knots to swell and
grow correspondingly with their own growth, and thus find themselves
in a well-fortified home exactly fitted to their wants. Within the
galls, the naked, helpless worms are at once protected from exterior
assaults of every kind and provided with an unfailing supply of food
which they can reach without effort, so that their development goes

486 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY,

on without obstruction of any kind. According to A. Schenck, the
gall-nuts of the rose are adapted to the shelter and support of the larva)
of more than two hundred species of flies, and those of the oak are also
the home of numerous varieties. Malpigbi, who died near the end of
the seventeenth century, remarked that there was no part of the plant
on which galls did not arise. The roots, runners, stalks, leaf-stems,
leaves, buds, flower-stems, flowers, and fruit, all are made to serve as
the nest or place of transformation for the young of one or more species
of insect ; but only the aphis lives upon them permanently.

Another very frequently observed means of securing young insect
broods is by envelopes formed, sometimes with great apparent skill, by
rollings or foldings of the leaf. Some weevils have the art of cutting
out patterns of leaves, and, without wholly severing their attachment,
rolling them up into a scroll, within which they deposit their eggs ;
and they do the whole with such mathematical accuracy that their con-
structions have been made the subjects of formal monographs, like
those of Drs. Heis and Debey on the funnel-rollers. Specimens of
these scrolls are familiar enough, as they have been observed on the
hazel, beech, hornbeam, alder, birch, aspen, and vine, where the opera-
tions of the insects are in some seasons attended with injury to the
crop. The caterpillars of many butterflies and moths are also shel-
tered in the same manner ; while other caterpillars associate them-
selves together and spin webs for their nests, in the air between the
leaves and twigs of trees. Nests of this kind are frequently found on
fruit-trees and shrubbery, and afford a very good degree of protection
to their inhabitants against late frosts, storms, birds, and parasites.
The nest of the procession-spinner serves, curiously, only as a resting-
place for the insect in the larval state, though it finally becomes the
common home of the pupae. The caterpillars, to satisfy their hunger,
are accustomed to leave the nest in a kind of orderly procession, climb-
ing up the stem of the tree to wander all over the crown of the foliage,
and, after they have done their work, to return again in procession to
their nest. They are avoided by man on account of the irritation pro-
duced by the sting of their hairs, and are for the same reason safe
against all birds but the cuckoo. A carnivorous beetle, the Calosoma
sycophanta, also despises their fortress and their weapons, and breaks
voraciously into their communities, like a wolf into a sheep-fold. We
must remember here, the consummate architectural skill with which
honey-bees build up their combs of waxen cells closely joined one to
another. Their whole manner of life and their professional division
of labor, in which they remind us of civilized human life, provoke the
query, Whence the mechanical and technical skill and the intelligence
of these little creatures ?

A considerable number of our insects are burrowers, and during
the period of their larval development excavate, under the epidermis
of the leaves and other green parts of plants, passages, small at first,

DEFENSES OF THE LESSER ANIMALS. 487

but which widen as the larva? grow, feeding themselves from the
parenchyma in which they work, and at the same time obtaining a
defense against external injurious influences and disturbances. They
usually leave their burrow, when about to assume the chrysalis state,
by a little hole that may be found at the extreme end of the excava-
tion, and either fall to the ground or make a cocoon, attached to
some plant, in the air. Other burrowing larvae bury themselves in
the ground.

For the preservation of the chrysalis, Nature has provided many
insect-larvae with the faculty of spinning, and organs for the purpose.
This function is so extraordinarily developed in the larvae of the but-
terflies that a whole group of that order have been called " the spin-
ners " ; while many of these spinners — the silk-worms — have been
made serviceable to human civilization. Before the spinning larva
advances to its last change of skin, it selects a sheltered, dry spot —
between leaves, on bark, in a hedge, in turf, or on a post — and then,
drawing from the spinning-glands situated under its neck and between
its head and fore-feet fine silken threads, it prepares an ample, firm,
and intricate web of flock-silk for its envelope. Having completed
its cocoon, it shakes off its old skin, and lays itself to sleep in this
soft but solidly-made bed, while its pupa-skin hardens and it awaits
the time for its next transformation ; and only when disturbed from
without does it show by some spasmodic motion of the posterior seg-
ment that it can still feel, and that its pupa-rest is not a death-sleep,
but only a temporary repose. If the larva is provided with a hairy
skin or bristles, they become interwoven with the cocoon, and a com-
posite texture is formed, which man must be careful how he touches,
or the bristles will sting his fingers and make them smart. Naked
caterpillars, or larvae, weave, like the real silk-worm, cocoons of pure
silk, or, like the false-caterpillars, and the larvae of wasps, ants, and
bees, transparent, cylindric-oval envelopes of a consistency like that
of parchment or waxed paper. The naked caterpillars of the Her-
mione moth make a kind of roof of pieces of bark over a hollow which
they have excavated in the ground for their bed ; and a hairy larva
provides for itself in a similar manner. Many other larvae go for the
security of their pupae into or upon the ground, where they prepare,
from leaf -dust, moss, and grains of sand, a ball rough on the outside
but smoothly finished within, or simply a hole in the ground, as an
envelope.

Arrived at last at its perfect and free state, the insect is efficiently
protected by that " mimicry " which has been much discussed by Wal-
lace and other writers, or the likeness in color, and sometimes in other
qualities, which it presents to objects that are associated with its
most accustomed haunts. Some instances of this mimicry may be
observed among higher animals, but it is most conspicuous and sig-
nificant with insects. We need only refer to the appearance of dif-

488 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ferent butterflies resting with their wings folded together on flow-
ers, leaves, bark, old walls, dead wood, etc., and to the thousands
of instances daily in which insects pass unobserved by being con-
founded in their general harmony with the objects that are nearest
to them.

The shells which serve as houses to land-snails, and which the
animals close in winter by their opercula, or doors, are known to all.
Many snails are not provided with shells, and they secure themselves
by creeping under dead leaves, stones, or pieces of wood, or into the
sod and the ground.

If we regard the animals in the water we shall find that they are
furnished with safeguards as well adapted to their wants as those of
their fellows of the air. The larvae hide, like those of the Ephemerae,
with their whole bodies in the ground, and thus escape destruction by
the fish ; or they live, like the larvae of the May -flies, in cases made
of splinters of wood, pieces of rush, seeds, bits of shells, or hollow
straws and stalks of weeds. Other larvae conceal themselves in leaf-
rollings on the surface of the water or beneath the floating leaves of
water-plants The soft animals of the water find their protection in
shells of limestone, either spirally coiled or double-valved and kept
tightly closed by a strong muscle. Crustaceans are protected by the
peculiar armor which gives the class its name, and which they change
once a year for a suit of larger size ; some members of the family take
possession of deserted shells, and concealing their hinder parts within
them live thus, and carry their acquired houses about with them, as
Diogenes did his tub. The coral-polyps of the ocean build from their
secretions solid, branching masse3 of limestone, within which they
conceal their jelly-like forms, furnishing another striking example of
the care Nature takes for all its creatures. The boring-worms of the
sea, the Serpulm, and the borers of oyster and other shells, the Sabellm
and the Terchellce, offer other examples of a similar kind. And the
Arenicola3y or sand-worms, like the earth-worms of the land, find their
security simply by being under the cover of the sand as they crawl
arouud for their food. — Translated and abridged for the Popular
Science Monthly from Die Natur.

♦•»

THE COMET OF 1812 AND 1883.

By Professor DANIEL KIKKWOOD.

IN the quarter of a century included between August, 1802, and
August, 1827, Jean Louis Pons discovered thirty comets — twice
as many as all observers besides. Of this number are the celebrated
comets of short period designated as Encke's, Biela's, and Winnecke's,

THE COMET OF 1812 AND 1883. 489

as well as the comet of 1812, now visible on its first predicted return.
It was originally detected on the 20th of July, and was the thirteenth
discovered by Pons within ten years. Its appearance at first was that
of an irregular nebula without tail or beard, and it was only visible
through a telescope. By the 14th of September it was easily seen
without optical aid ; its tail was over two degrees in length, and the
diameter of its nucleus was five or six seconds. It continued visible
till October — a period of ten weeks — and was consequently well ob-
served. Cooper's valuable work on " Cometic Orbits " contains eight
sets of elements by different computers. Encke distinctly recognized
the elliptic form of the orbit, and the elements which he assigned have
been generally preferred. They are as follows :

Perihelion passage, 1812, Sept., 15-3136, G. M. T.

Longitude of perihelion 92° 18' 46"

>0 -I I t) It

Longitude of ascending node 253° 1' o

Inclination 73° 5*7' 3"

Perihelion distance 0-V71

Eccentricity 0'9545

Period 70 68 years.

Motion direct.

According to Encke, therefore, the next perihelion passage was to
have been expected in June, 1883 — about three months before the
actual discovery of the comet by Mr. W. R. Brooks. A re-discussion
of the observations of 1812 had, however, been recently completed by
Dr. Schulhof and M. Bossert, whose calculations gave a probable pe-
riod about seven months longer than that obtained by Encke. The
true period is found to be very nearly a mean between these earlier
and later estimates.

On its present return the comet was first glimpsed on the night
of September 1st, by Mr. William R. Brooks, Director of Red House
Observatory, Phelps, New York. He was, however, prevented by
clouds from verifying his conjecture of the cometary character of the
nebulous speck till the evening of the 3d. Its identity with the comet
of 1812 was shown on the 18th of September, by the Rev. Mr. Searles,
of New York, and independently on the day following by Professor
Lewis Boss, of the Dudley Observatory. The latter designated Janu-
ary 25, 1884, as the date of perihelion passage. Astronomers of the
twentieth century will probably witness its next apparition in the
summer of 1955.

The comet of 1812 is one of a remarkable group whose periods
range between sixty-eight and seventy-six years, all of their aphelia
being some distance beyond the orbit of Neptune. It seems, how-
ever, to be specially related to the fourth comet of 1846. The latter
was discovered by De Vico, at Rome, on February 20th, and inde-
pendently, by Professor G. P. Bond, February 26th. It remained
visible ten weeks, and its elements were calculated by Peirce, Hind,

49°

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Van Diense, and others. The present writer has elsewhere * called
attention to the close agreement of the elements of the comets of 1812
and 1846. These coincidences are seen at a glance in the following
figure, where the dotted ellipse represents the orbit of the comet of
1812, and the continuous curve that of the fourth comet of 1846.

It seems difficult to regard this general similarity as accidental.
A possible explanation may be found in the hypothesis of an ancient
comet's separation into parts — a phenomenon known to have oc-
curred in the case of Biela's comet. It has also been pointed out
that the paths of both comets very nearly intersect the orbit of Ve-
nus ; that of 1812 in true anomaly 341°, and that of 1846 in 347°.

On the hypothesis of a common origin it is obvious that these bod-
ies must have entered the solar system at a remote epoch. It seems,
therefore, quite remarkable that neither is known to have been ob-
served before 1812. The period of De Vico's comet of 1846 is still
too uncertain to be traced backward through former returns ; but,
with a mean period of the Pons-Brooks comet equal to the interval
between the two observed apparitions, we find the dates of former
perihelion passages to have been approximately as given below. The

* u Comets and Meteors," Chapter III. The nodal lines are nearly coincident, but the
ascending node of the one is at the descending node of the other.

HOW WE SNEEZE, LAUGH, STAMMER, AND SIGH. 491

Dearest corresponding dates at which comets were seen are also ap-
pended :

Former returns of the
comet of 1&12.

Corresponding dates
at which comets

Former returns of the
comet of 1812.

Corresponding dates
at which comets

were seen.

were seen.

1741

1742

1456

1457

1670

• • •

1384

1352

1598

• • • •

1313

1313

1527

1529

1241

1240

No comets are recorded for 1670 and 1598, and very little is known
of those seen in 1742 and 1529. Some of the preceding may have
been returns of the Pons-Brooks comet. The comets of 1812 and
1846, as has been shown, are both liable to great perturbation by
Venus.

■»»♦»

HOW WE SNEEZE, LAUGH, STAMMEE, AND SIGH.

By FKEDEEIC A. FEENALD.

THE nose is an organ in more senses than one. From its resonant
pipes proceed the sonorous tones which tell of blissful slumber,
and the convulsive snort, varying from the mere " cat-sneeze " to the
tremendous " Horatio," that has less definite meaning ; while the
Frenchman and the typical New-Englander (who is nearly as rare as
the aborigine in New England, by-the-way) give it an important share
in the production of speech. To give some physiological explanation
of these and other involuntary actions of the respiratory mechanism is
the object of the present article.

Snoring is produced in sleep by the passage of the breath through
the pharynx when the tongue and soft palate are in certain positions.
The soft palate must have fallen back in such a manner as to nearly
or quite close the entrance to the nasal cavity from the throat, and the
tongue must also be thrown back so far as to leave only a narrow open-
ing between it and the soft palate. It is by the air being forced either
inward or outward through this opening that the noise is produced. A
snore results also when, with a closed mouth, the air is forced be-
tween the soft palate and the back wall of the pharynx into the nasal
cavity. With deep breathing, perhaps accompanied by a variation in
the position of the soft palate, a rattling noise may be heard in addi-
tion to the snoring, which is due to a vibration of the soft palate.
Hence it is evident how flinging a pillow at a snorer, or poking him in
the ribs, will often cause him to be silent even when the disciplinary
measure does not awaken him, for a change of position that lets the
tongue and soft palate fall a little forward secures a free passage for
the air.

492 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Grunting is a noise which is produced when, after the larynx has
been perfectly closed, whether spasmodically or as a voluntary action
with the object of holding the breath, the current of air thus inter-
rupted is suddenly resumed. In the grunt we must distinguish two
elements : the first is a clicking sound, and the other an explosive
60und or slight report. The click is the noise produced by the meet-
ing of air in the space left vacant when two moistened bodies are sud-
denly separated. It forms, however, but a very small part of the noise
of grunting, and can scarcely be experimentally demonstrated. The
" report " is the well-known phenomenon connected with the sudden
expansion of a body of compressed air.

" Talking through the nose " when a person has a cold is in reality
talking with the nose so stopped that less rather than more than the
usual quantity of vibrating air can pass through the nasal cavity. In
producing certain articulate sounds — those which occur in English are
represented by m, n, and ng — all the vocal air escapes from the pharynx
by the nose. The nasal air-passage has the general form of a resonator,
and there can be no doubt but that it has a corresponding influence,
and that the sounds produced by the air passing through it are strength-
ened by its resonance. The larger the nasal cavity the more powerful
the resonance, and consequently the re-enforcement experienced by the
tone. Sounds uttered with the nasal resonance, particularly the nasal
vowels, are fuller and more ample than the same sounds when strength-
ened by the resonance of the cavity of the mouth, and it is for this
reason that third-rate tragic actors like to give a nasal resonance to all
the vowels in the pathetic speeches of their heroic parts. The reso-
nance of the nasal cavity plays a part also in the formation of non-nasal
articulate sounds ; then, however, appearing only as a re-enforcement
of the resonance of the cavity of the mouth. The directly excited
nasal resonance sometimes plays an immediate part in the formation of
all articulate sounds, producing the nasal " twang." But the general
conception of this mode of speaking is by no means scientifically cor-
rect, every species of pronunciation in which the nasal element asserts
itself with undue prominence being called " talking through the nose."
It may, however, arise from two unlike causes : firstly, from a stoppage
of the nasal cavity ; or, secondly, from incomplete closure of the poste-
rior entrance to this cavity. If the nasal cavity is obstructed, as when
a child's nose is pinched and he is told to say " pudding," an accumula-
tion of air forms in the back of the mouth, being unable to escape
through the nose, and in the end is obliged to find exit through the
mouth. The resonance is also altered, and the nasal sounds are, there-
fore, formed imperfectly and falsely. The same disturbance is pro-
duced by the partial obstruction of the nasal cavity which is experi-
enced from the swollen condition of the mucous membrane, and from
its increased secretion, during a " cold in the head."

A nasal twang from improper escape of air through the nasal cav-

HOW WE SNEEZE, LAUGH, STAMMER, AND SIGH. 493

ity may be due to a cleft palate, or to some less grave defect which
prevents insufficient contact between the soft palate and the back wall
of the pharynx. Yarious other noises emanate from the mouth and
nose, accompanying certain unusual and mainly involuntary forms of
respiration. These are classified by Yon Meyer, from whose " Organs
of Speech," in the " International Scientific Series," most of the mate-
rial for this article has been obtained, as disturbances of inspiration,
to which class belong hiccough, gaping, and stammering, and dis-
turbances of expiration, under which he enumerates sneezing, cough-
ing, laughing, and sighing.

Hiccough is the simplest of the former class, and is merely a vio-
lent inspiration caused by a convulsive contraction of the diaphragm.
The ensuing expiration then takes place quietly. The air inhaled may
enter principally either through the mouth or the nose, or through
both equally, and in each case the accompanying noise is different.
A contraction of the glottis may also take place at the same time, and
in this case the entering stream of air creates, in passing between the
vocal chords, a sharp, clear tone. During an attack, one inspiration
in about four or five is convulsive. Hiccough arises from over-irri-
tation of the nerves of the diaphragm, the cause of which we know
to be either psychical conditions or overfilling of the stomach. When
the stomach is overladen with food or with effervescing or alcoholic
drinks, it resists to a greater or less extent the fall of the diaphragm ;
the contractions of the diaphragm necessarily become more labored,
and occasionally, like other over-irritated muscles, assume a convulsive
character. Frequently, however, the hiccough appears as a sign of
the general over-irritation of the nervous system in hysteria, and,
probably from the same reason, it may not uncommonly be observed
in otherwise healthy young persons, particularly children. The above
explanation of hiccough as a convulsive contraction of the diaphragm
is further confirmed by the manner in which it may be stopped. It
is, namely, only necessary to allow an exceedingly protracted and, at
the end, forcible expiration to follow a long and quiet inspiration.
The slow inspiration, especially when it is chiefly performed by the
wall of the chest, prevents the phrenic nerve from being too power-
fully irritated, while the long expiration gives this nerve time to re-
cover from its over-irritation. A remedy which the writer has tested
many times without a failure can always be used upon a person who
has " the hiccoughs " by some one else, and generally by the sufferer
himself. You say to your friend something like this : " See how close
together you can hold the tips of your forefingers without their touch-
ing. No, keep your elbows out free from your sides. You can get
your fingers closer than that. They are touching now. There, now
hold them so. Steady." By this time you can generally ask, " Now,
why don't you hiccough ? " The involuntary tendency to breathe
slowly and steadily when the attention is fixed on performing a deli-

494 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

cate manipulation is here what counteracts the convulsive action of
the diaphragm.

Gaping is also a convulsive form of inspiration, which, however,
is not so short and violent as the hiccough. In gaping, moreover,
those muscles which raise the walls of the chest are at once brought
into prominent action ; while, further, a rapid contraction of the dia-
phragm is necessary before the climax can be reached, after which a
somewhat rapid fall of the thorax produces a quick expiration. The
important part which is played by the rise of the chest is particularly
shown by the fact that in very violent gaping the head is thrown back-
ward, and the shoulders raised, in addition to which even the arms are
sometimes stretched upward. During the gaping inspiratory process
the mouth is opened spasmodically, and at the same time the soft pal-
ate is spasmodically raised, closing the air-passage of the nose. The
whole phenomenon, including the sense of satisfaction after the inspi-
ration, seems an indication of a strong desire for air, and the existence
of this desire under those circumstances in which gaping is generally
observed — sleepiness, for instance, or weariness — is readily explaina-
ble. Such circumstances are accompanied by a general inactivity of
the nervous system, from which results a weak respiratory action, in-
sufficient for the body when awake.

Stammering results from efforts to talk while a similar action to
that which produces hiccough is going on. The difference is that, in
stammering, the contractile spasm of the diaphragm is longer. During
its continuance no expiration can take place, and, as speech depends
upon the existence of an issuing stream of air, it is impossible for a
person while suffering such a spasm to produce any sound. Ineffectual
and therefore exaggerated efforts to create sound with the organs of
the mouth and throat give rise to distressed grimaces, and this dis-
tressed expression must necessarily be augmented by the fact that, by
so long delaying expiration, a want of breath is felt and the circula-
tion of the blood interrupted. "When at length the spasm ceases, and
is followed by a quick expiration, the natural condition is restored till
again destroyed by a fresh spasm. But there may be no attempt to
speak, and yet the cause of the phenomenon (the s]^asm in the dia-
phragm) may be experienced ; in this case it will not cause stammer-
ing, and may be quite imperceptible to the observer. If, now, as ap-
pears from the above, stammering is only an occasionally observed
symptom of a contractile spasm in the diaphragm, it must be clear
that all attempts to cure stammering by exercising the organs of the
mouth and throat must be unsuccessful, and that this defect can be
efficiently treated only by following rules already given for the treat-
ment of hiccough. A quiet, unhurried inspiration must be followed
by an expiration as slow and long as possible, the issuing stream
either being employed in speech or not. With this treatment the
motor nerves of the diaphragm can most effectually recover from their

HOW WE SNEEZE, LAUGH, STAMMER, AND SIGH. 495

state of over-irritation, and return to their normal condition. We
must, however, be careful not to fall into the common error of con-
founding stuttering with stammering. In stuttering the process of
breathing is quite normal, and the defective speech arises only from
inaptitude in the formation of sound ; this defect of speech is, there-
fore, peculiar to children, idiots, and persons suffering from apoplexy.

Sighing, which is classed by Von Meyer as an unusual form of ex-
piration, is better regarded as including the preceding inspiration also.
A sigh is in fact a long breath, and, like a gape, is an involuntary
spurt made to catch up with the demand for air. This is true even
when it arises from depressing emotion. The expiration is often the
more prominent part of the action, the rapidity with which the air
flows out being due to a sudden cessation of the activity of the expira-
tory muscles, which commonly regulate, by retarding, the issuing
stream of air. In sobbing, air is obtained by short, abrupt inspirations,
and the tears which overflow into the nasal cavity assist in causing
this air to produce sound.

Sneezing is the simplest of the purely expiratory noises. Just as
the hiccough depends upon a single violent spasm during inspiration,
so the sneeze is due to a single violent spasm during expiration, gen-
erally of the abdominal muscles, but, when very violent, of the other
expiratory muscles also. It is a reflex action which occurs after an
irritation of the mucous membrane lining the air-passages of the nose,
and also after irritation of the optic nerve by a bright light. A few
slight contractions of the abdominal muscles are at first suppressed by
some short inspirations rapidly following each other without any in-
tervening expiration ; then follows a vigorous contraction of the ab-
dominal muscles, by means of which the stream of air is violently
driven out through the mouth and nose. In its passage through the
nose, the air produces a well-known noise, which may, however, be
connected with a sound produced in the vocal chords. We recognize
the same peculiarity, though the action is voluntarily performed, in
blowing the nose. Sneezing is not an observer of times and seasons,
and often seems to choose the most inopportune moment for exhibiting
its power. In such a case the impending catastrophe may be averted
by pressing firmly upon some branch of the fifth nerve, say in the up-
per lip close under the nose.

Coughing and laughing are also due to a spasmodic contraction of
the expiratory muscles. These acts differ from sneezing only in this
respect, that, while in the latter expiration is accomplished by a single
violent action, it is here characterized by a number of separate im-
pulses of the expiratory muscles with small intervening pauses. In
long-continued coughing or laughing, short inspirations, which, on ac-
count of their shortness and violence, often approach the verge of
hiccoughing, are taken between the separate expirations, and, indeed,
laughing after a full meal frequently leads to a fit of hiccoughs. Cough-

496 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ing most closely resembles sneezing, not only as regards its origin, but
also as regards its execution. This is a reflex action which follows an
irritation of the air-passages, particularly of the windpipe and the
larynx, but also of the pharynx and the nasal cavity. Stimulation of
other nerves, as those of the skin by a draught of cold air, may also
produce coughing. The expiratory impulses induced may attain great
violence, so as in this respect to resemble the single impulse of sneez-
ing. While, however, in sneezing, the stream of air escapes, as a rule,
through the nose, in coughing it escapes through the cavity of the
mouth, which is shut off by the raised soft palate from the nasal cavity,
and enlarged by dropping the lower jaw, and by the depression of the
floor of the cavity, the tongue at the same time being pushed forward.
The closed glottis holds this air back for an instant against the press-
ure of the abdominal muscles, and then suddenly opens part way,
letting it escape with an explosive noise, generally accompanied by a
sound, shrill or deep as the case may be, produced by the vocal chords.
Performed voluntarily, and with less violence, coughing assumes the
form known to us as " clearing the throat." In laughing, the separate
expiratory impulses are not so violent, and the stream of air passes
through the fairly open mouth, or, when the mouth is shut, through
the nose. It is accompanied by contractions of the muscles of the
face, and is mainly involuntary, being generally caused by an impres-
sion produced upon the higher parts of the brain. Violent laughing
may be caused by tickling some parts of the body. Characteristic
sounds are produced in the same way as already described in coughing,
and in both, when long continued, the air which from time to time is
quickly inspired may produce a clear, shrill note in passing through
the glottis.

■»»»■

THE CHEMISTEY OF COOKEEY.

By W. MATTIEU WILLIAMS.

XXII.

I NOW come to a very important constituent of animal food, al-
though it is not contained in beef, mutton, pork, poultry, game,
fish, or any other organized animal substance. It is not even proved
satisfactorily to exist in the blood, although it is somehow obtained
from the blood by special glands at certain periods. I refer to casein,
the substantial basis of cheese, which, as everybody knows, is the con-
solidated curd of milk.

It is evident at once that casein must exist in two forms, the solu-
ble and insoluble, so far as the common solvent, water, is concerned.
It exists in the soluble form, and completely dissolved in milk, and
insoluble in cheese. When precipitated in its insoluble or coagulated

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY. 497

form, as the curd of new milk, it carries with it the fatty matter, or
cream, and therefore, in order to study its properties in a state of
purity, we must obtain it otherwise. This may be done by allowing
the fat-globules of the milk to float to the surface, and then remove
them — i. e., by separating the cream as by the ordinary dairy method.
We thus obtain in the skimmed milk a solution of casein, but there
still remains some of the fat. This may be removed by evaporating
it down to solidity, and then dissolving out the fat by means of ether,
which leaves the soluble casein behind. The adhering ether being
evaporated, we have a fairly pure specimen of casein in its original or
soluble form.

This, when dry, is an amber-colored, translucent substance, devoid
of odor, and insipid. This insipidity and absence of odor of the pure
and separated casein is noteworthy, as it is evidently the condition in
which it exists in milk, but very different from that of the casein of
cheese. My object in pointing this out is to show that in the course
of the manufacture of cheese new properties are developed. Skim
milk — a solution of casein — is tasteless and inodorous, while cheese,
whether made from skimmed or whole milk, has a very decided flavor
and odor.

If we now add some of our dry casein to water, it dissolves, form-
ing a yellowish, viscid fluid, which, on evaporation, becomes covered
with a slight film of insoluble casein, which may be readily drawn off.
Some of my readers will recognize in this description the resemblance
of a now well-known domestic preparation of soluble casein, condensed
milk, where it is mixed with much cream, and in the ordinary prepara-
tion also much sugar. The cream dilutes the yellowness, but does not
quite mask it, and the viscidity is shown by the strings which follow
the spoon when a spoonful is lifted. If a concentrated solution of
pure casein is exposed to the air it rapidly putrefies, and passes
through a series of changes that I must not tarry to describe, be-
yond stating that ammonia is given off, and some crystalline sub-
stances, such as leucine, tyrosine, etc., very interesting to the physio-
logical chemist, but not important in the kitchen, are formed.

A solution of casein in water is not coagulated by boiling ; it may
be repeatedly evaporated to dryness and redissolved. Upon this de-
pends the practicability of preserving milk by evaporating it down,
or " condensing." This condensed milk, however, loses a little ; its
albumen is sacrificed, as everybody will understand who has dipped a
spoon in freshly-boiled milk and observed the skin which the spoon
removes from the surface. This is coagulated albumen.

If alcohol is added to a concentrated solution of casein in water, a
pseudo-coagulation occurs ; the casein is precipitated as a white sub-
stance like coagulated albumen, but, if only a little alcohol is used, the
solid may be redissolved in water ; if, however, it is thus treated with
strong alcohol, the casein becomes difficult of solution, or even quite
vol. xxiv. — 32

498 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

insoluble. Alcohol added to solid soluble casein renders it opaque,
and gives it the appearance of coagulated albumen. The alcohol itself
dissolves a little of this.

The characteristic coagulation of casein, or its conversion from the
soluble to the iDsoluble form, is produced rather mysteriously by ren-
net. Acids precipitate it from an aqueous solution, producing an ap-
parent coagulation, but it is not a true and complete coagulation like
that effected by the rennet, for on neutralizing the acid precipitant
with an alkali or metallic oxide the casein again dissolves. Excepting
iu the cases of acetic and lactic acids (vinegar and the acid of sour
milk), which precipitate pure casein, the acid precipitates appear to
be a compound of casein with the acids, and the casein is set free in
its original state when the acid goes over to the alkali or basic metal-
lic oxide. The action of rennet in the coagulation of casein is still a
chemical mystery, especially when we consider the smallness of the
quantity of coagulating agent required for the rapid and complete con-
version.

A calf has four stomachs, the fourth being that which corresponds
to ours, both in structure and functions. It is lined with a membrane,
from which are secreted the gastric juice and other fluids concerned in
effecting the conversion of food into chyme. A weak infusion made
from a small piece of this " mucous membrane " will coagulate the
casein of two or three thousand times its own quantity of milk, or the
coagulation may be effected by placing a small piece of the stomach
(usually salted and dried for the purpose) in the milk, and warming
it for a few hours.

Many theoretical attempts have been made to explain this action
of the rennet. Simon and Liebig supposed that it acts primarily as a
ferment, converting the sugar of milk into lactic acid, and that this
lactic acid coagulates the casein ; but Selmi has shown that alkaline
milk may be coagulated by rennet in the course of ten minutes, and
that after the coagulation it still has an alkaline reaction. This is the
case whether fresh naturally alkaline milk is used, or milk that has
been artificially rendered alkaline by the addition of soda.

Casein, when thoroughly coagulated by rennet, then purified and
dried, is a hard and yellowish horn-like substance. It softens and
swells in water, but does not dissolve therein, nor in alcohol nor weak
acids. Strong mineral acids decompose it. Alkalies dissolve it readi-
ly, and, if concentrated, decompose it on the application of heat.
When moderately heated, it softens, and may be drawn into threads,
and becomes elastic ; at a higher temperature it fuses, swells up, car-
bonizes, and develops nearly the same products of distillation as the
other protein compounds.

I have good and sufficient reasons for thus specifying the proper-
ties of this constituent of food. I regard it as the most important of
all that I have to describe in connection with my subject — the science

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY. 499

of cookery. It contains (as I shall presently show) more nutritious
material than any other food that is ordinarily obtainable, and its
cookery is singularly neglected, is practically an unknown art, espe-
cially in this country. We commonly eat it raw, although in its raw
state it is peculiarly indigestible ; and in the only cooked form famil-
iarly known among us here, that of a Welsh rabbit, or rare-bit, it is too
often rendered still more indigestible, though this need not be the case.

Here, in this densely populated country, where we import so much
of our food, cheese demands our most profound attention. The diffi-
culties and cost of importing all kinds of meat, fish, and poultry, are
great, while cheese may be cheaply and deliberately brought to us
from any part of the world where cows or goats can be fed, and it
can be stored more readily and kept longer than other kinds of animal
food. All that is required to render it, next to bread, the staple food
of Britons, is scientific cookery.

If I shall be able, in what is to follow, to impart to my fellow-
countrymen, and more especially countrywomen, my own convictions
concerning the cookability, and consequent improved digestibility, of
cheese, these papers will have " done the state some service ! '

XXIII.

In my last I referred generally to the high nutritive value of cheese.
I will now state particulars. First, as regards the water. Taking mus-
cular fiber without bone, i. e., selected best part of the meat, beef con-
tains on an average 72^- per cent of water ; mutton, 73^- ; veal, 74J ;
pork, 69f ; fowl, 73f ; while Cheshire cheese contains only 30J-, and
other cheeses about the same. Thus, at starting, we have in every
pound of cheese rather more than twice as much solid food as in a
pound of the best meat, or comparing with the average of the whole
carcass, including bone, tendons, etc., the cheese has an advantage of
three to one.

The following results of Mulder's analysis of casein, when compared
with those by the same chemist of albumen, gelatine, and fibrin, show
that there is but little difference in the ultimate chemical composition
of these, so far as the constituents there named are concerned :

Carbon 53*83

Hydrogen T*15

Nitrogen 1 5*65

0xySen 123-37

Sulphur ,

> 23?

* Casein.

Albumen. Gelatine. Fibrin.

Carbon 535 5040 52-7

Hydrogen 7'0 6*64 6*9

Nitrogen 15*5 18*34 15*4

Oxygen 22-0 24*62 23*5

Sulphur 1-6 " 1*2

Phosphorus 0*4 " 0*3

5oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

We may therefore conclude that, regarding these from the point of
view of nitrogenous or flesh-forming, and carbonaceous or heat-giving
constituents, these chief materials of flesh and of cheese are about
equal.

The same is the case as regards the fat. The quantity in the car-
cass of oxen, calves, sheep, lambs, and pigs varies, according to Dr.
Edward Smith, from 16 per cent to 31*3 per cent in moderately-fatted
animals, while in whole-milk cheeses it varies from 21'68 per cent to
32-31 per cent, coming down in skim-milk cheeses as low as 63. Dr.
Smith includes Neufchatel cheese, containing 18*74 per cent among
the whole-milk cheeses. He does not seem to be aware that the cheese
made up between straws and sold under that name is a ricotta, or crude
curd of skim-milk cheese. Its just value is about threepence per pound.
In Italy, where it forms the basis of some delicious dishes (such as
budino di ricotta, of which anon), it is sold for about twopence per
pound or less.

There is a discrepancy in the published analyses of casein which
demands explanation here, as it is of great practical importance.
They generally correspond to the above of Mulder within small frac-
tions, as shown below in those of Scherer and Dumas :

Scherer. Dumas.

Carbon 54*665 537

Hydrogen 7-465 7'2

Nitrogen 15-724 16*6

Oxygen, sulphur 22'146 22*5

In these the one hundred parts are made up without any phosphate of
lime, while, according to Lehmann ("Physiological Chemistry," vol. i,
p. 379, Cavendish edition), " casein that has not been treated with acids
contains about six per cent of phosphate of lime ; more, consequently,
than is contained in any of the protein compounds we have hitherto
considered."

From this it appears that we may have casein with, and casein with-
out, this necessary constituent of food. In precipitating casein for lab-
oratory analysis, acids are commonly used, and thus the phosphate of
lime is dissolved out ; but I am unable at present to tell my readers the
precise extent to which this actually occurs in practical cheese-making
where rennet is used. What I have at present learned only indicates
generally that this constituent of cheese is very variable ; and I hereby
suggest to those chemists who are professionally concerned in the
analysis of food, that they may supply a valuable contribution to our
knowledge of this subject by simply determining the phosphate of lime
contained in the ash of different kinds of cheese. I would do this my-
self, but, having during some ten years past forsaken the laboratory
for the writing-table, I have neither the tools nor the leisure for such
work ; and, worse still, I have not that prime essential to practical re-

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY. 5oi

search (especially of endowed research), a staff of obedient assistants
to do the drudgery.

The comparison specially demanded is between cheeses made with
rennet and those Dutch and factory cheeses the curd of which has been
precipitated by hydrochloric acid. Theoretical considerations point to
the conclusion that in the latter much or even all of the phosphate of
lime may be left in solution in the whey, and thus the food-value of
the cheese seriously lowered. We must, however, suspend judgment
in the mean time.

In comparing the nutritive value of cheese with that of flesh, the
retention of this phosphate of lime nearly corresponds with the reten-
tion of the juices of the meat, among which are the phosphates of the
flesh.

These phosphates of lime are the bone-making material of food,
and have something to do in building up the brain and nervous matter,
though not to the extent that is supposed by those who imagine that
there is a special connection between phosphorus and the brain, or
phosphorescence and spirituality. Bone contains about eleven per cent
of phosphorus, brain less than one per cent.

The value of food in reference to its phosphate of lime is not merely
a matter of percentage, as this salt may exist in a state of solution, as
in milk, or as a solid very difficult of assimilation, as in bones. That
retained in cheese is probably in an intermediate condition — not actu-
ally in solution, but so finely divided as to be readily dissolved by the
acid of the gastric juice.

I may mention, in reference to this, that, when a child or other
young animal takes its natural food in the form of milk, the milk is
converted into unpressed cheese, or curd, prior to its digestion.

Supposing that on an average cheese contains only one half of the
six per cent of phosphate of lime found, as above, in the casein, and
taking into consideration the water contained in flesh, the bone, etc.,
we may conclude generally that one pound of average cheese con-
tains as much nutriment as three pounds of the average material of
the carcass of an ox or sheep as prepared for sale by the butcher ; or,
otherwise stated, a cheese of twenty pounds weight contains as much
food as a sheep weighing sixty pounds as it hangs in the butcher's
shop.

Now comes the practical question. Can we assimilate or convert
into our own substance the cheese-food as easily as we may the flesh-
food?

I reply that we certainly can not if the cheese is eaten raw ; but
have no doubt that we may if it be suitably cooked. Hence the para-
mount importance of this part of my subject. A Swiss or Scandinavian
mountaineer can and does digest and assimilate raw cheese as a staple
article of food, and proves its nutritive value by the result ; but feebler
bipeds of the plains and towns can not do the like.

502 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

I may here mention that I have recently made some experiments on
the dissolving of cheese by adding sufficient alkali (carbonate of pot-
ash) to neutralize the acid it contains, thus converting the casein into
its original soluble form as it existed in the milk, and have partially
succeeded both with water and milk as solvents ; but before reporting
these results in detail I will describe some of the practically established
methods of cooking cheese that are so curiously unknown or little
known in this country.

In the fatherland of my grandfather, Louis Gabriel Mattieu, one of
the commonest dishes of the peasant who tills his own freehold and
grows his own food is a " f ondevin " (I can not explain the etymology
of the word, and spell it only by ear, never having seen it in print or
writing). This is a mixture of cheese and eggs, the cheese grated and
beaten into the egg as in making omelets, with a small addition of new
milk or butter. It is placed in a little pan like a flower-pot saucer,
cooked gently, served as it comes off the fire, and eaten from the ves-
sel in which it is cooked. I have made many a hearty dinner on one
of these, plus a lump of black bread and a small bottle of genuine but
thin wine ; the cost of the whole banquet at a little auberge being usu-
ally less than sixpence. The cheese is in a pasty condition, and partly
dissolved in the milk or butter. I have tested the sustaining power of
such a meal by doing some very stiff mountain-climbing and long fast-
ing after it. It is rather too good — over-nutritious — for a man only
doing sedentary work.

A diluted and delicate modification of this may be made by taking
slices of bread, or bread and butter, soaking them in a batter made of
eggs or milk — without flour — then placing the slices of soaked bread
in a pie-dish, covering each with a thick coating of grated cheese, and
thus building up a stratified deposit to fill the dish. The surplus bat-
ter may be poured over the top ; or, if time is allowed for saturation,
the trouble of preliminary soaking may be saved by simply pouring
all the batter thus. This, when gently baked, supplies a delicious and
highly nutritious dish. We call it cheese-pudding at home, but my
own experience convinces me that we make a mistake in using it to
supplement the joint. It is far too nutritious for this ; its savory char-
acter tempts one to eat it so freely that it would be far wiser to use it
as the Swiss peasant uses his f ondevin, i. e., as the one and only dish
of a good wholesome dinner.

I have tested its digestibility by eating it heartily for supper. ISTo
nightmare has followed. If I sup on a corresponding quantity of raw
cheese, my sleep is miserably eventful. — Knowledge.

UNDER-GROUND WIRES. 503

UNDER-GROUND WIRES.

By Dr. WILLIAM W. JACQUES,

ELECTRICIAN OF THE AMERICAN BELL TELEPHONE COMPANY.

THE first telegraph line constructed in this country, from Balti-
more to Washington, in 1843, was intended to be laid under-
ground, and the first nine miles was so laid. Four copper wires were
each wound with cotton, soaked in shellac, and the whole drawn into
a lead tube. This tube was laid in a trench by the side of the rail-
road. Hardly was the section completed, however, when water found
its way into the joints, destroying the insulation, and the conductors
failed. They were accordingly replaced by wires strung on poles, and
the rest of the line was constructed in this way.

In England a very similar line was built, along the line of the
Great Western Railway, for a distance of thirteen miles out from the
city of London. This line failed in exactly the same way as the
American lines, and the pipes were dug up and placed on short posts
six inches above the ground. They were, however, soon replaced by
pole lines.

At various places on the Continent similar experiments were tried,
and everywhere with the same results. Thus it happened that, though
the first idea of telegraph engineers the world over was to run electric
wires under-ground, they were everywhere obliged to string the wires
on poles. In England and on the Continent there has always been a
strong desire to have a part, at least, of the electric wires under-ground.
In the cities, pole lines have been considered objectionable, because
they disfigure the streets. Between cities, under-ground lines have
been desired, because of their great safety in case of invasion, great
secrecy, and reliability in case of storms.

The introduction of gutta-percha, in 1846, accordingly gave a new
impetus to under-ground construction, and, though it took years of
experimenting and millions of dollars, and though system after system
failed in England, Germany, and the rest of Europe, there exists to-
day a successful and durable system of under-ground telegraph wires
connecting together the principal cities of the German Empire, besides
many other under-ground lines in various parts of Europe. Many of
the European cities have the telegraph lines carried from the center of
the city to the outskirts, under-ground ; and, in Paris, not only all of
the telegraph lines, but those for electric lights, telephones, and the
various other private and municipal lines, are carried in the sewers
under the streets of the city.

It must be remembered, however, that these various systems have
cost from ten to twenty times as much as similar overhead lines ; that,
for every mile of under-ground wire, there are many miles on poles ;

504 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

and that in Paris, which is the only city in the world having a com-
plete under-ground system, there are unusual facilities for the running
of wires, as sewers large enough to walk about in extend even under
the less important streets of the city. Moreover, it has been found
that, for delicate and quick-working apparatus, such as automatic
telegraphs, polarized relays, and, above all, the telephone, long under-
ground lines are far less efficient than pole lines. There are two rea-
sons, apart from the difficulty of securing good insulation, why these
long under-ground lines are comparatively inefficient :

1. If an electric conductor be brought near to a large mass of con-
ducting matter, as is a wire when it is taken down from a pole and
buried in the earth, there appears in the current the phenomenon of
retardation, by which each signal, instead of being sharp and distinct,
is partly kept back, so that it overlaps and mingles with the next ; the
result is to limit the speed of working of the apparatus ; or if, like the
telephone, it be an apparatus in which the currents are necessarily ex-
tremely frequent, to confuse and destroy the signals altogether. With
ordinary Morse telegraphic apparatus, this is not very troublesome on
under-ground lines a hundred miles long. With delicate relays, and
more especially with quick working printing telegraphs, or automatic
telegraphs, such lines are very troublesome ; and, with telephones,
the retardation is a very troublesome matter on under-ground lines ten
miles long.

2. The second difficulty is called induction, and is noticed when two
or more wires are run side by side and near together, as they necessa-
rily are in an under-ground cable.

If the signals on one wire of such a cable be sharp and quick, they
cause fac-simile signals on all of the neighboring wires, and this too,
though the insulation may be absolutely perfect ; indeed, above a cer-
tain point, the more perfect the insulation the greater the induction.
The result of this phenomenon is, that messages sent over one wire are
liable to be received on all of the other wires, and, in the case of the
telephone, this phenomenon is noticeable on cables one thousand feet
long, and on a cable one mile long the parties on one wire can easily
understand what those on the other wires are saying. For any other
instrument, however, the interference only becomes annoying on much
longer lines. Steady currents, like those used with electric lights, are,
of course, not affected either by retardation or induction.

In our own country there is little doubt that the proper method of
constructing electrical wires between cities is, to string them on poles
in mid-air. A brief review of some of the European systems that have
been constructed will convince us of this. Between the years 1847
and 1850 a system of cables, containing 2,648 miles of wire, was
laid under-ground to connect Berlin with the other principal cities
of Prussia. Gutta-percha-covered wires were drawn into lead tubes,
which were then buried in trenches two feet deep. The cost of this

UNDER-GROUND WIRES. 505

system was at least ten times that of well-constructed overhead lines.
By 1850 the earliest of these lines had failed, and by 1853 the entire
system was replaced by pole lines. In 1852 asimilar cable was laid
in Russia, between St. Petersburg and Moscow ; this worked a few
years and then failed. Between 1846 and 1852 many miles of some-
what similar cables were laid in France, but, excepting those laid in
the sewers of Paris, they universally failed.

In 1854 quite a number of lead-covered cables were laid in Den-
mark, but these were soon obliged to be abandoned in favor of over-
head lines. In 1853 the Telegraph Company of England laid down
a cable of ten gutta-percha- covered wires, in wooden troughs, along
the high-road between London and Manchester, a distance of two hun-
dred miles. Although neither expense nor pains were spared in the
construction of this line, the cost being comparable with that of the
Prussian system, two years had not elapsed before some of the wires
ceased to work, and, though these were replaced and workmen kept
constantly busy on the line, at the end of seven years the line was
wholly abandoned in favor of overhead wires.

During the same year the Electric Telegraph Company laid down
a somewhat similar system between London, Manchester, and Liver-
pool, though iron and earthenware pipes were substituted for the
wooden troughs. Some of these lines began to fail almost as soon as
completed, while others were, by constant repairing and attention, kept
working for nearly ten years, when the whole was finally abandoned
and overhead lines put up.

The great trouble with all of these systems, whether in England
or on the Continent, was due to water, which found its way to the
conductors, and of course destroyed the insulation. It was difficult to
handle the wires without abrading the gutta-percha ; and, when safely
laid, the gutta-percha was attacked by coal-gas, vegetable growths,
and the constituents of the soil. During this time many other shorter
lines were constructed, but invariably with the same results.

In 1855 the French government, having failed in their attempt to
use gutta-percha wires, laid down a large number of bare wires in a
trench filled in with bituminous compounds. The details of this work
were very carefully carried out, and the experiment is of interest
because similar plans are constantly being proposed to-day. This sys-
tem, costing from eight to ten times that of a thoroughly built pole
line, never worked satisfactorily, and soon had to be abandoned. In
1858 the administration decided to return to gutta-percha-covered
cables laid in lead tubes. The reason of this was, that some of these
cables laid in the sewers of Paris, in 1846, were still in good condition.
Many miles of this cable were laid, some with the lead pipe laid di-
rectly in the earth, some with it drawn again into iron pipes, and some
carried through the sewers of the principal cities. Those cables laid
directly in the earth soon failed, but those in iron pipes and the sewers

5o6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

continued to work, and from this grew the system now used in Paris.
Up to 1870 the above-described attempts, as well as many others (not
recounted), had proved a series of complete failures. Since that, how-
ever, several lines have been built in England that have continued to
work successfully ; and in Germany successful under-ground cables have
been laid down connecting together all of the principal cities of the
empire. The present complete system, as used between Liverpool
and Manchester, was constructed as follows : Iron or stoneware pipes
were laid from one to two feet below the level of the road-side with
flush-boxes coming to the surface every two hundred yards. Into
these was drawn a cable of gutta-percha-covered wires. The joints
were carefully made in the pipes, and they were smoothed inside to
prevent any possible abrading of the cable. The route was especially
selected through a low and marshy section of country, so that the
pipes were almost constantly filled with water — this being the best
possible condition for the preservation of the gutta-percha. The pres-
ent European system dates from 1875. The cable is similar to that
used for submarine purposes. It consists of seven copper wires, each
coated with two layers of gutta-percha and two of Chatterton's com-
pound, and the whole covered with an armor of galvanized- iron wires.
This cable is laid in a trench by the road-side, and comes to the surface
only inside the telegraph-offices in the cities. Its cost was nearly
twenty times the cost of a well-built pole line.

Although both the English and the German systems are success-
fully working lines of telegraph, they are far less efficient than pole
lines of the same length. The speed of working even the ordinary
instruments is limited ; serious trouble appears in attempting to use
fast-working machines, or automatic senders, and the use of the tele-
phone is impossible.

I think these facts have sufficiently demonstrated that for long
lines of telegraph, stretching from city to city, here in America, pole
lines, which can be cheaply built, easily repaired, and where the wires
can be removed from the retarding influence of the earth and the in-
ductive influences on each other, are decidedly superior to under-
ground lines.

Within our large cities the problem presented is somewhat differ-
ent. During the last few years the number of electric wires has
rapidly increased, especially since the introduction of the telephone
and electric light, and the probability is that the next few years will
show a further large increase. If these wires are run on poles, they
not only disfigure the streets, but seriously interfere with the opera-
tions of firemen in case of fire, as we have repeatedly seen during the
last few years. A cobweb of wires running over the house-tops re-
quires the linemen to continually tramp through the houses and over
the roofs, causing annoyance to the tenants and damage to the build-
ings. Moreover, wires fixed to house-tops are subject to removal at

UNDER-GROUND WIRES. 507

the whim of the owner, and they have to be continually removed from
building to building as the good- will of each owner is exhausted.

In almost all of the large cities the question is now being asked,
Why can not all of these wires be buried along with the gas and
water pipes under the streets ? In answer, I propose to describe briefly
what has been done in this direction in European cities, then to look
at some experiments lately made in this country, and thus to show
how far such a plan is and how far it is not practicable.

In Paris, all the wires are carried in the sewers under-ground.

In London, the telegraph wires are carried from the central office
to many of the branch offices and to the railways leading out of the
city under-ground.

In Vienna, Prague, Briinn, Munich, Augsburg, Nuremberg, and
many other cities, the telegraph-wires are carried under-ground by
armored cables to the outside of the city.

In the German cities we have seen that many of the telegraph-
wires are carried under-ground from the center of the city to connect
with cables running to other cities.

Telephone wires, electric-light wires, and a large majority of tele-
graph wires in European cities are, however, as in America, carried
over house-tops or on poles.

The cable most generally made in Paris consists of seven gutta-
percha-covered wires laid into a cable covered with tarred hemp and
drawn into a lead pipe ; this pipe is fastened by hooks to the side-wall
of the sewer. The cables are thus easy of access, and any new cables
may be added as required without disturbing those already in use.
In some of the newer cables wires covered with cotton soaked in pa,r-
affine are used instead of gutta-percha-covered wires. The distances
within this city are so short that neither induction nor retardation
has to be considered in the telegraph wires. Electric-lighting wires,
we have seen, are not affected. The telephone wires are in Paris
protected from these evils by an extremely simple though expensive
device. Instead of a single wire for each circuit, two wires twisted
together are used, the current going out over one and returning over
the other. Such a device is called a "metallic circuit." Any outside
disturbing circuit tends to induce, in the two wires of the metallic
circuit, equal and opposite currents, which neutralize and disappear.
In such an arrangement, too, there is a minimum of retardation.

There are several thousand miles of wire in the sewers of Paris,
and the cost of the gutta-percha-covered cables is about $140 per mile
of wire, or about five times the cost of a pole line to do the same
work. As telephone cables require two wires for each circuit, this
estimate would have to be doubled. The paraffined cables are, how-
ever, considerably cheaper, though their durability has not yet been
proved. The cost for repairs is very small, and some cables have not
been touched for twenty years. In any other city than Paris, the

5o8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

above figures would be very greatly increased by the cost of under-
ground piping and chambers to contain the cables.

It is thus demonstrated that it is technically possible to place all
of the wires in a city under-ground. It is also demonstrated that the
cost, even when a large number of wires run side by side, is enormously
increased. For many purposes, as telephony or electric lighting, a
considerable number of wires start out from a central office together,
but continually bifurcate until single wires run to the houses of the
subscribers. The cost of one wire by itself is vastly larger than where
many are run together, the cost of the pipe and for laying being not
much greater for fifty wires than for one, and the cost of single wire
cables being greater per mile of wire than multiple wire cables, so
that the expense of putting such a system as one of our telephone
exchanges entirely under-ground would place the cost of the instru-
ments entirely out of reach of the subscribers. If telephones were re-
quired in every house, as are gas and water, such a system might be
practicable, but at present that is not likely to be the case.

The American Bell Telephone Company has recently constructed
two short lines of under-ground wires in the business section of Bos-
ton, and these give us excellent data from which to judge of the extent
of technical practicability and the expense of putting all wires under-
ground. We have seen that in Paris the retardation and induction
are both obviated by the use of double and twisted wires in metallic
circuit. It is necessary that all of the wires be in metallic circuit,
for, if a metallic circuit be connected to a single-line circuit, the dis-
turbances are not removed. If a subscriber in one city wishes to talk
with a subscriber in a neighboring city, both cities must have me-
tallic-circuit systems and metallic circuits between the two cities. As
the two lines constructed in Boston are short, only about one quarter
of a mile each, it was deemed best to use single-line circuits, hoping
that the induction and retardation on so short lines would not be
serious.

The system is constructed as follows : Eight wrought-iron pipes,
three inches in diameter, are laid side by side in two rows, about four
feet below the surface. At each street corner is built a brick cham-
ber, large enough to admit a man, and with a cover flush with the
street. The cables, of which several kinds are in use, run out from the
basement of the central office through these pipes and up the side
of buildings to roofs, from which they spread out to the subscribers
by means of ordinary overhead lines.

Conversation over these lines is not so easily carried on as by means
of overhead wires, and it is frequently possible to overhear other con-
versation. This prohibits further extension of the single-wire system
under-ground, for technical reasons. The cost of the piping and cham-
bers is in round numbers $50,000 per mile, and these pipes are intended
to accommodate one thousand wires. The cost of the cables is from

AN OVERDOSE OF HASHEESH. 5o9

$60 to $150 per mile for each circuit, according to the kind of cable
used.

In round numbers we may estimate the total cost for one thousand
wires at $150,000 per mile, or $150 per mile per circuit. The cost of
piping and chambers would be nearly as great for one hundred cir-
cuits as for one thousand, as the cost of chambers and the labor of
excavating and filling would be the same ; so that the cost for one
hundred wires may be estimated at $50,000 per mile, or $500 per mile
per conductor. The cost per conductor thus increases enormously as
the number of conductors diminishes, so that it would be clearly im-
possible to follow out the wires of an exchange system in all of their
bifurcations.

It may be argued that cheaper methods of laying wires may be
devised ; but the experience of forty years has led continually to
more and more expensive systems. If, then, the present method of
running wires overhead is objectionable, and the expense of running
them under-ground is so great as to put the cost of telephones, electric
lights, and other electrical appliances out of the reach of would-be
users, how are the wires to be run?

It seems to the writer that much of the inconvenience may be
obviated, and without greatly increasing the expense, by adopting the
following plan : From each telephone exchange, electric-lighting sta-
tion, or other center of electric wires, run overhead cables out to a
considerable number of points about the city, some one of which would
be quite near to each subscriber. From each of these points to the
various subscribers run short stretches of ordinary house-top wire. In
this way hundreds of single wires would be gathered into small and
inoffensive cables, and the enormous wooden structures would be re-
placed by small cable supports of brick or iron. In no place would
there be the offensive multiplicity of wires. Such a system would be
more durable, needing fewer repairs, than the present, and would not
be much more expensive. For any other apparatus than telephones,
retardation and induction would not be felt on so short cables. With
telephone cables of moderate length these troubles would not be seri-
ous, and, if longer cables were necessary, metallic circuits could be
used.

■♦•♦»

AN OVERDOSE OF HASHEESH.

By MARY C. HUNGERFORD.

BEING one of the grand army of sufferers from headache, I took,
last summer, by order of my physician, three small daily doses
of Indian hemp (hasheesh), in the hope of holding my intimate enemy
in check. Not discovering any of the stimulative effects of the drug,
even after continual increase of the dose, I grew to regard it as a

5io THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

very harmless and inactive medicine, and one day, when I was assured
by some familiar symptoms that my perpetual dull headache was
about to assume an aggravated and acute form, such as usually sent
me to bed for a number of days, I took, in the desperate hope of
forestalling the attack, a much larger quantity of hasheesh than had
ever been prescribed. Twenty minutes later I was seized with a
strange sinking or faintness, which gave my family so much alarm
that they telephoned at once for the doctor, who came in thirty min-
utes after the summons, bringing, as he had been requested, another
practitioner with him.

I had just rallied from the third faint, as I call the sinking turns,
for want of a more descriptive name, and was rapidly relapsing into
another, when the doctors came. One of them asked at once if I had
been taking anything unusual, and a friend who had been sent for
remembered that I had been experimenting with hasheesh. The phy-
sicians asked then the size and time of the last dose, but I could not
answer. I heard them distinctly, but my lips were sealed. Undoubt-
edly my looks conveyed a desire to speak, for Dr. G , bending over

me, asked if I had taken a much larger quantity than he ordered.
I was half sitting up on the bed when he asked me that question,
and, with all my energies bent upon giving him to understand that I
had taken an overdose, I bowed my head, and at once became uncon-
scious of everything except that bowing, which I kept up with ever-
increasing force for seven or eight hours, according to my computa-
tion of time. I felt the veins of my throat swell nearly to bursting,
and the cords tighten painfully, as, impelled by an irresistible force,
I nodded like a wooden mandarin in a tea-store.

In the midst of it all I left my body, and quietly from the foot of
the bed watched my unhappy self nodding with frightful velocity. I
glanced indignantly at the shamefully indifferent group that did not
even appear to notice the frantic motions, and resumed my place in
my living temple of flesh in time to recover sufficiently to observe
one doctor lift his finger from my wrist, where he had laid it to count
the pulsations just as I lapsed into unconsciousness, and say to the
other : " I think she moved her head. She means us to understand
that she has taken largely of the cannabis Indica." So, in the long,
interminable hours I had been nodding my head off, only time enough
had elapsed to count my pulse, and the violent motions of my head
had in fact been barely noticeable. This exaggerated appreciation of
sight, motion, and sound is, I am told, a well-known effect of hasheesh,
but I was ignorant of that fact then, and, even if I had not been,
probably the mental torture I underwent during the time it enchained
my faculties would not have been lessened, as I seemed to have no
power to reason with myself, even in the semi-conscious intervals
which came between the spells.

These intervals grew shorter, and in them I had no power to speak.

AN OVERDOSE OF HASHEESH. 511

My lips and face seemed to myself to be rigid and stony. I thought
tnat I was dying, and, instead of the peace which I had always hoped
would wait on my last moments, I was filled with a bitter, dark despair.
It was not only death that I feared with a wild, unreasoning terror,
but there was a fearful expectation of judgment, which must, I think,
be like the torture of lost souls. I felt half sundered from the flesh,
and my spiritual sufferings seemed to have begun, although I was
conscious of living still.

One terrible reality — I can hardly term it a fancy even now — that
came to me again and again, was so painful that it must, I fear, al-
ways be a vividly remembered agony. Like dreams, its vagaries can
be accounted for by association of ideas past and passing, but the suf-
fering was so intense and the memory of it so haunting that I have
acquired a horror of death unknown to me before. I died, as I be-
lieved, although by a strange double consciousness I knew that I should
again reanimate the body I had left. In leaving it I did not soar
away, as one delights to think of the freed spirits soaring. Neither
did I linger around dear, familiar scenes. I sank, an intangible, im-
palpable shape, through the bed, the floors, the cellar, the earth, down,
down, down ! As if I had been a fragment of glass dropping through
the ocean, I dropped uninterruptedly through the earth and its atmos-
phere, and then fell on and on forever. I was perfectly composed, and
speculated curiously upon the strange circumstance that even in going
through the solid earth there was no displacement of material, and in
my descent I gathered no momentum. I discovered that I was trans-
parent and deprived of all power of volition, as well as bereft of the
faculties belonging to humanity. But in place of my lost senses I had
a marvelously keen sixth sense or power, which I can only describe as
an intense superhuman consciousness that in some way embraced
all the five and went immeasurably beyond them. As time went on,
and my dropping through space continued, I became filled with the
most profound loneliness, and a desperate fear took hold of me that I
should be thus alone for evermore, and fall and fall eternally without
finding rest.

" Where," I thought, " is the Saviour, who has called his own to his
side ? Has he forsaken me now ? " And I strove in my dumb agony
to cry to him. There was, it seemed to me, a forgotten text which,
if remembered, would be the spell to stop my fatal falling and secure
my salvation. I sought in my memory for it, I prayed to recall it, I
fought for it madly, wrestling against the terrible fate which seemed
to withhold it. Single words of it came to me in disconnected mock-
ery, but erased themselves instantaneously. Mentally, I writhed in
such hopeless agony that, in thinking of it, I wonder I could have
borne such excess of emotion and lived. It was not the small fact of
life or death that was at stake, but a soul's everlasting weal.

Suddenly it came. The thick darkness through which I was sink-

5 12 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ing became illuminated with a strange lurid light, and the air, space,
atmosphere, whatever it might be called, separated and formed a wide
black-sided opening, like the deadly pit which shows itself in the cen-
ter of a maelstrom. Then, as I sank slowly into this chasm, from an
immeasurable distance above me, yet forcibly distinct, the words I
longed for were uttered in a voice of heavenly sweetness : " He that
believeth on me hath everlasting life, and shall not come unto condem-
nation." My intense over-natural consciousness took possession of
these words, which were, I knew, my seal of safety, my passport to
heaven. For one wild instant a flash of ineffable joy, the joy of a
ransomed soul, was mine. I triumphed over sin and hell and the un-
utterable horrors of the second death. Then I plunged again into the
outer darkness of the damned. For the talisman which had been so
suddenly revealed was, as if in mockery, as suddenly snatched from
me, and, as before, obliterated from my recollection.

Then all the chaos beyond the gap into which I was falling became
convulsed, as if shaken by wind and storm. Hideous sounds of souls
in torment, and still more hideous peals of mocking, fiendish laughter,
took the place of the hitherto oppressive silence. I was consumed by
a fearful, stinging remorse for the sins done in the body. Unlike the
experience of the drowning, my sins did not present themselves to my
remembrance in an array of mathematical accuracy. On the contrary,
not one was specifically recalled, but, if my daily walk and conversa-
tion had through life been entirely reprobate, and the worst of crimes
my constant pastimes, my consequent agony of self-reproach could
not have been greater. My conscience, in its condition of exaggerated
self-accusation, was not only the worm that never dieth, but a viper
that would sting eternally, a ravening beast that, still insatiate, would
rend and gnaw everlastingly.

I began then, without having reached any goal, and for no apparent
reason, to ascend with neither more nor less swiftness than I had gone
down, and in the same recumbent position in which my forsaken body
lay upon the bed a fathomless distance above, and which I had been
all the time powerless to change. Even the dress, a thin, figured Swiss
muslin, was the same, although a hundred times more diaphanous.
Even in my agonies of remorse I noticed how undisturbed by my fall-
ing were its filmy folds. There was not even a flutter in the delicate
lace with which it was ornamented. As I rose, a great and terrible
voice, from a vast distance, pronounced my doom in these words of
startling import : " In life you declared the negation of the supernatu-
ral. For truth you took a false philosophy. You denied the power
of Christ in time — you shall feel it in eternity. In life, you turned
from him — in death, he turns from you. Fall, fall, fall, to rise again
in hopeless misery, and sink again in lonely agony forever ! " All space
took up the last four words of my terrible sentence, and myriads of
voices, some sweet and sad, some with wicked, vindictive glee, echoed

AN OVERDOSE OF HASHEESH, 513

and re-echoed like a refrain, " In lonely agony forever ! " Then ensued
a wild and terrible commingling of unsyllabled sounds, so unearthly
that it is not in the power of language to fitly describe them. It was
something like a mighty Niagara of shrieks and groans, combined with
the fearful din and crash of thousands of battles and the thunderous
roar of a stormy sea. Over it all came again the same grandly domi-
nant voice, sternly reiterating the four last words of doom, " In lonely
agony forever ! " and all the universe seemed to vibrate with them.

Silence reigned again. A strange, brassy light prevailed ; rapid
and fierce lightning flashed incessantly in all directions, and the shaft-
like opening about me closed together. Impelled by a resistless force
I still rose, although now against a crushing pressure and an active
resistance which seemed to beat me back, and I fought my upward
way in an agony which resembled nothing so much as the terrible
moment when, from strangling or suffocation, all the forces of life
struggle against death, and wrestle madly for another breath. In
place of the woful sounds now reigned a deadly stillness, broken only
at long but regular intervals by a loud report, as if a cannon, louder
than any I ever heard on earth, were discharged at my side, almost
shot into me, I might say, for the sound appeared to rend me from
head to foot, and then die away into the dark chaos about me in
strange, shuddering reverberations. Even in the misery of my asGend-
ing I was filled with a dread expectancy of the cruel sound. It gave
me a feeling of acute physical torture, with a lingering intensity that
bodily suffering could not have. It was repeated an incredible num-
ber of times, and always with the same suffering and shock to me.
At last the sound came oftener, but with less force, and I seemed
again nearing the shores of time. Dimly in the far distance I saw
the room I had left, myself lying still and death-like upon the bed,
and the friends watching me. I knew, with no pleasure in the knowl-
edge, that I should presently reanimate the form I had left. Then,
silently and invisibly, I floated into the room, and was one with my-
self again.

Faint and exhausted, but conscious, the seal of silence still on my
lips, with all the energy I was capable of I struggled to speak, to
move, to make some sign which my friends would understand ; but I
was as mutely powerless as if in the clutch of paralysis. I could hear
every word that was spoken, but the sound seemed strangely far away.
I could not open my eyes without a stupendous effort, and then only
for an instant. " She is conscious now," I heard one of the doctors say,
and he gently lifted the lids of my eyes and looked into them. I tried
my best then to throw all the intelligence I could into them, and re-
turned his look with one of recognition. But, even with my eyes fixed
on his, I felt myself going again in spite of my craving to stay. I
longed to implore the doctor to save me, to keep me from the unutter-
able anguish of falling into the vastness and vagueness of that shadowy

TOL. XXIT. — 33

5i4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

sea of nothingness again. I clasped my hands in wild entreaty ; I was
shaken by horrible convulsions — so, at least, it seemed to me at the
time — but, beyond a slight quivering of the fingers, no movement was
discernible by the others. I was unable to account for the apathy
with which my dearest friends regarded my violent movements, and
could only suppose it was because my condition was so hopeless that
they knew any effort to help me would be futile.

For five hours I remained in the same condition — short intervals
of half-consciousness, and then long lapses into the agonizing experi-
ence I have described. Six times the door of time seemed to close on
me, and I was thrust shuddering into a hopeless eternity, each time
falling, as at first, into that terrible abyss wrapped in the fearful
dread of the unknown. Always there were the same utter helpless-
ness and the same harrowing desire to rest upon something, to stop,
if but for an instant, to feel some support beneath ; and through all
the horrors of my sinking the same solemn and remorseful certainty
penetrated my consciousness that, had I not in life questioned the
power of Christ to save, I should have felt under me the " everlast-
ing arms" bearing me safely to an immortality of bliss. There was
no variation in my trances ; always the same horror came, and each
time when sensibility partially returned I fought against my fate and
struggled to avert it. But I never could compel my lips to speak,
and the violent paroxysms my agonizing dread threw me into were
all unseen by my friends, for in reality, as I was afterward told, I
made no motion except a slight muscular twitching of the fingers.

Later on, when the effect of the drug was lessening, although the
spells or trances recurred, the intervals were long, and in them I seemed
to regain clearer reasoning power and was able to account for some of
my hallucinations. Even when my returns to consciousness were very

partial, Dr. G had made me inhale small quantities of nitrite of

amyl to maintain the action of the heart, which it was the tendency of
the excess of hasheesh to diminish. Coming out of the last trance, I
discovered that the measured rending report like the discharge of a
cannon which attended my upward way was the throbbing of my own
heart. As I sank I was probably too unconscious to notice it, but
always, as it made itself heard, my falling ceased and the pain of my
ascending began. The immense time between the throbs gives me as
I remember it an idea of infinite duration that was impossible to me
before.

For several days I had slight relapses into the trance-like state I
have tried to describe, each being preceded by a feeling of profound
dejection. I felt myself going as before, but by a desperate effort of
will saved myself from falling far into the shadowy horrors which I
saw before me. I dragged myself back from my fate, faint and ex-
hausted and with a melancholy belief that I was cut off from human
sympathy, and my wretched destiny must always be unsuspected by

11

THE CAUSES OF EARTHQUAKES. 515

my friends, for I could not bring myself to speak to any one of the
dreadful foretaste of the hereafter I firmly believed I had experienced.
On one of these occasions, when I felt myself falling from life, I saw a
great black ocean like a rocky wall bounding the formless chaos into
which I sank. As I watched in descending the long line of towering,
tumultuous waves break against some invisible barrier, a sighing whis-
per by my side told me each tiny drop of spray was a human existence
which in that passing instant had its birth, life, and death.
How short a life ! " was my unspoken thought.
Not short in time," was the answer. " A lifetime there is shorter
than the breaking of a bubble here. Each wave is a world, a piece of
here, that serves its purpose in the universal system, then returns again
to be reabsorbed into infinity."

" How pitifully sad is life ! " were the words I formed in my mind
as I felt myself going back to the frame I had quitted.

" How pitifully sadder to have had no life, for only through life
can the gate of this bliss be entered ! " was the whispered answer. " I
never lived — I never shall."

" What are you, then ? "

I had taken my place again among the living when the answer
came, a sighing whisper still, but so vividly distinct that I looked
about me suddenly to see if others besides myself could hear the
strange words :

" Woe, woe ! I am an unreal actual, a formless atom, and of such
as I am is chaos made."

-»•»•■

THE CAUSES OF EARTHQUAKES.

By M. DAUBEEE,

OF THE INSTITUTE OF FRANCE.

T

\HE causes of earthquakes have long been the subject of many
conjectures. The numerous investigations of later years have
contributed much to define their characters ; and several data recently
acquired tend further to make their mechanism clear. It is known
that the shocks are by no means distributed at hap-hazard over the
surface of the globe. The countries where the strata have preserved
their original horizontal position, like the north of France, a part of
Belgium, and the most of Russia, are privileged with tranquillity.
Violent commotions are manifested particularly in regions that have
suffered considerable mechanical accidents, and have acquired their last
relief at a recent epoch, like the region of the Alps, Italy, and Sicily.

The tracts that are simultaneously disturbed by the same shock
most frequently comprise arcs of from 5° to 15°, or from 300 to 1,500
kilometres. They rarely include a much more considerable fraction

5i6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

of the globe ; although the celebrated catastrophe at Lisbon on the
1st of November, 1755, extended over some 17° or 18°, into Africa
and the two Americas, or over a surface equal to about four times
that of Europe.

The detailed examination of many earthquakes has enabled us to
determine the center of the shocks as well as the contours of the dis-
turbed areas. From the manner in which the latter surfaces agree
with the lines of pre-existing dislocations, several of the most distin-
guished geologists, including Mr. Dana, M. Suess, and Albert Heim,
have considered the shocks in question as connected with the forma-
tion of chains of mountains, of which they may be a kind of continu-
ation.

In fact, the crust of the earth everywhere shows the enormous
effects exercised by the lateral pressures that have been in operation
at all epochs. The strata, bent and bent over again many times through
thousands of metres of thickness, as well as the great fractures that
traverse them, are the eloquent witnesses of these mechanical actions.
Notwithstanding the apparent tranquillity now reigning on the surface
of the globe, equilibrium does not exist in the earth, and commotions
have not been arrested in its depths. The proof of this is found, not
only in earthquakes, but also in the slow movements of the soil, of
elevation and depression — a kind of warping, which has continued to
manifest itself within historical times in all parts of the globe. It is
conceivable that slow actions of this kind, after more or less prolonged
strains, may end in abrupt movements, as 321ie de Beaumont supposed.
We can see, also, in experiments intended to imitate the bending of
strata, how gradual inflections lead all at once to fractures and out-
bursts. Simple cavings-in, in deep cavities, have also been regarded
as possibly giving rise to earthquakes ; and this opinion has been
adopted by M. Boussingault after the well-known observations he
made in the Andes. There is, in fact, nothing to prove that disturb-
ances of these different kinds do not take place in the interior of the
globe ; but we may certainly consider them as the general cause of
earthquakes. These shocks are, however, most commonly in evident
connection with volcanoes ; and it is in the neighborhood of the latter
that they are especially frequent. As is well known, every volcanic
eruption is announced by precursory earthquakes, the violence of
which is stilled when an outlet is opened for the vapor of water which
is successively the cause of the subterranean agitations and the pro-
jecting agent of all the eruptions. The tension of the vapor in the
volcanic reservoirs must be very high. Thus, that pressure which
forces the lava up to more than 3,000 metres above the sea, to the top
of Etna, can not be less than a thousand atmospheres.

An attentive study of the phenomena confirms the attribution of
the cause of the shocks, however violent they may be, to the vapor of
water. It is sufficient for this to be the case for vaporization to take

THE CAUSES OF EARTHQUAKES. 517

place at a temperature of 1,000° C. (1,800° Fahr.), approximately that of
lava, and under a volume equivalent to that of the water in the liquid
state whence the vapor is derived. Under these conditions, we must
suppose the vaporization to be total, for the critical temperature,
above which the liquefaction of vapor can not be realized, is, accord-
ing to M. Clausius, 332° C. (629° F.). The pressure, of which it is
also possible to make an approximate estimate, then becomes compar-
able to that of the most powerfully explosive gases, and is, conse-
quently, capable of producing very considerable dynamic effects.
These effects may also be produced at a much lower temperature than
that of lavas at 500° C. (900° F.) ; for example, if we suppose that
the volume imposed upon the vapor is so limited as to correspond to a
density of 0*8 or 0*9. No doubt such conditions are realized in the
lower regions of the globe, where water is confined within limited
spaces, and as hot as the melted rocks which we see gushing out from
the surface at a temperature of 1,000° C. (1,800° F.) or more. We
shall see, however, that such depths and such a temperature are not
necessary.

The vapor of water when superheated acquires a power of which
the most terrible boiler-explosions could give no idea if we had not
the result before our eyes. The tubes of the best quality of iron that
I used in observing the action of superheated water in the formation
of silicates had an inside diameter of twenty-one millimetres and
were eleven millimetres thick. They sometimes exploded, and were
projected into the air with a noise like that of the firing of a cannon.
Before bursting, the tubes swelled out into bulbous forms, and rents
were opened in the middle of the bulbs. If the iron had no flaws and
according to the estimate that it would preserve up to 450° C. (810° F.),
the temperature to which it was raised, the same tenacity it had when
cold, such rents must have indicated a pressure of several thousand
atmospheres. A few cubic centimetres of water were sufficient to pro-
duce an effect like that ; and, considering the small dimensions of the
inside of the tubes as compared with the volume of the water, the
vapor must have reached a density of about 0*9. If we apply the data
we possess to the depths of the globe, it is not difficult to conceive
very simple dispositions in which the vapor of water, under the condi-
tions we have just determined, will suddenly provoke shocks or series
of shocks that will too often make themselves felt on the surface.
Whatever conception we may form of the volcanic reservoirs, we must
admit it to be very probable that solutions of continuity exist between
the soft or fluid masses in fusion and the solid masses superposed
over them. Moreover, cavities may also exist in the solid rocks them-
selves that lie over the soft masses. On the other hand, the incessant
losses, which these internal reservoirs suffer in consequence of the enor-
mous volumes of water in the condition of vapor which they disen-
gage every day, are probably repaired by supplies from the surface.

5i8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

I have shown by experiment that these supplies may be transmitted
through the pores of some kinds of rocks. Simple capillary action,
in conjunction with gravity, may force water to penetrate against very
strong counter-pressure, from the superficial and cooler regions of the
globe, to deep and hot regions, where, by reason of the temperature
and pressure it acquires there, it becomes capable of producing very
great mechanical and chemical effects. If we suppose that water pene-
trates, either directly or after a halt in a reservoir where it has remained
liquid, to masses in fusion, so as to acquire there an enormous tension
and an explosive force, we shall have the cause of the anterior real ex-
plosions and of the instantaneous shocks due to gases at high pressure.
If the cavities, instead of forming a single reservoir, are divided into
several parts or distinct compartments, there is no reason why the ten-
sion of the vapor should be the same in the different receivers, pro-
vided they are separated by walls of rock. The pressure may even be
very different in two or more of them. This admitted, if a separating
wall is broken by excess of pressure or melted by the heat, vapor at
high pressure will be set in motion, and in the presence of the solid
masses upon which it will strike it will behave just as if there had
been an instantaneous formation of vapor, as we supposed in the former
case.

It is very hard to establish, as has been attempted, a clear line of
demarkation between the character of the earthquakes of volcanic re-
gions proper and of regions without volcanoes, such as Portugal, Asia
Minor (Chios, April 3, 1881, five thousand victims), Syria, Algeria, and
the rim of the Mediterranean generally. In both classes, the charac-
teristic manifestations which we perceive are the same. If, as some
assume, the internal movements of the rocks were a cause of real
earthquakes, it could only be because those internal movements me-
chanically developed heat, and in that way provoked the formation of
vapor. But, in the recently disturbed regions we have especially in
view, which are the seat of so frequent shocks, another cause is much
more probable. There doubtless remain in them interstices and inte-
rior cavities that permit the access of water to the hot regions. The
depth of the centers of disturbance of earthquakes has been estimated,
in different cases, by calculations only grossly approximate, at eleven
kilometres, twenty-seven kilometres, and thirty-eight kilometres. In
any case, such depth, though very slight in comparison with the length
of the radius of the earth, is great enough for the temperature at the
normal rate of increase to be very high ; and the same will also be
the case with the water that may be present there. Now, as we have
already seen, a temperature of 500° C. (900° Fahr.) is sufficient to cause
water to explode with violence.

It is certainly in the largest number of cases very difficult to admit
collisions of solid bodies in the interior as the moving causes of earth-
quakes. How, for instance, can we conceive that so violent and ex-

THE CAUSES OF EARTHQUAKES. 519

tensive an earthquake as that of Lisbon on the 1st of November, 1755,
was produced in this way ? John Mitchell (Royal Society, 1760, vol.
x, p. 751) drew from this memorable example the conclusion that the
vapor of water intervenes in these shocks as well as in the eruptions
of volcanoes. Manifest effects of a class of internal explosions, un-
doubtedly due to the production or sudden moving of a great quantity
of superheated vapor, are exhibited at the present epoch, and are not
rare. Such explosions, for instance, are exceptionally formidable in
the region of Java, and the mind is naturally led to the one which has
just convulsed the zone between that island and Sumatra, which has
caused the disappearance of the island of Krakatoa and its mountains,
has raised other mountains, and has claimed more than forty thousand
victims.

At a period more remote from us, the explosive force of interior
gases gave rise to very remarkable circular cavities, which have been
called " craters of explosion," and are well known. Examples of them
are found in Auvergne (Lake Pavin) and in the district of the Eifel,
where the stratified beds have been sharply cut as if with a punch.
What gases thus put in motion are capable of, as a mechanical power,
could hardly have been suspected till since the explosive effects of gun-
cotton, nitroglycerine, and dynamite, have been known. The effects of
compressed air in the air-gun and of the powder-gases in fire-arms have
been wonderfully surpassed, for we now measure explosive pressures
of six thousand atmospheres and more. In the experiments in which
I have had occasion to observe gases at high pressure in order to ex-
plain the action that a meteor coming with planetary speed is sub-
jected to on the part of the atmosphere into which it plunges, I have
been surprised at witnessing the great energy of gaseous masses. They
engrave themselves deeply, as if with a burner, into the pieces of steel
that are opposed to them, and of themselves reduce a part of it to an
impalpable dust shot into the atmosphere as if it were volcanic ashes.
It is no less surprising — and this observation is of much importance in
explaining the problem that occupies us — to remark the tenuity of the
gaseous mass that produces such results. Yet its force causes rup-
tures which the pressure of a weight six hundred thousand times
heavier than the gas could not effect !

In short, gaseous movements under high pressure, put in operation
from time to time by a simple mechanism like what Nature can and
does present, will account for all the essential features of earthquakes.
Much better than the hypothesis of interior collisions of solid bodies,
they explain the effect of the shock, resembling the blows of a ram,
their violence, their frequent succession, and their recurrence in the
same regions after many centuries ; they explain also the production
of earthquakes in regions of dislocation, especially in those in which
the disturbance is recent, and their subordination to deep fractures of
the crust of the earth.

520 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Earthquakes seem to be volcanic eruptions that are suppressed
because they can not find any outlet, nearly as Dolomieu thought. The
motive power of gases, the immense effects of which we can see in the
protuberances or jets shot out from the sun with prodigious speed and
of enormous dimensions, appears to be sufficiently considerable in the
depths of the globe also to explain all the effects of earthquakes. —
Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scienti-
fique.

-+•■+-

LAST WILLS AND TESTAMENTS.

By JOSEPH W. SUTPHEN.

CAN a will of real or personal property be so prepared and executed
as, barring questions of incapacity and undue influence, to be in-
contestable ? Protracted and expensive litigation, frequently involv-
ing a period of years, often eating up large portions of estates, and
finally resulting in the defeat of a testator's wishes, suggests this oft-
repeated question. Considering the matter of execution first, noth-
ing would appear simpler. Our statutory requirements are few and
explicit, and, if properly observed, the inquiry, so far as execution
is concerned, is easily answered. The provisions of the New York
Revised Statutes are —

1. That the will shall be in writing, and subscribed by the testator
at the end.

2. That such subscription shall be made by the testator in the
presence of each of the attesting witnesses, or shall be acknowledged
by him to have been so made to each of the attesting witnesses.

3. The testator at the time of making such subscription, or at the
time of acknowledging the same, shall declare the instrument so sub-
scribed to be his last will and testament.

4. There shall be at least two attesting witnesses, each of whom
shall sign his name as a witness, at the end of the will, at the request
of the testator.

These provisions are practically the same in most of the United
States, with the exception, perhaps, of Louisiana, unless it be that
some of the States require three or more in the place of two wit-
nesses. An intelligent compliance with the above directions would
seem in no wise difficult, yet many an intended will has proved an
abortion, solely from lack of their observance, ignorance, and careless-
ness, and in some instances, no doubt, forgetfulness on the part of
witnesses as to what actually transpired at the execution, explaining
the circumstance. A witness's stupidity or forgetfulness can not easily
be guarded against,, except by the selection of intelligent witnesses.
This sometimes, as in the case where the testator is in extremis, is im-
possible ; but a stupid or forgetful witness to a will is a great misfor-

LAST WILLS AND TESTAMENTS. 521

tune, for he may utterly destroy its value. Unless proof aliunde is
obtainable, showing that the requirements of the statute were duly
observed, there is great probability that the will will be rejected by
the surrogate, and his decree sustained by appellate tribunals.

In November, 1850, an instrument, dated February 2, 1849, was
offered for probate to the Surrogate of Kings County, New York, as
the last will and testament of Thomas Lewis. It devised all his real
and personal estate to his wife ; but its probate was opposed by the
heirs of the deceased. This document was signed in the proper hand-
writing of Mr. Lewis ; it had two subscribing witnesses, while attached
to the will and above the signatures of the witnesses was an attesta-
tion clause in the following words :

" The above-written instrument was subscribed by the said Thomas
Lewis in our presence, and acknowledged by him to each of us, and
he at the same time declared the above instrument so subscribed to be
his last will and testament, and we, at his request, have signed our
names as witnesses hereto."

On the contest, Ferris Tripp, one of the witnesses, swore that he
was a clerk in the store of the deceased at the date of the will, and
that Wing, the other witness, was also a clerk ; that he (the witness)
signed his name at the end of the attestation clause, at the request of
the testator ; that, on the occasion when he did so, Wing and he were
called by the deceased into his private office, where he had a paper, of
which he turned up so much as would allow them to write their names
thereon, requesting them to sign the same and add their residences ;
that he also then said, " I declare the within to be my free will and
deed " ; that this was all that was said, according to his recollection,
and that he and Wing then signed their names to the instrument
where they appeared ; that he did not then know to a certainty what
the instrument was, but thought it a will from the fact that the de-
ceased had that morning sent out and procured a blank will. On cross-
examination this witness testified that at the time he signed his name
to the instrument it was so folded or placed upon the desk that he saw
no part of the contents, and that neither the same nor any part of it
was read to him ; that he did not see the testator sign it, nor did he
see his signature to it when he signed as a witness.

The other witness testified in substance that he signed his name to
the alleged will in the office of the deceased ; that he was unable to say
what occurred on that occasion, but that, according to his recollection,
he signed at the request of the deceased ; that he had no recollection
that the deceased said anything else to him at the time he signed, un-
less it was " to see him sign the document " ; that he did not recollect
that the deceased signed the instrument in his presence ; that he had no
recollection that Tripp, the other witness, was present when he signed,
and could not state anything further which occurred or was said or
done by the deceased on the occasion. On his cross-examination he

522 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

further testified that he did not read nor was any part of the instru-
ment read to him when he signed it, and that he had no recollection
that he then knew what the paper was.

Here was an instrument which on its face met all the requirements
of the law. It was in writing ; it was subscribed by the testator at
the end ; it had two subscribing witnesses, and a full attestation clause.
The testimony of Tripp and Wing completely nullified it ; their want
of recollection, although less than two years had elapsed since its
execution, effectually prevented its probate. The probabilities are,
that all legal technicalities had been observed, but the particular facts
had escaped the memories of the witnesses. The surrogate adjudged
it no will ; the widow appealed to the General Term, which affirmed
the decree of the surrogate, and then to the Court of Appeals, which
affirmed the General Term (Lewis vs. Lewis, UN. Y., 220).

Ignorance and carelessness are even more reprehensible than stu-
pidity or forgetfulness, and each has proved a prolific source of evil
to testators' intentions, of expense to suitors, and of disappointment to
apparent legatees. Assumption of the sufficiency of one's own knowl-
edge regarding matters concerning which he has little or no informa-
tion has caused the wishes of more than one testator to utterly fail, or
ruined his estate in costly litigation. Books entitled " Every Man
his own Lawyer," "Legal Directory," "Legal Remembrancer," are
not, as a rule, the best fountains from which to quench legal thirst.
Their accuracy is often subject to impeachment, and their pages have
more than once proved to the layman a stumbling-block. Nor should
relations complain of the courts if carelessness has led him into the
execution of an instrument which proves either to be no will at all,
or only such after much of his estate has been squandered to ascer-
tain the fact. It is always wise to prepare and execute such a docu-
ment in the leisure moments of life, for to do so in articulo mortis is
a serious matter in more senses than one, concerning which a man
should think twice, for, if he leave it until then, he will have little
time to think at all. Mr. Gordon undoubtedly thought he knew how
to draw a will well enough when he executed the following :

" Dear old Nance, I wish to give you my watch, two shawls, and
also $5,000. Your old friend, E. A. Gordon."

After much litigation this was established as a will, but it is likely
that "old Nance " was obliged to content herself with the watch and
two shawls (Clarke vs. Ransom, 50 Cal., 595).

So, too, with Ehrenberg's will, who was the author of the follow-
ing laconic testament — a model of brevity :

" Mrs. Sophie Loper is my heiress."

(Signature.)
Following which appeared :

" The legatee's name is correctly spelled Loeper.'

it

LAST WILLS AND TESTAMENTS. 523

To this there were no witnesses, the law of Louisiana requiring none.
After ten years' litigation or controversy this was also sustained as a
will (Succession of Ehrenberg, 21 La. Ann., 280). The sufficiency of
the legal attainments of each testator in these instances, it is true,
was enough, but to establish that fact old Nance and Mrs. Loper un-
doubtedly paid handsomely. In the following case the success of the
would-be testator was not so signal :

In 1876 an instrument purporting to be the last will and testament
of John Kelly was offered for probate to the Surrogate of the County
of New York. It was partly written and partly printed, and was ap-
parently a short form of will such as may be purchased at a stationer's.
After disposing of his property, this document ran as follows :

" Likewise I make, constitute, and appoint Edward McCarthy to
be executor, J. Kelly, of this my last will and testament, hereby re-
voking all former wills by me made. In witness whereof I have here-
unto subscribed my name and affixed my seal the 24th day of July,
1874, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty.

Witnesses :

Ed ward McCarthy,
Daniel Van Clief.

Subscribed by John Kelly , the testator named, etc."

When the deceased requested the witnesses to sign the instrument,
the name J. Kelly had already been written by him where it first ap-
pears. The witnesses then signed it, and afterward the deceased
wrote his name where it appears in the attestation clause. The point
in dispute touched the first requirement of the statute : Was the sub-
scription J. Kelly in the body of the instrument a " subscribing at the
end of the will " ? The subscription John Kelly in the attestation
clause was, of course, bad, being made after the witnesses had signed.
It appeared from the evidence that the testator presented the instru-
ment to the witnesses, saying : " I drawed up a will for fear anything
might happen me before coming back ; in case there was any dispute
about the trifle of money I have, I want you to witness this will."
The name J. Kelly had been written in before this was said. The
surrogate rejected the instrument, as not executed and attested in the
manner prescribed by law. The General Term reversed his decree,
directed that the will be admitted to probate, and that letters testa-
mentary issue thereon (7 Huec, 290). The Court of Appeals then
finally settled the law in the case by reversing the Supreme Court and
setting aside the instrument as absolutely void (67 N. Y., 409). A
curious circumstance in connection with the proof of this instrument
is the fact that the Supreme Court were unanimously of the opinion
that this document was a will, while the Court of Appeals were unani-
mously of the opinion that it was not ! Even when, by a mistake in
turning over the paper, the signature is put on the back of a blank

524 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

page occurring in the middle of the will, it can not be sustained
(Heady's Will, 15 Abb. Pr., N. S., 211).

Instances might be multiplied to illustrate the serious consequences
resulting from ignorance, carelessness, stupidity, or forgetfulness in
the execution and proof of wills, but these are sufficient to emphasize
the necessity of intelligence, accuracy, and forethought in the matter.
Returning to the discussion of execution :

1. The will must be in writing, and subscribed by the testator at
the end.

Apparently this is plain and concise enough, and adapted to the
comprehension of a child, yet a long list of expensive appeals attest to
the difficulty experienced in solving the meaning of this phraseology.
What is writing? What is a signature? Where is the end of a
will ? are questions which appellate courts have been called upon to
determine. If a will be printed ; if it be done by a type-writer ; if it
be executed wholly in lead-pencil, instead of ink ; if the signature be
by a mark, or if it be made by another at the request of and for the
testator ; if the signature, as in the case of the will of J. Kelly (supra),
be not immediately at the foot of the instrument — these and similar
inquiries call for an answer to the quaere, "Have the requirements of
the statute been complied with ? " It has already appeared that J. Kel-
ly's will was not a will. The Court of Appeals, it is true, decided this
case on other grounds than the single fact that the signature occurred
before reaching the end of the document. Perhaps, if nothing of im-
portance had followed the signature (McGuire vs. Kerr, 2 Brad., 244),
the court would have sustained the decision of the General Term, and
held the will to have been properly executed ; but the fate of this
instrument conclusively shows that it is not safe to tamper with a
statute, and that the end of a will is at the end ; in other words, the
testator should have signed immediately above the witnesses, at the
conclusion of the document.

Printed wills and wills executed by a type-writer have been held
to be written within the meaning of the statute. On March 9, 1883,
Judge York, at New Haven, Connecticut, admitted the will of James
Willey, which was in type-writing, to probate, holding that the legal
definition of writing included printing. The Supreme Court of Penn-
sylvania, in the case of Myers vs. Vanderbilt (1 Schuylkill Leg. Reg.,
55), recently decided that ink was not essential, by recognizing as
valid a will which was wholly written in lead-pencil and so subscribed.
This agrees with the views of ex-Surrogate D. C. Calvin, of New
York, who, in October, 1878, admitted the will of Henry J. Mann,
otherwise and better known as the actor Montague, to probate. This
will was written and signed wholly in pencil, upon a leaf torn from an
ordinary diary or small memorandum-book, and was as follows :

" If anything happens to me, I make this my last will and testa-

LAST WILLS AND TESTAMENTS. 525

ment in favor of my mother, who is to take everything I possess ; in

case of her death, then my sister inherits all my effects. L. Simon

and Arthur Sewell I appoint executors.

H. J. Montague."

On the back of this scrap, also in pencil, occurs :

" Witnessed by T. R. Edwaeds,

Louis M. Simon."

In cases of contracts, lead-pencil agreements have repeatedly been
held sufficient (Merrit vs. Clason, 12 Johns., 102 ; Clason vs. Bailey,
14 id., 484 ; Brown vs. Butchers' and Drovers' Bank, 6 Hill, 443),
and the same reasoning applicable to such applies also to testaments.
It is certainly to be hoped that the tendency of the decisions in this
respect will change. The door for the admission of fraud is here
opened too wide. To erase and rewrite in the body of the will is much
too easily and cleverly accomplished, and this temptation should be
removed by statutory enactment or judicial interpretation.

A mark or cross has been held a good subscription. Some years
ago Moses W. Jackson left a will signed —

his

Moses W. X Jackson.

mark.

The surrogate adjudged this sufficiently subscribed ; the Supreme
Court upheld the surrogate, and the Court of Appeals sustained the
Supreme Court, holding that it was not even necessary that the words
" Moses W. Jackson, his mark " should have been written before he
made the X . The law would undoubtedly admit the cross if the
words were entirely wanting, under proper evidence (Jackson vs.
Jackson, 39 IT. S., 153). If the testator requests a third person to
subscribe the will for him, and it be done in the presence of the wit-
nesses, it comes within the statute (Campbell vs. Logan, 2 Brad., 90 ;
Van Hanswyck vs. Wiesl, 44 Barb., 494). But such third person
must himself also sign as a witness.

2. Such subscription shall be made by the testator in the presence
of each of the attesting witnesses, or shall be acknowledged by him
to have been so made to each of the attesting witnesses.

On December 1, 1865, William Baskin made a last will, and five
weeks afterward died at the age of eighty-nine years. Thirteen years
before he had made a previous will, which still continued in existence.
At his death the will of 1865 was offered for probate to the Surrogate
of Yates County, New York, but its admission was contested. The
evidence showed that the last will was drawn by one Henry Smith on
the morning of December 1, 1865, at the bedside of the deceased ;
that the whole was read over to him, clause by clause, and that Mr.
Baskin at the completion of the reading sat up on the side of the bed
and wrote his name at the foot of the will without assistance and

526 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

without spectacles. Mr. Smith then affixed his own signature at the
request of the deceased, as an attesting witness. Mr. Wilsey, the other
witness, was then called in from the adjoining room, when the testator
said, "I want you to sign this will," Mr. Smith at the same time
handing it to him. While still in Smith's hand, the latter asked the
testator if he acknowledged it to be his last will and testament. He
said " Yes." Wilsey then signed, when Mr. Baskin said, " That kills
the other will." No conflict of evidence existed. Both witnesses
agreed that the signature of the testator was affixed before Wilsey
came into the room, and that Mr. Baskin did not expressly state in
his presence that he had signed the will. The surrogate said this was
no will, for it had not been signed in the presence of each attesting
witness, but the Supreme Court reversed his decree, and the Court of
Appeals affirmed the Supreme Court, holding : " Where the testator
produces a paper bearing his personal signature, requests the witnesses
to attest it, and declares it to be his last will and testament, he thereby
acknowledges the subscription within the meaning of the statute"
(Baskin vs. Baskin, 36 N. Y., 416). In fact, it is not even necessary
that the subscribing witnesses should be shown the signature of the
testator to the will at the time of acknowledging its execution.

In 1866 the will of Samuel Mott came before the Surrogate of
Queens County, Long Island, for probate. It was contested upon the
ground, among others, that it had not been signed in the presence of
each witness, they signing after the testator but on different days, and
that at least one of them had not so much as seen Mr. Mott's signa-
ture, the document being so folded when executed as to hide the name.
The surrogate admitted it, however, the Supreme Court and Court of
Appeals affirming his decision (Willis vs. Mott, 36 N. Y., 486 ;
Hoystradt vs. Kingman, 22 N. Y., 372). So in the case of Ellis vs.
Smith, decided in 1754 (1 Yesey, Jr., 11) by Lord Chancellor Hard-
wicke, assisted by Sir John Strange and the Chief -Justice of the Com-
mon Pleas and Chief Baron of the Exchequer, it was held that a tes-
tator's declaration was equivalent to an actual signing in the presence
of the witnesses, a rule unchanged by the statute under consideration.

These cases show that considerable latitude is tolerated under this
section, but that one of two facts must transpire in order to comply
with its terms — either an actual subscribing by the testator in the
presence of each of the witnesses before they sign ; or a clear, indis-
putable acknowledgment to each of them that the instrument has been
already so subscribed by him (Chaffee vs. Baptist Missionary Conven-
tion, 10 Paige, R. 85). Of course, in the latter case, if the subscrip-
tion subsequently appears wanting, such acknowledgment amounts to
nothing ; there is no will.

3. The testator, at the time of making such subscription, or at the
time of acknowledging the same, shall declare the instrument, so sub-
scribed, to be his last will and testament.

LAST WILLS AND TESTAMENTS. 527

Here, again, nice questions have arisen. What is a declaration that
" this is my last will and testament " ? Is it sufficient that the ques-
tion be asked me and that I assent thereto by " yes " or a nod ? If I
say " This is my free will and deed," have I fulfilled the requirement,
or must I use the precise words " This is my last will and testament " ?
These and kindred inquiries have perplexed the courts, and weary
litigants have been forced to possess their souls in patience, awaiting
the interpretation of blunders which could easily have been avoided in
this particular of execution. The courts say it is not imperative that
the word " declare " should be employed — I " acknowledge " this paper
to be my last will and testament is enough (Seguine vs. Seguine, 2
Barb., 385). But a mere nod of assent to the inquiry, " Is this your
last will and testament ? " observed only by one of the persons pres-
ent, is not enough (Burritt vs. Silliman, 16 Barb., 198), while an an-
swer " yes " to the inquiry has been held sufficient (Coffin vs. Coffin,
23 N. Y., 9). To say " This is my free will and deed " is not good,
for, as above appeared, the Court of Appeals has held that Thomas
Lewis failed to acknowledge his will, although he used these particular
words, and rejected his final testamentary disposition as a nullity.
What apparently could be easier than to say " This is my last will
and testament " at the proper time and under the proper circumstances ?
yet that many fail to either use these simple words, or to know the pro-
prieties of time or circumstance, is shown by the foregoing cases.

4. There shall be at least two attesting witnesses, each of whom
shall sign his name as a witness at the end of the will, at the request
of the testator.

A will with but one witness is bad on its face — it is no will ; it is
a plain failure to observe an all-important formality, but questions
" What is a signing by a witness ? " " Where is the end of a will ? " and
" What constitutes a testator's request?" have been before the courts
for determination. To answer the first two inquiries briefly, it is
enough to state that the same rules which apply to the testator's sig-
nature and to the place of his subscription apply with equal force to
witnesses. A witness's mark is good (Meehan vs. Rourke, 2 Brad.,
385 ; Morris vs. Kniffen, 37 Barb., 336), and he should sign after the
testator, immediately at the conclusion of the instrument. Concerning
the third " inquiry " as to the request, some contrariety of opinion has
existed as to what shall be deemed sufficient. The following cases are
in point :

A request may be implied ; it need not be in express terms, as, if
the testatrix be told in the presence of the witnesses that they have
come to witness her will, and she then bow assent and they sign it,
it is a request (Brown vs. De Selding, 4 Sand., 10 ; Peck vs. Carey, 27
N. Y., 9). Handing a will to the witnesses, at the same time evincing
a desire to have them sign it, is enough (Gamble vs. Gamble, 39 Barb.,
373). But a mere request to sign, without in some way disclosing the

528 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

nature of the paper, is bad (Harris's Estate, 1 Tuck., 293). Such ques-
tions as, " Will you witness my will ? " or " I want you to witness my
will," if addressed to both witnesses, are good (Van Hooser vs. Van
Hooser, 5 N. Y. Surr., 365), but bad if addressed to only one of them
(Rutherford vs. Rutherford, 1 Denio, 33).

Touching the question of the formalities of execution, a word on
foreign wills is in place. All wills of residents of this State executed
in foreign countries in accordance with the laws of the country where
executed, but not in accordance with the law of New York, and all
wills of foreigners executed in accordance with the law of their for-
eign domicile, if not also in accordance with the law of this State,
who die leaving no property situated or which afterward comes here,
are not admissible to probate, not because they are necessarily il-
legal, but because the statute-book declares this to be the law. The
importance of this provision must particularly commend itself to the
mind of every citizen intending to make a will, and contemplating
a visit beyond the jurisdiction of his own domicile. Sometimes an
action in the Supreme Court to establish such succeeds ; but who can
be found willing to unnecessarily involve his estate in litigation to
ascertain the validity of a will when it can easily be avoided ? The
surrogate has certainly no power to admit such wills.

In concluding this discussion on the execution of a will, it may
properly be said that the instrument must be fully completed before
death — that is, it must have been subscribed by the testator at its
foot, in the presence of the witnesses, or the subscription so acknowl-
edged ; it must have been declared to them to be his last will and
testament, and the witnesses must actually have signed it, at his re-
quest, for, if he die ere this is accomplished, there is no will (Yernon
vs. Spencer, 3 Brad., 16). Simple as these statutory requirements are,
the instances cited prove that even the question of execution is not
free from serious snares. Yet a literal compliance with the formali-
ties of the statute is not required, a substantial observance of them
being sufficient (Coffin vs. Coffin, supra).

It is entirely possible to execute a will so as to be technically incon-
testable.

Touching the graver question as to preparing or drawing the will —
in other words, considering its contents, whether its provisions offend
the law or not — the scope of the inquiry broadens and becomes very
comprehensive. It presupposes on the part of the draftsman a knowl-
edge of the law as determined in unnumbered decisions adjudicated
both in England and the United States. The common law, principles
of international comity, and statute-books, all must be resorted to
in answering the question. It assumes in the writer of the will an
accurate and extended fund of information upon the subject of trusts,
powers, and uses, and generally an intimate acquaintance with all the
nice details relating to that great branch of jurisprudence — real estate.

LAST WILLS AND TESTAMENTS. 529

It suggests a familiarity with laws past and laws present, and it means,
if it means anything, that competent intelligence must guide the hand
which guides the pen.

In view of these facts, there is small reason to complain at the
litigation so frequently entailed in connection with estates. To pre-
pare or draw a will is not the simple matter some imagine it to be,
even when short and free from intricate questions of law. The
slightest ambiguity in language, giving opportunity for dispute as to
the testator's real intentions ; ignorance of the legal effect of certain
dispositions made in the instrument ; wishes imperfectly expressed ;
illegible writing ; erasures ; interlineations, and circumstances similar
in character, are all fruitful of evil consequences. The books are full
of instances where instruments have been propounded as wills, but
which have proved to be still-born, or, if initiated into existence as
living, genuine wills, only so after the ordeal of many years' litigation
to determine their genuineness, sufficiency, or construction, has been
endured. Like surgery, law is a science. The unscientific man may
with equal propriety endeavor to amputate his own limb as draw his
own will. In each case he has ventured upon a field in which he has
neither knowledge, experience, nor skill. He may succeed, but every
probability points to a fatal result.

The antiquity of testaments is such that many imagine that to pre-
pare and execute one is a matter of general information — one concern-
ing which all are competent to speak. It is true that this mode of
transferring title or ownership dates far back into remote ages.
Writers assert that abundant evidence exists that wills were in use
among the Hebrews in the earliest times. Plutarch speaks of their
introduction by Solon into Athens, some six hundred years before the
Christian era. The Twelve Tables gave to the Romans the right of
bequeathing their property, a power which in England is coeval with
the invasion of the Saxon, for no record or memorial exists of a
period when this right did not obtain. But this antiquity proves
nothing. Other sciences are equally old.

To prepare or draw a icill can only safely be undertaken by him
whose intelligence and experience have earned him the right to assume
the task.

The subject of incapacity and undue influence is not embraced in
this inquiry, but a word in reference to it may not be out of place.
No will was ever yet drawn, nor can one be, which was or will be
proof against attack from this quarter. That many have been dis-
gracefully contested by shameless relatives is true; for, to forget such
in his will, even if related to the deceased but in the remotest degree,
is conclusive evidence to the minds of some that the sanest or most
self-willed man while living has proved, in spite of all, weak and in-
sane at death. Because contests frequently arise, however, from this

cause, it does not follow that this is not at times a very proper ground
vol. xxiv. — 34

53o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

to take in resisting the probate of a will. To do so would be to fly
directly in the face of the decision of Delafield vs. Parrish (22 N. Y., 9),
where the question of incapacity was so ably and exhaustively pre-
sented to the Court of Appeals by Mr. Evarts, Mr. O'Conor, and other
illustrious counsel. No one can fairly doubt, after reading the able
opinion of the Court in that celebrated case, that Henry Parrish was
incompetent to execute the last two codicils to his will. It is true he
had been a keenly intelligent man ; he had amassed a large fortune ;
he had never acted in life from impulse, for wisdom, discretion, and
reflection prevailed in his counsels. Yet, after his paralytic stroke,
he became a changed man. The quiet, urbane gentleman became a
fretful invalid, forgetful of even the proprieties of life. Idiotic de-
mentia took possession of his once-active brain. It was in this condi-
tion, and after the stroke of paralysis, that the last two codicils were
executed. It should occasion no surprise that the courts utterly refused
to receive them. Still, that much abuse of this objection to the pro-
bate of a will is prevalent, is undeniable. Nor does there seem to be
any cure for the disease, unless the theory " omne testamentum morte
consummation est / et voluntas testatoris est ambulatoria usque ad
mortem" be changed, and every man allowed to probate his own will
before he dies, if he desire. Let him summon all who have the right
to contest his ability, etc., to execute a will, and, if they do not appear,
or if they do not succeed in showing his inability so to do, they shall
be forever estopped from attacking the will thereafter. Of course,
there are serious objections to this course, for all beneficiaries would
then know the contents of the document, and few men care to let the
world into the secret of their final intentions or ulterior purposes ; still
this law has been tried in some of the States successfully and satisfac-
torily. Whatever is contained in this paper on last wills and testa-
ments applies with equal force to codicils.

-«*-0~

FIFTY YEAES OF MECHANICAL ENGINEEPJNG.*

By ABNER C. HARDING.

I WILL begin by referring to the steam-plant employed for manu-
facturing purposes. In 1832 the stationary engine was commonly
the beam-engine, often condensing but seldom compounded. Steam
was supplied by boilers having but little resemblance to the boilers
which most of us are familiar with. The name given the boilers ex-
plains their form ; they were variously called tun, hay-stack, balloon,
elephant, chimney, and ring boiler, to each of which they severally
bore a striking resemblance. They were built in utter disregard of all

* Read before the Tcoria Scientific Society, March 24, 18S3.

FIFTY YEARS OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING. 531

laws relating to the strength of material, but were well adapted for
the convenience of the firemen, in that the flues were of such size that
a man could pass through them to remove accumulated soot.

The result was, that the boilers were incapable of withstanding an
internal pressure of more than four or five pounds to the square inch.
The low pressure made a large cylinder necessary to secure the required
power, and the size of the cylinder restricted the speed, which rarely
exceeded 250 feet a minute. The boilers were commonly fed by a tank
situated high enough to enable the water to overcome the pressure of
the steam. The low pressure and slow piston-speed necessitated very
large cylinders relatively to the power obtained. The consumption of
fuel was about ten pounds to the one horse-power per hour.

The governing was done by slowly-revolving pendulum-arms scarce-
ly securing centrifugal force enough to raise the balls and actuate the
butterfly-valve in the steam supply-pipe, thus making a very poor and
inefficient governor. The low speed made a very heavy fly-wheel
necessary to secure uniformity of motion, also costly trains of gear-
wheels to secure the rotative speed required for factory-work.

In 1882 the boilers are cylindrical, frequently internally fired, and,
thanks to Sir William Fairbairn's circumferential bands, the flue, sub-
jected to external pressure, is so strengthened that the danger of col-
lapse is removed even with our present high pressures. The tendency
of the day seems to incline toward the water-tube sectional type of
boiler and a rational system of inspection and test. The pressures in
use to-day vary from 80 to 150 pounds. The piston-speed is nearer
500 feet per minute, often 800 and 1,000. An engine of 1832 capable
of exerting 25 one horse-power to-day would indicate about 250 work-
ing under fair conditions. The same expenditure of fuel to-day would
give nearly four times the power.

The decrease in size of the cylinder due to the higher pressures has
made higher rotative speeds possible ; hence, the engine requires a
much lighter fly-wheel, and the governing is made more effective. The
most efficient engines of to-day are found in our city pumping-stations.
Here the conditions are favorable for securing the highest economy,
a duty of 100,000,000 foot-pounds being frequently secured. The
engine of to-day for mill-use is, comparatively speaking, a portable
engine requiring nothing but a foundation to bolt it to. The engine of
fifty years ago wTas not self-contained or self-supporting, but required
to be built from the ground up, and the support of walls and timbers.

To-day the practice is to make large engines condensing and often
compound, expanding the steam in some instances ten volumes. The
higher pressures and rotative speeds of to-day have made the use of
high expansions possible in comparatively small engines, and economies
are secured which, but a few years ago, would have been wonderful
for large engines. The governing is done by quick-running govern-
ors which either throttle the supply-pipe or alter the point of cut-off,

532 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

and thus secure uniformity of motion with the highest expansive use
of the steam.

In 1832 no steamship had essayed the passage across the Atlantic.
The marine boilers of 1832 were unfit for resisting any considerable
pressure, in fact, so weak were they that they have been known to col-
lajDse when steam had been let down. The engine and boilers took up
so much of the tonnage of the vessel, and used such enormous quanti-
ties of coal, that it was predicted that it would never be possible to
cross the Atlantic unaided by sail. In fact, the prediction held good
for a long time, for transatlantic steamship lines were compelled to
establish coaling-stations at Halifax and Queenstown in order to re-
duce the coal carried, and allow of a little cargo being taken on. In
1832 all hulls were wood, and salt-water was invariably used in the
boilers, much to their injury. The speed rarely exceeded eight knots
an hour.

In 1882 the ships are almost invariably of iron or mild steel, and
this enables the introduction of an element of safety impossible with
the use of wood : I refer to the compartment and cellular system of
naval construction. The use of iron and steel has made the construc-
tion of ships of great length possible.

The boilers are of enormous strength, and carry from 80 to 125
pounds pressure. The cylinder or cylinders are now adapted to the
economical utilization of all the expansive force due to the pressure
used. To secure this, more than one cylinder, is used ; all the expan-
sion could be had in one cylinder, but the difference in temperature of
the cylinder, due to the temperature of the steam before and after
expansion, would cause undue condensation. The substitution of the
propeller for the paddle-wheel for sea-navigation and the high speeds
required by the former have done much to reduce the size and weight
of the marine engine ; and have also had a marked effect on the econ-
omy. The paddle-wheel has practically disappeared, except on rivers.

A piston-speed of 800 feet a minute is often attained in daily
practice. Hence, enormous powers are secured with comparatively
little loss of carrying-space.

The marine governor of to-day is almost endowed with prophecy.
It anticipates the pitching of the ship and withdrawal of the screw
from the water, and cuts off steam just before its occurrence, thus
avoiding the dangerous racing of the engine when the screw leaves its
work. This, for a long time, has been almost the only danger in bad
weather ; the racing of the engines subjected the screw- shaft to strains
for resisting which the shaft was inadequate. The twisting off of the
propeller-shaft of an Atlantic steamer is not an uncommon occurrence.
Condensation is now had almost in all cases by the surface condenser,
thus returning all the water to the boiler to be used again. It might
be well to speak here of a steamship built in 1882. Steamships are
now making long voyages at a high rate of speed, voyages which till

FIFTY YEARS OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING. 533

a short time ago had been left to sailing-vessels. This steamship has
some points of interest, and illustrates the most advanced ideas on
steam-engineering as applied to the mercantile marine. The engines
of this steamer are triple expansive, having one high-pressure, one in-
termediate, and one low-pressure cylinder, using steam at 125 pounds
pressure, generated by boilers whose only peculiarity consists in the
fact that they are capable of withstanding such a pressure. On trial
these engines gave one horse-power for 1*28 pound of coal burned
per hour. This would, according to the usual analogy, indicate a
daily working efficiency of about 1*50 pound to the one horse-power.
This steamer can carry coal for a voyage of 12,000 miles, and, with
proper use of sails, could probably keep under steam for two months
without coaling. The weight of the engine and boilers of 1832 was
about 1,000 pounds to the horse-power ; to-day it is about 300, and
in some instances has been reduced to forty-five pounds to the horse
power.

An English firm have recently completed a small light compound
engine, which, in point of weight, eclipses anything heretofore built.
This engine is made of steel and phosphor-bronze ; all parts are built as
light as possible, the rods and shafting and all parts possible being bored
out to reduce weight. At a speed of only 300 revolutions a minute
they indicate over twenty horse-power, and weigh but 105 pounds all
told. This engine would give fully thirty horse-power actual at a
piston-speed of 500 feet a minute. The size is three and three quar-
ters high pressure, seven and a half low pressure, and five stroke. That
thirty horse-power can be had from a proper utilization of steam and
proper distribution of 105 pounds of metal is certainly most astonish-
ing, especially so, considering that the engine is compound. A ship of
2,500 tons displacement was almost unknown fifty years ago ; to-day
the transatlantic steamer, the highest class of the mercantile marine,
has from 8,000 to 13,500 tons displacement, and engines of 5,000 to
10,000 one horse-power. Several of the transatlantic liners have shown
a mean ocean-speed of twenty miles an hour, and make the passage in
less than seven days.

The present generation has grown so accustomed to the results of
the progress of mechanical science that it has long ceased to wonder
at its greatest works.

It may be well here to speak of the torpedo-boats which have been
recently built for the English Government ; they indicate the extreme
limit of naval construction of this day. These little instruments of
destruction are only eighty-seven feet in length, ten and a half feet in
beam, forward draught eighteen inches, aft fifty-two inches, total dis-
placement thirty-three tons. The engines are compound condensing,
of the intermediate receiver type, high-pressure cylinder twelve and
three fourths inches, low-pressure twenty and three fourths, stroke
twelve inches, and indicated over 500 horse-power, with a gross weight

534 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

of only eleven tons, boiler, water, engine, condenser, propeller, and
shaft included.

The special feature of the boat is the enormous power developed per
hundredweight of propelling machinery. The boilers evaporate eight-
een pounds of water per hour per square foot of heating surface, and
1*20 pounds of coal per square foot of grate-surface. This is fully six
times the amount of water and coal usually dealt with per square foot
of surface in furnace and boiler. Such a forced combustion precludes
all thought of economy, yet a one horse-power is secured at full speed
with an expenditure of three and a half pounds of coal. The forced
draught is secured by maintaining in the stoke-hole an air-pressure cor-
responding to a column of water six inches high ; this renders the
stoke-hole quite cool and comfortable.

One ton of coal will last for a run of 100 miles at a ten-knot speed.
A speed of twenty-two and a half knots has been secured in trials last-
ing three hours. This is a speed of 2,250 feet a minute, or thirty-
seven and a half feet a second, and seems almost incredible.

But, remarkable and important as these results are in the phase of
steam-engineering, these little vessels have revealed in their perform-
ances under speed-trials facts of equal importance to another depart-
ment. The speeds attained are high even for large steam- vessels, but
enormously high for such small vessels. It is found that passing the
ten and twelve knot point, which bears about the same ratio to these
little boats that eighteen knots an hour does to large steamers, the
ratio of resistance to the speed decreases, and at the fifteen-knot point
it is about the 3^-power, at the eighteen-knot point about the 3-power,
and sometimes at the twenty-two-knot point is as low as the 1-J-power
of the speed.

Effort has been frequently made to utilize steam at much higher
pressures than I have mentioned, but, owing to the solvent nature of
steam or water at a high temperature, the results have not been satis-
factory ; among many difficulties encountered was that of lubricating
the cylinders.

Loftus Perkins, an English engine-builder of prominence, is devot-
ing much time to the use of steam at about five hundred pounds press-
ure, and with some success. Unfortunately, the gain to be anticipated
from the use of these exceedingly high pressures does not seem to be
very great on trial. The Anthracite, a small steamer fitted with en-
gines and boilers specially adapted to the utilization of steam at five
hundred pounds pressure, was more wasteful than many steamers using
steam at one hundred pounds. However, here is a wide field and one
that promises well.

Should the same change of law as to the resistance increasing as
the square of the speed be found to hold good in large steamers as in
the little torpedo-boats, we shall most of us live to see locomotive
speeds at sea. There is now building in this country an engine which

FIFTY YEARS OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING. 535

will exert the greatest power as yet secured from one cylinder. The
stroke is fourteen feet and the diameter of the cylinder is nine feet
two inches, and the engine is expected to develop eight thousand horse-
power. As an illustration of the size of the engine, the wrist-pin is
almost exactly the size of a flour-barrel.

We now come to the engines and boilers used for railways. The
year 1832 was the beginning of our present passenger and railway
system on this side of the water, and, if the engines imported in that
year to run on American roads are any indication of the state of the
science of steam-engineering abroad, they could not have been much
in advance. At this time the engine and boiler weighed about eight
tons, carried forty pounds pressure, and could make about twenty
miles an hour under light load and favorable conditions. The engine
of that date could not pull more than three or four times its own
weight, and had to stop at stations to fill boilers, as they could not
pump while running.

The speed to-day is from forty to sixty miles an hour, and the en-
gines weigh from thirty-five to eighty tons, and draw as high as eight
hundred tons of paying freight in addition to the weight of the train.
To-day the pressures run from one hundred and thirty-five to two hun-
dred pounds. The latter pressure is used in Switzerland. The auto-
matic and continuous breaks now stop a heavy train within four hun-
dred yards at a speed of sixty miles an hour. Recent trials show that
these breaks will absorb twenty miles of speed in one minute.

In 1832 the transmission of power was by flat tumbling-rods and
cast-iron shafting of great weight and little strength. To-day we have
smooth, light, rapidly revolving steel or iron shafting, supplemented
and aided with rubber and leather belting where the latter will serve
and the former can not. Where power has to be transmitted at a great
distance, wire ropes, moving at a high rate of speed, are used. Wire-
rope transmission commences at the point where the belt and shafting
become too long or heavy to be useful. It is much cheaper than its
equivalent of shafting or belting. In fact, a long line of shafting
would cost more for oil in a year than a wire rope would in fifteen.

At the Rhine-fall, in Switzerland, eight hundred horse-power is
transmitted a distance of two miles to a village where fifty small
manufacturing industries, situated in every conceivable position rela-
tive to the cable-line, secure power. For ten years the cable street-
railway system has been in use in San Francisco. The same system,,
slightly modified, is being adopted in many Eastern cities.

Fifty years ago compressed air had not been successfully employed
in engineering, though its application as a blast to forges is coextant
with history. Sir Henry Bessemer's steel process was made possible
only upon the ability of engineers to furnish air under pressure in the
converter. The importance of compressed air and the part it has
taken in recent engineering undertakings can not be overestimated.

536 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Without it the boring of most of our tunnels and the placing of ma-
sonry foundations under water could not have been accomplished. In
1832 the turbine wheel had just been invented, but not brought into
use ; in fact, hydro-mechanics has made as great steps forward in the
last fifty years as any of her sister sciences.

A recent invention of Sir W. Armstrong deserves mention. A
steam-engine actuating a pump is used to secure an artificial head of
water, which water is afterward employed in driving various hydraulic
motors operating cranes, lifts, driving riveting machinery, and the
artificial head is secured by loading a ram of sufficient size with weight
enough to place a pressure of seven or eight hundred pounds to the
inch in the cylinder. The pumping-engine pumps against this ram,
the chamber of which is connected with each of the machines requir-
ing to be driven ; whenever the work done in the various motors is
less than the work of the engine, the surplus is expended in raising
the ram, and when the ram is fully extended an automatic device
stops the pump, which again resumes work on the withdrawal of water
from the ram by leakage or use in motors. By the aid of this system
of storing power, a small steam-pump attached to an accumulator is
capable of furnishing three hundred or more horse-power for a short
time. This arrangement is adopted in all docks and ship-yards of any
pretensions.

Our modern turreted man-of-war handles its eighty and one hun-
dred ton guns, and all the loading machinery, by the aid of similar
hydraulic devices. These accumulators give an efficiency of ninety-
eight per cent in practice, which amounts to perfection.

In 1832 rolled plates such as are now rolled were unknown, and
the rolling of armor-plates twenty-two inches thick, weighing thirty
tons, was not thought of.

The process of making wrought-iron by puddling has not changed
much, though larger masses are handled. The manufacture of iron
by puddling seems doomed ; steel is taking its place rapidly ; in 1832
masses of steel of over sixty pounds were not made ; steel was dealt in
by the pound for cutlery-use. Thanks to Sir Henry Bessemer and
Dr. Siemens, steel is made on the Bessemer and open-hearth process,
and in masses of many tons' weight. The rapid advancement made
in engineering skill is due in a great measure to the cheapening of
iron and steel making. Never in the history of the iron industry
were there so many partially developed processes, the completion of
which will revolutionize the industry, and furnish iron and steel at
a cost much below present prices.

The unprecedented expanding of our railway interests since 18C5
has had much to do with the development of the iron interests. In-
ventors of prominence promise us steel at one cent a pound, and in
the light of the past it is not safe to assert that it will not be done.
Steel rails have been sold within a few years at one hundred dollars a

FIFTY YEARS OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING. 537

ton ; to-day they are worth thirty-eight dollars. It is confidently pre-
dicted by those who have made it a study, that the downward tend-
ency can not be checked, and that one cent a pound will be reached as
soon as the experimenters have worked out plans now in hand.

Considering the many improvements which are now proposed and
tested, we can safely assume that the steel-plant of the future will
differ widely from the plant of to-day. All the available heat and all
the useful elements in the ore will be used. Briefly this is as follows :
The ores, limestone, and fuel will be placed in the furnace, the molten
metal will be run to converters, and there the foreign elements will be
removed by a blast, the metal then recarbonized and cast into ingots,
the ingots will be rolled into blooms, then the bloom into rails, and
the rails will then be placed on small cars, and, while at a temperature
of about 1,000° Fahr., will be placed in the flues of steam-boilers until
they have given up about 700° Fahr., and then passed on as finished.
The slag flowing from the blast-furnace will be placed on cars, and,
while at a temperature of 3,000° Fahr., be run into the flues of other
boilers used to generate steam for operating the blowers, rolls, etc.
This, in brief, is one of the proposed steps in steel-making, viz., the
utilization of all the heat in the coal, and afterward all the heat given
to the iron and slag by the coal ; by so placing the iron and slag as
to give up their heat again to boilers used to generate steam for the
roller-mills and blowing-engines, which in turn aid the smelting of the
iron.

A rail-mill of 500 tons a day, at a low estimate, would secure heat
to run a 1,000 horse-power battery of boilers from the cooling rails
alone, and 4,000 horse-power in heat from the slag. Hence the steel-
plant of the future will have no heating-furnaces, no gas-producers, no
coal-consuming boilers, no cupolas, no ash-piles, and no fuel to be con-
sumed except that required to melt the iron. The converter-slag can
now be used instead of limestone by the new process. This, in brief,
will be, it is confidently predicted, the new rail-mill of the immediate
future. Everything is done by the aid of air, steam, and water. Mus-
cle will be in little demand, brains at a premium. In 1832 cast-iron
bridges existed of short span, but wrought-iron had not been used.
To-day we think little of trusses of 500 feet span, and suspension-
bridges of 1,000 feet ; while it is proposed to build a steel truss-bridge
over a mile long, with two spans of 1,700 feet each. In the power-
printing press, an invention of the eighteenth century, we find that
the last half-century has wrought wonders. In 1832 the best presses
could turn out about 1,000 poorly printed sheets of printed matter ;
to-day, thanks to Hoe's revolving type and the processes of electro-
plating and stereotyping, we have presses capable of printing 50,000
impressions an hour ; and, what is almost as wonderful, it will num-
ber, fold, and stick together the whole. Such a machine costs about
$100,000.

538 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY,

TVe live in an age of progress. The additions to our knowledge
made during the last fifty years seem to excel in utility and lasting
benefits the knowledge acquired in centuries. Popular belief is that
the possibilities of progress in all directions are unlimited. Those who
should know, think that in mechanics we have nearly reached the limit
which theory, well established, places before us. The steam-engine,
using but one tenth of the power to be obtained from the coal, is
nearer its limit than most people imagine.

The science of the future is undoubtedly in chemistry, and our great
discoveries and greatest progress will be in that science. Mechanics
may hereafter expect to take a secondary part. In the iron industry
chemistry and mechanics have stood side by side ; chemistry gener-
ally propounds the problems, pointing the way to the chemical solu-
tion, and calling upon mechanics to devise means for carrying out the
undertaking.

One of the most notable features of modern industrial progress is
the utilization of what has always been considered waste material.
This is done by devising and constructing special machinery to meet
the case. Sometimes costly experiments are necessary ; but, in this
age of speculation, those who gain the prizes offered in legitimate busi-
ness are those who are willing to accept ventures involving large risks.
There is no limit to human wants, and the industrial expansion we are
engaged in will not be restricted except by the impossible.

Photography and the electric sciences are two arts of which nothing
was known fifty years ago : what a gap the removal of one of these
would make in our civilization to-day !

Sir Henry Bessemer's steel process has had a very marked influence
on the mechanical advancement of the last half-century. Yet so
closely allied are all the great steps in progress, that one can not be
taken without the other, and Sir Henry was himself compelled to seek
or invent numerous devices before his original steel process merited
the name.

We daily complete engineering works which, in the amount of
human labor they represent, far exceed the labor represented by the
great Pyramid of Cheops. Undoubtedly the progress of the age, which
is so largely engineering progress, does greatly increase the welfare of
man. The forces of Nature now do the hard work, and the labor of
the toiling millions is lightened many fold. The laboring-man now
works with brain and eye, and his occupation is to direct and apply
some principle of science. He now has time for improvement, comfort,
and refinement ; the forces of Nature having become obedient to the
will of man, are made to produce for him not only plenty, but con-
veniences and luxuries formerly undreamed of.

A PREHISTORIC WATER-SYSTEM. 539

A PREHISTORIC WATER-SYSTEM.

Br M. A. LUDERS.

THE canton of Valais, though not so much frequented by travelers
as some of the others, is really one of the most attractive can-
tons of Switzerland, and possesses, in its Alpine heights and its tem-
perate valleys, many beauties peculiarly its own. There are also
many features worthy of notice in the customs and the economical
devices of its population. One of the most interesting features of
the latter class is its system of conduits for watering the pasturage
and tillage lands. This canton, in fact, possesses the model system of
wTater-supply in the Alps. The people have maintained it from primi-
tive times, and have by it, during the whole period of their history,
drawn the water from the glaciers and mountain-springs, to be applied
directly to every part of their farms and garden-plots. Without such
watering as it makes practicable, the production of the district would
fall off one half. This was exemplified in the experience of some of
the towns during the building of the Simplon road in 1802, when their
canals were interrupted and their water-supply was cut off. The
grass-crop was so greatly diminished that the number of cattle fell off
to one fourth of what it had been, and the former productiveness of
the fields was not restored till new canals were made in 1810. In the
little town of Zenegger, also, the springs wrere dried up, in conse-
quence of an earthquake in 1855, and the number of cattle that could
be maintained was reduced from two hundred to fifty. New conduits
had to be made for this place also, with much labor and at great expense.

The maintenance of the water-system of the Canton Yalais is inti-
mately associated with the communal and family life of the people.
The water is brought down in wooden flumes, that have to cross pre-
cipitous clefts at hundreds of metres above the bottom. A watchman
has to go over them daily, and sometimes at night. His pay is very
small, and his office is rather one of honor, full of dangers, to which
some fall victims in nearly every year. By an ancient prescription,
no one can hold a public office till he has served for some time as a
guard of the aqueducts. It is not unusual, wThen repairs are to be
made in particularly dangerous places, to send a priest along with the
workmen, so that, if any of them meet with an accident, they may be
provided with the consolations of religion.

The water is drawn from glaciers, lakes, or reservoirs, springs, and
melted snow. Glacier-water is best esteemed, and is preferred if it is
turbid, for then it holds valuable mineral constituents ; lake or reser-
voir water contains less of such matters, for they have settled. Spring-
water is least in favor, because it is most deficient in mineral sub-
stances, and because the time it occupies in running down the conduits

54o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

is so short that it does not become warm enough to be used with advan-
tage. The same objection is alleged against snow-water. The glacier-
water, however, which is exposed to the sun for hours while running
down the flumes, reaches the fields at an agreeable temperature, and
ready for immediate application. This water is here free from oxide
of iron, and is entirely fertilizing ; but additional richness is some-
times given to it by carrying it around through the barn-yards, and
making it the means for transporting manure directly to the fields.

The chief canals which bring the water down from the mountains
vary in length from one thousand to fifty-five thousand metres ; or,
measured by the time it takes the water to run through them, from a
quarter of an hour to six hours. The total length of the canals in the
canton is one million five hundred thousand metres, or two hundred
and fifty hours. The skill with which they have been located and
constructed excites an admiration that is increased when it is remem-
bered that they date from a remote antiquity and are the work of a
simple country-people. Beginning often in the immediate neighbor-
hood of the glaciers, crossing treacherous hills and lofty precipices,
and spanning deep abysses, passing through tunnels and cuts, led
along artificial terraces, that sometimes require additional embank-
ments or Avails to support them, these canals are really formidable
works. They furnish the life-blood of civilization to the canton, and
stand for a capital of incalculable value. They have been built and
are kept up by the villages ; and a badly kept one is an exception.
In most of the valley-slopes they lie in groups of three or four, the
uppermost one being the longest, and reaching far up toward the
glacier-source, and have an average descent of about 0*5 per cent.
The subordinate ditches are of a simpler character, till finally a mere
mark on the ground is all that directs the water to the particular spot
where it is wanted.

The application of the water begins at about the first of April in
the valleys, and later as the height of the locality increases, till, on
the highest cultivated grounds, it is delayed till the middle of June,
and is continued for from two and a half to three months. The right
to draw off the water is apportioned out by village officers into turns,
of which there are from four to twelve in the season, of from eight to
twenty-one days or more each, according to the number of land-owners
claiming to share in it.

Among the most remarkable of the main aqueducts are those of
the Gradetsch Valley, where the water is led down by eleven canals,
the highest of which starts from an altitude of 2,300 metres, or
nearly 7,500 feet above the sea. Some of the canals require wooden
conduits three or four thousand metres long, that have at times to be
supported by poles for six hundred metres at a stretch. To reach
them for repairs the workmen have in some places to be let down the
perpendicular rock-walls with ropes.

A PREHISTORIC WATER-SYSTEM. 54i

The oldest of the canals date unquestionably from pre-Roman
times. The " Roth " Canal supplies three villages with water, and is
19,200 metres (more than eleven miles), or four hours and twenty-
three minutes long. It starts from " La Plaine Morte " glacier, on the
Weisshorn, 2,673 metres above the sea, crosses several clefts, is con-
ducted through a tunnel more than three hundred metres long, is cov-
ered for 9,600 metres, exhibits other features of high engineering
skill, has an average section of a metre and three tenths, and delivers
nearly a cubic metre of water a second. An artificial lake, or reser-
voir, has been built in the same district, to hold the water that is not
wanted for immediate use. Its water, however, has not the same
value as that taken directly from the glaciers, because it has lost
most of its mineral constituents by settling ; but, as it has become
thoroughly warmed, it is admirably adapted to those applications in
which water is wanted simply to refresh vegetation, and make the
soil more friable.

The villages of Ried and Bietsch have three aqueducts (Kehr-
wasser, Bietscherrinne, and Riederrinne), severally 8,400, 2,400, and
12,000 metres long, to bring down the muddy water from the great
Aletsch glacier, which are led for long distances along vertical cliffs
and over giddy chasms. At one point on the " Kehrwasser " three
men have been killed, within twenty-five years, by falling into the
gorge. The water of the Bietscherrinne issues foaming from a fear-
ful-looking chasm. The canal, having a border formed of stones laid
with sods, and masked by bushes from the Massa ravine that yawns
beneath it, is safe to walk along at first. The bushes soon disappear,
and the aqueduct becomes simply a wooden conduit, made of planks
that have to be drawn to the place, and adjusted there with great
danger, while the narrow, slippery gang-plank, which is the only walk,
offers but the most precarious footing to one who has to look down
through the high trestles or into the steep ravine of the wild Massa,
on one side, while he must watch on the other side lest he hit his head
against the overhanging rocks and lose his balance. The highest of
the three canals, the Riederrinne, is distinguished from the others by
its loftier rock-walls and deeper chasms. It reaches to the foot of the
Aletsch glacier, and draws the water from its source. Near it may be
seen older, abandoned canals.

Near where these three canals start is the Marjalen Lake, having
its surface covered, even in summer, with floating ice. Its natural
outlet is by the valley of Yiesch into the Rhone, but occasionally, in
seasons of extraordinarily high water, it overflows in the opposite
direction, and pours its floods into the Massa, causing breaks in the
canals and stopping the conveyance of water. The existence of the
villages of Bietsch and Ried depends upon their obviating the mis-
chievous effects of these overflows, and it is customary to give a pair
of shoes to the mountaineer who first notifies the dwellers in the

542 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

valley of the occurrence of a break. A canal has been built to reduce
the level of the lake, but it is not sufficient for the purpose.

The irrigation-canals of Lombardy and Lucca are more scientifically
constructed, and display more technical skill, but they are net laid out
on a more extensive scale than those of the Canton Valais. It is a fact
deserving admiration that all of these colossal works have been and
are still being built without the aid of technical knowledge, without
any expensive instruments, by the people of the country ; and that
these people not only make great sacrifices of money and labor, but
put their lives at stake, to assure themselves of a supply of water.
Certainly a real struggle for existence is going on here ; for, without
a system of water-supply, there would be in many of the villages no
grass, no vegetable crops, no corn, and no wine. — Translated for the
Popular Science Monthly from Das Ausland.

■»•»■

WORKING CAPACITY OF UNSHOD HOESES.

By AETHUE F. ASTLEY.

I SEND herewith a photograph of the near fore-foot of my unshod,
white-hoofed, low-heeled chestnut horse " Tommy." This photo-
graph was taken after I had driven the old horse (he may be twenty
years old), in a phaeton, a hundred miles on hard roads in and around
London. This does not include drives for exercise. It is impossible
to say that the hoofs of this old horse (bought chiefly in order to test
this question) are exceptionally good. The reverse is the case, as any
of your readers, who may favor me with a call, shall see for them-
selves. That this animal, after having been for years " the victim of
the farrier," should work, as he does, barefoot, is, I think, remarkable.
As the old horse is nearly, if not quite, thorough-bred, he must have
been shod (as is the vicious custom on the turf) very early ; yet over
all these evil influences, incidental to " the miserable coerced shod
foot," the unshod foot has triumphed. Shod, my horse " brushed "
and stumbled badly, but barefoot he does neither.

In Africa, a horse working in a post-cart does barefoot, over bad
ground, twenty-four miles in two hours. In New Mexico, horses are
ridden barefoot forty miles day after day, and perhaps twenty miles
of this will be over a rough mountain-track. In Brazil, little horses
(they seldom exceed fourteen hands) carry, slung across pack-saddles,
barefoot (they have never been shod) some thirty-tico stone ! Thus
loaded (or, rather, overloaded) they do twenty to thirty miles a day.
Their journey may be some three hundred miles, and they load back
the same. In England, even race-horses are shod ! To gallop over
a race-course, which no doubt may be hard at times, it is actually

WORKING CAPACITY OF UNSHOD HORSES. 543

thought necessary to shoe a horse ! Here, where weight is of the very
utmost consequence, the heels of the English race-horse must be
weighted with plates ! The fact that Marden, when he ran barefoot
in the Sandown Derby on June 2, 1882, beat, in the deciding heat, his
two shod opponents by three lengths (though in his first race with
them that day Marden, icith his plates on, could only dead heat them),
such a fact as this weighs little with the horsey Englishman, who will
still be found to set his thoughts or opinions against facts ! After all
that can be said as far as argument goes, he will still be found to pre-
fer mere assertion ; it will still be the " I think this," and " I don't
think the other," with him ! But then is not the horsey (and for the
most part untraveled) Englishman, as a rule, in the language of '''Free-
lance" in "Horses and Roads," " energetically conservative" ?

Any one who will read this book will thereby much increase his
knowledge as to the real capability of the horse's hoof. " Horses and
Roads " was published in 1880, by Longman, Paternoster Row. I find
quoted in it the saying, " An ounce at the heel tells more than a pound
on the back." This explains Marden's success when, by removal of
" plates," his heels were lightened for the deciding heat.

But many of our countrymen connected with horses, deeming
themselves practical men, are too apt to think that they have, as Mr.
Ransom ("Freelance") says, "gone into everything," and they may
consider their knowledge as to the real capability of the horse's hoof
complete. Now, is it complete? Is
not shoeing horses very much a mat-
ter of routine with us ? I will give two
instances in order to prove this :

1. Some weeks ago I received a
letter in which the writer said that he
had been told by a veterinary surgeon
that if a horse were worked barefoot
his hoofs " would wear down to the
quick in a few hours." Now, I saw
the other day a horse which has been
doing the work of his master, a doc-
tor, barefoot, not for " a few hours,"
but for over five years! During this
time the horse must have traveled,

shoeless as he is, some thirteen thousand miles over the not too good
roads of the east of London, and often with a heavy brougham behind
him. The hoofs of this horse are the admiration of veterinary sur-
geons, and they show no sign of uudue wear. This horse icas unshod
when eight years old.

2. I recently saw a pony seventeen or eighteen years old, never
shod, except for a short time when in the breaker's hands. This
breaker shod the pony. This was done against the master's wish and

544 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

without his knowledge. The breaker was, I dare say, practical enough
in other details of his calling, but, like the majority of his countrymen,
he " had always seen horses shod, and he thought they always must be
shod." The pony was sure-footed xoithout shoes, but with them she
nearly fell with her master as he rode her home from the breaker's.
The shoes were taken off, and the pony did her work admirably with-
out them for years. She has done plenty of work, for her owner tells
me that he has frequently driven her, and also ridden her, over forty
miles in the day. The saying, " One horse can wear out four sets of
legs," does not, of course, apply to this pony. The application of this
saying is to the shod horse, whose every step is made upon iron. As
a writer has well said, " It is the shoe, not the road, that hurts the
horse."

Now, we see that both veterinarian and breaker mistook the nail-
lacerated, contracted, unused foot for the natural healthy foot. The
former, raised off the ground with an iron ring called a shoe, and with
the insensitive sole and frog pared away, is not (when the shoe is first
pulled off) fit for contact with the ground. In such a case time must
be given for the foot to recover before the unshod horse can be asked
to work barefoot.

I have a cast of the off fore-foot of a mare belonging to Mr.
Whitmore Baker. This cast was taken in December, 1882, after the
mare had worked barefoot on stony, hilly Devon roads for two years.
She was unshod in December, 1880, being then seven years old. This
foot shows no signs of undue wear, and I shall be happy to show the
cast to any one. — Land and Water.

-+++-

HOUSE-BUILDING IN THE EAST.

IN England house-building is a matter on which, in spite of "jerry"
builders, one can look with comparative equanimity. In Indo-
China it is a very different affair. Everything that is a source of
trouble in the West disappears in those comfortable latitudes. A site
can be found practically anywhere. The jungle furnishes, for the
trouble of cutting it, as much material as may be required. Com-
paratively so little skill is wanted to start as an architect that every
man can be his own house-builder, and, if he is tolerably diligent and
not too ambitious, might finish his house in a few days. But, as a set-
off to all these advantages, it is a very difficult matter to raise up a
house which is not rendered dangerous or ineligible by the nature of
the soil, the idiosyncrasies of the surrounding spirits, or the revolu-
tionary character of the timber used. Building houses is, therefore,
a very critical operation, and not to be undertaken without very con-
siderable Sabaistic lore and an intimate acquaintance with all the ani-

HOUSE-BUILDING IN THE EAST. 545

mistic peculiarities of the neighborhood. Otherwise the house-builder
simply courts disaster, and may involve not only his own family, as
well as himself, in overwhelming difficulties, but may actually render
a whole district uninhabitable by his unwarrantable irritation of the
spirits dwelling in the soil, in the air, and in the very logs of timber
which are recklessly used, or are put up with an improper exposure
to the south instead of to the north, or set in position at a time of
year when presiding demons hold that such things ought not to be
done. It is, however, a necessity, even of Indo-Chinese existence, that
mankind should have houses to live in. For the instruction, therefore,
of those who are forced by necessity, or are foolhardy enough to be-
lieve that they can build themselves houses without coming to any
particular harm, there are elaborate text-books, both in Burmese and
Siamese. The Burman Dehtton is a bulky treatise, containing a far-
rago of omens and signs with regard to all possible events and circum-
stances, and not merely to the process of building. The Siamese
" Tamra," or " Manual of House-Building," is considerably more sys-
tematic, and, in addition, possesses the advantage that it sticks to the
subject of which it professes to treat. The theories in both works are
based on and elaborated from the Shastras which record the customs
of the Brahmans. Notwithstanding their Buddhism, which prohibits
all such beliefs, the Indo-Chinese have a very strong regard for the
Brahmanical observances. They are much easier to comprehend, or
at any rate more fitted to seize on the imagination, than the abstruse
problems of the faith of the Buddha. Buddhist metaphysical posi-
tions are fine things to confound hostile controversialists with, but the
common Indo-Chinese mind yearns for something more concrete. The
house-building code is, therefore, a very popular institution. It per-
suades a man that he is pious when he has an internal conviction that
he ought to be damned.

The first thing the would-be house-builder has to do is to find out
the situation of the great dragon that encircles the earth with his
body, like the Midgard serpent of Northern mythology. This must
be ascertained before operations are begun at all, for it will have a
great influence, not only on the time of beginning the building, but
on the way in which the foundations must be dug and the method of
hoisting the posts into position. This the Burmese have recorded for
them in a rhyme which every school-boy can repeat. The Siamese are
not less alive to the necessity of accurate information on the subject,
and it is fully set out in the " Tamra." The reason of this is that
when you come to dig the hole for the main post of the house you
must heap up the earth on the side toward the Nagah's belly. Ter-
rible consequences follow if you do not observe this preliminary pre-
caution. If you should pile up your mound in the direction of the
head of the dragon, your negligence or ignorance will involve the
death of your parents, your brothers, and the patrons, of your house.

VOL. XXIV. — S5

546 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

To be without a patron in Siam or Cambodia is to get your name put
down on the list of royal slaves. Insulting the dragon's tail is even
more calamitous, for the tail is a most touchy member, and would as
soon create an earthquake and ruin the whole township as not. The
reckless builder who did such a thing would, therefore, be stoned out
of the community as a public enemy. Touching the dragon's back is
simple lese-majeste. The lord of the house will soon find out his crime,
but the knowledge will come too late. He will die. The belly is the
only safe part. If you choose that quarter toward which to heap up
your earth, then, subject to a number of other precautions to be men-
tioned, you are comparatively safe. It is to be observed, however,
that you have only three months to do your digging in. The Nagah,
for all that he is so testy, sleeps during that period, or, rather, it is
the disturbing him in his sleep that causes all the mischief. When the
quarter-year has passed he rouses himself, and shifts round to the next
point of the compass, and there, like the Norway kraken, composes
himself to sleep again. Digging operations must then be conducted
according to the new rules. Still, the time allowed is not unreasona-
ble. Even an average Indo-Chinese can dig a hole for a house-post in
three months. When you have settled generally how you ought to
dig, there are a number of special rules to be observed in the digging
itself. It will never do to go blindly ahead, for all the world as if
you were a navvy on piece-work. In the first place, it is well to dig
at large all over the space your house is intended to cover. In fact,
if you have any regard for yourself, you certainly will. There are
divers reasons for this. If you find costly articles, silver or gold, or
the images of men and deities, it is a most happy sign, and will go
far to counteract all but willful remissness in other matters. On the
other hand, when bones or ashes or the figures of wild animals are
found, the deductions are most unpropitious, and, if you persist in
going on, the house will have neither luck nor peace. If the remains
of previous house-posts are found still lying buried in the ground, they
must be carefully dug out and carried away, for if this were not done,
and a new building were to be run up over the old remains, sickness
and quarrelings would be the certain result.

In addition to such elementary rules, which are matters of universal
knowledge in Indo-China, there are so many others that every one but
a very self-sufficient person will submit his surface soil to the inspec-
tion of a regular professional man, an expert in the science of founda-
tion-digging, before he makes a final decision. For example, though
it is undoubtedly most lucky to find silver or old bricks in your exca-
vations, you may at the same time come upon a colony of ants or other
living creatures settled upon the spot. It is one of the fundamental
rules of Buddhism that the breath of no living thing is to be taken,
and to dispossess them is not by any means a creditable proceeding.
Moreover, irrespectively of this objection, ants can bite through even

HOUSE-BUILDING IN THE EAST. 547

sun-toughened skins, so that there is a direct personal argument to sup-
port the sentimental objection. Then, again, you may find lead in
your soil-turning. There is not the smallest hesitation in the books on
a question like this. If you go on and build you will lose slaves and
goods. But, for all the lead that is there, the turned-up earth may
smell of beans, or may have the fragrance of the sacred lotus itself.
This is a most happy omen. The dwellers in a house raised on such
land will be most fortunate, and the soil round about is the best pos-
sible for cultivation. In such a dilemma there is nothing for it but to
call in a Sayah and pay him to work out the problem, to make a reso-
lution of forces for you. There are certain amateur ways of arriving
at a conclusion by means of split bamboos and heaps of paddy, but
they are apt to be fallacious and afford no real satisfaction to a well-
constituted mind. It is not surprising to be told that sand is not a
good foundation on which to raise a house, or that a soil which is
mainly composed of small stones is undesirable ; but when it comes to
the slope of the ground, or the friability or stiffness of the earth, none
but a thoroughly reckless man will trust to his own unaided intelligence.
At any rate, whether you get the advice of an expert or not, it is
imperative that you should carefully turn over all the ground where
the new building is to be. Having done this, it is a matter of reason-
able precaution to make offerings to the earth-spirit. Acquaintance
with this Phra Phum and his belongings is no light matter, and is
likely to be as good as an annuity to the man who has mastered the
details. As he is an earthy spirit he is especially liable to mortal fail-
ings, and notably possesses a very short temper, which will brook no
deficiency in reverence. It will not do to be ignorant of the names of
his father and mother and of his nine children. Forgetfulness of his
possessions is equally likely to cause trouble. There must be no hesi-
tation as to the proper titles of his house and the tower on it, his cat-
tle-shed, his granary, his bridal chamber, his thrashing-floor, his lands,
his garden, his monastery, and his three chief servants. Remissness
in any one of these particulars is apt to make an offering dangerous
rather than otherwise. This offering, by whomsoever brought, must
be set down at the extremity of the toes of the Phra, who thereupon
graciously takes up his broom and sweeps the place clean, and gives
the pious votary his blessing. If an ignorant or presumptuous man
should place his gifts near the head, the earth-spirit would curse him
with terrible imprecations, and brush everything away, worshiper and
all. Negotiations with this deity are therefore rather ticklish work,
but it is perilous to leave them undone. The site being settled, and
things made right with the guardian spirit of the earth, the next thing
to be done is to dig holes for the reception of the posts. It is neces-
sary to begin with that for the chief post, and the hole for this must
not be dug square, but in the form of a triangle. This may imply
more work, but that can not be helped. When the hole for the

548 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

main post is finished, go on with the others, but be sure to do it in
regular order, working round in circles from right to left, so as to fol-
low the line of the dragon's body from head to tail. When it comes
to the hoisting of the posts into position, the face must throughout be
turned toward the back of the Nagah, a little inclining toward the tail,
and the post must be heaved up toward this point of the compass.
Thus in the first three months of the year you must face west-south-
west, and haul up the beam from the northeast, and so on for the other
quarters. It is also necessary to be very careful in the selection of the
timber for the house. Trees especially to be avoided are those which
have no flowers, those which have no leaves, trees which grow on ant-
hills, trees with birds' nests on them, and those from which the bark
has been torn off from whatever cause. Unhappily these distinctions
are not obvious in timber which you have not cut yourself, and rascally
Chinese carpenters will not hesitate to palm off upon the unwary
wood from a tree on which scores of egrets — the Byeing, or sacred
paddy-bird of the Talaings — have nested. Chinamen in their way are
nearly as unscrupulous as Manchester piece-goods manufacturers, and
have as little regard for the comfort and ultimate opinion of their cus-
tomers. The beams for the house must all be measured with the
standard of your own hand. This, however, is a detail which hardly
needs to be strongly urged in a country where the three-foot rule is
unknown. After you have got the posts up, the surface of the ground
must be smoothed down, and then the posts are decorated with little
bags of shells, coins, husked rice, and the like. These must be hung
up by the hands of a maiden, and not by any rude male. The heads
of the posts are also covered over with cloth, for the safe keeping of
the guardian spirit of the house. It would be neither seemly nor safe
to leave him exposed to the elements. The final ramming in of the
posts is done at an hour fixed by the astrologers, the culminating point
of some happy constellation. There is much shouting and feasting on
the occasion.

With the foundation of his house settled satisfactorily, the sensi-
bilities of the great world-dragon and the guardian spirit of the earth
soothed and conciliated, and the house-posts raised and decorated with
proper profusion, the house-builder may consider himself past all his
troubles. If anything has been done wrong, it is now too late to re-
pair the error. If everything has been carried out in seemly and or-
derly fashion, he may deem himself particularly fortunate. The put-
ting on of the roof and the fitting up of the plank or split bamboo
matting walls is a simple matter, and may be done according to the
light of nature and with what dilatoriness and adornments the builder
pleases, so long as he does not depart from the mundane laws of use
and wont and infringe upon the sumptuary regulations. That is even
a greater offense than flouting the great Nakh, or setting up posts in
defiance of the angel of the soil. It certainly meets with swifter

SKETCH OF SIR CHARLES WILLIAM SIEMENS. 549

and more obvious, if not more exemplary, punishment. " There are
two chances in the stare of a demon," says the Burmese proverb, " there
is none in that of a king." One formality, indeed, remains, which is
often omitted, it is true, but which no man of well-ordered mind should
fail to observe. It relates to the setting up of the stair, or rather lad-
der, by which the house is entered, all the dwellings in Indo-China
being raised off the ground on piles. If this stair is turned to the
south, let a cat be the first living creature to ascend. If you manage
this, then you will always have abundance in your house. The diffi-
culty is to make the cat see the matter in the same light. If your
steps face the west the question is simpler. All you have to do is to
take some iron in your hand along with a few lotus-leaves and a wisp
of kaing, or elephant-grass. Everything you attempt will thereafter
come easy to you. A cock should crow at the top to inaugurate the
stair ascending on the north side of the house. This also is a matter
likely to keep you out of your dwelling for a long time if you persist
in waiting for it. Stairs never ascend from the east, for the same
reason that no Buddhist should sleep with his feet pointing to that
quarter. It was from the east that the Lord Buddha came, and it
would be scandalous to show to that quarter a disrespect that would
entail severe punishment if it were exhibited toward the king or a great
man. It will hardly be necessary to mention that there is only one
set of stairs and one entrance to the house, if built according to the
national model.

It will thus be seen that, though a wooden house or a walled hut
does not seem to imply much expenditure of time, labor, or capital in
its construction, yet, in reality, what with the perplexing rules to be
attended to, the dangers to be avoided, and the spirits to be propiti-
ated, the Eastern house-builder has emphatically a hard time of it, and
is not to be envied by Westerns who have no greater grievances than
damp walls, defective drainage, perpetual draughts, and chimneys that
will not draw. — Saturday Review.

•+•»•

SKETCH OF SIR CHAELES WILLIAM SIEMENS.

IN a paper giving an account of the British Association of 1882, of
which Dr. Siemens was president, Professor Emil du Bois-Rey-
mond referred, with some expressions of admiration, to the many ways
in which the name of Siemens is identified with the most important
of the recent advances in technical science. What Krupp is among
German industrials in warlike arts, he said, the collective name of
Siemens is in the arts of peace. Siemens telegraph wires gird the
earth, and the Siemens cable-steamer Faraday is continually engaged
in laying new ones. By the Siemens method has been solved the
problem, by the side of which that of finding a needle in a hay-stack

550 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

is one of childish simplicity, of fishing out in the stormy ocean, from
a depth comparable to that of the vale of Chamouni, the ends of a
broken cable. Electrical resistance is measured by the Siemens mer-
cury unit. " Siemens " is written on water-metres, and Russian and
German revenue officers are assisted by Siemens apparatus in levying
their assessments. The Siemens processes for gilding and silvering
and the Siemens anastatic printing mark stages in the development
of those branches of industry. Siemens differential regulators control
the action of the steam-engines that forge English arms at Woolwich
and that of the chronographs on which the transit of the stars is
marked at Greenwich. The Siemens cast-steel works and glass-houses,
with their regenerative furnaces, are admired by all artisans. The
Siemens electric light shines in assembly-rooms and public places, and
the Siemens gas-light competes with it ; while the Siemens electro-
culture in greenhouses bids defiance to our long winter nights. The
Siemens electric railway is destined to rule in cities and tunnels. The
Siemens electric crucible, melting three pounds of platinum in twenty
minutes, was a wonder of the Paris Exposition, which might well
have been called an exposition of Siemens apparatus and productions,
so prominent were they there. It is a rare phenomenon when a whole
family becomes so distinguished by eminent talent in a particular field
of activity as the four Siemens brothers have been. They all seem to
share their peculiar talent in a nearly equal degree, and to use it for
a common purpose ; and so heartily have they assisted each other that
in the list of their inventions it is often hard to draw the line between
what shall be accredited to one, what to another of the brothers. They
all worked so harmoniously together, says the biographer of Sir Will-
iam in the London " Times " — " the idea suggested by one being taken
up and elaborated by another — that it is hardly possible to attribute
to each his own proper credit for their joint labor. The task, too, is
rendered all the harder by the fact that each brother was always ready
to attribute a successful invention to any of the family rather than to
himself." William was most appreciated in England because he lived
and worked there ; Werner, in Germany, because there was his home
and field of activity.

Charles William Siemens was born at Lenthe, in Hanover, April
4, 1823. He received his early education at the " Catharinum," in
Liibeck ; then studied engineering in the Polytechnical School at
Magdeburg ; and in 1841 and 1842 studied in the University of Got-
tingen, where he enjoyed the instructions of Wohler and Himly. Hav-
ing finished his academical career at the age of nineteen, and dis-
playing already some of that inventive faculty by which his brother,
six years older, was distinguished, he entered the engine-works of
Count Stolberg, where his attention was directed in the line of the
practical applications of science to industry. He and Werner having
devised an improved process in electro-plating with silver and gold,

SKETCH OF SIR CHARLES WILLIAM SIEMENS. 551

William went to England in 1843 to dispose of the invention. In his
lack of knowledge of the strange land, and his ignorance of our lan-
guage, he made his first visit to an undertaker, thinking that he must
be the proper person to take up, or " undertake," and push the new
application. A call upon Mr. Elkington, who then controlled the gild-
ing industry in England, was attended by a more satisfactory result,
and Siemens went home so well paid for his trouble that he came back
the next year with his chronometric regulator for steam-engines. This
invention was less successful, commercially, than the other had been,
but it made Siemens known to the engineering world, and it has been
applied to the regulation of the great transit instrument at the Green-
wich Observatory. The process of anastatic printing, another of the
earlier inventions of the brothers, was made the subject of a lecture
at the Royal Institution, by Faraday, in 1845. It is worthy of remark
that the last lecture by Faraday at this Institution was on the advan-
tages of the Siemens furnace. Another of the inventions of this pe-
riod was the water-metre, which, according to Sir William Thomson,
" exactly met an important practical requirement, and has had a splendid
thirty years' success." The adoption of England as his home by Will-
iam Siemens was determined by the fact that he found the patent
laws of that country more favorable to the inventor than those of his
own land.

Turning his attention to finding means for recovering the heat
which is allowed to go to waste in engineering and manufacturing
processes, William Siemens constructed a four horse -power steam-
engine with regenerative condensers, which he set up, in 1847, in the
factory of Mr. John Hicks at Bolton. This machine failed to become
commercially successful ; but Mr. Siemens, continuing his studies in
the same direction, and having become acquainted and impressed with
the dynamical theory of heat, read a paper before the Institution of
Civil Engineers in 1853, " On the Conversion of Heat into Mechanical
Effect," for which he obtained the Telford prize. In this paper he de-
fined a perfect engine as one in which all the heat applied to the elastic
medium is consumed in its expansion behind a working piston, leaving
no portion to be thrown into a condenser or into the atmosphere, and
advised that expansion should be carried to the utmost possible limit.
Two years afterward he exhibited two steam-engines, with regener-
ative condensers, at the Paris Exhibition.

The greatest of the inventions with which the name of Siemens is
associated is that of the regenerative furnace for glass-making and
metallurgical operations, which he worked out in connection with his
brother Frederick, who was also his pupil. By its means the defects
of the discharge of the products of combustion at a very high tempera-
ture, and in an incompletely combined state, are remedied ; a nearer ap-
proach is made to saving and applying to the work all the heat which
the combustibles are capable of affording ; a very high temperature is

552 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

attained, and steel is produced on the open hearth. Having matured
his process at his experimental works in Birmingham, he laid the foun-
dations of an industry which has attained a very great development
in England, and lies at the base of extensive factories all over the
world. The application of the principle of the regenerative furnace
has been extended to numerous industrial purposes in which great heat
is required ; for the powers of the furnace are limited in practice only
by the nature of the materials of which it is constructed. For the kind
of services exemplified in this invention the Society of Arts awarded
to Dr. Siemens, in 1874, its Albert medal "for his researches in con-
nection with the laws of heat, and the practical applications of them to
furnaces used in the arts, and for his improvements in the manufac-
ture of iron, and generally for the services rendered by him in connec-
tion with economization of fuel in its various applications to manu-
factures and the arts." Only a week before his death, the Council of
the Institution of Civil Engineers awarded him the Howard quinquen-
nial prize, which had been previously awarded only to Sir Henry Bes-
semer for a similar meritorious service.

Sir William Siemens and his brother Werner have co-operated in
electrical invention, beginning with the Siemens armature, which they
introduced about twenty-five years ago. The brothers, with Mr. Halske,
of Berlin, established the Siemens telegraph-works in London, whence
the most important telegraph and cable lines in the world have been
supplied, and where valuable improvements have originated. The
house has constructed four transatlantic cables — the Indo-European
line, the North China Cable, the Platino-Brazilian Cable, and others.
The want of a suitable vessel had been a serious difficulty in laying
the long cables across the Atlantic, and Dr. Siemens had the Fara-
day constructed, with novel features that made it admirably adapted
for its work. In 1860, while experimenting with the Malta and Alex-
andria Cable, he devised a pyrometer for measuring temperature
through the amount of resistance developed in conductors by increas-
ing heat. In 1867 he read before the Royal Society a paper on the
conversion of dynamical into chemical force, at the same meeting at
which Sir Charles Wheatstone announced his simultaneous discovery
of the same principle, while Mr. Cromwell Varley had applied for a
patent embodying the idea. Subsequently the Siemens dynamo was
developed. We next find Dr. Siemens's name associated with the elec-
tric light, electric railways, and the electrical transmission of power. A
fine illustration of the latter application is given by the Portrush and
Bushmills Railway in the north of Ireland, opened last September,
where passengers are carried on a line six and a half miles long of
steep gradients and sharp curves " at a good ten miles an hour," solely
by the water-power of the river Bush, applied through turbines to a
dynamo at a distance of seven miles. At his own residence, near Tun-
bridge Wells, " not only did electricity perform a large part of the

SKETCH OF SIR CHARLES WILLIAM SIEMENS. 553

actual work of the farm, sawing wood and pumping water, but it was
made to supply in part the place of the sun itself, and assist the growth
of plants and fruits."

The latest research having a practical bearing, with which Dr. Sie-
mens's name is associated, was that which had for its ultimate end econ-
omy of the fuel used in domestic consumption and the abolition of
smoke. With these purposes he was studying plans for extracting
the gas from coal, and burning the gas and the coke separately, with a
promise of successful realization which Sir William Thomson has well
indicated in relating an incident that happened on the day of Dr. Sie-
mens's death. On the 19th of November Sir William was accosted
in a manner of which most persons occupied with science have not
infrequent experience ; " Can you scientific people not save us from
these black and yellow city fogs ? " The instant answer was : " Sir Will-
iam Siemens is going to do it ; and I hope, if we live a few years longer,
we shall have seen almost the last of them." An apparatus which he
had devised for the application of his plan to steam-machinery was to
have been set in operation at the end of November.

Another research in which Dr. Siemens was engaged, all theoreti-
cal, was into the manner in which the solar heat is kept up ; and he
sought to show that, as in his own regenerative furnaces, none of the
heat is lost, but that all is kept alive in some form, ultimately to be
returned to the sun and to renew its energies in perpetuity,

One of Sir William Siemens's biographers well says of him that, in
whatever direction he turned, his thoughts seemed to perceive new
methods of working out old problems, or to discover new problems
which it immediately became his province to solve ; and it is said to
have been a common saying in his workshops, that as soon as any
particular problem had been given up by everybody as a bad job, it
had only to be taken to Dr. Siemens for him to suggest half a dozen
ways of solving it, two of which would be complicated and imprac-
ticable, two difficult, and two perfectly satisfactory.

Sir William Siemens was not a voluminous writer, but thirty -five
papers are attributed to him in the Royal Society's catalogue of scien-
tific papers, published in 1873. He has done much since, which is
probably represented by literary results. His last public lecture was
delivered March 13, 1883, and was on " The Electrical Transmission and
Storage of Power." He was fully supplied with honors and titles, sci-
entific and civil, and was a member of numerous learned societies.

Sir William Thomson says that " in private life, Sir William Sie-
mens, with his lively, bright intelligence, always present, and eager to
give pleasure and benefit to those around him, was a most lovable
man, singularly unselfish, and full of kind thought and care for others."

Dr. Siemens died on the 19th of November last, of ossification of
the heart, in connection with the results of a fall which he had suffered
on the 5th. His funeral was held in Westminster Abbey.

554

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

CORRESPONDENCE.

THE AGE OF TREES.
Messrs. Editors :

HAVING been a regular reader of " The
Popular Science Monthly " from its
commencement, I have, of course, noticed
the various articles having reference to the
value of the concentric rings in determin-
ing the age of trees which from time to
time have appeared in its columns, the last
of which, in your August issue, induces me
to give you the result of my observations
upon this subject. I have had my atten-
tion directed to it during a residence of over
forty years in Florida, during which my
views as to the value of the rings in deter-
mining the age of trees have undergone a
change. For the first few years my efforts
were directed toward securing a grateful
shade for the streets of the city of Jackson-
ville, and for this purpose the water-oak was
selected on account of its beauty, symme-
try of form, and rapid growth. And now
the appellation of " Forest City," applied to
it by visitors, is in no sense inappropriate,
for many of the older trees have attained
a size which in the State of New York,
whence I came, would have required a hun-
dred years to reach. Strangers from the
North are apt to overestimate the age of
our trees, and the number of rings pre-
sented appears to confirm in many instances
the correctness of their estimate. When
first called upon to account for the discrep-
ancy shown by the rings, and the known
age of the tree, I was perplexed and at a
loss to find a satisfactory solution of the
problem. But, having from my first arrival
here kept a careful record of the weather,
an analysis of my tables, a comparison with
the record made by Nature on her infallible
tablets in the trees furnished me the key
to it.

Here, as well as at the North, the cold
of winter puts a stop to vegetable growth,
and in all exogenous trees a concentric
ring will be formed, embracing all woody
matter deposited since the preceding stop
to its growth ; but here in this climate causes
are in operation that frequently produce as
complete a stop to vegetable growth as docs
the cold of winter.

Our spring begins in February, when
growth commences a new deposit between
the bark and wood, but often (not always)
there comes so severe a drought during late
spring and early summer as to produce as
full and complete a stop to vegetable growth
as does the cold of winter ; immediately
after comes on our rainy season, generally

about the middle or last of June, producing
a rapid and luxuriant growth, which con-
tinues until winter again puts a stop to it.
Our rainy seasons, however, do not consist
of deluges of rain that overflood the country,
but of daily showers, occurring in the early
part of the afternoon, lasting an hour or
two, leaving the sky bright and clear, the
air cool for the rest of the twenty-four
hours, comfortable to man, and favorable
to luxuriant vegetable growth. The rainy
seasons, when regular, continue day after
day, for about sixty days, but often there
is an interval of clear, sunshiny weather,
for about a fortnight, between the rainy
periods, which carries the rainy season into
the fall months. Upon examination of
the tree, it will be found that, when those
severe droughts have put a stop to vegetable
growth, a concentric ring well defined has
been produced, and the growth which has
occurred during the rainy season and until
winter's cold has formed another and per-
haps a thicker ring, making two rings in
one year. But the phenomena of such a year
are not necessarily repeated each year, for
considerable variation occurs.

What physiological meaning is attached
to these rings ? They simply mark the
amount of growth of woody matter depos-
ited day by day between the periods when
a stop to vegetable growth has prevented
daily deposit and produced a line of demar-
kation, whether from drought of summer or
cold of winter.

For some two or three years before his
lamented death, Professor Jeffries Wyman
was exploring the mounds of Florida. It
was my privilege to enjoy his acquaint-
ance and learn his views on matters of sci-
ence in which wc were both interested.
I have heard him express his belief that
he had reached an approximate age of
some of the mounds wrhich he had explored,
by the indications which the trees growing
upon them had furnished. It so happened
that we were one time walking down-town
together and passed a lot where prepara-
tions for building a dwelling-house were
going on, and a tree which stood upon the
proposed site was being cut down. He re-
marked that it was sacrilege to cut down
so noble a tree ; he would have changed
the site of the house and let the tree re-
main as a shade, "for," said he, "it would
take a hundred years to produce such an-
other tree." In "that, I told him, he was
mistaken, as I knew the age of that tree,
and it was not yet thirty years old. " Impos-

CORRESP ONDENCE.

555

siblc ! " said he, and proposed, as the tree
had been felled and lay on the ground, to
go over and count the rings, to which I as-
sented, and looked on while the professor
undertook the task. I soon saw that he
was under considerable perplexity. He said
he found it no easy matter, as some of the
rings were so indistinct that he was un-
able to decide whether they were single or
double, M but," said he, " I can make out
thirty or more, but how many more I will not
venture to say." I carefully examined the
rings, and saw what I had seen before. I
have no doubt that at least forty rings could
have been identified by a close and critical
examination. I reiterated my statement as
to the real age of the tree, for thirty years
before I had seen corn growing on thi3 spot.
I told him the tree which he had just
examined presented a true record of the
weather, so far as drought and rainfall were
concerned, since it had been a tree, and in-
vited him to call at my office and examine
the records which I had kept during the
same period, and he would find a confirma-
tion of what I had stated. " This theory,"
says he, " is new to me, but it is plausible,
and the facts here presented seem to sub-
stantiate it." His death, after his return
North that year, put a stop to further sci-
entific investigations in Florida on his part,
but the reasons then given have induced
many others to change their views as to the
value of concentric rings in determining the
age of trees. In a climate like that of
Florida they certainly are not to be de-
pended on ; how it may be in a more north-
ern latitude I will not undertake to assert
or deny, but it seems to me probable that
any arrest of growth, from climatic or other
causes, will be indicated by some peculiarity
in the formation of the concentric rin^s of
the tree; and it may in some instances pre-
sent two rings instead of one to mark an
entire year's growth.

Very respectfully,

A. S. Baldwin, M. D.
Jacksonville, Fla., September 27, 1SS3.

BIETH-EATE IN A NEW HAMPSHIRE
TOWN.
Messrs. Editors:

While preparing a history of Chester-
field, Cheshire County, New Hampshire, the
writer has had occasion to collect the birth-
records of several hundred families, includ-
ing both original settlers and their descend-
ants. These families may be regarded as
typical New England families, the original
settlers having come, for the most part,
from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode
Island. The foreign element has always
been very small in the town. A careful in-
spection of the birth-records in question
(taking into account the children of one

marriage only, in cases in which the father
married more than once, and excluding the
still-born) yields the following results :

1. The total number of births in 165
families, from 1750 to 1810, was 1,359, or
an average number of 8^f- to each family.

2. The total number of births in 328
families, from 1810 to 1870, was 1,825, or
an average number of 5^|f to each family.

3. The average number of births in 140
families, from 1810 to 1840, was 6fg.

These figures show that there was a
marked decrease in the birth-rate of Ches-
terfield families between 1810 and 1840,
and that in the period of sixty years, from
1810 to 1S70, this decrease was still more
marked.

If what is true of this town, in this re-
spect, is also true of the majority of New
England towns, as is quite probable, it
would appear that the birth-rate in New
England families has steadily decreased
since the introduction of railroads and the
extensive establishment of manufactories.

O. E. Randall.

West Chesterfield, N. H., September 3, 1S33.

"TIDAL ANOMALIES."
Messrs. Editors •

In the January number of your journal
there is a communication under the above-
named title, from G. W. Grim, of the bark
Coryphene. Referring to a preceding letter
of mine, he says of my article, " After dem-
onstrating, as a result of Professor Schnei-
der's theory, a great inequality in the daily
range of the tides," etc.

The gentleman entirely misconceives the
purport of my criticism. I showed that
Professor Schneider's theory is demonstra-
bly false, and my reference to the New
York tides was merely to show by them that
the theory does not conform to the facts.
The " daily inequality " is easy to explain :
most of those given by Mr. Grim present no
difficulty at all — with others, when the facts
are established, the explanation will follow.

No theory of the tides is of any value
except as based on facts — in which respect
Mr. Grim's theory i3 worse off than Mr.
Schneider's. A theory of the tides resting
solely on one's inner consciousness is not a
valuable contribution to knowledge.

R. W. McFarland.
Omo State University, December 27, 1883.

CAERYING-POWEE OF FLUID CUEEENTS.
Messrs. Editors:

I see that in your November number,
page 95, Mr. Carter applies the " law of
carrying-power of currents " (R a v6) to
blood-currents carrying waste matter. Now,
I make no objection to the general correct-
ness of Mr. Carter's conclusions, but I am

556

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

sure that this is an entire misapplication of
the law.

The fact is, this law is so often misun-
derstood and misapplied that it becomes
dangerous to use it without clear concep-
tions of its nature. By many good hy-
draulic engineers it has been confounded
with the law of erosive power of currents ;
by others, with the quantity of material car-
ried in suspension ; and now Mr. Carter con-
founds it with quantity of matter carried in
solution. It were well if, in popular lan-
guage, the name of the law were changed.
Perhaps it would be less liable to be misun-
derstood if it were called "lifting-power
of currents." It expresses only the size of
the largest transportable particle. It is a

law which concerns mainly the geologist and
the ore-dresser. The geologist finds certain
bowlders scattered about in the lower part
of a valley. The question is, Were they
brought by currents ; and, if so, what was
the velocity ? It is applied thus, by Dana,
in discussing the material brought down by
the Connecticut River during the Champlain
epoch. Again, the ore-dresser has crushed
rock, which he wishes to sort by means of a
current decreasing in velocity in its course.
The question is, Where will the particles of
different sizes drop ? I do not know any
other cases of practical application. Cer-
tainly it can have no application to matters
in solution. Joseph Le Cokte.

Berkeley, Cal., November 22, 1883.

EDITOR'S TABLE.

SCIENCE AS A HOPE IN POLITICS.

THE following paragraph has been
circulating through the newspa-
pers : "The Lord Mayor of London, in
welcoming Professor Huxley to the city
recently, suggested that the position of
President cf the Royal Society was
really one of even greater importance
than that of Prime Minister; Mr. Glad-
stone is chief Minister of England, but
Professor Huxley was ' the head of the
intellectual life of the world.' " The
complaisant utterances of eminent offi-
cials, who are ever expected to say the
agreeable thing that shall put their
guests at ease, are not to be taken too
seriously ; yet there is considerable sig-
nificance in this declaration of the Lord
Mayor of London, both from its impli-
cation of the vast changes that have
been wrought by science in the views
of human affairs, and from the open
recognition of these changes by so con-
spicuous a party.

The advance of science is evinced in
numberless ways, but our weightiest
proof of it is found in the gradual ac-
ceptance of enlarged in place of nar-
rower views of the subject. New dis-
coveries are important; the widening
of the ranges of research is important ;
the extension of generalizations and the
better organization of positive knowl-

edge are important; but more impor-
tant still is the growing general recog-
nition that science is the grand agency
in modern times for reshaping the com-
mon opinions of the community.

By the narrower view of science, we
mean what may be called that profes-
sional conception of it by which it is re-
stricted to certain definite experimental
results. Our literary and theological
friends are especially solicitous that the
term science should be confined to phys-
ical science merely — laboratory science,
observatory science, manipulatory sci-
ence of any sort that can be regarded as
belonging properly to specialists. But
they grow jealous of it when it takes on
that wider and deeper meaning which
has been given to it by the growth of
ideas in these later times, and when it
is seen to involve a new method of
thought, of the most comprehensive ap-
plication, and bearing upon the whole
circle of human interests. They are
very commendatory of science, so long
as it is busy establishing new physical
facts and extending new physical truths,
but they regard it as an impertinent
usurper when it interferes with that
old order of conceptions which per-
vades the cemmon life.

But it has long been seen by the
more discerning that one of the great

EDITOR'S TABLE.

557

results of the striking advance and wid-
ening influence of modern scientific
knowledge must be a sharp revision of
the ancient and current valuations of
great men. The old standards can not
continue to be accepted, and the decla-
ration of the Lord Mayor of London is a
clear admission of it. He represents the
position of Professor Huxley as Presi-
dent of the Royal Society not merely
as the head of an eminent body of Eng-
lish investigators, distinguished as that
position would be, but as " the head of
the intellectual life of the world," and
he gives greater emphasis to the state-
ment by affirming that Huxley's position
is " really one of even greater impor-
tance " than that of Gladstone, Prime
Minister of England. This is in no
sense a comparison of the talents or
genius of two distinguished personali-
ties, but a comparison of their positions
as representative men, and an affirma-
tion of the superiority of the illustrious
scientist to the illustrious politician.
The deeper meaning of this averment
is that it brings into contrast two types
of character — that formed under scien-
tific influences and embodying its spirit,
and that formed under political influ-
ences and embodying its spirit. The
immense import of the statement arises
from its recognition that a new order
of men has arisen in these times and
worked its way to acknowledged su-
pereminence as leaders in " the intel-
lectual life of the world." This means
a great deal.

Undoubtedly the great changes of
modern thought which threaten to dis-
place an old ideal of great men, and to
substitute a new ideal, have far-reaching
consequences, which may turn out to
be of the most practical kind. It would
be folly to deny that in recent years
there has been a rapid decline in the
respect generally entertained for emi-
nent political men. The world has al-
ways worshiped successful politicians,
and will no doubt long continue to wor-
ship them as the embodiments of power

in society; but, as the possession of po-
litical power becomes more and more
a matter of accident, there will be in-
creasing hollowness in the homage ren-
dered to those who have had the good
luck to get possession of official places.
Already political success has altogether
ceased to imply greatness of character ;
the machinery of partisan politics may
give prominence to a wary and skillful
manager — the tricky manoeuvring of a
convention may furnish a President —
but nobody is deceived into supposing
that distinguished merit is thereby dis-
closed, or that genuine greatness has
met with the honor to which it is en-
titled. Incontestably, there are no such
shams and humbugs in modern society
as successful politicians. "We do not
expect them to be men of solid acquisi-
tions, to have mastered the knowledge
that is needful for statesmen, or to ex-
emplify anything like manliness and in-
dependence of character. These traits
are all in the way of political success.
Transparency and uprightness of mind
are not wanted, insincerity and crook-
edness of mind are indispensable to the
political manager. He views all things
with reference to immediate results,
and holds any expedients justifiable
that will enable him to win in partisan
conflict. The school of politics, in short,
gives us men that are not entitled to
public respect, and this scandalous fact
is universally understood.

But are we to regard this as the
hopeless finality of things in the po-
litical and public sphere? There are
strong reasons for taking a different
view and indulging in better anticipa-
tions. Agencies are at work which
will form men of more elevated char-
acter. We look to the extension of
science and the deepening of scientific
influences to give us minds capable of
improving the existing state of things.
It is impossible to overestimate the good
that may be hoped from this scientific
influence, as it becomes strengthened
and organized and brought to bear

558

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

upon public affairs, because science is
allegiance to truth, while current poli-
tics is little else than allegiance to lies.
No man expects that a politician will
be honest, or candid, or truthful, or
make a bold and honorable avowal of
principles; nor is there any possible
ground to hope that our politics will
purify themselves by any working of
their internal elements so that men of
probity, high character, and real great-
ness will be put in the positions of
power. The regenerative influence, if
it comes at all, must come from other
sources, and we expect it to come
sooner or later from the great move-
ment of modern science, which must
bring with it a new training in the
intellectual virtues. It is to the new
conceptions and new culture of science
that we look for the production of men
of a higher quality for public use to
replace that lower quality which has
ceased to command the admiration of
intelligent and honorable-minded peo-
ple. Our politics is to-day the despair
of our most earnest citizens, and we
can see no possible escape from its cor-
ruption and its degradation but by the
supply of new men animated by higher
ideas, qualified by superior intelligence,
and trained in reverence for truth, and
these men are to be produced by the
slowly ripening influence of science, as
it comes gradually to pervade our edu-
cational systems. Of course, no great
change of this kind can be suddenly
precipitated ; it must be a slow growth,
to work effectual results; but science
advances with its work, and gives us
some ground of hope even in the most
discouraging of all the fields of human
effort.

ED UCA TION WI TfTO UT DEAD LA N-
GUAOES.

Oxe would think that the advocates
of the classics, as the one superior sys-
tem for the unfolding of the human
mind, would have long ago abated their
exclusive pretensions in face of the fact

that such multitudes fail with it, and
that so many succeed without it. It is
not found difficult to evade the force of
the first objection that great numbers
of dead-language students come to noth-
ing with their classics, because it is said
that they neglect their opportunities, or
get far more good from this source than
they are ever aware of. But it is not
so easy to escape the objection to the
wonderful worth of defunct speech in
the cultivation of the human faculties
with such multiplying evidence as we
have of great intellectual power acquired
by a mental cultivation into which the
dead languages have never entered.
That these studies have declined in con-
sideration, and are put upon the de-
fensive, and fall back upon tradition
and authority for backing, is simply be-
cause other instruments of culture in
these modern times are not only com-
peting with them but are beating them
everywhere. Accompanying the de-
cline of the classics, there has arisen
an outside education, irregular in form,
unguided by institutions, self-inspired
and self-shaped, which is full of great re-
sults. The past generation has abound-
ed in men who have either turned their
backs upon the universities, after trying
them, or who have never gone near
them, but who have become leaders of
thought in all departments of intellect-
ual activity. The unfortunate creatures
who have been enticed to college, and
there loaded down with a knapsack of
dead languages have found, as was very
natural, that they were overweighted
in the competitive race of practical life,
and left behind by those whose acqui-
sitions are better adapted to the new
requirements of the age. Charles Dar-
win went to the university, neglected
the classics, and made what he could
out of it for the promotion of his natu-
ral history studies ; and Herbert Spen-
cer refused to be lured there at all.
Yet these are the men who are guiding
the mind of the age, while for twenty
years we have been afflicted with the

EDITOR'S TABLE.

559

pitiful protestations of classical gradu-
ates (with their incomparable "mental
discipline") that they could not even
understand the epoch-making books of
these great thinkers.

From this point of view, the English
experience with classical studies is espe-
cially rich in instruction. Every public
influence in that old, aristocratic, tradi-
tion-ridden country has favored the as-
cendency and the perpetuity of dead
languages in all grades of education.
Whatever benefits could be got from
them have been there obtained in
abounding measure. Modern knowl-
edge has been hindered and repressed
that the classics might have free course
and undisputed sway; and yet, as we
have before observed, the system worked
out such miserable and scandalous re-
sults that the state was compelled to
look into the subject and do what it
could to expose if not to correct the
abuses. The Government reports on
the condition of education in the uni-
versities and great public schools re-
vealed a state of things which will be
the wonder of all future ages. Some
twenty years ago, Prof. W. P. Atkinson,
of Boston, printed a very valuable pam-
phlet devoted to these English educa-
tional reports. We regret to say that
it is now out of print, for it would be
an invaluable contribution to the dis-
cussion now going forward upon this
question. As its contents will be new
to many, we reprint some passages il-
lustrating the extent to which, even at
that time, the classical university edu-
cation had been practically superseded
by forms of culture more suited to the
necessities of the times :

This view [that the English universities
have lost the hold they once had on the edu-
cated classes] will be corroborated if we con-
sider how many of the most influential minds
of the century, in science, literature, art, and
politics, have either had no connection what-
ever with the universities, or are under small
obligation to them for any connection they
may have had. In politics, and political
economy, we might name, among others,

Romilly, Bentham, Ricardo, Bright, Cobden,
Stuart Mill. Though the government of Eng-
land is monopolized by the aristocracy, the
political thought which governs her govern-
ors comes daily more and more from the
people. The list of "uneducated" men of
science — if I may be allowed the absurdity of
such a phrase — is far longer, as, after what
has been said, might reasonably be expected,
than any the universities can show — Davy,
Wollaston, Dalton, Faraday, Wheatstone, De
la Beche, Murchison, Hind, South, Fitzroy,
Playfair, Carpenter — it might be indefinitely
extended; and we shall find that the most
eminent of her college - educated men of
science are the foremost in denouncing her
university system. Of course, all her great
engineers, inventors, and builders, are un-
educated men — Watt, Telford, Smeaton, Ren-
nie, Brindley, the Brunels, the Stephensons,
Sir Joseph Paxton — it is with these names
that that sad but glorious volume, " The Pur-
suit of Knowledge under Difficulties," is
filled. Her great artists are all " uneducated "
men — Flaxman and Gibson, Landseer, Tur-
ner, and Stanfield, Kemble and Macready,
and all the rest. And, when we turn to liter-
ature itself, the greatest English historical
work of this generation — a work on classic
history, too — was written by an " unedu-
cated" London banker. The greatest, I
might almost say the only, English attempt at
a philosophy of history, a work which, with
all its errors and paradoxes — and I shall not
deny that they are many and great — is still
one which can not be matched by any similar
academic performance, was the work of the
"uneducated" son of a London merchant.
Her novelists — Dickens, Thackeray, Jerrold,
Marry at — come from all quarters save the
banks of the Cam and the Isis ; not to men-
tion so many of that sex which is excluded
altogether from their sacred borders. Bulwer
is, indeed, a Cambridge man, but I think
Cambridge will be slow to put forward that
pretentious charlatan as an example of the
fruits of her classical training. Even of her
poets, critics, and essayists, what a long list
are among the wholly "uneducated," or must
be classed among those who derived no bene-
fit from their stay at a university, save that
(undoubtedly great) one which comes from
mere residence at a place of learning ! The
names at once occur of Crabhe, Rogers,
Lamb, Moore, Montgomery, Hunt, Gifford,
Hazlitt, Hood. Who would hesitate to say
where Scott's real education lay ? Who has
criticised the education of Oxford so wittily
as Sydney Smith, or so grimly as Carlyle?
Wordsworth and Coleridge, in their short

560

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

stay at the university, owed little or nothing
to the studies of the place. Southey says he
only learned to swim there — badly ; Byron
was ruined there ; and the beautiful genius
of Shelley found there, instead of the help
and guidance it so much needed, only cruel
and ignominious abuse. Keats, some of
whose exquisite poems breathe the very spirit
of classical antiquity, was a stable-keeper's
son, and never studied at public school or
university. England's eminent surgeons and
physicians are not university men ; and what
is it that in that country keeps theology so
far behind all other sciences, but the fact
that the clergy are the only profession who
are compelled to subject their minds to the
full " dementalizing " power of Oxford train-
ing? What power less potent could produce
the bigotry of an English High -Church
bishop ? I am not forgetful of the eminent
names that may be produced on the other
side; but, even in regard to these, the ques-
tion must always he asked, How far was their
eminence due to their education ? The real
relation in which the English schools and
universities stand to her greatest minds, even
in the past, and the share which university
teaching really had in training them, is a
problem that still needs elucidation. " We
are not sure," says the present Lord Brough-
am, writing in 1826, " whether the result of
the investigation would be so favorable as
is commonly supposed to Oxford and Cam-
bridge. And of this we are sure, that many
persons, who, since they have risen to emi-
nence, are perpetually cited as proofs of the
beneficial tendency of English education,
were at college never mentioned but as idle,
frivolous men, fond of desultory reading, and
negligent of the studies of the place. It
would be indelicate to name the living ; but
we may venture to speak more particularly
of the dead. It is truly curious to observe
the use that is made, in such discussions, of
names which we acknowledge to be glorious,
hut in which the colleges have no reason to
glory — that of Bacon, who reprobated their
fundamental constitution ; of Dry den, who
abjured his Alma Mater, and regretted that
he had passed his youth under her care ; of
Locke, who was censured and expelled ; of
Milton, whose person was outraged at one
university, and whose works were committed
to the flames at the other.

It may, perhaps, be argued that many of
the M uneducated " men whom I have been
enumerating would have been the better for
a university training. For a true university
training, no doubt they would — one that
would have developed all their powers har-

moniously, while it gave full play to their
special genius. With the advocates of such
a training, I have here no controversy ; I
will even grant that many of these writers,
in spite of their genius, betray the faults
which are wont to mark the self-educated
man. But would it have been better for Mr.
Buckle himself if, by a long course of non-
sense-verses, the attempt had been made to
flatter and polish him down to the regulation
standard of Oxford mediocrity ? Mr. Buckle
at least stimulates us to think ; can as much
be said of Oxford bishops ? There is a pas-
sage in a recently published book of travels
in Eussia, by Professor Piazzi Smyth, the
Astronomer-Royal for Scotland, which bears
on this question and records a somewhat sur-
prising conclusion. Describing a conversa-
tion he had with that eminent astronomer,
Struve, as to the results of their experience
in university teaching, both agreed that on
many points further inquiry was greatly
needed ; but Professor Struve said that " this
conclusion had been drawn independently
by so many differently circumstanced men
in the Eussian and German-Baltic provinces,
from the general impressions which their
recollections gave them, that there could be
little doubt of its containing much truth —
truth, too, of a startling character : the first
hoys at school disappear at the colleges, and
those ivho are first in the colleges disappear in
the world." I am not sure that a similar
conclusion would not follow from a similar
investigation into our own, as well as into
English and German academical history, and
that it would not be found that the men most
useful and successful in after-life were not
those who had placed themselves most fully
under the influence of college training, or
been stimulated to exertion by mere hope of
college rewards, but those who had been mos^
successful in escaping its narrowing influences,
while, on the other hand, they had also es-
caped the still greater dangers of idleness and
dissipation in the formative period of their
history — men who had cast from them the
trammels of pedantry, and with independent
energy marked out their own career.

We publish the first of a series of
articles on some of the political tend-
encies of the times, by Herbert Spen-
cer. The present paper, though treat-
ing of affairs in England, and there-
fore full of English illustrations, will be
found to have a bearing upon urgent
questions in this country, and to in-

LITERARY NOTICES.

561

volve, indeed, some of the most radical
problems of popular government. We
have been told that the price of liberty
is eternal vigilance, and the truth is
far more pregDant than is generally
supposed. But we require to learn a
still more elementary lesson, that is,
what liberty is. Our common notion
of slavery has come to be negroes sold
at auction, and our notion of liberty has
come to be the privilege of locomotion
and of voting. A people with such no-
tions of the subject will hardly be very
vigilant in paying the price of liberty
by strenuously resisting all encroach-
ments upon individual rights. There-
fore, every discussion which makes the
subject clearer, and calls attention to
considerations which are apt to be gen-
erally overlooked and forgotten, is im-
portant ; and nowhere is it more impor-
tant to guard against the indifference of
citizens and the fallacies by which they
are misled on the subject of liberty
than where government is popularly
administered. Mr. Spencer's future pa-
pers will probably bear much more di-
rectly upon American political prob-
lems than the present.

LITERARY NOTICES.

World - Life ; or, Comparative Geology.
By Alexander Winchell, LL. D., Pro-
fessor of Geology and Paleontology in
the University of Michigan. Chicago :
S. C. Grigg3 & Co. Pp. 642. Price,
$2.50.

In this compact but comprehensive book
Professor Winchell has made a contribution
to science that was greatly needed, and he
has performed his task in a manner that
well comports with the grandeur of the sub-
ject. A carefully prepared book, represent-
ing the present state of knowledge on " the
processes of world-formation, world-growth,
and world-decadence," has been urgently
needed for some years. There is, no doubt,
much shallow skepticism in many minds re-
garding the validity of inquiries in this field,
which has been relegated to the sphere of
scientific romance and fanciful speculation.
But sober and well-instructed minds have
vol. xxiv. — 36

not shared in this feeling. Our knowledge
concerning the genesis of worlds is, of
course, yet very incomplete, and there is
necessarily much of that divei'gence of opin-
ion in relation to it which always belongs to
the stage of active advancing inquiry. But
there is already a great body of assured and
formulated knowledge bearing upon the
problem of the genesis of worlds which i8
not to be gainsaid, and there has been the
steadily increasing necessity that this knowl-
edge should be collated, and organized into
definite scientific form. But a somewhat
special preparation was required to do any-
thing like tolerable justice to this work.
The factors of the discussion are of the
largest import. Celestial mechanics has
long been the fundamental element of the
research, and within recent years celestial
chemistry has come forward as of equal im-
portance. Nebular cosmogony and nebular
evolution are now established conceptions
of science, and, in working them out, the
sciences of geology and astronomy are of
equal significance and application. Profess-
or Winchell refers to his task as an attempt
at " laying the foundations of a science
which, from one point of view, may be
styled the geology of the stars, and, from
another, the astronomy of the earth. It is
the science of comparative geology. It is
astrogeology." In regard to the present
position of the nebular view, the author re-
marks : " Nor can it be correctly said that
the general theory remains still in the status
of an hypothesis. In certain points of de-
tail opinion may still remain divided ; but,
when an hypothesis has stood the scrutiny of
three generations, and has become all but
unanimously accepted, by those prepared to
form original opinions, as the real expres-
sion of a method in nature, surely, then, the
time has passed when any person can ad-
vantageously illustrate his learning and sa-
gacity by continuing to reproach the con-
ception as ' a mere hypothesis.' If any
' mere hypothesis ' ever strengthened into
the condition of a scientific doctrine, as-
suredly we find in the scientific world to-
day the general features of a sound nebular
doctrine."

Professor Winchell's geological studies,
long carried on in connection with the cos-
mical problems which they involve, have well

562

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

prepared hiin for the broad investigation
which has led to the writing of the present j
volume ; but the problems of the nebular
hypothesis have long occupied a large
amount of attention with him, and been
made a subject of his college lectures, so
that he has made it a point to master the
various special questions that have recently
come forward in connection with this sub-
ject. We know of no other work in which
the reader can find a full, connected, and
systematic presentation of the results of
cosmical research that will compare with
this, and we are especially glad to see that
the publishers have put it at a reasonable
and popular price.

No sufficient account of the contents of
the book can be offered in the space at our
command, but we give an imperfect outline
of the main features of the exposition.

The book is divided into four parts, of
which Part I, entitled " World-Stuff," treats
of the process by which the constituent
particles of worlds become aggregated into
spheroidal masses. The meteoric matter
which is constantly falling upon the earth
in masses varying from dust-particles to
meteorites of several tons weight, the zo-
diacal light, which polariscopic study shows
to be reflected sunlight, comets, which are
now known to be simply conglomerations of
cosmical dust, the rings of Saturn, and the
irresolvable nebula?, all go to show that a
vast amount of matter such as our earth is
made of, must exist diffused in space. "All
the moving bodies of our system must be
continually pelted by these cosmical atoms,
and the aggregate result of these collisions
must, in thousands or millions of years,
affect their motions. Supposing the mo-
tions of the cosmical atoms to have no pre-
vailing direction, it is evident that the mo-
tions of the planets, satellites, and comets
of our system would cause them to meet
more of these atoms than the total number
which would overtake them. The result
would, therefore, be a resistance to the
movement of these bodies, and the effect of
this would be an acceleration of their mo-
tions and a shortening of their periods. I
venture the opinion that this cause is a
more efficient resistance than the supposed
ethereal medium." These material particles
are drawn by mutual attraction into groups,

and any central attractive force, as of a sun
or planet, would also cause them to aggre-
gate, by deflecting their motions into con-
verging lines. But, in the presence of two
or more attractive centers, as in the present
constitution of the cosmos, it is impossible
that any mass shall fall directly upon its
center of attraction ; hence every body
would tend to circulate about every other
body. But the resulting movements would
be so infinitely complex as to precipitate
countless collisions of particles and masses.
Each group or swarm which gradually forms
will have a progressive motion along a path
having the essential character of an orbit
around some dominant center of attraction.
If any condition of interplanetary matter
exists in space, its resistance would cause
the smaller particles to fall behind, and the
whole swarm to assume an elongated fan-
shape. The attractions that control these
motions would be feeble; sometimes the
controlling one would be only that of an-
other cosmical swarm. Most of these swarms
of cosmical dust would simply float poised
in space, growing by accession of particles,
and occasionally coalescing with other clouds,
until an aggregation is formed large enough
to be called a nebula. From these various
attractions and collisions the nebula would
have acquired a rotary motion. It would
assume the form of an oblate spheroid, and,
as the cloud-like mass cooled, the conse-
quent contraction would increase the speed
of rotation, until an equatorial ringlet of
particles gained a centrifugal tendency equal
to the centripetal. Further contraction
would cause the main body of the spheroid
to shrink away from this ring, which would
then rotate independently. We might sup-
pose that successive slender ringlets would
become detached until the whole mass was
converted into an essentially continuous disk,
for the attraction of the ring first separated
would be added to the centrifugal force of
the circlet of particles nearest it, and so on.
But every successive addition to the annular
mass increases its distance from the next
ringlet of particles, and upon this its influ-
ence, though increasing with the growth of
the ring, diminishes as the square of the
distance increases. As a result, " an annu-
lar mass of relatively considerable amount
would separate, and a secular interval would

LITERARY NOTICES.

563

intervene before the separation of another
annular mass." ' None of these rings could
long remain of uniform thickness. Each
would attenuate in some part, and finally
rupture, resolving itself into a mass that
would possess a rotary motion, the direction
of which would be determined by the rela-
tion of the velocities of the outer and inner
zones of the ring.

Part II, " Planetology," occupies about
half the volume. In the first chapter of it,
certain observed phenomena of the solar sys-
tem are enumerated which accord with the
requirements of the nebular theory, and ob-
jections to the theory are answered. For
the retrograde motions of the satellites of
Uranus and Neptune our author advances
several explanations : 1. It is entirely con-
ceivable that both the Uranian and Neptu-
nian systems should have suffered a tilting
through more than a right angle by the in-
fluence of some powerfully attracting body
passing in the neighborhood. 2. The coa-
lescence of two or more spheroids may have
tilted the axis of the resultant planet, and
its whole system of satellites would be cor-
respondingly tilted. 3. Certain relations
of density, distance from the center of the
nebulous mass, breadth of ring, and ve-
locity might cause retrograde motion in the
earlier stages of the evolution of a nebula
of a certain magnitude. The next chapter
describes the passage of a gaseous planet
to the molten phase, the solidification of its
core from pressure of the superincumbent
portions, the incrustation of its surface, and
the transformations of this crust. A large
influence on planetary history is ascribed to
tidal action, a tide being defined as "the
prolateness of a body resulting from the
attraction of another body." Coming to
some special considerations of the planetary
bodies in the solar system, Professor Win-
chell mentions three independent conceiva-
ble causes for the molten condition in which
a part of the earth's substance evidently is :
•' There may be a zone too deep for solidifi-
cation by cooling, and too shallow for solidi-
fication by pressure. ... In the next place,
we may suppose that at all depths beneath
the surface the pressure is such that the
fusing-point is higher than the actual tem-
perature, so that a state of solidity exists.
. , . We may conceive that heat and fu-

sion result from some mechanical crushing
pressure." In regard to this last theory he
says, further : " But a cause of crushing press-
ure which seems to me more adequate than
secular cooling is suggested by Sir William
Thomson's and Archdeacon Pratt's, and,
we may add, Professor G. H. Darwin's, dem-
onstrations of tidal effects in a globe as
rigid as steel or glass. May not the tidal
deformations of the earth's crust be the
source of the internal heat which manifests
itself in fluidity ? The whole value of the
lunar tidal oscillation in a yielding globe
should be about fifty-eight inches. In a
globe as rigid as glass it should, therefore,
be about 34"8 inches, and, in one as rigid as
steel, 1933 inches. The whole tidal oscil-
lation under the joint maximum influence
of the sun and moon in a perfectly yielding
globe would be about 8T2 inches. The
amount in a globe of glass would, therefore,
be, when at a maximum, 48'72 inches, and,
in a globe of steel, 27"06 inches. Should
the terrestrial globe yield to the extent of
any one of these amounts, the crushing
effect experienced by the superior zones
of the crust would not be uniformly distrib-
uted, since variations in structure and hard-
ness and surface configuration would pre-
serve certain portions from any change, and
the whole amount of the interstitial dis-
placements would be accumulated in the re-
maining portions. It does not seem at all
improbable that the transformation of such
enormous mechanical force into heat should
suffice to bring to a state of fusion volumes
considerable enough to answer all the re-
quirements of the thermal manifestations
of modern times, as well as the terrestrial
movements of modern earthquakes." From
an examination of the planetology of the
moon he concludes that " lunar history must
have presented characteristics widely di-
vergent from those of terrestrial history ;
and in this divergence the tenuity of the
moon's atmosphere has performed a part
quite comparable with the energetic work of
the tides. . . .

" The question of the habitability of other
worlds has generally been discussed from
the assumption that all other corporeal be-
ings must be clothed in flesh and bones
similar to those of terrestrial animals, and
must be adapted to a similar physical envi-

564

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ronment. But it is manifest, on a moment's
consideration, that corporeality may exist
under very divergent conditions. It is not at
all improbable that substances of a refrac-
tory nature might be so mixed with other
substances, known or unknown to us, as to
be capable of enduring vastly greater vicis-
situdes of heat and cold than is possible
with terrestrial organisms. . . . There may
be intelligences corporealized after some
concept not involving the processes of inges-
tion, assimilation, and reproduction. Such
bodies would not require daily food and
warmth. They might be lost in the abysses
of the ocean, or laid up on a stormy cliff
through the tempests of an Arctic winter, or
plunged in a volcano for a hundred years,
and yet retain consciousness and thought.
It is conceivable. Why might not psychic
natures be enshrined in indestructible flint
and platinum ? These substances are no
further from the nature of intelligence than
carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and lime."

" General Cosmogony " is the title of
Part III, which consists of a short chapter
on the condition of the fixed stars and neb-
ulse, with some general considerations on the
whole system. " Evolution of Cosmogonic
Doctrine " occupies the rest of the volume.
In these concluding chapters the growth of
man's view of the universe is traced from
the partial conceptions of the Greek phi-
losophers to the comprehensive system of
modern astronomers. The theories of Kep-
ler, Descartes, Leibnitz, Swedenborg, and
Thomas Wright, are described briefly, and
that of Kant is given with some detail.
Then follow the views of Lambert, Sir Will-
iam Herschel, and Laplace, and a brief
" Systematic Resume of Opinions."

Man a Creative First Cause: Two Dis-
courses delivered at Concord, Mass.,
July, 1882. By Rowland G. Hazard,
LL. D. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin &
Co. Pp. 112.

In this instructive little volume we have
a compact and very lucid restatement of the
leading philosophical views of its veteran
author, which were several years ago de-
veloped in an extended form in his more
elaborate works. Mr. Hazard is well known
as a man of original and versatile thought,
and has dealt with a considerable variety of

subjects, practical as well as theoretical, in
his various publications ; but he will prob-
ably be best known in the future by his
comprehensive metaphysical treatise en-
titled "On the Freedom of the Mind in
Willing." The origin of this work is, on
various accounts, so interesting and signifi-
cant, that it should not be forgotten.

The celebrated Dr. William Ellery Chan-
ning, whose reputation is world-wide as a
gifted preacher, a discriminating philan-
thropist, and as the father of American
liberal theology, is understood to have been
in a somewhat unsettled state of mind upon
what may be regarded as the logic of the
old free-will controversy. He is said to
have "confessed to an incapacity to form
any satisfactory philosophical theory and
defense of that moral freedom in which he
devoutly and earnestly believed." Dissatis-
fied with all that had been written upon the
problem, and confessedly unable himself to
cope with its difficulties, and at the same
time holding inflexibly by the doctrine of
mental liberty in volition, he was very natu-
rally solicitous to see the question handled
by some powerful intellect, qualified for the

! research, and who could put the proofs of
man's moral liberty on a firmer basis than
they had hitherto occupied. But who was
to be found competent to enter upon this
formidable task? Learned scholars were
sufficiently abundant. The colleges turned
out their annual multitude of men who had

. been long steeped in recondite studies ;
whose intellects had been disciplined and
sharpened by those marvelous instrumen-
talities destined from the foundations of
the world "for the perpetual training of
the minds of the later generations," the
dead languages, but Dr. Channing did not
find his man in this class. In his celebrated
essay on "Self-Culture," there occurs the
following passage : " I have known a man
of vigorous intellect who "had enjoyed few
advantages of early education, whose mind
was almost engrossed by the details of an
extensive business, who composed a book
of much originality of thought in steam-
boats, on horseback, while visiting distant
customers."

The book here referred to was entitled
" Language : an Essay," and was written
forty-seven years ago by Mr. Hazard. Dr.

LITERARY NOTICES.

S65

Charming was so impressed by the work,
that he sought the author out, made his
acquaintance, and found that, notwithstand-
ing his "few advantages of early educa-
tion," he gave better promise of ability to
grapple with a profound metaphysical prob-
lem, and make more progress in its analy-
sis, than any of the regulation scholars with
whom he was acquainted. An authoritative
critic speaks as follows of Mr. Hazard's
first work, the essay on language :

The essay was not more worthy of attention
from the circumstances under which it was written
than from the interest and freshness, if not the ab-
solute originality, of some of its thinking. The tone
of the first essay is that of a refined and elevated
idealism in its underlying philosophy and in the
moral earnestness of its practical spirit. The essay
was highly esteemed in those days of transcendent-
al aspiration, and excited a very general curiosity
among the eager seekers after new truths and new
prophets. Unlike many of the effusions of the
taught and untaught seers of those effervescing
3*ears, this essay was in every line clear, analytic,
and severely reasoned. It was, however, as char-
acteristically idealistic in its philosophical spirit as
it was imaginative in its poetical and ethical por-
traitures. The essay put Dr. Channing upon the
quest to discover its author, and this discovery led
to a friendly intimacy between the two till tho
death of the philosophic divine, which was com-
memorated by an affectionate yet discriminating
essay from his philosophic protege and friend.

Yielding to the earnest injunction of Dr.
Channing, Mr. Hazard early in life took up
the question of free-will, and published the
results of his studies in two solid volumes,
"Freedom of the Mind in Willing, etc."
(1864) ; and two letters on " Causation," and
"Freedom in Willing," addressed to John
Stuart Mill (1869). Those who desire to
become familiar with Mr. Hazard's reason-
ing in its full elaboration must consult
these works ; in the volume before us the
results are necessarily much epitomized.

Into the merits of the great question of
free-will we can not, of course, here enter.
It is alleged that modern science, by its vast
extension of the idea of natural law, has
strengthened the conceptions of necessity
and fatalism at the expense of moral free-
dom, But determinism never had a more
powerful champion than Jonathan Edwards,
and he certainly did not draw his inspira-
tion from modern science. Mr. Hazard
takes broad issue with Edwards. Professor
Huxley, a leading " automatist," and rep-
resenting the latest science, admits that

"volition counts for something" — but the
philosophical question is, For how much?
Nobody claims that the will is unlimited.
The title of Mr. Hazard's book, "Man a
Creative First Cause," seems rather start-
ling at first, but it is because of our theo-
logical connotations of the term " creative."
His obvious implication is of the mind will-
ing and working in its own sphere, where
we properly speak of creative genius and
originating capacity. Indeed, Mr. Hazard
explicitly says : " Exterior to itself, it (the
human mind) may not have the power to
execute what it wills ; it may be frustrated
by other external forces, since in the exter-
nal the ideal incipient creation may not be
consummated by finite effort. But, as in
our moral nature the willing, the persever-
ing effort, is itself the consummation, there
can be no such failure ; and the mind in it
is therefore not only a creative but a su-
preme creative first cause.

Mr. Hazard's book is tersely and vigor-
ously written, and takes a somewhat wide
range both of philosophical and practical
suggestion. The author has a sturdy faith
in the value of metaphysical studies for
practical utility as a mental training, and
also in their disciplinary power for the for-
mation of human character. This view is
incidentally presented, and we only regret
that he has not more fully and formally
developed it. Such a discussion would be
valuable to education, and we are not with-
out hope that Mr. Hazard may yet find it
practicable to give fuller expression to his
views and reasonings upon the subject.

INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC SERIES.
VOL. XLVI.

The Organs of Speech, and their Appli-
cation in the Formation op Articulate
Sounds. By G. H. von Meyer, Profess-
or in the University of Zurich. New
York: D. Appleton & Co. Pp. 349.
Price, $1.75.

There has long been wanted a first-class
work on this interesting subject, treated
with reference to the requirements of ordi-
nary intelligent readers. It has, of course,
been familiar in a certain way to the ana-
tomists who have dissected the vocal struc-
tures with reference to pathology and sur-
gery, and given the representations of the
parts in their text-books. But the com-

566

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

bination of physiology with anatomy, and
the study of function in connection with
structure, and especially the later progress
in acoustical science, have given a new in-
terest to the vocal apparatus quite beyond
that of the bare anatomist. The subject
of the vocal organs, considered in relation
to their marvelous capacities, or the most
wonderful results obtained from the sim-
plest means, is one of quite extraordinary
interest. We hear much of the subtilties,
refinements, and complexities of vocal lan-
guage, with its hundreds of forms among
different peoples, its millions of words, its
capacity of expressing numberless shades
of feeling, and conveying the highest spir-
itual influence. But, besides the common
uses of speech in conversation, reading, and
oratory, we are all familiar with vocal mu-
sic as an art, inexhaustible in its variety of
styles, and the ranges of its development.
But what is the foundation of all this ?
Nothing but mechanism, bellows, and me-
chanical arrangements for acting upon cur-
rents of air for the production and control
of sound. This side of the subject, being
merely mechanical and material, has had but
little interest for those who care only about
the effects. When people lose their voices,
they are reminded that there is a mechanism
involved, and consult the doctor to find out
what ails their vocal organs ; but there has
been so little other concern about them,
that any thorough-going scientific investiga-
tion of their wonderful capacities and work-
ing has been long neglected.

Dr. Meyer's work is a contribution to the
physiological science of the vocal organs
from this point of view. It is an original
treatise, with strong philological bearings,
and contains various new interpretations,
the result of the author's special and ex-
tensive researches. The object and plan
of the work can not be better presented
than in the language of the author in his
preface :

The more we become convinced that a true
knowledge of the laws which govern the transforma-
tion of the elements of speech, in the formation of
dialects or derivative languages, can only be ob-
tained from a study of the physiological laws of the
formation of articulate sounds, the more necessary
does it become for the philologist to be thoroughly
acquainted with the structure and functions of the
organs of speech. The ordinary anatomical hand-
books are little adapted to this purpose, for much

is there discussed at length which is of no use to the
philologist; while, on the other hand, points which
to him are of considerable importance are only
briefly alluded to. In physiological hand-books, also,
only a short space is in most cases devoted to this
subject.

It is, therefore, my object, in the present work,
to discuss, with special reference to this require-
ment of the philologist, the structure and functions
of the organs of speech.

In explaining the origin of articulate sounds, I
have so far departed from the usual method that I
have not attempted to arrange physiologically the
entire series of sounds employed in the most differ-
ing languages ; but rather, starting from the struct-
ure of the organs of speech, to give a sketch of all
possible articulate sounds. I believe I have thus
constructed a system in which all known articulate
sounds, and all those with which we may hereafter
become acquainted, will find a place. Such a sketch
could not, of course, be given without reference to
existing languages. The object has not been, how-
ever, to enter into the field of discussion upon the
various modifications of sounds, but merely to bring
forward a sufficient number of examples in con-
firmation of the laws explained, for which purposo
the more nearly related European languages aro
sufficient.

Ocean Grove Camp-Meeting Association.
Fourteenth Annual Report. Ocean Grove,
N. J. Published by order of the Asso-
ciation. Pp. 75.

The friends of the Association were dis-
turbed much more than they had reason to
be last year by some dozen lines concerning
unhealthy conditions that had been noticed
at Ocean Grove, which we published in the
course of an article of considerable length,
dealing with the sanitary condition of seaside
resorts generally. Without further noticing
the unkind words — the more unkind because
they are undeserved — which the president
of the Association still applies to us, we call
attention to the confessions contained in the
present report that there were things at the
Grove that needed remedying, and to the
'gratifying fact that the Association has ap-
plied the remedies. Owing to what the re-
port calls continuous and studied misrep-
resentations, a prejudice existed, " to remove
which required our most energetic toil. To
meet the expenses of such labor demanded
funds largely in advance of current re-
ceipts." If only a prejudice, and that false,
why so much labor and expense in building
sewers and sinking an artesian well to re-
move what was only ideal and unfounded ?
A system of sewerage was begun about three
years ago. " The plan of running the sewage

LITERARY NOTICES.

567

into tanks, and letting it out periodically
into the sea, had many objections, and was
only partially successful. Another must be
devised. . . . The result is so triumphantly
satisfactory that Dr. E. M. Hunt, the Sec-
retary of the New Jersey State Board of
Health, after a very careful examination of
its work, pronounced it not only satisfactory
but the most complete that could be made."
It embraces 15,050 feet of twelve-inch
mains, and 8,500 feet of connecting lines,
or in all 23,550 feet, or four and one half
miles of sewer, connecting with all the large
and with many of the smaller houses. Of
the work of the year, the president is glad
to state that uan offensive condition of
things which has for several years caused
much complaint, in the rear of the tents
near the Trenton House, has been effectu-
ally removed, and the water-closet arrange-
ments have been so adjusted as to give
perfect satisfaction to those immediately
concerned, greatly to the relief of the man-
agement of the Grove." An artesian well
was opened in August, having a depth of
420 feet, and delivering about a barrel of
water a minute. There are also at least
800 tube-wells which draw water from a
depth of from twenty to thirty feet. Dr.
Hunt says, in his report of the State Board
of Health, that the sanitary prospects of the
Grove have been greatly improved " the last
year." The township Board of Health ex-
amined the sewer arrangements and report
them satisfactory in every respect. Physi-
cians at Ocean Grove and Asbury Park de-
clare that the sanitary conditions of Ocean
Grove were never so good ; and some of
them that the sanitary conditions there are
superior to those of any other of the watering
places of New Jersey. u The Popular Sci-
ence Monthly " is as glad as the officers of
the Association or its best friends can be that
it has been so successful in improving the
condition of things, present and prospective,
and is able to make so good a showing.

The Evolutionary Significance of Human
Character. By Professor E. D. Cope,
Philadelphia. Pp. 12.

In this paper Professor Cope essays a
sketch of the order of development of the
different faculties of the mind, and summa-
rizes his conclusions by saying that the or-
der of the appearance of the intelligence is

nearly dependent on the development of the
powers of observation. The character of
most civilizations tends to diminish the
power of perception, while the higher de-
partments of reason and imagination are
enlarged. The imagination reached a high
development before reason had attained
much strength. With the exception of a
few families, the intelligence of mankind
has, up to within two or three centuries,
expressed itself in works of imagination.
" With the modern cultivation of the natural
and physical sciences, the perceptive facul-
ties will be restored, it is to be hoped, to
their true place, and thus many avenues
opened up for the higher thought-power of
a developed race. Thus it is that in the
order of human development there is to be
a return to the primitive powers of obser-
vation, without loss of the later-acquired
and more noble capacities of the intellect."

Horses : Their Feed and their Feet. By
C. E.Page, M. D. New York: Fowler
& Wells. Pp. 149. 75 eta.

A book of plain, practical maxims on
the proper keeping of horses, involving some
views that are novel, but the value of which
has been tested in the author's experience. A
leading object is to recommend a reformed
system of feeding, that we might charac-
terize as the " two-meal " system, which is
fully expounded and earnestly maintained.
Accounts are given of the way Mr. Bonner
and other famous fanciers treat their horses.
The causes of various diseases are pointed
out, and suggestions are given respecting
their treatment. The question of shoeing
is fully considered, and it is shown how,
under many conditions, horses will do better
service without shoes ; and Colonel C. M.
Weld contributes an account of his expe-
rience with barefoot horses.

Photo-Micrographs, and how to make
them. By George M. Sternberg, M. D.,
United States Armv. Boston : James
R. Osgood & Co. Pp. 204, with Twenty
Colored Heliotype Plates. $3.

This work, which is really an elegant,
although the author modestly styles it a
" little " volume, is practical, and is intended
for beginners in the art to which it relates.
That art, photo-micrography, is the art of
taking sun-pictures of microscopic objects

$62

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

more or less magnified, and is to be distin-
guished from micro • photography, which
merely takes microscopic photographs of
objects that can be seen by the naked eye.
The former art is scientifically instructive,
the latter merely produces curiosities. The
author's object in preparing the volume has
been to give such an account of the tech-
nique of the art as will enable persons famil-
iar with the use of the microscope to make
photo-micrographs of suitable objects with
a minimum expenditure of time and money.
The illustrations have been selected with a
view of showing the kinds of microscopic
objects best suited for photographing, and
the results which may be expected by one
who is willing to devote a little time to the
mastering of technical difficulties. They
represent forty-nine different objects.

Sewer-Gas and its Alleged Causation of
Typhoid Fever. By George Hamilton,
M. D. Pp. 12. The Status of Pro
fessional Opinion and Popular Senti-
ment regarding Sewer-Gas and Con-
taminated Water as Causes of Typhoid
Fever. By George Hamilton, M. D.
Philadelphia. Pp. 10. Etiology and
Non-Infection of Sewer-Gases. By
Washington Ayer, M. D., of San Fran-
cisco. Pp. 25.

Dr. Hamilton undertakes to controvert
the sewer-gas theory of the origin of ty-
phoid fever, by showing that the disease
is not dependent upon the presence or ab-
sence of sewers, or upon any conditions of
filth in large cities ; and that it prevails in
the country, where there are no sewers, and
everything is favorable to purity of the at-
mosphere, more extensively and more fatal-
ly than anywhere else. Dr. Ayer maintains
substantially the same points, but rather
on philosophical grounds than by the cita-
tion of examples, and disputes the compe-
tency of the experiments which have been
relied upon to determine that bacteria are
the cause of the diseases with which they
have been found associated.

The Influence of Athletic Games upon
Greek Art. By Charles Waldstein,
Esq., University of Cambridge, England.
Pp. 24.

This paper is an inquiry into the cause

of the persistency of the influence of Greek

art upon us. The answer is found in the

fact that Greek art is true to nature, yet

not so servile as to be sensual and sensa-
tional, but is also ideal. " The ideal in art
is the highest generalization of form. In
Greek art it was the highest generalization
of the forms of nature. The works of
Greek art are, therefore, not dependent for
appreciation upon one individual spectator,
or one special mood of the individual, but
are valid for all sane men, for all men of a
certain physiological constitution of their
senses, surrounded by man and nature rela-
tively the same." The inquiry is pursued
how Greek art effected this combination of
the natural and the ideal. The natural was
developed in the portraiture of athletes,
the ideal in the effort to represent and char-
acterize the gods.

An Index to Articles relating to His-
tory, Biography, Literature, Society,
and Travel, contained in Collections
of Essays, etc. By W. M. Griswold,
Bangor, Me. Q. P. Index. Pp. 56.

This is No. 13 of the " Q. P. Index," a
series of works for the projection and exe-
cution of which Mr. Griswold, who has
made it his special business, deserves the
thanks of every student and reader. The
character of the present number of the
series is fairly well represented by its title.
There are hosts of articles of great value
on particular subjects inclosed in volumes
of essays and miscellaneous writings, which
arc practically inaccessible because the gen-
eral title of the volume gives no clew to
what is in it. The present index gives the
key to the subjects within its scope as rep-
resented in 799 volumes by different au-
thors. The publisher hopes in time to im-
prove upon it and enlarge it — that is, to
bring other books into view.

A Physician's Sermon to Young Men.
By William Pratt. New York : M. L.
Holbrook & Co. Pp. 48. 25 cts.

A lecture to young men on the impor-
tance of personal purity and of the restraint
of all tendencies to vicious indulgence, the
destructive physical and moral consequences
of which are pointed out in language that
does not err by lack of plainness or vigor.
As counteractives to vicious propensities,
are recommended cold bathing, hard beds,
and sleeping alone, abundant work, plain
food, careful reading, right choice of com-
panions, and religion.

LITERARY NOTICES,

569

Hydraulic Tables for the Calculation
of the Discharge through Sewer-
Pipes and Conduits. By P. J. Flynn,
C. E. New York : D. Van Nostrand.
Pp. 135. 50 cts.

The usefulness of such tables as arc
presented in this volume, to all persons en-
gaged in works demanding the calculations,
needs no demonstration. The tables are
based on Kulter's formula.

The Oyster Epicure. New York : White,
Stokes & Allen. Pp. 61. 30 cts.

This is a collation of authorities on the
gastronomy and dietetics of the oyster, the
reading of which is appetizing, and calcu-
lated to make the reader wish he could find
some oysters as good in the actuality as he
can imagine them to be.

PUBLICATIONS EECEIVED.

Malaria as an Etiological Factor in New York
City. By Simon Baruch, M. D. New York : Trow's
Printing and Bookbinding Co. Pp. 22.

Continuity and Catastrophes in Geology. By
the Duke of Argyll. Edinburgh: David Douglas.
Pp. 32. One shilling.

A Plea for the Cure'of Eupture. By Joseph H.
Warren, M. D. Pp. 117, with a Plate. $ 1 .

Proceedings of the Indiana Pharmaceutical As-
sociation, May, 1SS3. Indianapolis: Joseph E.
Perry, Secretary. Pp. 1 64.

Bulletin of the United States Geological Survey,
No. 1. Two Special Papers. By Whitman Cross
and S. F. Emmons. Washington : Government
Printing-Office. Pp. 42.

Pilot Chart of the North Atlantic, for December,
with " Supplement," giving details of storms and
nautical information. Washington : U. S. Hydro-
graphic Office. (Supplement) pp. 11.

Eeports of Observations and Experiments in the
Division of Entomology. Department of Agricul-
ture. Washington : Government Printing-Office.
Pp. 75, with Three Plates.

Transactions of the American Dermatol ogical
Association, August, 1853. Dr. Arthur Van Har-
lingen, Secretary. Philadelphia. Pp. 49.

Scientific Papers of the Vassar Brothers Insti-
tute, Poughkeepsie, N. Y., lSSl-^i. Leroy C.
Cooley, Ph. D., Chairman. Pp. 113.

Cuentos de Hoy y Mafiana. Cuadros Politicos
y Sociales. (Stones ot To-day and To-morrow;
Political and Social Sketches.) By Eafael de C.
Palomino, Jr. No. 1. New York : N. Ponco de
Leon. Pp. 53.

Eecherches sur le Structure de quelques Dia-
tomees contenues dans le (Jementstein du Jutland.
(Researches on the Structure of Certain Diatoms
contained in the Cement-Stone of Jutland.) By
MM. W. Prinz and E. Van Ermengen. Brussels :
A. Manceaux. Pp. 74, with Four Plates.

One Thousand and One Eiddles. By Nellie
Greenway. New York: J. S. Ogilvie & Co. Pp.
124. 15 cents.

Casseirs " Family Magazine." January, 18S4.
New York : Cassell & Co. (Limited). Pp. 64. 15
cents monthly. $1.50 a year.

Developments in the Kinetic Theory of Solids,
Liquids, and Gases. By H. T. Eddy, Ph. D. Cin-
cinnati. Pp. 16.

Local Government and Free Schools in South
Carolina. By B. James Kamage. A. B. Baltimore :
Johns Hopkins University. New York : G. P. Put-
nam's Sons. Pp. 40. 40 cents.

Suggestions on Library Architecture. American
and Foreign. By J. L. Smithmeyer. Washington :
Gibson Brothers. Pp. 31.

Notes on the Literature of Explosives. By
Professor Charles E. Munroe, U. S. N. A., Annapo-
lis, Md. Pp. 20.

The Evidence for Evolution in the History of the
Extinct Mammalia. By E. D. Cope, Philadelphia.
Salem, Mass.: Salem Press. Pp. 19.

The Winter Eesorts of Florida, South Georgia,
Louisiana, Texas, California, Mexico, and Cuba, and
how to reach them. By John Temple Graves. Pub-
lished by the Passenger Department, Savannah,
Florida, and Western Railway Company. Pp. 103.

Injurious and other Insects of the State of New
York. First Annual Eeport. By J. A. Lintner.
Albany : Weed, Parsons & Co. Pp. 3S3.

Geology of the Comstock Lode. By George F.
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570

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

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POPULAR MISCELLANY.

The Ice Age. — At a meeting of tbe
Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadel-
phia, Professor Heiiprin advanced the opin-
ion that the enormous sheet of ice which
extended over a large portion of North
America and Europe during the Glacial
period could not have originated from a po-
lar "ice-cap." He deemed it doubtful that
there could have accumulated in the Arctic
regions sufficient snow and ice to propel a
glacier probably several thousand feet thick
over hundreds of miles, and up slopes to
heights of five or six thousand feet. Pre-
cipitation in polar regions takes place mainly
in a low atmospheric zone ; hence it would
be impossible for so great a mass of snow
to accumulate at so great an elevation as
would be necessary to propel southward a
glacier of the extent required by geologists.
Professor Lewis called attention to a point
observed some time ago by Dr. Haye3, but
not yet sufficiently appreciated, namely, that
the rate of increase in the thickness of the
glacier diminished northward. Recent ob-
servations of his own showed the glacier to
have been 800 feet thick five miles from
its southern limit, and 2,030 feet thick at a
point eight miles from its edge, while it was
only about 3,100 feet in thickness at a dis-
tance of 100 miles, and 5,000 feet at 300
miles from its termination. Rejecting sev-
eral hypotheses, Professor Lewis suggested
that the ice-cap flowed south simply because
it flowed toward a source of heat. Such a
motion not being caused by gravity, would
take place in a nearly flat field of ice, and
upon his supposition the ice need not have
been more than a few times its present
thickness in Greenland. Professor Ileilprin
replied that no laws of glacial action were
known which would account for the indis-
criminate progression of an ice-sheet toward
a source of heat, and that the molecular
expansion theory, as applied to the Alpine
glaciers, took no cognizance of the direction
of the heat-power, but merely of that of

least resistance (the trend of the slope). At
a subsequent meeting he supported his
views previously communicated by statistics
of precipitation at different elevations on
the Alps, and presented some curious calcu-
lations in regard to the rate of progression
of the great ice-sheet. Allowing for it the
average rate of the Alpine glaciers, one foot
a day, it would have required a period of no
less than 25,000 years to move from the
sixty-fifth parallel of latitude to the line of
its terminal moraine. But it may well be
questioned if the conditions allowed progres-
sion at more than one fifth of this rate.
Professor Lewis remarked that arguments,
drawn from meteorological conditions as
they now exist, will not in all cases apply in
considering the Glacial epoch. He further
suggested a probable analogy between the
Antarctic ice-cap, some 25,000 miles in di-
ameter, and the polar ice-cap of glacial
times, and mentioned Croll's estimate that
the former is twelve miles thick at its cen-
ter. In speaking of a polar ice-cap, he did
not mean to imply, however, that the ice
was necessarily thickest on the pole, but
that in Greenland, Labrador, the Hudson
Bay region, or elsewhere, there may have
been centers from which glaciers grew final-
ly to coalesce into one mass of ice, the top
strata of which flowed southward to the great
terminal moraine.

Effect of Watering Plants with Acids. —

Mr. L. P. Gratacap, of New York city, has
published a report of experiments he has
made to determine the effect of watering
with solutions of acids upon plants. He ex-
perimented upon the silver-leaved geranium
with hydrochloric, nitric, carbolic, formic,
salicylic, sulphuric, tartaric, and citric acids,
and water. The plants watered with the
first six acids except salicylic were unfavor-
ably affected from the first day of the ex-
periment. From June 22d to September
6th none of the plants died except the car-
bolic-acid plant, although the nitric-acid
plant succumbed shortly after the experi-
ment terminated. Of the rest the sulphuric-
acid plant was most thriving, then the hy-
drochloric-acid plant, and last, and just
alive, the plant treated with formic acid.
Analyses of the ashes of the plants showed
that the acid waters tended to introduce in-

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

57i

organic ingredients into their tissues. Of
hyacinth-bulbs treated in a similar way, only
the one treated with tannic acid developed
roots. The hydrochloric-acid bulb died, and
the sulphuric-acid bulb a month later. After
the tannic-acid one, a bulb treated with ox-
alic acid did best. Tannic acid seemed to
increase the intensity of the color of the
flower. The plants were dwarfed by the
treatment.

Temperature of the Glacial Period. —

Mr. G. F. Becker closes a carefully consid-
ered review, in the " American Journal of
Science," of the phenomena of glaciation
with the conclusion that, if the generally
received view (the substantiation of which
would not be superfluous) that the sun is a
gradually cooling body is correct, "it ap-
pears nearly certain that the absolute maxi-
mum in the development of glaciers is past,
and that the glacial period was not one of
general cold, but one of higher mean tem-
perature at sea -level than the present."
This is advanced without denying that a
variety of other causes than those immedi-
ately considered by him may have had an
influence, and, perhaps, a great influence,
upon glaciation. "Indeed, it seems more
probable that the formation of glaciers was
affected by all contemporaneous changes,
such as extraordinary upheavals and sub-
sidences or periodic fluctuations in the ec-
centricity of the earth's orbit ; but, if the
reasoning offered is correct, it is not neces-
sary to resort to such events to account for
the occurrence of a glacial epoch." He be-
lieves that the production of glaciers is
chiefly a question of differences between the
temperatures at the sea-level and at the
level at which the glacier is formed.

Pathology of the Pear.— At a meeting
of the New Jersey State Microscopical So-
ciety, a paper was read by. the secretary, Dr.
Samuel Lockwood, on " Fecal Sclerogen," the
last word meaning the indurated particles
of lignine in the pear. He showed a quan-
tity of material like sand, which had been
passed by a person to whom it had caused
great distress. In the microscope it looked
unlike any mineral sand, and each particle
was composed of a cluster of sharp-pointed
crystals, like dog-toothed spar. It even re-

sisted the action of nitrie acid, but was dis-
solved readily by ammoniuret of copper.
Suspecting its nature, he took the rind and
core of a ripe Bartlett, and gave them to his
bees, which were suffering from a dearth of
flowers. The insects cleaned away the glu-
cose and all the juices, leaving the pear-grit
clean ; which, by comparison in the micro-
scope, was identical with the fecal grit.
The truth was, the person had been feasting
inordinately on ripe Bartletts. The doctor
remarked that it had never been cleared up
why the pear should cause to many such
suffering in the alimentary canal, as its
juices were really far less acrid than those
of the apple. He showed that it was due to
the sclerogen, or pear-grit. Each particle
literally bristles with sharp angular points,
and the cathartic energy is due to the me-
chanical action irritating the walls of the
alimentary canal.

Growth of Boys and Girls.— The in-
vestigations of the Anthropometric Com-
mittee of the British Association have made
more or less clear several interesting facts
respecting the rate of growth of the two
sexes in the British Isles. The period of
most rapid growth is from birth to five
years of age, and then both sexes grow
alike, the girls being a little shorter and
lighter than the boys. From five to ten
the boys grow a little faster than the girls,
but from ten to fifteen the girls grow the
faster, and at between eleven and a half
and fourteen and a half years old are actu-
ally taller, and from twelve and a half to
fifteen and a half are heavier than the boys.
The boys, however, take the lead between
fifteen and twenty years, and grow at first
rapidly, but afterward slower, and complete
their growth at about twenty-three years,
while girls grow very slowly after fifteen
years of age, and attain their full stature
at about the twentieth year. The tracings
and tables show a slow but steady increase
in stature up to the fiftieth year, and a more
rapid increase in weight up to the sixtieth
year in men, but the statistics of women are
too few after the age of twenty-three to de-
termine the stature and weight of their sex
at the more advanced periods of life. The
curve of the chest-girth in men shows an
increase at a rate similar to that of the

572

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

weight up to the age of fifty years, but it
appears to have no definite relation to the
curve of stature. The strength of males
increases rapidly from twelve to nineteen
years, and at a rate similar to that of the
weight; more slowly and regularly up to
thirty years, after which it declines at an
increasing rate to the age of sixty years.
The strength of females increases at a more
uniform rate from nine to nineteen years,
and more slowly to thirty, after which it
falls off in a manner similar to that of
males. The curves of strength for the two
sexes are not parallel : at eleven years fe-
males are weaker than males by twenty-two
pounds, at twenty years of age by thirty-six
pounds. The fact that man continues to
grow in stature up to his fiftieth year con-
tradicts the popular notions on the subject,
according to which he ceases to grow before
he reaches half that age.

The Extinct Volcanoes of the Pacific
Slope. — According to the " Notes " fur-
nished by Messrs. A. Hague and J. P. Id-
dings, of the United States Geological Sur-
vey, to the " American Journal of Science,''
the series of extinct volcanoes on our Pacific
coast extends northward from Lassen's Peak,
near the fortieth parallel, at intervals, for
nearly five hundred miles, and follows in
general the axial lines of the Sierra and
Cascade Ranges. The more prominent
peaks of the chain are Lassen's Peak
and Mount Shasta, in California ; Mount
Pitt, Three Sisters, Mount Jefferson, and
Mount Hood, in Oregon; and Mounts St.
Helen's, Adams, Rainier, and Baker, in
Washington Territory. Mount Rainier is
the grandest one of the number, and forms
the most prominent topographical object in
Washington Territory. The surface feat-
ures of the western part of the Territory
have been greatly modified by the lava-flows
of the volcano, and four of the important
rivers of the region rise among its glaciers.
Snow and ice cover its top, reaching down-
ward for five or six thousand feet, while
with the most marked contrast the broad
base of the mountain supports a dark, dense,
grand forest vegetation. The summit is
formed by three peaks, the chief of which,
a circular cone, with a crater about a quar-
ter of a mile in diameter, rises to 14,444

feet above the sea. Mount Hood is situ-
ated directly on the crest of the Cascade
Range, about twenty-five miles south of the
Columbia River, and is 11,225 feet high.
Its summit is a single peak — a portion of
a rim of an ancient crater. The crater is
about half a mile wide from east to west,
and its encircling wall, for three fifths of
the circumference, rises 450 feet above the
snow and ice that fill the basin. Mount
Adams and Mount St. Helen's, on the north
side of the Columbia River, form, with
Mount Hood, a triangle, the area of which
has been the center of great volcanic activity.
None of the volcanoes along the belt oc.
cupy so comparatively isolated a position as
Mount Shasta, which stands upon an open
plain with the neighboring hills and ridges
many thousand feet lower. Its altitude is
given as 14,440 feet, and, as the neighboring
ridges rarely attain an altitude of over 3,000
feet, the volcano presents an imposing spec-
tacle surpassed by few mountains in the
world. As seen from the west, it presents
a double cone, the smaller built upon the
flanks of the larger one, and about 2,000
feet lower. Around the broad base of the
mountain numerous lesser cones have bro-
ken out, one of which, Little Shasta, rises to
more than 3,000 feet above the neighbor-
ing valley. Seventy miles southeast of
Mount Shasta, near the boundary between
Nevada and California, is Lassen's Peak,
which, though it is about 10,500 feet high,
is by no means so conspicuous an object as
many of the volcanoes, because it is sur-
rounded by other peaks of considerable ele-
vation. It is a broad, irregularly shaped
mountain, with four prominent summits, and
bears on its slopes abundant evidence of
comparatively recent extrusions of lava.

Science and Jack-Pnddings. — Mr. R. A.

Proctor, in " Knowledge," notices the single
abusive utterance that was made against
Mr. Herbert Spencer while he was in this
country, and which came, not from a corner
saloon, but from a pulpit, and remarks of it
that it is difficult to say whether the terms
used by the preacher " are more strikingly
contrasted with the teaching and method of
the writer he attacks or with those of the
intelligent, well-trained, and well-educated
clergymen who have, indeed, dissented from

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

573

some of the inferences which appear to them
to follow from modern scientific theories,
but who know well that they would but de-
grade their cause and themselves (to say
nothing of their calling) were they to sub-
stitute reviling for rhetoric and railing for
reasoning." Then Mr. Proctor quotes such
passages from the attack as are fit for pub-
lication, and adds : " Nearly three centuries
ago there was at least earnestness in the
arguments used by priests, and monks, and
friars, against the fearful doctrine that the
earth goes round the sun. Unwise though
their conduct, and unjudging their intoler-
ance, they believed what they taught, and
in their day their belief was natural enough.
It is encouraging to find that in our day the
advance of science is only opposed by the
untaught and the foolish ; only abused by
the ranter and the Jack-Pudding. When
we consider how necessary are certain doc-
trines for the world's welfare — even though
hereafter they may have to give place to
higher and broader and deeper truths — it is
well to see that those who do their best to
discredit those doctrines are not now men
whose words have any weight, are not even
fanatics or bigots, but simply — clowns and
charlatans."

The Recent Eclipse of the Sun.— The
formal reports of the observations of the
solar eclipse of the 6th of May last have not
yet been published ; but a few preliminary
statements respecting them have appeared
in the journals. The American, French,
and English parties arrived safely and in
good time at Caroline Island, and set up
their apparatus under generally satisfactory
conditions. The day of the eclipse opened
rather unfavorably, but the sky cleared be-
fore the first contact. The clouds continued,
however, to float around, so that the corona
was partly hidden during twenty seconds of
the first minute of totality, and the phenom-
enon was wholly obscured after the cessation
of totality. As totality, however, lasted for
nearly five minutes and a half, good obser-
vations of that stage were obtained. The
supposed intra-Mercurial planets were sought
but not found. Photography does not seem
to have given the results that were expected
from it ; but it is said that proofs were got
the combination of which will permit the

reconstruction of the entire corona as it was
shown at the time. Mr. Hastings, of Balti-
more, made some observations on the spec-
tra of the opposite sides of the corona, from
which he has drawn the conclusion that the
outer portions of it are not real, but are ef-
fects of diffraction. This conclusion, " Ciel et
Terrc," of Brussels, observes, would account
for the differences of form which the corona
exhibits to different observers, but fails to
account for the predominance of coronal
light toward the solar equator. M. Janssen
observed anew that, besides the spectrum of
bright lines, the corona gives a weak con-
tinuous spectrum showing some of the prin-
cipal dark rays of the solar spectrum. This
would favor the theory that the light really
proceeds from the coronal appendage, and
that its exterior is made up of a mass of
meteors reflecting the light of the sun — a
theory that is already supported by the re-
sults of polariscopic analysis. It is also
stated that M. Tacchini has observed near
the limit of the coronal atmosphere the spec-
trum of a hydrocarbon similar to that which
i comets give when they are far from the sun.

Function and Structure. — The French
Academy of Medicine recently discussed the
question whether an identity of action ex-
ists between the living tissues of animals
and of men. M. Bechamp denied any simi-
larity, and alleged differences in the prop-
erties of the salivas of man and animals,
and between the milks of man, the cow, and
the goat, in support of his view. The an-
swer to this, as suggested by the " Lancet,"
is that, in the process of evolution, function
precedes structure ; hence the legitimate
corollary is deduced that the properties of
a tissue are more delicate tests of its nature
than the structure. It is more than prob-
able, however, that in drawing this conclu-
sion we are swerved by the imperfections of
our senses, and that molecular structure
goes hand-in-hand with function, and that
a change in property is accompanied by a
corresponding variation in the arrangement
of the constituent atoms of a molecule.
Every cell and every molecule has its indi-
vidual characteristics, and these idiosyncra-
sies may extend to different individuals of
the same species, to different species, and
to different genera.

574

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

A Home-made Microphone. — Some of
the readers of this journal may be pleased
to have a description of a little microphone
that has given good results, and which can
be made, in a few minutes, from material
at hand. It is represented in the figure of
the natural size. It is made from a visiting-
card of the ordinary thickness cut square.
A round card might look better, but it will
give less satisfaction. On the card should
be fastened with sealing-wax three thin,
light disks of carbon, BBB', of the qual-
ity used in the electric light. The disks

ters, for example, by the terminal D', follows
the rod C, then the disk B', whence by the
wire b it passes by the two disks B to return
to the terminal D through the two rods C C.
The little instrument may be made very
sensitive to the voice and to all sounds, pro-
vided the card A is given the proper weight,
and is neither too heavy nor too light. The
voice, with its timbre, of a person speaking
in his usual tone at the other side of the
room, can be heard very distinctly in it.
The sounds of the piano are particularly well
reflected. The apparatus should be placed

should be placed symmetrically at the an-
gles of an equilateral triangle, and should
be put in communication with each other by
the copper wires bbb\ which are either sol-
dered or stuck tightly into holes made in
each disk to receive them. Platinum may
be advantageously substituted for copper.
The rest of the apparatus consists of a
square wooden foot, M, supporting three
prismatic rods of carbon, C C C ', arranged
so as to correspond exactly with the three
disks BBB'. Two of the rods, C C, com-
municate by the copper or platinum wires
dd with the common terminal D, while the
third rod, C, communicates alone with a
second terminal, D'. The upper ends of the
charcoal rods should be cut into a bevel-
shape — not into a point, for that does not
give sufficient contacts. The rods are sealed
to the wooden base M. The theory of this
microphone is very simple. The current en-

upon a table two or three metres away from
the sound. For a battery to put the micro-
phone in action, I have generally used a small
Bunsen element. Two or three Leclanche
elements would do as well. I have used a
modification of the Leclanche elements, in
the shape of a pile made of a plate of zinc
and a carbon plate, moistened with a satu-
rated solution of bichromate of potash and
hydrochlorate or sulphate of ammonia. It
is in fact the bichromate pile without the
costly mechanism which is used for reliev-
ing the zinc from the action of the acid
when the apparatus is at rest. This ele-
ment does not waste when the current is
interrupted, as in the Leclanche pile. A
difficulty which arises in the use of the pile,
from the penetration of the carbons by the
ammoniacal solutions till they attack the
wires, has been obviated by M. Preaubert's
device of exposing the carbons to a bath of

NOTES.

575

boiling paraffine, which destroys their capil-
larity, while it does not affect their conduct-
ing power. The superficial paraffine may
be scraped off after the bath. Piles may be
obtained by this means that will endure in-
definitely, and have, apparently, an electro-
motive force superior to that of a Leclanche
pile of the same dimensions. — M. A. Bleu-
nard (translated for the Popular Science
Monthly from La Nature).

Lightning without Andible Thunder. —

A correspondent of " Nature " reports a vio-
lent rain and lightning storm which took
place near the crest of the Apennines, and
during which no sound of thunder was
heard. The writer also describes two other
such storms that he witnessed on the edire
of the Montenegrin highlands. " On these
nights," he states, " the lightning was so in-
cessant and vivid that we were able to walk
about, choosing our way among the stones
and shrubs as readily as by daylight, the
intervals between the flashes being, I should
judge, never more than a minute, while much
of the time they seemed absolutely continu-
ous, the landscape being visible in all de-
tails under a diffused violet light. Looking
overhead, the movements of the lightning
were easily discernible, the locality of the
discharges varying from one part of the
vault to another in a manner which it was
impossible to confound with the reflection
of lightning from a distance. Like the
storm of last night, those were followed by
copious rain, but not a single peal of thun-
der was heard during the whole night."

Combustion - Products from Different

Lights, — The following figures show the
amount per hour of combustion-products
from several varieties of artificial light. Un-
less the electric light has some peculiar in-
jurious influence, it has a great superiority
on sanitary grounds :

LIGHT OF 100 CANDLES.

Electric lamp, arc

Electric lamp, incandescent

Gas, argand-burner

Lamp, petroleum, flat flame

Lamp, colza-oil

Candle, paraffine

Candle, tallow

*^ j£

l

CuZ

§ »

8

? s

I 3

d r.

>- 3

a 3

■sj

« a

2 *

*a o

rt -a

■2 3

rt — «

*j

O .3

9

X

0

0

57-158

0

0

290-536

0-86

046

4S60

o-so

095

7200

0-85

1-00

6S00

0-09

1-22

9200

1-05

1-45

9700

NOTES.

Mr. Robert E. C. Stearns, in a paper
read before the California Academy of Sci-
ences, announces his conclusion, from his
studies of the shells of the Colorado Desert
and the region farther east (particularly
from studies of Physa and Anodonta), that
every item bearing upon the geographical
distribution of the species indicates the
mountain-lakes as the sources whence they
are derived ; points to their descent from
northerly regions as well as from higher
altitudes ; and contributes additional testi-
mony as to the antiquity of these widely
spread though inferior forms of life.

General Richard D. Cutts, of the
United States Coast Survey, died in Wash-
ington, December 13th, in the seventy-
seventh year of his age. He had been con-
nected with the Coast Survey during the
greater part of his life, and was at the time
of his death first assistant superintendent
of the service.

In a paper before the American Asso-
ciation on the *' Serpentine of Staten Island,
N. Y.," Dr. T. Sterry Hunt expressed him-
self in favor of the opinion of Dr. Britton,
of the School of Mines, Columbia College,
that the belt containing the mineral is a
protruding portion of the Eozoic series.
The appearance of isolated hills and regions
of serpentine is common in other regions,
and is by Dr. Hunt explained by the consid-
eration that this very insoluble magnesian
silicate resists the atmospheric agencies
which dissolve limestones and convert
gneisses to clay — the removal of which
rocks leaves exposed the included beds and
lenticular masses of serpentine. Similar
appearances are seen in many parts of Italy,
where ridges and bosses of serpentine are
found protruding in the midst of Eocene
strata, and have hitherto, by most European
geologists, been regarded as eruptive masses
of Eocene age. Mather, who described the
Staten Island locality more than forty years
ago, also looked upon the serpentine as an
eruptive rock.

A curious instance of the kindling of
a fire by means of the concentration of the
sun's rays by a globular water-bottle through
which they passed is related by a corre-
spondent of "La Nature." The day was
cold, but the sun shone brightly ; the bottle,
an " onion-shaped " flask, filled with water
so as to form a perfect lens, sat upon the
table. The starting of the fire, which would
have caused great damage if the relater of
the incident had not been present to extin-
guish it, was revealed by the smoke. A de-
liberate experiment was made on the next
day, with complete success, in kindling a fire
by this means.

576

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

The "Pall Mall Gazette" cites some
more cases illustrating the quality of the
learning furnished by the English board-
schools. The study was geography. The
children were able to give an accurate list
of the exports of Norway, but could not
recall the picture of a fiord. They knew
that the latitude of Paris was 49°, but when
asked, " What is latitude ? " they were
either dumb, or gave such answers as —
" Latitude means lines running straight
up " ; " Latitude means zones or climate " ;
"Latitude is measured by multiplying the
length by the breadth." Correct lists of
imports were given, but customs duties were
defined, by a girl, " Customs are ways,
duties are things that we have to do, and
we ought to do them " ; by a boy, " Cus-
tomers' duties are to go to the places and
buy what they want, not stopping about,
but go out when they are done."

According to tables prepared by Dr.
Daniel Draper, of the New York Meteoro-
logical Observatory, Greenwich Observatory
had 1,245 hours of sunshine in 1878, in a
possibility of 4,447, while New York had
2,936 hours, in a possibility of 4,449; and
in 1879, Greenwich had 977 hours, and New
York 3,101 hours.

Professor Sven Nilsson, of the Lund
University, Sweden, a distinguished zoolo-
gist, died November 30th, at the age of
ninety- seven years.

It is proposed to hold next year, in the
building of the International Fisheries Ex-
hibition at South Kensington, an exhibition
illustrating the relations of food, dress, the
dwelling, the school, and the workshop,
with health. The exhibition will be divided
into sections of education and health, and
further into six principal groups: 1. Food-
matters and their preparation; 2. Dress,
with specimens of different styles and ma-
terials ; 3, 4, and 5. What pertains to the
healthful construction and fitting of the
dwelling, the school, and the workshop ;
and, 6. All that relates to primary, technical,
and art education.

Popular lore teaches several signs by
which it pretends to determine from the
weather on a particular day what the weath-
er will be for a longer or shorter time in the
future. M. A. Lancaster reports, in " Ciel et
Terre" of Brussels, concerning a test he
has made of one of these signs. It is that
of St. Medard's day, or the 8th of June, con-
cerning which a proverb is rife in the Conti-
nental countries that, if it rains then, it will
rain for forty days afterward. M. Lancas-
ter examined the record for fifty years, from
1833 to 1882, and found from it that, as a
rule, it rained about as much and as often
during the forty days following the 8th of
June when it did not rain on that day as

when it did. Taking the averages of all the
years, there was a difference of 2*3 days,
or less than one seventeenth, and of twelve
millimetres (88'l-77-6) of rain in favor of
the rainy St. Medard: not enough, certainly,
on which to found a rule.

Mr. John Eliot Howard, F. R. S., a well-
known chemist and quinologist of London,
died in November last, at the age of seven-
ty-six years. His father, Mr. Luke Howard,
F. R. S., was in his own day distinguished
as a meteorologist.

Turgenieff, the great Russian novelist,
recently deceased, had the heaviest brain
that has yet been weighed — 2,012 grammes.
The average weight of the human brain is
1,390 grammes. The statistics of brain-
weights so far gathered do not show that
great intellects are marked by heavy brains.
Cuvier's brain, 1,800 grammes, was consid-
erably larger than the average, while Gam-
betta's was remarkably small. The brains
of Raphael, Cardinal Mezzofanti, Charles
Dickens, Lord Byron, and Charles Lamb,
did not exceed the average, and only Mez-
zofanti's reached it.

Lieutenant Wissmann, a German ex-
plorer, is about to make another journey
into Africa, the cost of which is defrayed
by private contributions. His object will
be to explore the Kaissai from Mukenge to
its mouth into the Congo. The success of
the expedition is likely to have an impor-
tant bearing on the extension and develop-
ment of trade on the Congo, and to contrib-
ute much to geographical knowledge; for
the contemplated route will intersect the
southern and unexplored part of the bend
of the great river, probably in the middle,

The remains of Commandant Langle and
other companions of the explorer La Pe-
rouse, who were massacred by savages in
the last century, have been discovered by
the Roman Catholic missionaries on the Isl-
and of Tutuila, where the massacre occurred.
A memorial chapel is to be built at the spot
where they are buried.

The Italian traveler Sacconi, who was
exploring the country of the Somaulis under
the auspices of the Geographical Society of
Milan, was murdered by the natives on the
12th of August. His death puts an end to
one of the most important explorations of
the day into a country concerning which
many questions still remain to be settled.

Among the 20,000 articles of bronze be-
longing to the lake-dwellers so far found in
Switzerland, about 30 per cent are rings, 17
per cent bracelets, 4 per cent knives, 3 per
cent needles, 0-4 per cent hammers, and 0*2
per cent fibulae.

ORMSBY MACKNIGI1T MITCIIEL.

THE

POPULAR SCIENCE
MONTHLY.

MARCH, 1884.

FKOM MONER TO MAN.

By FRANCES EMILY WHITE, M. D.,

PBOFESSOR OF PHYSIOLOGY IN THE WOMAN' S MEDICAL COLLEGE OF PENNSYLVANIA.*

MAN has long been regarded not only as a compendium of the
entire animal kingdom, but as an epitome of the universe — as
Nature's short-hand expression of a long-continued history begun with
the beginning condensation of the nebulae, and still going on to the
development of higher types of humanity. Nature's language is hiero-
glyphic, and for the correct interpretation of her occult characters a
key is necessary. It is one of the many triumphs of modern science
that she has found at least a partial key to this mysterious book, and
it is to the unlocking of some of its secrets that your attention is in-
vited on this occasion.

My subject — the development of the human body from a micro-
scopic speck of living matter — is a vast one, and the attempt to con-
dense its consideration into the space of a single hour can result, at
best, in a little more than a bare outline ; but even such an exposition,
however imperfect, may perhaps be deemed justifiable as a means of
inciting to further study, and it is in this hope that the task is under-
taken.

In the earliest perceptible stage of its existence, the human being
consists of a minute apparently homogeneous mass of living matter
of the kind known, since the days of Von Mohl and Remak, as pro-
toplasm. The word means simply the first formative material, or the
material in which all plants and animals have their origin. That it
is a fact of natural history, and not a mere figment of the scientific
imagination, that all plants and animals originate in a common sub-
stance, is no longer denied. This great principle was, indeed, recog-

* Address delivered at the opening of the Twenty-ninth Annual Session.
vol. xxiv. — 37

578 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

nized by Harvey, and first expressed in his famous aphorism, " Omne
vivum ex ovo" — an egg, whenever it occurs, consisting essentially of
a minute globule of protoplasm.

What is the origin of this universal, white-of-egg-like material?
As little is known of the history of the first production of protoplasm
as of that of the elements — hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, etc.,
of which it is composed. So far as yet discovered, all protoplasm,
whether vegetable or animal, is derived from pre-existing protoplasm.
The spontaneous production of living matter from non-living mate-
rials has never been satisfactorily proved. The particular kind of pro-
toplasm which we are about to consider — viz., the human germ — is the
combined derivative of certain glands which exist in separate adult
human beings who represent the opposite sexual polarities belonging
to all except the lowest vegetable and animal types. At the earliest
recognizable stage of his existence man may therefore be regarded,
physiologically, as a secretion. Zoologically, to what rank is he, then,
entitled ? The undeveloped human ovum, immediately after its fer-
tilization, corresponds in structure to the lowest known order of the
most simple class of animals, the Protozoa, which stand at the very
foot of the zoological scale. To this most humble of all known living
creatures Professor Haeckel has given the name of Moner, a word of
the same origin as monad, and expressive of ultimate simplicity and
primitiveness.

More simple even than the moner, however, is the bathybius, found
on the deep-sea bottom, and described by Professor Huxley as consist-
ing of an ill-defined mass of a slime-like material possessing all the
properties of living protoplasm. Even granting with skeptics on this
point that the existence of bathybius is not satisfactorily proved, we
may nevertheless assert with confidence that, as the natural predecessor
of the moner, it ought to exist, and will some time be discovered, just
as certain unobserved heavenly bodies have been partially described
and located by astronomers long before the telescope had penetrated
the obscurity in which they were hidden.

Through the processes of nutrition, under the combined influences
of growth and development, this non-nucleated mass of living proto-
plasm (the human ovum) acquires a nucleus ; in other words, there
appears at its center a minute speck of matter slightly more opaque
than the surrounding matter. Differentiation has therefore begun ;
that is, a difference of parts has made its appearance. How does this
nucleus (to which, in cell-physiology, so much importance is attached)
differ from the surrounding: matter which constitutes the bulk of the
germ-? Chemically, it is more active; it is believed to be the part
where nutrition (the assimilation of new material) mainly takes place.
Its greater chemical, and, therefore, nutritive activity, is shown by its
deeper staining with coloring -matters, such as carmine and hoema-
toxylin, and by the fact that, with the access of nutriment, fresh nu-

FROM MONER TO MAN. 579

clei make their appearance. It undoubtedly contains a larger propor-
tion of the nitrogenous matter which enters into the composition of all
protoplasm, and, like the nuclei of other cells, a certain percentage of
phosphorus. At this stage of its existence the germ (still microscopic)
is represented in the zoological scale by the Amoeba, which it closely
resembles in structure, having thus ascended to the second round of
the zoological ladder.

The amoeba has received its full share of attention from biologists.
Its physiological endowments are scarcely greater than those of the
non-nucleated moner. Both are capable of effecting those exchanges
of matter which constitute nutrition ; both are capable of reproduction
(a phase of nutrition) ; both have the power of changing their form
by thrusting out portions of their mass (the so called " false-feet "), and
of thus executing slight creeping movements. These little masses of
protoplasm are also capable of responding to contact of other matter,
thus exhibiting the rudiments of common sensation. What is the evi-
dence of this capacity ? How does the amoeba manifest a sense of
touch ? When some substance, perhaps a smaller representative of its
own species, floats against the surface of an amoeba, the precocious bit
of protoplasm responds to the salute by flowing around its victim,
which is thereby inclosed within the body of its captor, and gradually
appropriated as food. Probably the term " victim " is of doubtful ap-
plication in this case, since the difference between eating and being
eaten must be trifling. However that may be, the one improvises a
stomach for the occasion, and digests the other with all the nonchalance
of a Feejee-Islander. The human germ is, however, preserved from a
similar indulgence in incipient cannibalism by its different environ-
ment— not the only period of its existence when it escapes evil-doing
through lack of opportunity — for it receives its pabulum, ready pre-
pared, from the blood of the mother, which is doubtless one of the
conditions of its future higher development.

In this response to contact by movement on the part of the amoeba,
it exhibits the rudiments of both muscular and nervous action, since,
under the influence of an external force or stimulus, a reflex move-
ment is produced.

The next perceptible change in the evolution of the ovum is known
as segmentation. This consists in an increase of its mass by duplica-
tion and reduplication ; the single cell first acquires a second nucleus,
and the surrounding protoplasm then separates into two masses, each
having its own nucleus ; this process is continued until the enveloping
membrane contains a mass of cells, each like the original amoeboid
cell. From the resemblance of the ovum at this period to a mulberry,
this is called the mulberry or morula stage of embryonic development.
In the zoological scale, it corresponds to the labyrinthida, a little ani-
mal which consists of an aggregation of simple nucleated cells. From
this multiplication of nuclei, which are regarded as the active centers

58o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

of nutrition, there must result an increased power of development and
growth.

By the absorption of fluid from the maternal tissues in which it is
imbedded and the accumulation of this fluid at the center of the mass,
the cells of this mulberry-like body become crowded outward to the
periphery, thus forming a lining for the membranous sac — i. e., the
outer covering of the ovum — which incloses them, the entire globular
mass now being about one twenty-fourth of an inch in diameter, and
consisting of a structureless outer membrane lined with a layer of nu-
cleated cells (the blastoderm), and filled with clear fluid. These lining
cells multiply rapidly ; the inner ones become larger, darker, and
softer than the outer ones, and thus differentiation has again occurred
— the lining having developed into two distinct layers. This is known
as the gastrula stage of embryonic development. All animals, from
sponges to man, pass through this phase, becoming first two and then
three layered sacs ; but, from this point, the different branches or sub-
kingdoms diverge ; and the next recognizable phase in the develop-
ment of the human embryo is confined to vertebrates, with a single ex-
ception, the ascidian. The larval ascidian swims like a tadpole by
means of a caudal appendage in which may be traced a rod-like body
thought to be a rudimentary chorda dorsalis, since it resembles the
embryonic structure which, in the perfect vertebrate, develops into the
spinal column with its contained, highly endowed spinal cord. This,
however, not only fails to develop but actually disappears in adult
life, leaving the ascidian a simple invertebrate animal. But, whether
the ascidian be a true connecting link between invertebrates and ver-
tebrates, or, as suggested by Balfour, a reversion from the higher
form, it serves equally to indicate a close relationship between these
two great subdivisions of the animal kingdom.

Between the two layers of germinal cells which belong to the gas-
trula stage, a third layer is developed, and from these three layers (the
epiblast, the mesoblast, and the hypoblast) all the tissues and organs of
the body are derived. The inner layer (hypoblast) gives origin to the
epithelial lining of the alimentary canal and to the various glands de-
rived from it. From the outer layer (epiblast) are developed the brain
and spinal cord, and the epidermis with its appendages and derivatives,
including the organs of the special senses. From the middle layer
(mesoblast) the various intermediate structures are produced. The
remaining history of development is, therefore, the history of the dif-
ferentiation of these three layers of the blastoderm (which alike con-
sist of simple nucleated cells) into the various tissues and organs of
the body. Accompanying this process there is a corresponding de-
velopment of functions. As absorption and assimilation, so perfectly
performed by these germinal cells, are, however, the fundamental facts
in the nutrition of even the highest organisms, so also reaction in re-
sponse to a stimulus, of which we have found even the moner and the

FROM MONER TO MAN. 581

amoeba to be capable, is the fundamental fact in the functions of the
fully developed muscle, nerve, and brain of the highest organisms.

The embryon, in its condition of a three-layered sac, soon begins
to show a slight bilateral symmetry, and a chorda dorsalis appears.
Its rank, as a vertebrate, is thus established in the dawning of that im-
portant structure, a backbone.

Allusion has been made to the ascidian as introducing the verte-
brate type. Whatever may be thought of the claims of this animal
to so important a place in the genealogical tree, there can be little
doubt about the position of the amphioxus with its dorsal cord dis-
tinct and persistent throughout life. Though classed, on this ac-
count, among vertebrates, it is singularly wanting in vertebrate char-
acteristics, having neither heart nor brain in the true sense of these
words. It is also destitute of limbs, even of the most rudimentary
kind, such as are found in the very lowest fishes. In fact, it is dis-
tinctly neither vertebrate nor invertebrate, thus admirably filling the
position of a connecting link between these two great subdivisions of
the animal kingdom.

At the chordonian stage of its development, the human embryon
is equally destitute of a true heart, brain, and limbs, thus correspond-
ing to a sub-type of the vertebrates called by Haeckel, Acrania, of
which the amphioxus is the best-known representative. There is, nev-
ertheless, in this heartless, brainless, limbless, and almost shapeless mass
of but slightly differentiated protoplasm, that wonderful impulse of
evolution by which its destiny, as an individual of the highest organic
rank, is assured.

Along the line of the chorda dorsalis, rudimentary nerve-centers
and spinal vertebrae gradually appear, the embryon thus entering on a
grade of development comparable to that of the lowest fishes, in which
the spinal column is cartilaginous rather than bony.

The budding limbs resemble budding fins ; arches similar to those
which, in water-breathing animals, support the gills are seen ; and the
rudimentary lungs are mere air-bladders.

Next arises the amnion stage, so named from an important though
temporary nutritive organ whose development begins at this period ;
it is an extension of the yolk-sac, and contains a highly nutritious
fluid.

The gill-arches gradually disappear, developing into more ad-
vanced structures ; the heart becomes subdivided into four chambers ;
the air-bladders give place to true lungs ; and, with the complete
formation of a placenta, the mammalian stage of development is fully
established. The embryon is henceforth recognizable as belonging
to the class mammalia, the highest of the vertebrates.

As the growing organism becomes more and more complex, its
progress is more and more gradual. We have seen how the germ
passes, almost at a single step, from the gastrula to the rudimentary

58z THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

vertebrate stage ; but, after the mammalian stage is reached, it moves
with deliberation through various lower embryonic forms of the class
mammalia, till the human type is fully developed. At birth even, dif-
ferentiation is far from being complete ; not only do the several human
races differ materially in shape and size of skull and in weight of
brain, but there are also wide possibilities of difference among indi-
viduals of the same race and even between members of the same
family. Exceptional characters are not recognized in their cradles ;
on the contrary, growth and differentiation continue till full matu-
rity is reached, lifting the inventor, the philosopher, and the creative
genius as far above the average human being as the average human
being is above the chimpanzee.

In order to illustrate the relations to each other of the different
grades of animal life, Haeckel employs the figure of a tree, which is
intended to exhibit the probable lines of evolution of the entire series
of animal forms continued through vast geological periods ; and it is
a fact of the utmost significance that this tree serves equally well as
an illustration of the plan and progress of human embryonic develop-
ment, thus indicating that the life-history of every human embryo is
a recapitulation, in brief, of the history of the development of the
whole animal kingdom. The base of the trunk of this tree represents
the lowest, i. e., the most simple of animal forms — those which the
human germ so closely resembles after fertilization, before develop-
ment has begun.

The roots of this tree have not been represented by Professor
Haeckel ; but the supposition that, like the roots of other trees, they
are concealed in the inorganic crust of the earth, is necessary to the
completeness not only of the figure, but of the theory which it is in-
tended to illustrate ; I have therefore ventured to make this addition
in the copy of Haeckel's figure which is before you.*

Ascending by a single step, the lowest branches represent those
organisms in which the first developmental change has occurred, the
amoeba, it will be remembered, showing its superiority to the moner in
the possession of a nucleus.

From this point the trunk is carried upward through the various
stages, giving off large branches which thereafter pursue separate
paths of development in different directions. These groups, in their
turn, subdivide ; and while at each step the divergence is a gentle
one, it nevertheless leads farther and farther away from the common
type with which the process of differencing began ; like the terminal
twigs of any widely-branching tree which, though closely surrounded
by other twigs, are far removed from the common trunk, and still
more widely separated from those branches which have developed on
the opposite side.

This tree is one which bears all manner of fruit ; but, as all the

* The lecture was illustrated by drawings.

FROM MONER TO MAN. 583

branches of a tree receive the life-supporting sap from a common
trunk, so all living forms have a common origin in protoplasm with
which the evolution of their life begins ; the entire growth and devel-
opment of the body consisting in the growth and differentiation of
the protoplasm of which its tissues and organs are composed.

Observe how admirably the figure of a tree exhibits the supposed
relationship between the various types of animals both extinct and
living ; indicating, not that each type has been derived directly from
one immediately preceding it, either in time or in structural rank,
but that various types have had a common ancestor from which, by
development in different directions, all have more or less diverged ;
so that the relationship between man and the existing anthropoid apes,
for example, is that of remote cousinship rather than of direct descent.
The common stock is represented by the trunk of the tree ; from this
trunk, which rises higher and higher with each diverging offshoot, has
sprung an immense variety of branches ; and, at the very pinnacle of
this magnificent structure, man appears — the crowning efflorescence
of organic evolution.

The permanent types which represent these various phases of em-
bryonic development show a progressively increasing differentiation
from their environment. The moner and the amoeba are almost as
structureless as the water in which they are found, consisting of little
more than water with a trace of albumen ; in specific gravity, in tem-
perature, in color, etc., the difference between these low organisms and
their environment is slight. Compared with the differences — chemi-
cal, physical, and structural — between man and the invisible atmos-
phere in which he is submerged, the contrast in this particular is a
striking one. This leads us to other considerations of still greater sig-
nificance.

The true environment of any organism consists in as much of the
external universe as that organism is capable of holding communica-
tion with ; so that, as the life becomes higher, the environment also
becomes more complex.

At the deep-sea bottom, where life is exhibited in its most simple
grades, the temperature is unvarying ; no light penetrates to those
depths ; a uniformity of conditions is thus preserved almost unbroken,
and the adjustments necessary to the continuance of life under such
circumstances are as trifling as the grade of life is simple.

By the greater complexity of the human organism as compared
with other animals, man is brought into communication with and
under the influence of a vastly increased variety of external condi-
tions, mainly through the organs of the special senses and their inti-
mate relations with a highly developed nervous system.

That without the eye and its connections with the brain we could
have no consciousness of light is the merest commonplace of physiol-
ogy ; yet, could we realize the full meaning of this and other similar

584 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

facts, we should be near to an understanding of the difference between
a high and a low organism ; the life is high when there is a high
degree of correspondence with a highly complex environment.

Poets have understood this principle better, perhaps, than physi-
ologists.

" Who has no inward beauty none perceives,
Though all around is beautiful " —

says Wordsworth ; and Coleridge —

"... We receive but what we give ;
And in our lives alone does Nature live ! "

Emerson also embodies this whole philosophy in a single illustra-
tion : " The sea drowns both ship and sailor, like a grain of dust, and
we call it fate ; but let him learn to swim, let him trim his bark, and
the water which drowned it will be cloven by it and will carry it like
its own foam — a plume and a power."

When we remember that our environment consists, not only of
the natural elements of earth and sky, reaching to the most distant
star which communicates its vibrations to our atmosphere, but that
it also includes other human beings with the influences which such
an environment involves, we realize that, while physiology undoubted-
ly rests on chemistry and physics, it also includes psychology and
reaches far toward sociology — sciences which involve the highest prob-
lems of our existence ; and, though we find it impossible to sink our
plummet to the depths of this ocean, or to send an arrow to the stars
which gem the arching dome above, we may at least hope to gather
a few shells on the shore of the one, and to intercept some gleams of
light from those distant suns which fascinate by their very distance,
and make glorious the night of our intellectual darkness even.

How, we next inquire, does the human embryo differ, at the pro-
gressive stages of its evolution, from the embryos of the various lower
types which it successively resembles ? Whence the impulse of devel-
opment by which it rises from these lower levels to the human plane ?
In reply to these questions we can only refer to the principle of hered-
ity which, though it imprints upon the germ no trace discoverable
by any known test, unfailingly molds the plastic protoplasm into cer-
tain prescribed and prearranged forms, with their accompanying ca-
pacities and powers. The inherent forces by which one germ develops
into an oak and another into a trailing vine, one into a mollusk and
another into a man, are handed down from generation to generation,
so that each plant and animal reproduces its own kind and not some
other kind. This can not be regarded, however, as an exceptional
fact ; the production of the germ with all its hidden possibilities, like
every other differentiation of matter, depends upon the general prin-
ciple known as the persistence of force ; and to deny that the power
of development of any grade of life is inheritable is to deny the per-

FROM MONER TO MAN. 585

sistence of force * — a doctrine which lies at the very foundation of the
stately edifice of modern science.

What is there in the whole stupendous drama of evolution, as con-
ceived by the most enthusiastic supporters of the hypothesis, more
wonderful or more difficult of comprehension and acceptance than these
facts of embryonic development at which we have briefly glanced ?

By the simultaneous processes of growth and differentiation, by
a gradual increase of complexity and heterogeneousness continued
through a considerable period of time, a microscopic speck of appar-
ently structureless protoplasm, undistinguishable by any known test
from the germ of any other animal, develops into the most highly
endowed organism of which we have any knowledge.

And through what agencies are these remarkable results accom-
plished ? Besides the inherited impulse of growth and development
already referred to, there is furnished to this germ a due supply of
ready-prepared food ; a certain uniform temperature is also secured
to it until the time of birth. After that period, its environment be-
comes gradually more complex ; but embryonic development does not
differ essentially from the continued development of infancy, child-
hood, and youth, by which the adult state is reached. The minute
speck of simple protoplasm which constitutes the human organism at
the beginning of its career is as truly an independent individual as
it ever becomes. At this, as at every subsequent stage of its exist-
ence, its life and growth and progress depend on the activities of its
own tissues, brought into play by the influence of external forces.
Then, as always, it receives food from its environment ; while the
appropriation and assimilation of this food, as well as the elimination
of the products of disintegration and waste, are accomplished by
means of the same processes of absorption, chemical combination and
decomposition, which constitute nutrition at all periods of existence.
The embryon lives its own life — a work which can not be delegated
to another.

Our next inquiry is in regard to the forces manifested by living
bodies. What are the relations between the highly developed varie-
ties of protoplasm which constitute their different tissues and organs
and the remarkable functions — muscular action, emotion, volition, etc.
— peculiar to animal organisms ?

This question will be best answered by means of a familiar illustra-
tion. By an appropriate combination of valves and pistons, of wheels
and levers, and numerous other contrivances put together in strict
conformity with the principles of mechanics, in which the most deli-
cate allowances are made for unavoidable friction, and the attraction
of gravitation is either annihilated by counterbalancing weights or
turned to account as a source of power, a machine is constructed
which strikingly illustrates the importance, not only of the particular

* See "Principles of Biology," Herbert Spencer, vol. ii.

5 86 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

character of the different parts of which it is composed, but of the
relations of these parts to each other. The force operating such a
machine may be derived from a simple fall of water, or from the oxida-
tion of burning anthracite ; but, although this may be the sole source of
the actual energy expended, it is far from being the only factor con-
cerned in the production of the special kind of work accomplished.
The results are due to the transformations of this initial force into
force of other kinds, the character of the work done depending on the
peculiar construction of the machine — in other words, on the relations
of its parts. Thus the expansive power of steam may be expended in
the idle clapping of the lid of a tea-kettle, or in the driving of the
piston in the engine of an ocean-steamer, according to the relations
into which the steam is brought. Keeping this illustration in mind,
we may perhaps attain to some conception of the meaning of a living
organism, and wherein consist the differences in different organisms.

The life-processes are concerned in the building up of the tissues —
that is, in the construction and constant repair of the mechanism out
of materials supplied by food ; coincident with this assimilation of
new material, there is a corresponding accumulation of energy or
force. The energies liberated, on the other hand, in the activities of
muscle, nerve, brain, etc., come from the oxidation — the so-called
waste — of these tissues ; and (as in the machine) the results produced
are due to the transformations of this initial force, derived from oxida-
tion of the tissues, into other kinds of force, viz., those manifested by
living animal organisms, the character of the work done depending (as
in the illustration) on the particular construction of the mechanism
concerned. In the operations of living organisms, not less than in
those mechanisms whose motive power is derived from steam, not a
known law of matter is violated, but all are wrought into a harmony
so complete that the entire complex and heterogeneous structure acts
as a unit.

Glancing in thought over the vast expanse of matter of which the
universe consists, what has been the direction of the progress witnessed
through the long ages since the beginning condensation of the nebu-
lous masses in which our solar system is believed to have originated ?
The immense globes which whirl in repeated circles through the
heavenly spaces, though bound together by the strongest and most
subtile bonds, roll blindly on, forever unconscious of themselves and of
one another. The lily of the field even, clothed in beauty though it
be, and surrounded by the greater glories of earth and sky — the warm
sunshine and green fields — has no conscious enjoyment of itself or of
them ; but as elements identical with those which compose these
unconscious forms have combined and recombined in compounds of
increasing complexity, as molecules have condensed and differentiated
in the development of a higher kind of living matter, consciousness has
dawned, and (mainly through the avenues of the special senses) mind

COLLEGE ATHLETICS. 587

has developed. Each generation, heir to the endowments of all pre-
ceding ones, has added its increment of gain, and later generations —
those which belong to the historic period — have begun their lives with
a vast amount of inherited intelligence. There is sound philosophy in
the statement once jocosely made, that the natives of a certain part
of the country, remarkable for their intellectual activity, are born with
a good common-school education. By far the greater part of our edu-
cation is indeed born with us.

Increased refinements of emotion, clearer subtilties of thought —
these are the directions which further development of the race must
take ; and the individual who experiences a hitherto unrealized emo-
tion, or who grasps a new thought which corresponds with some never
before observed fact or relation in the external world, is the seat
and center of progress. In such minds, nature is undergoing a still
higher evolution, and the colors of humanity are thus successively
planted on hitherto unsealed summits.

«»>♦»

COLLEGE ATHLETICS.

By EUGENE L. EICHAEDS.

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF MATHEMATICS ES- YALE COLLEGE.

II. — EVILS AND THEIE EEMEDIES.

WITH regard to the evils of the present system of college athletics
it must be remembered that the best system will not be free
from all evil. No human system can be free from evil. Even the
divine government of the world does not exclude the existence of evil.
That the present system has evils is no valid argument against it, unless
it can be shown either that these outweigh the good, or that some
other practical system can be devised which shall have all the good
with less of the evil of the present system.

1. One evil alleged against the present system is the excessive
amount of time required for exercise under it. It is no doubt true that
some students do give too much time to athletics. Some students also
give too much time to study; yet that fact is not brought forward as
a fatal argument against the college course of study. Of the two ex-
cesses— excess of study and excess of exercise — the dangerous pressure
at present is toward excess of study. But, in point of fact, this evil
of too much time given to athletics has been greatly exaggerated. The
winter term is not open to the charge of excessive athletics. The ath-
letes then training do not devote an average of more than an hour a
day to exercise. Perhaps a few give an hour and a half. It would
be safe to say that, counting all the time consumed, including the time

588 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY,

of exercise, the time used in going to and from the gymnasium, and
the time used in dressing and undressing, it would not go beyond two
hours per day, and in most cases would be less than that amount.
So, to consider the question of excessive time, we must look at the fall
and spring terms. In the fall, during days when afternoon recitations
are held, the class nines do not spend more than two hours' time alto-
gether, including both practice in the field and the time of going to and
from practice. The same may be said of the Foot-ball and Lacrosse
Teams. On Wednesday and Saturday afternoons the students give from
two to three hours to practice. On these afternoons the match-games
occur. They are prohibited on other days, except during examina-
tions, at which time they are allowed on any day, provided no player
is thereby prevented from attending his examination. The crews,
also, in practice on the water and in going to and from their boats,
spend two hours daily. On Wednesdays and Saturdays they use
more time, but the practice is so arranged as not to interfere with
recitations.

In the summer the same amount of time, daily, is given to practice,
except that, when recitations cease and examinations begin, the Uni-
versity and Freshman Nines use more time. Even then that time will
not average more than three hours per day. When match-games are
played out of town, to the time of the game must be added the time
used in travel to and from the scene of the match. In the season of
1882, of the games played during the time when recitations or exami-
nations were being held, only five were played out of town by the Yale
University Nine, though the men went out of town once or twice more
but were prevented from playing by the rain. Of these five, three
were played in New York city, which is only a little over two hours'
ride from New Haven. Of the remaining two, neither needed more
than thirty-six hours' absence from town.

The University Crew row only one race a year. The Foot-ball
Elevens and the Lacrosse Team play a few games out of New Haven,
but do not use in this way as much time as the Nine.

2. It is said that the excitement attendant on these sports distracts
from study. It is true that the contests do furnish excitement for
the students, but it is excitement of a healthy kind. Athletic sports
do not divert so many from study as the theatre and billiards. Banish
athletics, and you increase the attendance at the theatres and the
saloons, where the temptations are greater, and the excitements less
healthy than those of the ball-field and boat-race.

3. There is the evil of betting. This is not an evil peculiar to
athletics. The men in college, who are in the habit of betting, would
continue to bet on something else, if not a game were played nor a
race rowed. Gambling would increase if the athletics were prohib-
ited. Games and races in colleges do not create betting. They sim-
ply divert it from other channels.

COLLEGE ATHLETICS. 589

«

4. Then there are the disorders consequent upon victories. These

disorders are sometimes quite serious, but are by no means so serious
as they are often represented to be. On the campus such disorders
have never been more serious than some disorders taking place after
the conferring of degrees. They have always been easily controlled.
They have been avoided when the college authorities have given no-
tice that a recurrence of them would imperil the existence of the
athletic organizations, or annul the permission to play match-games.
These disorders, then, can not be a necessary and inherent evil of
athletics.

It may be replied that disorders consequent upon victories are not
confined to the college campus. Indeed, to the minds of many candid
men, the great disorders which bring dangerous disgrace to the pres-
ent system of college athletics, and reflect upon college government
as well, occur at the intercollegiate contests, when the athletes meet
on neutral ground. Such men admit the advantages of the system.
They would encourage it in the separate colleges, but would have
it go no further. They would abolish intercollegiate contests alto-
gether. But this action would do away with the very element (healthy
rivalry between colleges) which is the most effective motive power
and stimulus of the whole system. Without this element the. system
would go to pieces in many colleges. In others it would be miserably
contracted and inefficient. For this evil a more general interest in
the subject on the part of instructors and parents, and their more gen-
eral attendance at the games, would easily suggest the remedies of a
healthy and manifested public opinion and a judicious personal influ-
ence.

5. It is charged against athletics that they benefit, the few, and
that these few are those least requiring the exercise. One part of the
charge can be appreciated — that few are benefited — these few being
the members of the Crew, Kine, Eleven, and Lacrosse Teams of the
university. These, with substitutes, amount to about fifty men. But
it has been already shown that more men are induced to exercise than
the actual membership of these organizations ; and that the present
system affects, in the matter of exercise, at least half of the under-
graduate department.

The objection, that the men under training in the university or-
ganizations are the men least requiring the training, can be understood
to be one of two propositions, viz., either that these men have natu-
rally so much power or skill that they need not develop any more,
or that they will cultivate their strength and nerve without being
stimulated to do so by the workings of the present system. This
would be like arguing that men of great mental gifts either do not
need an education, or would get an education without any opportu-
nities being provided for this purpose in a school or college system — a
proposition which, however true in exceptional cases, taken as a gen-

59o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

•

eral statement no argument is required to prove absurd. Men of mus-
cle do need exercise. Indeed, it may be said that they must have ex-
ercise. The more systematic such exercise is, the better their brains
work, as observing instructors of such men will testify. The reason
is plain. They enjoy better health. The men who suffer most from
the confinement of student-life are the men of vigorous bodies. Their
vital force is like a flame. It must be fed with oxygen. Many of
them, without the capacity of self-control, and without the health
which they gain by exercise under the present system of athletics,
would never be able to graduate. Many others would graduate with
impaired bodily powers, and others still as slaves to habits of dissi-
pation.

6. It is said, again, that the system may develop men, but it only
makes fine brutes of them, and sets before the college a false standard
of excellence, viz., one entirely physical. It can not be said with truth
that the standard is false. The standard of good scholarship remains,
and many of the athletes take high rank in scholarship. The stand-
ard of good conduct remains. The students still respect their fellows
who approach these standards, yet they think no worse of a man, but
rather better of him, and rightly, too, if he be a thorough man, and
have a manly body as well as a good mind and upright character.
Other things being equal, the bright mind and good heart in a strong
body are better than the same things in a weak body, because they
can accomplish more in life.

It is further said that the applause bestowed upon some feat in any
of the athletic contests helps to establish some boy in the conceit that
he is a great man, because he can do such things, and that, therefore,
study is of no further use to him. There may be such youths, but,
whatever be their fate at other colleges, they seldom appear at the
college with which the writer is connected, and when they do appear
do not stay.

7. The evil of a general nature last to be considered is that of
expense.

The expenses of the organizations which have special university
representatives are only taken into account, since these are the organi-
zations of which the evils have been so loudly proclaimed to the pub-
lic. In the table given below (for Tale College), the " expenses " and
" income " are the totals for both university and class clubs combined.
For base-ball, foot-ball, and Lacrosse, the amounts in the column
headed " Earned " are made up for the most part of gate-money taken
at exhibition-games. For the boat clubs, of the amount put in the
same column, $1,045.36 was the net result of a dramatic entertainment
given by the students for the benefit of the university club. The
balance was obtained from entrance and carriage fees at regattas,
renting of lockers, and sale of boat.

COLLEGE ATHLETICS.

59i

Expenses.

INCOME.

CLUBS.

Total.

Balance from 1881.

Earned.

Subscribed.

Base-ball . . .
Foot-ball . . .
Lacrosse. . . .

$7,348.86

6,863.38

2,689.80

574.00

$7,426.52
7,254.15

2,792.36
575.00

$177.54
$1,080.71

$1,322.11

5,457.15

1,329.65

225.05

$5,926.87

1,797.00

382.00

349.95

Total .

$17,476.04

$18,048.03

$1,258.25

$8,333.96

$8,455.82

It will be observed that the total amount subscribed is less than half
the expenses. Two hundred and ninety dollars of this sum was given
by graduates. Deducting this, and considering that, according to the
catalogue of 1881-'82, there were, in the undergraduate academical and
scientific departments, seven hundred and eighty-six students, the cost
(above earnings) of the present system averages only a little over ten
dollars per man. As all departments are benefited by the system, the
average ought to be taken for the whole university. There being in
the university over one thousand men, the average cost per man would
be considerably less than ten dollars. It will be said that part of the
earnings come from the students, since they are the chief attendants at
the game. This is true. Assuming that half the earnings come from
the students (an amount probably in excess of the real amount), the
average cost per man for the university will not be far from twelve
dollars. Fifteen dollars per man would undoubtedly cover the whole
cost of athletics throughout the year, counting not only the athletics
represented in the table, but all other kinds as well. Certainly this
does not seem an extravagant sum to pay for the benefits derived
from the system. The writer believes that the expenses can be very
much diminished. The tendency to unnecessary increase of expenses
can certainly be diminished by measures hereafter noticed.

By the table, it will be seen that the subscriptions for base-ball
and foot-ball were small in amount as compared with their earnings.
It is generally believed, among students, that the university organiza-
tions of both these sports can be made self-supporting.

The evils already commented on are general. There are other so-
called evils which are special — some peculiar to one kind of athletics,
but not belonging to the others. One of these, charged against base-
ball, is that the game brings the students into contact with "profes-
sionals." Whatever may be the extent of the evil in other colleges, at
Yale it has not proved to be so great as to call for Faculty interfer-
ence, or even to excite apprehension. All the evils, real or imagi-
nary, connected with ball-playing, are reduced to a minimum when
the students meet " professionals." They meet them simply for prac-
tice. Betting is, as a rule, precluded by the fact that the result is
generally a foregone conclusion, and men bet on only doubtful is-
sues. Off the field there is no more intercourse between the students
and the " professionals " than is necessary to transact the business at-

592 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

tending the match. The professional nine are then generally repre-
sented by their business manager, and the students by the president or
treasurer of their club. In the game one nine is in the field, while
the members of the other are at the bases, or waiting for their turn at
the bat. The " professionals " are under the strictest discipline, so that
their presence does not invite or occasion dissipation in any form. Vic-
tories of college nines over " professionals " are not frequent, and are
not attended by disorders on the campus.

But to some objectors the evil of " professionalism " in athletics
includes more than playing with professional nines. The employment
of professional "trainers" in preparing students for contests is, for
some, the chief evil. Such trainers are looked upon as bad companions
for our young men. It is contended that they undermine the morals
of our students by their profanity and generally low talk. They are
also supposed to give too high a standard of excellence for our ama-
teur athletes, and thus to draw on too much of their time and strength,
in the effort to make them conform to this standard. All these things
may happen in some cases, but they do not happen frequently. Ad-
mitting, for the sake of argument, what is generally denied by the
students, that for the past two years the crew has been coached by the
professional oarsman who rigged their boats, his coaching would have
brought him into personal contact with not more than a dozen men at
the most, and for a time of only three or four weeks in the spring
and summer. For a short time in the winter some of the candidates
for the university nine have exercises in boxing with a trainer, in
order to bring them into " condition " for the spring and summer
work. There can hardly be more than fifteen such men.

The only other really professional training done has been done for
those who go into track athletics. This training lasts for about six
weeks, and is given to some fifteen or twenty men. A "professional"
has sometimes accompanied the foot-ball team when they have played
their great matches, but his office has not been to train the men, but
to apply his skill to limbering stiffened joints and healing bruised mus-
cles.

It is quite natural that students, when taking lessons of any kind,
should prefer the best masters. Unfortunately, the best masters are not
always the best men. That the pupils are, therefore, always led into
bad courses by the example of their instructors does not follow. There
is enough good sense in college students generally to dissociate good
instruction from faults of character. The trainer seldom influences
the student beyond the purpose of his training. The young man
does not make a comj^anion of his trainer, nor trust his morals to his
direction. An easy cure for possible evils in this direction would be
for the faculty of each college, troubled by vicious trainers, to forbid
their students employing such men. An investigation, however, into
the relations between such trainers and their pupils would show that

COLLEGE ATHLETICS. 593

the pupils despise the lowness of the men quite as much as do the
faculty themselves. Another and better remedy would be to select an
amateur athlete from the graduates, educated as a physician, and give
him a salaried office, with duties as general adviser and guardian of the
athletic interests. Such a man, if properly qualified, would help the
students to a safer and better physical developmept than they now
get, and would, besides, soon drive away all trainers exercising im-
proper influences among them.

In foot-ball there is no professional element. But it is charged
against the game that there is danger in it to life and limb. Undoubt-
edly it is a rough sport, but year by year it is becoming less dangerous
in consequence of the increasing strictness of the rules and the severity
of the penalties against foul play. In the match-games these rules are
generally so well observed that few accidents occur. In the games
between Yale and Princeton, which have always been the most hotly
contested, no man has been seriously hurt. It is a game which par-
ticularly requires courage, and is therefore a most manly game. It is
like a battle with the danger not all left out, but a battle in which
courage and self-possession not only secure victory but safety. With
all its dangers it is less dangerous to the players than the confinement
accompanying excess of study.

One great evil connected with athletics, and not generally receiv-
ing public notice or animadversion, is the excess of feeling between
students of different colleges, occasioned by the intercollegiate con-
tests. This excess of feeling seems akin to excessive class-feeling
already noticed. It is partly due, no doubt, to the youthfulness of the
parties. It is seldom entertained by the contestants. It is a strange
fact that such feeling does not appear to exist between professional
clubs, nor between professional and amateur clubs. In this matter,
therefore, it would seem that the students might learn a good lesson
from "professionals."

What the condition of the college would be without a system of
athletics is a question already partly answered by what has been said in
meeting the charges against the system. We can understand, also, the
effect of abolishing the present system by calling to mind the disorders
reported in colleges in which no such system is allowed to exist. The
revolts against authority and the great disorders between classes now
occur with the most frequency not at colleges which have the great-
est number of students and the most extensive athletic organizations,
but at the colleges in which the students either are not able or are not
allowed to establish such organizations. The disorders which used to
occur in New Haven thirty or even twenty-five years ago ought to
convince any candid man that, however great the present evils of col-
lege-life are with athletics, the past evils without athletics were worse.
On one occasion in those " good old times," in consequence of a con-
flict between students and town boys, a cannon was brought before the

VOL. XXIV. — 38

594

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

college buildings to demolish them. The writer remembers another
occasion when there was a collision between students and firemen, and
one of the firemen was mortally wounded by a pistol-shot. That
ni^ht the dormitories were bolted and barred and the students acted
like a besieged party, and were making preparations for a possible
tight the next day. In those same good old times there were more
frequent disturbances between classes. There were snow-ball fights,
too, on the campus, to the great destruction of window-glass. Accord-
ing to the testimony of men in the college in those days, drunkenness
was more common. Certainly within the last twenty years the college
sentiment with regard to intoxication has undergone a change for the
better. Before that period a student given to this vice did not neces-

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COLLEGE ATHLETICS. 595

sarily lose caste among his fellows as he does at this day. The pressure
of college opinion is against dissipation. It is absolutely necessary for
the athletes to abstain from it. Being taught the evil effects of ex-
cesses upon their strong men, the university is not slow to see that
intemperance is a wrong and an evil for all men.

As a contribution to this part of the discussion, the accompanying
diagrams are offered, as bearing on the subject of disorders. The first
diagram gives, for each year of the twenty college years from 1862-'63
to 1881-'82, the percentage of the number of men expelled and sus-
pended from the Academical department of Yale College to the mem-
bership of that department. The numbers were taken from the Faculty
records, and include expulsions for all cases of disorder ; all dismis-
sals and suspensions for disorders by day or by night ; for drunk-
enness and for marks and irregularity. Each case counts as a unit
without regard to the severity of the penalty. Had more weight been
allowed to one case than another, it is not likely that the results would
have been materially changed, as the severe punishments of expulsion
and dismissal are infrequent. No account is taken of dismissals for
scholarship, the writer for,the present confining his investigations to
the effects of athletics on college order. The percentages are arranged
in vertical columns, one for each college year, the year being written
under the column. Each square represents one fifth of one per cent
(0'002). Thus, in 1862-'63, the cases of discipline were four and one
tenth per cent of the total membership for that year. In the next
year the cases of discipline were one and seven tenths per cent, etc.
The average for the twenty years will be found to be about three per
cent. For the first decade the average was a little more than three
and six tenths per cent, and for the last decade a little less than two
and four tenths per cent. Though a race between crews of Harvard
and Yale was rowed as early as 1852, yet it was not until the summer
of 1864 that the Harvard- Yale boat-race began to be the regular event
which it has since continued to be. The first permission to play ball out
of town was granted to the Yale Club in June, 1869, and the first per-
mission to the Foot-ball Team was given in November, 1878. These
permissions are indicated on the diagrams.

In the second diagram the expulsions, dismissals and suspensions
for hazing, rushes, and attempted interference by members of one class
with the liberty or property of members of another, are given by num-
bers. Each square represents one case of discipline. These cases,
though already counted in forming Diagram No. 1, are represented in
No. 2 by themselves, in order to make evident the fact that this par-
ticularly troublesome class of disorders is diminishing. The writer
has already stated the reasons of his belief that the diminution of
them is due in great measure to the influence of athletics.

In the opinion of the writer, the diagrams show that, whatever may
be the public impression, the real facts, as evidenced by the Faculty

596 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

records, are, first, that the college disorders, as a whole, have not in-
creased since the introduction of athletics ; and, second, that one class
of disorders has sensibly diminished. Of course, other influences have
contributed to bring about these results. Still, even if the claim in
behalf of athletics of a special influence for good in this respect be
not allowed, it can not be fairly said that the evil effects of the system
are such as to overpower all the other good influences.

As to those evils which are capable of remedy, and of which the
remedy has not been before expressed or implied, we will take up that
of unnecessary expense. It has been before shown that the expense
of the system is not enormous, considering the good done. But un-
doubtedly it is greater than it need be. Moreover, it will naturally
tend to increase. Still, it is well to remember that, as the number of
athletic organizations increases, the increased subscriptions demanded
of the students begin to waken some of the thoughtful among them
to wiser discrimination in their giving, and to a sharper watchfulness
of the management of the associations to which they do give. Conse-
quently, new care in the spending of money is required of each univer-
sity organization, and a healthy suspicion on the part of the students
is developing itself. In other words, each athletic interest begins to
act as a check on the extravagance of the others. Still, money is inevi-
tably wasted, in consequence of the inexperience of the young men.
Each oflicer, as a rule, serves but a year, when he makes room for a
new oflicer, who is as inexperienced as his predecessor. The expe-
rience gained each year might be made serviceable by associating with
the incoming treasurer a permanent graduate treasurer. The vice-
president might be elected to become president as soon as the year's
service of the president expired, so that he would serve as vice-presi-
dent one year and one year as president, his service thus extending
over two years. It has also been proposed to consolidate the athletic
interests under one salaried superintendent, who should be a gradu-
ate. The objection to this plan is that, though it might secure a
more consistent and economic management, it would destroy the pres-
ent healthy rivalry of the athletic interests, and relieve the students
themselves of the responsibility of success or failure. Besides the
changes suggested, a general auditing committee for all the interests
should be formed consisting of graduates and undergraduates. At pres-
sent, though the accounts of all the interests are published, yet nobody
feels it his particular business to object to any one item. If a graduate
finds fault, his complaint is not worth much, as only undergraduates are
supposed to know the needs of to-day. A committee of both graduates
and undergraduates could audit the accounts, and would be able to make
suggestions which would be sure of a hearing. By such changes in
the system and the economies which ought to result from them, field-
sports, such as base-ball, foot-ball, and lacrosse, should be self-support-
ing. The income derived from gate-money should meet the expenses.

. COLLEGE ATHLETICS. 597

Since some very worthy people who believe in manly sports object
to young men playing for money taken at the exhibition-games, it is
necessary to say a word of explanation with regard to this feature of
all ball-games. If field athletics are to continue, the expense of them
must be met in one of two ways, either by gate-money or by subscrip-
tion. Most young men prefer to give their money at the gate, and
thus to pay for what they see. If a club knows that it is to spend
only what it earns, it will be stimulated, first, to play as good a game
as possible ; and, secondly, to spend its earnings with prudence. It
seems only just, too, that, if the public desire to see a good game, they
should pay for the exhibition. The men work hard in practice, and
are entitled to have their expenses paid. More than that they do not
ask. They do not play for gain, but for honor. By their rules, they
do not allow any man to be a member of their organizations who has
earned money as a professional.

The evil of liability to strains and injuries in athletics can not be
entirely obviated. It is well to bear in mind, at this point, the fact
that even those who are not athletes do not, therefore, enjoy immu
nity from accidents. Yet, so far, according to the recollection of the
writer, no regular member of a Yale Crew, Team, or Nine, has been
permanently injured by participating in a race or match. Still, it is
possible that a slight injury, to a person having organic weakness,
might result in a fatal difficulty. Such an issue might be avoided by
the requirement that every candidate for trial should be examined by
a competent physician, and, in default of procuring a certificate of physi-
cal soundness, should be excluded from participation in athletic con-
tests. Besides this, every candidate for a place in a crew should be
debarred from entering a race unless he had mastered the art of swim-
ming.

If, moreover, the Faculty of every college having a system of ath-
letics would exert a sympathetic as well as a judicious oversight of the
students interested in the system, they would find the young men quite
willing to listen to friendly suggestions. If, also, the times of recita-
tion were so arranged that a proper amount of time could be devoted
to exercise without interference with study, more brain-work, and of
better quality, would be secured than by the policy prevailing in some
colleges, according to which, not only no encouragement is given to
athletic sports, but, on the contrary, every obstacle is thrown in their
way.

The college which neglects or ignores physical culture may send
out scholars, but it will not educate forceful men. It will not be the
living power which it might be. Truth is not to prevail by the dry
light of intellect alone, but through the agency of good, wise, and
strong men.

598 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

GREEN SUNS AND RED SUNSETS.

By W. H. LAEEABEE.

THE whole world enjoyed, during the closing months of 1883 and
through January, 1884, the spectacle of a succession of sunsets
and sunrises marked by a brilliant, gorgeous red coloration. The phe-
nomenon, if it had been only for a day or, two, might not have excited
any particular remark, for in the United States the sight of a brilliant-
ly-colored sunset is not at all unusual ; but when it was found to be
continuous for months, and to extend to every part of the earth, the
impression became nearly universal that something uncommon was
going on in our atmosphere or in space. The phenomenon apparently
reached its culmination about the 27th of November, when the western
sky was illuminated for more than an hour after sunset by a lurid
glow, as of some great conflagration ; and in many places the public
thought it actually was the mark of a fire, while in some towns fire-
alarms were sounded. The phenomenon first began to excite attention
in the Eastern States at about the time of its brightest manifestation,
in the last days of November. It was, however, remarked on the
Pacific coast about a week earlier ; in Europe early in the month ; and
at points in the Indian and Pacific Oceans as early as September.
Among the earliest published mentions of it were those from the isl-
ands of Rodrigues, Mauritius, and Seychelles, August 28th, Brazil,
August 30th, New Ireland, September 1st, the Gold Coast, Africa,
September 1st and 2d, and one that was made in connection with the
observation of a " blue sun " at Trinidad, September 2d, when, after
dark, says the report, "we thought there was a fire in the town,
from the bright redness of the heavens." At Ongole, India, after the
sun had set, green, " light yellow and orange appeared in the west,
a very deep red remaining for more than an hour after sunset " ;
whereas under ordinary conditions all traces of color leave the sky
in that latitude within half an hour after the sun disappears. Cap-
tain Holland, of the French Messageries steamer Saghelien, passing
from near King George's Sound, Australia, to the Island of Reunion,
observed, from the 25th of September to the 12th of October, a red
light around the sun, which became more pronounced at sunset, and
persisted for a length of time after that hour in proportion as the
ship was in a higher latitude. " The colored part of the sky, which
was at times extremely lively, had, about a half -hour before sunset,
a very considerable surface, extending to a distance of forty-five
degrees from the sun." The same coloring was seen in the morn-
ing. A correspondent writing from Wailuku, Sandwich Islands, to
the " Hawaiian Gazette " of October 3d, speaks of the " most extraor-
dinary " sunsets they had been having for some time past, " fiery red,

GREEN SUNS AND RED SUNSETS. 599

spreading a lurid glare over all the heavens, and producing a most
weird effect." The Attorney-General of West Australia wrote to Dr.
J. W. Judd, October 27th, describing the same glow ; and a letter from
Umballah, India, October 30th, says : " There has been for some time a
remarkable appearance in the sky every night. The sun goes down as
usual and it gets nearly dark, and then a bright red and yellow and
green and purple blaze comes in the sky and makes it lighter again.
It is most uncanny, and makes one feel as if something out of the com-
mon was going to happen." The wrriter of this article has noticed
from his own windows the interval of darkness between the setting of
the sun and the appearance of the glow remarked in the letter.

The earliest observations of the glow in Europe appear to have
been made about the 9th of November, after which time references to
it and descriptions of it abound in the scientific and other journals.
These descriptions agree with each other as to all essential features,
and might be as well applied to the phenomenon as seen anywhere in
the United States. The sky is generally spoken of as cloudless where
the glow has appeared, although a few observers speak of light cirrus
clouds floating in the air or passing over the sun or near it ; and one
observer at Ootacamund, India, mentions a green cloud that passed over
the sun's disk, followed by a red one.

The red light is regarded by those who have paid most attention
to the subject as associated with the blue or green sun which was ob-
served in many parts of the East Indies early in September. It was
noticed at Manila, in the Philippine Islands, on the 9th, w7hen, during
a "light dry mist," "the sun appeared colored green and diffusing
over all the bodies it illuminated a strange and curious greenish
hue, to the great terror of the islanders " ; at Colombo, Ceylon, on the
same day, when the sun, about forty minutes before setting, emerged
from behind a cloud of a bright-green color. The whole disk was
distinctly seen, and the light was so subdued that one could look
steadily at it. The moon was also, to some extent, affected in the
same way. A correspondent of the " Ceylon Observer," writing on
September 12th from Puleadierakam, states that no light came from
the sun, although it was visible, until nearly seven o'clock in the
morning, and adds : " For the last four days, the sun rises in splendid
green when visible — that is, about 10° from the horizon. As he ad-
vances he assumes a beautiful blue, resembling bnrning sulphur.
When about 45° high, it is not possible to look at the sun with the
naked eye ; but, even when at the very zenith, the light is blue, vary-
ing from a pale blue early to a bright blue later on, almost similar to
moonlight even at midday. Then, as he declines, the sun assumes the
same changes, but vice versa. The heat is greatly modified, and there
is nothing like the usual hot days of September. The moon, now
visible in the afternoon, looks also tinged with blue after sunset, and
as she declines, assumes a most fiery color at 30° from the zenith."

600 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

At Madras, India, Professor C. Micliie Smith, of the Christian
College, remarked the " perfectly rayless " and bright silvery-white
color of the sun on the 9th of September. The same was noticed
on the next day, but was succeeded, after the reappearance of the
sun from behind a cloud, by a bright pea-green color. This pecul-
iar color was again observed the next morning, and in the evening it
" was a magnificent spectacle, and attracted the notice of every one.
The silvery sheen was visible early in the afternoon, and the bright-
ness of the sun rapidly faded, till by about five o'clock one could look
at it directly without any difficulty. At this time there was a distinct
tinge of green in the light when received on a sheet of white paper,
while shadows were very prettily tinted with the complementary pink.
As the sun sank toward the horizon the green became more and more
strongly marked, and by 5.30 it appeared as a bright -green disk,
with a sharp outline. In fact the definition was so good that a large
spot (about 1' long) was a conspicuous object to the naked eye."
The green suns were also seen for several days about the 22d. The
spectrum, which Dr. Smith carefully examined, " showed clearly that
aqueous vapor played a large part in the phenomena, for all the atmos-
pheric lines usually ascribed to that substance were very strongly de-
veloped. But in addition to this there was a very marked general
absorption in the red." Abnormal electrical conditions of the atmos-
phere were noticed at this place in connection with the phenomenon.
Of an earlier date than any of these observations is a notice of a
" green sun," remarked at Panama on the 2d and 3d of September, the
same day on which a blue sun and lurid sky were observed at Trinidad.

The appearance of the green color in the sun and in parts of the
sky outside of the sphere of the red glow was also remarked in numer-
ous observations made in Europe. In one of the earliest notices of
the spectacle published in England, the writer says that at sunset " a
very peculiar greenish and white opalescent haze appeared about the
point of the sun's departure, and shone as if with a light of its own,
near the horizon. The upper part of this pearly mist soon assumed a
pink color, while the lower part was white, green, and greenish-yel-
low." Another observer, at Worcester, describes the blue of the sky
as having been changed to green and the green as being speedily
replaced by the ruddy tint ; and again, in the morning, " the color of
the sun changed to an exquisite emerald hue, staining the landscape,
and investing houses, buildings, glazed windows, and greenhouses
with a remarkably weird aspect." At sunset of the same day, " the
crescent of the moon, being just above the fringe of red light, assumed
a lively green hue, and continued to exhibit the novelty of an emerald
crescent " for a quarter of an hour. At other places, we read of the
contrast of the glow with "the pale greenish hue of the clear sky
around " ; of a crimson arch stretching from southeast to northeast,
"with a very clear greenish-blue sky beneath it in the east," and be-

GREEN SUNS AND RED SUNSETS. 601

tween the arch and the western horizon " a sky of a bright silver- white
color, which was so brilliant that it gave us quite a second daylight " ;
at another, of the sky nearer the zenith appearing "of a sea-green
tint." The sea-green tint in the east was observed at Rome ; and at
Berlin, according to Herr Robert von Helmholtz, there was " a green-
ish sunset at 3.50, an unusually bright-red sky with flashes of light
starting from southwest. An interesting physiological phenomenon
which recalls ' Contrast-Farben ' was there beautifully illustrated by
some clouds, no longer reached by direct sunlight ; they looked in-
tensely green on the red sky." The whole phenomenon was exhibited,
according to Mr. J. Addington Symonds, with remarkable intensity at
Davos-Platz in the High Alps ; and on one occasion " the whole north-
eastern region of the heavens was at the same time of the most vivid
golden-green — the peculiar green of chrysoprase and some highly-
tinted beryls. Each tone of light, rose and green, was reflected on
the long, broad basin of valley snow, the blending of both colors being
of a strange, bewildering brilliancy." The sun, at this place, appeared
through the day " surrounded by a luminous, slightly opalescent haze
— not at all resembling halo or iridescence of vapor."

The red glow and the green sun are most likely due to a common
cause. The same medium which will give by transmitted light a
green color to objects viewed through it, will, by the universal law of
the absorption and reflection of light, reflect the red rays. The close
connection of the two phenomena may be regarded as real.

The spectacle must be due to some peculiar condition of our atmos-
phere, for, if it was produced by any cause outside of the atmosphere,
it would have been visible in some form through the night, whereas
its duration corresponded tolerably closely with that of ordinary twi-
light ; the cause must have been co-extensive with the atmosphere, for
the glow lasted as long as the twilight, if not longer. The manifes-
tation was not auroral or electrical, for no auroras have been seen
which could reasonably be associated with it, and no electrical dis-
turbances have been mentioned in connection with it, except at Ma-
dras. Professor Michie Smith, of Madras, and Professor C. Piazzi
Smyth, believe that it is the result of peculiar conditions of vapor in
the air ; but, while this might easily account for colors lasting a few
days, it is difficult to suppose a peculiar accumulation and distribution
of ordinary vapors enduring for so long a period. Nevertheless, Mr.
Lockyer has seen the sun green through the steam of a steamboat ;
it has been seen green through the mist of the Simplon ; and Mr.
Henry Bedford, describing the summer sunset and sunrise just within
the Arctic Circle in July, 1878, in an English magazine of that year,
said : " The color brightens, and some small streaks of clouds grow
brighter and brighter, until the sun — the green sun — appears. A
distant low range of rocks comes between us and its point of rising,
and, as we glide on, an opening between them shows us the sun, a

602 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

bright emerald, as pure and brilliant as ever gem that glistened ; again
we lose it, and again an opening shows it to us in its own golden light ;
and then once more it is the bright green ; and now it rises higher,
clears the ridge, and is once more the golden orb." The Rev. G. H.
Hopkins, of Cornwall, England, has observed that in a clear sky, as
the disk of the sun sinks down beneath the horizontal line of the
ocean, the parting ray is of a deep emerald green. The effect is not
produced if there are clouds around the sun. Dr. F. A. Forel, of
Morges, Switzerland, mentions as a fact confirmatory of the opinion
that meteorological factors alone can not furnish a sufficient explana-
tion of the phenomenon, that in Switzerland the glow, after having
decreased subsequently to the 3d of December, attained a second
maximum on the 24th and 25th of the month, when the atmospheric
conditions were quite different from those which prevailed in the coun-
try at the time of the first maximum.

The hypothesis that the spectacle was caused by the presence in
the atmosphere of a cloud of " cosmic dust," which the earth has en-
countered in its travels, has been advanced by several observers, and
is supported by Mr. Proctor. Mr. Nordenskiold and other men emi-
nent in science have taught us to believe that a meteoric dust falling
upon the earth from space plays a much more important part in ter-
restrial economy than we have been accustomed to suppose ; and they
have collected, in uninhabited countries and far away from any vol-
cano, quantities of dust — little rounded particles of metallic com-
pounds— unlike anything the earth is known to produce, and strik-
ingly like what meteors of that size would be. Investigating whether
an unusual quantity of such dust is now falling upon us, Mr. W.
Mattieu Williams has found it in carefully selected snow from his
garden. M. Emile Yung, of Geneva, has also found an extraordinary
quantity of a similar dust in fresh snow that fell in the latter part of
November and early in December on the steeple of the cathedral of
Saint-Pierre, at " les Treize-Arbres," Mont Saleve.

Numerous suggestions have been made that the phenomena are the
result of the diffusion through the whole atmosphere of the entire
earth of ashes and cinders from the eruption of the volcano of Kraka-
toa, in the Straits of Sunda, which took place on the 26th of August
last. This theory has the support of Professor Lockyer and other emi-
nent men of science, and there is much to be said in favor of it. The
principal objections to it are summarized in a remark by Mr. Proctor,
"that we should have to explain two incongruous circumstances : first,
how the exceedingly fine matter ejected from Krakatoa could have so
quickly reached the enormous height at which the matter producing
the after-glow certainly was ; and, secondly, how, having been able to
traverse still air so readily one way, that matter failed to return as
readily earthward under the attraction of gravity." It will not do to
limit our ideas of the effect that may have followed the eruption of

GREEN SUNS AND BED SUNSETS. 603

Krakatoa by our knowledge of what has followed any other volcanic
eruption ; for the outburst at Krakatoa far exceeded in violence any
event of the kind that is remembered in the history of man. Mr. W.
J. Stillman, formerly United States consul in Crete, who has wit-
nessed the explosions of two eruptions of the submarine volcano of
Santorin, and has seen masses of rock weighing many tons thrown
from a half a mile to a mile, and escaping gases expanding, after two
seconds, into huge masses of cloud, at an elevation of from six to ten
thousand feet, and then drifting away with the wind and dropping vol-
canic dust in its course, believes that on the enormously greater scale
of the Krakatoa explosions the dust could have been thrown to the
top of the atmosphere, there to drift over the whole earth ; and he
suggests that at such a height the distribution might be effected in
twenty-four hours by a single revolution of the earth. Mr. Proctor's
second difficulty is met by Messrs. Preece and William Crookes, who
suggest that very finely divided particles of dust having an electrical
charge of the same sign as that of the earth, may be kept suspended in
the upper air for an indefinite period, by electrical repulsion ; and Dr.
Crookes adduces experiments showing how similar things have been
done with electrified gold-leaf. Professor S. P. Langley contributes
some interesting testimony on this point, which is based upon his
observations on Mount Whitney, in 1881. On this mountain, from a
height of twelve thousand feet, " we looked down," he says, " on
what seemed a kind of level dust-ocean, invisible from below, but
whose depth was six or seven thousand feet. . . . The color of the
light reflected to us from this dust-ocean was clearly red, and it
stretched as far as the eye could reach in every direction, although
there was no special wind or local cause for it. It was evidently like
the dust seen in mid-ocean from the Peak of Teneriffe — something
present all the time, and a permanent ingredient in the earth's atmos-
phere. At our own great elevation the sky was of a remarkably deep
violet, and it seemed at first as if no dust was present in this upper
air, but in getting, just at noon, in the edge of the shadow of a range
of cliffs which rose twelve hundred feet above us, the sky immediately
took on a whitish hue. On scrutinizing this through the telescope, it
was found to be due to myriads of the minutest dust-particles. . . .
It is especially worth notice that, as far as such observations go, we
have no doubt that the finer dust from the earth's surface is carried
up to a surprising altitude. I speak here, not of the grosser dust-par-
ticles, but of those which are so fine as to be individually invisible,
except under favorable circumstances, and which are so minute that
they might be almost an unlimited time in settling to the ground, even
if the atmosphere were to become perfectly quiet." Professor Lang-
ley thinks that the explosion of Krakatoa may have added millions of
tons to the dust-envelope of the globe, and that the new contribution
is not likely at once to fall to the surface again.

6o4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

In illustration of this theory, we have the testimony of Captain Sir
C. Fleming Stenhouse, who named the island, that after " Graham's
Island " appeared in the Mediterranean in 1831, similar red sunsets to
those the world has just been admiring were seen at Malta. A more
striking record of a similar phenomenon is given in White's "Natural
History of Selborne," Bonn's edition, page 300, where we read : " The
summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and portentous one, and
full of horrible phenomena ; for besides the alarming meteors and tre-
mendous thunder-storms that affrighted and distressed the different
counties of this kingdom, the peculiar haze, or smoky fog, that pre-
vailed for many weeks in this island, and in every part of Europe, and
even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike
anything known within the memory of man. By my journal I find
that I had noticed this strange occurrence from June 23d to July 20th,
inclusive, during which period the wind varied to every quarter, with-
out making any alteration in the air. The sun, at noon, looked as
black as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-colored ferruginous light on
the ground and floors of rooms, but was particularly lurid and blood-
colored at rising and setting. . . . The country people began to look
with a superstitious awe at the red, lowering aspect of the sun ; and,
indeed, there was reason for the most enlightened person to be appre-
hensive, for all the while Calabria, and part of the Isle of Sicily, were
torn and convulsed with earthquakes ; and, about that juncture, a vol-
cano sprang out of the sea on the coast of Norway." Cowper men-
tions the same phenomena in his " Task " ; and Mrs. Somerville, in her
" Physical Geography," traces their origin to the eruption of the vol-
cano Skaptar, in Iceland, " which broke out May 8th, and continued
to August, sending forth clouds of mingled dust and vapor, which
spread over the whole of Northern Europe." It is stated in the " An-
nals of Philosophy," vol. ii, that the sun appeared of a blue color in
England, in April, 1821 ; and it appears from other sources that a
violent volcanic eruption had taken place in the Island of Bourbon in
February of that year, and a destructive outbreak in Gunung Api in
June of the previous year.

A curious counterpart to White's relation is given by Professor
James Main Dixon of what he witnessed in Japan at the time of the
eruption of Krakatoa. " During the two or three days at the end of
August," he says, " we enjoyed fine, dry weather, but the sun was cop-
per-colored and had no brightness. It was capital weather for travel-
ing, but rather inexplicable. When we got to Nikko, the people came
to us to inquire if some catastrophe were impending, for the appearance
of the sun foreboded evil. We laughed at their fears, and assured
them all was right. However, it seems that if the appearance of the
sun foreboded no evil, it was a wonderful sign of the greatest earth-
quake and volcanic catastrophe on record. The fearful explosion of
Krakatoa, in the Straits of Sunda, took place on August 26th; and

GREEN SUNS AND RED SUNSETS. 605

there seems little reason to doubt that the monsoon had carried the
volcanic dust along with it, the dust obscuring the sun. The dis-
tance is nearly three thousand miles."

Dr. Budde, of Constantinople, was assured, when traveling in
Southern Algeria in 1880, that the sun has a decidedly blue color when
seen through the fine dust of a Sahara wind. Mr. Edward Whymper,
remarking upon a metallic-green coloration of the moon, observed on
some evenings in December, says that the peculiar hue recalled to him
a similar appearance which he had witnessed in South America when
the atmosphere was charged with volcanic dust ; and he has described
the colorings seen by his party under a cloud of ashes from Cotopaxi
in language which would almost precisely apply to the diversified ap-
pearances that are the immediate subject of our discussion. Extremely
brilliant colorations of the sky have been mentioned by several travel-
ers as common spectacles in a particular tropical belt. Colonel Stuart
Wortley, who spent the year 1862 in Southern Italy, in the study, by
the aid of photography, of the formation of clouds, was struck with the
unusual colors of the sunsets during and after the eruptions of Vesu-
vius with which that year was distinguished. Four years ago, while
sailing in the Pacific, he was much impressed with the fact that " very
frequently the whole vault of heaven was overspread with magnificent
and glorious coloring, and that in thethigher regions of the air colors
were found that were never seen in the horizon or below a certain
height." Inasmuch as this exceptional magnificence and peculiarity
of coloring only occurs in certain latitudes and in well-defined belts,
he suggests that, seen in the new light that is now cast on the sub-
ject, " the constant stream of volcanic matter thrown out by the great
volcanoes in the mountain-ranges of South America, and possibly from
elsewhere, form an almost permanent stratum of floating matter, car-
ried in certain directions and kept in certain positions by alternating
currents in the higher regions of the air, and that to this stratum of
volcanic matter much of the exceptional coloring, found to be asso-
ciated with sunrises and sunsets in portions of the Southern Pacific
Ocean, is due." As an interesting coincidence in connection with this
view may be noticed the extraordinary fact, to which Mr. Lockyer has
called attention, that "before even the lower currents had time to
carry the volcanic products to a region so near as India, an upper cur-
rent from the east had taken them in a straight line via the Sev-
chelles, Cape Coast Castle, Trinidad, and Panama, to Honolulu, in
fact very nearly back again to the Straits of Sunda."

Very strong evidence in favor of the theory of the agency of vol-
canic dust has been derived from the examination of the sediment in
freshly fallen snow at Madrid, Spain, on the ?th of December, and of
the mineral matter deposited by a rain that fell at Wageningen, Hol-
land, on the 13th of December. The sediment at Madrid, besides the
ordinary atmospheric dust of the city, contained particles of what ap-

6o6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY,

peared to be volcanic hypersthene, pyroxene, magnetic iron, and vol-
canic glass. At Wageningen, every drop of the rain that fell upon
the windows left, when it dried up, a slight sediment of grayish-
colored matter which was compared with original volcanic ash from
Krakatoa that had been sent to the Agricultural Laboratory for analy-
sis. Both the sediment and the volcanic ash were found to contain in
common — 1. Small, transparent, glassy particles ; 2. Brownish, half-
transparent, somewhat filamentous little staves ; and, 3. Jet-black,
sharp-edged, small grains resembling augite. These observations, say
Messrs. Beyerinck and Van Dam, who made the analyses, " fortify us
in our supposition that the ashes of Krakatoa have come down in Hol-
land." On the 17th of November a fall of layers of gray and black
dust took place at Storlvdal, Norway, and a fall of discolored rain
near Worcester, England. Grayish sediments were found deposited
on windows at Gainsborough and York, England, after a heavy rain
on the 12th of December.

Mr. E. Douglas Archibald has suggested in " Nature " that, whether
the cause of the phenomena be meteoric dust or volcanic ashes, the re-
flection arises from a definite stratum, and not merely from an atmos-
phere filled throughout with such dust. Professor Roujon, of Cler-
mont, France, has also observed that two of the twilights, one following
the other one day apart, " were so different in intensity as to provoke
the supposition that the substance which produced them, at a great
height, was not uniformly diffused, but moved in vast masses." This
would serve to account for the variations that all must have observed
in the brilliancy of the glow.

Mr. Edmund Clark has offered a suggestion upon which the theory
that invokes the agency of aqueous vapor and the one which refers
the manifestations to volcanic or meteoric dust may be combined, viz.,
that the dust may act as a nucleus for the condensation of any vapor
that may exist at such a high level. The height of the mass of the
matter producing the glow has been fixed by Miss Ley, of England,
at thirteen miles.

-•-♦-♦-

THE ANCESTKY OF BIEDS.

By Peofessob GKANT ALLEN.

SEATED on the dry hill-side here, by the belted blue Mediterranean,
I have picked up from the ground a bit of blanched and molder-
ing bone, well cleaned to my hand by the unconscious friendliness of
the busy ants ; and looking closely at it I recognize it at once, with
a sympathetic sigh, for the solid welded tail-piece of some departed
British tourist swallow. He came here like ourselves, no doubt, to
escape the terrors of an English winter : but among these pine-clad

THE ANCESTRY OF BIRDS. 607

Proven9al summits some nameless calamity overtook him, from greedy-
kestrel or from native sportsman, and left him here, a sheer hulk, for
the future contemplation of a wandering and lazy field-naturalist.
Fit text, truly, for a sermon on the ancestry of birds ; for this solid
tail-bone of his tells more strangely than any other part of his whole
anatomy the curious story of his evolution from some primitive lizard-
like progenitor. Close by here, among the dry rosemary and large-
leaved cistus by my side, a few weathered tips of naked basking
limestone are peeping thirstily through the arid soil ; and on one of
these gray lichen-covered masses a motionless gray lizard sits sunning
his limbs, in hue and spots just like the lichen itself, so that none but
a sharp eye could detect his presence, or distinguish his little curling
body from the jutting angles of the rock, to which it adapts itself
with such marvelous accuracy. Only the restless sidelong glance from
the quick upturned eye suffices to tell one that this is a living animal
and not a piece of the lifeless stone on which it "rests like a shadow."
A very snake the lizard looks in outline, with only a pair of sprawling
fore-legs and a pair of sprawling hind-legs to distinguish him out-
wardly from his serpentine kin. Yet from some such lizard as this,
my swallow and all other birds are ultimately descended ; and from
such a little creeping four-legged reptile science has to undertake
the evolutionary pedigree of the powerful eagle or the broad- winged
albatross.

Reptiles are at present a small and dying race. They have seen
their best days. But in the great secondary age, as Tennyson graphi-
cally puts it, " A monstrous eft was of old the lord and master of earth."
At the beginning of that time the mammals had not been developed
at all ; and even at its close they were but a feeble folk, represented
only by weak creatures like the smaller pouched animals of Australia
and Tasmania. Accordingly, during the secondary period, the reptiles
had things everywhere pretty much their own way, ruling over the
earth as absolutely as man and the mammals do now. Like all domi-
nant types for the time being, they split up into many and various
forms. In the sea, they became huge paddling enaliosaurians ; on the
dry land, they became great erect dinosaurians ; in the air, they be-
came terrible flying pterodactyls. For a vast epoch they inherited
the earth ; and then at last they began to fail, in competition with
their own more developed descendants, the birds and mammals. One
by one they died out before the face of the younger fauna, until at
last only a few crocodiles and alligators, a few great snakes, and a
few big turtles, remain among the wee skulking lizards and geckos to
remind us of the enormous reptilian types that crowded the surface of
the liassic oceans.

Long before the actual arrival of true birds upon the scene, how-
ever, sundry branches of the reptilian class had been gradually approxi-
mating to and foreshadowing the future flying things. Indeed, one

608 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

may say that at an early period the central reptilian stock, consisting
of the long, lithe, four-legged forms like the lizards, still closely allied
in shape to their primitive newt-like and eel-like ancestors, began to
divide laterally into sundry important branches. Some of them lost
their limbs and became serpents ; others acquired bony body-cover-
ings and became turtles ; but the vast majority went off in one of two
directions, either as fish-like sea-saurians, or as bird-like land-saurians.
It is with this last division alone that we shall have largely to deal in
tracing out the pedigree of our existing birds. Their fossil remains
supply us with many connecting links which help us to bridge over
the distance between the modern representatives of the two classes.
It is true, none of these links can be said to occupy an exactly inter-
mediate place between reptiles and birds ; none of them can be re-
garded as forming an actual part of the ancestry of our own swallows
and pigeons : they are rather closely related collateral members of
the family than real factors in the central line of descent. But they
at least serve to show that, at and before the period when true birds
first appeared upon earth, many members of one great reptilian group
had made immense advances in several distinct directions toward the
perfected avian type.

Clearly, the first step toward the development of a bird must con-
sist in acquiring a more or less upright habit : for the legs must be
well differentiated into a large hind pair and a free fore pair, before
the last can be further specialized into feathered wings ; and the body
must have acquired a forward poise before flying becomes a possible
mode of locomotion. Such an upright habit is first foreshadowed
in the larger-limbed and longer-legged lizards like the dinosaurians,
which walked to some extent erect, and more particularly in some
highly specialized reptiles like the iguanodon, which had large hind-
legs and small fore-legs, and could walk or hop on the hind-legs alone,
much after the fashion of a kangaroo, or still more of a jerboa or a
chinchilla. Now, it is noticeable that the tendency to acquire the
most rudimentary form of flying is common among animals of this
semi-erect habit, especially when they frequent forests and jump about
much from tree to tree. For example, among our modern mammals,
the squirrels are a race much given to sitting on their hind-legs and
using their paws as hands ; while they are also much accustomed to
jumping lightly from bough to bough : and some among them, the
flying squirrels, have developed a sort of parachute consisting of an
extensible skin between the fore and hind legs, which they use to
break their fall in descending to the ground. Again, among the lower
monkey-like animals, the so-called flying lemur or galeopithecus has
hit upon an exactly similar plan ; while, in the bats, a membrane which
may be fairly called a wing has been evolved to a very high degree of
perfection. Everywhere, the habit of living among trees or jumping
from rocks tends to produce either parachute or wing-like organs ;

THE ANCESTRY OF BIRDS. 609

and in our own time the tendency is very fully displayed among a
large number of forestine mammals.

During the secondary ages, however, it was the reptiles which took to
thus developing a rudimentary flying-mechanism. Even at the present
day there are some modern lizards, the " flying-dragons " of popular natu-
ral history, which possess a parachute arrangement of the front ribs, and
are so enabled to jump lightly from branch to branch, somewhat in the
same manner as the flying-squirrels. But this is an independent and
comparatively late development of a flying apparatus among the rep-
tiles, quite distinct in character from those which were in vogue among
the real and much more terrible flying-dragons of the liassic and oolitic
age. Far the most remarkable of these predecessors of the true birds
were the pterodactyls whose bones we still find in our English cliffs at
Lyme Regis and Whitby ; creatures with a large reptilian head, fierce
jaws set with sharp-pointed teeth, and fore-arms prolonged into a great
projecting finger so as to support a membranous wing or fold of skin,
somewhat analogous to that of the bats. The pterodactyls do not
stand anywhere in the regular line of descent toward the true birds ;
but they are interesting as showing that a general tendency then ex-
isted among the higher reptiles toward the development of a flying
organ. In these frightful dragons, the organ of flight is formed by
an immense prolongation of the last finger on each fore-leg, to a length
about as great as that of the rest of the leg all put together. Between
this long bony finger and the hind-leg there stretched, in all probabil-
ity, a featherless wing like a bat's, by means of which the pterodactyl
darted through the air and pounced down upon its cowering victims.
As in birds, the bones were made very light, and filled with air instead
of marrow ; and all the other indications of the skeleton show that the
creatures were specially designed for the function of flight. Imagine
a cross between a vulture and a crocodile, and you have something
like a vague mental picture of a pterodactyl.

But at the very time when the terrestrial reptilian type was
branching out in one direction toward the ancestors of the pterodac-
tyls, it was branching out in another direction toward the ancestors of
the true birds. In the curious lithographic slate of Solenhofen we
have preserved for us a great number of fossil forms with an extraor-
dinary degree of perfection ; and among these are several which help
us on greatly from the reptilian to the avian structure. The litho-
graphic slate is a member of the upper oolitic formation, and it is
worked, as its name implies, for the purpose of producing stones for
the process of lithography. But the same properties which make the
slate in its present condition take so readily the impress of a letter or
a sketch made it in its earlier condition take the impress of the vari-
ous organisms imbedded as they fell in its soft mud. Even the forms
and petals of early flowers washed down by floods into the half -formed
mud-bank"1, have been thus preserved for us with wonderful minute-

YOL. XXIV. — 39

610 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY,

ness. Most interesting of all for our present purpose, however, are the
bones of contemporary reptiles and birds which this Nature-printing
rock incloses for the behoof of modern naturalists. One such reptile,
known as compsognathus, may be regarded as filling among its own
class the place filled among existing mammals by the kangaroo. It
was a rather swan-like, erect saurian, standing gracefully on its hind-
paws, with its fore-legs free, and probably dragging its round tail be-
hind it on the ground as a support to steady its gait. The neck was
long and arched, and the head small and bird-like in shape ; but the
jaws are armed with sharp and powerful teeth, as in the pterodactyls.
Altogether, compsognathus must have looked in outward appearance
not at all unlike such birds as the auks and penguins, though its real
structural affinities lie rather with the emus and cassowaries. The
apteryx or kiwi of New Zealand, which is a bird that does not fly, be-
cause it has no wings worth mentioning to fly with, approaches even
nearer in the combination of both points to this very bird-like oolitic
reptile.

Even compsognathus himself, however, though very closely allied
to the true birds, can not be held to stand as an actual point in the
progressive pedigree, because in the very same Solenhofen slates we
find a real feathered bird in person. Accordingly, as the two were
thus contemporaries, the one could not possibly be the direct ancestor
of the other. Nevertheless, it is certainly from some form very closely
resembling compsognathus that the true birds are descended. We
have only to suppose such a reptile to acquire forestine habits, and to
begin jumping freely from tree to tree, in order to set up the series
of changes by which a true bird might be produced. But the first
historical bird of which we know anything, the archseopteryx of the
Solenhofen slate, still remains in many points essentially a reptile. It
is only bird-like in two main particulars ; its possession of rudiment-
ary wings and its possession of feathers. From the popular point of
view, these two particulars are decisive in favor of its being consid-
ered a bird ; but its anatomical structure is sufficient to make it at
least half a reptile ; and eminent authorities have differed (with their
usual acrimony) as to whether it ought properly to be called a bird-
like saurian or a lizard-like bird. There is nothing like a mere ques-
tion of words such as this to set scientific men or theologians roundly
by the ears for half a century together.

Archseopteryx, then, is just compsognathus provided with rude
wings and feathers, but in most other respects a good lizard. Unlike
all modern birds, it has a long tail composed of twenty separate verte-
brae ; and opposite each vertebra stand two stout quill-feathers, so
that instead of forming a fan, as in our own pigeons and turkeys, they
form a long pinnate series like the leaflets of yonder palm-branch.
These feathers, like all others, show traces of their origin from the
scales of lizards. Moreover, in the jaw are planted some small conical

THE ANCESTRY OF BIRDS. 611

teeth, the like of which of course exist in no living bird. The skele-
ton is for the most part reptilian ; and, though the legs are bird-like,
they are not much more so than those of compsognathus, an unmixed
reptile. Even the wings are more like the fore-legs, and could only
be used for flight by the aid of a side membrane. Accordingly, we
may say that we have lithographed for us in archseopteryx a specimen
of the intermediate state, when reptiles were just in the very act of
passing into birds. The scales and protuberances on the body had
already developed into feathers ; the fore-legs had already developed
into rude and imperfect wings, and the feet had become decidedly
bird-like ; but as yet there was only a very small breast-bone, the tail
remained in internal structure like that of a lizard, the jaws still con-
tained pointed teeth, and the wing ended in a three-toed hand, while
flight was probably as rudimentary as in the flying-lemur and the fly-
ing-squirrel. Nowhere in the organic series has geology supplied us
with a better missing link than this uncouth and half -formed creature,
Nature's first tentative rough draft of the beautiful and exquisitely
adapted modern birds.

Such an animal, once introduced, was sure to undergo further modi-
fication, to fit it more perfectly for its new sphere of action. In the
first place, the tail was sure to grow shorter and shorter, by stress of
natural selection, because a more fan-like organ would act better as a
rudder to steer the flight than the long lizard-like tail of archaeopteryx.
In the second place, the general bony structure was sure to grow bet-
ter adapted for flight, by the development of some such feature as the
keeled breast-bone, and the general modification of the other parts
(especially the wing) into better correspondence with their new func-
tion. At the same time, it must not be supposed that all intermediate
birds would lose their reptilian features equally and symmetrically.
Some for a time might retain one lizard-like peculiarity, say the teeth,
and some might retain another, say sundry anatomical points in the
structure of the skeleton. It was long indeed before the whole tribe
of birds acquired the entire set of traits which we now regard as char-
acteristic of their class. During the intervening period they kept
varying in all directions, tentatively, if one may say so, and thus the
early forms of birds differ far more among themselves than do any
modern members of the feathered kingdom. In other words, when
the full bird type was finally evolved, it proved so much better adapted
to its airy mode of life than any other and earlier creature that it lived
down not only the rude reptilian pterodactyls but also the simpler
primeval forms of birds themselves : exactly as civilized European
man is now living down not only the elephants and buffaloes but the
red Indian and the Australian black fellow as well.

Some of the varying primeval forms have been preserved for us as
fossils in the chalk deposits of the Western States, which are of course
later in date than the oolitic slates of Solenhofen, where we find the

612 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

compsognathus and his cousin the archseopteryx. One of these first
sketches, the ichthyornis, has a row of teeth in each jaw, and displays
another strikingly early reptilian or fish-like peculiarity in the joints
of its backbone, which are cup-shaped or hollow on either side, exactly
like those of a cod. This strange bird must have resembled an emu in
many respects, and it might easily have devoured the large ganoid fish
of this period with its formidable jaws. Still more reptilian in some
particulars is the hesperornis, also found in the Western American
chalk. Hesperornis was a huge swimming ostrich, and it had pointed
teeth like a crocodile's, set in a groove running down the jawbone.
They were supported on stout fangs, in the same way as the teeth of its
reptilian allies, the mosasaurians. Like the ostrich, hesperornis had a
broad breast-bone, but this breast-bone was destitute of a keel, as is
still the case in all the ostrich family. The wings were also very im-
perfect, like those of the cassowaries. In its tail, hesperornis resem-
bled its predecessor, archseopteryx, so far as regards the lizard-like
separateness of the vertebrae, except at the extreme end, where they
were slightly massed together into the first resemblance of a plowshare-
bone, such as the one I hold in my hand. Thus these two interme-
diate birds of the chalk period, though slightly more bird-like than
their cousins of the oolitic age, still retained, each in its own way,
many unmistakable relics of their descent from reptilian or almost
amphibian ancestors. As usual, the further back we go, the more do
we find all the lines converging toward a common center.

The primitive teeth died slowly and gradually out as time went on.
In the still later eocene deposits of the London clay in the Isle of
Sheppey, we find the remains of a true bird, known as odontopteryx,
in which the teeth have entirely coalesced with the beak, and have
assumed the form of bony projections. Strict biologists will tell us
that these projections are not teeth at all, because true teeth are not
bony in structure, and are developed from the skin of the gums. But
such hair-splitting distinctions are of little value from the evolutionary
point of view ; the really important fact to observe is this, that while
hesperornis has teeth in a groove, reptile-fashion, ichthyornis has
teeth in distinct sockets, mammal-fashion, and odontopteryx has them
reduced to bony projections from the bill, in a fashion all its own, thus
leading the way to modern birds, in which the teeth are wholly want-
ing and the bill alone remains. Indeed, among our existing kinds
there are some which still keep up some dim memory of the odonto-
pteryx stage ; for the merganser, a swimming fish-eating bird, has bony
ridges on its bill, which help it to grasp its prey ; and the South
American leaf -cutter has a double set of bony bosses on its beak and
palate.

The most apparently distinctive feature of birds lies in the fact
that they fly. It is this that gives them their feathers, their wings,
and their peculiar bony structure. And yet, truism as such a state-

THE ANCESTRY OF BIRDS. 613

ment sounds, there are a great many birds that do not fly : and it is
among these terrestrial or swimming kinds that we must look for the
nearest modern approaches to the primitive bird type. From the very
beginning, birds had to endure the fierce competition of the mammals,
which had been developed at a slightly earlier period ; and they have
for the most part taken almost entirely to the air, where alone they
possess a distinct superiority over their mammalian compeers. There
are certain spots, however, where mammals have been unable to pene-
trate, as in oceanic islands ; and there are certain other spots which
were insulated for a long period from the great continents, so that
they possessed none of the higher classes of mammals, as in the case
of Australia, South America, New Zealand, and South Africa. In
these districts, terrestrial birds had a chance which they had not in the
great circumpolar land tract, now divided into two portions, North
America on the west, and Asia and Europe on the east. It is in
Australia and the southern extremities of America and Africa, there-
fore, that we must look for the most antiquated forms of Jbirds still
surviving in the world at the present day.

The decadent and now almost extinct order of struthious birds, to
which ostriches and cassowaries belong, supplies us with the best ex-
amples of such antique forms. These birds are all distinguished from
every other known species, except the transitional Solenhofen creature
and a few other old types, by the fact that they have no keel to the
flat breast-bone — a peculiarity which at once marks them out as not
adapted for flight. Every one whose anatomical studies have been
carried on as far as the carving of a chicken or a pheasant for dinner
knows that the two halves of the breast are divided by a sharp keel
or edge protruding from the breast-bone ; but in the ostrich and their
allies such a keel is wanting, and the breast-bone is rounded and blunt.
At one time these flat-chested birds were widely distributed over the
whole world ; for they are found in fossil forms from China to Peru ;
but, as the mammalian race increased and multiplied and replenished
the earth, only the best adapted keeled birds were able to hold their
own against these four-legged competitors in the great continents.
Thus the gigantic ostriches of the Isle of Sheppey and the great divers
of the Western States died slowly out, leaving all their modern kin-
dred to inhabit the less progressive southern hemisphere alone. Even
there, the monstrous sepyornis, a huge, stalking, wingless bird, disap-
peared from Madagascar in the tertiary age, while the great moa of
New Zealand, after living down to almost historical times, fell a victim
at last to that very aggressive and hungry mammal, the Maori himself.
This almost reduces the existing struthious types to three small and
scattered colonies, in Australasia, South Africa, and South America
respectively, though there are still probably a few ostriches left in
some remote parts of the Asiatic Continent.

The Australian ostrich kind are in many respects the most archaic

6i4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

and peculiar of all. Strangest among them is the kiwi or apteryx of
New Zealand, that almost wholly wingless bird who may be seen any
morning at the Zoo, gravely stalking up and down, like an important
political prisoner, within the small inclosure to which tyrannical cir-
cumstances have temporarily confined him. The kiwi has feathers
which closely resemble hair in texture, and his wings are so very
rudimentary that they can only be properly observed at a post-mortem
examination. His bones have no air-canals, and some of his internal
anatomy is very abnormal. The cassowaries of the Papuan district
are somewhat more bird-like in type, but they also preserve many
antique features, especially in the relative smallness of the head and
brain compared with the general size of the whole body. The Aus-
tralian emus approach more closely to the true ostriches, and their
feathers are far more feathery than those of the cassowary. In both
these classes, however, the small and functionless wings are destitute
of plumes, which are only represented by a few stiff, horny shafts.
The true ostriches, including both the familiar African species and
the South American rheas, have real wings with real feathers in them,
though they can only use them to aid them in running, and not for
the purpose of flight. They are therefore the most bird-like of their
order, with small wings and very feathery plumes. We may fairly
regard all these keelless and often almost wingless birds — the kiwis,
cassowaries, emus, and ostriches — as the last survivors of a very an-
cient group, immediately descended from ancestors not unlike the
toothed hesperornis, and never forced by circumstances to develop
into the full avian type represented by the swallows, hawks, and
herons. All of them are strictly terrestrial in their habits ; none of
them can fly in even the slightest degree ; and the feathers of the
most developed among them invariably lack the tiny barbules or small
hooks which bind together the cross-barbs in the feathers of the flying
bird, so as to form a compact and resisting blade. It is this looseness
of the cross-barbs which gives ostrich-plumes their light and fluffy
appearance ; while, pushed to an extreme in the cassowary and the
kiwi, it makes the plumage of those ugly birds approximate in charac-
ter to the hair of mammals. Though from the human and decorative
point of view we may admire the fluffiness of ostrich-plumes, it is
obvious that, looked upon as a question of relative development, such
loose, floating barbs are far less advanced in type than the firm and
tightly interlocked quill-feathers of a goose or a raven, with which
alone sustained flight is possible.

Except in such isolated countries where higher mammals do not,
or did not till lately, exist, the power of flight, once acquired, was
sure to be developed in a high degree. For the possession of feathers
gives birds an advantage in this respect which enables even the little
sparrows to hold their own in the midst of our crowded cities. Hence
all other modern birds, except these lingering, ostrich-like creatures,

THE ANCESTRY OF BIRDS. 615

have keeled breast-bones, which imply their descent from forms adapted
to true flight. They are linked to the ostriches, however, and there-
fore to the still earlier toothed ancestral types, by the South American
tinamous, which are intermediate in various anatomical points (too
intricate for a lazy man to go into here and now), between the two
classes. Put briefly, one may say that these partridge-like Paraguayan
birds are ostriches in the bones of their head, but game-birds in those
of the breast and body. This line of descent seems to lead us up di-
rectly toward the cocks and hens, the pheasants, and the other scrapers.
There are more marks of a primitive organization, however, among
the penguins, which are almost wingless swimming birds, belonging
nearly to the same class as the ducks and geese ; and we have reason
otherwise to consider the penguins a very early form, since fowls re-
sembling them in many particulars have been unearthed in the upper
greensand. Here the wings are reduced to small rudiments, covered
with bristly, scale-like feathers, and so rigid that they can be only
moved in the mass like fins by a single joint at the base. They are
used, in fact, exactly in the same way as the flappers in seals, to assist
the bird in diving. The habitual erect attitude of the penguins
strongly recalls that of their reptilian ally, compsognathus. From
such an incomplete form as this, the gap is not great to the equally
erect auks, the guillemots, the grebes, and other web-footed divers,
which have short, pointed wings with true quills, but without any
extended power of flight. Some species, indeed, can not fly at all,
though the puffins and many other kinds can steer their way through
the air with comparative ease. Thence to the cormorants, gulls, and
ducks the transitions are slight and easy. We are thus led insensibly
from almost wingless erect birds, like the penguins, through winged,
but mainly swimming forms like the auks and divers, to creatures
with such marvelous powers of flight as the frigate-birds, the petrels,
and the albatrosses, which pass almost their whole life upon the wing.
It must be remembered, however, that in this line of descent the com-
paratively wingless forms must be regarded as somewhat degenerate
representatives of flying ancestors ; for the presence of a keeled breast*
bone almost conclusively proves hereditary connection with fully-
winged progenitors.

By far the greater number of modern birds belong to the still
more strictly aerial orders of the perchers, the peckers, and the birds
of prey. In almost all these cases, the power of flight is highly de-
veloped, and the bird type reaches its highest ideal point of typical
excellence. Among the perchers, this perfection of form is best seen
in the swallows, whose ceaseless and graceful curved evolutions every-
body has seen with his own eyes ; while among tropical varieties of
the same type the birds-of-paradise, the sun-birds, and the orioles are
the most conspicuous. Among the peckers, our own swifts closely
simulate the swallow type, while their American relatives, the hum-

616 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ming birds, in spite of their small size, possess a power of rapid flitting
and of lightly poising themselves in front of flowers which makes
them in some ways the very fullest existing embodiment of the avian
ideal. To the same order belong also those most intelligent of all
birds, the parrots, whose large heads and crafty eyes mark them at
once as the opposite pole from the small-browed, dull-eyed, stupid
cassowaries. With them must be ranked the toucans, the barbets,
the king-fishers, the trogons, and whole hosts of other beautiful south-
ern creatures, among which the feathers have been variously modified
into the most exquisite ornamental devices. As for the birds of prey,
the eagles, vultures, falcons, hawks, owls, and ospreys must suffice by
way of example.

Even among these central groups of birds, which have varied most
and developed farthest from the primitive reptilian character, there
are many kinds which retain here and there some small and isolated
peculiarities of the ancestral forms. For example, among the duck-
like birds, as we have already seen, a single group, that of the mer-
gansers, still keeps up some faint memory of the original sharp teeth
in the shape of a few horny projections along the edge of the beak.
The tooth-billed pigeon of Samoa, a close relation of that early and
extinct form the dodo, has also some rudiments of horny teeth ; and
the South -American leaf-cutters, a primitive set of songless perchers,
possess somewhat similar relics of the lost fangs. So, too, our earliest
known bird, the archseopteryx, had three free claws on its fore-limb
or undeveloped wing ; and traces of such claws turn up in sundry un-
connected birds even now, no doubt by reversion to the almost for-
gotten ancestral type. In all modern birds, one of the three fingers
which make up the pinion still remains free ; and in some species this
finger supports an evident claw, sometimes used as a spur for the pur-
pose of fighting. In many thrushes a rudiment of this claw may be
perceived in the shape of a small tubercle or knob at the end of the
wing, thus pointing back directly to some remote four-footed and
claw-bearing reptilian ancestor. Several plovers have spurs, and so
has the spur-winged goose ; while the horned screamer has two on
each wing, which he uses with great effect in battling with his rivals.
The Australian brush-turkeys have also the rudiment or last relic of a
primitive pinion-claw.

There is another way in which modern birds still partially recall
the peculiarities of their reptilian ancestors, and that is in the course
of their individual development within the egg. No adult existing
bird has all the bones of the tail distinct and separate, like those
of the archeeopteryx ; the last joints are all firmly welded together
into a solid expanded piece, known from its queer shape as a plow-
share-bone, such as the one which I am holding in my hand as the
text for this discourse. The use of the plowshare-bone is to sup-
port the fan-like quill-feathers of the tail, and also to shelter the oil-

THE ANCESTRY OF BIRDS. 617

glands with whose contents the birds preen and dress their shining
plumage, to secure them against the evil effects of damp or rain. But,
while the young chick is in the egg, all its tail-bones still remain sepa-
rate, as in the ancestral, lizard-like bird and the still earlier ancestral
lizard ; it is only as the development of the embryo progresses that
they become firmly united, as in modern forms. In other words, every
young bird begins forming its tail as if it meant to be an archaeopteryx,
and only afterward so far changes its mind as to become a crow or a
sparrow. Similarly, no adult existing bird has true teeth ; but the
young of certain parrots show in the egg a set of peculiar little swell-
ings inside the jaw, known as dental papillae, and commonly found as
the first stage of teeth in other animals. Moreover, these swellings
are actually covered by a thin coat of dentine, the material of which
true teeth are made. So here again the young parrot begins its devel-
ment as though it meant to start a set of conical fangs in its jaw,
like those of the archaeopteryx, but afterward changes its mind and
contents itself with a bill instead. Such symptoms as these point
back surely though remotely to a far-distant reptilian ancestry.

It is worth while noting, too, that the links which bind the birds
to the reptiles bind them also in part to the lower mammals. For the
lowest existing mammal is that curious Australian creature known to
the rough-and-ready classification of the colonists as the water-mole,
and rejoicing in the various scientific aliases of the ornithorhynchus
and the duck-billed platypus. Unsophisticated English people know
the animal best, however, as " the beast with a bill." Now, there are
many close resemblances between this strange Australian burrower,
on the one hand, and such antiquated forms of birds as the New
Zealand kiwi, on the other. In many particulars, too, the water-mole
recalls the structure of reptiles, and especially of the ichthyosaurus.
In short, it is at once the most bird-like and the most reptile-like of
mammals. Hence we may fairly conclude that birds and mammals
are both descended by divergent lines from a single common reptilian
ancestry. For, on the one hand, the kiwi, an early type of nocturnal
bird, preserved for us in isolated New Zealand, has some marked rep-
tilian and mammalian affinities, not only in the external character of
its hair-like feathers, but also in the more important structural points
of its diaphragm, its movable vertebrae, and its keelless breast-bone,
which are questions rather for the professed anatomist than for mere
idle loungers basking lazily in the sun on a Provencal hill-side. And,
on the other hand, the ornithorhynchus, an early type of burrowing
aquatic mammal, preserved for us in isolated Australia, has marked
reptilian affinities in its bony structure, and in the teeth implanted on
its tongue ; while it has also marked resemblances to the ducks and
other swimming birds in the external features of its horny bill and
webbed feet, besides being still more closely related to them in many
of its less obvious anatomical peculiarities.

618 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Birds, then, may be roughly described as reptiles with feathers.
Professor Huxley was the first to see the real closeness of the connec-
tion between the two groups, and to unite them under a common name
as Sauropsida. Strictly speaking, the only constant difference between
them, the only one distinctive character of birds as a class, is the
possession of feathers ; and, if, like uncompromising Karl Vogt, we
insist upon calling archaeopteryx a reptile, because of its anatomical
peculiarities, even this solitary distinction must vanish utterly, leaving
us no point of difference at all between the two classes. It must be
remembered, of course, that all the other characters which we always
have in our mind as part of the abstract idea of a bird are either not
constant or not peculiar to birds alone. For instance, we usually
think of a bird as a flying animal ; but then, on the one hand, many
birds, such as the ostriches, kiwis, penguins, and dodos, do not or did
not fly at all ; and, on the other hand, many other creatures, such as
the bats, flying-squirrels, flying-lemurs, pterodactyls, dragon-lizards,
and butterflies, do or did once fly just as much as the birds. So with
their other peculiarities : their habit of laying eggs descends to them
from fish and reptiles ; their nest-building propensities, which are want-
ing in some birds, are found in the Australian water-mole, in field-
mice, and even in stickleback ; and their horny bill, which is almost
confined to them, nevertheless occurs again in the ornithorhynchus
and in many turtles. In short, every other apparently distinctive point
about birds except the possession of feathers either breaks down on
examination or else descends to them directly from early unbird-like
ancestors. And the first feathered creature of which we know any-
thing, archaeopteryx, was at least as much of a reptile as of a bird. —
Longmarts Magazine.

+•»

MEXICO AND ITS ANTIQUITIES.*

THE Mexican Republic extends from the fifteenth to the thirtieth
degree of north latitude, and embraces an area of about 750,000
square miles. It is traversed by the continuation of the Cordillera of
South America, here called the Sierra Madre, which trends north-
westerly from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and varies in height from
a moderate elevation in the southern States of Chiapas and Oaxaca to
a mean height in the nineteenth degree of latitude of 9,000 feet, with
the peaks of Orizaba and Popocatepetl — " the culminating point of
North America " — rising to the elevations of 17,200 and 17,720 feet
respectively. On the parallel of 21°, the Cordillera becomes very wide
and divides itself into three ranges : one running eastwardly to Saltillo

* Appletons' Guide to Mexico. By Alfred R. Conkling, LL. B., Ph. B. With Rail-
way Map and Illustrations. New York : D. Applcton & Co. Pp. 3*78.

MEXICO AND ITS ANTIQUITIES.

619

and Monterey ; one traversing the States of Jalisco and Sinaloa, and
subsiding in Northern Sonora ; and a central ridge extending through
the States of Durango and Chihuahua, and forming the water-shed of
the northern table-land. This range decreases in elevation going north-
ward. Four peaks — Popocatepetl, Iztaccihuatl, Orizaba, and the Ne-
vada de Toluca — rise above 15,000 feet, and three others — the Cofre
de Perote, Ajusco, and the volcano of Colima — above 11,000 feet.

"%*\f;,

Fig. 1.— Indian Hut in the Tierra Caliente.

The country is divided into three zones : the tierra caliente, or hot
land, bordering the coast of either sea for from forty to seventy miles
inland ; the tierra templada, or temperate land ; and the tierra fria, or
cold land. About one half the surface of the country lies in the latter
zone, while the remainder of the republic is almost equally divided be-
tween the temperate and hot regions. The country consists for the
most part of a plateau, having an average height of about 6,000 feet
above the level of the sea, which extends from the frontier of the
United States to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and is about 350 miles
wide in the latitude of the capital. But few of the rivers are navi-
gable, and the longest of them, the Rio de Santiago, is only 542 miles
long. The numerous lakes on the plateau are mostly shallow lagoons,
the mere remains of large basins of water that formerly existed, and
without outlet, and therefore filled with salt water. After the lagoon
of Terminos, on the coast of the Gulf of Campeachy, which is really
an arm of the sea, the largest lakes are the Lake of Chapala, in the
State of Jalisco, and Lakes Patzcuaro and Cuitzco. The country en-
joys a variety of climates, of which those of the temperate and cold
regions are tolerably uniform. The rainy season generally occurs in

62o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

the summer, but at other times the air of the plateau is inconveniently
dry.

A large part ot the country is overlaid by the igneous rocks, of
which trachyte, feldspar, porphyry, and amygdaloid basalt, are of most
frequent occurrence. In the Sierra Madre the metamorphic rocks are
common. Limestone is extensively quarried at Orizaba, and consti-
tutes the greater part of the eastern branch of the Cordillera between
San Luis Potosi and Monterey. The Cordillera, from Chihuahua on
the north to Oaxaca on the south, contains very extensive deposits of
gold, silver, iron, copper, and lead ; and zinc, mercury, tin, platinum,
and coal occur in a few places. The argentiferous veins constitute
the principal part of the mineral wealth of the country. The silver
occurs generally in the form of sulphides, in gangues of quartz, fre-
quently in the metamorphic clay-slate, but sometimes in porphyry, as
at Real del Monte, or in talcose slate, as in some mines at Guanajuato.
Among the most remarkable mineral veins of the continent, after the
Comstock lode, are the Veta Madre of Guanajuato and the Veto,
Grande of Zacatecas, which have been worked for about three hun-
dred years.

The next most important deposits are the immense beds of iron,
chiefly in the form of the magnetite and hematite ores. The well-
known Cerro del Mercado, in the State of Durango, has been estimated
to contain sixty million cubic yards of iron-ore, which have a weight
of five billion quintals, and give, according to an analysis by Mr. M. H.
Borje, of Philadelphia, sixty-six per cent of pure metal. Lead-ores are
abundant ; copper is mined at various places ; oxide of tin is found in
veins and alluvial beds at Durango. Mercury occurs as cinnabar in
several States ; and zinc-ores, with platinum, antimony, cobalt, and
nickel, in not large quantities, are found in Chihuahua. The principal
coal-beds are in the States of Oaxaca, Vera Cruz, Mexico, Puebla,
Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, and Sonora. The anthracite-bed recently
discovered at Barranca, on the Yaqui River in Sonora, is probably the
largest and richest deposit of coal in the republic. Lignite, or brown
coal, occurs in many places, but is not used to any great extent. The
demand for coal is, so far, much greater than the supply accessible
to the railroads. Mining is still conducted by working on the old
Mexican plan, and this system has been found, under existing circum-
stances, to be more economical and profitable than a system in which
modern and improved methods are applied.

Some of the oldest mines in Mexico, many of which were worked
before the Spanish conquest, are at Pachuca, in the State of Hidalgo.
There are about one hundred and fifty of them, seventy -five of which
are in the Real del Monte, affording an ore composed mainly of black-
ish silver sulphides. The ore is worked here, as at Guanajuato, by
the patio process, which is illustrated in the accompanying view. It
is first crushed by a revolving stone wheel, iron-tired, in a pit, at the

MEXICO AND ITS ANTIQUITIES.

621

center of which is a sieve through which the finer pieces are shoveled
into a vault below. These pieces are then carried to the arrastras,
flat stones of hard rock kept revolving in a large tub half -filled with
water, where they are in twenty-four hours ground to a fine powder.

o

a

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E*

-4

iJ
hJ

1-4

H

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HI

I

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The pulverized ore, called lama, is next carried to the patio, a court-
yard paved with large flat stones, where it is allowed to accumulate to
a depth of about two feet. The muddy mass is then mixed with ma-
gistral, or blue vitriol, salt, and quicksilver, and the whole, now called
torta, is thoroughly stirred together by the trampliDg of mules. This
process is kept up for seven hours daily, for from two to four weeks,
according to the quality of the ore. The torta is then carried to the
lavaderos, or large cisterns, where it is washed and stirred by means of

622

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

revolving sticks. The silvery mass being heavy, settles at the bottom,
and in two or three days the muddy water is drawn off. The amal-
gam, or pella, which has been formed, is now taken from the lavaderos
to a sort of oven or depression in the ground, covered with a huge
metallic hood termed a capellina. A fire is built around the capellina,
and the mercury is separated by distillation in about four days. The
block of silver which remains is transported to the nearest mint, and
worked into coin or sold.

The volcanoes form one of the most interesting features of the
country. Only four of them are active, but no eruption has taken
place from either of these during the present century. Earthquakes
are, however, common, and solfataras, fumaroles, and adjoining warm
springs, indicate that these volcanoes are still in a semi-active state.
According to Humboldt, they lie on the same great vent of the earth's
crust, and approximately on the nineteenth parallel of latitude. Ori-
zaba, which may be reached from Esperanza on the railway from Vera
Cruz to Mexico, has been quiet since 1566, but was reported to be
smoking in April, 1883. There is no hazardous climbing on the mount-

Fio. 3.— Popocatepetl.

ain, but the ascent is exceedingly laborious on account of the steepness
of the snow-clad cone. About five hours are required to reach the
summit, but very few persons have thus far accomplished the task.
The excursion to Popocatepetl starts from Amecameca, on the Morelos
Railway, the road leading at first through fine wheat-fields watered by
the melting snows of the great volcano. The path soon rises and

MEXICO AND ITS ANTIQUITIES. 623

enters a magnificent forest, which is succeeded by a growth of thick
grass, after which the crest-line of the ridge is crossed, and the ranch
of Tlamacas, the starting-point for the summit, is reached. The lower
part of the peak of the volcano has a slope of about 20°, and the angle
increases in ascending till it reaches about 45° just below the sum-
mit. The crater is not visible until the traveler arrives at the. edge.
It is roughly estimated to be about five hundred yards in diameter and
one hundred and fifty yards deep, and contains several fumaroles, with
a small pond at its bottom. The temperature of the air on the summit
at about ten o'clock in the morning was 32°. The view from the peak
commands an area of about one hundred thousand square miles, and
reaches to the Gulf of Mexico, one hundred and fifty miles distant.
The descent may be made, if the snow is soft enough, by coasting on
a sled. The volcano of Jorullo, in Michoacan, is famous for having
been the result of a sudden eruption from a previously peaceful plain,
on the night of the 28th — 29th of September, 1759, the phenomena of
which are fully related in a graphic description in Humboldt's " Cos-
mos." It is reached by a fifty-five-mile horseback-ride from Patz-
cuaro-station on the railroad from Mexico to Manzanillo. Horses may
be ridden to within half a mile of the crater. The volcano is pear-
shaped, with the outlet of the crater on the north side. The cone is
covered with loose black ashes, in which a few bushes grow, and slopes
at about 45° on the north and west sides. The crater is about a mile
in circumference. The traveler may descend in it to the bottom,
about five hundred feet below the summit. The walls slant rapidly,
and are covered with an enormous mass of talus. Grass, a few ferns,
and some native trees grow on its borders, and deer are abundant on
the mountain. Shocks of earthquakes are often felt in the environs of
Jorullo, one of which, in March, 1883, left cracks in the ground at a
point ten miles off. Although no eruption has taken place for more
than a hundred years, the volcano is still in a semi-active state, as is
shown by the heat of the crater- walls, the emission of aqueous gas and
vapor, and the frequency of earthquakes. A very extensive view is
commanded from the summit.

Great interest is given to Mexico by its ancient ruins, relics of un-
known people, whose character, origin, and history are destined long
to be fruitful themes of study. They consist of teocallis, or pyra-
mids, in different parts of the country, and the remains of elaborate
buildings and of cities, chiefly situated in the States of Yucatan, Chia-
pas, and Oaxaca. The most prominently known ruins of cities are those
of Uxmal, in Northern Yucatan, which are considered to be the oldest ;
those of Palenque, in Chiapas, next in age ; and those of Mitla, in
Oaxaca, third in age. The buildings were usually constructed of
hewed stone, and have excited general admiration on account of the
skill in architecture and the elaborate workmanship displayed in them.
Near some of them are the remains of finely constructed artificial

624 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

lakes, with bottoms of cemented stones ; and the traces of a very-
ancient paved road have been found in Yucatan. Charnay found the
country in Yucatan covered with ruins from north to south ; and
Stephens, about 1840, visited forty-four ruined cities or places, in which
remains of buildings were still found, most of which were unknown
to white men, even to those inhabiting the country. The remains of
Mayapan, the ancient capital of the Mayas, are scattered over a broad
plain, and are characterized by a mound sixty feet high with a base a
hundred feet square, the summit of which, a stone platform fifteen
feet square, was reached by four stairways twenty-five feet wide.
Another building is of stone, and circular, and stands on a sloping
foundation thirty-five feet high. Near it are two rows of capitals,
without columns.

The ruins of Uxmal are pronounced by Stephens, who explored
them thoroughly, worthy to stand side by side with those of Egyptian
and Roman art. The most important building, the Casa del Goberna-
dor, is three hundred and twenty feet long, and was built of hewed
stone laid in mortar or cement, and bore a cornice which was deco-
rated all around with " one solid mass of rich, complicated, and elabo-
rately sculptured ornaments." It stands on a foundation of three ter-
races, altogether forty-two feet high, the lowest of which was five
hundred and seventy-five feet long. The remains of Chichen-Itza
are similar to those of Uxmal. In one building the walls of the rooms
are covered with picture-writing ; and figures of serpents are a fre-
quent ornament. At Ake, thirty-six columns, in three parallel rows,
are all that remain of a once magnificent structure.

At Palenque, Captain del Rio found, in 1787, ruins extending
seven or eight leagues one way and half a league the other, and visited
and described fourteen edifices admirably built of hewed stone. The
largest known building is two hundred and twenty-eight feet long, one
hundred and eighty wide, and twenty-five feet high, built entirely of
hewed stone, laid with admirable precision in excellent mortar, and it
stood on a much larger terrraced pyramidal foundation. A corridor
nine feet high, and roofed by a pointed arch, went round the building
on the outside ; and this was separated from another within of equal
width. Other buildings are nearly as remarkable. Tablets, with
elegantly carved inscriptions, are plentiful ; and of the sculptured hu-
man figures Stephens says that "in justness of proportion and sym-
metry they must have approached the Greek models."

The four palaces, as Dupaix calls them, at Mitla, are said by him
to have been " erected with lavish magnificence. . . . They combine
the solidity of the works of Egypt with the elegance of those of
Greece. But what is most remarkable, interesting, and striking in
these monuments," he adds, " and which alone would be sufficient to
give them the first rank among all known orders of architecture, is the
execution of their mosaic rilievos, very different from plain mosaic,

MEXICO AND ITS ANTIQUITIES.

625

and consequently requiring more ingenious combination and greater
art and labor. They are inlaid on the surface of the wall, and their
duration is owing to the method of fixing the prepared stones into the
stone surface, which makes their union with it perfect." M. Charnay
says that the beauty of these buildings can be matched only by that
of the monuments of Greece and Rome in their best days.

The Pyramid of Cholula was one of the great edifices of the world.
It was 1,423 feet wide at the base, 177 feet high, and covered a super-
ficial area of forty-five acres. Civilized man is gradually destroying
it, and a cut has been made in one side of it for a railroad-track.
Near it are other smaller pyramids.

Fig. 4.— Aztec Temple at Cholttla.

The teocallis of San Juan Teotihuacan are next in age to those of
Cholula. The two largest are dedicated to the Sun and the Moon.
The former is 180 feet high, and 682 feet long at the base. Its sum-
mit— now marked by a platform about 75 feet square and a modern
cylindrical monument of stone — is said to have been crowned with a
temple, in which was a gigantic statue of the Sun, made of an entire
block of stone, and wearing a breastplate of gold and silver. The
two principal pyramids are surrounded by several smaller ones, few of
which exceed twenty-five feet in height. According to tradition, they
were dedicated to the Stars, and served as sepulchres for the illustrious
men of the nation.

Toltec ruins are found at Tula, about fifty miles north of the
capital.

TOL. XXIY. 40

6z6

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Fis. 5.— Pyramids op San Juan Teotihtjacan.

At Papantla, in the State of Vera Cruz, is a pyramid remarkable
for its symmetry, built of immense stones of porphyry, regularly cut
and finely polished, many of which are covered with hieroglyphics,
with carvings of serpents and crocodiles.

Fig. 6.— Toltec Palace at Tula.

The Museum of the city of Mexico contains a sacrificial stone, and
a number of the idols of Aztec worship. We give cuts of two of
these idols — Quetzalcoatl, the chief god of the people, and a feathered
serpent.

The Marquis de Nadaillac, who has lately reviewed the whole sub-

MEXICO AND ITS ANTIQUITIES.

627

ject of " Prehistoric Art in America," has given a graphical descrip-
tion of the Mexican ruins as a whole. " The massive constructions in
Mexico and Peru," he says, " the immense spread of the bases and the
inclination of the walls, give a
pyramidal tendency and an ap-
pearance of stability and dura-
bility that force us to think of
Egypt. Palenque, with its pal-
aces, and Tiaguanuco, or Huanu-
cho-Viejo, in Peru, with their
monumental portals and their not
numerous openings in the form
of the tau, for the admittance
of light, their walls covered with
bright-red paint, and their figures
always in profile, would not be
out of place on the banks of the
Nile. The bas-reliefs of Chichen-
Itza resemble those of Babylon
and Nineveh in richness of orna-
mentation. The meanderings of the friezes of Mitla, of the Casa del
Gobernador, and the Casa de Monjas, at Uxmal, are of a kind with
those of Greek art. The porch of Kabah, an aqueduct on the Roda-
dero, at Cuzco, might have stood on the Roman Campagna. The
figures with which the temple of Xochicalco (Mexico) was adorned
were represented sitting with crossed legs in the traditional attitude

FlG. 7.— QTTETZALCOATL.

Fig. 8.— Featheked Seepent.

of Buddha ; and recently a Protestant missionary remarked upon
the resemblances between the edifices at Chichen-Itza and the topes
or dagobas he had seen at Anaradjapora, the ancient capital of
Ceylon. The pyramids are certainly the most salient feature in
this ancient architecture. The walls that still stand are composed of

628 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

immense blocks of granite or porphyry of cyclopean construction, or
of mason-work of stone or brick, cove red with cement. All travelers
have remarked the solidity and elegance of the building. The facades
were regularly shaped, the joints well pointed, and the edges clean-cut.
Generally, they were adorned with a projecting cornice loaded with
rich ornaments in stucco. The possibly excessive monotony of the
architecture was relieved by square towers several stories high. Such
towers may be seen at Copan, Palenque, and Tikal ; the Casa de la
Culebra at Uxmal was crowned with thirteen turrets. The architects
were also careful in placing statues, pilasters, caryatides, and bas-re-
liefs on the facades ; and important mural paintings have been de-
scribed at Chichen-Itza. They represent processions of men and ani-
mals, combats, struggles between man and the tiger or the serpent,
trees, and houses. One painting, the only one relating to navigation,
represents a boat somewhat like a Chinese junk.

" The sculptures that adorned these buildings," the marquis con-
tinues, "present so many differences in style and execution that we can
hardly believe them the work of the same race, or that they represent
the same civilization. In some cases they depict strange idols in incor-
rect forms, men wearing tigers' heads, an alligator holding in his jaws
a figure with a human head and an animal's extremities, or a gigantic
frog with his paws terminating in a cat's claws. Besides such mon-
sters, we recollect at Copan a statue wearing the highest expression of
Maya art, in which we know not whether to be most astonished at the
oddity of the conception, the richness of the ornamentation, or the
fineness of the execution. At Palenque we may see a statue with a
placid expression that would not be out of place in the palace of a
Pharaoh ; and the sepulchral stone of Chac-Mol, recently found at Chi-
chen, the bas-reliefs of Santa Lucia, and other works, are not discord-
ant with modern art. These striking contrasts, while they bring no
explanation, add, in the endless problems they raise, a new attraction
to American archaeology."

♦♦+

THE EEMEDIES OF NATURE.

By FELIX L. OSWALD, M. D.
CATARRH.— PLEURISY.— CROUP.

THE progress of the healing art, as distinguished from certain ster-
ile branches of medical science, can be best measured by the
progress of our insight into the causes of special maladies. For the
accidental discovery of a " specific " means generally nothing but the
discovery of a method for suppressing special symptoms of a disease.
Quinine subdues chills, but does not prevent a relapse of febrile affec-

THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 629

tions ; brandy neither cures nor subdues dyspepsia, but merely inter-
rupts it with a transient alcohol-fever. But, as soon as we ascertained
that scrofula, or the " king's-evil," was not caused by a mysterious
dispensation of Providence, but by bad food and foul air, the cure of
the disease became easy enough ; the king's-evil disappeared without
the aid of the king.

That "colds," or catarrhal affections, are so very common — so
much, indeed, as to be considerably more frequent than all other dis-
eases taken together — is mainly due to the fact that the cause of no
other disorder of the human organism is so generally misunderstood.
Few persons have recognized the origin of yellow fever ; about the
primary cause of asthma we are yet all in the dark ; but in regard to
" colds " alone the prevailing misconception of the truth has reached
the degree of mistaking the cause for a cure, and the most effective
cure for the cause of the disease. If we inquire-after that cause, ninety-
nine patients out of a hundred, and at least nine out of ten physi-
cians, would answer, " Cold weather," " Raw March winds," or " Cold
draughts," in other words, out-door air of a low temperature. If we
inquire after the best cure, the answer would be, " Warmth and pro-
tection against cold draughts " — i. e., warm, stagnant, in-door air.
Now, I maintain that it can be proved, with as absolute certainty as
any physiological fact admits of being proved, that warm, vitiated in-
door air is the cause, and cold out-door air the best cure, of catarrhs.
Many people " catch cold " every month in the year and often two or
three times a month. Very few get off with less than three colds a
year ; so that an annual average of five catarrhs would probably be an
underestimate. For the United States alone that would give us a yearly
aggregate of two hundred and fifty-five million "colds." That such
facilities for investigation have failed to correct the errors of our exe-
getical theory is surely a striking proof how exclusively our dealings
with disease have been limited to the endeavor of suppressing the
symptoms instead of ascertaining and removing the cause. For, as a
test of our unbiased faculty of observation, the degree of that failure
would lead to rather unpronounceable conclusions. What should we
think of the scientific acumen of a traveler who, after a careful ex-
amination of the available evidence, should persist in maintaining that
mosquitoes are engendered by frost and exterminated by sunshine ?
Yet, if his attention had been chiefly devoted to the comparative
study of mosquito-ointments and mosquito-bars, he might, for the rest,
have been misled by such circumstances as the fact that mosquitoes
abound near the ice-bound shores of Hudson Bay, and are rarely
seen on the sunny prairies of Southern Texas. In all the civilized
countries of the colder latitudes, catarrhs are frequent in winter and
early spring, and less frequent in midsummer : hence the inference
that catarrhs are caused by cold weather, and can be cured by warm
air. Yet of the two fallacies the mosquito theory would, on the

630 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

whole, be the less preposterous mistake ; for it is true that long
droughts, by parching out the swamps, may sometimes reduce the
mosquito-plague, but no kind of warm weather will mitigate a catarrh,
while the patient persists in doing what thousands never cease to do
the year round, namely, to expose their lungs, night after night, to the
vitiated, sickening atmosphere of an unventilated bedroom. " Colds "
are, indeed, less frequent in midwinter than at the beginning of
spring. Frost is such a powerful disinfectant that in very cold nights
the lung-poisoning atmosphere of few houses can resist its purifying
influence ; in spite of padded doors, in spite of " weather-strips " and
double windows, it reduces the in-door temperature enough to paralyze
the floating disease-germs. The penetrative force of a polar night-
frost exercises that function with such resistless vigor that it defies
the preventive measures of human skill ; and all Arctic travelers agree
that among the natives of Iceland, Greenland, and Labrador pulmo-
nary diseases are actually unknown. Protracted cold weather thus
prevents epidemic catarrhs, but during the first thaw * Nature suc-
cumbs to art : smoldering stove-fires add their fumes to the effluvia
of the dormitory, tight-fitting doors and windows exclude the means
of salvation : superstition triumphs ; the lung-poison operates, and
the next morning a snuffling, coughing, and red-nosed family discuss
the cause of their affliction. " Taken cold " — that much they premise
without debate. But where and when? Last evening, probably,
when the warm south wind tempted them to open the window for a
moment. Or " when those visitors kept chatting on the porch, and a
drop of water from the thawing roof fell on my neck." Or else the
boys caught it by playing in the garden and not changing their stock-
ings when they came home. Resolved, that a person can not be
too careful, as long as there is any snow on the ground. But even
that explanation fails in spring ; and, when the incubatory influence of
the first moist heat is brought to bear on the lethargized catarrh-
germs of a large city, a whole district-school is often turned into a
snuffling-congress. The latter part of March is the season of epidemic
colds.

The summer season, however, brings relief. In the sweltering
summer nights of our large sea-board towns the outcry of instinct gen-
erally prevails against all arguments of superstition ; parents know

* The correlation of damp weather and catarrhs can be explained by the fact that
moisture lessens the modicum of fresh air which would otherwise penetrate a building in
spite of closed windows. " All materials," says a correspondent of the " Revue des
Deux Mondes," " become impermeable to the air when they are wet. It has been found
less easy to drive moisture through bricks and mortar than to make air pass through
them ; only a few drops of the liquid can be made to appear on the opposite surface.
Water is therefore not easy to dislodge from the pores it has occupied, and is removed at
most very slowly by evaporation. But, when water stops the pores, it prevents the air
from circulating through them — a mischievous effect upon the permeability of building
materials." — (Vide " Popular Science Monthly" for December, 1883, p. 170.)

THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 631

that their boys would desert and sleep in a ditch rather than endure
the horrors of an air-tight sweat-box ; so the windows are partially-
opened. The long, warm days also offer increased opportunities for
out-door rambles. In midsummer, therefore, Nature rallies once more.
But not always. There are people whose prejudices can not be
shaken by experience, and in their households a perennial system of
air-poisoning overcomes the redeeming tendencies of out-door life, as
the subtile mixtures of La Brinvilliers overcame the iron constitution
of her last husband. Their children snuffle the year round ; no cough-
medicine avails, no flannels and wrappers, even in the dog-days ; and
the evil is ascribed to " dampness," when the cold-air theory becomes
at last too evidently preposterous.

To an unprejudiced observer, though, that theory is equally un-
tenable in the coldest month of the year. No man can freeze himself
into a catarrh. In cold weather the hospitals of our Northern cities
sometimes receive patients with both feet and both hands frozen, with
frost-bitten ears and frost-sore eyes, but without a trace of a ca-
tarrhal affection. Duck-hunters may wade all day in a frozen swamp
without affecting the functions of their respiratory organs. Ice-cut-
ters not rarely come in for an involuntary plunge-bath, and are obliged
to let their clothes dry on their backs : it may result in a bowel-com-
plaint, but no catarrh. Prolonged exposure to a cold storm may in
rare cases induce a true pleural fever, a very troublesome affection, but
as different from a " cold " as a headache is from a toothache — the
upper air-passages remain unaffected. Sudden transition from heat to
cold does not change the result. In winter the " pullers " of a rolling-
mill have often to pass ten times an hour from the immediate neigh-
borhood of a furnace to the chill draught of the open air ; their skin
becomes as rough as an armadillo's, their hair becomes grizzly or lead-
colored ; but no catarrh. On my last visit to Mexico, I ascended the
peak of Orizaba from the south side, and reached the crater bathed in
perspiration ; and, following the guide across to the northwest slope,
we were for ten minutes exposed to an ice-storm that swept the sum-
mit in blasts of fitful fury. Two of my companions, a boy of sixteen
and an old army-surgeon, were not used to mountain-climbing, and
could hardly walk when we got back to our camp in the foot-hills, but
our lungs were none the worse for the adventure. Dr. Franklin, who,
like Bacon and Goethe, had the gift of anticipative intuitions, seems
to have suspected the mistake of the cold-air fallacy. " I shall not
attempt to explain," says he, "why damp clothes occasion colds, rather
than wet ones, because I doubt the fact ; I believe that neither the
one nor the other contributes to this effect, and that the causes of colds
are totally independent of wet and even of cold " (" Miscellaneous
Works," p. 216).

" I have, upon the approach of colder weather, removed my under-
garments," says Dr. Page, " and have then attended to my out-door

632 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

affairs, minus the overcoat habitually worn ; I have slept in winter
in a current blowing directly about my head and shoulders ; upon
going to bed, I have sat in a strong current, entirely tiude, for a
quarter of an hour, on a very cold, damp night, in the fall of the year.
These and similar experiments I have made repeatedly, and have never
been able to catch cold. I became cold, sometimes quite cold, and
became warm again, that is all " (" Natural Cure," p. 40).

There are many ways, less often sought than found, for " becoming
quite cold, and warm again," but an experimenter, trying to contract
a catarrh in that way, would soon give it up as a futile enterprise ;
after two or three attempts he would find the attainment of his pur-
pose more hopeless than before ; he would find that, instead of impair-
ing, he had improved the functional vigor of his breathing-apparatus.
Cold is a tonic that invigorates the respiratory organs when all other
stimulants fail, and, combined with arm-exercise and certain dietetic
alteratives, fresh, cold air is the best remedy for all the disorders of
the lungs and upper air-passages. As soon as oppression of the chest,
obstruction of the nasal ducts, and unusual lassitude indicate that a
" cold has been taken " — in other words, that an air-poison has fastened
upon the bronchi — its influence should at once be counteracted by the
purest and coldest air available, and the patient should not stop to
weigh the costs of a day's furlough against the danger of a chronic
catarrh. In case imperative duties should interfere, the enemy must
be met after dark, by devoting the first half of the night to an out-
door campaign, and the second half to an encampment before a wide-
open window. If the fight is to be short and decisive, the resources
of the adversary must be diminished by a strict fast. Denutrition,
or the temporary abstinence from food, is the most effective, and at
the same time the safest, method for eliminating the morbid elements
of the system ; and there is little doubt that the proximate cause of
a catarrh consists in the action of some microscopic parasite that de-
velops its germs while the resistive power of the respiratory organs
is diminished by the influence of impure air. Cold air arrests that
development by direct paralysis. Toward the end of the year a damp,
sultry day — the catarrh- weather par excellence — is sometimes followed
by a sudden frost, and at such times I have often found that a six
hours' inhalation of pure, cold night-air will free the obstructed air-
passages so effectually that on the following morning hardly a slight
huskiness of the voice suggests the narrowness of the escape from a
two weeks' respiratory misery. But, aided by exercise, out-door air
of any temperature will accomplish the same effect. In two days a
resolute pedestrian can walk away from a summer catarrh of that
malignant type that is apt to defy half-open windows. But the specific
of the movement-cure is arm-exercise — dumb-bell swinging, grapple-
swing practice, and wood-chopping. On a cold morning (for, after all,
there are ten winter catarrhs to one in summer), a wood-shed 7?iatinee

THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 633

seems to reach the seat of the disease by an air-line. As the chest
begins to heave under the stimulus of the exercise, respiration becomes
freer as it becomes deeper and fuller, expectoration ceases to be pain-
ful, and the mucus is at last discharged en masse, as if the system had
only waited for that amount of encouragement to rid itself of the
incubus. A catarrh can thus be broken up in a single day. For the
next half-week the diet should be frugal and cooling. Fruit, light
bread, and a little cold, sweet milk, is the best catarrh-diet. A fast-
day, though, is still better. Fasting effects in a perfectly safe way
what the old-school practitioners tried to accomplish by bleeding ; it
reduces the semi-febrile condition which accompanies every severe
cold. There is no doubt that by exercise alone a catarrh can gradually
be " worked off." But in-doors it is apt to be steep up-hill work, while
cold air — even before the season of actual frosts — acts upon pulmonary
disorders as it does upon malarial fevers : it reduces them to a less
malignant type.

A combination of the three specifics — exercise, abstinence, and
fresh air — will cure the most obstinate cold ; only, the first signs of
improvement should not encourage the convalescent to brave the at-
mosphere of a lung-poison den. So-called chronic catarrhs are, prop-
erly speaking, a succession of bronchial fevers. The popular idea
that an average " cold " lasts about nine days, has some foundation in
truth. Like other fever3, catarrhs have a self -limited period of de-
velopment, but the recovery from the first attack constitutes no
guarantee against an immediate relapse ; on the contrary, the first
seizure appears to prepare the way for its successors. A long sojourn
in an absolutely pure atmosphere, as in a summer camp on the mount-
ains, seems for a while to make the lungs catarrh-proof, by increasing
the vigor of their resisting ability, and the returned tourist may find
to his surprise that the air of his family den can now be breathed
without the wonted consequences. But the addition of a stove or a
double window at last turns the scales against Nature, and the first
malignant cold reproduces the sensitiveness of the respiratory organs.

After recovery from a chronic catarrh the danger of contagion
should therefore be carefully avoided. In many of our Northern cities
ill-ventilated reading-rooms are veritable hot-beds of lung-poison, as
crowded court-rooms in the villages, aud taverns and quilting-assem-
blies in the backwoods. Meeting-houses, with their large windows
and small, rarely-used stoves, are less dangerous ; but stuffy school-
rooms are as prolific of colds as swamps of mosquitoes, and often
counteract all sanitary precautions of the domestic arrangements.
Stuffed railway-cars, too, could claim a premium as galloping-con-
sumption factories ; and after dark the retreat to an over-heated
" Pullman sleeper " would hardly increase the chances of longevity ;
the best plan for long-distance travelers would, on the whole, be to
secure a rear seat, where open windows are less apt to awaken the

634 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

groans of air-fearing fellow-passengers, and risk cinders and smoke
rather than the miasma of the galloping man-pen.

It would be a mistake to suppose that " colds " can be propagated
only by direct transmission or the breathing of recently vitiated air.
Catarrh-germs, floating in the atmosphere of an ill-ventilated bedroom,
may preserve their vitality for weeks after the house has been aban-
doned ; and the next renter of such a place should not move in till
wide-open windows and doors and a thorough draught of several days
has removed every trace of a " musty " smell.

If a bronchial catarrh is accompanied by a persistent cough, it in-
dicates that the affection is deep-seated, and that it has probably spread
to the upper lobes of the lungs. Arm-exercise and a mild, saccharine
diet generally suffice to loosen the phlegm and thereby remove the
proximate cause of the evil. But, if those remedies fail, there is a
presumption that the chronic character of the affection is due to a
permanent external cause of irritation, which can be removed only by
a change of air. In such cases cough-sirups merely palliate the evil.
Medicines, counter-irritants, and fasting are in vain, if the lungs of
the patient are constantly impregnated with new morbific germs ; even
exercise can do little more than alleviate the distress of the symp-
toms ; a radical cure is impossible as long as every night undoes
the work of the preceding day. In a home of prejudices the patient
should at once change his bedroom and take care to profit by the
change.

A neglected catarrh may result in an attack of x>leurisy. Each
lung is inclosed in a sack-like serous membrane, which connects with
a similar membrane lining the inner surface of the chest. This double
integument, known as the pleura, or the visceral and parietal layer of
the pleural membrane, communicates both with the lungs and with
the uj)per air-passages, and is more or less affected by every morbid
condition of the respiratory organs. Pleurisy, or the congestion of
the pleural membrane, is generally an inflammatory complication of a
chronic catarrh. The original affection may have apparently subsided.
Counter-irritants, alcoholic tonics, etc., have subdued the cough ; with
the exception of an occasional uneasiness about the chest, the condi-
tion of the patient seems greatly improved ; only an abnormally rapid
pulse justifies a suspicion that the smothered fire has not been wholly
extinguished. A change of residence or plenty of out-door exercise
may perhaps ratify the sham-cure. A normal pulse would give assur-
ance that the masked fever has really subsided. But under less favor-
able circumstances an oppressive heat and a strange feeling of un-
easiness will some day announce the approaching crisis of the latent
disorder. Chills follow at shorter and shorter intervals, and at last
a pricking pang in the region of the upper ribs reveals the seat of the
affection. Breathing soon becomes so painful that the patient finds
no rest in a horizontal position, but has to sit up in his bed, and may

THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 635

feel sorely tempted to relieve his distress by invoking the aid of the
drug-gods. For believers in the remedial resources of Nature, pleurisy
is, indeed, a crucial test of faith, and Dr. Isaac Jennings's observations
on his experience during an acute attack of the disease deserve to
be framed in every hygienic sanitarium.

"For twelve hours," says he, "breathing was at best laborious
and painful, confining me to nearly an erect position in bed ; but the
distress occasioned by efforts at coughing was indescribable. The
confidence of my wife in the ' let-alone ' treatment, which had been
strengthening for years, and had carried her unflinchingly through a
number of serious indispositions, on this occasion faltered ; and she
begged me to let her send for a physician to bleed me or do something
to give at least temporary relief ; * for,' said she, * you can not live
so.' In my own mind there was not the least vestige of misgiving re-
specting the course pursued.

" In view of the constitutional defect in the pulmonary department
of my system, and the nature and severity of the symptoms, it ap-
peared to me very doubtful whether the powers of life would hold
out and be able to accomplish what they had undertaken and put me
again upon my feet. But I felt perfectly satisfied that whatever
could be done to good purpose would be done, by ' due course of law.'
My mind, therefore, was perfectly at ease in trusting Nature's work
in Nature's hands. There was no danger in the symptoms, let them
run as high as they would. They constituted no part of the real dif-
ficulty, but grew out of it. The general movement which made them
necessary was aiming directly at the removal of that difficulty. In-
stead, therefore, of being troubled with the idea that I could not live
with such symptoms, my conviction was very strong that I could live
better with them than without them.

" In the morning, ten or twelve hours from the beginning of the
cold chill, there was some mitigation of suffering, which continued
till afternoon, when there was a slight exacerbation of symptoms ;
but the heaviest part of the work was accomplished within the first
twenty-four hours. From that time there was a gradual declension of
painful symptoms, till the fifth day, when debility and expectoration
constituted the bulk of the disease.

" Full bleeding at the commencement of the disease, followed by
the other * break-up ' means usually employed in such affections, would
have given me immediate relief, and, by continuing to ply active means
as the work was urged on (for there would have been no stopping of
it, short of stopping the action of the heart), the strongest, most dis-
tressing, and critical part of the disease might have been pushed for-
ward to the fifth day ; and I might even then possibly have recovered.
But, granting that my life would have been spared, I suffered much
less on the whole under the ' let alone ' treatment than I should have
done under a perturbating one, besides having the curative process con-

636 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ducted with more regularity, made shorter, and done up more effectu-
ally " ("Medical Reform," p. 312).

After the paroxysm of the disease has subsided, the pectoral fever
can be alleviated by the free use of cold water and strict abstinence
from solid food. Avoid over- warm bedclothing. By a load of warm
covers alone a common catarrh can be aggravated into a hot fever
till the blanket-smothered patient is awakened by the throbbing of a
galloping pulse. Exercise would promote the discharge of the ac-
cumulated serum, but, while the patient is too sore to tarn over in his
bed, gymnastics are out of the question, and their effect must be ac-
complished by " passive exercise," manipulation of the thorax, and a
swinging motion in a hammock or a rocking easy-chair. With the
aid of fresh air and abstinence the remedies of the movement-cure
might be entirely dispensed with, if the accumulation of purulent
matter were the only risk, but in acute pleurisy there is a greater
danger from another cause, namely, that the inflamed surface of the
visceral pleura has a tendency to adhere to the lining of the thorax
and thus obliterate the pleural cavity. The consequences of that re-
sult would be a permanent embarrassment of breathing, or even the
total paralysis of the affected lung. Passive exercise and friction
(rubbing the less affected parts of the chest with a bathing-brush)
will, however, not fail to obviate that danger. As soon as Nature
finds relief in a copious expectoration, the crisis of the disease is
weathered, and further precautions may be limited to rest and a sparse
but emulsive diet — a modicum of sweet cream, with oatmeal-gruel
and stewed raisins. That pleurisy was formerly considered a most
fatal disease can be more than sufficiently explained by the fatal
measures of treatment which were then in vogue. Dr. Buchan's
" Family Medical Library," not more than thirty years ago about the
most popular pathological compend, contains the following directions :
" In the beginning of a pleurisy the only efficient course is to make
the patient stand up on the floor, while blood is drawn from a large
orifice until he faints or is about falling. ... If, after the first bleed-
ing, the pain, with the other violent symptoms, should still continue,
it will be necessary to take eight or nine ounces more. If the symp-
toms do not then abate, and the blood shows a strong buffy-coat, a
third or even a fourth bleeding may be requisite. . . . Topical bleeding
has also a good effect in this disease. It may be performed by apply-
ing a number of leeches to the parts affected, or by cupping, which is
both a more certain and expeditious method than the other. . . . Then,
take : Solution of acetated ammonia, three drachms ; mint-water, one
ounce ; tincture of opium, twenty-five drops ; sirup of tolu, two
drachms ; antimonial wine, thirty drops. Nothing is so certain to
give speedy and permanent relief as a combination of ipecac, calomel,
and opium." And in that form of the disease known as "bilious
pleurisy," " emetics and mercurial cathartics are of the utmost im-

THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 637

portance. . . . Purgatives should be continued through the whole course
of the disease ; . . . a blister should be applied of sufficient size to em-
brace the whole breast" ! ("Family Medical Library," pages 174, 183).

Croup is an obstruction of the upper air-tubes, induced by the
lethargic influence of overfeeding and warm, impure air. How an
overloaded stomach reacts on the functions of the respiratory organs,
many adults have an opportunity to experience in the strangling sen-
sations of a " nightmare," though the respiratory stimulus of the cool
night-air generally helps to overcome such affections, especially if the
sufferer can ease his lungs by a contraction of his arms or by turning
over on his side. But infants are not only more grossly overfed than
the most gluttonous adults, while the phlegm-producing quality of
their food increases the danger of respiratory obstructions, but that
danger is still aggravated by feeding their lungs on the sickening air
of an overheated and ill-ventilated bedroom, and still further aggra-
vated by swaddling and bandaging them in a way to prevent every
motion that might help to ease their distress. Spasmodic croup gen-
erally occurs after the establishment of a plethoric diathesis — after
persistent overfeeding has turned a baby into a mass of fat and fretful
sickliness. Some night, usually after a heavy surfeit, the child is
awakened by a feeling of suffocation and gasps for breath till the ob-
struction is removed by a violent fit of coughing. u Croup-sirup "
(treacle and laudanum) subdues the symptoms by lethargizing the ir-
ritability— for a little while, for soon a second and more violent fit
has to complete the work of the first paroxysm by expelling the accu-
mulated phlegm.

But a far more dangerous form of the disease is developed when
the predisposing causes are aggravated by an inflammation of the
larynx. Inflammatory croup, or exudative laryngitis,* does not oc-
cur unawares, but is preceded by a very peculiar cough, a hoarse,
cough-like bark, mingled with strange wheezing and metallic sounds.
The windpipe is congested, and in that note of warning appeals for re-
lief from impure air and deliverance from the influence of a crapulent
diet. Nine times out of ten the effect of its appeal is a dose of nar-
cotic cough-medicine, more tightly-closed windows and a hotter stove.
The process of surfeit in the mean while continues ; the windpipe, al-
ready abnormally contracted by its inflamed condition, becomes less
and less able to resist the obstructing influence of the accumulated
phlegm ; at night, when the exclusion of every breath of fresh air f has

* Called also " true croup," or " pseudo-membranous laryngitis," " plastic laryngitis."
f " I lately attended an infant, whom I found muffled up over head and ears in many
folds of flannel, though it was in the middle of June. I begged for a little free air to the
poor creature ; but, though this indulgence was granted during my stay, I found it al-
ways on my return in the same situation. Death, as might have been expected, soon
freed the infant from all its miseries ; but it was not in my power to free the minds of
its parents from those prejudices which proved fatal to their child " (Dr. G. G. Nor-
wood, " Management of Children," p. 619).

638 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

still further reduced the functional energy of the respiratory organs, a
viscid matter rises in bubbles, and one of these bubbles, like a tena-
cious membrane, closes the tube of the larynx. Suffocation results,
and, in the ensuing struggle for life, Nature has a very slim chance to
prevail. In our Northern States alone, five or six thousand perish thus
every year — killed by domestic contrivances as surely as the prisoners
of Sura j ah Dowlah were killed by the architectural arrangements
of the Black Hole. If the physician is only called in the last stage
of the deliquium, inflammatory croup constitutes one of those excep-
tional cases where artificial causes of disease have to be met by arti-
ficial remedies. The far-gone exhaustion of the patient, a thin, expir-
ing pulse, would indicate that tracheotomy, or the opening of the
windpipe, offers the only hope of salvation. A violent, suffocating,
and spasmodic cough would indicate that the expulsive efforts of Na-
ture require the aid of a swift emetic — tartar or ipecacuanha.

But, if the symptoms of danger are heeded in time, croup is as cu-
rable as a common catarrh. As soon as the characteristic cough be-
trays the condition of the windpipe, the patient — infant or adult —
should be reduced to two meals, the last one not later than four hours
before sunset. Flesh-food, greasy made- dishes, narcotic drinks, as
well as all kinds of alcoholic stimulants, should be strictly avoided.
Before night the bed should be removed to a cool and carefully venti-
lated room. Families who have no alternative should not hesitate to
open every window for at least fifteen minutes, and in the mean while
compromise with their prejudices by carrying the child to the next
neighbors, rather than bring it back before the air of the bedroom has
been thoroughly purified. A draught of very cold air might possibly
excite a cough that would precipitate the crisis of the disease, though
by no means lessen the chances of a lucky issue. But more probably
fresh air, whether cold or cool, would so re-enforce the remedial re-
sources of Nature that the inflammation would subside in the course
of a few days.

If in spite of such precautions a strangling-fit should occur at
night, the child should be immediately raised to a half-upright posi-
tion, by making the weight of the body rest on the knees, with the
head slightly inclined (face downward), the elbows back, and the hands
resting against the hips — the position which a person would instinct-
ively assume in the endeavor to aid an expulsive effort of the lungs.
Between the paroxysms ease the chest by a quick foncard-and-back-
ward movement of the arms, and by persistent friction toith a wet brushy
applied to tlie neck and the upper ribs. Under the influence of these
stimulants, combined with the invigorating tendency of fresh air, the
organism will employ all its resources to the best advantage and soon
relieve itself by a sort of retching cough. If the difficulty has not
been aggravated by the use of " croup-sirup," the patient will rest at
ease for the remaining hours of the night. A week may go by with-

STUDY— PHYSIOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED. 639

out a recurrence of the suffocating fit ; but only the subsidence of
the inflammation — indicated by the diminished hoarseness of the
cough — gives a guarantee that the danger is past.

•» » ♦»

STUDY— PHYSIOLOGICALLY CONSIDEEED.

By P. J. HIGGINS, M. D.

THE ultimate element by means of which those processes that con-
stitute the mind are carried on, is the microscopic cell of the
gray matter of the brain. These gray nerve-cells, with the delicate
tissue in which they are imbedded, form a layer, from one sixth to one
twelfth of an inch in thickness, on the surface of the brain. This area
would be small, were it not disposed in folds or convolutions which
greatly increase its extent. It is upon the number and quality of these
nerve-cells, and the systematic exercise of their function, rather than
upon mere size or weight of brain, that the mental capacity of the
individual depends.

The activity of the nerve-cells of the brain, in other words, de-
pends partly upon their inherent vitality or vigor of constitution, and
partly upon the quantity and quality of their blood-supply. They
may be stimulated into unwonted activity by an effort of the will or
the spur of excited consciousness ; but even in these cases, should the
strain last any length of time, the blood-supply is quickly and largely
increased.

Skeptics may cavil, but the solid fact remains that strength of
intellect, like that of muscle, is frequently inherited. Capacities differ
from the beginning. For this reason, children can not be expected to
make equal progress under any system of teaching, any more than
horses upon a race-course. But, by persistent and judicious training,
the strength, speed, and endurance of all may be increased through a
steady and gradual development.

In order that the teacher may utilize his efforts to the best advan-
tage, he should understand the laws of the mind's development, and
the influences that modify and regulate its activity. Mental philoso-
phy deals with the former — to explain some of the latter is the object
of this paper.

The brain-substance may be touched, and even cut, with little or
no consciousness of sensation ; yet the gray nerve-matter is very deli-
cate in construction, and exquisitely sensitive to changes in its blood-
supply. Like other organs, it is exhausted by continued activity, and
needs rest in order to recuperate its vitality. All tissues wear more or
less by work ; that is, molecules of their cell-substance die and become
foreign matter, which must be cast off and replaced by new material.

640 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

This new material is absorbed by the cells from the blood, through
the thin walls of the minute blood-vessels in their vicinity. Through
the walls of the same vessels the cast-off matters pass in the opposite
direction into the circulation and are washed away by its current.
While the tissue is hard at work, the process of disintegration is at
a maximum, and that of repair at the opposite extreme — consequently
the waste is produced more rapidly than it can be carried away, and
accumulates. As ashes in a stove interfere with combustion, it im-
pedes the current of thought, and lessens its intensity. But, during
repose, the opposite conditions obtain — repair is at its maximum, and
waste almost or entirely suspended. The blood has been busy all
night ridding itself and the tissues of all impurities, and is richly
charged with oxygen. The brain, and consequently the mind, is fresh
and vigorous after the night's repose ; the damages have been all
repaired, and the debris cleared away. It is a matter even of common
observation that at no other time is the mind so sharp, clear, and
strong, as in the morning.

Concrete ideas tax the mind but lightly. The more abstract ideas
become, the more difficult is their comprehension, and the greater the
nervous strain involved in their contemplation. For this reason, the
abstruse studies should be taken up during the forenoon session, as the
faculties of the mind are then in the most favorable condition to grap-
ple with their difficulties.

Of all school-studies, mathematics requires the strongest grasp of
mind, and the closest exercise of the reasoning powers and the judg-
ment. In abstruseness and difficulty of comprehension, geometry,
algebra, and arithmetic, rank in the order enumerated. Rhetoric, in-
cluding grammar and composition, comes next. In every school and
college, therefore, these subjects should be taken up during the morn-
ing session.

The mind learns by means of impressions made upon the gray
nerve-cells, through the senses, of which sight is the most vivid and
durable in its effects. Hearing ranks next, but its impressions are less
vivid and more fleeting. Further, they are recalled to the memory
less readily and distinctly. "We all remember what we see longer than
what we hear. Hence the most reliance should be placed upon the
eye as an avenue of instruction, and the teacher should make use of it
whenever practicable. When an impression is made upon a nerve-cell,
it is said to retain it " in potency " — that is, it is capable of renewing
it by an exercise of the memory. Now, the clearness and permanence
of a mental impression depend — (a) upon its vividness ; (b) upon
the frequency of its repetition ; and (c) upon the inherent vigor of
the nerve-cell.

To obtain vividness of impression, the teacher's language should be
clear and simple ; his descriptions of processes and objects sharp and
vivid ; he must present the same ideas again and again, in order to fix

STUDY— PHYSIOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED. 641

them permanently in the memory. The inherent vigor of the mind
can be strengthened by systematic exercise, just as the muscles of a
blacksmith's arm become strong and brawny by years of daily toil at
the clinking anvil.

Throughout animated nature, a period of repose succeeds one of
activity, both recurring in regular alternation. The vegetable world
grows and blooms ; then, for a season, all the vital processes stand still.
Work brings weariness, which rest must dissipate. So is it with the
tissues of the body ; and the younger and more delicately organized
they are, the sooner does toil exhaust them. Brain-matter is the most
delicate of all our tissues, and nearly one third of the pure blood
thrown out by the heart at each contraction goes to supply it. A
tissue, when at work, has its blood-supply largely increased. When
the mind is actively engaged in study, the circulation in the brain is
full and active, the temperature is raised, even the face is flushed ;
and the more difficult the study, the more these effects are intensified.
After a time, the brain becomes so engorged with blood that its activ-
ity is depressed and its energies begin to flag. The younger a pupil
is, the sooner does his mind grow tired. Between the ages of six and
seven, the lessons should not exceed ten minutes' duration, as young
children are unable to keep their attention fixed upon one subject for
a greater length of time. It may be laid down as a safe rule, that
close mental application for an hour and a half will tire out the ma-
jority of pupils, and leave them unfit and indisposed to proceed further
without a relaxation of at least ten or fifteen minutes.

Here the forenoon recess is indicated — not, as some imagine, simply
to kill time, but as a positive physical necessity, not for the pupil
alone, but also for the teacher. The worry and mental strain of gov-
erning a roomful of nervous, restless children, and teaching at the
same time, no one can fully realize without actual experience.

How should recess be spent by the pupil ? To reply to this, his
physical condition must be considered. As the blood is contained in
a series of closed vessels, it is evident that, if the circulation be in-
creased in one portion, it is correspondingly diminished in another.
When the brain is engorged, some other portion of the economy must
be under-supplied. By a wise provision of Nature, the surplus is
drawn from the tissue that is least active — in this case, from the mus-
cular system. The indication is to relieve the congested brain, and
this is best met by muscular exercise, as a tissue in action has its
blood-supply largely increased. The muscular system is of consider-
able extent, and the exercise that brings the most muscle into action
is the most beneficial.

Therefore, daring recess, nothing can take the place of active exer-
cise in the open air.

But if the temperature is very low, recess had better be taken in-
doors, for the intense cold exhausts the vitality by drawing largely

VOL. XXIV. — 41

642 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

upon the heat-supply. By constringing the cutaneous vessels, it con-
gests the internal organs and weakens the heart, while it requires some
time to restore the equilibrium of the circulation. In rainy weather,
the result is still more detrimental. In a climate like ours, exposure
to rain is at all times fraught with danger to health, and particularly
when one sits still in wet or damp garments for any great length of
time. No recess out-doors, on a bitterly cold or rainy day, should be
the rule, and gymnastic exercises, calisthenics, motion-songs, etc.,
should take its place. Every grammar-school should have one room
fitted up as a gymnasium. There is a certain amount of nerve-energy
that is accustomed to find outlet in the muscles, and, if unduly re-
pressed, it will often break through the strictest discipline and cause
the teacher much annoyance. It must not be forgotten that muscles
were not created to be kept still during waking hours, and, when kept
at rest an hour or two, a surplus of energy accumulates, which recess
gets rid of legitimately. It also serves another purpose admirably.
Of all sedatives of the nervous system, muscular exercise is the most
efficient, because physiological. It quickens the circulation, and stimu-
lates the heart and all the vegetative functions.

After exercise, the muscles — of the hand and forearm particularly
— are subject to rhythmic, automatic waves of contraction ; that is,
there is a tremor beyond the power of the will to control. So that
writing and drawing, which require great steadiness of the hand and
fingers, should never be taken up after recess, or at the commence-
ment of the afternoon session. Of the elementary studies, mental
arithmetic involves the closest application of the highest powers of the
mind — drawing at once upon memory, reason, and judgment — and this
may be taken up advantageously from half -past eleven to twelve.
Breakfast digestion is then nearly if not quite completed, and intense
application is least detrimental to the vegetative system.

The morning meal is usually light in material and amount ; dinner,
partaken of soon after noon (except in the largest cities), is the prin-
cipal meal. It is " solid," in a physiological not less than in a popular
sense, for it is most generous in amount, and usually rich in nitrogen-
ized matters — flesh-meat, .puddings, eggs, etc. After its ingestion, the
digestive organs are taxed to their utmost capacity, and soon become
loaded and distended with blood. The digestive system is quite ex-
tensive, and is richly supplied with blood-vessels, which are imbedded
in rather loose tissue, so that they may dilate, to accommodate the
sudden influx from the outlying portions of the body, together with
the newly-absorbed products of digestion. The brain is thus deprived
of its full supply ; and if, by reason of severe study, it draws upon the
circulation, the digestive organs are robbed of their needs, and their
efficiency interfered with seriously. Intense application at this time
does harm in another way. All the functions of the body are under
nervous control. The digestive organs are mainly innervated by the

STUDY— PHYSIOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED. 643

pneumogastrics — two nerves arising from the lower portion of the
brain, near the base. Now, the thinking portion of the brain being
situated on the convex surface, deep and perplexing thought robs
the roots of the pneumogastric nerves of their circulation, and in this
way depresses their influence. Lacking the proper nervous stimulus,
the digestive juices become scanty in amount ; peristalsis is enfeebled;
the liver — that refinery where the crude products of digestion are
purified and elaborated — loses tone, and allows the peptones to pass
unchanged into the general circulation, giving rise to much discomfort
and mental depression. Thus are laid the foundations of dyspepsia,
that common complaint of students ; and in the higher institutions of
learning, where the course is difficult and protracted, many, after
graduation, return home invalids — often only to die.

The products of digestion are taken up by two different sets of
vessels. The fatty matters, in the form of an emulsion, go almost
directly to the right side of the heart ; while the others, before enter-
ing the general circulation, pass through the liver. A portion of the
refuse is excreted here ; the rest, remaining in solution in the blood, is
carried to other organs to be gradually eliminated. So that, during
digestion, the blood is not only charged with impurities from the ali-
mentary canal, but also with newly or imperfectly formed material.

The brain, then, being deprived of its full blood-supply, and the
blood itself being impure and impoverished, it may at once be seen
that the mind is not very active after dinner, and by no means fitted
for severe study. Hence the lighter subjects — reading, geography,
history, writing, drawing, music — should occupy the afternoon session,
as these subjects involve chiefly the imitative faculty and the memory.
Of these, reading and music — the lightest of all — should precede ; dic-
tation and geography may follow. When the programme includes an
afternoon recess, history may follow with advantage. The most ap-
propriate time for writing and drawing is from half -past three to four.
The muscles of the hand are steady, the pupils are fatigued mentally,
and the imitative faculty — the lowest in the scale — is the only one
called into play.

Two o'clock may be set down as the most judicious time for the
opening of the afternoon session. Half -past one is not quite so good,
but will answer very well. To begin at one is a positive detriment.
The pupils hurry home, snatch a hasty dinner, and as hurriedly return.
Those who dwell at some distance are often late. Some are obliged
to attend to household duties, and this also occasions tardiness. Sun-
light is cheap and plenty, and the half -hour gained would be more
useful if taken at the end of the session. Indeed, two hours' steady
work will exhaust the majority of children, and will leave all seriously
disinclined to exertion. When school assembles at two, and is dis-
missed at four, no recess is necessary, if the plan here indicated is fol-
lowed, for the work is much lighter than during the morning session.

644 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Of late certain spasmodic efforts have been made to abolish recess,
and hold but one long session per day — from nine to one or half -past
one ; but this is a mistaken notion, founded on lack of knowledge of
the effects of long-continued study and the physical needs of the
young. It is true that in some of the largest cities this plan is fol-
lowed in the high-schools, but the cause is local, for the pupils come
from long distances — in New York city, for instance, as far as five
miles. Besides, in many of these schools the pupils do much of their
studying at their homes, and the majority are in the neighborhood of
twenty years of age, so that they are in a better condition to stand
the additional strain without injury.

Anything that distracts the pupil's attention from his studies re-
tards his progress, by making less vivid the impressions received by
the nerve-cells ; for, by concentrating the mental vision upon one
point, to the exclusion of others, we see that point more distinctly.
All peripheral irritation, therefore, should be removed as far as pos-
sible. The distraction of discomfort, particularly of the cutaneous
surface, is a serious drawback ; comfortable seats — preferably single —
high enough to support the lower limbs, and desks of the proper height
to rest the arms, are in this way valuable indirect aids to study. But
of all peripheral irritation, that produced by cold is perhaps the most
distracting. When the temperature of the room falls below 50° Fahr.,
the next exercise should be dismissal. Between 50° and 70° the
temperature may range ; but from 60° to 65° is the safest and most
comfortable ; safest, because the cutaneous surface does not become
overheated and congested — liable to be chilled by the lower tempera-
ture of the open air — and most comfortable, because neither heat nor
cold is perceptible. It is needless to add that every school-room should
have a thermometer, which the teacher should frequently consult, and
govern himself according to its indications.

For the reasons noted above, children at home should not be al-
lowed to prepare their lessons immediately after supper, or late into
the night ; for study congests the brain, and, as sleep is produced by
the opposite condition, they lie awake and restless until the amount
and pressure of blood within the cranium are greatly diminished.

Strange as the assertion may seem, a pupil's diet has much to do
with his progress. A liberal supply of non-stimulating food — in other
words, bread, milk, vegetables, fruits, and a farinaceous diet princi-
pally—is far superior for the healthy growth of bone and nerve and
muscle than a regimen into which nitrogenized materials — flesh-meat,
eggs, etc. — enter largely. These latter unduly stimulate the nervous
system, cause a premature development of the body, and load the blood
with impurities, that tax the liver and the excretory organs sorely. In
a warm climate, such as ours, the liver, choked with albuminoids, will
fail in its function periodically, through sheer fatigue ; the bilious
matters then circulate throughout the system and stain the complex-

FASHION AND DEFORMITY IN THE FEET. 645

ion ; torpor, malaise, and headache, will result. In this condition study-
is a task instead of a pleasure ; the mind is weak, and the memory-
can not retain imparted knowledge for any great length of time.

In general terms, it may be laid down as a rule, that much effect-
ive study must not be expected from a pupil who is overfed, especially
if on rich and stimulating food. Let it not be understood that flesh-
meat should be excluded from the diet of the young. By no means ;
it is only its excess that is objected to. An overfed pupil is indolent,
intellectually, not because he may be so inclined willfully, but for the
reason that his digestive organs rob his brain, and his blood is charged
with effete matter ; in figurative phrase, the fire is slow because the
stove is filled with coal and choked with ashes.

To recapitulate : The more abstruse studies — mathematics, science,
rhetoric — should be taken up during the morning session. The proper
time for the forenoon recess is at half -past ten. The lighter or concrete
subjects — reading, history, geography, writing, drawing, music — should
occupy the afternoon session, commencing preferably at two o'clock.
When it begins at half -past one, a recess of ten or fifteen minutes is
necessary, preferably the quarter-hour preceding three o'clock. No
out-door recess when the weather is inclement. For the younger pu-
pils, short lessons frequently repeated, exercising chiefly the imitative
faculty and the memory, should be the rule.

■♦•»

FASHION AND DEFOEMITY IN THE FEET.

By ADA H. KEPLEY.

" A WELL-FORMED foot," says Chapman in "The American
-£^- Drawing-Book," " is rarely to be met with in our day, from the
lamentable distortion it is doomed to endure by the fashion of our shoes
and boots. Instead of being allowed the same freedom as the fingers
to exercise the purposes for which Nature intended them, the toes are
cramped together, and are of little more value than if they were all in
one ; their joints enlarged, stiffened, and distorted, forced and packed
together, often overlapping one another in sad confusion, and wantonly
placed beyond the power of service. As for the little-toe and its
neighbor, in a shoe-deformed foot, they are usually thrust out of the
way altogether, as if considered supernumerary and useless, while all
the work is thrown upon the great-toe, although that too is scarcely
allowed working-room in its prison-house of leather. It is, therefore,
hopeless to look for a foot that has grown under the restraints of
leather, for perfection of form ; and hence the feet of children, al-
though less marked in their external anatomical development, present
the best models for the study and exercise of the pupil in drawing."

646

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Camper, who wrote, in the seventeenth century, " On the Best Form
of Shoe," says that his treatise originated in a jest made with his pu-
pils, who " did not believe I should dare to make public a work on
such a subject," which indicates the small estimate that was put upon
the foot as an organ of the body. He begins by deploring the per-
versity which wholly neglects the human feet, while forcing the great-
est attention to the feet of " horses, mules, oxen, and other animals of
burden," and declares that from the earliest infancy the foot-coverings
worn serve but to deform them, and make walking painful, and some-
times impossible ; and he lays the blame on the ignorance of shoe-
makers.

James Dowie, a practical and scientific Scotch shoemaker, in his
excellent little book, makes the same statements as the artist ; and the
great Dutch surgeon, whose treatise he had translated into the English
language, also laments that the subject of the feet is so neglected by
those who are competent to instruct us about them. Lord Palmer-
ston said to Dowie that " shoemakers should all be treated like pirates,
put to death without trial or mercy, as they had inflicted more suffer-
ing on mankind than any class he knew."

One can not treat of the deform-
ities of the feet without considering
the nature of their covering, the boots
and shoes, for it is these which cramp,
distort, and disable them ; therefore
in this article, after a brief account
of the anatomy of the foot, our atten-
tion will be confined to its principal
distortions and the causes which pro-
duce them.

The feet furnish a firm base for the
body in standing, and, undeformed,
make walking easy and healthful.
They sustain alternately the whole of
the body's weight, and, though com-
paratively small, are admirably fitted
to carry it without jar or discomfort,
if unhampered by their coverings.
They are in the highest degree elas-
tic, from the large number of bones,
with many articulations, with their
attachments, and the plentiful supply
of muscles, blood-vessels, and nerves to keep them vigorous and well-
nourished. This elasticity enables them to carry the body over smooth
and rough surfaces, not only without injury, but to its greater health.
In just so far as this elasticity and freedom of natural action are inter-
fered with, is their health, and with it that of the body, lowered.

Fig. 1.

FASHION AND DEFORMITY IN THE FEET. 647

Anatomists divide the skeleton of the foot into three portions, the
tarsus, with seven bones, forming the heel and arch bones ; the meta-
tarsus, with five bones just forward of the tarsus ; and the toes, which
contain fourteen bones, two in the great-toe, three in e?ch of the other
toes ; beneath the ball of the foot, as it is called, are two small bones,
which lie under the articulation of the great-toe and the adjoining
metatarsal bones, making twenty-eight bones in each foot (see Figs. 1G,
17, 19).

The large articulating surface of the feet, and their numerous
blood-vessels, muscles, nerves, etc., render it peculiarly susceptible to
injuries. Their distance from the center of circulation, together with
the variations of temperature they have to endure, make them ex-
tremely liable to contract disease.

It seems as if the general injuries to the body resulting from dis-
eased and crippled feet should be plain enough to attract attention, but
such does not appear to be the case. No complete treatise on the feet
has been produced. Physicians as a class seem to pay the subject but
little attention. In the books in which the diseases and injuries of the
feet are considered, the causes of disease, if stated, seem to be men-
tioned incidentally, and without proper notice of the connection be-
tween the diseases and the bad physiological conditions they induce.
Physicians will prescribe for diseases caused largely by unsuitable cloth-
ing of the feet, without saying anything of the reform in the chaus-
sare by means of which the disorder might be greatly mitigated, if not
cured. A delicate woman was treated for months for a peculiar dis-
ease which made her a complete invalid, by an eminent specialist, who
said nothing of the high-heeled, paper-soled, thin boots, the habitual
wearing of which greatly aggra-
vated her disorder. A paper show-
ing the deleterious effects of such
shoes on the health of women, read
at a recent meeting of an associa-
tion of doctors, seemed, according
to the reports, to call out more ob-
jectors than it found friends. A
competent woman physician ex-
cused herself for wearing such
shoes because it was so hard to find hygienic shoes in stock, and added
that, when physicians prescribed reforms in clothing, they had to be
politic, to keep their patients ; and when asked if she ever saw a woman
who wore tight shoes, replied " No " ; nor did she know any who wore
tisfht corsets.

Walking is the exercise that, more than any other, brings every
portion of the system into healthful activity. Many complaints would
disappear under a thorough and careful course of pedestrianism ; but
who can walk if the feet are sore or diseased ? General bad concli-

FlG. 2.

643

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

tions arise from lack of exercise, which invigorates the muscles and
oxygenizes the vital fluid. Dyspepsia is the usual attendant on such
conditions, and may manifest itself either by general emaciation or
by fatty degeneration.

The feet demand a covering which shall conform to their shape,
allow them free play, and afford protection from injuries.* Dowie
scoffingly remarks, in his treatise, respecting shoes so cut at the toes
as to represent the foot like that of a goose, with the great-toe in the
middle. We are now in an era of " pencil-toed " shoes, so called,
which recall Dowie's comparison. It is difficult to understand how
shoemakers can be so careless of the shape of the feet and their needs
as to cut shoes that in the toe are the very reverse of what toes de-
mand ; but it is more difficult to conceive how any one can endure the
suffering they inflict. Dowie insists that tight-toed stockings are in-
jurious to the feet, and recommends that they be woven with a sepa-
rate covering for each toe, as gloves are made with fingers.

Fig. 1 is a foot copied from the antique, and shows "beauty of
form and proportion, ease and elasticity of motion, as well as an ad-
mirable expression of adaptation and power for use throughout."

Fig. 2 shows the distorted foot of a Chinese woman, photographed
from nature.

Fig. 3 represents the sole of a normal human foot. The dotted
line shows how the foot is usually cramped in the shoe-sole. The heel
of the foot is narrow, the anterior portion broad, the toes are nearly
parallel to a line " C," drawn through the center of the sole from beel
to toe. The line A B is drawn through the center of the instep, or
great arch of the foot, and bisects the great-toe. It is this arch which
mainly supports the weight of the body ; the heel forms one of its

Fig. 3.

piers, the great-toe the other. One may easily see that when the
great-toe is drawn from its line with the arch, as indicated by the
dotted lines, the stability of the body is by so much destroyed ; and
when the heel is taken from its level with the bulk of the foot, by a
high heel, yet more is the stability of the body destroyed. Erichson
says : " Firmness of gait is caused by the foot resting on the heel be-

* The Indian moccasin is probably the easiest and most comfortable foot-covering
worn, as it adapts itself perfectly to the shape and motion of the foot.

FASHION AND DEFORMITY IN THE FEET. 649

bind and the ball in front, and principally by the foot resting on the
broad line formed by the great-toe and the breadth of the fore part
of the foot."

The dotted lines in Fig. 3 show the outlines of a quite liberal sole.
It is easy to see how an ordinary foot would be cramped if confined
within its limits.

Fig. 4 shows a very common shape of the foot, produced by cramp-
ing and crowding the toes. Many persons have only to look at their
own feet to see fine specimens of this sort.

Jig 4.

The diseases most common to the feet are corns, bunyons, calluses,
enlarged and stiffened joints, stiff and wasted toes, overlapping and
underlapping toes, in-growing nails, caries of the bone, exostosis
of the toe-bones, onyxitis of the toes, flat-foot, club-foot, ulcers, malig-
nant and fibrous tumors, dislocations, changes in the shape of the
bones from pressure, and elephantiasis. All wounds, injuries, and dis-
eases are extremely liable to take on erysipelatous and scrofulous con-
ditions, which speedily endanger life through their inflammatory, gan-
grenous, or debilitating nature ; fatty degeneration of the tissues may
take place, and weakness of the joints and thickening of the ankles
plague their owners.

Corns consist of hardened flesh that becomes thorn-like in its shape
and density, and a dismal source of pain. " A corn," says a writer,
" is really a wicked demon, incarnated in a piece of callous skin. Its
mission is to distress and agonize humanity and increase its wicked-
ness." Gross says, " A bunyon is a corn on a large scale," and he and
other writers agree that it is caused by a diversion of the great-toe
from its line with the arch of the foot. When the toe is thus diverted,
it forms an angle on the foot, which the shoe irritates and makes
callous ; inflammation sets in, and suppuration frequently ensues,
that, in extreme cases, may make necessary amputation of the foot
or feet.

Fig. 5 represents the foot of a young woman who wore high-
heeled, narrow-soled shoes, which must also have been too short.

Figures 6 and 7 represent forms of bunyon complicated with under-
and over-lapping toes.

650

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Fig. 8 shows a deformity of the foot resulting from inflammation
of the metatarsal, phalangeal, or great-toe joint.

Fig. 9 shows an apparatus for the cure of bunyons. Its object is
to draw the great -toe back into line with the great arch of the foot.

Fig.

Fig. 6.

Erichson says, bunyon is caused by improperly cut shoes, and adds
that to cure it the foot should be put in a shoe cut straight from
heel to toe at the inner line of the sole. The toes are naturally quite
flexible. Cases are well known of men and women who, being devoid
of hands or Angers, have learned to use the feet and toes instead.
Miss Biffin, of London, became expert as a portrait-painter ; another

woman used scissors to cut out all sorts
of figures from paper ; and men have
been fully as capable with their toes. The
Chinese and Hindoos are said to be able
to pick up the most delicate objects with
their toes. Yet in most feet the toes are
wholly incapable of independent motion,
while in many feet they are entirely stiff,
and are distressing objects to look at.

In-growing nails are caused by shoes
which are too short, and are a source of
exquisite torture. This disease may de-
generate into a worse condition called
onyxitis (see Fig. 10), when it discharges
a fetid humor, and may render a resort
to the surgeon's knife a necessity. Caries
of the bone may follow wounds, bruises,
contusions, bunyons, corns, and calluses of the feet ; and bunyons, corns,
and calluses, as well as wounds, bruises, and contusions, may take on
erysipelatous, scrofulous, ulcerous, or tumorous conditions. Exostosis

xgJ Si

Fig. 7.

FASHION AND DEFORMITY IN THE FEET. 651

of the bones (Fig. 11) is an abnormal growth which requires the saw,
knife, and gouge of the surgeon for its extirpation. The toes are es-
pecially liable to this disease.

Fig. 12 is a specimen of splay or flat foot. It is caused by a break-
ing down of the arch of the foot, whereby locomotion becomes painful
and sometimes impossible. Impairment of the general health accom-
panies it ; in its worst forms a partial displacement of the bones occurs,
the toes turn up, and the sole grows convex, while the ankle is very
likely to thicken and lose strength by fatty degeneration. It is most
common among youth. Some writers attribute it to " vicious eversions
of the foot in attempts at polite walking" ; by others it is attributed
to overwork. It is most common among the children of the wealthy
classes. Old people are subject to it from a breaking down of the
tissues with age. For its cure local means must be used, and special
attention be given to the general health.

Fig. 8.

A disease called elephantiasis, sometimes necessitating amputation
of the whole limb, may result from injuries to the foot. A case of this
sort is found in the books, where a dislocation of the foot, caused by
drawing off a boot, induced the disease.

It is now time to consider defects in shoes, by which most of these
diseases may be provoked or aggravated.

Dowie, who was a practical as well as theoretical shoemaker, and
so full of enthusiasm that he studied the foot under skillful anatomists,
and sent all his journeymen to a course of lectures on the feet, enumer-
ates as the principal evils, that shoes are worn too short ; that they are
cut too narrow at the toes and in the sole; that the soles do not con-
form to the shape of the inner curve of the foot, nor to the line of
the great arch or instep and the great-toe ; that at the waist, or mid-
dle, the sole is too stiff and unyielding ; that the toe is vertically too

652

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

shallow, or " wedge-toed," as lie calls it ; that the heel is too high ;
that the sole turns up too much at the toes. He and Camper agree on
these points. The evils attending shoes too short will be more readily
perceived when it is understood that the foot is lengthened in walk-
ing, and more in running and jumping.

The degree of elongation depends upon the shape of the foot.
Long, slim, high-arched feet elongate most ; short, fleshy feet least.
In the first case the elongation varies from one fourth of an inch to
one inch. It takes place forward and back, and the shoe should be
long enough to allow for it. It is produced by the flattening of the

Fig. 9. — Apparatus for the Treatment
of Busyons.

Fig. 10.— Onyxitis of the Great Toe.

arch of the foot, when the weight of the body falls upon it ; just as a
carriage-spring elongates under pressure. The shoe which is just long
enough when the foot is at rest, becomes too short when the elongation
takes place, and the toes rise, as shown by the dotted lines in Fig. 13,
preventing them from forming the firm pier which the anterior portion
of the arch of the foot should have to rest upon, diminishing the elas-
ticity of the organs, impairing their muscular force, and inducing the
formation of corns through the rubbing of the toes against the leather.
The weight of the body also crowds the toes up, and, turning the great-
toe out of place, unfits it for its useful function. In-growing nails
are caused by short shoes. An old poet says —

" The shoe too short, the foot will wring " ;

and an old English couplet sums up the height of aggravating mis-
ery in these lines :

" ITere's to our friends ; as for our foes,
We wish them short shoes, and corns on their toes."

FASHION AND DEFORMITY IN THE FEET. 653

Narrow-toed shoes aggravate the abnormal position of the great-
toe, and cramp the other toes closely together, stopping all their free
and healthful motion.

Narrow soles cramp the whole foot ; calluses, corns, stiff and in-
elastic joints, and wasted muscles follow. The distress endured by a
fleshy foot in a narrow shoe must be felt to be appreciated. If shoes
are not cut " rights and lefts," they do not conform to the shape of the
foot, and keep it in a continuous strain, exercising also a tendency to
break down the supporting arch. The foot, thrown out of position,
falls too far to one side or the other, and we have " running down at
the heels," and vicious inversions of the foot in walking.

Tight shoes impede the circulation, deprive the feet of the warmth
they need, and ultimately cause waste of the tissues. A friend of
the writer, a strong, vigorous man, in splendid health, nearly lost his
life from congestion induced by an hour's wearing of a pair of tight
boots. Of shoes too stiff at the waist or middle, Dowie says, " Rigidity
of this portion of the foot-covering is particularly destructive of the
muscles of the foot and leg, for it interferes almost entirely with the
free play of the whole foot." *

" Wedge-toed " shoes call for some preliminary remark. If one
examines the ends of the fingers, it will be seen that they have a
fleshy protuberance ; the toes have this in common with the fingers,
and its office in both is to make a soft, cushion-like protection for the
bones. A wedge-toed shoe, such as is seen in Fig. 14, forces the toes
immovably into a close envelope that crowds this cushion away from
the bones, and wastes it to such an extent that the bones, lacking its
protection, become diseased often to a degree requiring surgical treat-
ment. The dotted lines in Fig. 14 indicate how the evil might be
mitigated by giving a fullness in the upper leather.
Take a round and narrow wedge-toed shoe, and
let it be short as one may generally see them,
worn, and you have an instrument of torture that
is little short of the famous iron boot of the past
ages.

"Box-toes" possessed the virtues of giving Fig. ll.— Exostosis or the

room for the extension of the foot, and saved

their wearers from the torments of " wedge-toes," but they had other

defects, and are now almost out of use.

High heels augment all the injuries and miseries we have enumer-
ated. The foot on heels is in the position it occupies in going down-hill,
or down the roof of a house, a most insecure and unstable one. The
weight of the body is thus thrown forward, the center of gravity

* This is a prolific cause of the homely spindle-shank, which he says marks the Eng-
lish laborer in his wooden solid shoe. Dowie cites the Irish laborer, who goes barefoot,
and has a splendid muscle in his calf, as a sample of what free play of the foot will do
for the improvement of the leg.

654 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

is shifted, and the weight becomes unequally distributed among the
different parts of the foot, and the forward portion has to do the bulk
of the work. The inevitable detriment such a condition entails upon
the health of the foot and of the body does not need to be enlarged
upon. Additional inconveniences resulting from it arise from the lia-
bility of the body to fall from its unstable poise, and the propensity
of the narrowly pointed heels to catch in every little crack or opening,
and trip up the wearer. Of these evils the awkward, tottering gait
produced by high-heeled shoes is visible evidence.

The center of gravity of the body falls directly on the angle pro-
duced by the lines A and B in Fig. 15, which shows the foot at rest
in its normal position on a level surface ; the line A falls inside the
outline of the foot, whereby the harmonious relations of each portion
of the foot are indicated. Figs. 13 and 16 represent the foot as in
position upon high heels, 13 being rather exaggerated, but 16 little
higher than the average heel. A glance will show that just as the
heel is elevated, the line A is thrown outside of the outline of the
foot, disturbing the relation of its parts, throwing the weight of the
body unequally upon it, and thereby seriously interfering with its
functions.

•".'•■• • 'i.-vtf-fiv-;..' «-»t

Fig. 12— Splay or Flat Foot.

There are those who believe and assert that an upright carriage of
the body is assisted by high heels. A little thought and observation
will convince the candid inquirer that this is a mistake. A shoemaker
called my attention to the baggy trousers knees observable in connec-
tion with the wearing of high-heeled boots, and said, " Elevation of the
heel thrusts the knee forward." The human body should stand erect
from the heels upward, but the projection of the knee makes necessary
a bending forward of the whole frame, to maintain an equilibrium.
This is undoubtedly one cause of the ungraceful round shoulders and
poked-forward head noticeable with so many women and girls.

The shoes of men, as a rule, are not so badly constructed and worn
as the shoes of women and children. A larger proportion of men
wear custom-made shoes, in which some effort is made to fit the foot.
Business-men generally have eschewed heels, except the lowest "lifts."

FASHION AND DEFORMITY IN THE FEET. 655

Among soldiers and policemen, foot-soreness is a common complaint,
and renders the man who has to endure it unfit for service. It is stated
that, during the late East Indian wars, the native foot-soldiery, when
ordered to " march," took off their regulation shoes and hung them on
the ends of their muskets, while they went barefoot. Commanding
officers reported great loss of men who could not keep up on account
of foot-soreness, and were easily picked off by the enemy. A High-
land regiment, when ordered to " charge " the foe, took off their shoes
and charged barefoot, as they could do more effective work. The regu-
lation shoes interfered with free muscular action. Dowie characterizes
the shoe as a " Juggernaut of cruelty," saying it possesses wedge-toes,
a rigid waist, high heels, and convex inner soles, and adds : " If a sol-
dier be weak or lame in the feet, he can never apply with advantage
the strength of his arm in charging the enemy, or in sustaining a
charge, because the foot is that part of the mechanical system or lev-
erage which rests upon the fulcrum, the ground, and, if you weaken the
leverage at this important point, the strength of the whole system is
reduced."

Fio. 13.

The opinions of Mr. Dowie on this subject coincide with those of
eminent military men. The defects which he enumerated were com-
mon in the shoes of our own soldiery during the late war, and were
followed with the same results.

It is very hard to find any woman who will confess that her shoes
are too tight, too short, or too high-heeled. Her shoes are usually
" miles too big," and hurt by their looseness. If women complain of
lame backs or aching feet, they will be sure the shoes have no part in
it ; because women are really not aware how they have departed from
nature in this regard. The perfect female foot is described by a phy-
sician as follows : " It should have great breadth and fullness of instep,
a well-marked great-toe, a long second toe, a small little-toe." Wom-
an needs a strong and firm footing, particularly because of her func-
tion of motherhood, and yet this perfect foot is the exact opposite of

656 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

the ideal lady's foot of to-day ; narrowness, shortness, and littleness
are the qualities that go to make it up ; and there are women, if we
may believe what is said in the newspapers, who to secure a narrow
foot are willing to have the little-toe ruined.

Strange as it is, the American women, while cramping the feet,
deny it. The Chinese are more logical. They distort and cripple the
feminine foot to a much greater degree, and then sing its praises. Its
favorite name, the " golden lily," is well known.

Many of the peculiar ailments under which women pass their days
in invalidism, unhappy and miserable themselves and making others
unhappy, would vanish or be greatly mitigated if they would but
apply common sense to the selection of their shoes. It is very hard to
persuade them to reform their habits on this point, but I have never
known any woman who had learned the new comfort to go back to the
old habit.

No exercise is so healthful and delightful as walking, yet few wom-
en can endure it. For to walk in their ordinary shoes is one of the
most exhausting labors women can attempt. There is no doubt that
by a thorough and careful system of pedestrianism many women would
become robust, though now half-invalids. I know of one who walked
on an average two or three miles a day, and would spend an hour or
(?s^ two cutting brush, saplings, and small

F^ /W trees, lopping off limbs, hauling brush

1 *~^v t° gullies and into heaps, and climbing

\^^ fences. Her garments were warm and

^^~-— «i^-; loose, her shoes " stogies," big, broad,

^Miig^^gSjg^^^^^^IjP^ and low-heeled. Health came as a re-

SBfassl ward. Another case is of a lady who

Fig. 14. — A Wedge-toed Shoe. • • 1 , -, ■,

is a commercial traveler in a large
Western State. Her health broke wdth in-door confinement at school-
teaching and book-keeping, and she was advised to try the road, which
she did, as agent for a sash, door, and blind factory, and afterward for
a paint, oil, and glass establishment. She never misses a day nor a
train, dresses feet and body for comfort, is hearty and well, and earns
a large salary.

The feet not only look smaller, but really become so in tight, high-
heeled shoes, in consequence of a reduction of the blood-supply. We
are told of a Frenchman who invented an apparatus for reducing the
size of the nose, and it consisted only of a spring which cut off the
supply of blood to the organ. A paper was read at a recent health
congress in Switzerland, calling attention to a French style of shoe,
which, the author remarked, gave the foot a "hoof -like" appearance.
This style is much worn here, and produces a clumping, ungraceful
jolt in the gait, tending to induce destructive spinal vibrations.

Probably the worst and most lasting injuries to the foot are pro-
duced during childhood, wThen the bones and cartilages are tender, and

FASHION AND DEFORMITY IN THE FEET. 657

the muscles are soft and most sensitive to strains. As a rule, chil-
dren's shoes are too short and too tight, and no allowance is made in
them for the growth which is all the time going on, or trying to go
on, in the foot. Evidently an injury cramping the growth at this
time can not be remedied ; and if the children have any tendency to
become bandy-legged or knock-kneed, badly shaped shoes, especially if
they have high heels, will aggravate the evil and make it more lasting.

/

Fig. 15.— Proper Position op the Foot upox the Ground.

Andre, an old French writer, is quoted by Camper as saying that
high-heeled boots produce curvature of the spine in children. The
shifting of the body from foot to foot to get ease contributes to this
effect in one direction, and the bending forward of the body to pre-
serve equilibrium in another, while the soft condition of the bones
and muscles is a helping influence to it.

Fig. 16.

It should be remembered, too, that children suffer most from in-
growing nails caused by short shoes. Flat-foot, which is also most
common among children and youth, is largely the result of convexity
of the inner sole — a too common fault of children's shoes. In such
shoes the center of gravity of the body is thrown out of its relations
with the corresponding point in the foot, and eversions take place.
The continuous strain between the foot and an improperly fitted shoe

VOL. XXIV,

658

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

tends to produce dislocations of the bones and to weakening of the
muscles. Doubtless much of the breaking down of girls at school
may be traced to some such cause as this. Boys' shoes, on the other
hand, generally have low heels and broad soles, and their wearers are
relieved from the special suffering which too vain mothers allow to be
inflicted on the feet of their daughters.

The evils to which women are subjected from the causes we have
delineated do not stop with the sufferers who induce them upon them-
selves, but are transmitted to their children, an inheritance of acquired
weakness and suffering.

Fig. 17.

Some specimens of the shoemaker's art are shown, to illustrate how
far those artists are from adapting their work to what the feet require.

Fig. 17 is the sole of an old lady's shoe, custom-made, for the
wearer, suffering from constant aching feet, wanted shoes cut for ease.
The heel is correctly cut, but the soles are made convex, or not curved,
as the dotted line indicates they should be, to the inner curve of the
foot ; the toes are narrowed, or rounded, turning the great-toe inward
and cramping the rest, and they allow nothing whatever for the elonga-
tion of the foot, and would look like stuffed puddings when the feet
were in them. They were cut of soft kid, but, except the low heel and
the soft material, they had not a single merit. They were cut in exact
contrariety to the shape of the feet, and did not bring about the relief
that was sought for in them.

Fig. 18 is a sample of an improved cut of shoe for women and
misses. These shoes are worn by a small minority at present. They

Fig. 18.

Fig. 19.

do not altogether escape the faults of other shoes ; some are wedge-
toed ; in others the heel is too high ; and oftentimes a fault in the sole
wrenches or distorts the foot. The best grades of these shoes are too
high in price for other than well-to-do people to enjoy them.

ON RAINBOWS. 659

Fig. 19 is a specimen of the best sort of shoe made for children,
but, worn too short and too tight, it will become a means of harm to
the tender foot of the child.

It is hard to understand how men and women can endure to wear
the present style of pointed-toed shoes and boots. The " corn-crop "
is one that never fails, and the prevalent fashion will certainly assure
a yield of unusual abundance. The devotee who wore peas in his shoes
for penance could make ample atonement for all his sins by simply
dressing his feet according to the mode.

The whole subject is worthy of the profound study of the physi-
cian, the shoemaker, and the shoe-wearer, all of whom seem to have
wickedly neglected it. If men and women, in this period of the revival
of the antique, will study the natural and beautiful feet of that era,
when the appreciation of physical beauty was most perfectly devel-
oped, we may hope for some not-far-distant time when our demand
will be for a normal healthy foot in a natural and comfortable cover-
ing, and not for a crippled and distorted, withered, ugly " club," bound
in an instrument of torment.

-+—+-

ON RAINBOWS *

By JOHN TYNDALL, F.E.S.

THE oldest historic reference to the rainbow is known to all : "I
do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a cove-
nant between me and the earth. . . . And the bow shall be in the
cloud ; and I shall look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting
covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is
upon the earth." To the sublime conceptions of the theologian suc-
ceeded the desire for exact knowledge characteristic of the man of
science. Whatever its ultimate cause might have been, the proximate
cause of the rainbow was physical, and the aim of science was to ac-
count for the bow on physical principles. Progress toward this con-
summation was very slow. Slowly the ancients mastered the princi-
ples of reflection. Still more slowly were the laws of refraction dug
from the quarries in which Nature had imbedded them. I use this
language because the laws were incorporate in Nature before they were
discovered by man. Until the time of Alhazan, an Arabian mathe-
matician, who lived at the beginning of the twelfth century, the views
eutertained regarding refraction were utterly vague and incorrect.
After Alhazan came Roger Bacon and Vitellio,f who made and re-

* From author's advance sheets.

| "Whewell (" History of the Inductive Sciences," vol. i, p. 345) describes Yitellio as a
Pole. His mother was a Pole ; but Poggendorff (" Handworterbuch d. Exacten Wissen-
schaften ") claims Vitellio himself as a German, born in Thtiringen. " Vitellio " is de-
scribed as a corruption of Witelo.

66o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

corded many observations and measurements on the subject of refrac-
tion. To them succeeded Kepler, who, taking the results tabulated
by his predecessors, applied his amazing industry to extract from them
their meaning — that is to say, to discover the physical principles which
lay at their root. In this attempt he was less successful than in his
astronomical labors. In 1604 Kepler published his " Supplement to
Vitellio," in which he virtually acknowledged his defeat, by enunciat-
ing an approximate rule, instead of an all-satisfying natural law. The
discovery of such a law, which constitutes one of the chief corner-
stones of optical science, was made by Willebrord Snell, about 1621.*

A ray of light may, for our purposes, be presented to the mind as
a luminous straight line. Let such a ray be supposed to fall vertically
upon a perfectly calm water-surface. The inci'dence, as it is called, is
then perpendicular, and the ray goes through the water without devia-
tion to the right or left. In other words, the ray in the air and the
ray [in the water form one continuous straight line. But the least
deviation from the perpendicular causes the ray to be broken, or " re-
fracted," at the point of incidence. What, then, is the law of refrac-
tion discovered by Snell ? It is this, that no matter how the angle of
incidence, and with it the angle of refraction, may vary, the relative
magnitude of two lines, dependent on these angles, and called their
sines, remains, for the same medium, perfectly unchanged. Measure,
in other words, for various angles, each of these two lines with a scale,
and divide the length of the longer one by that of the shorter ; then,
however the lines individually vary in length, the quotient yielded
by this division remains absolutely the same. It is, in fact, what is
called the index of refraction of the medium.

Science is an organic growth, and accurate measurements give co-
herence to the scientific organism. Were it not for the antecedent
discovery of the law of sines, founded as it was on exact measure-
ments, the rainbow could not have been explained. Again and again,
moreover, the angular distance of the rainbow from the sun had been
determined and found constant. In this divine remembrancer there
was no variableness. A line drawn from the sun to the rainbow, and
another drawn from the rainbow to the observer's eye, always inclosed
an angle of 41°. Whence this steadfastness of position — this inflexi-
ble adherence to a particular angle ? Newton gave to De Dominis f
the credit of the answer ; but we really owe it to the genius of Des-
cartes. He followed with his mind's eye the rays of light impinging
on a rain-drop. He saw them in part reflected from the outside surface
of the drop. He saw them refracted on entering the drop, reflected

* Born at Leyden 1591 ; died 1626.

f Archbishop of Spalatro, and Primate of Dalmatia. Fled to England about 1616 ;
became a Protestant, and was made Dean of Windsor. Returned to Italy and resumed
hia Catholicism ; but was handed over to the Inquisition, and died in prison (Poggen-
dorff's "Biographical Dictionary").

ON RAINBOWS. 661

from its back, and again refracted on their emergence. Descartes
was acquainted with the law of Snell, and, taking up his pen, he cal-
culated, by means of that law, the whole course of the rays. He
proved that the vast majority of them escaped from the drop as diver-
gent rays, and, on this account, soon became so enfeebled as to produce
no sensible effect upon the eye of an observer. At one particular
angle, however — namely, the angle 41° aforesaid — they emerged in a
practically parallel sheaf. In their union was strength, for it was this
particular sheaf which carried the light of the " primary " rainbow to
the eye.

There is a certain form of emotion called intellectual pleasure,
which may be excited by poetry, literature, nature, or art. But I
doubt whether among the pleasures of the intellect there is any more
pure and concentrated than that experienced by the scientific man
when a difficulty which has challenged the human mind for ages melts
before his eyes, and recrystallizes as an illustration of natural law.
This pleasure was doubtless experienced by Descartes when he suc-
ceeded in placing upon its true physical basis the most splendid meteor
of our atmosphere. Descartes showed, moreover, that the " secondary
bow " was produced when the rays of light underwent two reflections
within the drop, and two refractions at the points of incidence and
emergence.

It is said that Descartes behaved ungenerously to Snell — that,
though acquainted with the unpublished papers of the learned Dutch-
man, he failed to acknowledge his indebtedness. On this I will not
dwell, for I notice on the part of the public a tendency, at all events
in some cases, to emphasize such short-comings. The temporary weak-
ness of a great man is often taken as a sample of his whole character.
The spot upon the sun usurps the place of his " surpassing glory."
This is not unfrequent, but it is nevertheless unfair.

Descartes proved that, according to the principles of refraction,
a circular band of light must appear in the heavens exactly where the
rainbow is seen. But how are the colors of the bow to be accounted
for ? Here his penetrative mind came to the very verge of the solu-
tion, but the limits of knowledge at the time barred his further prog-
ress. He connected the colors of the rainbow with those produced
by a prism ; but then these latter needed explanation just as much as
the colors of the bow itself. The solution, indeed, was not possible
until the composite nature of white light had been demonstrated by
Newton. Applying the law of Snell to the different colors of the
spectrum, Newton proved that tbe primary bow must consist of a se-
ries of concentric circular bands, the largest of which is red, and the
smallest violet ; while in the secondary bow these colors must be re-
versed. The main secret of the rainbow, if I may use such language,
was thus revealed.

I have said that each color of the rainbow is carried to the eye by

662

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

a sheaf of approximately parallel rays. But what determines this par-
allelism ? Here our real difficulties begin, but they are to be sur-
mounted by attention. Let us endeavor to follow the course of the
solar rays before and after they impinge upon a spherical drop of
water. Take first of all the ray that passes through the center of the
drop. This particular ray strikes the back of the drop as a perpen-
dicular, its reflected portion returning along its own course. Take
another ray close to this central one and parallel to it — for the sun's
rays when they reach the earth are parallel. When this second ray
enters the drop it is refracted ; on reaching the back of the drop it is
there reflected, being a second time refracted on its emergence from
the drop. Here the incident and the emergent rays inclose a small
angle with each other. Take again a third ray a little farther from
the central one than the last. The drop will act upon it as it acted
upon its neighbor, the incident and emergent rays inclosing in this in-
stance a larger angle than before. As we retreat farther from the
central ray the enlargement of this angle continues up to a certain
point, where it reaches a maximum, after which further retreat from
the central ray diminishes the angle. Now, a maximum resembles the
ridge of a hill, or a water-shed, from which the land falls in a slope at
each side. In the case before us the divergence of the rays when they
quit the rain-drop would be represented by the steepness of the slope.
On the top of the water-shed — that is to say, in the neighborhood of
our maximum — is a kind of summit level, where the slope for some
distance almost disappears. But the disappearance of the slope indi-
cates, in the case of our rain-drop, the absence of divergence. Hence
we find that at our maximum, and close to it, there issues from the
drop a sheaf of rays which are nearly, if not quite, parallel to each
other. These are the so-called " effective rays " of the rainbow.*

Let me here point to a series of measurements which will illustrate
the gradual augmentation of the deflection just referred to until it
reaches its maximum, and its gradual diminution at the other side of
the maximum. The measures correspond to a series of angles of inci-
dence which augment by steps of ten degrees :

i d

10° 10°

20° 19°36'

30° 28° 20'

40° 35° 36'

50° 40° 40'

i d

60° 42° 28'

T0° 39° 48'

80° 31° 4'

90° 15

The figures in the column i express these angles, while under d we
have in each case the accompanying deviation, or the angle inclosed

* There is, in fact, a bundle of rays near the maximum, which, when they enter the
drop, are converged by refraction almost exactly to the same point at its back. If the
convergence were quite exact, then the symmetry of the liquid sphere would cause the
rays to quit the drop as they entered it— that is to say, perfectly parallel. But inasmuch

ON RAINBOWS. 663

by the incident and emergent rays. It will be seen that as the angle
i increases, the deviation also increases up to 42° 28', after which,
although the angle of incidence goes on augmenting, the deviation
becomes less. The maximum 42° 28' corresponds to an incidence
of 60°, but in reality at this point we have already passed, by a small
quantity, the exact maximum, which occurs between 58° and 59°. Its
amount is 42° 30'. This deviation corresponds to the red band of the
rainbow. In a precisely similar manner the other colors rise to their maxi-
mum, and fall on passing beyond it ; the maximum for the violet band
being 40° 30'. The entire width of the primary rainbow is therefore
2°, part of this width being due to the angular magnitude of the sun.
We have thus revealed to us the geometric construction of the
rainbow. But though the step here taken by Descartes and Newton
was a great one, it left the theory of the bow incomplete. Within
the rainbow proper, in certain conditions of the atmosphere, are seen a
series of richly-colored zones, which were not explained by either Des-
cartes or Newton. They are said to have been first described by
Mariotte,* and they long challenged explanation. At this point our
difficulties thicken, but, as before, they are to be overcome by atten-
tion. It belongs to the very essence of a maximum, approached con-
tinuously on both sides, that on the two sides of it pairs of equal value
may be found. The maximum density of water, for example, is 39°
Fahr. Its density when 5° colder, and when 5° warmer, than this
maximum is the same. So, also, with regard to the slopes of our
water-shed. A series of pairs of points of the same elevation can be
found upon the two sides of the ridge ; and, in the case of the rain-
bow, on the two sides of the maximum deviation we have a succession
of pairs of rays having the same deflection. Such rays travel along
the same line, and add their forces together after they quit the drop.
But light, thus re-enforced by the coalescence of non-divergent rays,
ought to reach the eye. It does so ; and were light what it was once
supposed to be — a flight of minute particles sent by luminous bodies
through space — then these pairs of equally deflected rays would dif-
fuse brightness over a large portion of the area within the primary
bow. But inasmuch as light consists of waves and not of particles,
the principle of interference comes into play, in virtue of which waves
can alternately re-enforce and destroy each other. Were the distance
passed over, by the two corresponding rays within the drop, the same,
they would emerge exactly as they entered. But in no case are the

as the convergence is not quite exact, the parallelism after emergence is only approxi-
mate. The emergent rays cut each other at extremely sharp angles, thus forming a
" caustic " which has for its asymptote the ray of maximum deviation In the secondary
bow we have to deal with a minimum, instead of a maximum, the crossing of the incident
and emergent rays producing the observed reversal of the colors. (See Engel and Shell-
bach's diagrams of the rainbow.)

* Prior of St. Martin-sous-Beaune, near Dijon, member of the French Academy of
Sciences ; died in Paris, May, 1684.

664 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

distances the same. The consequence is that when the rays emerge
from the drop they are in a condition either to support or to destroy
each other. By such alternate re-enforcement and destruction, the
colored zones are produced within the primary bow. They are called
" supernumerary bows," and are seen not only within the primary but
sometimes also outside the secondary bow. The condition requisite
for their production is, that the drops which constitute the shower shall
all be of nearly the same size. When the drops are of different sizes,
we have a confused superposition of the different colors, an approxi-
mation to white light being the consequence. This second step in the
explanation of the rainbow was taken by a man the quality of whose
genius resembled that of Descartes or Newton, and who eighty-two
years ago was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Royal
Institution of Great Britain. I refer, of course, to the illustrious
Thomas Young.*

But our task is not, even now, complete. The finishing touch to
the explanation of the rainbow was given by our last, eminent, As-
tronomer Royal, Sir George Airy. Bringing the knowledge possessed
by the founders of the undulatory theory, and that gained by subse-
quent workers to bear upon the question, Sir George Airy showed
that, though Young's general principles were unassailable, his calcula-
tions were sometimes wide of the mark. It was proved by Airy that
the curve of maximum illumination in the rainbow does not quite co-
incide with the geometric curve of Descartes and Newton. He also
extended our knowledge of the supernumerary bows, and corrected
the positions which Young had assigned to them. Finally, Professor
Miller, of Cambridge, and Dr. Galle, of Berlin, illustrated by careful
measurements with the theodolite the agreement which exists between
the theory of Airy and the facts of observation. Thus, from Des-
cartes to Airy, the intellectual force expended in the elucidation of the
rainbow, though broken up into distinct personalities, might be re-
garded as that of an individual artist engaged throughout this time
in lovingly contemplating, revising, and perfecting his work.

We have thus cleared the ground for the series of experiments
which constitute the subject of this discourse. During our brief resi-
dence in the Alps this year, we were favored with some weather of
matchless perfection ; but we had also our share of foggy and drizzly
weather. On the night of the 22d of September, the atmosphere was
especially dark and thick. At 9 p. m. I opened a door at the end of a
passage and looked out into the gloom. Behind me hung a small
lamp, by which the shadow of my body was cast upon the fog. Such
a shadow I had often seen, but in the present case it was accompanied
by an appearance which I had not previously seen. Swept through
the darkness round the shadow, and far beyond, not only its boundary,

* Young's works, edited by Peacock, voL i, pp. 185, 293, 357.

ON RAINBOWS. 665

but also beyond that of the illuminated fog, was a pale, white, lumi-
nous circle, complete except at the point where it was cut through by
the shadow. As I walked out into the fog, this curious halo went in
advance of me. Had not my demerits been so well known to me, I
might have accepted the phenomenon as an evidence of canonization.
Benvenuto Cellini saw something of the kind surrounding his shadow,
and ascribed it forthwith to supernatural favor. I varied the position
and intensity of the lamp, and found even a candle sufficient to render
the luminous band visible. With two crossed laths I roughly meas-
ured the angle subtended by the radius of the circle, and found it to
be practically the angle which had riveted the attention of Descartes
— namely, 41°. This and other facts led me to suspect that the halo
was a circular rainbow. A week subsequently, the air being in a simi-
lar misty condition, the luminous circle was well seen from another
door, the lamp which produced it standing on a table behind me.

It is not, however, necessary to go to the Alps to witness this singu-
lar phenomenon. Amid the heather of Hind Head I have had erected
a hut, to which I escape when my brain needs rest or my muscles lack
vigor. The hut has two doors, one opening to the north and the other
to the southland in it we have been able to occupy ourselves pleasantly
and profitably during the recent misty weather. Removing the shade
from a small petroleum-lamp, and placing the lamp behind me, as I
stood in either doorway, the luminous circles surrounding my shadow
on different nights were very remarkable. Sometimes they were best
to the north, and sometimes the reverse, the difference depending for
the most part on the direction of the wind. On Christmas-night the
atmosphere was particularly good-natured. It was filled with true fog,
through which, however, descended palpably an extremely fine rain.
Both to the north and to the south of the hut the luminous circles
were on this occasion specially bright and well-defined. They were,
as I have said, swept through the fog far beyond its illuminated area,
and it was the darkness against which they were projected which ena-
bled them to shed so much apparent light. The " effective rays," there-
fore, which entered the eye in this observation gave direction, but not
distance, so that the circles appeared to come from a portion of the
atmosphere which had nothing to do with their production. When
the lamp was taken out into the fog, the illumination of the medium
almost obliterated the halo. Once educated, the eye could trace it,
but it was toned down almost to vanishing. There is some advantage,
therefore, in possessing a hut, on a moor or on a mountain, having
doors which limit the area of fog illuminated.

I have now to refer to another phenomenon which is but rarely
seen, and which I had an opportunity of witnessing on Christmas-day.
The mist and drizzle in the early morning had been very dense ; a walk
before breakfast caused my somewhat fluffy pilot dress to be covered
with minute water-globules, which, against the dark background under-

666 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

neath, suggested the bloom of a plum. As the day advanced, the
southeastern heaven became more luminous, and the pale disk of the
sun was at length seen struggling through drifting clouds. At ten
o'clock the sun had become fairly victorious, the heather was adorned
by pendent drops, while certain branching grasses, laden with liquid
pearls, presented, in the sunlight, an appearance of exquisite beauty.
Walking across the common to the Portsmouth road, my wife and I,
on reaching it, turned our faces sunward. The smoke-like fog had
vanished, but its disappearance was accompanied, or perhaps caused,
by the coalescence of its minuter particles into little globules, visible
where they caught the light at a proper angle, but not otherwise.
They followed every eddy of the air, upward, downward, and from
side to side. Their extreme mobility was well calculated to suggest a
notion prevalent on the Continent, that the particles of a fog, instead
of being full droplets, are really little bladders or vesicles. Clouds
are supposed to owe their power of floatation to this cause. This
vesicular theory never struck root in England ; nor has it, I apprehend,
any foundation in fact.

As I stood in the midst of these eddying specks, so visible to the
eye, yet so small and light as to be perfectly impalpable to the skin
both of hands and face, I remarked, " These particles must surely yield
a bow of some kind." Turning my back to the sun, I stooped down so
as to keep well within the layer of particles, which I supposed to be a
shallow one, and looking toward the " Devil's Punch-Bowl," saw the
anticipated phenomenon. A bow without color spanned the Punch-
Bowl, and, though white and pale, was well defined and exhibited an
aspect of weird grandeur. Once or twice I fancied a faint ruddiness
could be discerned on its outer boundary. The stooping was not
necessary, and as we walked along the new Portsmouth road, with the
Punch-Bowl to our left, the white arch marched along with us. At a
certain point we ascended to the old Portsmouth road, whence, with a
flat space of very dark heather in the foreground, we watched the bow.
The sun had then become strong, and the sky above us blue, nothing
which could in any proper sense be called rain existing at the time in
the atmosphere. Suddenly my companion exclaimed, " I see the whole
circle meeting at my feet ! " At the same moment the circle became
visible to me also. It was the darkness of our immediate foreground
that enabled us to see the pale, luminous band projected against it.
We walked round Hind Head Common with the bow almost always
in view. Its crown sometimes disappeared, showing that the minute
globules which produced it did not extend to any great height in the
atmosphere. In such cases, two shining buttresses were left behind,
which, had not the bow been previously seen, would have lacked all
significance. In some of the combes, or valleys, where the floating
particles had collected in greater numbers, the end of the bow plung-
ing into the combe emitted a light of more than the usual brightness.

ON RAINBOWS. 667

During our walk the bow was broken and reformed several times, and,
had it not been for our previous experience, both in the Alps and at
Hind Head, it might well have escaped attention. What this white
bow lost in beauty and intensity, as compared with the ordinary col-
ored bow, was more than atoned for by its weirdness and its novelty
to both observers.

The white rainbow {pare en del blanc) was first described by the
Spaniard, Don Antonio de Ulloa, Lieutenant of the Company of
Gentlemen Guards of the Marine. By order of the King of Spain,
Don Jorge Juan and Ulloa made an expedition to South America, an
account of which is given in two amply-illustrated quarto volumes to
be found in the library of the Royal Institution. The bow was ob-
served from the summit of the mountain Pambamarca, in Peru. The
angle subtended by its radius was 33° 30', which is considerably less
than the angle subtended by the radius of the ordinary bow. Between
the phenomenon observed by us on Christmas-day, and that described
by Ulloa, there are some points of difference. In his case fog of suffi-
cient density existed to enable the shadows of him and his six com-
panions to be seen, each, however, only by the person whose body cast
the shadow, while around the head of each were observed those zones
of color which characterize the " specter of the Brocken." In our case
no shadows were to be seen, for there was no fog-screen on which they
could be cast. This implies also the absence of the zones of color ob-
served by Ulloa.

The white rainbow has been explained in various ways. A learned
Frenchman, M. Bravais, who has written much on the optical phe-
nomena of the atmosphere, and who can claim the additional recom-
mendation of being a distinguished mountaineer, has sought to connect
the bow with the vesicular theory to which I have just ref erred. This
theory, however, is more than doubtful, and it is not necessary.* The
genius of Thomas Young throws light upon this subject as upon so
many others. He showed that the whiteness of the bow was a direct
consequence of the smallness of the drops which produce it. In fact,
the wafted water-specks seen by us upon Hind Head f were the very
kind needed for the production of the phenomenon. But the observa-
tions of Ulloa place his white bow distinctly within the arc that would
be occupied by the ordinary rainbow — that is to say, in the region of
supernumeraries ; and by the action of the supernumeraries upon each
other Ulloa's bow was accounted for by Thomas Young. The smaller

* The vesicular theory was combated very ably in France by the Abbe Raillard, who
has also given an interesting analysis of the rainbow at the end of his translation of my
"Notes on Light."

f Had our refuge in the Alps been built on the southern side of the valley of the
Rhone, so as to enable us to look with the sun behind us into the valley and across it, we
should, I think, have frequently seen the white bow ; whereas on the opposite mountain,
slope, which faces the sun, we have never seen it.

668 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

the drops the broader are the zones of the supernumerary bows, and
Young proved by calculation that when the drops have a diameter
°f 30*00 or ToW °f an incn> the bands overlap each other, and pro-
duce white light by their mixture. Unlike the geometric bow, the
radius of the white bow varies within certain limits, which M. Bravais
shows to be 33° 30' and 41° 46' respectively. In the latter case the
white bow is the ordinary bow deprived of its color by the smallness
of the drops. In all the other cases it is produced by the action of the
supernumeraries.

The physical investigator desires not only to observe natural phe-
nomena but to recreate them — to bring them, that is, under the domin-
ion of experiment. From observation we learn what Nature is willing
to reveal. In experimenting we place her in the witness-box, cross-ex-
amine her, and extract from her knowledge in excess of that which
would, or could, be spontaneously given. Accordingly, on my return
from Switzerland last October, I sought to reproduce in the laboratory
the effects observed among the mountains. My first object, therefore,
was to obtain artificially a mixture of fog and drizzle like that ob-
served from the door of our cottage. A strong cylindrical copper
boiler, sixteen inches high and twelve inches in diameter, was nearly
filled with water, and heated by gas-flames until steam of twenty
pounds pressure was produced. A valve at the top of the boiler was
then opened, when the steam issued violently into the atmosphere,
carrying droplets of water mechanically along with it, and condensing
above to droplets of a similar kind. A fair imitation of the Alpine
atmosphere was thus produced. After a few tentative experiments,
the luminous circle was brought into view, and, having once got hold
of it, the next step was to enhance its intensity. Oil-lamps, the lime-
light, and the naked electric light were tried in succession, the source
of rays being placed in one room, the boiler in another, while the ob-
server stood, with his back to the light, between them. It is not, how-
ever, necessary to dwell upon these first experiments, surpassed as they
were by the arrangements subsequently adopted. My mode of pro-
ceeding was this : The electric light being placed in a camera with a
condensing lens in front, the position of the lens was so fixed as to
produce a beam sufficiently broad to clasp the whole of my head, and
leave an aureole of light around it. It being desirable to lessen as
much as possible the foreign light entering the eye, the beam was
received upon a distant black surface, and it was easy to move the
head until its shadow occupied the center of the illuminated area. To
secure the best effect it was found necessary to stand close to the
boiler, so as to be immersed in the fog and drizzle. The fog, however,
was soon discovered to be a mere nuisance. Instead of enhancing, it
blurred the effect, and I therefore sought to abolish it. Allowing the
steam to issue for a few seconds from the boiler, on closing the valve,
the cloud rapidly melted away, leaving behind it a host of minute

ON RAINBOWS. 669

liquid spherules floating in the beam. A beautiful circular rainbow
was instantly swept through the air in front of the observer. The
primary bow was duly attended by its secondary, with the colors, as
usual, reversed. The opening of the valve for a single second causes
the bows to flash forth. Thus, twenty times in succession, puffs can
be allowed to issue from the boiler, every puff being followed by this
beautiful meteor. The bows produced by single puffs are evanescent,
because the little globules rapidly disappear. Greater permanence
is secured when the valve is left open for an interval sufficient to dis-
charge a copious amount of drizzle into the air.*

Many other appliances for producing a fine rain have been tried,
but a reference to two of them will suffice. The rose of a watering-
pot naturally suggests a means of producing a shower ; and on the
principle of the rose I had some spray-producers constructed. In
each case the outer surface was convex, the thin convex metal plate
being pierced by orifices too small to be seen by the naked eye.
Small as they are, fillets of very sensible magnitude issue from the
orifices, but at some distance below the spray-producer the fillets shake
themselves asunder and form a fine rain. The small orifices are very
liable to get clogged by the fine particles suspended in London water.
In experiments with the rose, filtered water was, therefore, resorted
to. A large vessel was mounted on the roof of the Royal Institution,
from the bottom of which descended vertically a piece of compo-
tubing, an inch in diameter and about twenty feet long. By means of
proper screw fittings, a single rose, or, when it is desired to increase
the magnitude or density of the shower, a group of two, three, or four
roses, is attached to the end of the compo-tube. From these, on the
turning on of a cock, the rain descends. The circular bows produced
by such rain are far richer in color than those produced by the smaller
globules of the condensed steam. To see the effect in all its beauty
and completeness, it is necessary to stand well within the shower, not
outside of it. A water-proof coat and cap are, therefore, needed, to
which a pair of goloshes may be added with advantage. A person
standing outside the beam may see bits of both primary and second-
ary in the places fixed by their respective angles ; but the colors are
washy and unimpressive, while within the shower, with the shadow of
the head occupying its proper position on the screen, the brilliancy of
the effect is extraordinary. The primary clothes itself in the richest

* It is perhaps worth noting here, that when the camera and lens are used the beam
which sends its " effective rays " to the eye may not be more than a foot in width, while
the circular bow engendered by these rays may be, to all appearance, fifteen or twenty
feet in diameter. In such a beam, indeed, the drops which produce the bow must be very
near the eye, for rays from the more distant drops would not reach the required angle.
The apparent distance of the circular bow is often great, in comparison with that of the
originating drops. Both distance and diameter may be made to undergo variations. In
the rainbow we do not see a localized object, but receive a luminous impression, which is
often transferred to a portion of the field of view far removed from the bow's origin.

670 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

tints, while the secondary, though less vivid, shows its colors in sur-
prising strength and purity.

But the primary bow is accompanied by appearances calculated to
attract and rivet attention almost more than the bow itself. I have
already mentioned the existence of effective rays over and above those
which go to form the geometric law. They fall within the primary,
and, to use the words of Thomas Young, " would exhibit a continued
diffusion of fainter light, but for the general law of interference which
divides the light into concentric rings." One could almost wish for
the opportunity of showing Young how literally his words are ful-
filled, and how beautifully his theory is illustrated, by these artificial
circular rainbows. For here the space within the primaries is swept
by concentric supernumerary bands, colored like the rainbow, and
growing gradually narrower as they retreat from the primary. These
spurious bows as they are sometimes called,* which constitute one of
the most splendid illustrations of the principle of interference, are
separated from each other by zones of darkness, where the light-
waves, on being added together, destroy each other. I have counted
as many as eight of these beautiful bands, concentric with the true pri-
mary. The supernumeraries are formed next to the most refrangible
color of the bow, and therefore occur within the primary circle. But,
in the secondary bow, the violet, or most refrangible color, is on the
outside ; and, following the violet of the secondary, I have sometimes
counted as many as five spurious bows. Some notion may be formed
of the intensity of the primary, when the secondary is able to produce
effects of this description.

An extremely handy spray-producer is that employed to moisten
the air in the Houses of Parliament. A fillet of water, issuing under
strong pressure from a small orifice, impinges on a little disk, placed
at a distance of about one twentieth of an inch from the orifice. On
striking the disk, the water spreads laterally, and breaks up into ex-
ceedingly fine spray. Here, also, I have used the spray-producer both
singly and in groups, the latter arrangement being resorted to when
showers of special density were required. In regard to primaries,
secondaries, and supernumeraries, extremely brilliant effects have been
obtained with this form of spray-producer. The quantity of water
called upon being much less than that required by the rose, the fillet-
and-disk instrument produces less flooding of the locality where the
experiments are made. In this latter respect, the steam-spray is par-
ticularly handy. A puff of two seconds' duration suffices to bring
out the bows, the subsequent shower being so light as to render the
use of water-proof clothing unnecessary. In other cases, the incon-
venience of flooding may be avoided to a great extent by turning on
the spray for a short time only, and then cutting off the supply of
water. The vision of the bow being, however, proportionate to the

* A term, I confess, not to my liking.

ON RAINBOWS. 671

duration of the shower, will, when the shower is brief, be evanescent.
Hence, when quiet and continued contemplation of all the phenomena
is desired, the observer must make up his mind to brave the rain.*

In one important particular the spray-producer last described com-
mends itself to our attention. With it we can operate on substances
more costly than water, and obtain rainbows from liquids of the most
various refractive indices. To extend the field of experiment in this
direction, the following arrangement has been devised : A strong
cylindrical iron bottle, wholly or partly filled with the liquid to be
experimented on, is tightly closed by a brass cap. Through the cap
passes a metal tube, soldered air-tight where it crosses the cap, and
ending: near the bottom of the iron bottle. To the free end of this
tube is attached the spray-producer. A second tube passes also through
the cap, but ends above the surface of the liquid. This second tube,
which is long and flexible, is connected with a larger iron bottle, con-
taining compressed air. Hoisting the small bottle to a convenient
height, the tap of the larger bottle is carefully opened, the air passes
through the flexible tube to the smaller bottle, exerts its pressure upon
the surface of the liquid therein contained, drives it up the other
tube, and causes it to impinge with any required degree of force
against the disk of the spray-producer. From this it falls in a fine
rain. A great many liquids have been tested by this arrangement,
and very remarkable results have been obtained. I will confine my-
self here to a reference to two liquids, which commend themselves on
account of their cheapness and of the brilliancy of their effects. Spirit
of turpentine, forced from the iron bottle, and caused to fall in a fine
shower, produces a circular bow of extraordinary intensity and depth
of color. With paraffine-oil or petroleum a similar effect is obtained.

Spectrum analysis, as generally understood, occupies itself with
atomic, or molecular, action, but physical spectrum analysis may be
brought to bear upon our falling showers. I asked myself whether a
composite shower — that is to say, one produced by the mingled spray
of two or more liquids — could not be analyzed and made to declare its
constituents by the production of the circular rainbows proper to the
respective liquids. This was found to be the case. In the ordinary
rainbow the narrowest color-band is produced by its most refrangible
light. In general, the greater the refraction, the smaller will be the
bow. Now, as spirit of turpentine and paraffine are both more refrac-
tive than water, I thought it probable that in a mixed shower of water
and paraffine, or water and turpentine, the smaller and more luminous
circle of the latter ought to be seen within the larger circle of the
former. The result was exactly in accordance with this anticipation.
Beginning with water, and producing its two bows, and then allowing
the turpentine to shower down and mingle with the water, within the

* The rays which form the artificial bow emerge, as might be expected, polarized
from the drops.

672 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

large and beautifully colored water-wheel, the more richly colored
circle of the turpentine makes its appearance. Or, beginning with
turpentine, and forming its concentrated iris ; on turning on the
water-spray, though to the eye the shower seems absolutely homoge-
neous, its true character is instantly declared by the flashing out of the
larger concentric aqueous bow. The water primary is accompanied by
its secondary close at hand. Associated, moreover, with all the bows,
primary and secondary, are the supernumeraries which belong to them ;
and a more superb experimental illustration of optical principles it
would be hardly possible to witness. It is not the less impressive be-
cause extracted from the simple combination of a beam of light and a
shower of rain.

In the "Philosophical Transactions" for 1835, the late' Colonel
Sykes gave a vivid description of a circular solar rainbow, observed
by him in India, during periods when fogs and mists were prevalent
in the chasms of the Ghats of the Deccan :

It was during such periods that I had several opportunities of witnessing that
singular phenomenon, the circular rainbow, which, from its rareness, is spoken
of as a possible occurrence only. The stratum of fog from the Konkun on some
occasions rose somewhat above the level of the top of a precipice forming the
northwest scarp of the hill fort of Hurreechundurghur, from two to three thou-
sand feet perpendicular, without coming over upon the table-land. I was placed
at the edge of the precipice just without the limits of the fog, and with a cloud-
less sun at my back at a very low elevation. Under such a combination of fa-
vorable circumstances, the circular rainbow appeared quite perfect, of the most
vivid colors, one half above the level on which I stood, the other half below it.
Shadows in distinct outline of myself, my horse, and people appeared in the cen-
ter of the circle as a picture, to which the bow formed a resplendent frame. My
attendants were incredulous that the figures they saw under such extraordinary
circumstances could be their own shadows, and they tossed their arms and lega,
about, and put their bodies into various postures, to be assured of the fact by
the corresponding movements of the objects within the circle; and it was some
little time ere the superstitious feeling with which the spectacle was viewed
wore off. From our proximity to the fog, I believe the diameter of the circle at
no time exceeded fifty or sixty feet. The brilliant circle was accompanied by
the usual outer bow in fainter colors.

Mr. E. Colborne Baber, an accomplished and intrepid traveler, has
recently enriched the " Transactions " of the Royal Geographical So-
ciety by a paper of rare merit, in which his travels in Western China
are described. He made there the ascent of Mount O — an eminence
of great celebrity. Its height is about eleven thousand feet above the
sea, and it is flanked on one side by a cliff " a good deal more than a
mile in height." From the edge of this cliff, which is guarded by
posts and chains, you look into an abyss, and if fortune, or rather the
mists, favor you, you see there a miracle, which is thus described by
Mr. Baber :

Naturally enough it is with some trepidation that pilgrims approach this fear-

ON BAINBOWS. 673

some brink, but they are drawn to it by the hope of beholding the mysterious
apparition known as the uFo-Kuang," or "Glory of Buddha," which floats in
mid-air, half-way down. So many eye-witnesses had told me of this wonder,
that I could not doubt ; but I gazed long and steadfastly into the gulf without
success, and came away disappointed, but not incredulous. It was described to
me as a circle of brilliant and many-colored radiance, broken on the outside with
quick flashes and surrounding a central disk as bright as the sun, but more beau-
tiful. Devout Buddhists assert that it is an emanation from the aureole of
Buddha, and a visible sign of the holiness of Mount O.

Impossible as it may be deemed, the phenomenon does really exist. I sup-
pose no better evidence could be desired for the attestation of a Buddhist miracle
than that of a Baptist missionary, unless, indeed, it be, as in this case, that of
two Baptist missionaries. Two gentlemen of that persuasion have ascended the
mountain since my visit, and have seen the Glory of Buddha several times. They
relate that it resembles a golden sun-like disk, inclosed in a ring of prismatic
colors more closely blended than in the rainbow. . . . The missionaries inform
me that it was about three o'clock in the afternoon, near the middle of August,
when they saw the meteor, and that it was only visible when the precipice was
more or less clothed in mist. It appeared to lie on the surface of the mist, and
was always in the direction of a line drawn from the sun through their heads,
as is certified by the fact that the shadow of their heads was seen on the meteor.
They could get their heads out of the way, so to speak, by stooping down, but
are not sure if they could do so by stepping aside. Each spectator, however,
could see the shadows of the by-standers as well as his own projected on to the
appearance. They did not observe any rays spreading from it. The central
disk, they think, is a reflected image of the sun, and the inclosing ring is a rain-
bow. The ring was in thickness about one fourth of the diameter of the disk,
and distant from it by about the same extent ; but the recollection of one inform-
ant was that the ring touched the disk, without any intervening space. The
shadow of a head, when thrown upon it, covered about one eighth of the whole
diameter of the meteor. The rainbow ring was not quite complete in its lower
part, but they attribute this to the interposition of the edge of the precipice..
They see no reason why the appearance should not be visible at night when the
moon is brilliant and appositely placed. They profess themselves to have been
a good deal surprised, but not startled, by the spectacle. They would consider
it remarkable rather than astonishing, and are disposed to call it a very impres-
sive phenomenon.

It is to be regretted that Mr. Baber failed to see the " Glory," and
that we in consequence miss his own description of it. There seems
a slight inadvertence in the statement that the head could be got
out of the way by stooping ; for, as long as the " Glory " remained
a circle, the shadow of the head must have occupied its center.
Stepping aside would simply displace the bow, but not abolish the
shadow.

Thus, starting from the first faint circle seen drawn through the
thick darkness at Alp Lusgen, we have steadily followed and developed
our phenomenon, and ended by rendering the " Glory of Buddha " a
captive of the laboratory. The result might be taken as typical of
larger things.

vol. xxiv. — 43

674 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

SCIENCE VERSUS THE CLASSICS.

By C. A. EGGERT,

PROFESSOR IN THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA.

AT the present stage of the discussion as to the value of the train-
ing in the Latin and Greek languages and their literature, the
testimony of Professor Preyer, of the University of Jena, is not with-
out importance. Professor Preyer is interested, and he not alone
among German professors, in the question of " health and vigor ve?'sus
disease and weakness " of the German youth. In an article " On the
Preservation of Health, " published in the " Deutsche Rundschau," he
made the following pertinent remarks :

" The preservation of health, of the power of sight and muscle, of
the readiness of the mind to receive impressions from nature and man,
of freshness and youthful elasticity, is undoubtedly of much more
consequence for the age of our graduates than a knowledge, no mat-
ter how thorough, of history and the dead languages. A first-class
German college (gymnasium) requires at present the reading of Sopho-
cles, Homer, Thucydides, Demosthenes, Plutarch, Herodotus, Xeno-
phon, Tacitus, Horace, Caesar, Cicero, Livy, Virgil, Sallust, Ovid, and I
find among its text-books Greek, Latin, and Hebrew grammars, a Latin
phrase-book, an ecclesiastical history, and several other books, which,
to be understood, require an amount of brain- work out of proportion to
the results obtained. I find there the very same Latin and Greek au-
thors which I read myself at school some twenty-four to twenty-eight
years ago. The present stand-point of the humanistic gymnasia is, in
spite of some attempts at adaptation to the new time, essentially the
mediaeval one, which was justifiable several centuries ago, because there
was then nothing better than the ancient classics, and particularly no
exact natural science, to furnish means of discipline. At present, how-
ever, there are many books which, both as regards form and contents,
are better fitted for the instruction of young people than the authors
enumerated. Why are not extracts read from the writings of Galilei,
Descartes, Newton, Bacon, Faraday, Luther, Harvey, Frederick the
Great, Leibnitz, Kant, Haller ? At the age of our graduates it is, be-
sides, of the greatest importance that there be less reading and writ-
ing, less taxing of the memory, more exercise of the muscular system.
Not learning, but health and character, should be the main objects in
education and schooling, and therefore the education of the senses
should be emphasized. Only a philologist will deny that grammar,
with its many exceptions, is rather a heavy ballast for the memory
than a proper means for the training of the logical faculty. The stu-
dent involuntarily becomes accustomed to admit exceptions also in
the case of other rules, ethical laws, the laws of nature, and in matters
of his own experience. The elements of mechanics and chemistry —

SCIENCE VERSUS THE CLASSICS. 675

these are objects of instruction which are incomparably more adapted
to the young student for exercises in thinking, while having the addi-
tional advantage of appealing directly to the senses. The most deli-
cate test of correct thinking is furnished by the experiment. The most
natural way to make the intellect independent is through the occupation
with the exact sciences, physics and chemistry, with elementary experi-
ments forming a transition from play to the seriousness of reality ;
but not through translations of the speeches, long since deprived of all
vital interest, of Greek or Roman lawyers, or of the phraseology of
dead languages with their intricate syntax and superfluous particles.

" I seize every opportunity to censure this unnatural condition, and
I blame it in this connection because it injures health. ... I regret
vividly that precisely in Germany, the home of physiology, the coun-
try in which it is honored the most, where the greatest means are
placed at its disposal and laboratories resembling palaces are built for
it, that here where the number of its learned adherents is the largest,
the science is least known among the people at large. . . . Every edu-
cated person has been compelled in his youth to learn a lot of details
— for instance, of Greek mythology, the history of the Church, of the
Old and New Testaments, grammar, etc. — which in later years never
again entered into the circle of his ideas, and only burdened his mem-
ory without the least advantage for his intellectual development, and
his mental and moral education. As to the inner condition of his
own body, the connection of the heart's beating with the breathing
process, of the process of alimentation with the production of animal
heat, and as to what is meant by muscles, nerves, ganglia, and how
the gradual transformation of the tissues goes on in youth and old
age — that is not taught, though there would be time enough for it, if
less attention was paid to unnecessary matters."

If we contrast with these remarks of a scholar and scientist, who
evidently knows whereof he speaks, the utterances of a lawyer like Lord
Coleridge, or of a dealer in aesthetics like Mr. Matthew Arnold, we are
struck with the absolute pertinence of the former, and the thin gener-
ality of the latter. " Sweetness and light " come with health, physical
and mental ; logical acumen comes from an accurate knowledge of
things brought to the test of rigid experiment. Felicity of expression,
or perfect harmony between the thought and its outward dress, is
not limited to Greek and Latin writers, but is as general as literature
itself. And if the progress from general knowledge of disconnected
events to special knowledge of phenomena connected by invisible
and yet omnipresent law everywhere marks the advance of human
thought, why, then, should the intelligent study of the latter be a
less efficient guide to " sweetness and light," or to the " highest edu-
cation," than the study of literatures that dealt for the most part
with problems which possess only slight interest, or none at all, for
the best thinkers of to-day ?

676 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

THE JUKI SYSTEM.

By HENRY H. WILSON.

THIS is an age in which ancestral faiths, traditional customs, and
primitive institutions alike, are receiving the attacks of icono-
clasts. These attacks are always vigorous, usually just, frequently
learned, but sometimes hasty and ill-considered. There was a time
when institutious which had become quite useless were still continued
and revered simply because they were ancient. In our day there is
danger that institutions whose origin, growth, and practical utility are
little understood may be swept away amid the general assault, merely
because they bear the marks of age. Institutions are not the inven-
tions of individuals, but are the outgrowth of the general sentiments
and impulses of the time and place of their origin. Every institution,
however absurd or worthless it may seem to us, must, at one time,
have supplied the actual wants of a part of the human race. It is,
therefore, but reasonable to presume that every institution which we
have inherited contains some principle that may still be useful. Be-
fore assuming to pass judgment upon the merits or demerits of the jury
as an element of our judicial system, it may, therefore, be well to
inquire into its distinguishing features, and to ascertain, as far as may
be, the origin of its several characteristics. Most prominent among
the peculiar features of the modern jury are — 1. That they are called
from the vicinage, or from a limited territory, over which the court in
which they sit has jurisdiction. 2. That they possess no previous
knowledge of the merits of the case which they are impaneled to try.
3. That they consist of a definite number previously determined, usu-
ally twelve. 4. That unanimity or consent of all is necessary to render
a verdict. 5. That they are chosen by lot from a certain number of
qualified citizens previously selected. Of these in their order let us
inquire the origin, growth, and present utility.

1. When, in its earliest stages, the jury was composed of the wit-
nesses who knew more or less about the facts in dispute, it was natural
and indeed necessary to call them from the vicinity where the transac-
tion occurred. This reason becomes the more apparent, when it is re-
membered that the ordinary commercial transactions among our rude
ancestors were accompanied with great ceremony and publicity. For
example, if a man wished to go abroad to buy a horse, he must first
announce his intention to do so to his neighbors, and upon his return
he must give all the circumstances of the purchase, that the requisite
number of witnesses, or men who knew the facts, could be had to
form a jury, should his title ever be questioned. Should he fail to
observe these precautions, he was presumed to have stolen the horse,
or to have obtained it in some unlawful way.* While, in this com-

* Forsyth, " Trial by Jury," p. 71.

THE JURY SYSTEM. 67?

mercial age, when "business extends over such wide territories, and
when commercial transactions are usually evidenced more or less by-
written instruments, a debtor may be sued wherever he can be found,
except in a few special cases, yet, on the other hand, crimes which,
from the nature of the case, are evidenced usually and almost wholly
by living witnesses, must still be tried in the vicinage or county
where they were committed. While most civil actions may now be
brought wherever the defendant may be found, yet the jury must be
called from the vicinity of the forum in which they are tried. In the
early history of the jury, vicinage meant simply the immediate neigh-
borhood, while the same term is now used to denote the whole terri-
tory over which the court has jurisdiction. Calling the jury from the
vicinage would seem to have the advantage of strengthening local
self-government. Litigants usually have the assurance that their
rights are to be determined, not by strangers who may be used to
different customs and habits of life, but by their neighbors, upon
whose rights they in turn may be called upon to adjudicate. And
this feature of the jury has the further advantage that, while the
jurors know nothing about the facts of the particular case, yet the
parties have the benefit of whatever good repute they may sustain
among their neighbors. So, while the reasons that gave rise to this
restriction in calling a jury no longer exist, yet, when reasonable pro-
visions are made for a change of venue in cases of violent popular
feeling, there are some advantages derived from it, and there seems
to be no good reason for a change.

2. We are next to consider the jury with reference to their pre-
vious knowledge of the facts in dispute. As before intimated, in the
early stages of the system the jurors were called because they knew
more or less about the facts in the case, and if, upon examination, it
should be found that any one who was called was entirely ignorant of
the facts to be tried, he was excluded, and another was called in his
stead.* This process was continued until all those who could add
nothing to the jury's knowledge of the case were excused, and the
requisite number of those possessing such information were found.
They were then sworn to render a true verdict, not upon the evidence
produced in court, but upon the knowledge they themselves possessed,
or upon the words of their fathers.f This explains the seeming
anomaly of attaint for a false verdict. Should either party be dis-
satisfied with the verdict, he could demand a jury of double the usual
number, to try the truthfulness of the former verdict.]; This was
simply trying the whole panel for perjury because they possessed the
requisite knowledge, and had sworn that they would render a true
verdict upon that knowledge.

It often happened that controversies would arise when twelve men

* Forsyth, " Trial by Jury," p. 105. \ Stubbs, " Constitutional History," vol. i, p. 616.

% Forsyth, " Trial by Jury," p. 149.

678 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

could not be found who possessed the information necessary, and so,
to those who knew the facts, were added others who joined in the ver-
dict, relying on the knowledge and good faith of their fellow-jurors.
From this the step was short and easily taken to that stage where wit-
nesses not on the panel were called to give testimony concerning facts
within their knowledge.* Here we find a jury, composed of informed
and uninformed jurors, all joining in a common verdict.f Those who
knew the facts in issue were, however, finally separated from those
who did not, \ and while the former gradually assumed the character
of the modern witnesses who simply detail the facts under the sanc-
tion of an oath, the latter became the modern jury essentially as we
now have it — that is, triers of facts upon evidence produced by others.
So, while we challenge a juror because he knows too much about the
facts to be tried, our ancestors objected to him because he did not
know enough about them. Perhaps no other feature of the whole sys-
tem of trial by jury has called forth so much adverse criticism as this.
It is justly said that to rigorously enforce this rule in an age of news-
papers and telegraph would exclude every intelligent citizen from
juries called to try cases of any considerable notoriety. To meet the
demands of our changing civilization, most if not all the States of the
Union have, by statute, relaxed this once universal rule of the com-
mon law. An opinion founded on rumor or newspaper-reading will
not now exclude a *juror, and several of the States have gone to the
doubtful length of authorizing the presiding judge to permit a juror
to sit even though he have a decided opinion as to the merits of the
case, provided he will swear that, notwithstanding such opinion, he
believes he can render a fair and impartial verdict. It would be mere
mockery to submit facts to a man who would not agree to determine
them fairly and impartially ; and if there be any place in which this
rule is rigidly enforced it ought not to be urged against the whole
system, when it can be remedied so easily without detracting at all
from what is of real value in it. The reasonable application of the
rule excluding from the jury those who have formed opinions upon
ex-parte statements of the facts to be tried, certainly tends to insure a
true verdict. No evidence should be laid before those who are to
weigh it, except that which can be subjected to the crucial test of cross-
examination. The frequent instances of a smooth, plausible, persua-
sive narrative in chief being totally contradicted by a shrewd cross-
examination of the same witness shows how unreliable would be any
decision made by either judge or jury upon statements heard out of
court.

3. As to the origin of the number requisite to form a jury, it is
impossible now to say anything definite. The number twelve of which

* Bigelow's " History of Procedure in England," p. 336.

f Forsyth, " Trial by Jury," p. 128.

\ Stubbs, " Constitutional History," vol. i, p. 620.

THE JURY SYSTEM. 679

the jury is composed in all probability came from the accustomed
number of compurgators whom the plaintiff or defendant brought into
court in early times, before the jury was known, to vouch for his ve-
racity.* This being the quantum of proof required to render a party's
testimony credible, it was natural that the same quantum of proof —
that is, the verdict of twelve jurors possessing the necessary informa-
tion— should be required to establish the existence or non-existence of
the alleged facts. Thus determining the number of jurors necessary
to render a verdict was simply fixing the amount of proof necessary to
establish a fact if disputed. When jurors gradually ceased to be wit-
nesses the number twelve was still retained, probably because there
was no particular reason for changing it. Why there should have
been twelve compurgators, why that was fixed upon as the quantum
of proof necessary, it is impossible to say with any degree of certainty.
Various reasons have been given by various antiquaries, none of which
seem to have much more than speculation to support them.

Whatever may have been the origin of the number twelve, the rea-
sons which gave rise to it have doubtless long ceased to exist, yet it
may be difficult to point out why it should be changed. Should a
majority be able to return a verdict, it would be an advantage to have
the jury composed of some odd number, but so long as the law re-
quiring unanimity remains, or should two thirds or three fourths be
allowed to render a verdict, there seems no sufficient reason for chang-
ing the number. Should any change in this respect be made, it would
seem expedient to make the number of jurors in some degree corre-
spond to the importance of the issues to be tried.

4. The fourth characteristic feature of the jury which I shall con-
sider is the requirement of unanimity in the verdict. This, like the
number, is due to the fact that the ancient jury was composed of wit-
nesses. Twelve lawful men must declare upon oath the existence of a
fact before a verdict could be rendered. But, should they disagree,
others were added until twelve out of the whole number were of one
mind, which process was called afforcing the jury. This process re-
sulted in allowing a bare majority to render a verdict whenever that
majority consisted of twelve, f From this it is clear that it was the
quantum of proof required, and not the probability of correctness aris-
ing from unanimity, that gave rise to the rule that twelve men must
consent to the verdict. Since jurors are no longer witnesses, the rule
has survived the circumstances that gave it birth.

Laws affecting millions of people are enacted by a mere majority
and are equally binding on all ; courts of last resort frequently decide
by a bare majority as to the validity or proper application of those
laws ; and it is exceedingly difficult to understand why the unanimous
verdict of twelve men is necessary to establish the existence of the
facts to which such laws apply. When we remember how differently
* Forsyth, " Trial by Jury," p. 62. f Stubbs, " Constitutional History," vol. i, p. 616.

680 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

men are impressed by the occurrence of things that transpire before
their eyes, how impossible it is for us always to agree upon the most
ordinary affairs of life, when we remember that the jury is called only
because two men, who are the litigants, can not agree, we will see the
absurdity of putting twelve men into the jury-box to hear the most
contradictory evidence of a particular fact, and then say that they
must all agree ! In many cases this agreement, when reached, is only
apparent, and occasionally a false verdict is doubtless procured by the
tenacity of some determined juryman. And still more frequently are
juries discharged because they can not agree, and the parties and the
public are subjected to the expense of another trial.

To give moderate room for honest difference of opinion, to disarm
occasional prejudice and render corruption fruitless, I think in all civil
causes three fourths of the jury ought to be able to return a verdict.
It has been urged that the rule requiring unanimity is necessary to
insure that every juror shall be heard and the grounds of his opinion
considered. Indeed, this has been defended as the only redeeming
feature of the whole system of trial by jury. If, after hearing all the
evidence adduced, after counsel have exhausted their powers in pre-
senting their respective sides of the case, after the presiding judge
has pointed out the issues to be determined and laid down the rules of
law applicable to them — I say, if, after all this, nine out of the twelve
are agreed and are ready to render a verdict without the advice of the
other three, it is very probable that the preponderance of evidence is
on their side. In Nevada the three-fourths rule in civil cases has been
in successful operation nearly twenty years, and bench, bar, and people
alike, seem to be well satisfied with the result. Although this provis-
ion is in their State Constitution,* yet the Legislature by a two-thirds
vote might introduce the rule of unanimity. That no attempt has
been made to do so speaks volumes for the practical workings of the
three-fourths rule. While I think that three fourths may safely be
allowed to return a verdict in civil causes, I am inclined to believe
that in criminal causes considerations of humanity demand, and the
State can afford to grant every individual, such a strong presumption
of innocence that only a unanimous verdict of twelve of his peers shall
be able to overcome it. In civil causes, where a preponderance of
evidence entitles either party to a verdict, it is illogical to require una-
nimity, but in criminal cases, where the defendant must be proved
guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, it would be absurd to say that he
may be convicted while a single voice from the jury-box is heard pro-
testing that he is innocent. Should it be impossible for a jury in a
criminal case to agree, they are discharged, and the defendant is put
on trial again before another jury. So justice can be defeated only
by the unanimous consent of twelve sworn men of the neighborhood,
and, if justice may sometimes be delayed and extra expense incurred

* Constitution of Nevada, Article I, section 3.

THE JURY SYSTEM, 681

by the disagreement of a jury, the State can afford to wait, and no ex-
pense should be balanced against the possibility of innocence. So I
think that justice will be best insured by retaining the rule requiring
unanimity in criminal cases, and in all civil causes permitting three
fourths to render a verdict.

5. The fact that jurymen are chosen by lot has been the subject of
no little ridicule, and yet I think no other method would, on the whole,
prove as satisfactory. When juries were composed of those who
knew the facts in dispute, the panel must have been drawn from a
limited number, and often the whole number of witnesses were not
sufficient to make a complete panel. At that time, knowledge of the
matter in controversy determined who should be called to sit as jurors ;
but, when the jury became a tribunal for the trial of facts upon the
testimony of others, the jurors were called from the whole number of
citizens possessing the requisite qualifications. In most of the States
of the Union the qualifications of a juror are the same as those of a
voter, and the panel is chosen by lot. In this way the personal ele-
ment is, if not eliminated, at least restrained, and the impersonal ele-
ment— blind chance — that knows neither friend nor foe, decides who
shall be the arbitrators. In popular election Justice may be defeated,
but Fortune always gives her an even chance.

Having described some of the leading characteristics of the mod-
ern jury, I shall now consider some of its advantages — first, as a judi-
cial tribunal ; and, secondly, as a political institution. No one now
questions the utility of the separation of the legislative or law-mak-
ing power from the judicial or law-interpreting power. No less im-
portant is the separation of the power that decides upon the facts
from the power that applies the law to the facts when so determined.
The former is the province of the jury, and the latter that of the
judge. It is the duty, and the whole duty, of the jury to determine
whether certain facts do or do not exist. It is sometimes said that in
criminal cases the jury are the judges of the law as well as the fact.
This misapprehension arises, I think, from the nature and effect of the
verdict rendered in such cases. On all issues joined in criminal cases
the jury may bring in a general verdict of "guilty" or " not guilty,"
and, if the latter, the defendant can not be tried again, no matter how
erroneous the verdict may be. And this, too, is the result, even though
the verdict be contrary to the express instruction of the court. The
jury are, however, bound to follow the instructions of the court in all
matters of law, and if they do not they are false to their trust, how-
ever remediless the state may be. If, on the other hand, the jury
return a special verdict, that is, that certain facts do exist, the court
is bound either to act upon those facts as true, or set the verdict aside
and submit the facts to another jury. Now, suppose the judge should
usurp the power of the jury, and should, notwithstanding the verdict,
declare the alleged facts untrue, or decide that the facts though true

682 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

do not constitute a crime, although by express statute they do, and
suppose the judge so deciding, however erroneously, should discharge
the defendant, would not the result be the same, and the state equally
remediless ? To this it will hardly be answered that judges can always
be depended upon to do their duty, while jurors can not. The truth
is, that the sole duty of the jury is to find the facts, and that of the
judge to apply the law, and when either does more, except in those
cases where the judge tries both, it is a usurpation of power.

Bearing in mind the fact that the only work of the jury is to de-
termine the truth or falsity of certain alleged facts, let us inquire
whether or not and how well it is adapted to this purpose. It is well
known that technical training in any branch of learning has a peculiar
influence on the mind. The mind by such training develops certain
idiosyncrasies, and nothing is more common than to see an eminent
specialist whose judgment is quite untrustworthy out of his specialty.
A mind so trained usually adopts certain more or less artificial tests of
truth, to which every proposition is submitted with a predetermination
as to the relative weight of certain classes of evidence. Nothing is
more boundless than the variety of facts that may be submitted for
judicial determination, and these facts do not usually belong to any
specialty, but arise out of the ordinary transactions of all men. No
trade or profession can claim a monopoly of facts, and I am of the
opinion that twelve men, coming to the work unbiased and untram-
meled by any technical rules or artificial tests, are more likely to arrive
at the truth in the ordinary affairs of life than any one, or indeed any
number of specialists.

Perhaps the most frequent error alleged in appeals to the superior
courts is that the verdict of the jury is against the weight of evidence,
which is the nature of an appeal from the verdict of the jury on the
facts, and yet it is safe to say that not one case in fifty is reversed on
that ground. And, for every case reversed because the jury were
wrong, more than a score are reversed for some error committed by
the presiding judge in matters of law. I am aware that it is often
said that only those who have the bad side of cases want to try them
to a jury. This statement has little or no foundation in fact. Re-
cently one of the foremost jurists of this country, who certainly is
not overmuch attached to the jury system, said : "I am also forced
to admit, however, that even in civil cases my experience as a judge
has been much more favorable to jury trials than it was as a practi-
tioner. And I am bound to say that an intelligent and unprejudiced
jury, when such can be obtained, who are instructed in the law with
such clearness, precision, and brevity as will present their duty in bold
relief, are rarely mistaken in regard to the facts which they are called
upon to find."* I think experience has shown what reason would

* Judge Miller's address before the New York Bar Association, " Albany Law Jour-
nal," vol. xviii, p. 409.

THE JURY SYSTEM. 683

suggest, that the jury, with the modifications I have pointed out, is
well adapted for its special work — the finding of facts.

But even stronger are the reasons for retaining the jury as a po-
litical institution. Some one has tersely said that it is not so neces-
sary that the people get justice as that they should think they do.
While this is, perhaps, putting it a little too strongly, yet there is
much truth in it. Judges are usually chosen from a rank far above
the mass of litigants, and the latter doubtless often feel that they are
appealing for justice to one who has but little in common with the
class to which they belong. And at this time, when there is a strong
tendency to lengthen the tenure of judicial offices, it would be dan-
gerous to cut off the popular branch of our judicature. The question
that most threatens this country at present is the question of capital
and labor. The tyranny that menaces us is not the tyranny of kings,
but that of corporate capital. Whether the bench is really corrupted
by the vast moneyed interests of the country is not material to the
issue, if there is a deep-rooted suspicion of it in the minds of the
people. Most men would feel safer, in a contest with one of these
modern leviathans, to submit the facts in dispute to twelve men called
from the vicinage, but what twelve no one could point out until the
litigants had made the last challenge and the jury is in the custody of
a sworn officer and beyond the reach of corrupting influences. Juries
are doubtless sometimes corrupt, and sometimes go wrong by mistake,
but the verdict of a jury, however erroneous, affects only one case,
and neither establishes a bad precedent nor materially lessens our con-
fidence in the system. The verdict deciding only the facts of the par-
ticular case has no influence upon the rights of any but the parties to
that suit, and it is altogether improbable that the same twelve men
will ever be called upon to sit together to try another case. So, how-
ever erroneous may be the verdict, and although every one may con-
cede that it is wrong, no serious consequences follow, and the litigants
in the next case proceed with the usual confidence in the justice of
their fellow-men. It is only those who have a bad cause, or have lost
confidence in mankind, that fear the jury. But how is it with the
judges ? Instead of their power ending with a single case, in the Fed-
eral courts and in seven States of the Union they hold their offices
during life, and in the others for a term ranging from six to twenty-
one years ; and our present cumbrous method of impeachment, which
can be effectual for nothing less than a " high crime or misdemeanor,"
affords but slight protection against ignorance, tyranny, or even cor-
ruption on the bench. If through ignorance or prejudice a judge has
arrived at a wrong conclusion in one case, and from that conclusion
there is no appeal, how can he be trusted in the next. And, still more,
if he has yielded to the corrupting influences of power, or, what is
practically the same thing, if the people believe he has so yielded, in
one case, who but the powerful can trust him afterward ? Ignorance

684 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

or corruption in a jury may affect a particular case, but ignorance or
corruption of a judge affects the whole system upon which depend the
rights cf all. If a corrupt jury taints the waters for a moment, to
become pure again the next, a corrupt judge poisons at its head the
fountain from which all must drink. I am inclined to think that the
corrupting influences of corporations upon our courts is greatly exag-
gerated, but it would be idle to underrate the strength of public opin-
ion on this subject. When so many suspect the purity of the bench,
we should consider well before we eliminate the popular element from
our courts of justice. Let us do nothing to exclude in fact or alienate
in feeling the people from one of our most important institutions lest
the evil spirit should whisper in the ear of poverty the all-too-powerful
argument of Romeo :

" Art thou so bare, and full of wretchedness,
And f ear'sfc to die ? famine is in thy cheeks,
Need and oppression starveth in thy eyes,
Contempt and beggary hang upon thy back,
The world is not thy friend, nor the world's law ;
The world affords no law to make thee rich ;
Then be not poor, but break it and take this."

What do the opponents of the jury offer in its stead ? The only
substitute that has yet been proposed is an increase of judges and trial
to the court in all cases. We have already seen that one of the most
useful features of the system of trial by jury is the separation of the
j)Ower that tries the facts from that which decides the law. A ques-
tion of fact is tried upon evidence, in the weighing and considering of
which the mind should be trammeled by no artificial tests or technical
rules. On the other hand, to determine questions of law requires long
experience and accurate knowledge of rules and principles evolved
from the common experience of mankind. The judge must be learned
in the common law scattered through thousands of volumes of reported
cases, as well as thoroughly acquainted with the statutory and consti-
tutional law of the land. A finding of fact in one case can not, from
the nature of the circumstances, be any aid in determining another
set of facts upon different evidence in another case, and hence a find-
ing of fact, or a verdict of a jury, can have no authority as a prece-
dent. On the other hand, a determination of a principle of law is
final not only in that particular case, but in all similar cases in that
jurisdiction — thus a court of last resort, in deciding a single case, may
settle a principle of law upon which scores of other cases depend.
Now, it is this separation of the trial of the law and the facts — func-
tions essentially different in their nature and requiring entirely differ-
ent kinds of training and preparation — that has enabled our courts to
build up, develop, and unify our system of jurisprudence. This divis-
ion of labor, which has had much to do in producing the certainty,
completeness, and symmetry of our law, would be wholly lost by the

THE JURY SYSTEM. 685

proposed change. It is suggested that, instead of a jury of twelve
untrained men, three or five judges experienced in the law should de-
termine hoth the law and the fact, and that such decision be final. This
would certainly have the virtue of producing speedy justice, if justice
at all. But what would be the result ? Let us suppose a case. The
Legislature passes a law which the judicial tribunal of one county
holds to be unconstitutional, while that of another county declares it
constitutional, and in two other counties it is construed to mean two
quite different things, and so on through fifty counties, each of which
has an independent, distinct, and final judicature. We see at a glance
that there must be one supreme judicature whose jurisdiction is con-
terminous with that of the Legislature, whose will it interprets. The
confusion now existing between the thirty-eight States in this regard
is the source of much regret, and might have been fatal to the exist-
ence of the Union had it not been for the Federal Supreme Court,
whose silent but constant influence gradually overcame the violence of
contending factions. Then, by whatever tribunal cases are first tried,
we must always have one Supreme or Appellate Court, and it is fair to
presume that about as many cases would find their way into the higher
courts, if first tried to the court, as if tried by a jury. And the pro-
posed system would have the further disadvantage that, the higher a
case were carried through the successive tribunals, the less would be
the probability of a correct determination of the facts. While the ap-
pellate tribunals are usually best qualified to settle a question of law,
they are, from their technical training and tendency to generalize, least
qualified to determine a question of fact. Nor can we reasonably ex-
pect a reduction in expense by employing high-salaried specialists to
do that which the ordinary laymen can do much better.

It is suggested, however, that justice would more certainly be
meted out to litigants if the whole subject of controversy were in the
hands of a few experienced men. Might not the same be said of the leg-
islative branch of our Government ? A score of well-trained lawyers
could doubtless enact a more consistent and probably a better code
of laws than any of our heterogeneous Legislatures, yet this would
scarcely induce the people to make the change. Indeed, the strongest,
cheapest, and best government is an absolute despotism in the hands
of a strong, wise, good man. But the character of an institution
ought to be estimated by its effects on the people, and that is on the
whole the best which produces the best results. It is not only what
people are called upon to actually do, but also the possibilities that lie
before them, that affects their character. The occasional deposit of a
ballot is not of itself much of a public education, but the possibilities
and responsibilities that the elective franchise brings with it can
scarcely be overestimated in their influence on the character of a peo-
ple. Much the same is the influence of the popular branch of our
system of judicature. While the direct influence of sitting occasion-

686 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ally as a juror ought not to be underestimated, yet I think still greater
good comes from the increased responsibility of the people at large.
There will be fewer criminals when every citizen feels that he is in
some sense a conservator of the peace. The direct educating influ-
ence of trial by jury has often been remarked by those who have
studied the influences that mold the character of nations. Bentham,
who certainly will not be charged with venerating anything be-
cause it is old, in speaking of the jury as a public educator says :
" Every judicatory, of which a jury forms a part, is a school of jus-
tice ; without the name, it is so in effect. In it the part of master is
performed by the judge ; the part of scholars by the jurymen ; and
what takes place, takes place in a company more or less numerous
of spectators. The representation there given is given by a variety
of actors, appearing in so many different parts." * I believe that the
people will not willingly give up an institution to which they owe
so much of their self-reliance and ability to govern themselves until
stronger reasons than any yet suggested are presented.

-♦♦♦-

s

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY.

By W. MATTIEU WILLIAMS.
XXIV.

INCE the publication of my last paper, I have learned the proper
name of the Swiss compound there described as fondevin, accord-
ing to my recollection of its pronunciation in Switzerland. In an old
edition of Mrs. Rundell's " Domestic Cookery," it is described as fondu.
A similar dish is described in that useful book " Cre-Fydd's Family
Fare," under the name of cheese souffle or fondu. I had looked for it
in more pretentious works, especially in the most pretentious and the
most disappointing one I have yet been tempted to purchase, viz., the
twenty-seventh edition of Francatelli's "Modern Cook," a work
which I can not recommend to anybody who has less than £20,000 a
year and a corresponding luxury of liver.

Amid all the culinary monstrosities of these " high-class " manuals,
I fail to find anything concerning the cookery of cheese that is worth
the attention of my readers. Francatelli has, under the name of " Eggs
a la Swisse," a sort of fondu, but decidedly inferior to the common
fondu of the humble Swiss osteria, as he lays the eggs upon slices of
cheese, and prescribes especially that the yolks shall not be broken ;
omits the milk, but substitutes (for high-class extravagance' sake, I
suppose) " a gill of double cream," to be poured over the top. Thus

* Benthatn's works, vol. ii, p. 125.

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY. 687

the cheese is not intermingled with the egg, lest it should spoil the ap-
pearance of the unbroken yolks, its casein is made leathery instead of
being dissolved, and the substitution of sixpenny worth of double
cream for a halfpenny worth of milk supplies the high-class victim
with fivepence halfpenny worth of biliary derangement.

In Gouffe's "Royal Cookery-Book" (the Household Edition of
which contains a great deal that is really useful to an English house-
wife) I find a better recipe under the name of cheese souffles. He says :
"Put two and one fourth ounces of flour in a stewpan, with one and
a half pint of milk ; season with salt and pepper ; stew over the fire
till boiling, and, should there be any lumps, strain the souffle paste
through a tammy-cloth ; add seven ounces of grated Parmesan cheese,
and seven yolks of eggs ; whip the whites till they are firm, and add
them to the mixture ; fill some paper cases with it, and bake in the
oven for fifteen minutes."

Cre-Fydd says : " Grate six ounces of rich cheese (Parmesan is the
best) ; put it into an enameled saucepan, with a teaspoonful of flour
of mustard, a saltspoonful of white pepper, a grain of cayenne, the
sixth part of a nutmeg, grated, two ounces of butter, two tablespoon-
fuls of baked flour, and a gill of new milk ; stir it over a slow fire till it
becomes like smooth, thick cream (but it must not boil) ; add the
well-beaten yolks of six eggs, beat for ten minutes, then add the whites
of the eggs beaten to a stiff froth ; put the mixture into a tin or a card-
board mold, and bake in a quick oven for twenty minutes. Serve im-
mediately."

Here is a true cookery of cheese by solution, and the result is an
excellent dish. But there is some unnecesary complication and kitchen
pedantry involved. The following is my own simplified recipe :

Take one fourth of a pound of grated cheese ; add it to a gill of
milk in which is dissolved as much powdered bicarbonate of potash as
will stand upon a threepenny-piece ; mustard, pepper, etc., as prescribed
above by Cre-Fydd.* Heat this carefully until the cheese is com-
pletely dissolved. Then beat up three eggs, yolk and whites together,
and add them to this solution of cheese, stirring the whole. Now take
a shallow metal or earthenware dish or tray that will bear heating ;
put a little butter on this, aud heat the butter till it frizzles. Then
pour the mixture into this, and bake or fry it until it is nearly solidified.

A cheaper dish may be made by increasing the proportion of cheese
— say, six to eight ounces to three eggs, or only one egg to a quarter
pound of cheese for a hard-working man with powerful digestion.

The chief difficulty in preparing this dish conveniently is that of

* Before the Adulteration Act was passed, mustard-flour was usually mixed with well-
dried wheaten-flour, whereby the redundant oil was absorbed, and the mixture was a dry
powder. Now it is different, being pure powdered mustard-seed, and usually rather
damp. It not only lies closer, but is much stronger. Therefore, in following any recipe
of old cookery-books, only about half the stated quantity should be used.

688 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

obtaining suitable vessels for the final frying or baking, as each por-
tion should be poured into, and fried or baked in, a separate dish, so
that each may, as in Switzerland, have his own fondu complete, and
eat it from the dish as it comes from the fire. As demand creates
supply, our ironmongers, etc., will soon learn to meet this demand if
it arises. I am about writing to Messrs. Griffiths & Browett, of Bir-
mingham, large manufacturers of what is technically called "hollow-
ware " — i. e., vessels of all kinds knocked up from a single piece of
metal without any soldering — and have little doubt that they will
speedily produce suitable fondu dishes according to my specification,
and supply them to the shopkeepers.

The bicarbonate of potash is an original novelty that will possibly
alarm some of my non-chemical readers. I advocate its use for two
reasons : First, it effects a better solution of the casein by neutraliz-
ing the free lactic acid that inevitably exists in milk supplied to towns,
and any free acid that may remain in the cheese. At a farm-house
where the milk is just drawn from the cow it is unnecessary for this
purpose, as such new milk is itself slightly alkaline. My second reason
is physiological, and of greater weight. Salts of potash are necessary
constituents of human food. They exist in all kinds of wholesome
vegetables and fruits, and in the juices of fresh meat, but they are
wanting in cheese, having, on account of their great solubility, been
left behind in the whey.

This absence of potash appears to me to be the one serious objec-
tion to the free use of cheese-diet. The Swiss peasant escapes the
mischief by his abundant salads, which eaten raw contain all their
potash salts, instead of leaving the greater part in the saucepan, as do
cabbages, etc., when cooked in boiling water. In Norway, where
salads are scarce, the bonder and his housemen have at times suffered
greatly from scurvy, especially in the far north, and would be severely
victimized but for special remedies that they use (the mottebeer, cran-
berry, etc., grown and preserved especially for the purpose. The Lap-
landers make a broth of scurvy-grass and similar herbs). Mr. Lang
attributes their recent immunity from scurvy, which was once a sore
plague among them, to the introduction of the potato.

Scurvy on board ship results from eating salt meat, the potash of
which has escaped by exosmosis into the brine or pickle. The sailor
now escapes it by drinking citrate, of potash in the form of lime-juice,
and by alternating salt-junk with rations of tinned meats.

I once lived for six days on bread and cheese only, tasting no other
food. I had, in company with C. M. Clayton, son of the Senator of
Delaware (who negotiated the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty), taken a pas-
sage from Malta to Athens in a little schooner, and expecting a three
days' journey we took no other rations than a lump of Cheshire cheese
and a supply of bread. Bad weather doubled the expected length of
our journey.

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY. 689

We were both young, and, proud of our hardihood in bearing pri-
vations, were stanch disciples of Diogenes ; but on the last day we
succumbed, and bartered the remainder of our bread and cheese for
some of the boiled horse-beans and cabbage-broth of the forecastle.
The cheese, highly relished at first, had become positively nauseous,
and our craving for the vegetable broth was absurd, considering the
full view we had of its constituents, and of the dirtiness of its cooks.

I attribute this to the lack of potash salts in the cheese and bread.
It was similar to the craving for common salt by cattle that lack ne-
cessary chlorides in their food. I am satisfied that cheese can never
take the place in an economic dietary otherwise justified by its nutri-
tious composition, unless this deficiency of potash is somehow sup-
plied. My device of using it with milk as a solvent supplies it in a
simple and natural manner.

XXV.

My first acquaintance with the rational cookery of cheese was in
the autumn of 1842, when I dined with the monks of St. Bernard.
Being the only guest, I was the first to be supplied with soup, and
then came a dish of grated cheese. Being young and bashful, I was
ashamed to display my ignorance by asking what I was to do with
the cheese, but made a bold dash, nevertheless, and sprinkled some
of it into my soup. I then learned that my guess was quite correct ;
the prior and the monks did the same.

On walking on to Italy I learned that there such use of cheese is
universal. Minestra without Parmesan would there be regarded as
we in England should regard muffins and crumpets without butter.
During the forty years that have elapsed since my first sojourn in
Italy my sympathies are continually lacerated when I contemplate the
melancholy spectacle of human beings eating thin soup without any
grated cheese.

Not only in soups, but in many other dishes, it is similarly used.
As an example, I may name " Risotto a la Milanese," a delicious,
wholesome, and economical dish — a sort of stew composed of rice and
the giblets of fowls, usually charged about twopence to threepence
per portion at Italian restaurants. This is always served with grated
Parmesan. The same with the many varieties of paste, of which maca-
roni and vermicelli are the best known in this country.

In all these the cheese is sprinkled over, and then stirred into the
soup, etc., while it is hot. The cheese being finely divided is fused
at once, and, being fused in liquid, is thus delicately cooked. This is
quite different from the " macaroni cheese " commonly prej>ared in
England by depositing macaroni in a pie-dish, and then covering it
with a stratum of grated cheese, and placing this in an oven or before
a fire until the cheese is desiccated, browned, and converted into a
horny, caseous form of carbon that would induce chronic dyspepsia in
the stomach of a wild-boar if he fed upon it for a week.
vol. xxiv. — 44

690 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

In all preparations of Italian pastes, risottos, purees, etc., the cheese
is intimately mixed throughout, and softened and diffused thereby in
the manner above described.

The Italians themselves imagine that only their own Parmesan
cheese is fit for this purpose, and have infected many Englishmen with
the same idea. Thus it happens that fancy prices are paid in this
country for that particular cheese, which is of the same class as the
cheese known in our midland counties as " skim dick," and sold there
at about f ourpence per pound, or given by the farmers to their laborers.
It is cheese " that has sent its butter to market," being made from
the skim-milk which remains in the dairy after the pigs have been
fully supplied.

I have used this kind of cheese as a substitute for Parmesan, and
I find it quite satisfactory, though it has not exactly the same fine
flavor as the best qualities of Parmesan, but is equal to that commonly
used by the Italian millions. The only fault of our ordinary whole-
milk English and American cheeses is that they are too rich, and can
not be so finely grated on account of their more unctuous structure,
due to the cream they contain.

I note that in the recipes of high-class cookery-books, where Par-
mesan is prescribed, cream is commonly added. Sensible English
cooks, who use Cheshire, Cheddar, or good American cheese, are
practically including the Parmesan and the cream in natural combina-
tion. By allowing these cheeses to dry, or by setting aside the outer
part of the cheese for the purpose, the difficulty of grating is over-
come.

I have now to communicate another result of my cheese-cooking
researches, viz., a new dish — cheese-porridge — or, I may say, a new
class of dishes — cheese-porridges. They are not intended for epicures,
not for swine who only live to eat, but for men and women who eat
in order to live and work. These combinations of cheese are more
especially fitted for those whose work is muscular, and who work in
the open air. Sedentary brain-workers like myself should use them
carefully, lest they suffer from over-nutrition, which is but a few de-
grees worse than partial starvation.

Typical cheese-porridge is ordinary oatmeal-porridge made in the
usual manner, but to which grated cheese is added, either while in the
cookery-pot or after it is taken out, and yet as hot as possible. It
should be sprinkled gradually and well stirred in.

Another kind of cheese-porridge or cheese-pudding is made by
adding cheese to baked potatoes — the potatoes to be taken out of their
skins and well mashed while the grated cheese is sprinkled and inter-
mingled. A little milk may or may not be added, according to taste
and convenience. This is better suited for those whose occupations
are sedentary, potatoes being less nutritious and more easily digested
than oatmeal. They are chiefly composed of starch, which is a heat-

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY. 691

giver or fattener, while the cheese is highly nitrogenous, and sup-
plies the elements in which the potato is deficient, the two together
forming a fair approach to the theoretically demanded balance of
constituents.

I say baked potatoes rather than boiled, and perhaps should explain
my reasons, though in doing so I anticipate what I intended to say
when on the^subject of vegetable food.

Raw potatoes contain potash salts which are easily soluble in water.
I find that when the potato is boiled some of the potash comes out
into the water, and thus the vegetable is robbed of a very valuable
constituent. The baked potato contains all its original saline constit-
uents which, as I have already stated, are specially demanded as an
addition to cheese-food.

Hasty-pudding made, as usual, of wheat-flour, may be converted
from an insipid to a savory and highly nutritious porridge by the ad-
dition of cheese in like manner.

The same with boiled rice, whether whole or ground, also sago,
tapioca, and other forms of edible starch. Supposing whole rice is
used, and I think this the best, the cheese may be sprinkled among
the grains of rice and well stirred or mashed up with them. The
addition of a little brown gravy to this gives us an Italian risotto.

Peas-pudding is not improved by cheese. The chemistry of this
will come out when I explain the composition of peas, beans, etc.

I might enumerate other methods of cooking cheese by thus adding
it in a finely divided state to other kinds of food, but if I were to ex-
press my own convictions on the subject I should stir up prejudice by
naming some mixtures which some people would denounce. As an ex-
ample I may refer to a dish which I invented more than twenty years
ago — viz., fish and cheese pudding, made by taking the remains from
a dish of boiled codfish, haddock, or other white fish, mashing it with
bread-crumbs, grated cheese, and ketchup, then warming in an oven
and serving after the usual manner of scalloped fish. Any remains
of oyster-sauce may be advantageously included.

I find this delicious, but others may not. I frequently add grated
cheese to boiled fish as ordinarily served, and have lately made a fish
sauce by dissolving grated cheese in milk with the aid of a little bi-
carbonate of potash. I suggest these cheese mixtures to others with
some misgiving as regards palatability, after learning the revelations
of Darwin on the persistence of heredity. It is quite possible that,
being a compound of the Swiss Mattieu with the Welsh Williams,
cheese on both sides, I may inherit an abnormal fondness for this
staple food of the mountaineers.

Be this as it may, so far as the mere palate is concerned, I have
full confidence in the chemistry of all my advocacy of cheese and its
cookery. Rendered digestible by simple and suitable cookery, and
added, with a little potash salt, to farinaceous food of all kinds, it

692 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

affords exactly what is required to supply a theoretically complete
and a most economical dietary, without the aid of any other kind of
animal food. The potash salts may be advantageously supplied by a
liberal second course of fruit or salad. — Knowledge.

-•~*~*-

SCIENCE AND SAFETY AT SEA.

By KICHAKD A. PEOCTOE.

IN the autumn of 1879 the steamship Arizona, five thousand tons,
at that time the swiftest ocean-going steamship in existence, was
urging her way, at the rate of some fifteen knots an hour, on the
homeward course from New York, whence she had sailed but a day or
two before. It was night, and there was a light haze, but of danger
from collision with a passing ship there was little or none. The cap-
tain and crew knew of no special reason for watchfulness, and the
passengers were altogether free from anxiety. Indeed, it so chanced
that at a time when, in reality, the most imminent danger threatened
every soul on board, many of the saloon-passengers were engaged in
purchasing at auction the numbers for the next day's run — runs below
three hundred and fifty knots being sold at a very low rate indeed.
Suddenly a crash was heard, the ship's swift progress was stopped,
and a few minutes later every one knew that the Arizona had run dead
upon an enormous iceberg, the spires and pinnacles of which could be
seen hanging almost over the ship, and gleaming threateningly in the
rays of her mast-head light. But the risk that threatened her living
freight was not that of being crushed by falling ice. The bows of the
Arizona were seen to be slowly sinking, and presently there was a
well-marked lurch to starboard. The fore compartment and a smaller
6ide compartment were filling. It was an anxious time for all on
board. Many an eye was turned toward the boats, and the more ex-
perienced thought of the weary miles which separated them from the
nearest land, and of the poor chance that a passing steamer might pick
up the Arizona's boats at sea. Fortunately, the builders of the Ari-
zona had done their work faithfully and well. Like another ship of
the same line which had been exposed to the same risk, save that her
speed was less, and therefore the danger of the shock diminished, the
Arizona, though crippled, was not sunk. She bore up for St. John's,
and her passengers were taken on later by another steamer.

The danger which nearly caused the loss of the Arizona — collision
with an iceberg — is one to which steamships, and especially swift
steamships, are exposed in exceptional degree. Like this danger, also,
it is one which renders the duty of careful watching, especially in the
night and in times of haze or fog, a most anxious and important care.

SCIENCE AND SAFETY AT SEA. 693

But, unlike the risk from collision with another ship, the risk from col-
lision with icebergs can not be diminished by any system of side-
lights or head-lights or stern-lights, except in just such degree (un-
fortunately slight) as a powerful light at the foremast-head, aided by
strono- side-lights or bow-lights, may serve to render the gleam of the
treacherous ice discernible somewhat farther ahead. But to a steam-
ship running at the rate of fourteen or fifteen knots an hour, even in
the clearest weather, at night, the distance athwart which a low-lying
iceberg can be seen, even by the best eyes, is but short. She runs
over it before there is time for the watch to make their warning heard,
and for the engineers to stop and reverse their engines.

But science, besides extending our senses, provides us with senses
other than those we possess naturally. The photographic eyes of sci-
ence see in the thousandth part of a second what our eyes, because in
so short a time they can receive no distinct impression at all, are un-
able to see. They may, on the other hand, rest on some faintly lumi-
nous object for hours, seeing more and more each moment, where ours
would see no more — perhaps even less — after the first minute than they
had seen in the first second. The spectroscopic eyes of science can
analyze for us the substance of self-luminous vapors or of vapors ab-
sorbing light, or of liquids, etc., where the natural eyes have no such
power of analysis. The sense of feeling, or rather the sense for heat,
which Reid originally and properly distinguished as a sixth sense (not
to be confounded, as our modern classification of the senses incorrect-
ly confounds it, with the sense of touch), is one which is very limited
in its natural range. But science can give us eyes for heat as keen and
as widely ranging as the eyes which she gives us for light. It was no
idle dream of Edison's, but a thought which one day will be fraught
with useful results, that science may hereafter recognize a star by its
heat, which the most powerful telescope yet made fails to show by its
light. Since that was said, the younger Draper (whose loss followed
so quickly and so sadly for science on that of his lamented father) has
produced photographic plates showing stars which can not be seen
through the telescope by which those photographs were taken. As
yet the delicate heat-measurers devised by science have not been ap-
plied to astronomical research with any important results. But Edi-
son's and Langley's heat-measurers have been used even in this way,
and the very failure which attended the employment of Edison's heat-
measurer (the tasimeter, or, literally, the strain-measurer, described
shortly before in the " Times ") during the eclipse of 1878 shows how
delicate is the heat-estimating sense of science. When the light of
the corona — which has no heat that the thermometer, or even that
far more delicate heat-measurer, the thermopile, will recognize — fell
on the face of the tasimeter, the index which Edison supposed likely,
to move just perceptibly actually flew beyond the index-plate. Thus,
though the heat of the corona could not be measured, the extreme

694 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

delicacy of the tasimeter was demonstrated unmistakably. Langley's
heat-measurer is scarcely less sensitive, and probably more manage-
able. But in point of fact each instrument is more sensitive than the
heat-sense of science is required to be, to do the work I have now to
indicate ; and an instrument can readily be constructed which shall be,
in the right degree, less sensitive than they are, though it might be
difficult at present to invent any that should be more senstive.

The sense of sight is not the only sense affected as an iceberg is
approached. There is a sensible lowering of temperature. But to
the natural heat-sense this cooling is not so obvious or so readily and
quickly appreciated that it could be trusted instead of the outlook of
the watch. The heat-sense of science, however, is so much keener
that it could indicate the presence of an iceberg at a distance far
beyond that over which the keenest eye could detect an iceberg at
night ; perhaps even an isolated iceberg could be detected when far
beyond the range of ordinary eye-sight in the day-time. Not only
so, but an instrument like the thermopile, or the more delicate heat-
measurers of Edison and Langley, can readily be made to give auto-
matic notice of its sensations (so to speak). As those who have heard
Professor Tyndall's lectures any time during the last twenty years
know, the index of a scientific heat-measurer moves freely in response
either to gain or loss of heat, or, as we should ordinarily say, in re-
sponse either to heat or cold. An index which thus moves can be
made, as by closing or breaking electrical contact, or in other ways,
to give very effective indication of the neighborhood of danger. It
would be easy to devise half a dozen ways in which a heat-indicator
(which is of necessity a cold-indicator), suitably placed in the bows
of a ship, could note, as it were, the presence of an iceberg fully a
quarter of a mile away, and speak of its sensations much more loudly
and effectively than the watch can proclaim the sight of an iceberg
when much nearer at hand. The movement of the index could set a
fog-horn lustily announcing the approach of danger ; could illuminate
the ship, if need be, by setting at work the forces necessary for in-
stantaneous electric lighting ; could signal the engineers to stop and
reverse the engines, or even stop and reverse the engines automati-
cally. "Whether so much would be necessary — whether those among
lost Atlantic steamships which have been destroyed, as many have
been, by striking upon icebergs, could only have been saved by such
rapid automatic measures as these — may or may not be the case ; but
that the use of the infinitely keen perception which the sense-organs
of science possess for heat and cold would be a feasible way of ob-
taining much earlier and much more effective notice of danger from
icebergs than the best watch can give, no one who knows the powers
of science in this direction can doubt. — London Times.

SKETCH OF ORMSBY MACKNIGHT MITCHEL. 695

SKETCH OF OKMSBY MACKNIGHT MITCHEL.

i

WITH the year 1842 practically commences the history of astro-
nomical science in America. In that year, Oemsbt Macknight
Mitchel, a young graduate of West Point, and Professor of Mathe-
matics at Cincinnati, having met with success in lecturing before his
classes, was invited to give a course in the college hall. So successful
was he in this course, and so great was the interest that he awakened
in the subject, that he resolved to turn it to account, and enlist his
hearers in the work of building an observatory. As the wealthier
cities of the Eastern States had not yet moved in the direction, his
plan was regarded by many as impracticable, but, after vigorous per-
sonal application, he succeeded in obtaining sufficient subscriptions to
warrant a commencement of the work. The enterprise took shape by
the organization of the Cincinnati Astronomical Society. Professor
Mitchel had no observatory to model from, no practical knowledge of
astronomy, and no instrument-makers from whom to purchase instru-
ments or object-glasses. All this must be taught in older countries,
and he resolved to go to Europe to this end. In order to husband
his resources, he proceeded first to "Washington, in the hope that he
might be given some mission from the State Department, the remu-
neration for which would pay his expenses. Mr. Webster, then Secre-
tary of State, informed him that his request was impossible, and
nearly everybody, including President Tyler, was inclined to sneer at
him as an impractical enthusiast. There was one notable exception
— John Quincy Adams spoke words of kindness and encouragement.
His application failed, and he proceeded on his journey, crossing
the ocean in a sailing-vessel. Upon arriving in England, he looked
for an object-glass, but found none worthy of his attention. From
England he proceeded to Paris, and called upon M. Arago at the ob-
servatory there, who received him kindly ; but, not finding what he
desired in France, he proceeded to Germany, where he found a fine
glass in the Frauenhofer works at Munich, which he purchased. Re-
turning to England, he entered as a student in the Royal Observatory
at Greenwich, and for some months devoted himself to the study of
practical astronomy. Upon his return to America, he applied himself
vigorously to the work of getting his observatory building ready for
the reception of the equatorial telescope that he had ordered in Mu-
nich. He desired to secure the services of Mr. John Quincy Adams
to deliver the oration at the laying of the corner-stone, and went to
Niagara, where he learned Mr. Adams was sojourning at the time,
to induce him to go to Cincinnati for that purpose. Notwithstanding
the opposition of Mr. Adams's family, on account of his advanced age
and infirmity, and the difficulties attending so long a journey in a
stage-coach, so great was the ex-President's interest in the matter, and

696 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY,

so certain did he feel it to be his duty, that he consented. On No-
vember 9, 1842, he delivered the address.

The time required to mount the glass, financial depression, and
various discouragements prevented the completion of the building and
the arrival of the telescope till the spring of 1845, when Professor
Mitchel commenced his duties. He occupied himself in the ordinary
routine of astronomical work. He paid considerable attention to per-
fecting instruments for attaining greater delicacy of observation. He
claimed to be the first (though he found a rival to dispute this honor
with him) to make a clock record its beats, thus obtaining a graphical
and more minute measurement of time.

The pioneer of American observatories was not destined to be
long-lived. Before many years rolled round, the smoke from the
growing city at the base of the hill on which it stood rendered ob-
servations impossible. Its immediate successor, containing its instru-
ments, is located some five or six miles from the original site, and
other observatories, built afterward, occupy many a hill-top through-
out America.

At the time the observatory was finished, an accident occurred
which at first seemed very unfortunate for Professor Mitchel, but
which in the end served to call out the full extent of his practical pow-
ers. The building of the college, from which Ije drew his only means
of support, took fire and burned to the ground. The observatory was
without endowment, and he had engaged to be its director for ten
years without compensation, relying for support on his college profess-
orship. He determined to enter the field as a professional lecturer on
astronomy. With characteristic boldness he proceeded to Boston, be-
lieving that if he could succeed in that critical city, where the arts and
sciences had been so thoroughly cultivated, and which numbered
among its own citizens so many men of high scientific attainment, he
could succeed elsewhere. He met with perfect success, and thus com-
menced that series of brilliant efforts in every city in the United
States which lasted for fifteen years.

He published, in 1848, "Planetary and Stellar Worlds"; in 1860,
" Popular Astronomy " ; he also published, from 1846 to 1848, the
" Sidereal Messenger," a periodical ; and after his death a fragment,
entitled "Astronomy of the Bible," was given to the public. These
works, though the progress of science and of thought has left them
now far behind, are still read by some who can discern in them the
ardent poetic nature of their author. But his great work in science
was in exciting an interest, wherever he appeared in person, to talk
of the wonders of the heavens. He never attempted to amuse an
audience, and never dropped below the dignity of the sublime subject
of which he spoke. When flights of eloquence came to him, they
seemed to meet him from among the lofty realms to which he as-
cended. Thither he carried his hearers, not by diagrams, not by

SKETCH OF ORMSBY MAC KNIGHT MITCHEL. 697

actual pictorial representations, but by language alone. He possessed
the power of magnetism to a remarkable degree. He could at once
gain the sympathy of his audience, and always held it till he had
ceased to speak. To him, far more than to any other man, is due
the interest that grew up in astronomical science in America between
the years 1842 and 1860, for there was scarcely a town or city in the
United States in which he did not speak during that period.

In 1859 he delivered a course of lectures in the Academy of Music
in New York for the benefit of an observatory that it was proposed
to erect in Central Park. The last lecture of this course was the last
he ever delivered. It was a fitting close to a brilliant work. The
Academy was crowded almost to the ceiling. On the platform were
seated many of the most prominent men in New York. As he led
his audience out into space, to planet and sua and system, it became
powerfully moved. When he closed, the ordinary methods of ap-
plause seemed inadequate. His hearers rose from their seats and
cheered — an act not uncommon at meetings of a political nature, but
probably without precedent at an astronomical lecture.

In 1860 Professor Mitchel was called to the directorship of the
Dudley Observatory at Albany, the building of which he had himself
designed.

At the opening of the late civil war, Professor Mitchel felt called
upon to turn the military education he had received to the account of
the Government that had given it. He was appointed a brigadier-
general of volunteers. At the time of his appointment, Cincinnati —
his former home — was threatened by the Confederates, and he was
sent to defend it. After fortifying the city, he desired to occupy
East Tennessee. By order of the Secretary of War, he organized a
force for the purpose ; but it was necessary to move through a depart-
ment commanded by another general. That general would not con-
sent, and the expedition had to be abandoned.

In April, 1862, he found himself in command of a division of
General Buell's army (detached from the main column, then proceed-
ing on the route to Corinth), and directed to observe the country
south of him. Without orders, he proceeded by forced marches to
Huntsville, Alabama, surprised and captured that part of the railroad
and territory lying between Stevenson and Decatur, with seventeen
locomotives and eighty cars, and held the territory he had been ordered
to observe. For this service President Lincoln promoted him to be
major-general. He asked for troops with which to march through
Georgia, but Mr. Lincoln replied that all available forces had been
given to General McClellan and General Halleck. He then asked to
be transferred to a more active field, but Mr. Lincoln directed him to
remain for future operations in the territory where his " military genius
had effected so much." Upon General Buell's arrival with the rest of
the Army of the Ohio at Huntsville, in July, 1862, General Mitchel

698 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

urged an immediate advance into East Tennessee. General Buell de-
layed, and General Mitchel asked to be relieved. It was not, how-
ever, till the President determined to use him in a special service that
he ordered him to report at Washington.

Mr. Lincoln proposed to send an army down the Mississippi under
his command. He selected the force and wrote the order ; but just
at that time concluded to appoint General Halleck his military ad-
viser. When General Halleck arrived at Washington he declined to
appoint General Mitchel to this command. For two months he was
unemployed, and in September, 1862, was sent, by General Halleck's
order, to the then quiescent Department of the South, in South Caro-
lina. Here he died of yellow fever on the 30th of October, 1862.
His term of military service was fourteen months. During this time
he found but one opportunity to act upon his own uncontrolled judg-
ment.

Professor Mitchel was born in Union County, Kentucky, August
28, 1810. At twelve years of age, having acquired a tolerably fair
knowledge of Latin and Greek and the elements of mathematics, he
became a clerk in Miami, Ohio, but afterward removed to Lebanon,
in the same State where he had been educated. He entered the Mili-
tary Academy at West Point in June, 1825, having himself earned
the money with which he was enabled to reach the school. After
being graduated in 1829, he became acting Assistant Professor of
Mathematics in the Academy, and served in that capacity for two
years. He then removed to Cincinnati, where he practiced law till
1834, when he became Professor of Mathematics, Philosophy, and
Astronomy, in Cincinnati College, a position in which he remained
for ten years, or till the college-building was burned.

Of the more important features of his work at the observatory,
" Nature " says, in an article on " Observatories in the United States "
(July 9, 1874) : " At the request of Professor BacLe, the telegraph
company connected the observatory with their stations for determin-
ing longitude, Cincinnati being then a central point in such work.
The astronomer royal, under whose instruction Mitchel had passed
three months in 1842, urged, in an encouraging letter, that 'the first
application of his meridional instruments should be for the exact de-
termination of his geographical latitude and longitude, and that his
observing energies should be given to the large equatorial., With
this advice, he directed his attention largely to the remeasurement of
Struve's double stars south of the equator.

" Airy and Lamont had invited him to make minute observations
of the satellites of Saturn, since in the latitude of Cincinnati the
planet is observed at a more favorable altitude than at Pulkova,
twenty degrees farther north. To these, and chiefly ' to the physical
association of the double, triple, and multiple stars,' he gave his close
attention. He made interesting discoveries in the course of this re-

SKETCH OF 0 RMS BY MACKNIGHT MITCH EL. 699

view. ' Stars which Struve had marked as oblong were divided and
measured ; others marked double were found to be triple.' He pro-
posed a new method for observing, and new machinery for recording
north polar distances or declinations. Professor Peirce reported favor-
ably on this method at the meeting of the American Association in
1851, and Professor Bache, as Superintendent of the Coast Survey,
indorsed their approval in his report for that year, presenting also a
full account of work done by the new method in observations made
by the enthusiastic astronomer and his patient wife, who assisted him
through all. It was claimed that the results rivaled the best work
done at Pulkova. Mitchel was the first 'to prepare a circuit inter-
rupter with an eight-day clock, and to use it to graduate the running
fillet of paper ' ; and to invent and use the revolving-disk chronograph
for recording the dates of star-signals. Professors Bache and Walker
had declined to adopt the first of these improvements in astronomical
appliances, through an apprehension of injury to the astronomical
clock. Mitchel's work proved the apprehension to be groundless. His
revolving disk is an invaluable invention.

" To the perfection of such methods and instruments, together with
the routine work of observation, he gave all the energies not of ne-
cessity employed in outside labors devolving on him for his support.
Unhappily these, at an early date, became almost absorbing. For
the Astronomical Society, having secured their observatory and their
director, had failed to secure a basis for its support."

Of his lectures, " Nature " remarks that he stirred up an enthusi-
asm by them " which quickened the movements resulting in the estab-
lishment of some of the first observatories of this day in the United
States."

General Mitchel always acted with the incentive of genius rather
than talent, if such a distinction exists. Hence his proposals were
often regarded as impracticable. Their practicability depended upon
his energy, resource, and magnetism. Without these, they would
have been mere visionary schemes.

His simplicity and purity of character, his earnest patriotism and
military foresight, are all minutely recorded in his correspondence. It
is expected that the record will some day pass — one of its many chap-
ters— into the voluminous history of the rebellion.

700

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

CORRESPONDENCE.

MOSQUITOES AND MALARIA.

-Vfssrs. Editors :

'^ "TTTHO shall decide when doctors dis-
V V agree ? " Not long since was put
forth the theory that the " bite " of the mos-
quito is a genuine antidote for malaria, and
one of the arguments used to sustain the
assertion was that Nature provides reme-
dies alongside all forms of disease, and
that, wherever malaria abounded, mosqui-
toes did much more abound, and were busily
engaged, to the best of their ability, in in-
jecting a tonic under the skin of poor ague-
stricken humanity, which would effectually
cure the disease if the humane work of the
winged surgeons was not interfered with ;
and now comes Professor King, in the Sep-
tember number of your journal, with the
startling claim that the mosquito is the very
cause of malarial diseases ! — and the prob-
lem, Shall we encourage or kill the insect ?
is still unsolved.

Having had some experience with these
much-denounced insects in the woods and
by the inland lakes in the northern part of
the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, and on
and beside the lagoons of Southern Florida
and even in the hotel sleeping-rooms in many
parts of the land, I feel compelled to differ
with Professor King in some of his alleged
" facts," and I fear some of my statements
will at least throw a doubt over the supposed
" established facts " of the professor.

The professor argues that a locality
abounds in mosquitoes, and that malaria is
found to prevail in the same locality, and
therefore it is quite probable that the ma-
larial diseases there are produced by the
mosquitoes.

Suppose we assume that it is quite as
probable that the condition of heat, moist-
ure, soiL, and vegetation, merely makes the
locality a spot favorable to the generation
of both mosquitoes and malaria, without
any connecting relation one with the other.
Suppose, again, we find localities where the
mosquito, during a part of the year, is, by
the power of numbers and fierceness of at-
tack, almost king of the woods, and yet
there is no malaria to be feared or found.

I have been in several localities on Indian
River and Mosquito Lagoon, on the south-
east coast of Florida, where I would not like
to have1 been on the outside of my netting,
under the little shelter-cabin of our sail-
boat, but I have never seen more numerous
and, in localities, more voracious mosquitoes
than in our northern forests in Michigan.
The efforts on the part of these insects to
produce malarial disease, in some form, if

this is their mission, were never more per-
sistent than there. I have from the best
authority the fact that it is no very uncom-
mon thing for hardy woodsmen, in the
spring months, to be driven from their work
in the forest by the mosquitoes and black
flies ; but the general rule is, in the milder
attacks, for the choppers to become so ac-
customed to the mosquitoes, day and night,
as to pay little attention to them, they " let
'em bite," only disturbing them when, by
an unusual attack, they overstep the rea-
sonable demands for blood. Many of these
men have come under my personal observa-
tion during a residence of from two to six
weeks each year for seven years at our sum-
mer resort on Grand Lake, three miles back
from Lake Huron. As I knew them to be
working day after day in the low cedar lands,
often in wet swamps, and drinking the
swamp water where they could find a pool
under some old moss-bed, and often sleep-
ing in rude log or board shanties in the
same locality, I have often asked them if
they did not get the ague, or " chills " and
fever. The answer was always, "Never."
I have seen manv little children, from the
babe up, with naked legs, feet, arms, and
no head-covering but the hair, absolutely
covered more with mosquito-bites than gar-
ments, all through the season, but I have
never known a case of malarial disease in
any form among them. In view of these
observations, I must conclude the case is
hardly made out that mosquitoes produce
malarial diseases, although in many locali-
ties the two are co-existent.

The professor says it is a fact of com-
mon observation that mosquitoes are more
numerous in the late summer months. I am
not 6ure of other localities, but in Upper
Michigan, at our resort, and all through
Northern Michigan, the fact is exactly the
reverse. We usually require nettings dur-
ing July. About the 1st of August the
mosquitoes begin to disappear, and we can
sleep without nettings; but, during May,
June, and July, if they created malarial dis-
eases, there would be lively shakes among
the settlers, where malarial diseases are now
unknown, or of extremely rare occurrence.

I do not know but the sea-coast mos-
quito is a more wicked fellow, but our North
Michigan mosquitoes, I believe, are engaged
in better work than creating malaria. In
fact, I am not sure but that the " bites " of
mosquitoes, in the cases of our northern
cedar-cutters, and their freedom from dis-
ease in great exposure furnish the "anti-
dote " for the malarial tendency of the

CORRESP ONDENCE.

701

swamp air and swamp water, and furnish
an argument for the antidote theory rather
than otherwise.

We can hardly accord to Professor King
the soundness of his argument, that be-
cause miasma and mosquitoes prevail at
night, therefore the mosquito is the author
of miasma. Does the mosquito produce the
miasma in the air, or create the disease by
his " bite " ? Suppose we say bats fly only
at night, and dew falls only at night, there-
fore the bats create the dew ?

The night air may be congenial to both
malaria and mosquitoes, as it may be to
both bats and dew, without any further rela-
tionship. If Professor King will spend a
week or a month in May or June in our
northern cedar-lands, I will warrant him
more mosquito-bites to the square inch of
exposed person than there are pounds of at-
mospheric pressure on the same surface, and
I will also guarantee him safety from all ma-
larial disease. F. R. Stebbins.
Adeian, Michigan, October 8, 1883.

A REPLY TO EDITORIAL STATEMENTS.
Messrs. Editors:

In your editorial comments on the clas-
sical question, you refer to Germany as fa-
vorable to the old education on account of
royalty and the Bismarckian regime ; you
also quote from " Science " a condemnation
of German scientific writers. Allow me, in
the briefest manner, to set you right on these
two points. Whatever you may think of
Bismarck, you should, in the present discus-
sion, at least state that Bismarck does not
favor Greek, but thinks it is only studied
for a make-believe of mental superiority ;
also that he has emphatically stated that
the state must take its civil officers wherever
they can be found, efficiency being the only
test, not the approval, etc., of the university ;
and, thirdly, you should bear in mind that
Bismarck is no favorite with the Berlin Uni-
versity, the latter being much more of your
opinion as to the " regime " now existing
in Prussia than of an opinion favorable to
Bismarck.

While I share your views as to the aris-
tocratic tendencies that take shelter under
the Latin-Greek education, I yet believe that
respect for royalty in Germany is fostered
mainly by the common school, while the
universities are decidedly democratic in their
influence.

As regards the lack of clearness and
order formerly so common in German scien-
tific writers, I beg to call your attention to
the many excellent scientific writers that
Germany can now point to, when a com-
parison with other countries is instituted.
I believe a somewhat careful investigation
would startle those who accept the common
dogma that German scientific writers are
obscure and deficient in order. Schleiden,

the botanist, Carl Yogt, Du Bois-Reymond)
Virchow, Haeckel, are only a few of the
best-known German scientists who excel in
order and clearness, and in the graces of
style. No modern literature has scientific
works superior in order, clearness, and style,
to those of George Forster and Jacob Mole-
schott, and yet the former excelled, and the
latter still excels, in scientific work. In a
country like Germany, where so many write,
bad writing is apt to be more readily no-
ticed. As for the absence of important
generalizations by German scientists, I think
this subject should be treated separately.
Kepler's grand generalizations were written
in Latin ; Leibnitz published many of his
in French; there are other authors distin-
guished for important generalizations, who,
if they can not compare with Darwin, yet
occupy a high rank — for instance, Dr. J. R.
Mayer, who first formulated the great law
of heat-equivalents, and hence of the con-
servation of force.

I should be glad to find that your sense
of justice is strong enough to make the cor-
rections your statements and the extract re-
quire. C. A. E.
Iowa City, December 26, 1SS3.

Our sense of justice is perhaps not very
strong, but it is put to no strain by publish-
ing the foregoing. We referred to the
" Bismarckian regime " only as a name for
the present phase of the administration
of the German Government, and our argu-
ment could not depend upon any man's per-
sonal views, because it rested upon the
broad declaration of the university authori-
ties that the ascendency of the classics must
be maintained for church and state reasons.
It is interesting to know that Bismarck re-
gards Greek as a humbug, but he would
probably be the last man to deny that
shams may have their political uses.

The quotation from " Science " was made,
not because we approved or considered per-
tinent all that it said, but because it testi-
fied decisively to the neglected condition of
the native speech on the part of a people
long given over to the worship of classical
ideals. Our correspondent recognizes " the
lack of clearness and order formerly so com-
mon in German scientific writers." He,
however, enumerates several recent writers
that are not open to this charge. But are
not those exceptions to a general practice ?
and would it not have been somewhat more
to the point to inform us whether or not
these writers were assiduous cultivators of
the classics ? — Ed.

702

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

EDITOR'S TABLE.

collegiate influence upon tee
lower education:

THERE is one aspect of the broad
classical controversy of momentous
importance, but which has been much
neglected in the general discussion of
the subject. TVe refer to the relation of
our collegiate system to the system of
education in the schools of lower grade.
It is only by scrutinizing this relation
that we can really appreciate the extent
of the practical antagonism between the
classical and the scientific systems of
study, and recognize how completely
the colleges are all on one side in this
issue.

We are abundantly assured that,
whatever may have been the case in the
past, there is now no ground of com-
plaint that the dead languages usurp
too much attention, while the sciences
are correspondingly neglected. The cur-
riculums are appealed to to show that
classical studies are no longer in the
way of science, which is every year re-
ceiving increasing attention in these
institutions. New laboratories, observa-
tories, and museums, are pointed at to
show the augmenting facilities of sci-
entific study, and we are told that, by
the growing optional system, the stu-
dent is more and more allowed a choice
of subjects when he enters college, which
enables him, if he likes, to give a larger
portion if not his entire time to science.

But all this does not mean so much
as it appears to mean. We are not for
a moment to regard the influence of the
colleges as limited to the students who
come under their direct control. They
exert a varied and powerful influence
upon the secondary schools, upon the
methods of early teaching, and upon
both the youthful and adult mind of
the community at large, which is over-
whelmingly in behalf of the classics, and

solid against science. They not only de-
termine the prior studies of the great
numbers who enter college, but they
set the standards of education for mul-
titudes who never pass to the higher
institutions. They sustain and they en-
force an ideal of culture which shapes
the policy and fixes the character of
the whole system of instruction that
deals with the common education of
the people. The alleged liberality im-
plied by the optional system is mis-
leading, if it is taken to imply any real
liberty of the student to choose his
studies untrammeled by college require-
ments, for not the slightest option is
allowed as between the dead languages
and the sciences in that prior period
when the youthful mind receives its
bent in the lower or preparatory schools.
The relaxation of classical demands after
admission to college, so far from indi-
cating a diminished exaction of dead-
language studies, is accompanied by an
increasing stringency of requirement in
these subjects before college- is entered.
"With increasing option in college the
standard of preparation is raised, which
means that more Greek and Latin is
forced upon the preparatory schools.
The point of strain is shifted, but this
is done in such a way as greatly to
aggravate the evils of classical study.
The worst influence of the colleges upon
general education, as we have often
maintained, is their reactive effect upon
the preparatory schools, and the whole
secondary system of instruction to which
the youthful mind of the country is
subjected. By their demands upon these
institutions, the colleges lend their in-
fluence to maintain throughout the com-
munity an ideal of culture that is pre-
dominantly and in effect exclusively
classical. Modern studies have no status,
no recognition in the preparatory stage

EDITOR'S TABLE.

7°3

of those who propose to obtain a so-
called liberal education. The alleged
concessions to the spirit of progress
are therefore illusive. The concessions
made to science after entrance into col-
lege are not allowed in the period of ear-
ly study when they would be far more
valuable. Nothing substantial is con-
ceded to science when our colleges keep
their classical standards of admission
so high that all the time of pupils is
consumed in Latin and Greek prepara-
tion. No concession is made to science
when proficiency in scientific studies
gained at school is not allowed to count
in entering college. No such concession
is made by a collegiate system that does
not provide by imperative requirement
for some thorough grounding in scien-
tific branches in the preliminary schools,
and which does not allow solid profi-
ciency of scientific attainment to open
the way to the highest college honors.

But the radical antagonism of our
colleges to educational progress through
their reactive influence upon the lower
school system is only to be fully appre-
ciated when we understand in what
that progress consists. In its philoso-
phy, traditional education is very much
where it was a hundred years ago, but
it is undeniable that many important
principles have been reached which are
of the greatest moment as guides to
better educational practice. A century
of science is not to go for nothing in
the treatment of this subject. There
are relations among the great divisions
of modern knowledge which are fun-
damental in laying down courses of
study. There is an order in the devel-
opment of the human faculties which
is fundamental to the art of rational
and successful teaching. There is an
ideal of the highest purpose in cultivat-
ing the intellect — the investigation of
the truth of nature by various processes
— which has been developed by the ad-
vance of science. Systematic and com-
prehensive efforts have been made to
reduce this new ideal to practice in

the lower sphere of education. Efforts
have been made to teach first the things
which belong first in the course of
mental unfolding, to bring the young
mind into closer relations with the
facts of experience, to cultivate more
thoroughly the all-important habit of
observation, and to provide for the
training of the active and inventive
powers by simplified experiment and
various manipulations, and finally to
make the operations of study exercises
in investigation and in original and in-
dependent thought upon subjects with-
in the common sphere of intelligence,
and adapted to educate the judgment.
It is no longer a question that these
supreme objects can be secured to very
considerable degree by proper methods
of dealing with the minds of youth,
and great progress has been made in
recent times in working out the prac-
tical methods by which they are at-
tained. But the whole movement be-
longs to the lower schools, and the
whole influence of our college system
upon those schools is not to help but
to hinder it. In illustration and con-
firmation of this view, we quote some
remarks made by Dr. Barnard, Presi-
dent of Columbia College, at the dinner
given in New York to Professor Tyn-
dall in 1873 :

I say, then, that our long-established and
time-honored system of liberal education —
and when I speak of the system, I mean the
whole system, embracing not only the col-
leges, but the tributary schools of lower grade
as well— does not tend to form original in-
vestigators of Nature's truths ; and the reason
that it does not is, that it inverts the natural
order of proceeding in the business of mental
culture, and fails to stimulate in season the
powers of observation. And when I say this,
I must not be charged with treason to my
craft — at least not with treason spoken for
the first time here, for I have uttered the same
sentiment more than once before in the sol-
emn assemblies of the craft itself.

I suppose, Mr. President, at a very early
period of your life you may have devoted,
like so many other juvenile citizens, a portion
of your otherwise unemployed time to experi-
ments in horticulture. In planting legumi-

7o4

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

nous seeds you could not have failed to ob-
serve that the young plants come up with
their cotyledons ou their heads. If, in pon-
dering this phenomenon, you arrived at the
same conclusion that I did, you must have
believed that Nature had made a mistake,
and so have pulled up your plants and re-
planted them upside-down. Men and women
are but children of a larger growth. They
see the tender intellect shooting up in like
manner, with the perceptive faculties all alive
at top ; and they, too, seem to think that
Nature has made a mistake, and so they treat
the mind as the child treats his bean-plant,
and turn it upside-down to make it grow bet-
ter. They bury the promising young buds
deep in a musty mold formed of the decay of
centuries, under the delusion that out of such
debris they may gather some wholesome nour-
ishment ; when we know all that they want
is the light and warmth of the sun to stimu-
late them, and the free air of heaven in which
to unfold themselves. What heartless cruelty
pursues the little child-martyr every day and
all the day long, at home or at school alike ;
in this place bidden to mind his book and
not to look out of the window — in that, told
to hold his tongue and to remember that chil-
dren must not ask questions ! . . .

Among the great promoters of scientific
progress, how large is the number who may,
in strict propriety, be said to have educated
themselves. Take, for illustration, such fa-
miliar names as those of William Herschel,
and Franklin, and Rumford, and Eitten-
house, and Davy, and Faraday, and Henry.
Is it not evident that Nature herself, to those
who will follow her teachings, is a better
guide to the study of her own phenomena
than all the training of our schools ? And is
not this because Nature invariably begins
with the training of the observing faculties %
Is it not because the ample page which she
spreads out before the learner is written all
over, not with words, but with substantial
realities ? Is it not because her lessons reach
beyond the simple understanding and im-
press the immediate intuition? That what
she furnishes is something better than barren
information passively received — it is positive
knowledge actively gathered ?

If, then, in the future we would fit man
properly to cultivate Nature, and not leave
scientific research, as, to a great extent, we
have done heretofore, to the hazard of chance,
we must cultivate her own processes. Our
earliest teachings must be things, and not
words. The objects first presented to the
tender mind must be such as address the
senses, and such as it can grasp. Store it

first abundantly with the material of thought,
and the process of thinking will be sponta-
neous and easy.

This is not to depreciate the value of oth-
er subjects, or of other modes of culture. It
is only to refer them to their proper place.
Grammar, philology, logic, human history,
belles-lettres, philosophy — all these things will
be seized with avidity and pursued with pleas-
ure by a mind judiciously prepared to receive
them. On this point we shall do well to learn,
and believe we are beginning to learn some-
thing, from contemporary peoples upon the
Continent of Europe.

Object-teaching is beginning to be intro-
duced, if only sparingly, into our primary
schools. It should be so introduced universal-
ly. And in all our schools, but especially in
those in which the foundation is laid of what
is called a liberal education, the knowledge
of visible things should be made to precede
the study of the artificial structure of lan-
guage and the intricacies of grammatical rules
and forms.

The knowledge of visible things — I repeat
these words that I may emphasize them, and,
when I repeat them, observe that I mean
knowledge of visible things, and not informa-
tion about them — knowledge acquired by the
learner's own conscious efforts, not crammed
into his mind in set forms of words out of
books.

But how do onr colleges stand as a
body in regard to these explicit require-
ments of educational progress ? Their
whole power is exerted to defeat them.
They force Latin and Greek upon all the
preparatory schools; they make gram-
mar and verbal studies, which should
belong later in the course, imperative in
early years ; they supplement the clas-
sics by mathematics, and give the go-by
to all the natural sciences. There is not
the slightest provision in the studies in-
troductory to college for any cultiva-
tion of the mind by immediate inter-
course with the facts of nature. We
have before us " A Comparative View of
the Requisitions for Admission to Rep-
resentative American Colleges, correct
to 1880-'81," printed in the prospectus
of the Berkeley School of New York
city. Latin, Greek, and mathematics
are of course the staple studies, and the
amount of requirement in these sub-

EDITOR'S TABLE.

705

jects is given in detail. Under the
bead of miscellaneous are included such
further subjects as the several institu-
tions hold important for admission to
college. The common element here is
English grammar, but neither Yale,
Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Dart-
mouth, Williams, Amherst, Trinity,
Michigan University, Vassar, Smith,
nor Johns Hopkins, requires a shred of
scientific preparation of any kind, un-
less school-geography is allowed to pass
for science. Harvard requires some
acquaintance with physics and either
chemistry or botany, and Cornell in-
cludes physiology among the prepara-
tory studies. By all these leading 'and
influential collegiate institutions, which
arrogate to themselves the prerogative
of conferring a "liberal education,"
the study of Nature is absolutely left
out in the early period of study, aud
nothing worthy of the name of science
is recognized or required, when the
foundations of intellectual character
are being laid. There is one everlast-
ing grind in grammar — Greek gram-
mar, Latin grammar, English grammar
— until the mental habits are formed by
verbal studies ; and then when the stu-
dent enters college he is offered some
restricted liberty of taking up scientific
subjects.

Undoubtedly, the great issue of sci-
ence against the classics is made up
and to be met here. The continuance
of the system of discrimination against
modern knowledge, and in favor of
dead languages, is not to be tolerated.
The college premiums on old studies
condemned by the common sense of
mankind, and doubly damaging in early
youth, must be withdrawn. Those in-
stitutions can not too soon take meas-
ures to get out of the way of the im-
provement of the lower schools. It is
becoming more and more obvious, as
shown by the current discussion of the
subject, that there is urgent necessity
for a readjustment of the relations of
the higher and lower systems of in-
vol. xxiv. — 45

struction, and in evidence of this we
quote the following instructive pas-
sages f ronfan excellent article by Mr. R.
E. Bowker, in the " Princeton Review "
for January, on "The College of To-
day " :

This brings us face to face with the at pres-
ent difficult problem of the relations of the
college to the general education out of which
its curriculum must proceed. It is noticeable
that while there has been much activity in
the improvement of the higher education, and
much progress, following the suggestions of
Froebel and Pestalozzi, in primary education,
the immediate education remains much where
it was, and blocks the road in the middle. Our
common schools are still " grammar-schools,''
although, as has been noted, educators are in
agreement that "grammar," as such, is the
one thing that should not be taught until the
very highest grades are reached. And the
colleges can not do their proper work, nor can
an approximately correct curriculum be put
into practice, until many features of the
middle schools are not only reformed but
revolutionized. The scheme of the proper
education, following the child from its first
lessons, should be developed in view of two
chief conditions : the order in which the
natural development of the mind fits it for
the reception of successive studies ; and the
practical fact that,. since the number to be edu-
cated decreases each year beyond the early
years, the essential subjects must be pre-
sented early in the course. Happily, these
two conditions largely coincide. The pres-
ent curriculum of the middle schools has de-
veloped from the practical recognition of this
last condition, in ignorance of the first, but
through much misconception as to which are
essential subjects. It is, of course, important
that every child should be taught to speak,
to write, to read, to figure, correctly ; but it
is now known that the child learns correct
speech, for instance, chiefly through its observ-
ing faculties, by imitation, and not through
its reflective faculties, by study of grammar.
The child develops through the what, the how,
the why — first the fact, next its relations,
lastlv its causes : and vet the lower schools
will be teaching the laws of grammar, and
leaving the facts of nature, as the elements
of botany, for which the child-mind is hun-
gering and thirsting, to the advanced student.
The college professor of the natural sciences,
for instance, should find the foundations laid
for him when the student enters college,
whereas now he ^must begin at elementary

706

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

facts. A correct college curriculum is scarce-
ly possible as middle education stands now.
Kecognizing, then, the fact that the order in
which the mind can best learn is the order
in which it can best be taught, it becomes of
the utmost importance that the college, ad-
mitting the necessity of present compromise,
should exert its full influence to reorganize
the education below.

It thus appears that the antagonism
of the classical institutions to the pop-
ular schools in their real purpose is of
a very radical kind. Our colleges, by
their history and traditions, are aca-
demic, scholastic, and literary institu-
tions, designed at least theoretically to
form a learned class ; while on the other
hand the great body of the subordinate
schools is devoted to the general edu-
cation of the people, which should be
practical and useful, based upon com-
mon needs and a preparation for the
working duties of life. The colleges
by their policy are chiefly solicitous to
make the lower schools tributary to
their own prosperity; but they must
take larger views of their own interests
by ceasing their indirect resistance to
the progress of education in the lower
schools, and by efficiently helping it for-
ward. In an enlarged view, as Mr. Bow-
ker well remarks, " the colleges can not
do their proper work, nor can an approxi-
mately correct curriculum be put into
practice until many features of the mid-
dle schools are not only reformed but
revolutionized.1' But this revolution
of the middle schools is a revolution
that must begin in the colleges them-
selves, by which their exclusive exac-
tion of a classical preparation is aban-
doned, and the sciences are given an
equal chance with the dead languages.
The classical gentlemen may league to-
gether to resist this change, but it will
be of little avail ; sooner or later it is
sure to come. "We observe by the last
report of the President and Treasurer
of Harvard College, 1882-'83, that this
question is under serious consideration
by the authorities of that institution,
and, if they shall see fit to take the step

now so urgently demanded, other insti-
tutions will be certain to follow.

President Eliot says (page 16) : " The
College Faculty is the body in which
almost all the considerable changes,
made during the past sixteen years in
the educational methods of Harvard
College, and of the schools which reg-
ularly feed it, have been first studied in
detail, and then wrought into practical
shape ; and it is at present engaged, not
for the first time, in the discussion of
the gravest question of university pol-
icy which has arisen, or is likely to
arise, in this generation — namely, the
extent to which option among the dif-
ferent subjects should be allowed in
the examination for admission to col-
lege."

LITERARY NOTICES.

Excursions op an Evolutionist. By John
Fiske. Boston : Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
Pp. 379. $2.

Mr. Fiske has laid the reading public
under many obligations by the reissue of
these more recent papers, which embody
his matured views on a wide and varied
range of topics. Nothing need be said in
commendation of the literary work of a
writer who has been long recognized as
unrivaled in the art of lucid, effective, and
pleasing exposition. But we are not to
forget that these accomplishments have
been put to the noblest service, and make
him the most admirable interpreter of a
new epoch in the advance of human thought.
Mr. Fiske's writings belong eminently to a
transition era in philosophic and scientific
progress, and are in a high sense authori-
tative representations of it. And this is
much to say of any one man's relation to a
mental movement more comprehensive in
its bearings upon widely received opinion
than any that has ever before taken place.

There can be no doubt that Mr. Fiske's
" Cosmic Philosophy " must rank first among
the few masterpieces of expository state-
ment contributed by this age on the subject
of evolution. It is the book for the people
upon this subject. It is not only an emi-
nently instructive but a most charming work.

LITERARY NOTICES.

707

The author handles the great problems in-
volved with originality and power, and at
the same time with a clearness, a felicity of
illustration, and a fascination of style, that
give the work an unequaled claim upon
popular regard. And we do not for a mo-
ment mean by this that the treatise is low-
ered in quality to adapt it to uncultivated
minds. Its peculiar excellence is, that while
it treats of abstract and difficult questions,
in such a way that the uninitiated may pur-
sue the discussions with satisfaction, the
most adept minds will also be profoundly
interested. "We have seen a school-boy ab-
sorbed in the work ; and Mr. Charles Dar-
win, after having gone slowly and carefully
through it, wrote to the author, u I never
in my life read so lucid an expositor — and
therefore thinker — as you are " ; and he
adds, " It pleased me to find that here and
there I had arrived from my own crude
thoughts at some of the same conclusions
with you, though I could seldom or never
have given my reasons for such conclusions."
The testimony of Mr. Darwin is corrobo-
rated by that of many others, the effect of
which is to accord to Mr. Fiske an eminent
and enviable place among those who have
command of the questions that are now oc-
cupying the most earnest attention of the
thinking world.

These considerations are important in
their bearing upon our estimate of the pres-
ent volume. The most fertile conception
ever launched into the intellectual sphere is
that of universal evolution. As deep as the
forces of nature, it is as broad as the phe-
nomena of nature. It is a new view of the
movement of things, a new interpretation of
their most comprehensive relations. There
is hardly any great subject that escapes its
influence. It has necessitated a recasting
of the sciences, and a thorough-going re-
organization of knowledge. So productive
and all-influential an idea can be but par-
tially dealt with in the most systematic
and elaborate treatises ; outstanding prob-
lems still remain to be solved and new ap-
plications of the doctrine worked out. Mr.
Fiske has pursued the subject, after the pub-
lication of his elaborate book several years
ago, in various aspects and in new direc-
tions, developing many points that were
there but briefly touched upon. The vol-

ume before us consists mainly of these sup-
plemental excursions in various directions,
but all animated and characterized by the
fundamental doctrine to which his first work
was devoted. We recommend it to all stu-
dents of the course of modern thought and
the critical questions of the time, and can
give our readers no better idea of the vari-
ety and instructiveness of its contents than
by quoting the titles of the subjects treated.
These are :

1. Europe before the Arrival of Man.
2. The Arrival of Man in Europe. 3. Our
Aryan Forefathers. 4. What we learn from
Old Aryan Words. 5. Was there a Primitive
Mother-Tongue? 6. Sociology and Hero-
Worship. 7. Heroes of Industry. 8. The
Causes of Persecution. 9. The Origins of
Protestantism. 10. The True Lesson of
Protestantism. 11. Evolution and Religion.
12. The Meaning of Infancy. 13. A Uni-
verse of Mind Stuff. 14J In Memoriam.
Charles Darwin.

INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC SEEIE3.
VOL. XLYII.

Fallacies. A View of Logic from the
Practical Side. By Alfred Sidgwick,
Berkeley Fellow of Owens College, Man-
chester. D. Appleton & Co. Pp. 375.
Price, Sl.^o.

It is curious that the subject, which is
at the same time the most important, the
most practical, and which involves questions
of the deepest intellectual interest — that is,
the science and art of correct reasoning —
should somehow have come to be regarded
as the dullest and heaviest of all subjects.
No doubt this repulsiveness of logic is very
much due to that ancient pedantic formality
which was imparted to it in scholastic times
and has continued ever since, and also to
the fact that its practical objects have been
forgotten in the development of its pro-
cesses. University drill in logic has become
itself the end without much reference to its
reduction to utilitarian practice. Whatever
may be the cause of the unattractivenesa
of logic, much of it must certainly be due to
prejudices arising from its imperfect pres-
entation. In his book on " Fallacies," Pro-
fessor Sidgwick has made a very success-
ful attempt to rescue the subject from its
repellent forms, and to deal with it in a
way that shall be interesting to the general

708

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

reader. The book is, therefore, written as
much as possible from an unprofessional
point of view, and in a way to require no
previous technical training. Although any
treatment of fallacies must, to a great ex-
tent, deal with methods of proof, and must,
therefore, demand a certain amount of gen-
eral logical theory, yet by trying to keep
chiefly in view the practical and applicable
side of the science of logic, and subordi-
nating all else to this, Professor Sidgwick
claims to have been able to neglect the dis-
cussion of much debatable matter, and to
avoid definite adherence to a school. Mill
and Bain are chiefly followed, but the author
has attempted to utilize their most impor-
tant results without being compelled to ac-
cept the whole of their philosophy. The fol-
lowing passages from Professor Sidgwick's
introductory chapter may serve to illustrate
the point of view from which he regards
his subject, and also his fresh and uncon-
ventional manner of writing upon it :

Logic holds what may well be called an uncom-
fortable position among the sciences. According to
some authorities, it can not be properly said that a
body of accepted logical doctrines exists ; according
to others, the facts and laws that form such doc-
trine are so completely undeniable, that to state
them is hardly to convey new or important infor-
mation. Ilence, if a writer on the science tries to
avoid truism, and so to give practical importance
to his statements, there is danger both of real but
crude innovation, and also of over-simple belief in
the value of merely verbal alterations. Moreover,
at its best, logic has many persistent enemies, and
by no means all of them are in the wrong ; so that
those who view the science as the thief or burglar
views the law, find themselves apparently supported
and kept in countenance by others who reaily have
the right to view it as perhaps the artist views tho
rules that hamper genius. Through its deep con-
nection with common sense, logic is often a source
of exasperation to philosophy proper ; while com-
mon sense, on the other hand, is apt to dread or dis-
like it as unpractical or over-fond of casuistical re-
finements. Failing thus to win a steady footing, it
turns, sometimes, to physical science for a field of
operations ; but physical science has its proper
6hare of boldness, and often leaves the cautious
reasoner behind. As for art — which finds even com-
mon sense too rigid— here logic is liable to meet
with opposition at every grade ; from the righteous
inpatience of poetic souls that are genuinely under
grace, down to the incoherent anger of mere boast-
ful vagueness, or to the outcry of the sentimental
idler.

In the midst of these perplexities, it is difficult
to choose a quite satisfactory course. Some excuses
may, however, be offered for the line that has here
been taken ; and, first, I would plead, as against the

charge of irregularity or presumption, the fact that
I have wished to keep a single purpose in view,
avoiding all questions that fail to bear directly upon
it. Usually in works on logic, the object has been
to say something valuable upon all the questions
traditionally treated as within the field of the sci-
ence, and, in attempting this, the single, practical
purpose is apt to become obscured. It is only in
consequence of my avoidance of side-issues that
any appearance of novelty in the treatment has fol-
lowed. Moreover, it is not teaching, but suggestion
that is chiefly here intended. It is always allow-
able to write rather in the co-operative spirit than
the didactic, and this has certainly been my aim
throughout. And the same apology may apply to
the charge of forcing verbal changes upon the read-
er ; the novelties of statement are here put forward
merely as possible aids in keeping our single pur-
pose clear, and, in fact, I found them almost un-
avoidable.

As regards physical science, it must be confessed
that logic merely follows after it, systematizing
methods already adopted there, and found to lead
to good results. And I hold that to combat fallacy
is the raison d'etre of logic; and that science,
though not infallible, is more free from discover-
able fallacies than any other field of thought.
Again, while experimental methods may no doubt
be capable of much improvement, it seems a ten-
able view that the duty should be left to a special
and very advanced department of inquiry. There
might, perhaps, be formulated a system of advice
for discovery in general — rules and hints important
even to the leading men of science. But, in the
mean time, logic (as usually understood) can hardly
help containing a good deal of elementary matter,
and is compelled to take for granted in the learner
a power of making very elementary mistakes. It
seems that the best scientific discovery must always
be in advance of inductive logic, in much the same
way as the best employment of language runs in
advance of grammar. Still, there may be some use
in trying to direct and help those who are not al-
ready scientific, or only in the earlier stages of tho
pursuit ; nor need the name [of logic compel logi-
cians to claim a dignity beyond their power. One
can not fulfill successfully the duties of lord chan-
cellor and justice of the peace at once.

A Natural History Reader. For School
and Ilome. Compiled and arranged by
James Johonnot, author of " Principles
and Practice of Teaching," etc. New
York: Pp. 414. D. Appleton & Co.
Price, $1.25.

The work of the compiler of this vol-
ume has been executed with intelligence,
taste, and good practical judgment, and he
has made of it a most interesting book of
natural history for general reading. It is
an excellent sign of the healthy growth of
an interest in science when works of this
kind are called for and introduced into
schools. The literature of science must

LITERARY NOTICES,

yog

undoubtedly precede its actual and more
thorough cultivation, and a great point will
have been gained when this literature se-
cures a prominent and established place in
the schools. It is a concession to the rights
of knowledge. Hitherto we have stopped
with rhetoric, careless of the contents of
thought, and in subserviency to the dogma
that style and expression are everything.
Such works as this are tributes to a sounder
view, and evidences of advancement in the
right direction. On this subject Professor
Johonnot well remarks :

" Under the later system, the truth is rec-
ognized that the object of all school exer-
cises is to promote mental growth, to which
end ideas and thoughts are indispensable.
"Words, like bank-notes, are regarded not
for their intrinsic but for their representa-
tive value. In so far as they clearly reveal
the gold of thought, they may be taken for
genuine coin, but, failing in this, they are
worthless counterfeits. The kinds of ideas
and thoughts are also a matter of serious
moment. In each stage of the mind's
growth, those only should be used that will
command the attention by the interest ex-
eited, that will stimulate the reflective ac-
tivities of the mind, and that will incite to
further observation and investigation.

" With these objects kept clearly in view,
reading and the general acquisition of lan-
guage become secondary and not primary
processes. They are incident to the general
objects of instruction. Reading-matter is
selected upon the same principles as stud-
ies— that which will interest, stimulate, and
incite. At every stage of growth it is such
aa will best serve the present purposes of
the mind, and, at the same time, promote
the next step in advance. The pupil reads
because he is anxious to know. His progress
is rapid, because he is interested. His man-
ner of reading is correct, because he under-
stands the thought, and thought controls the
expression."

We must add that the " Natural nistory
Reader "is an attractive and a handsome
book. It is beautifully illustrated, poems
are interspersed with the prose chapters,
and it is elegantly printed. Its selections
are from the most recent writings of natu-
ralists, and the information they convey will
be found fresh and up to the times.

Lectures ox Painting. Delivered to the
Students of the Royal Academy. By
Edward Armitage, R. A. New York :
G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 337. $1.75.

Professor Armitage has given in this
book a selection of twelve from the lectures
delivered by him during the term of his pro-
fessorship in the Royal Academy, between
1876 and 1882. He has published them un-
der the impression that they might be inter-
esting to other students than those of the
Royal Academy, u and possibly even to those
who do not intend to follow art as a profes-
sion, but who would be glad to have a little
daylight thrown on a subject which, though
much written and lectured about of late
years, does not seem to have been often
treated in a simple, practical manner." The
subjects of the lectures are, "Ancient Cos-
tume," "Byzantine and Romanesque Art,"
" The Painters of the Eighteenth Century,"
"David and his School," "The Modern
Schools of Europe," " Drawing," " Color,"
"Decorative Painting," "Finish," "The
Choice of a Subject," "The Composition
of Decorative and Historical Pictures," and
the " Composition of Incident Pictures."

Archivos do Mcseu Nacional do Rio de
Janeiro (Archives of the National Mu-
seum of Rio de Janeiro). Dr. Ladislao
Netto, General Director. Vol. Ill, 1878,
pp. 194, with Six Plates; Vol. IV, 1879,
pp. 154, with Six Plates ; Vol. V, 1880,
pp. 470. Rio de Janeiro : Typographia
Economica.

The " Archives " are a quarterly publica-
tion of papers on scientific subjects that
properly come under the purview of the
Museum. The present volumes include the
publications for the second half of 1S7S,
and for 1879 and 1880. In the third vol-
ume are included papers on the venom of
the rattlesnake, by Dr. Lacerda; on the
geology of the diamond-bearing region of
the Province of Parana, by Orville A. Der-
by; observations on geological features in
the Bay of Todos os Santos, by Mr. Derby
and Richard Rathbun ; and other papers of
a more special character. The fourth vol-
ume contains a number of anthropological
and linguistic studies on the natives of the
country, and papers on subjects of entomol-
ogy and geology. The fifth volume is given
to the "Flora Fluminensis," a Flora, in

710

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Latin, of the Province of Rio, composed in
the last century by Fr. Jos 6 Marianno da
ConceicSo Velloso, and first published in
1825.

Tertiary History of the Grand Canon
District. By Clarence E. Dutton.
Washington: Government Printing-of-
fice. Pp. 264, with Forty-two Plates,
accompanied by an Atlas of Twenty-
three Plates.
The Grand Canon of the Colorado is char-
acterized by some of the most wonderful
rock-formations and the most gorgeous yet
desolate scenery to be found anywhere on
the earth. Captain Dutton has made the
study and the description of it a labor of
love, and the present volume, with its strik-
ing illustrations and the accompanying atlas
with its grand panoramas and bird's-eye
views, many of them, as well as the illus-
trations in the volume, colored according to
nature, constitute one of the most welcome
contributions to our literature and knowl-
edge which the United States Geological
Survey has made. Mr. Dutton's account of
the geology, formation, characteristics, and
scenery of the canon takes notice of every
aspect in which the wonder is likely to be
viewed. Among the details of the account,
to which we would invite attention, are the
carved niches or panels in the red-wall lime-
stone, and the exquisite tracery of the round-
ed and inward curves and projected cusps
of the walls, which are represented in plates
41 and 42 of the volume.

Electricity in Theory and Practice ; or,
the Elements of Electrical Engi-
neering. By Lieutenant Bradley A.
Fiske, U. S. N. New York : D. Van Nos-
trand. 1883. Pp. 265. Price, $2.50.

Whoever will carefully read Lieutenant
Fiske's lucid exposition will have no ex
cuse for persistence in the hazy notions
concerning the relation of electrical effects,
and the power requisite to produce them,
not uncommon among even the intelli-
gent and educated public. Very few per-
sons, perhaps, are in the position, in re-
gard to their knowledge of .electricity, of
the man who wanted to know why they
should have a steam-engine and a dvnamo-
machine to make an incandescent lamp go,
or of that English couple who purchased a
Swan lamp and spent much time trying to

light it with a match ; but the ignorance which
abounds on the subject is still very consid-
erable. With the great and increasing de-
velopment of the practical application of
electricity, it is especially desirable that the
general public, both in its character of in-
vestor and consumer, should have definite
and clear conceptions of the fundamental
pi'inciples involved in these applications.
These Lieutenant Fiske has essayed to fur-
nish in the present volume.

He introduces his subject with an ele-
mentary consideration of magnetism, which
he follows with a chapter upon statical elec-
tricity. The relation of work and potential,
and of the different electrical units to each
other, is very clearly explained. A chapter
is devoted to the laws of currents, and to
primary and secondary batteries. In speak-
ing of the electric light, no attempt is made,
and very properly, to describe different
forms, but to explain the essential principles
involved in this class of apparatus. The
chapter on electrical measurements is an ad-
mirable, concise statement of the subject, as
is also that on telegraphy and on the tele-
phone. The chapters upon electro-magnetic
induction and upon the dynamo are excel-
lent ; but upon the latter Lieutenant Fiske
might well have devoted some little atten-
tion to the designing of dynamos. He
states in his preface that he intended his
book to form a bridge between the theory
of electricity and its practical application.
There is probably no one case in which the
practical constructor finds more difficulty,
in passing from theory to practice than in
this of the designing of dynamos. He may
know what a unit magnet-pole is and the
magnetic effect of a unit-current, but he
still is able to but very vaguely see his way
to apply this knowledge in determining the
size of his field-magnets, the amount and
size of wire on them, and the like propor-
tions of his armature, to get the best re-
sults. Very few machines, wre imagine, have
been built so largely by rule of thumb as the
dynamo, and therefore information of this
sort could not fail of being of great value.

The book closes with a chapter upon the
electric railway, giving a general view of
the subject, and descriptions of the systems
carried out by Siemens Brothers, and that
devised by Mr. Edison and S. D. Field.

LITERARY NOTICES.

7ii

The Mounds of the Mississippi Valley,
historically considered. by lucien
Care, Peabody Museum. Cambridge,
Mass. Pp. 107.

This essay, which, forms a part of the
"Memoirs" of the Kentucky Geological
Survey, is an argument in favor of the the-
ory that the mound-builders were the ances-
tors of the present Indians. The advocates
of the theory that the mounds were built
by some other race rest to a large extent
upon the assumptions that the Indians were
not sufficiently advanced to execute the
works that have been examined ; that they
were not agriculturists, as the mound-build-
ers must have been; and that they were
not subject to such central authority, or
controlled by any such impelling motive, as
seems to have been necessary for the con-
struction of such extensive works. Mr.
Carr's effort is to controvert these assump-
tions. He argues, with the aid of many
citations from historians, chroniclers, and
travelers, that the Indians of the Mississippi
Valley lived in fixed villages, which they
were in the habit of fortifying by pali-
sades ; that they raised corn in large quan-
tities and stored it ; thut they all worshiped
the sun, as the mound-builders are supposed
to have done ; and that works similar to
those of the mound-builders, if not quite as
extensive, are known to have been erected
by Indians.

A Practical Treatise on Materia Medica
and Therapeutics. By Roberts Bar-
tholow, M. A., M. D., LL. D. Fifth edi-
tion, revised and enlarged. New York :
D. Appleton & Co. 1884. Pp. 738.

The appearance of a new edition of this
well-known work so soon after the edition
of 1881 is due, in part, as the author tells
us in his preface, to the recent changes in
the " United States Pharmacopoeia." Al-
though the work has been adapted to the
new official standard in general, we fail to
find any reference to the changes in the
morphia strength of the opium preparations,
and the doses prescribed are the same as in
the earlier editions. This is the more to be
regretted since the new Pharmacopoeia does
not itself give any doses.

Many additions demanded by the ad-
vance of science have been made in the
body of the work, so that nearly one hun-

dred pages in all have been added to the
book, making it a complete exponent of the
present state of knowledge in this direc-
tion.

In Part I the routes by which medicines
are introduced into the organism are classi-
fied and briefly described. Under this head
the author treats insufflation, the use of the
nasal douche and atomizers, etc., and gives
a valuable chapter upon hypodermatic (hy-
podermic) methods, with a list of the reme-
dies, solutions, and doses employed, and
cautions as to the points to be avoided in
hypodermatic injections. Then follows an
article on transfusion, with references, as in
other cases, to the authorities consulted. In
Part II the actions and uses of remedial
agents are very fully described. In this
part we find the uses of water, externally
and internally, of heat, of air, and of mass-
age, discussed, as well as the actions of
drugs in general, and the effects of various
kinds of aliments and beverages. Formulae
are given for the preparation of animal
broths and diet-drinks ; the koumiss-cure,
whey- cure, and buttermilk-cure, each receive
some attention. Directions are also given
for the preparation of gruels, jellies, pep-
tonized milk, and other restorative agents.

The various pharmacopceal preparations
are briefly mentioned, their strength noted,
and the dose given, while their physiologi-
cal and therapeutical use receives more at-
tention. Processes for their preparation are
not given.

In addition to a very copious general in-
dex, the work is provided with a very full
"clinical index," which will serve to sug-
gest the remedies that may be employed in
any particular disease, but which may also
prove an injury in other ways as furnishing
an aid to quackery, and offering an encour-
agement to " counter-prescribing " by drug-
gists.

Human Proportion and Anthropometry.
By Dr. Robert Fletcher. Cambridge,
Mass. : Moses King. Pp. 37, with Plates.
This is a lecture delivered at the Na-
tional Museum, Washington, D. C, and in-
cludes an examination and explanation of
the ancient Egyptian and the Polykleitan
canons of proportion, with a review of the
results of recent anthropometric measure-
1 ments.

712

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

The Motions of Fluids and Solids on the
Earth's Surface. By Professor Will-
iam Ferrel. .Reprinted, with Notes, by
Frank Waldo. Washington: Govern-
ment Printing-Office. Pp. 51.

This essay, the first and most important
of the valuable mathematical essays of Pro-
fessor Ferrel on the motions of the atmos-
phere, is reprinted as the first part of a
paper, the object of which is to place in the
hands of the investigator and student the
important writings on the subject, elucidated
with notes. It is to be followed by a sec-
ond part, including the writings of several
European mathematicians, who have en-
gaged in the study.

Meteorological and Physical Observa-
tions on the East Coast of British
North America. By Orray Taft Sher-
man. Washington: Government Print-
ing-Office. Pp. 202.

This volume contains the observations
and deductions made by the meteorologist
of the scientific party of the schooner Flor-
ence, which spent the winter of 1877— "78
in Cumberland Sound, latitude from 64-50°
to 67°, and completes the scientific record
of the expedition. The observations relate
to tidal phenomena, temperature, hygrome-
try, the winds, atmospheric pressure, the
weather, and the color of the sky, cloudi-
ness, precipitation, and auroral phenomena.

Annual Report of the Operations of the
United States Life-saving Service, for
the Fiscal Year ending June 30, 1882.
Washington: Government Printing-Of-
fice. Pp. 50-4.

The report well illustrates the efficiency
and usefulness of the service to which it
relates. The department has 189 stations,
of which 144 are on the Atlantic, 37 on the
lakes, seven on the Pacific, and one at the
Falls of the Ohio, Louisville, Kentucky. It
had cognizance, during the year covered by
the present report, of 345 disasters to ves-
sels of different classes, directly involving
2,398 persons. Of these persons, 2,386
were saved, and only twelve were lost. Of
$4,766,227 of property involved, $3,106,-
457 were saved. Interesting statements
are made respecting the success that has
attended the use of the surf-boat, the self-
righting and self -bailing life-boat, the
breeches-buoy, the wreck-gun, the hcaving-

stick, the India-rubber dress, and other life-
saving apparatus. Circumstantial accounts
are given of each of the cases of shipwreck
and rescue ; statistics are shown of wrecks
and casualties in American waters and dis-
asters to American vessels in other waters,
since 1879; and the instructions of the ser-
vice to mariners in case of shipwreck are
furnished.

Charts and Tables showing Geographi-
cal Distribution of Rainfall in the
United States. By H. H. C. Dunwtoody.
Washington : Government Printing-
Office. Pp. 51, with 13 Charts.

The charts exhibit the geographical dis-
tribution of the average monthly and aver-
age yearly rainfall in the United States, as
determined by observers of the Signal Ser.
vice. The tables give the actual rainfall
occurring during each month at the regular
Signal-Service stations and army posts, with
the average rainfall for each month, season,
and year, and serve to show the fluctuations
of rainfall in different sections of the coun-
try during the last ten years.

The North Atlantic Cyclones of August,
1883. By Lieutenant W. H. H. South-
erland, U. S. Navy. Washington : Gov-
ernment Printing-Office. Pp. 22.

This report includes the records of the
cyclones of August 19th to August 27th,
and of August 27th to September 1st, with
maps of their course, compiled from the
logs of vessels which came under their in-
fluence. Nautical directions are appended
for manoeuvring in, and avoiding the cen-
ter of, cyclones in the North Atlantic.

Horological and Thermometry Bureau
of Yale College Observatory. Third
Annual Report. By Leonard Waldo.
New Haven : Tuttle, Morehouse & Tay-
lor. Pp. 26.

Watches continue to be received for
testing from a variety of makers, and show
a decided improvement in quality of per-
formance. The establishment of a school
of horology is suggested, but endowments
are wanting. Time-signals are regularly
transmitted from the observatory to the
railroads of the State. Certificates have
been issued of 5,295 thermometers, against
4,552 in 1881-'82 and 1,957 in 1880-'81.

LITERARY NOTICES.

713

Chemical Problems, -with Brief State-
ments of the Principles involved. By
James C. Fote, Ph. D. New York : D.
Van Nostrand. Pp. 141. 50 cts.
The value of problems as means for secur-
ing accuracy in a knowledge of the subject,
and as tests for attainments, is generally
recognized by the best educators. The pres-
ent work was prepared to meet a need felt
by the author, who is a professor in Law-
rence University, Wisconsin, in instructing
his classes. Its plan is very simple. After
defining the terms used, and briefly stating
the principle to be illustrated, a typical prob-
lem is solved, and from the solution a for-
mula of general application is deduced, which
is followed by problems to be worked by the
student. These, as a rule, bear upon the fun-
damental principles of chemistry.

Steam-Heating. An Exposition of the Amer-
ican Practice of warming Buildings by
Steam. By Robert Briggs. New York :
D. Van Nostrand. Pp. 108. 50 cts.
Unless some application of electricity is
devised to supersede it, steam is, in all prob-
ability, destined to be the agent by which
our houses will be heated in the future.
Aside from its superior cleanliness as com-
pared with most other methods of heating
apartments, the facility with which the warm-
ing and ventilation are managed, when it is
once established, is a strong recommenda-
tion in its favor. Mr. Briggs's treatise in-
cludes a great deal that the builder and
householder will find useful on the subject,
particularly on the practical side.

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.

Proceeding of the Boston Society of Natural
History. Vol. XXII. November, 1SS2, to Febru-
ary, 1SS3. Pp. 112, with Six Plates.

Summary of Progress in Mineralogy in 1SS3.
By H. Carvill Lewis, Philadelphia. Pp. 50.

"What shall we do for the Drunkard T By Or-
pheus Everts, M. D. Cincinnati : Eobert Clarke
& Co. Pp. 56.

Insects injurious to VegetatioD and how to get
rid of Them. By Dr. C. A. Greene, of Harrisburg,
Pa. Pp.9.

A Brief Statement of the Doctrines and Philoso-
phy of the Social Labor Movement. By A. J.
Starkweather and S. Robert Nilson. San Francis-
co : S. F. Truth Publishing Company. Pp. 62.
15 cents.

Shall we put Spectacles on Children ? By Ju-
lian J. Chisholm, M. D., University of Maryland.
Pp.6.

Count Eumford, Originator of the Royal Institu-
tion. By Professor Tyndall. London. Pp. 48.

The Batrachia of the Permian Period of North
America. By E. D. Cope. Pp. 14.

Paleontological Bulletin. No. 37. Various pa-
pers by E. D. Cope. Philadelphia : A. E. Foote,
1223 Belmont Avenue. Pp. 20.

The Evidence for Evolution in the History of
the Extinct Mammalia. By E. D. Cope, of Phila-
delphia. Salem : Salem Press. Pp. 19.

Micrometrv, Report of the National Committee,
etc. R. H. Ward, Secretary. Troy, N. Y. Pp. 23.

The Bufalini Prize, U. S. Bureau of Education.
Washington : Government Printing-Office. Pp. 5.

Development of a Dandelion-Flower. By John
M. Coulter. Pp. 7.

The Seasons in Iowa, and a Calendar for 1884.
By Gustavus Hinrichs. Iowa City, Iowa. Pp. 24.

Illinois. By William Hosea Ballou. Pp. 6.

Official Register of Dentists in Iowa. Iowa Citv :
A. O. Hunt, D. D. S. Pp. 34.

Pilot Chart of the North Atlantic for January,
with a Supplement (pp. 2) giving Position and De-
tail of Floating "Wrecks. By Commander J. R. Bart-
lett, U. S. Hydrographic Office.

Injurious Garden Insects. Bv Byron D. Hal-
stead, Sc. D. New York : Phillips & Hunt. Pp.
16. 5.cents.

The Zone of Asteroids and the Ring of Saturn.
By Professor Daniel Kirkwood, Bloomington, Indi-
ana. Pp. 4.

People and Places. By Sarah K. Bolton.
Cleveland Educational Bureau, Cleveland, Ohio.
Pp. 40.

American Society of Microscopists. Proceed-
ings of the Sixth Annual Meeting, August, 1888.
Buffalo : Haas & Klein. Pp.279. $1.30.

Contributions from the Chemical Laboratory of
the University of Michigan. Edited by Albert B.
Prescott and Victor C. Vaughan. Vol. I, Part IL
Ann Arbor, Mich. Pp. 48. 40 cents.

Transactions of the New York Academy of Sci-
ences. " Contents " and " Index " of Vol. 1 and
eight numbers of Vol. II. Pp. 170.

Morphology, Estimates of Intelligence, Vital
Chemistry. By Frank B. Scott. Badax, Mich.
Pp. 16.

Physical Studies of Lake Tahce. By Professor
John Le Conte. Pp. 37.

Hysteria. By James Hendrie Lloyd, A. M., M. D.
Philadelphia. Pp. 21.

Downward Displacement of the Transverse Co-
lon. By Charles Hermon Thomas, M. D. Philadel-
phia. Pp. 4.

Of Work and Wealth : A Summary of Econom-
ics. By R. R. Bowker. New York : Society for
Political Education. Pp. 48. 25 cents.

Medical Symbolism. By T. S. Sozinskey, M. D.
Philadelphia. Pp. 11.

The Ellipticon. By J. L. Naish. New York.
Pp.2. $1.

New York Post-Graduate Medical School, New
York City. Sessions of 18S8-*84. Pp. 16.

The Termination of the Nerves in the Kidney.
By M. L. Holbrook, M. D. New York City. Pp. 8.

Annual Report of the Hydrographer of the Navy
Department. 1883. Washington: Government
Printing-Office. Pp. 15.

Report of the Commission to select and locate
Parks in New York City. New York: M. H.
Brown, 49 Park Place. Pp. 215, with Plates.

Federal Taxation : The Urgent Necessity of Re-
form. By Samuel Barnett. Atlanta, Ga. Pp. 45.

Prison Contract Labor: Analvsis of the Vote
(New York). Albany : Weed, Parsons & Co. Pp.
22.

Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College.
Thirty-eighth Annnal Report. By Edward C.
Pickering. Cambridge : John Wilson & Son. Pp.
17.

Bureau of Statistics, Treasury Department.
Quarterly Report to September 30, 1S83. Wash-
ington : "Government Printing-Office. Pp. 133.

7H

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Physics in Pictures. "With Thirty Colored
Plates for Ocular Instruction. By Theodore Eek-
ardt and A. II. Keane. London : Edward Stanford.
Text, pp. 20. 7*. 6c/.

Common - Sense Binder. New York • Asa L.
Shipman's Sons.

Hints on the Drainage and Sewerage of Dwell-
ing?. By William Paul Gerhard. .New York :
William f. Comstock. Ib84. Pp.302. Illustrated.
$2.50.

Lund and its Pent. By Francis A. "Walker,
Ph.D., LL. D. Boston: Little, Brown &, Co. 18S3.
Pp. 232. 75 cents.

A Bachelor's Talks about Married Life and
Things Adjacent. By William Aikman. D. D.
New York: Fowler & Wells. 1884. Pp. 273.
$1.50.

The Philosophy of Self-Consciousness. By P.
F.Fitzgerald. Cincinnau : E. Clarke & Co. 1SS3.
$1.25.

Electricity, Magnetism, and Electric Telegraphy.
By Thomas D. Lockwood. New York: D. Van
Nostrand. 1883. Pp. 377.

For Mothers and Daughters : A Manual of Hy-
giene for Women and the Household. By Mrs. E.
G. Cook, M.D. New York: Fowler & Wells.
Pp. 392. Illustrated. $1.50.

Geological Survey of Alabama : Report for
Years 1881 and 1882. By Eugene Allen Smith,
Ph.D. Montgomery, Ala.: W. D. Brown & Co.
1883. Pp. 615, with Maps.

Second Biennial Eeport State Board of Health
of Iowa for Fiscal Period ending June 30, 18S3.
Des Moines : George E. Roberts. 18S3. Pp. 417.

The Relations of Mind and Brain. By Henry
Calderwood, LL. D. Second edition. London :
Macmillan & Co. 1884. Pp. 527.

Chemistry, Inorganic and Organic, with Experi-
ments. By Charles Loudon Bloxam. From the
fifth and revised English edition. Philadelphia :
Henry C. Lea's Son & Co. 18S3. Pp. 738. Cloth,
$3.75 ; leather, $4.75.

First Registration Report of the State Board of
Health of Iowa, for the Year ending October 1,
18S1. Des Moines: George E. Roberts. 1883. Pp.
811.

The Field of Disease : A Book of Preventive
Medicine. By B. W. Richardson, M. D., F. R. S.
Philadelphia : Henry C. Lea's Son & Co. 1884.
Pp. 737. Cloth, $4 ; leather, $5 ; russia, $5.50.

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

Sub-aerial Decay of Rocks. — Professor
T. S. Hunt publishes, in the "American
Journal of Science," an elaborate paper on
the " Decay of Rocks," in which he insists
that recent geological studies afford evidence
that a sub-aerial decay both of silicated
crystalline and calcareous rocks has taken
place universally and from the most ancient
epochs, and that it was very extensive in
pre-Cambrian times. He further insists that
the materials resulting from this decay are
preserved in situ, in some regions by over-
lying strata ; in others by the position of
the decayed material with reference to de-
nuding agents ; and that the process of de-
cay, though continuous through later geo-
logical ages, has, under ordinary conditions,

been insignificant in amount since the gla-
cial period, on account of the relatively short
time that has elapsed, and also, probably,
on account of changed atmospheric con-
ditions in the later time. The process of
decay, he believes, " has furnished the ma-
terials for the clays, sands, and iron-oxides
from the beginning of Palaeozoic time to
the present, and also for the corresponding
rocks of Eozoic time, which have been
formed from the older feldspathic rocks by
the partial loss of protoxide bases. The
bases thus separated from crystalline sili-
cated rocks have been the source, directly
and indirectly, of all limestones and car-
bonated rocks, and have, moreover, caused
profound secular changes in the constitu-
tion of the ocean's waters. The decay of
sulphureted ores in the Eozoic rocks has
given rise to oxidized iron-ores, and also to
deposits of rich copper-ores in various geo-
logical horizons." Finally, Professor Hunt
maintains that " the rounded masses of crys-
talline rock left in the process of decay
constitute not only the bowlders of the
drift, but, judging from analogy, the simi-
lar masses in conglomerates of various ages,
going back to Eozoic time ; and that not
only the forms of these detached masses,
but the outlines of eroded regions of crystal-
line rocks, were determined by the preced-
ing process of sub-aerial decay of these
rocks."

" Colds."— The views of Dr. Page on the
subject of " catching cold," published in the
" Monthly " for January, having been sharp-
ly criticised as unsound and extreme, we
give below an extract on the same subject
from the London " Lancet," a scientific med-
ical authority of the highest grade: "A
person in good health, with fair play, easily
resists cold. But when the health flags a
little, and liberties are taken with the stom-
ach or the nervous system, a chill is easily
taken, and, according to the weak spot of
the individual, assumes the form of a cold,
or pneumonia, or, it may be, jaundice. Of
all causes of ' cold,' probably fatigue is one
of the most efficient. A jaded man coming
home at night from a long day's work, a
growing youth losing two hours' sleep over
evening parties two or three times a week,
or a young lady heavily ' doing the season,'

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

715

young children at this festive season over-
fed and with a short allowance of sleep, are
common instances of the victims of ' cold.'
Luxury is favorable to chill-taking; very
hot rooms, soft chairs, feather beds, create
a sensitiveness that leads to catarrhs. It is
not, after all, the ' cold ' that is so much
to be feared as the antecedent conditions
that give the attack a chance of doing harm.
Some of the worst 4 colds ' happen to those
who do not leave their house or even their
bed, and those who are most invulnerable
are often those who are most exposed to
changes of temperature, and who by good
sleep, cold bathing, and regular habits, pre-
serve the tone of their nervous system and
circulation. Probably many chills are con-
tracted at night or at the fag-end of the
day, when tired people get the equilibrium
of their circulation disturbed by either over-
heated sitting-rooms or underheated bed-
rooms and beds. This is especially the
case with elderly people. In such cases the
mischief is not always done instantaneously,
or in a single night. It often takes place
insidiously, extending over days or even
weeks. It thus appears that ' taking cold '
is not by any means a simple result of a
lower temperature, but depends largely on
personal conditions and habits, affecting es-
pecially the nervous and muscular energy of
the body."

How and where Malaria thrives. — The

health-officers of New Britain, Connecticut,
have made an instructive report concerning
the prevalence of malarial diseases in that
town, and their connection with certain sup-
posed causes. The causes of malarial and
other miasmatic diseases are not identical,
though they are similar, and the two classes
not infrequently occur in a given locality at
the same time ; and the hygienic measures
required to prevent them all are the same.
The essential conditions for the development
of malaria appear to be: the presence of
the malarial germ ; a high temperature and
dry atmosphere ; and favorable conditions
of the soil ; and the absence of either of
them will suspend or prevent the action of
the poison. We have power only over the
third condition. " A generous rain in the
vicinity has, we think, invariably suspended
its action. And yet a previous condition of

moisture is essential to its manifestation.
All deposits of vegetable matter, such as
muck, sink-drainage, heaps of decaying veg-
etable matter, or even wet, spongy land, fur-
nish the essentials for its support ; but it is
requisite that the soil shall have been very
wet, or covered with water some portions of
the year." A generous crop of grass, and
perhaps of other vegetable substance, has
been known to prevent malaria. In 1880
nearly all the families in the neighborhood
of some lots which were largely a deposit
of muck had malaria. The lots were
plowed, dragged, and sowed with grass-seed,
and the appearance of the crop of grass and
weeds was attended by a disappearance of
chills and fever. Two or three other in-
stances are mentioned in the same town, in
which fever-and-ague was banished by giv-
ing a similar treatment to tracts of swampy
and mucky soil. Another case is specified
where malaria was prevented by the drying
up of the sewerage and sink-water which
usually found its outlet through a system of
ditches cut in muck. Preparations were
making to lay tiles in the ditches and fill
them up, but, before this was done, a heavy
rain washed them out, and " caused the pre-
vailing sickness to abate as suddenly as it
had commenced." From the first, malaria
has not prevailed in those parts of the city
where vegetable deposits and filth have been
absent, and the health of the streets in
which sewers have been laid has been re-
markably good.

Can Dogs be taught to read ? — Under
the title " Instinct," Sir John Lubbock writes
as follows in a recent number of the " Spec-
tator " :

" Sir : Mr. Darwin's ' Notes on Instinct,'
recently published by my friend Mr. Ro-
manes, have again called attention to the
interesting subject of instinct in animals.
Miss Martineau once remarked that, consid-
ering how long we have lived in close asso-
ciation with animals, it is astonishing how
little we know about them, and especially
about their mental condition. This applies
with especial force to our domestic ani-
mals, and above all, of course, to dogs. I
believe that it arises very much from the
fact that hitherto we have tried to teach
animals, rather than to learn from them —

j\6

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

to convey our ideas to them, rather than to
devise any language, or code of signals, by
means of which they might communicate
theirs to us. No doubt, the former process
is interesting and instructive, but it does
not carry us very far. Under these circum-
stances, it has occurred to me whether some
such system as that followed by deaf-mutes,
and especially by Dr. Howe with Laura
Bridgman, might not prove very instructive,
if adapted to the case of dogs. Accordingly
I prepared some pieces of stout cardboard,
and printed on each in legible letters a
word, such as ' food,' ' bone,' ' out,' etc. I
then began training a black poodle, ' Van '
by name, kindly given me by my friend
Mr. Nickalls. I commenced by giving the
dog food in a saucer, over which I laid the
card on which was the word ' food,' placing
also by the side an empty saucer, covered
by a plain card. * Yan ' soon learned to dis-
tinguish between the two, and the next stage
was to teach him to bring me the card ; this
he now does, and hands it to me quite pret-
tily, and I then give him a bone, or a little
food, or take him out, according to the card
brought. lie still brings sometimes a plain
card, in which case I point out his error,
and he then takes it back and changes it.
This, however, does not often happen. Yes-
terday morning, for instance, he brought
me the card with ' food ' on it nine times in
succession, selecting it from among other
plain cards, though I changed the relative
position every time. No one who sees him
can doubt that he understands the act of
bringing the card with the word ' food ' on
it, as a request for something to eat, and
that he distinguishes between it and a plain
card. I also believe that he distinguishes,
for instance, between the card with the word
' food ' on it and the card with ' out ' on it.
This, then, seems to open up a method
which may be carried much further, for it is
obvious that the cards may be multiplied,
and the dog thus enabled to communicate
freely with us. I have as yet, I know, made
only a very small beginning, and hope to
carry the experiment much further, but my
object in troubling you with this letter is
twofold. In the first place, I trust that
some of your readers may be able and will-
ing to suggest extensions or improvements
of the idea. Secondly, my spare time is

small, and liable to many interruptions ;
and animals also, we know, differ greatly
from one another. Now, many of your
readers have favorite dogs, and I would ex-
press a hope that some of them may be dis-
posed to study them in the manner indicated.
The observations, even though negative,
would be interesting ; but I confess I hope
that some positive results might follow,
which would enable us to obtain a more cor-
rect insight into the minds of animals than
we have yet acquired."

Salts in Rivers and in the Sea.— The
sea, it is well understood, is fed with salt
as well as with water, by the rivers. The
question then arises naturally, How is it that
the rivers — admitting that they are mildly
salt, although they appear to be fresh— dif-
fer from the ocean in the kind as well as in
the strength of their saltness ? Mr. W. Mat-
tieu Williams answers the question by show-
ing that, when sea-water is evaporated, sul-
phate of lime is the first salt to be deposited,
while chloride of sodium, sulphate of mag-
nesia, chloride of potassium, and the bro-
mides, are deposited later. Hence, when
the sea-water reaches the point of satura-
tion with sulphate of lime, no more can be
dissolved in it, but all additional supplies
must be deposited. Moreover, if a soluble
salt of lime were brought into the sea, its
lime would combine with the sulphuric acid
there combined with magnesia, or soda, or
potash, which would, in obedience to a curi-
ous chemical law, leave those bases to com-
bine with that one which would form an
insoluble compound. Thus the total quan-
tity of lime in sea-water is limited by the
solubility of sulphate of lime, and this
amounts to only about one part in four
hundred of water.

The Caribs and the Greeks. — Mr. A. J.

Yan Koolnijk has published in the " Journal
of the Dutch Geographical Society " an ac-
count of Carib tombs and relics which have
been found in the Island of Aruba, off Dutch
Guiana. Among the relics are potteries of
good workmanship, elaborately ornamented
and painted in a variety of colors obtained
on the island. Some of the more common
ornaments are figures of frogs and frogs'
heads, which indicate that the Indians had

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

7*7

considerable respect for those animals.
Many of the ornaments, the handles of the
vessels, and the skill with which the reliefs
were finished, reminded the discoverers of
Greek patterns. Some of the vessels, too,
bore figures which were thought to be in-
scriptions or hieroglyphics, and a remark-
able resemblance was traced between these
characters and the letters of the Greek al-
phabet. This leads our Dutch antiquary to
consider the question whether there may
not have been some kind of a connection
between these Caribs and the ancient
Greeks. Ch. Riimelin is quoted as having
suggested the possibility of looking for the
origin of the'northern tribes of Colombia,
through the Guanches of the Canary Islands,
to the Foulahs of the Soodan. Cyries also
speaks of having seen hieroglyphic figures
representing the sun, moon, and various
animals, roughly cut on the granite rocks
of Guiana at such heights that ladders had
to be used to reach them.

The Stone Age in Africa. — Herr Richard
Andree has accumulated a large mass of
evidences of the existence of a stone age in
Africa — a point which has hitherto been in-
volved in much doubt. The Djurs, on the
White Nile, still hammer their iron with a
block of granite ; smoothed stones are still
used for hammer and anvil between the
east coast and the Tanganyika Lake ; the
Hottentots and Bushmen dig roots with per-
forated stones; the Arabs in Egypt curry
their shorn sheep with flint ; the Bushmen
tip their arrows with bone, and the Gabiri,
in Bagirmi, with clay. Stories, which are
reminiscences of the days of stone instru-
ments, are told among the Hereros, and
among the Bazimba of Madagascar. When
the Europeans discovered the Canary Isl-
ands, they found the Guanches in the midst
of a stone age. This much we know of the
present use of stone. The historical evi-
dences are scarce. Diodorus Siculus says
the Libyans threw stones at their enemies,
and Agatharcides says that the Ethiopians
tied stone points to their arrows, while Stra-
bo says they tipped them with antelope-
horn. Vessels and implements of stone have
become quite common among the " finds "
of Egypt, and in all the countries and the
deserts to the western border of Morocco.

While not more is known about the stone
evidences than about the other features of
the intermediate countries, flints and stone
vessels, of both crude palaeolithic and more
highly-finished forms are found at numer-
ous places in the southern point of Africa,
from the mouth of the Orange River to Dela-
goa Bay. The implements are very sim-
ilar in form and material to the European
finds, and present the same puzzle in the
occurrence of nephrite among them. As-
suming that evidences will be found at least
as abundantly in the countries which have
not yet been examined for them, the con-
clusion is drawn that the Africans, although
they have been using iron as far back in his-
torical times as our knowledge extends, had
also a stone age.

Indistinctness of Race Divisions. — Pro-
fessor Leon Rosny, in his forthcoming work
on the " Danubian Principalities," says,
speaking of the nationality of the Roumani-
ans, that that people confirms a view which
he has held for years, and which is also M.
Renan's view, that the matter of nationality
is very largely a question of feeling. Many
different elements may have contributed to
the formation of a Roumanian nationality,
but the chief one has been the fancy that
the people of Moldavia and Wallachia were
descended from a mixture of the ancient
Dacians with Trajan's soldiers, and were,
therefore, the Romans of the East, whose
mission it was to guard the interests of the
Latin race in that part of Europe. Reminis-
cences of Roman antiquity are still current
in the country, as, for example, in a popular
dance, the Kalusar, which represents the
rape of the Sabine women. Conversely, the
Tartars of the Dobrudja are composed of a
great variety of types, from that of the pure
European to that of the most pronounced
Mongolian, but they all pass alike for Tar-
tars. These things suggest, again and again,
the thought that the characteristic traits
which are held to be most decisive in de-
termining the differences between the groups
of mankind are in reality very flexible and
changeable. Physical tokens are of service
only for the establishment of two or three
grand divisions among men, and the value
even of these divisions is becoming more
and more subject to criticism. Linguistic

7i8

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

distinctions, on which ethnographic classifi-
cations have for some time been assumed,
are likewise very fallacious. People have
been capable of changing their vocabulary
and their grammar, and even of discarding
their whole language and adopting another
of different spirit. The groups of the hu-
man race are, as a whole, the product of his-
torical changes in the different phases of
their existence, and the influence of the sur-
roundings in which they have developed
themselves. Professor Halevy supports M.
Rosny's theory, and believes that nations
may change their language, their disposition,
and their moral character, according to the
surroundings among which they live, and
according to their institutions. Africans,
for example, show a change from the mo-
ment they become Mohammedans. The
word " race " should no longer be used in
ethnology. " When I was in Abyssinia,"
he says, " during the war between England
and King Theodore, it was quite impossible
to distinguish a Hindoo in the British ser-
vice, when he was stripped, from a native
Abyssinian. Even Theophrastus was aware
of the striking similarity, and classed the
Indians and Abyssinians together as Ethio-

pians

n

The Check in the Growth of France.—

The attention of French economists has been
drawn for several years to the fact that the
population of their country is not increasing,
but shows rather a tendency, in many parts
of the country, to diminish. The tendency
is steadily manifested, in several depart-
ments, to a greater degree than in others,
and has been maintained with considerable
uniformity in those departments where it is
most marked. The departments in which
the decrease is most observable are the
group in Languedoc and the group in Nor-
mandy. Of the five Norman departments,
only one, that of the Lower Seine, shows an
increase, and the increase there is solely due
to the attraction of the large towns of Havre
and Rouen. The tendency of population to
gravitate toward the cities, at the expense
of the rural districts, is as marked in France
as in other countries, and contributes its
quota toward retarding the growth of the
country as a whole ; for mankind are less
prolific in towns than in the country. A

few departments show an increase of popu-
lation, and these, curiously, are about even-
ly divided between the richest and the poor-
est departments in the nation. The cause
of the stationary condition of the population
is found, by those who endeavor to account
for it, in the evenly comfortable situation of
the people. They are contented with things
as they are, and avoid having large families,
in order to evade extra exertion and prevent
the diminution of their estates that would
follow if there were many heirs to divide
them among. Every one aims to live and
save, so as to leave his children as well off
as himself, and a little better off if possible.
Hence very few have more than three chil-
dren. All the large towns have increased
enormously during the present century, at
such a rate that, if the population of the
whole country had increased at the same
rate, France would have had seventy-five
million inhabitants, or would have been as
densely populated as England. Had it not
been, in fact, for the augmentation of the
populations of Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles,
the population of all France would have act-
ually diminished during the last five years.
This augmentative population, except as it
is of foreign origin, contributes, as we have
seen, to the tendency to depletion of the
aggregate.

Anthropology in Italy.— Anthropology
is studied in Italy with considerable zeal,
and nearly every large town has its collec-
tion and its specialist of repute. The coun-
try, as may be judged from the figure it has
made in history, is rich in monuments dat-
ing from a very great antiquity. In upper
Italy earth-walls have recently been discov-
ered on the mountain-heights, which are at-
tributed to the Celts. The plains of Lom-
bardy and Emilia have furnished numerous
remains of lake-dwellings, which have been
studied by Pigorini, Strobel, and Chierici,
and are represented in the collections of
Parma and Reggio. Not less important are
the Etruscan necropolis of Margabotto and
that of the Cerlosa of Bologna. Bologna
has its newly built Museo Civico under the
direction of Gozzodini, and the accomplished
geologist Capelini, who has discovered traces
of cannibalism in a cave on the Island of
Palmaria. The Olmo skull, which Cocchi

9

NOTES.

719

regards as post-Pliocene, and which may be
compared with the Cro-Magnon and Steeten
skulls, is in the geological collection of this
city. Mantegazza has founded an anthro-
pological and ethnological museum in Flor-
ence, with Miloni in charge of the Etruscan
and Schiaparelli of the archaeological de-
partments. Perugia, too, has Etruscan an-
tiquities, and Belluci is collecting prehistoric
stone implements there. Pigorini has estab-
lished a prehistorical and ethnological mu-
seum at Rome, where Michael St. de Rossi
has won much honor by his researches.
Nicolucci, who has founded an anthropo-
logical collection at the University of Na-
ples, has examined about a hundred skulls,
and has found them to be meso-cephalic
Grecian skulls, very like those still typical
in the region.

Two East African Tribes. — Some inter-
esting information respecting East African
tribes has been obtained by the London Geo-
graphical Society from the notes of the Rev.
T. Wakefield, missionary at Ribe, near Mom-
basa. Kavirondo appears to be the most
important country on the eastern shore of
the Victoria Nyanza, and is described as a
great grass-clad plain, with a few detached
hills and clumps of trees, but altogether
without forests. The people are tall and
powerfully built, of a deep black, and with
thick lips and flat noses. They wear their
hair short, or dress it elaborately, or shave
it all off but a tuft on the crown, or shave
half the head, or a few patches only, ac-
cording to their taste. The women tattoo
the stomach and the back, but the men do
so only rarely. Dress is almost unknown.
The women are content with a string worn
round the waist, to which they attach a tail-
like appendage made of bark. They wear
no ornaments, but smear themselves with
disagreeable (to whites) substances. The
men wear iron bracelets on their fore-arms,
and above their elbows. Their spears are
long and have short blades, and their shields
are made of buffalo-hides. Neither swords
nor knives are in use. Both sexes work in
the fields. Millet, beans, bananas, and large
crops of sweet-potatoes are grown, and two
harvests are gathered in the year. A thick
porridge, on festive occasions, made with
milk, constitutes the staple food, and is eaten
with the hands. Cattle, sheep, and goats

are raised. The huts are circular and roomy,
and high enough for a man to stand upright
within them. Another people, the Wa-Uka-
ra, are likewise tall and muscular, and have
a similar variety of tastes about their hair,
They paint their bodies red, with clay mixed
in oil, and their arms and legs with white ;
tattoo their stomachs and upper arms and
have few ornaments. Women wear kilts of
bark-cloth and skins, and men a longer gar-
ment of like material. They live in circular
huts, built over pits three feet deep, and
covered with conical roofs. They marry
only when full-grown, and pay the dowry
for their wives in cattle and goats. They
grow a variety of crops, and pound their
corn or millet in a wooden mortar, or grind
it on a flat stone, beneath which a cowhide
is spread out to receive the flour. Their do-
mestic animals are cattle, goats, sheep of a
superior kind, dogs, and fowls, but cats are
not known. Their blacksmiths manufacture
hoes, axes, and spears ; and they produce
cooking-pots of clay and baskets of wicker-
work. Ukara contains a large number of
populous villages.

NOTES.

Near Mandan, in the neighborhood of
the junction of the Hart and Missouri Riv-
ers, are what appear to be two large ceme-
teries of an ancient race. One of them is
composed of what are described as trenches
filled with bones of man and beast, and cov-
ered with several feet of earth so as to
form considerable mounds. With the bones
are associated broken pottery, vases of flint,
and agates. The pottery is described as
being of a dark material, handsomely deco-
rated, delicate in finish, and very light,
pointing to the existence of a considerable
degree of civilization.

The death has been announced of Mr.
Robert B. Tolles, of Boston, the distin-
guished maker of American microscopes
and telescopes of great powers.

Dr. Grassi is said to have made the im-
portant discovery that flies are active agents
in the propagation of disease. They take
the ova of parasitical worms into their
mouths and discharge them unchanged in
convenient places, often upon substances to
be used as human food. Dr. Grassi is so
deeply impressed with the magnitude and
seriousness of the consequences that he
hopes some effectual means may soon be
found of destroying flies. — Science Monthly.

720

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Special attention is given by the British
Government officers, in Cyprus, to the de-
struction of the locusts, with a view to their
extermination. The governor reports that
in 1882 he was successful in keeping the
pests down, and he considers the method of
screens so effectual that he proposes to rely
on catching the live locusts, and not to
gather their eggs. The accepted practice
in China, Russia, and Turkey is based on a
different view.

Brigadier-General Andrew A. Hum-
phreys, who died in Washington on the 28th
of November, in the seventy-fourth year of
his age, performed many important services
in the shape of scientific surveys and works
of engineering. He was Superintendent of
the Coast Survey from 1844 to 1849, of the
Topographic and Hydrographic Survey of the
Mississippi Delta from 1849 to 1851, and of
surveys for railroads and geographical ex-
plorations west of the Mississippi to 1861.
He was again engaged in the examination
of the Mississippi levees for about a year
after the war, after which he was placed in
command of the Corps of Engineers and in
charge of the Engineer Bureau. The report
on the " Physics and Hydraulics of the Mis-
sissippi," prepared by him in conjunction
with Lieutenant H. L. Abbott, has much sci-
entific value.

M. de Sarzec, a French Oriental archae-
ologist, suggested some time ago that the
ancient Eastern stone-cutters used diamond-
pointed tools in their more delicate work
on diorite and other hard stones. He is
corroborated by Mr. Flinders Petrie, an
English Egyptologist, who has found in his
minute examinations of ancient work lines
of a character that could not apparently
have been cut in those stones (diorites and
granites) with any metallic tool, but must
have been made with a gem-point.

M. Robert Haensel, of Reichenberg,
Bohemia, has succeeded in accurately photo-
graphing a flash of lightning. His pictures,
of which he has taken several, show the
light of the flash under the form of long-
continuous sparks, traversing the atmos-
phere. In one of them the point where
the spark meets the earth is very clearly
defined. With the spark, the landscape
also is well produced, and a means is given
for estimating the length of the luminous
train, which, in one instance, is calculated
to be 1,700 metres, or more than a mile.

An International Society of Electricians
has been formed at Paris, under the honor-
ary presidency of M. Cochet. It is open for
admission to membership to every French-
man or foreigner interested, whether in a
general, scientific, industrial, or commercial
way, in the progress of theoretical or ap-
plied electricity. The price of membership
is twenty francs, or about four dollars, a year.

M. George Bontemps, a French chemist,
distinguished particularly for his labors in
the application of the sciences to glass-
making, died at Amboise, France, November
14th, aged eighty-four years. He began his
chemical studies under Gay-Lussac and The-
nard, and has been connected with glass-
making, in nearly every branch of which he
has participated, since 1818. He introduced
several improvements in the art, among
them the revival of the manufacture of
ruby glass in 1826, after it had ceased for
two centuries, and was successful in mak-
ing good optical glass. He published many
papers related to glass-making, and a large
work on the subject.

M. de Quatrefages recently presented
to the French Academy of Sciences a re-
port by M. E. Cartailhac on a flint-quarry
that was worked during the stone age at
Mur-de-Barrez, in Aveyron. It consisted of
vertical pits dug through the Aquitanian
limestone to the level of the flint-beds, at
depths of from two to four metres. The
walls of the pits bore evident marks of the
pick, a tool of deer-horn, of which a con-
siderable number of specimens were found
in the bottoms of the pits. These pits are
the first that have been found in France,
and are very much like the ones which have
been discovered at Spiennes, in Belgium,
and Cisbury, in England.

M. Ivon Villarceat:, a French astrono-
mer and mathematician, died on the 23d of
December, aged seventy-one years. He was
educated to be an engineer, but became
connected with the observatory, where he
distinguished himself by his investigations
of the periodicity of comets, his calculations
of the motions of the stars, and his services
in determining latitudes and longitudes.

The common objection among woman-
kind, says the " Pall Mall Budget," to letting
their ages be known is not shared by the
ladies of Japan, who actually display the
facts as to their age in the arrangement of
their hair. Girls from nine to fifteen wear
their hair interlaced with red crape, describ-
ing a half-circle round the head, the fore-
head being left free with a curl at each side.
From fifteen t<5 thirty the hair is dressed
very high on the forehead, and put up at
theback in the shape of a fan or butterfly,
with interlacings of silver cord and a deco-
ration of colored balls. Beyond thirty, a
woman twists her hair round a shell-pin,
placed horizontally at the back of the head.
Widows also designate themselves, and
whether or not they desire to marry again.

The subject fixed for the Howard medal,
to be awarded next year by the English
Statistical Society, is " The Preservation of
Health, as it is affected by Personal Habits,
such as Cleanliness, Temperance, etc."

3HSR

'■''' 'Vvv'

AUGUSTUS WILLIAM HOFMANN.

THE

POPULAR SCIENCE
MONTHLY.

APRIL, 1884.

THE COMING SLAVERY.

By HEEBEET SPENCEE.

THE kinship of pity to love is shown among other ways in this, that
it idealizes its object. Sympathy with one in suffering suppresses,
for the time being, remembrance of his transgressions. The feeling
which vents itself in " poor fellow ! " on seeing one in agony, excludes
the thought of "bad fellow," which might at another time arise.
Naturally, then, if the wretched are unknown or but vaguely known,
all the demerits they may have are ignored ; and thus it happens that
when, as just now, the miseries of the poor are depicted, they are
thought of as the miseries of the deserving poor, instead of being
thought of, as in large measure they should be, as the miseries of the
undeserving poor. Those whose hardships are set forth in pamphlets
and proclaimed in sermons and speeches which echo throughout so-
ciety are assumed to be all worthy souls, grievously wronged, and
none of them are thought of as bearing the penalties of their own
misdeeds.

On hailing a cab in a London street, it is surprising how generally
the door is officiously opened by one who expects to get something for
his trouble. The surprise lessens after counting the many loungers
about tavern-doors, or after observing the quickness with which a
street-performance, or procession, draws from neighboring slums and
stable-yards a group of idlers. Seeing how numerous they are in every
small area, it becomes manifest that tens of thousands of such swarm
through London. " They have no work," you say. Say rather that

VOL. XXIY. — 46

722 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

they either refuse work or quickly turn themselves out of it. They
are simply good-for-nothings, who in one way or other live on the
good-for-somethings — vagrants and sots, criminals and those on the
way to crime, youths who are burdens on hard-worked parents, men
who appropriate the wages of their wives, fellows who share the gains
of prostitutes ; and then, less visible and less numerous, there is a cor-
responding class of women.

Is it natural that happiness should be the lot of such ? or is it natu-
ral that they should bring unhappiness on themselves and those con-
nected with them ? Is it not manifest that there must exist in our
midst an immense amount of misery which is a normal result of mis-
conduct and ought not to be dissociated from it ? There is a notion,
always more or less prevalent and just now vociferously expressed,
that all social suffering is removable, and that it is the duty of some-
body or other to remove it. Both these beliefs are false. To separate
pain from ill-doing is to fight against the constitution of things, and
will be followed by far more pain. Saving men from the natural
penalties of reckless living eventually necessitates the infliction of
artificial penalties in solitary cells, on tread- wheels, and by the lash. I
suppose a dictum on which the current creed and the creed of science
are at one may be considered to have as high an authority as can be
found. Well, the command " if any would not work neither should
he eat " is simply a Christian enunciation of that universal law of Na-
ture under which life has reached its present height — the law that a
creature not energetic enough to maintain itself must die ; the sole
difference being that the law which in the one case is to be artificially
enforced is, in the other case, a natural necessity. And yet this par-
ticular tenet of their religion which science so manifestly justifies is
the one which Christians seem least inclined to accept. The current
assumption is that there should be no suffering, and that society is to
blame for that which exists.

" But surely we are not without responsibilities, even when the suf-
fering is that of the unworthy?"

If the meaning of the word "we" be so expanded as to include
with ourselves our ancestors, and especially our ancestral legislators, I
agree. I admit that those who made, and modified, and administered,
the old poor-law, were responsible for producing an appalling amount
of demoralization, which it will take more than one generation to re-
move. I admit, too, the partial responsibility of recent and present
law-makers for regulations which have brought into being a permanent
body of tramps, who ramble from union to union ; and also their re-
sponsibility for maintaining a constant supply of felons by sending
back convicts into society under such conditions that they are almost
compelled again to commit crimes. Moreover, I admit that the phil-
anthropic are not without their share of responsibility ; since, while
anxiously aiding the offspring of the unworthy, they do nothing for

THE COMING SLAVERY, 723

the offspring of the worthy save burdening their parents by increased
local rates. Kay, I even admit that these swarms of good-for-noth-
ings, fostered and multiplied by public and private agencies, have, by
sundry mischievous meddlings, been made to suffer more than they
would otherwise have suffered. Are these the responsibilities meant ?
I suspect not.

But now, leaving the question of responsibilities, however con-
ceived, and considering only the evil itself, what shall we say of its
treatment ? Let me begin with a fact.

A late uncle of mine, the Rev. Thomas Spencer, for some twenty
years incumbent of Hinton Charterhouse, near Bath, no sooner entered
on his parish duties than he proved himself anxious for the welfare of
the poor, by establishing a school, a library, a clothing club, and land-
allotments, besides building some model cottages. Moreover, up to
1833 he was a pauper's friend — always for the pauper against the over-
seer. There presently came, however, the debates on the poor-law,
which impressed him with the evils of the system then in force.
Though an ardent philanthropist, he was not a timid sentimentalist.
The result was that, immediately the new poor-law was passed, he pro-
ceeded to carry out its provisions in his parish. Almost universal op-
position was encountered by him ; not the poor only being his oppo-
nents, but even the farmers on whom came the burden of heavy poor-
rates. For, strange to say, their interests had become apparently
identified with maintenance of this system which taxed them so large-
ly. The explanation is, that there had grown up the practice of pay-
ing out of the rates a part of the wages of each farm-servant — " make-
wages," as the sum was called. And though the farmers contributed
most of the fund out of which " make-wages " were paid, yet, since all
other rate-payers contributed, the farmers seemed to gain by the ar-
rangement. My uncle, however, not easily deterred, faced all this
opposition and enforced the law. The result was that in two years
the rates were reduced from £700 a year to £200 a year, while the
condition of the parish was greatly improved. " Those who had hith-
erto loitered at the corners of the streets, or at the doors of the beer-
shops, had something else to do, and one after another they obtained
employment " ; so that, out of a population of eight hundred, only fif-
teen had to be sent as incapable paupers to the Bath Union Work-
house, in place of the one hundred who received out-door relief a short
time before. If it be said that the £20 telescope which, a few years
after, his parishioners presented to my uncle, marked only the grati-
tude of the rate-payers, then my reply is the fact that, when, some
years later still, having killed himself by overwork, in pursuit of popu-
lar welfare, he was taken to Hinton to be buried, the procession which
followed him to the grave included not the well-to-do only but the
poor.

724 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Several motives have prompted this brief narrative. One is the
wish to prove that sympathy with the people and self-sacrificing ef-
forts on their behalf do not necessarily imply approval of gratuitous
aids. Another is the desire to show that benefit may result, not from
multiplication of artificial appliances to mitigate distress, but, con-
trariwise, from diminution of them. And a further purpose I have
in view is that of preparing the way for an analogy.

Under another form and in a different sphere, we are now yearly
extending a system which is identical in nature with the system of
"make-wages" under the old poor-law. Little as politicians recog-
nize the fact, it is nevertheless demonstrable that these various public
appliances for working-class comfort, which they are supplying at the
cost of rate-payers, are intrinsically of the same nature as those which,
in past times, treated the farmer's man as half -laborer and half -pauper.
In either case the worker receives, in return for what he does, money
wherewith to buy certain of the things he wants ; while, to procure
the rest of them for him, money is furnished out of a common fund
raised by taxes. What matters it whether the things supplied by
rate-payers for nothing, instead of by the employer in payment, are
of this kind or that kind ? the principle is the same. For sums re-
ceived let us substitute the commodities and benefits purchased ; and
then see how the matter stands. In old poor-law times, the farmer
gave for work done the equivalent, say of house-rent, bread, clothes,
and fire ; while the rate-payers practically supplied the man and his
family with their shoes, tea, sugar, candles, a little bacon, etc. The
division is, of course, arbitrary ; but unquestionably the farmer and
the rate-payers furnished these things between them. At the present
time the artisan receives from his employer in wages the equivalent
of the consumable commodities he wants ; while from the public
comes satisfaction for others of his needs and desires. At the cost of
rate-payers he has in some cases, and will presently have in more, a
house at less than its commercial value ; for of course when, as in
Liverpool, a municipality spends nearly £200,000 in pulling down and
reconstructing low-class dwellings, and is about to spend as much
again, the implication is that in some way the rate-payers supply the
poor with more accommodation than the' rents they pay would other-
wise have brought. The artisan further receives from them, in school-
ing for his children, much more than he pays for ; and there is every
probability that he will presently receive it from them gratis. The
rate -payers also satisfy what desire he may have for books and
newspapers, and comfortable places to read them in. In some cases
too, as in Manchester, gymnasia for his children of both sexes, as
well as recreation - grounds, are provided. That is to say, he ob-
tains, from a fund raised by local taxes, certain benefits beyond those
which the sum received for his labor enables him to purchase. The
sole difference, then, between this system and the old system of

THE COMING SLAVERY. 725

"make-wages" is between the kinds of satisfactions obtained; and
this difference does not in the least affect the nature of the arrange-
ment.

Moreover, the two are pervaded by substantially the same illusion.
In the one case, as in the other, what looks like a gratis benefit is not
a gratis benefit. The amount which, under the old poor-law, the half-
pauperized laborer received from the parish to eke out his weekly in-
come was not really, as it appeared, a bonus, for it was accompanied
by a substantially equivalent decrease of his wages, as was quickly
proved when the system was abolished and the wages rose. Just so
is it with these seeming boons received by working-people in towns.
I do not refer only to the fact that they unawares pay in part through
the raised rents of their dwellings (when they are not actual rate-
payers) ; but I refer to the fact that the wages received by them are,
like the wages of the farm-laborer, diminished by these public burdens
falling on employers. Read the accounts coming of late from Lan-
cashire concerning the cotton-strike, containing proofs, given by arti-
sans themselves, that the margin of profit is so narrow that the less
skillful manufacturers, as well as those with deficient capital, fail, and
that the companies of co-operators who compete with them can rarely
hold their own ; and then consider what is the implication respecting
wages. Among the costs of production have to be reckoned taxes,
general and local. If, as in our large towns, the local rates now amount
to one third of the rental or more — if the employer has to pay this,
not on his private dwelling only, but on his business-premises, facto-
ries, warehouses, or the like, it results that the interest on his capital
must be diminished by that amount, or the amount must be taken
from the wages-fund, or partly one and partly the other. And if
competition among capitalists in the same business and in other busi-
nesses has the effect of so keeping down interests that, while some
gain, others lose, and not a few are ruined — if capital, not getting
adequate interest, flows elsewhere and leaves labor unemployed — then
it is manifest that the choice for the artisan under such conditions lies
between diminished amount of work or diminished rate of payment
for it. Moreover, for kindred reasons these local burdens raise the
costs of the things he consumes. The charges made by distributors,
too, are, on the average, determined by the current rates of interest
on capital used in distributing businesses ; and the extra costs of carry-
ing on such businesses have to be paid for by extra prices. So that
as in the past the rural worker lost in one way what he gained in an-
other, so in the present does the urban worker ; there being, too, in
both cases, the loss entailed on him by the cost of administration and
the waste accompanying it.

" But what has all this to do with * the coming slavery ' ? " will per-
haps be asked. Nothing directly, but a good deal indirectly, as we
shall see after yet another preliminary section.

726 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

It is said that, when railways were first opened in Spain, peasants
standing on the tracks were not unfrequently run over, and that the
blame fell on the engine-drivers for not stopping, rural experiences
having yielded no conception of the momentum of a large mass mov-
ing at a high velocity.

The incident is recalled to me on contemplating the ideas of the
so-called " practical " politician, into whose mind there enters no
thought of such a thing as political momentum, still less of a political
momentum which, instead of diminishing or remaining constant, in-
creases. The theory on which he daily proceeds is that the change
caused by his measure will stop where he intends it to stop. He con-
templates intently the things his act will achieve, but thinks little of
the remoter issues of the movement his act sets up, and still less its
collateral issues. When, in war-time, " food for powder " was to - be
provided by encouraging population — when Mr. Pitt said, " Let us
make relief in cases where there are a number of children a matter of
right and honor, instead of a ground for opprobrium and contempt " * —
it was not expected that the poor-rates would be quadrupled in fifty
years, that women with many bastards would be preferred as wives to
modest women because of their incomes from the parish, and that hosts
of rate-payers would be pulled down into the ranks of pauperism.
Legislators who in 1833 voted £20,000 a year to aid in building school-
houses never supposed that the step they then took would lead to
forced contributions, local and general, now amounting to £6,000,000 ;
they did not intend to establish the principle that A should be made
responsible for educating B's offspring ; they did not dream of a com-
pulsion which should deprive poor widows of the help of their elder
children ; and still less did they dream that their successors, by requir-
ing impoverished parents to apply to boards of guardians to pay the
fees which school-boards would not remit, would initiate a habit of
applying to boards of guardians and so cause pauperization.! Neither
did those who in 1834 passed an act regulating the labor of women
and children in certain factories imagine that the system they were
beginning would end in the restriction and inspection of labor in all
kinds of producing establishments where more than fifty people are
employed ; nor did they conceive that the inspection provided would
grow to the extent of requiring that, before a " young person " is em-
ployed in a factory, authority must be given by a certifying surgeon,
who, by personal examination (to which no limit is placed), has satis-
fied himself that there is no incapacitating disease or bodily infirmity,
his verdict determining whether the " young person " shall earn wages
or not. X Even less, as I say, does the politician who plumes himself
on the practicalness of his aims conceive the indirect results that will

* Hansard's " Parliamentary History," xxxii, p. 710.

f "Fortnightly Review," January, 1884, p. 17.

\ " Factories and Workshops Act," 41 and 42 Victoria, cap. 16.

THE COMING SLAVERY. 727

follow the direct results of his measures. Thus, to take a case con-
nected with one named above, it was not intended through the system
of " payment by results " to do anything more than give teachers an
efficient stimulus ; it was not supposed that in numerous cases their
health would give way under the stimulus ; it was not expected that
they would be led to adopt a cramming system and to put undue press-
ure od dull and weak children, often to their great injury ; it was not
foreseen that in many cases a bodily enfeeblement would be caused
which no amount of grammar and geography can compensate for. Nor
did it occur to the practical politicians who provided a compulsory load-
line for merchant-vessels, that the pressure of ship-owners' interests
would habitually cause the putting of the load-line at the very highest
limit, and that from precedent to precedent, tending ever in the same
direction, the load-line would gradually rise — as from good authority
I learn that it has already done. Legislators who, some forty years
ag°> Dy act of Parliament compelled railway companies to supply
cheap locomotion, would have ridiculed the belief, had it been ex-
pressed, that eventually their act would punish the companies which
improved the supply ; and yet this was the result to companies which
began to carry third-class passengers by fast trains, since a penalty to
the amount of the passenger-duty was inflicted on them for every third-
class passenger so carried. To which instance concerning railways,
add a far more striking one disclosed by comparing the railway poli-
cies of England and France. The law-makers who provided for the
ultimate lapsing of French railways to the state never conceived the
possibility that inferior traveling facilities would result — did not fore-
see that reluctance to depreciate the value of property eventually com-
ing to the state would negative the authorization of competing lines,
and that in the absence of competing lines locomotion would be rela-
tively costly, slow, and infrequent ; for, as Sir Thomas Farrar has
shown, the traveler in England has great advantages over the French
traveler in the economy, swiftness, and frequency with which his jour-
neys can be made.

But the "practical" politician, who, in spite of such experiences
repeated generation after generation, goes on thinking only of proxi-
mate results, naturally never thinks of results still more remote, still
more general, and still more important than those just exemplified.
To repeat the metaphor used above — he never asks whether the politi-
cal momentum set up by his measure, in some cases decreasing but in
other cases greatly increasing, will or will not have the same general
direction with other such momenta ; and whether it may not join them
in presently producing an aggregate energy working changes never
thought of. Dwelling only on the effects of his particular stream of
legislation, and not observing how other such streams already existing,
and still other streams which will follow his initiative, pursue the same
average course, it never occurs to him that they may presently unite

728 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY,

into a voluminous flood utterly changing the face of things. Or to
leave figures for a more literal statement, he is unconscious of the truth
that he is helping to form a certain type of social organization, and
that kindred measures, effecting kindred changes of organization, tend
with ever-increasing force to make that type general, until, passing a
certain point, the proclivity toward it becomes irresistible. Just as
each society aims when possible to produce in other societies a struct-
ure akin to its own — just as, among the Greeks, the Spartans and the
Athenians severally struggled to spread their respective political insti-
tutions, or as, at the time of the French Revolution, the European
monarchies aimed to re-establish monarchy in France, so, within every
society, each species of structure tends to propagate itself. Just as
the system of voluntary co-operation by companies, associations, unions,
to achieve business ends and other ends, spreads throughout a com-
munity, so does the antagonistic system of compulsory co-operation
under state-agencies spread, and the larger becomes its extension the
more power of spreading it gets. The question of questions for
the politician should ever be, " What type of social structure am
I tending to produce ? " But this is a question he scarcely ever en-
tertains.

Here we will entertain it for him. Let us now observe the general
course of recent changes, with the accompanying current of ideas, and
see whither they are carrying us.

The blank form of a question daily asked is, " We have already
done this ; why should we not do that ? " And the regard for prece-
dent suggested by it is ever pushing on regulative legislation. Hav-
ing had brought within their sphere of operation more and more
numerous businesses, the acts restricting hours of employment and
dictating the treatment of workers are now to be made applicable to
shops. From inspecting lodging-houses to limit the numbers of occu-
pants and enforce sanitary conditions, we have passed to inspecting all
houses below a certain rent in which there are members of more than
one family, and are now passing to a kindred inspection of all small
houses. * The buying and working of telegraphs by the state is made
a reason for urging that the state should buy and work the railways.
Supplying children with food for their iminds by public agency is
being followed in some cases by supplying food for their bodies ; and,
after the practice has been made gradually more general, we may
anticipate that the supply now proposed to be made gratis in the one
case will eventually be proposed to be made gratis in the other, the
argument that good bodies as well as good minds are needful to make
good citizens being logically urged as a reason for the extension. And
then, avowedly proceeding on the precedents furnished by the church,
the school, and the reading-room, all publicly provided, it is contended

* See letter of Local Government Board, "Times," January 2, 1884.

THE COMING SLAVERY. 729

that " pleasure, in the sense it is now generally admitted, needs legis-
lating for and organizing at least as much as work." *

Not precedent only prompts this spread, but also the necessity
which arises for supplementing ineffective measures, and for dealing
with the artificial evils continually caused. Failure does not destroy
faith in the agencies employed, but merely suggests more stringent
use of such agencies or wider ramifications of them. Laws to check
intemperance, beginning in early times and coming down to our own
times, when further restraints on the sale of intoxicating liquors oc-
cupy nights every session, not having done what was expected, there
come demands for more thorough-going laws, locally preventing the
sale altogether ; and here, as in America, these will doubtless be fol-
lowed by demands that prevention shall be made universal. All the
many appliances for " stamping out " epidemic diseases not having
succeeded in preventing outbreaks of small-pox, fevers, and the like, a
further remedy is applied for in the shape of police-power to search
houses for diseased persons, and authority for medical officers to ex-
amine any one they think fit, to see whether he or she is suffering
from an infectious or contagious malady. Habits of improvidence
having for generations been cultivated by the poor-law, and the im-
provident enabled to multiply, the evils produced by compulsory char-
ity are now proposed to be met by compulsory insurance.

The extension of this policy, causing extension of corresponding
ideas, fosters everywhere the tacit assumption that Government should
step in whenever anything is not going right. " Surely you would
not have this misery continue ! " exclaims some one, if you hint a de-
murrer to much that is now being said and done. Observe what is
implied by this exclamation. It takes for granted, first, that all suffer-
ing ought to be prevented, which is not true : much suffering is cura-
tive, and prevention of it is prevention of a remedy. In the second
place, it takes for granted that every evil can be removed : the truth
being that, with the existing defects of human nature, many evils can
only be thrust out of one place or form into another place or form —
often being increased by the change. The exclamation also implies
the unhesitating belief, here especially concerning us, that evils of all
kinds should be dealt with by the state. There does not occur the
inquiry whether there are at work other agencies capable of dealing
with evils, and whether the evils in question may not be among those
which are best dealt with by these other agencies. And obviously, the
more numerous governmental interventions become, the more con-
firmed does this habit of thought grow, and the more loud and per-
petual the demands for intervention.

Every extension of the regulative policy involves an addition to
the regulative agents — a further growth of officialism and an increas-

* "Fortnightly Review," January, 1884, p. 21.

73o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ing power of the organization formed of officials. Take a pair of scales
with many shot in the one and a few in the other. Lift shot after
shot out of the loaded scale and put it into the unloaded scale. Pres-
ently you will produce a balance, and, if you go on, the position of the
scales will be reversed. Suppose the beam to be unequally divided,
and let the lightly loaded scale be at the end of a very long arm ; then
the transfer of each shot, producing a much greater effect, will far
sooner bring about a change of position. I use the figure to illustrate
what results from transferring one individual after another from the
regulated mass of the community to the regulating structures. The
transfer weakens the one and strengthens the other in a far greater
degree than is implied by the relative change of numbers. A com-
paratively small body of officials, coherent, having common interests,
and acting under central authority, has an immense advantage over an
incoherent public which has no settled policy, and can be brought to
act unitedly only under strong provocation. Hence an organization of
officials, once passing a certain stage of growth, becomes less and less
resistible ; as we see in the bureaucracies of the Continent.

Not only does the power of resistance of the regulated part de-
crease in a geometrical ratio as the regulating part increases, but the
private interests of many in the regulated part itself make the change
of ratio still more rapid. In every circle conversations show that now,
when the passing of competitive examinations renders them eligible
for the public service, youths are being educated in such ways that
they may pass them and get employment under Government. One
consequence is, that men who might otherwise reprobate some further
growth of officialism are led to look on it with tolerance, if not favor-
ably, as offering possible careers for those dependent on them and those
related to them. Any one who remembers the numbers of upper-class
and middle-class families anxious to place their children will see that
no small encouragement to the spread of legislative control is now
coming from those who, but for the personal interests thus arising,
would be hostile to it.

This pressing desire for careers is enforced by the preference for
careers which are thought respectable. " Even if his salary is small,
his occupation will be that of a gentleman," thinks the father, who
wants to get a Government-clerkship for his son. And this relative
dignity of state-servants, as compared with those occupied in business,
increases as the administrative organization becomes a larger and more
powerful element in society, and tends more and more to fix the stand-
ard of honor. The prevalent ambition with a young Frenchman is to
get some small official post in his locality, to rise thence to a place in
the local center of government, and finally to reach some head office
in Paris. And in Russia, where that universality of state-regulation
which characterizes the militant type of society has been carried far-
thest, we see this ambition pushed to its extreme. Says Mr. Wallace,

THE COMING SLAVERY. 73l

quoting a passage from a play, " All men, even shopkeepers and cob-
blers, aim at becoming officers, and the man who has passed his whole
life without official rank seems to be not a human being." *

These various influences, working from above downward, meet
with an increasing response of expectations and solicitations proceed-
ing from below upward. The hard-worked and overburdened who
form the great majority, and still more the incapables perpetually
helped, who are ever led to look for more help, are ready supporters
of schemes which promise them this or the other benefit by state
agency, and ready believers of those who tell them that such benefits
can be given and ought to be given. They listen with eager faith to
all builders of political air-castles, from Oxford graduates down to
Irish irreconcilables, and every additional tax-supported appliance for
their welfare raises hopes of further ones. Indeed, the more numer-
ous public instrumentalities become, the more is there generated in
citizens the notion that everything is to be done for them, and nothing
by them. Each generation is made less familiar with the attainment
of desired ends by individual actions or private combinations, and
more familiar with the attainment of them by governmental agencies ;
until, eventually, governmental agencies come to be thought of as the
only available agencies. This result was well shown in the recent
Trades-Unions Congress at Paris. The English delegates, reporting
to their constituents, said that, between themselves and their foreign
colleagues, " the point of difference was the extent to which the state
should be asked to protect labor " : reference being thus made to the
fact, conspicuous in the reports of the proceedings, that the French
delegates always invoked governmental power as the only means of
satisfying their wishes.

The diffusion of education has worked, and will work still more, in
the same direction. "We must educate our masters," is the well-
known saying of a Liberal who opposed the last extension of the fran-
chise. Yes, if the education were worthy to be so called, and were
relevant to the political enlightenment needed, much might be hoped
from it. But knowing rules of syntax, being able to add up correctly,
having geographical information, and a memory stocked with the dates
of kings' accessions and generals' victories, no more imply fitness to
form political conclusions than acquirement of skill in drawing implies
expertness in telegraphing, or than ability to play cricket implies pro-
ficiency on the violin. " Surely," rejoins some one, " facility in read-
ing opens the way to political knowledge." Doubtless ; but will the
way be followed ? Table-talk proves that nine out of ten people read
what amuses them or interests them rather than what instructs them,
and that the last thing they read is something which tells them dis-
agreeable truths or dispels groundless hopes. That popular education

* u

Russia," i, 422.

732 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

results in an extensive reading of publications which foster pleasant
illusions, rather than of those which insist on hard realities, is beyond
question. Says "A Mechanic," writing in the "Pall Mall Gazette"
of December 3, 1883 :

Improved education instills the desire for culture — culture instills the desire
for many things as yet quite beyond workingmen's reach ; ... in the furious
competition to which the present age is given up they are utterly impossible to
the poorer classes ; hence they are discontented with things as they are, and the
more educated the more discontented. Hence, too, Mr. Kuskin and Mr. Morris
are regarded as true prophets by many of us.

And, that the connection of cause and effect here alleged is a real one,
we may see clearly enough in the present state of Germany.

Being possessed of electoral power, as are now the mass of those
who are thus led to nurture sanguine anticipations of benefits to be
obtained by social reorganization, it results that whoever seeks their
votes must at least refrain from exposing their mistaken beliefs, even
if he does not yield to the temptation to express agreement with them.
Every candidate for Parliament is prompted to propose or support
some new piece of ad captandum legislation. Nay, even the chiefs of
parties, these anxious to retain office and those to wrest it from them,
severally aim to get adherents by outbidding one another. Each en-
deavors to score a trick by trumping his antagonist's good card, as we
have lately seen. And then, as divisions in Parliament show us, the
traditional loyalty to leaders overrides questions concerning the intrin-
sic propriety of proposed measures. Representatives are unconscien-
tious enough to vote for bills which they regard as essentially wrong
in principle, because party-needs and regard for the next election de-
mand it. And thus a vicious policy is strengthened even by those
who see its viciousness.

Meanwhile there goes on out-of-doors an active propaganda to
which all these influences are ancillary. Communistic theories, par-
tially indorsed by one act of Parliament after another, and tacitly if
not avowedly favored by numerous public men seeking supj>orters, are
being advocated more and more vociferously under one or other form
by popular leaders, and urged on by organized societies. There is the
movement for land-nationalization which, aiming at a system of land-
tenure equitable in the abstract, is, as all the world knows, pressed by
Mr. George and his friends with avowed disregard for the just claims
of existing owners, and as the basis of a scheme going more than half-
way to state-communism. And then there is the thorough-going
Democratic Federation of Mr. Hyndman and his adherents. We are
told by them that " the handful of marauders who now hold posses-
sion [of the land] have and can have no right save brute force against
the tens of millions whom they wrong." They exclaim against " the
shareholders who have been allowed to lay hands upon (!) our great

THE COMING SLAVERY. 733

railway communications." They condemn " above all, the active capi-
talist class, the loan-mongers, the farmers, the mine-exploiters, the
contractors, the middlemen, the factory-lords — these, the modern slave-
drivers " who exact " more and yet more surplus value out of the wage-
slaves whom they employ." And they think it "high time" that
trade should be " removed from the control of individual greed and
individual profit." *

It remains to point out that the tendencies thus variously dis-
played are being strengthened by press-advocacy, daily more pro-
nounced. Journalists, always chary of saying that which is distaste-
ful to their readers, are some of them going with the stream and add-
ing to its force. Legislative meddlings which they would once have
condemned they now pass in silence, if they do not advocate them ;
and they speak of laisser-faire as an exploded doctrine. " People are
no longer frightened at the thought of socialism," is the statement
which meets us one day. On another day, a town which does not
adopt the Free Libraries Act is sneered at as being alarmed by a
measure so moderately communistic. And then, along with editorial
assertions that this economic evolution is coming and must be accept-
ed, there is prominence given to the contributions of its advocates.
Meanwhile those who regard the recent course of legislation as disas-
trous, and see that its future course is likely to be still more disastrous,
are being reduced to silence by the belief that it is useless to reason
with people in a state of political intoxication.

See, then, the many concurrent causes which threaten continually
to accelerate the transformation now going on. There is that spread
of regulation caused by following precedents, which become the more
authoritative the further the policy is carried. There is that increas-
ing need for administrative compulsions and restraints which results
from the unforeseen evils and short-comings of preceding compulsions
and restraints. Moreover, every additional state-interference strength-
ens the tacit assumption that it is the duty of the state to deal with
all evils and secure all benefits. Increasing power of a growing ad-
ministrative organization is accompanied by decreasing power of the
rest of the society to resist its further growth and control. The mul-
tiplication of careers opened by a developing bureaucracy tempts
members of the classes regulated by it to favor its extension, as add-
ing to the chances of safe and respectable places for their relatives.
The people at large, led to look on benefits received through public
agencies as gratis benefits, have their hopes continually excited by the
prospects of more. A spreading education, furthering the diffusion of
pleasing errors rather than of stern truths, renders such hopes both
stronger and more general. Worse still, such hopes are ministered to
by candidates for public choice to augment their chances of success ;

* "Socialism made Plain," Reeves, 185 Fleet Street.

73+ THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

and leading statesmen, in pursuit of party ends, bid for popular favor
by countenanciDg them. Getting repeated justifications from new
laws harmonizing with their doctrines, political enthusiasts and unwise
philanthropists push their agitations with growing confidence and suc-
cess. Journalism, ever responsive to popular opinion, daily strengthens
it by giving it voice ; while counter-opinion, more and more discour-
aged, finds little utterance.

Thus influences of various kinds conspire to increase corporate ac-
tion and decrease individual action. And the change is being on all
sides aided by schemers, each of whom thinks only of his pet project,
and not at all of the general reorganization which his, joined with
others such, are working out. It is said that the French Revolution
devoured its own children. Here an analogous catastrophe seems not
unlikely. The numerous socialistic changes made by act of Parlia-
ment, joined with the numerous others presently to be made, will by-
and-by be all merged in state-socialism — swallowed in the vast wave
which they have little by little raised.

" But why is this change described as ' the coming slavery ' ? " is
a question which many will still ask. The reply is simple. All so-
cialism involves slavery.

What is essential to the idea of a slave ? We primarily think of
him as one who is owned by another. To be more than nominal,
however, the ownership must be shown by control of the slave's ac-
tions— a control which is habitually for the benefit of the controller.
That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labors
under coercion to satisfy another's desires. The relation admits of
sundry gradations. Remembering that originally the slave is a pris-
oner whose life is at the mercy of his captor, it suffices here to note
that there is a harsh form of slavery in which, treated as an animal, he
has to expend his entire effort for his owner's advantage. Under a
system less harsh, though occupied chiefly in working for his owner,
he is allowed a short time in which to work for himself, and some
ground on which to grow extra food. A further amelioration gives
him power to sell the produce of his plot and keep the proceeds.
Then we come to the still more moderated form which commonly
arises where, having been a free man working on his own land, con-
quest turns him into what we distinguish as a serf ; and he has to give
to his owner each year a fixed amount of labor or produce, or both,
retaining the rest himself. Finally, in some cases, as in Russia until
recently, he is allowed to leave his owner's estate and work or trade
for himself elsewhere, under the condition that he shall pay an annual
sum. What is it which, in these cases, leads us to qualify our concep-
tion of the slavery as more or less severe ? Evidently the greater or
smaller extent to which effort is compulsorily expended for the benefit
of another instead of for self -benefit. If all the slave's labor is for his

THE COMING SLAVERY. 73S

owner the slavery is heavy, and if but little it is light. Take now a
further step. Suppose an owner dies, and his estate with its slaves
comes into the hands of trustees, or suppose the estate and everything
on it to be bought by a company ; is the condition of the slave any
the better if the amount of his compulsory labor remains the same ?
Suppose that for a company we substitute the community ; does it
make any difference to the slave if the time he has to work for others
is as great, and the time left for himself is as small, as before ? The
essential question is, How much is he compelled to labor for other
benefit than his own, and how much he can labor for his own benefit ?
The degree of his slavery varies according to the ratio between that
which he is forced to yield up and that which he is allowed to retain ;
and it matters not whether his master is a single person or a society.
If, without option, he has to labor for the society, and receives from
the general stock such portion as the society awards him, he becomes
a slave to the society. Socialistic arrangements necessitate an enslave-
ment of this kind ; and toward such an enslavement many recent
measures, and still more the measures advocated, are carrying us.
Let us observe, first, their proximate effects, and then their ultimate
effects.

The policy initiated by the Industrial Dwellings Acts admits of
development, and will develop. "Where municipal bodies turn house-
builders, they inevitably lower the values of houses otherwise built,
and check the supply of more. Every dictation respecting modes of
building and conveniences to be provided diminishes the builder's
profit, and prompts him to use his capital where the profit is not thus
diminished. So, too, the owner, already finding that small houses en-
tail much labor and many losses — already subject to troubles of inspec-
tion and interference and to consequent costs, and having his prop-
erty daily rendered a more undesirable investment — is prompted to
sell ; and, as buyers are for like reasons deterred, he has to sell at a
loss. And now these still multiplying regulations, ending, it may be,
as Lord Grey proposes, in one requiring the owner to maintain the
salubrity of his houses by evicting dirty tenants, and thus adding to
his other responsibilities that of inspector of nuisances, must further
prompt sales and further deter purchasers — so necessitating greater
depreciation. What must happen ? The multiplication of houses,
and especially small houses, being increasingly checked, there must
come an increasing demand upon the local authority to make up for
the deficient supply. More and more, the municipal or kindred body
will have to build houses, or to purchase houses rendered unsalable to
private persons in the way shown ; houses which, greatly depreciated
in value as they must become, it will, in many cases, pay to buy rather
than to build new ones. And then, when in towns this process has
gone so far as to make the local authority the chief owner of houses,
there will be a good precedent for publicly providing houses for the

736 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

rural population, as proposed in the Radical programme,* and as urged
by the Democratic Federation, which insists on " the compulsory con-
struction of healthy artisans' and agricultural laborers' dwellings in
proportion to the population." Manifestly, the tendency of that which
has been done, is being done, and is presently to be done, is to ap-
proach the socialistic ideal in which the community is sole house-pro-
prietor.

Such, too, must be the effect of the daily growing policy on the
tenure and utilization of the land. More numerous public benefits,
to be achieved by more numerous public agencies, at the cost of aug-
mented public burdens, must increasingly deduct from the returns on
land ; until, as the depreciation in value becomes greater and greater,
the resistance to change of tenure becomes less and less. Already,
as every one knows, there is in many places difficulty in obtaining
tenants, even at greatly reduced rents ; and land of inferior fertility
in some cases lies idle, or when farmed by the owner is often farmed
at a loss. Clearly the margin of profit on capital invested in land is
not such that taxes, local and general, can be greatly raised to sup-
port extended public administrations, without an absorption of it
which will prompt owners to sell, and make the best of what reduced
price they can get by emigrating and buying land not subject to
heavy burdens, as, indeed, some are now doing. This process, carried
far, must have the result of throwing inferior land out of cultivation ;
after which there will be raised more generally the demand made by
Mr. Arch, who, addressing the Radical Association of Brighton lately,
and contending that existing landlords do not make their land ade-
quately productive for the public benefit, said "he should like the
present Government to pass a Compulsory Cultivation Bill " : an ap-
plauded proposal which he justified by instancing compulsory vacci-
nation (thus illustrating the influence of precedent). And this demand
will be pressed, not only by the need for making the land productive,
but also by the need for employing the rural population. After the
Government has extended the practice of hiring the unemployed to
work on deserted lands, or lands acquired at nominal prices, there will
be reached a stage whence there is but a small further step to that
arrangement which, in the programme of the Democratic Federation,
is to follow nationalization of the land — the " organization of agri-
cultural and industrial armies under state control on co-operative
principles."

If any one doubts that such a revolution may be so reached, facts
may be cited to show its likelihood. In Gaul, during the decline of
the Roman Empire, " so numerous were the receivers in comparison
with the payers, and so enormous the weight of taxation, that the
laborer broke down, the plains became deserts, and woods grew where

* " Fortnightly Review," November, 1883, pp. 619, 620.

THE COMING SLAVERY. 737

the plow had been. " * In like manner, when the French Revolution
was approaching, the public burdens had become such that many-
farms remained uncultivated, and many were deserted : one quarter of
the soil was absolutely lying waste ; and in some provinces one half
was in heath. f Nor have we been without incidents of a kindred
nature at home. Besides the facts that under the old poor-law the
rates had in some parishes risen to half the rental, and that in various
places farms were lying uncultivated, there is the fact that in one case
the rates had absorbed the whole proceeds of the soil.

At Cholesbury, in Buckinghamshire, in 1832, the poor-rate "suddenly
ceased in consequence of the impossibility to continue its collection, the land-
lords having given up their rent?, the farmers their tenancies, and the clergy-
man his glebe and his tithes. The clergyman, Mr. Jeston, states that in Octo-
ber, 1882, the parish officers threw up their books, and the poor assembled in a
body before his door while he was in bed, asking for advice and food. Partly
from his own small means, partly from the charity of neighbors, and partly by
rates in aid, imposed on the neighboring parishes, they were for some time sup-
ported." J

The commissioners add that " the benevolent rector recommends
that the whole of the land should be divided among the able-bodied
paupers " : hoping that, after help afforded for two years, they might
be able to maintain themselves. These facts, giving color to the
prophecy made in Parliament that continuance of the old poor-law
for another thirty years would throw the land out of cultivation, clearly
prove that increase of public burdens may end in forced cultivation
under public control.

Then, again, comes state-ownership of railways. Already this
exists to a large extent on the Continent. Already we have had here
a few years ago loud advocacy of it. And now the cry which was
raised by sundry politicians and publicists is taken up afresh by the
Democratic Federation, which proposes "state-appropriation of rail-
ways, with or without compensation." Evidently, pressure from above
joined by pressure from below is likely to effect this change, dictated
by the policy everywhere spreading ; and with it must come many
attendant changes. For railway -proprietors, at first owners and
workers of railways only, have been allowed to become masters of
numerous businesses directly or indirectly connected with railways ;
and these will have to be purchased by Government when the railways
are purchased. Already exclusive carrier of letters, exclusive trans-
mitter of telegrams, and on the way to become exclusive carrier of
parcels, the state will not only be exclusive carrier of passengers,
goods, and minerals, but will add to its present various trades many

* Lactant., " De M. Persecut.," cc. 7, 23.
f Taine, " La Revolution," pp. 337, 338.

\ " Report of Commissioners for Inquiry into the Administration and Practical Oper-
ation of the Poor-Laws," p. 37, February 20, 1834.
vol. xxiv. — 17

738 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

other trades. Even now, besides erecting its naval and military es-
tablishments, and building harbors, docks, breakwaters, etc., it does
the work of ship-builder, cannon-founder, small-arms maker, manufact-
urer of ammunition, etc., etc.; and, when the railways have been
appropriated "with or without compensation," as the Democratic
Federationists say, it will have to become locomotive-engine builder,
carriage -maker, tarpaulin and grease manufacturer, passenger-vessel
owner, coal-miner, stone-quarrier, omnibus-proprietor, etc. Meanwhile
its local lieutenants, the municipal governments, already in many
places suppliers of water, gas-makers, owners and workers of tram-
ways, proprietors of baths, will doubtless have undertaken various
other businesses. And when the state, directly or by proxy, has thus
come into possession of, or has established, numerous concerns for
wholesale production and for wholesale distribution, there will be
good precedents for extending its function to retail distribution : fol-
lowing such an example, say, as is offered by the French Government,
which has long been a retail tobacconist.

Evidently, then, the changes made, the changes in progress, and
the changes urged, are carrying us not only toward state-ownership
of land and dwellings and means of communication, all to be adminis-
tered and worked by state-agents, but toward state-usurpation of all
industries ; the private forms of which, disadvantaged more and more
in competition with the state, which can arrange everything for its
own convenience, will more and more die away just as many volun-
tary schools have, in presence of board-schools. And so will be
brought about the desired ideal of the socialist.

And now when there has been reached this desired ideal, which
"practical" politicians are helping socialists to reach, and which is
so tempting on that bright side which socialists contemplate, what
must be the accompanying shady side which they do not contem-
plate ? It is a matter of common remark, often made when a marriage
is impending, that those possessed by strong hopes habitually dwell
on the promised pleasures and think nothing of the accompanying
pains. A further exemplification of this truth is supplied by these
political enthusiasts and fanatical revolutionists. Impressed with the
miseries existing under our present social arrangements, and not re-
garding these miseries as caused by the ill-working of a human nature
but partially adapted to the social state, they imagine them to be
forthwith curable by this or that rearrangement. Yet, even did their
plans succeed, it could only be by substituting one kind of evil for
another. A little deliberate thought would show that under their pro-
posed arrangements their liberties must be surrendered in proportion
as their material welfares were cared for.

For no form of co-operation, small or great, can be carried on
without regulation and an implied submission to the regulating

THE COMING SLAVERY. 739

agencies. Even one of their own organizations for effecting social
changes yields them proof. It is compelled to have its councils, its
local and general officers, its authoritative leaders, who must be obeyed
under penalty of confusion and failure. And the experience of those
who are loudest in their advocacy of a new social order under the
paternal control of a government shows that, even in private volun-
tarily-formed societies, the power of the regulative organization be-
comes great, if not irresistible ; often, indeed, causing grumbling and
restiveness among those controlled. Trades-unions which carry on a
kind of industrial war in defense of workers' interests versus employ-
ers' interests find that subordination almost military in its strictness is
needful to secure efficient action ; for divided councils prove fatal to
success. And even in bodies of co-operators, formed for carrying on
manufacturing or distributing businesses, and not needing that obe-
dience to leaders which is required where the aims are offensive or de-
fensive, it is still found that the administrative agency acquires so great
a power that there arise complaints about " the tyranny of organiza-
tion." Judge, then, what must happen when, instead of combinations,
small, local, and voluntary, to which men may belong or not as they
please, we have a national combination in which each citizen finds
himself incorporated, and from which he can not separate himself
without leaving the country ! Judge what must under such conditions
become the power of a graduated and centralized officialism, holding
in its hands the resources of the community, and having behind it
whatever amount of force it finds requisite to carry out its decrees
and maintain what it calls order ! Well may a Prince Bismarck dis-
play leanings toward state-socialism.

And then, after recognizing, as they must if they think out their
scheme, the power possessed by the regulative agency in the new
social system so temptingly pictured, let its advocates ask themselves
to what end this power must be used. Not dwelling exclusively, as
they habitually do, on the material well-being and the mental gratifi-
cations to be provided for them by a beneficent administration, let
them dwell a little on the price to be paid. The officials can not
create the needful supplies ; they can but distribute among individu-
als that which the individuals have joined to produce. If the public
agency is required to provide for them, it must reciprocally require
them to furnish the means. There can not be, as under our existing
system, agreement between employer and employed — this the scheme
excludes. There must in place of it be command by local authorities
over workers, and acceptance by the workers of that which the au-
thorities assign to them. And this, indeed, is the arrangement dis-
tinctly, but as it would seem inadvertently, pointed to by the members
of the Democratic Federation. For they propose that production
should be carried on by " agricultural and industrial armies under
state control " ; apparently not remembering that armies presuppose

740 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

grades of officers, by whom obedience would have to be insisted upon,
since otherwise neither order nor efficient work could be insured. So
that each would stand toward the governing agency in the relation of
slave to master.

" But the governing agency would be a master which he and others
made and kept constantly in check, and one which therefore would not
control him or others more than was needful for the benefit of each
and all."

To which reply the first rejoinder is that, even if so, each member
of the community as an individual would be a slave to the community
as a whole. Such a relation has habitually existed in militant com-
munities, even under ^<m-popular forms of government. In ancient
Greece the accepted principle was that the citizen belonged neither
to himself nor to his family, but belonged to his city — the city being
with the Greek equivalent to the community. And this doctrine,
proper to a state of constant warfare, is a doctrine which socialism
unawares reintroduces into a state intended to be purely industrial.
The services of each will belong to the aggregate of all ; and for
these services such returns will be given as the authorities think
proper. So that even if the administration is of the beneficent kind
intended to be secured, slavery, however mild, must be the outcome
of the arrangement.

A second rejoinder is that the administration will presently become
not of the intended kind, and that the slavery will not be mild. The
socialist speculation is vitiated by an assumption like that which viti-
ates the speculations of the " practical " politician. It is assumed that
officialism will work as it is intended to work, which it never does.
The machinery of communism, like existing social machinery, has to
be framed out of existing human nature ; and the defects of existing
human nature will generate in the one the same evils as in the other.
The love of power, the selfishness, the injustice, the untruthfulness,
which often in comparatively short times bring private organizations
to disaster, will inevitably, where their effects accumulated from gen-
eration to generation, work evils far greater and less remediable ; since
vast and complex and possessed of all the resources, the administrative
organization once developed and consolidated must become irresisti-
ble. And, if there needs proof that the periodic exercise of electoral
power would fail to prevent this, it suffices to instance the French
Government, which, purely popular in origin, and subject from time
to time to popular judgment, nevertheless tramples on the freedom of
citizens to an extent which the English delegates to the late Trades-
Union Congress say " is a disgrace to, and an anomaly in, a republican
nation."

The final result would be a revival of despotism. A disciplined
army of civil officials, like an army of military officials, gives supreme
power to its head — a power which has often led to usurpation, as in

THE COMING SLAVERY. 741

mediaeval Europe and still more in Japan — nay, has thus so led among
our neighbors within our own times. The recent confessions of M.
de Maupas have shown how readily a constitutional head, elected and
trusted by the whole people, may, with the aid of a few unscrupulous
confederates, paralyze the representative body and make himself auto-
crat. That those who rose to power in a socialistic organization would
not scruple to carry out their aims at all costs, we have good reason
for concluding. When we find that shareholders, who, sometimes gain-
ing, but often losing, have made that railway-system by which na-
tional prosperity has been so greatly increased, are spoken of by the
council of the Democratic Federation as having " laid hands " on the
means of communication, we may infer that those who directed a
socialistic administration might interpret with extreme perversity the
claims of individuals and classes under their control. And when, fur-
ther, we find members of this same council urging that the state
should take possession of the railways, " with or without compensa-
tion," we may suspect that the heads of the ideal society desired,
would be but little deterred by considerations of equity from pursuing
whatever policy they thought needful — a policy which would always
be one identified with their own supremacy. It would need but a war
with an adjacent society, or some internal discontent demanding for-
cible suppression, to at once transform a socialistic administration into
a grinding tyranny like that of ancient Peru ; under which the mass
of the people, controlled by grades of officials, and leading lives that
were inspected out-of-doors and in-doors, labored for the support of
the organization which regulated them, and were left with but a bare
subsistence for themselves. And then would be completely revived,
under a different form, that regime of status — that system of compul-
sory co-operation, the decaying tradition of which is represented by
the old Toryism, and toward which the new Toryism is carrying us
back.

" But we shall be on our guard against all that — we shall take pre-
cautions to ward off such disasters," will doubtless say the enthusiasts.
Be they " practical " politicians with their new regulative measures, or
communists with their schemes for reorganizing labor, the answer is
ever the same : " It is true that plans of kindred nature have, from
unforeseen causes and adverse accidents, or the misdeeds of those con-
cerned, been brought to failure ; but this time we shall profit by past
experiences and succeed." There seems no getting people to accept
the truth, which nevertheless is conspicuous enough, that the welfare
of a society and the justice of its arrangements are at bottom depend-
ent on the characters of its members ; and that improvement in nei-
ther can take place without that improvement in character which re-
sults from carrying on peaceful industry under the restraints imposed
by an orderly social life. The belief, not only of the socialists but
also of those so-called Liberals who are diligently preparing the way

742 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

for them, is that by due skill an ill-working humanity may be framed
into well-working institutions. It is a delusion. The defective natures
of citizens will show themselves in the bad acting of whatever social
structure they are arranged into. There is no political alchemy by
which you can get golden conduct out of leaden instincts.

-o-*-»-

THE ELECTEIC KAILWAY.

By Lieutenant BEADLEY A. FISKE, U. S. N.

WITH most men who have not had time to follow the progress
made of late in applying electricity to the practical work of the
world, this form of energy is chiefly associated with certain experi-
ments at school, by which the tedium of book-studying was enlivened
with exhibitions of sparks and shocks and other curious and interest-
ing phenomena, though it may be also connected in their minds with
electric hair-brushes, electric corsets, magnetic clothing, etc. They
regard it also as convenient for sending dispatches by telegraph, and
in general for doing work where delicacy but not much force is requi-
site ; but the idea seldom occurs to them that this versatile power
is capable of swiftly moving the mightiest masses, as well as of
operating the tiniest apparatus ; of turning the wheels of ponder-
ous machinery, as well as of vibrating thousands of times per sec-
ond the little diaphragm of the telephone ; of conveying to far-
distant points the waste power of cataracts, as well as the minute
forces liberated by the telegraphic key, and of illuminating, with the
purest artificial light known, the most extensive and thickly popu-
lated cities.

Doubtless, one great cause of the skepticism with which many re-
gard any project for using electricity upon a large scale is the fact
that exhaustive experiments in this direction were made in the early
part of the century, and the conclusion reached was that, though
power and light could both be distributed by electricity, yet the ex-
pense would be so enormous as to render impracticable any extended
electrical system.

It should not be forgotten, however, that the only great trouble
found was the expense, and also that the principal source of this ex-
pense has been removed. In those days, the only way of generating
an electric current was by the use of the voltaic battery, in which the
electrical energy of the current was procured from the heat of the
chemical combination going on in the battery ; but in 1831 Faraday
discovered a much cheaper way of generating electricity, when he
found that it could be produced by simply moving magnets in the

THE ELECTRIC RAILWAY. 743

vicinity of coils of wire, or coils of wire in the vicinity of magnets.
The significance of his discovery was so apparent that inventors began
at once to devise means for generating currents upon an extended
scale, by moving large magnets in the vicinity of large coils of wire
by means of machinery ; and this mechanical system has now been
brought to such perfection that the cost of producing a horse-power
of electrical energy can be as easily and almost as accurately calcu-
lated as the cost of producing a horse-power in a steam-engine or any
other familiar apparatus.

In order to arrive at a clear comprehension of the present state of
the art, it will be necessary to remember that any work which we per-
form must be performed by the expenditure of a certain and absolute
amount of energy, and that we can not create this energy, but can only
obtain it by changing the form of some other kind of energy. In
the voltaic battery, as we have said, the electrical energy is obtained
by transforming the heat of the chemical action going on in the cell
into electrical energy, so that the amount of the latter that can be
got out of any voltaic battery is limited by the amount of energy of
the chemical combination. Now, the metal ordinarily used for fur-
nishing chemical energy in a voltaic battery is zinc, and the heat of
combination of zinc with oxygen is only about one sixth of that of
coal, while its cost is more than twenty times as great ; so that, to get
the same amount of energy from zinc as from coal, would cost about
one hundred and twenty times as much. Now, in the mechanical
method of generating electricity, the electrical energy is produced by
the mechanical means of moving large magnets near coils of wire ;
but the mechanical energy necessary to do this is obtained by the
combustion of coal (i. e., the chemical combination of coal with
oxygen).

It would be incorrect, however, to say that we can in this way pro-
duce electricity one hundred and twenty times as cheaply as by a bat-
tery, because there is an enormous loss in converting the heat of com-
bustion of the coal into electricity, whereas the voltaic battery pro-
duces the electricity directly. The losses in converting the energy of
the combustion of coal into mechanical energy are so prodigious that
even a theoretically perfect engine could not get hold of more than
from twenty to twenty-five per cent of the total energy in the coal, on
account of the loss of the heat ; so that, if an engine (a good one) has
an efficiency of eighty per cent, it can not actually convert into work
as much as twenty per cent of the total energy in the coal. The loss
now in converting this mechanical energy into the electrical energy in
the circuit where it is desired may be taken as about fifteen per cent,
so that only about from fifteen to seventeen per cent of the total en-
ergy of the burning coal may be looked for in the electrical circuit.
But, as the original cost of the coal is only yj-g- of that of the zinc fur-
nishing an equal amount of energy, we see that the mechanical method

744

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

of producing electricity is, roughly speaking, about twenty times as
cheap as that of generating it by batteries.

The present way of generating large quantities of electricity re-
quires, then, an engine and boiler for converting the chemical energy
of burning coal into mechanical energy, and a device whereby this
mechanical energy is made to move magnets in the vicinity of coils of
wire or coils of wire in the vicinity of magnets, so as to convert the
mechanical energy into electrical energy. Such a device is called an
electric machine, or, ordinarily, a dynamo-electric machine ; and this
term is usually abbreviated into " dynamo."

A dynamo of a type in considerable use, and one of the earliest
and best forms, is shown in Fig. 1. In this dynamo, coils of wire are
wrapped about the long "armature" shown in the center, which is
revolved between the poles of the large magnet (A) by a belt coming
from a steam-engine, and going around the armature-pulley seen at

Pio. 1.

the rear. The approach to and recession from the poles of the differ-
ent coils of wire of the armature generate a succession of currents
which are collected by " brushes," and sent out into the circuit as a
constant current.

But a most beautiful example of the truth of the theory of the

THE ELECTRIC RAILWAY. 745

conservation of energy is afforded by the fact that a dynamo will not
only generate an electric current if it be revolved by mechanical means,
but that it will itself revolve, if an electric current be sent through it
from an exterior source ; so that it not only can transform mechanical
energy into electrical energy, but can also transform electrical into
mechanical energy. "When used for this purpose it is called an " elec-
tro-motor," and sometimes an " electric engine."

Not only, however, is it necessary for an engine to be capable of
doing a certain kind of work ; it is also necessary for it to be capable
of doing it economically, and it is for this reason that such a great
future is prophesied for electric engines. For, while an excellent and
elaborately constructed stationary steam-engine can produce but a
small fraction of the energy it absorbs, a good electric engine (or elec-
tro-motor) will return seventy-five per cent of the electric energy given
it by the generating dynamo. For the reason, however, that no eco-
nomical means of generating large currents are yet discovered, except
the method described of first burning coal, the use of electric machin-
ery is at present restricted to certain industries. Now, one of these
industries is believed to be railroading.

The opinion is generally held that railroad companies desire to
obtain as large a return as possible upon their investment, and there-
fore to run their trains as cheaply as possible. If this be true, the
value of an electric railway will become obvious, when one remembers
that, of necessity, the present locomotive is wasteful in the extreme,
and that in an electric railway a large and economical stationary
engine renders its mechanical energy to a large and economical dynamo
which sends an electric current to an economical motor on an electric
locomotive. This motor is connected with the driving-wheels by
gearing, belting, or other suitable devices, so that its revolution pro-
duces a revolution of the driving-wheels and a consequent progress-
ive motion of the electric locomotive, in the same way that the
engine of a steam-locomotive produces a rotary motion of the driv-
ing-wheels, and a consequent progressive motion of the steam-loco-
motive. There is a certain loss of electricity in passing from the
dynamo to the motor on the locomotive, both from leakage and from
overcoming the resistance of the conductors ; but, for distances not
too great, this loss, added to the losses in converting the mechanical
energy of the stationary engine into electrical energy, and in recon-
verting this electrical energy back into mechanical energy by the
motor, is not equal to the loss inseparable from even the best steam-
locomotives.

It will be, of course, noticed that it is necessary constantly to
maintain an electrical connection between the electro-motor on the
locomotive and the stationary dynamo, in all positions of the locomo-
tive. To accomplish this effectively, a number of systems have been
invented. By one system the rails themselves act as conductors, the

746 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

current going to the locomotive by one rail and returning by the
other ; while, in other systems, a third or auxiliary conductor is used.
To collect the current and pass it through the motor, two strips of
copper or brass in the circuit of the motor extend from the locomo-
tive and press upon the conductors ; so that, as the car advances,
these keep up a scraping contact. Two wheels in circuit with the mo-
tor are also sometimes used as collectors.

The distinction of being the first to conceive and suggest the idea
of an electric railway seems to belong to Dr. Werner Siemens, of the
celebrated firm of Siemens & Halske, which has been more identified
with the practical development of electrical science than any other
firm in the world. In pursuance of his idea, Dr. Siemens constructed
the first electrical railway at Berlin in 1879.

In this railway, whose length was about three hundred and fifty
yards, and whose gauge was about three feet and three inches, a third
or auxiliary conductor was used to convey the current from the
dynamo to the motor. This conductor lay between and parallel to the
other two rails, and the current was taken from it by a metal brush
connected with the motor, which extended from the car and pressed
upon the conductor. After going through the motor, the current
went to both rails and by them back to the dynamo, the rails acting
as the " return." The motor was placed upon a car, attached to
which were three other cars, the first thus acting as the locomo-
tive. Such was the interest excited by this novel system of trans-
portation, and such its success, that it continued in operation for sev-
eral months, and carried thousands of people, the money received
for fares being contributed, it is said, to charitable institutions in
the city.

The success of this experimental railway led the Messrs. Siemens
to plan another upon a more extended scale ; and they applied to
the authorities for permission to build an elevated road in Berlin,
six miles long, on which single cars, each fitted with an electro-
motor, were to be run by means of electricity. Permission to do this
was refused, on account of the inconvenience to the inhabitants which
would result from the structure ; but, ultimately, leave was given
the same firm to build a surface electric railway from Lichterfelde,
one of the suburbs, to the military academy. This railway is still
running, and its operation has throughout, for more than two years,
been of the most satisfactory character. No auxiliary conductor is
used, the current going from the dynamo along one rail, through one
of the wheels, through the motor, through a wheel on the opposite
side of the car, and thence to the other rail, which acts as the "re-
turn." No trains are made up, but each car is fitted with an electro-
motor, which lies beneath the flooring. As the authorities declare
these cars to fall under the same heading as tram-cars, the speed at
which they may be run is limited by law to twelve miles per hour.

THE ELECTRIC RAILWAY.

747

This speed is realized with ease, but a much greater rate could be at-
tained, if it were allowed.

It can hardly be hoped, however, that such a simple system as
this could be adopted for running cars in the streets of a city, for
other difficulties would be introduced. The fact that the rails in the
streets must, of necessity, be close to the surface of the ground, and
that they are to be stepped upon by men and horses, shows at once
the necessity of having the conductor out of the way, and the danger
of having the current traverse the rails. At the Electrical Exposition
held at Paris in 1881, Messrs. Siemens & Halske had an electric rail-
way in operation, in which a third or auxiliary conductor was used ;
but this ran along on posts like a telegraph-wire, the current being
conveyed from this conductor to the motor by means of a flexible con-
ductor, which was connected at one end with the motor on the car,
and at the other with a contact-carriage, or trolly, which was drawn
along the conductor by the car as it advanced.

In mines, in tunnels, and in all places where the smoke of burning
coal is objectionable, it would seem that the electric railway possesses
unrivaled advantages. As the motor gives off no smoke, makes little
noise, occupies but a small space, and does not have to carry its own

Fig. 2.

748 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

fuel, it possesses many points of superiority over the present cumber-
some, noisy, smoky locomotive. Indeed, in long passages such as those
in the mines at Zankerode, where a Siemens electric railway is now
running, a steam-locomotive would be not only undesirable but im-
possible.

In the Zankerode-mine railway, the current is sent from the dy-
namo along the roof of the tunnel through one of the inverted T-rails
shown in Fig. 2, which thus acts as a conductor, and upon which slides
a contact-carriage connected with the motor on the car by one of the
flexible conductors, also shown. The return current coming from the
motor goes to the other inverted T-iron by the other flexible conduct-
or, and thence back to the dynamo.

The most extensive electric railway now in use is that constructed
by Messrs. Siemens in Ireland, which runs from Portrush to Bush-
mills, a distance of about six miles. As at present operated, a dynamo
revolved by a stationary steam-engine supplies the necessary current ;
but it is intended to utilize the waste power of a waterfall situated
about three quarters of a mile from the end of the line, as soon as the
necessary works can be constructed. The cost of running the electric
locomotives is found to be less than that of running steam-locomotives
over the same track, and it will be much reduced as soon as the utiliza-
tion of the power of the waterfall (twenty-four feet) is made possible.

By another system of electric propulsion, it has been attempted to
carry batteries of electric accumulators in the car, instead of conveying
the current to the car by conductors. By this system, as yet unde-
veloped, a large stationary engine is to be used to turn a dynamo
which will generate a current that will charge the accumulators or
" storage-batteries," as they are sometimes called ; these accumulators
to lie under the seats or in some other convenient place, and render the
current to the motor direct.

As accumulators may play an important part in electric railroading,
and as much that is incorrect has appeared in print concerning them,
a few words of description may not be out of place.

Probably the most prevalent conception of an accumulator is a box
or other receptacle in which electricity is put and from which it can
be drawn when desired ; and for practical purposes this idea is suffi-
ciently correct. From a scientific point of view, however, it is more
satisfactory to regard an accumulator as a battery in which the elec-
trical energy of the current which it renders arises from a chemical
action due primarily to another current which was sent through it.
To speak more in detail, the ordinary accumulator (Fig. 3) consists of
two lead plates standing in acidulated water and capable of behaving
like an ordinary voltaic battery, after they have been acted upon by a
strong current. This current, called the charging current, when it goes
through the liquid, decomposes it, the oxygen, separated, going to one
lead plate and the hydrogen to the other lead plate. The oxygen at-

THE ELECTRIC RAILWAY.

749

Fig. 3.

tacks the lead plate to which it goes, thus forming peroxide of lead,
and the hydrogen reduces any oxide that may be on the other lead
plate, thus producing pure lead, some of the surplus
hydrogen forming as a film upon the surface. The
charging current is then reversed, so that the latter
plate is now attacked, and is then reversed again ;
the effect of these operations being to render the
surfaces of both lead plates porous so that they pre-
sent a large surface, and can therefore hold a great
deal of peroxide of lead. When the charging cur-
rent is broken, the oxygen, which has been forcibly
separated from the liquid, seeks to recombine in the
same way that a stone which has been forcibly sep-
arated from the earth seeks the earth when liberated.
If now the two lead plates be joined with a wire, the
effect of the oxygen in the peroxide of lead trying
to recombine is to generate an electrical current in
the opposite direction to the original one ; and this
is the current which is utilized. The value of accu-
mulators would be much increased if this return cur-
rent could be made greater, and if the weight and
cost of the accumulators themselves could be made less. At pres-
ent, however, their use is restricted by reason of their great cost and
weight, and by the small ratio (about fifty per cent in practice) of the
electrical energy returned to that expended in charging them. Never-
theless, the fact that the accumulator system of electric railroading
obviates the necessity for any conductors, which sometimes are incon-
venient and expensive, and which themselves occasion great loss of
electrical energy, leads many to believe that for short routes, as upon
street-car lines of cities, accumulators will be very efficient.

At the Chicago Exposition of Railway Appliances, which has just
closed, the system of Messrs. T. A. Edison and S. D. Field, of New
York, was tried, and with undeniable success. By this system a third
conductor is used ; but it is not placed upon poles, as in the Siemens
system (for this would not be practicable in the streets of a city), but
lies in a long sunken trough which runs between and parallel to the
rails. The trough is covered, and a long and very narrow slit runs the
whole length of the cover. Through this slit extends a strong metallic
rod which is connected mechanically with a contact-carriage lying
upon the conductor, and which is mechanically and electrically con-
nected with the car.

It is claimed that by means of a scraper, carried by the contact-
carriage, there will be no trouble occasioned by any accumulation on
the conductor of ice, snow, or mud, but that the car can be satisfac-
torily run in all kinds of weather.

Fig. 4 represents the generator and track as arranged at the Chi-

75°

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

H

cago Exposition. It will be noticed that one pole of the generator
(dynamo) is connected with the auxiliary middle rail, and the other
with one of the two side-rails which are metallically connected togeth-
er, as shown. The current goes to
the motor on the car by the middle
conductor, and is returned to the
generator by the side-rails.

The advantages of the electric
railway, should it be made practi-
cable in all respects, are obvious,
and there is good reason for believ-
ing that in time it will be made
available and economical even for
lines of considerable length.

In the streets of a city, electric
cars would be advantageous upon
the surface roads for the reason
that they could be run more quietly
and swiftly than horse-cars, and, as
an electric car can be stopped in
less than its own length, just as
safely ; in crowded parts of the
city, they could thread their way
more rapidly through the crowds
of carts and other vehicles, because
they can be stopped and started
more quickly and require less room.
But it would be upon elevated roads
that their advantages would be pro-
nounced, for we should
then escape much of the
noise and all of the smoke
and smell that now at-
tend the passing of ele-
vated trains.

By reason of our abil-
ity to make every elec-
trical car its own loco-
motive, it is clear that we
uBflBrci TOY* can secure greater safety
in traveling, and greater
frequency in the times of
arrival and departure, so that to reach the depot half a minute too
late would not be so serious a thing as it now is. As each car is very
light, it can be stopped in a much shorter distance than is now possible
with a heavy train ; and, even if a collision should occur, it would not

^5

THE ELECTRIC RAILWAY. 75 1

be such a horrible thing as a collision between two ponderous trains,
not only because of the lightness of the electric cars, but also because
they do not carry steam and fire as locomotives do. Another advan-
tage of the lightness of the cars lies in the fact that they will exert
less " wear and tear " upon the tracks, and therefore occasion less out-
lay for repairs.

When the present mode of traveling in Pullman cars is compared
with the mode in use not very long ago, by which people were cramped
for hours and even days in a coach without springs worth calling by
that name, and were jolted and tossed about over uneven roads, we
conclude that traveling at the present time is a very luxurious thing.
But what will it be wThen we can sit at an open window, and glide
along at the rate of sixty miles an hour, without the fear of smoke
or cinders ; when electric bells are at hand leading to the inaccessible
retreats where porters now secrete themselves safe from discovery ;
when we can start from our homes to take a car for Boston, as we
now start to take an elevated train, knowing that, if we miss one
car, another will be soon at hand ; when electric incandescent lamps,
which can not, in case of accident, scatter burning oil in all directions,
shall fill the car with a mild and steady light ; when dispatches can be
received on board a train in motion as well as at an office ; when the
cars shall be heated and meals prepared by electric stoves which can
not, in case of accident, set fire to the car — all the electricity needed for
these and numberless other purposes being derived from the same con-
venient source — the conductor carrying the current which furnishes
the propelling power ?

That any such ideas as to what electricity can accomplish are vis-
ionary and impracticable may seem to be the case to some ; that they
are so in reality is not believed by many who have given the subject
impartial study. Some of these believe that, in the very near future
electric cars will supplant horse-cars ; and upon short lines like ele-
vated roads, steam-locomotives ; but that it will not be practicable for
many years to run electrical cars upon long lines. Such may be the
case. But it should be remembered that, in most instances in the his-
tory of industrial progress, the practical developments of meritorious
systems have surpassed in rapidity and extent the expectations of even
impartial men. A very high scientific authority in England once
spoke very favorably of the idea of using steam- vessels for accom-
plishing short distances, and for river navigation, but laughed heartily
over the suggestion of their ever going to sea, and offered publicly
to eat the boilers and engines of the first one that should cross the
Atlantic. Probably there are not many men who, in the light of what
has recently been accomplished, would promise to eat the motor of
the first electric car that should run from New York to Chicago.

752

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY,

PHOTOGRAPHING A STKEAK OF LIGHTNING.

By GASTON TISSANDIER.

A BOHEMIAN observer, M. Robert Haensel, of Reich enberg, has
succeeded in accurately photographing a flash of lightning. His
pictures, of which he has taken several, show the light of the flash,
under the form of long, continuous sparks, traversing the atmosphere.
With the spark the landscape also is well produced, and a means is

Fig. 1.

PHOTOGRAPHING A STREAK OF LIGHTNING. 753

given for estimating the length of the luminous train, which, in one
instance, is calculated to be seventeen hundred metres, or more than
a mile.

Wheatstone demonstrated by direct experiments of great ingenuity
that single flashes of lightning do not last more than a millionth of a
second. We may judge from this of the wonderful sensibility of the
new gelatine-bromide plates which permit the taking of correct views
under these conditions.

M. Haensel has given a short account of the circumstances under
which his photographs were taken and of the processes he employed.
On the 6th of July, 1883, during a storm, when the sky was traversed

Fig. 2.

by frequent flashes of lightning, he turned his instrument at about ten
o'clock in the evening toward that point whence the strongest flashes
seemed to issue. The apparatus was furnished with the most sensitive
gelatine-bromide plates, and the flash left its own impression upon
them as it was formed. Out of ten plates that were exposed, he ob-
tained only four photographs, of two of which we here give exact
copies, taken from heliographic reproductions by M. Gillot, of Paris.
The first figure represents two flashes. In the left one will be observed
a double spark, which also appears triple in the middle. Simulta-

TOL. XXIV. — 48

754 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

neously with this flash the sky was traversed by another, which
also appears ramified in even a more complicated manner than its
companion. The second figure represents in all its beauty a flash
with many extensive and divergent ramifications. — Translated for the
Popular Science Monthly from La Nature.

-♦♦■»■

METHODS OF INSTRUCTION IN MINERALOGY*

By M. E. WADS WORTH, Ph.D.,

OF THE MUSEUM OF COMPAKATIYE ZOOLOGY, CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

IN the present discussions concerning the relative merits of classical
and scientific studies as factors in education, one point seems to
be often lost sight of : the difference between instruction given for
the purpose of disciplining the mind and that given for the purpose
of imparting information. The former appears to be the chief func-
tion of our public schools, academies, seminaries, and colleges ; the
latter the principal object of technological and professional schools
and graduate or university courses proper.

It would seem, then, that it is necessary for any one, seeking to
replace any disciplinary study by something else, to show that the
proposed new study will afford an equivalent amount in kind. In
other words, if the scientist can not show that the studies he proposes
to introduce into our colleges and high-schools possess, beyond the
information given, a power of disciplining the mind, in certain valu-
able directions, equal to any other studies, his case had better be aban-
doned. Realizing this, it is proposed to show how instruction in
mineralogy can be and has been given in such a way as to cultivate
and develop faculties of the greatest value and use to any man, what-
ever may be his walk in life. Of necessity, personal experience must
be referred to in this case, which is the excuse for the seeming egotism
of this article.

It is intended, first, to show how this was accomplished in the ele-
mentary course in mineralogy in Harvard College, as given several
years ago. This course extended throughout the college year, re-
quiring of the students attendance upon three lectures a week, or their
equivalents, and, in addition, at least six hours of laboratory work.
Since it (like nearly all the courses in Harvard) was an elective, it was
taken only by a limited number of students.

At the time of my acquaintance with it, as a pupil, the first two
and a half months were devoted to crystallography, while determina-
tive mineralogy occupied the rest of the year. The crystallography
was taught by means of crystal models, with illustrations taken from
natural crystals, and embraced certain of the mathematical princi-

* Abstract of a paper read before the Society of Naturalists of Eastern United States,
New York, December 27, 1883.

METHODS OF INSTRUCTION IN MINERALOGY. 755

pies ; but the course was largely devoted to the drawing of figures of
crystals. Nearly all of this instruction was of a kind that caused
the pupil to do his work in a mechanical manner, following " thumb-
rules " given by the instructor. The student evidently was not ex-
pected to understand the reasons for his work — the great object
seemed to be to mechanically produce the most beautiful and perfect
drawings ; and on this part of the course itis not proposed to dwell.

The mineralogical instruction was given in the following manner :
First, there had been chosen a set of the most important mineral
species, amounting to over two hundred in all, with which it was
thought best that the student should be familiar. A sufficient num-
ber of typical specimens of each species and its important varieties
had been labeled and permanently arranged, according to Dana's
" System of Mineralogy," in a set of drawers accessible to the stu-
dent. The instructor, with the specimens before him and the stu-
dents around him, proceeded to point out the essential characteristics
of these minerals, calling attention mainly to those features which
would distinguish each mineral from all others in the chosen set.
It was not proposed to burden the pupil with long descriptions of
each mineral, but rather to require him to know and understand that
which separated each one from its fellows, and caused it to stand
out distinct from them. To this end every means of determination
that seemed essential was put in requisition, except quantitative analy-
sis. If the crystalline form was sufficient, the student was not ex-
pected to go further. If the physical properties sufficed, that was all
that was necessary ; if not, then resort must be had to the blow-
pipe, and even to the wet tests. The student was taught to do that
which the practical mineralogist does — to determine his minerals by
the shortest method consistent with accuracy — the method to vary
according to the specimen. The pupil was taught to observe the
color, streak, hardness, etc., to weigh the evidence in each case, and
to decide according to the weight of the evidence. No guess-work
was permitted, but some decisive test was required which should prove
that the specimen belonged to the species to which it had been as-
signed. After a certain group had been passed over by the instructor
— as, for instance, the picked species of the native elements, sulphides,
etc., and sulpharsenites, etc., of Dana's system — each student was as-
signed a drawer containing specimens of these minerals, unlabeled and
mixed together. These specimens were selected so as to be fair repre-
sentatives of the species and varieties, but yet sufficiently difficult and
varied to bring into play the student's faculties which it was desired to
cultivate. As aids, the student was allowed his lecture-notes, Dana's
" System of Mineralogy," and the lecture-drawers of labeled minerals.

After sufficient time had been given for the laboratory- work, each
student was expected to be questioned, during the lecture-hour, upon
such specimens as the instructor chose from his drawer. The student

756 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

was required not only to name the specimen, but also to give his proofs
why this belonged to a certain species and not to any other.

After this laboratory work had been performed, the instructor
passed on to the next group — the chlorides, etc., fluorides and oxides of
Dana's system. Lectures with the succeeding laboratory work fol-
lowed, but in the drawers for determination there were placed speci-
mens not only of this group but also of the preceding group. This
was followed throughout the year, so that the student was unable to
lose sight of any species he had previously studied. Written exami-
nations were occasionally interspersed, in which the student was re-
quired to determine a certain number of picked specimens that were
placed before him, and write out the reasons for his determinations.
This system of instruction, I believe, was devised by the teacher of the
course at that time, Professor J. P. Cooke. After having endeavored
to inform myself as to the methods of instruction in elementary min-
eralogy both in this country and in Europe, I have as yet failed to
find one that, in my judgment, equals this, both for the mental disci-
pline and the practical instruction it gives ; and I take pleasure in
acknowledging my great obligations and gratitude to Professor Cooke
for the mineralogical instruction I received from him in that course.

When, in the process of time, this course passed under my charge,
great modifications were made in it ; the crystallography was reduced
in amount and lithology added. By a different arrangement the crys-
tallography was taught in six lectures. In these, by means of a few
simple principles, the student was taught to recognize readily to which
form the planes of any crystal belonged, no matter how many different
forms might be represented. Further than this it did not seem prac-
ticable to go, without entering upon an extended course of instruction
and practice in mathematical crystallography, which would have con-
sumed the entire time of the course. However, it was found that the
students were better trained for the practical application of crystal-
lography to determinative mineralogy by this brief course than they
had formerly been by the two and a half months' instruction previ-
ously given.

Another radical change was the substitution for the "general
quiz " of all the students, at the lecture-hour, of an hour's oral ex-
amination for each student. Each one was required to arrange some
hour in which he could meet the instructor alone in his room, with
his (the student's) crystal models, or drawer of specimens, as the
case might be. During that hour he was carefully questioned upon
the material, and every effort was made to lead him to express his
ideas clearly. He was cross-examined on every point, relating not
only to general principles, but also to the particular specimens in
hand. He was required to state what characters were upon the speci-
mens, how he determined them, and what their relations were to oth-
ers. If it was found that the student's methods were imperfect, his

METHODS OF INSTRUCTION IN MINERALOGY. 757

logic defective, or that he had misunderstood anything in the lec-
tures) every effort was made to set him right. The examination was
really made a pleasant conversation between two friends, in which
one constantly endeavored to draw the other out, place him at his ease,
and enable him to tell what he knew. Methods of thought and work
were the great objects, far more than correctly naming the specimens.
In such an examination as this the student was obliged to depend upon
his merits. The teacher must have indeed been a poor one if he could
not in that hour find out, to a far greater extent than the student
dreamed or suspected, what he knew and what his methods of thought
and work were. Every effort was made to render the student an inde-
pendent thinker, to cultivate in him accuracy and quickness of observa-
tion and readiness of perception, to lead him to rely upon himself, to
weigh evidence, to reason closely, to form an opinion, and give his
reasons therefor — to see, to be accurate, to reason, to judge, to decide.
The time was also improved as a means of getting hold of him and
establishing cordial relations with him ; as well as to turn him uncon-
sciously in the right direction, and to come into that close personal
contact which it is so difficult to bring about in a large university, but
which is so precious and valuable. Since these hourly examinations
were repeated with each pupil for each group, the chief drawback was
the tax upon the instructor's time and strength, as any one can readily
realize when he considers that this species of mental gymnastics was
kept up from six to ten hours a day, and that there were seven groups
requiring from twenty-six to thirty hours in each group. It is to be
borne in mind that this work was entirely voluntary on the instructor's
part, but it paid in the results to the students, and in many of them it
has influenced powerfully their after-life.

The students attending the course comprised freshmen, sopho-
mores, juniors, seniors, graduates, specials, and scientific school stu-
dents— a perfectly natural result from the extended elective system of
Harvard. I am free to confess that, for a course like the one above de-
scribed, I much prefer freshmen and sophomores to juniors and sen-
iors. The reason is not far to seek. The prime objects of such a
course are to cultivate observation and accuracy, train the powers of
reasoning and judgment, and above all to beget in the student inde-
pendence and freedom of thought. The previous training of the
upper-class men had usually been such as to cramp and weaken what-
ever faculties in these directions they might have originally possessed,
and hence it was exceedingly difficult to stimulate them to right meth-
ods of wTork and thought. This was strikingly exemplified in the case
of those students who were thoroughly conversant with the blow-pipe,
from their previous study of chemistry. It was with the greatest diffi-
culty that they could be prevented from taking some one of the nu-
merous artificial blow-pipe keys for the determination of minerals,
shutting their eyes to all the physical characters, transforming them-

758 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

selves into mere wind-machines, and mechanically grinding out their
results.

One question will naturally arise in the minds of every one : Can
similar methods be applied in giving instruction for a limited time
when the means and appliances for determination are of themselves
much circumscribed ? In one case this has been practically answered
by myself, in giving instruction in the rudiments of mineralogy and
lithology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology. The problem was
to take dust-covered minerals and rocks that had accumulated through
many years — some good, but most of them mere rubbish, the odds and
ends of various collections — and give a two and a half months' course.
From the necessity of the case, no blow-pipes could be used in the
building, there were no crystal models, and the whole apparatus for
qualitative tests was a bottle of hydrochloric acid and a few test-tubes
which could be used in the cold. Streakers, magnifying-glasses, mag-
nets, and a knife or file, with some broken glass, completed the outfit.
The miscellaneous collection of minerals and rocks was washed and
sorted, and such specimens as could be used were labeled and placed in
drawers accessible to the students. With this material it was impossi-
ble to arrange test-drawers as described in the previous course. The
instructor then directed the attention of the students to those physical
and chemical characters of the specimens that they could make use of.
The same general system was pursued as before, so far as the differ-
ent conditions would permit — the object being the same, to impart
valuable instruction together with mental training. The students, un-
der the direction of the instructor, worked over the labeled drawers,
and determined for themselves why the specimens were labeled as
they were. At the end of the course a series of minerals and rocks
was placed before each student, and he was required to determine
them, writing out his reasons therefor. The result far exceeded my
expectations. Out of thirty-eight students examined, comprising fresh-
men, sophomores, juniors, seniors, graduates, special and engineering
students, thirteen took over ninety per cent, three of whom had the
maximum mark ; twelve obtained over eighty per cent, five over
seventy per cent, four between fifty and sixty per cent, and four be-
tween ten and fifty per cent.

That this course afforded an intellectual discipline of advantage to
the student has been shown, among various ways, by the testimony of
one of the sophomore students. His time later was largely devoted
to philosophical studies, including language and history, and after
graduation he pursued the same studies at Harvard and in the best
European universities. After his return from Europe and his estab-
lishment as an instructor in his favorite branches, he informed me that
this brief course had been of permanent advantage to him in his later
studies, and that it was one of the very few of the courses taken in
college upon which he could look back with any satisfaction and be-

METHODS OF INSTRUCTION IN MINERALOGY. 759

lieve it had materially aided him both in mental discipline and in meth-
ods of study. I speak of this simply to fortify my claim that miner-
alogy when rightly taught affords in certain directions a most valuable
means of intellectual training.

In most localities, especially in regions of crystalline rocks, the
teacher, even with very limited means, can usually procure many
specimens of at least a few species, which he can arrange for his stu-
dents, and practice them upon in such a manner as to bring into play
the required faculties. This method can even be pursued with large
audiences, if specimens enough can be obtained.

Besides exercising the pupils on the selected collection, they should
be encouraged to seek the specimens themselves in the field. Every
means possible should be taken to develop in them methods of thought
and work that will bear fruit in their future life. Far less should be
thought of training mineralogists than of training men.

In giving advanced instruction, the secret seems to be to bring the
student up to the level of the instructor ; to see that he has a broad
and thorough knowledge of the principles and necessary data of the
science ; to point out to him the untrodden fields ; to strengthen and
exercise him so that he may walk without the teacher's aid. The great
aim should be to render the student independent in his thought and
work, to free him from a slavish following after mere weight of au-
thority, and to beget in him a desire to seek truth for its own sake. He
should be so trained and strengthened that, when away from the instruct-
or's aid, he can walk in the untried grounds with a firm and steady step.

The preceding has not been given as of necessity the most perfect
way, but simply as a way for reaching certain results.

Far more, indeed, depends upon the teacher and his spirit than
upon the method, however valuable the latter may be.

It may also not be amiss to call attention to certain requirements
in the teacher. That an original investigator in any science may be a
poor instructor in that science is too well known to be disputed, but I
believe it to be equally true, that no man can teach any science in
spirit and truth — can produce upon his pupils the effect that ought to
be produced — unless he has the spirit and knowledge of an investigator
himself. In truth, it is confidently believed that no man can be a
teacher of the highest order who has not walked in the temple of
mystery itself, and wrung from Mother Nature some of her closely-
guarded secrets. As well ask one who has only read about disease to
properly teach medical students the practice of medicine as to ask one
who has only redd about any science to give proper instruction to his
students in it. Yet this is the thing which the majority of our col-
leges are doing, and they fill their chairs as if they thought a thorough
training in any science disqualified a man for teaching it. And then
we are told that science-teachingr is a failure ! Is not the failure more
in the teachers chosen than in the subjects ?

76o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

PHYSIOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF VITAL FOECE.

By WILLIAM G. STEVENSON, M. D.

MODERN science has so extended the horizon of our mental per-
spective, has achieved such brilliant triumphs in so many depart-
ments of thought, and, on the basis of verified fact, has erected such
an imposing superstructure of useful knowledge in the domain of in-
organic nature, that some, rejecting the vitalistic theories of the past,
have accepted the belief that the deeper mysteries of vital phenomena
will, in a final analysis, be demonstrated to be but resultants of physi-
cal forces acting under the complex conditions of organization.

To investigate and interpret the varied phenomena of nature is the
unquestioned prerogative of the human intellect ; but science, having
to do only with " particular orders of phenomena which exist in rela-
tion to the percipient mind " and are susceptible of verification, does
not hope to solve the profound mysteries involved in the ultimate reali-
ties of either matter, energy, or life. With restless energy the human
mind presses on in its search for truth, and brings from varied sources
new facts to add to the sum of knowledge, until the conclusion is
reached that matter is indestructible and energy persistent, and in the
formulated laws of the " correlation and conservation of energy " the
widest generalizations are made. In thus classifying and uniting the
manifestations of matter and of life, whether morphological or physio-
logical, under one general cosmic law, their explanation is made com-
plete within the limits of the known.

Phenomena are explained, but the absolute remains unrevealed.
The questions still are asked : What is gravity ? What are chemical,
electrical, and vital forces ? What is the essential nature of matter,
energy, and life ? There is no oracle to answer.

The study of vital phenomena is difficult because of their complex
character, and, in the absence of exact analysis, speculative philosophy
has for many ages ventured different theories in explanation of their
nature. In seeking to give the present status of physiological science
on this important question, it is of interest to take a general historical
retrospect, in order that the steps of progress may be observed.

The atomic philosophy, as taught by Democritus and Epicurus,
recognized but one kind of matter, whose elements, by virtue of their
various forms, had the property of diversified and endless combina-
tions. This play of atoms, independent of an overruling intelli-
gence, produced the worlds of inorganic and of organized matter,
which move on in endless cycles and are obedient only to physical
forces.

Plato regarded the intelligent soul as of dual character : one part,
located in the body, being mortal and presiding over the appetites and

PHYSIOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF VITAL FORCE. 761

passions ; the other part, located in the head, being immortal and the
source of reason.

The nature of the function of the brain and of the nervous system
was unknown to Aristotle, who thought the soul contained the body
having its mortal part located in the heart. He, as well as Plato,
thought the "pneuma," or breath, was to cool the blood, and in some
way act as an instrument of mind over bodily actions. The vital prin-
ciple of all life-forms resides in a germ ; " this principle, while it resem-
bles heat, is not fire, but a spirit similar in nature to the sun and stars."

Hippocrates accepted the Pythagorean doctrine of the four ele-
ments, and from it developed his theory of four principal " humors "
of the body. He taught the existence of an " intermediate nature,"
which, though distinct from the mortal soul or pneuma, was the source
of vital activity.

The pneuma was deemed such an important factor in the expla-
nation of vital phenomena, that a school called " Pneumatists " was
founded in the first century of our era. It was not then known that
the arteries contained blood, but they were regarded as the channels
through which the pneuma passed throughout the body ; and this
pneuma was to Galen, a. d. 130, identical with the soul. For fourteen
hundred years " pneumatism," under varied forms, was the accepted
philosophic belief of the civilized world, and only in the latter part of
the sixteenth century did anatomical study enable Sylvius, Fallopius,
Fabricius, and Harvey, to modify the prevailing belief of bodily func-
tions. Then it was that Paracelsus sought to explain vital phenomena
through the agency of an " archaeus " or demon, which, he affirmed,
was located in the stomach, and presided over the processes of nutri-
tion, separating the useful from the j)oisonous part of the food.

Van Helmont adopted the idea of an archseus, but thought it an
immaterial though personal force or entity, which " presided over all
bodily functions " and gave to each member of the body its own spe-
cial " vital spirit." The consensus of all these vital spirits produced
health, and their disagreement disease.

Van Helmont " discovered gaseous substances and identified the
archreus itself with gas." He proclaimed the existence of a general
bond of sympathy throughout the universe, because of the " vital spir-
its " which resided in all forms of matter.

Descartes regarded the body simply as a complex machine, acting
under conditions of physical forces, and all the phenomena of life were
but the products of their working. The soul, however, was a hihger
and independent principle which, located in the pineal gland, made
itself known by thought, and took its temporary abode in the body,
simply as a spectator of vital functions.

Leibnitz, while admitting a harmony established by Divine power,
denied to soul and body any reciprocal influence, saying : " The body
goes on in its development mechanically, and the laws of mechanics

762 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

are never transgressed in its natural motions. Everything takes place
in souls as though there were no body, and in the body everything
takes place as though there were no soul."

Lord Bacon accepted the doctrine of " vital spirits " as applied to
both animate and inanimate bodies.

Glisson believed in " vital spirits intermediate between the soul and
organs," and regarded " irritability as a force of which perception and
appetite are factors."

Stahl, in the eighteenth century, enunciated the doctrine that
chemical forces and vital force not only differ from each other, but are
antagonistic. Chemical forces are destructive of the living body, and
are held in abeyance, and their disintegrating power is neutralized by
a vital force which resides in the body and ministers to its functions.
" This vital force, struggling against physical force, acts intelligently,
upon a definite plan, for the preservation of the organism " ; its tri-
umph secures life, while the rule of the physical forces alone brings
death. The theories of " vitalism " and " animism " thus took their
places among the philosophic ventures of the age.

Borden, Barthez, and Grimaud, " representing the school of Mont-
pellier," accepted " vitalism " but rejected " animism." The principle
of life was believed to be distinct from the soul, though it was thought
to operate independently of mechanical or chemical laws.

Haller inaugurated the inductive method in physiological science,
and, by experiments, located irritability in the muscular tissue and
sensibility in the nervous tissue.

Buffon explained vital phenomena through the instrumentality of
" organic molecules " which, differing in form and nature, were inde-
structible and endowed with the "properties of vitality." These
molecules, when associated, not only gave specific character to each
part of the organism, and provided for its physiological activity, but
became the perennial source of life.

In order to explain how the organic molecules became arranged
into the specific forms of life, and preserved individual and type iden-
tity in nutrition and reproduction, Buffon projected his theory of " in-
terior molds," by which, in connection with the " organic molecules,"
he sought to account for all the phenomena of the organic world. It
was not until 1827, when the ovule in the ovarian follicle of mamma-
lians was discovered by De Baer, that the theory of " organic mole-
cules " and " interior molds " was overthrown. A single demonstrated
fact destroyed the speculations of an age.

Bonnet's theory of " included germs " was another example of rea-
soning from premises that had not been verified, and the result was
disastrous to the subjective method. He taught that the germs of all
life-forms not only pre-existed in their first-created representative, but
actually contained within themselves, already formed, all the parts of
the future organism.

PHYSIOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF VITAL FORCE. 763

Logical deduction and scientific research, according to the beliefs
and methods of the age, permitted such doctrines to receive for a time
the approval of popular assent. But the spirit of inquiry was abroad
in the world, and the advance of embryological science soon gave the
demonstration that the doctrine of " included germs " had no founda-
tion in fact, and so it was numbered with the errors of the past.

Cuvier, who had with such ability compared the structure of ani-
mal organs, and classified the facts of animal life in their statical or
anatomical relationship, was a " vitalist," and thought the vital prop-
erties of the body a kind of entity — independent of physical or chemi-
cal forces.

Bichat sought, by a study of the tissues which composed the or-
gans, to learn the nature of their functions, or the dynamics of the
living body. He found that all the various kinds of tissue of the
body, though differing in function, were endowed with two common
properties — extensibility and contractility.

While he made phenomena depend on the properties of matter, he
nevertheless followed Stahl as a " vitalist," and claimed that vital and
physical properties are not only distinct from but antagonistic to each
other : " The vital properties preserve the living body by counteract-
ing the physical properties that tend to destroy it." Each class of
phenomena is under distinct laws, and the conflict between them is
active and constant. As one or the other triumphs, life or death re-
sults, and "health and disease are but the vicissitudes of the strife."

Life is, by Bichat, defined as " the group of functions that resist
death," and is under the direct supervision of a special principle called
at different times " soul," " archseon," " psyche," or " vital force." The
philosophic theory which postulated this undetermined factor was
known by the generic term of "vitalism," which, under Stahl and
Bichat, took accurate definition, and deeply impressed its tenets upon
the physical, chemical, and physiological sciences of the age.

Entities of some kind presided over the functions of life and the
manifestations of matter. A " vital principle " ruled the organic world,
and the phenomena of inorganic nature depended upon the presence
of some " principle " which existed independent of the matter through
which it displayed itself. Material particles, darting from luminous
bodies into the eye, produced the sensation of light. Heat and cold
depended upon the presence or absence of a material substance called
"caloric." Electricity was a subtile, material agent, existing in a
" latent " state in all substances, and manifesting great power when
liberated from its repose. And so throughout the domain of chemical,
physical, and biological phenomena, material entities existed and were
manifested in all forms of inorganic and organic bodies, and yet were
independent of them.

This was not an age for synthetic work ; indeed, not even accurate
analytic work, except in simple things, could be performed. These

764 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

are possible only when facts have been observed, and definite knowl-
edge has been acquired in special directions. In the sixteenth century,
alchemy, having failed to discover the philosopher's stone, sought to
find chemical remedies for diseases. Crude theories were supported
by a few facts wrongly interpreted.

Early in the seventeenth century Glauber states that salt is the
origin of all things. Boyle argues against the theory that "salt,
sulphur, and mercury are the principles of things," and makes heat a
powerful factor in originating new bodies. Becher thought that metals
consisted of earth, of which there were three kinds — fusible or stony,
fatty or fluid, and a " something of which they became deprived on
ignition." This "something" Stahl named "phlogiston," which is
akin to " spirits " and " souls " of the alchemists.

The phlogistic theory of Stahl was without foundation in fact, and
yet, based upon experimental data, it was a step upward in chemical
research, and held the minds of all for over one hundred and fifty
years, including such great names in the eighteenth century as Hales,
Black, Scheele, Priestley, Cavendish, and Lavoisier. Then it was that
the analytic method became more accurate. Black, with the balance,
demonstrated that the ignition of the metals magnesium and calcium
gave no evidence that a ponderable " caloric " entered into them, but,
to the contrary, a peculiar " fixed air " was expelled from them, which
rendered them lighter than before they were burned.

The foundation of quantitative chemistry was thus laid, and the
existence of " imponderable " agents in nature questioned. The dis-
covery of " dephlogisticated air " by Priestley, the investigation of
gases by Cavendish, of heat and fire by Scheele, and of insoluble min-
erals by Bergman — by means of the blow-pipe — were important addi-
tions to chemical knowledge, and enabled Lavoisier to generalize the
facts already discovered. He announced a new theory of combustion,
and, by questioning the existence of phlogiston, and showing that
" principles should not be assumed where they could not be detected,"
revolutionized chemistry and gave it a new impulse, which has been
quickened by every discovery since made.

Analysis of inorganic bodies increased, new facts accumulated,
and new interpretations of phenomena were given, until the atomic
theory, first suggested by Dalton in 1804, was promulgated under the
great generalization known as the law of Avogadro or Ampere, which
makes " equal volumes of all substances, when in a state of gas, and
under like conditions, contain the same number of molecules."

This was the birth of modern chemistry, and, though it received
attention when first enunciated in 1811, its far-reaching principles of
truth were neither fully understood nor accepted for half a century
afterward.

Chemistry, free from the errors of the past, now seeks to discover
in the organic world the relations of diiferent substances, as it has

PHYSIOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF VITAL FORCE. 765

sought to know their relations in inorganic nature, and already the
evidence is prophetic of wonderful results.

In physical philosophy, " Stahlism " received its mortal wound at
the close of the last century by the experiments of Rumford and Davy,
which negated the theory of " caloric " and demonstrated heat to be a
" mode of motion."

This new doctrine, though founded on a demonstrated fact, was
not complete until 1850, when Joule, having determined the mechani-
cal equivalent of heat and established the law of thermo- dynamics,
made possible the classification of facts determined by Young, Mel-
loni, Faraday, Liebig, Mayer, Grove, Helmholtz, Carpenter, Tyndall,
Henry, and others, which enabled the deduction to be made of the
universal laws of the " correlation and conservation of energy."

In inorganic nature, unity, under law, is an accepted fact, and
analysis and synthesis harmonize as to causes and effects ; but in the
organic world there are yet many unknown quantities, and the prog-
ress in solving the mysteries of life-action is necessarily slow, because
of their complex character.

To some, " vitalism " yet maintains its position in the philosophic
realm of organization, and a " vital force," independent of and antago-
nistic to physical force, yet presides over the manifestations of organic
bodies. This, if true, necessitates " two distinct sciences and two dis-
tinct orders in nature," which, though related, are not reciprocal.
This view is not in harmony with either chemical, physical, or biologi-
cal science of the present day, and stands in direct contradiction to the
accepted doctrine of the correlation and conservation of energy.

Whatever may be the essential nature of the ultimate life-principle
— with which science has nothing to do — it can not be denied that life-
phenomena are presented to us only through forms of matter. Mat-
ter, or material organization, is, therefore, so far as human knowledge
goes, an absolute condition upon which all life-manifestations depend,
and to assert, as do the " vitalists," that this vital energy — an agency
which can not be verified, though dependent upon a material condi-
tion for a display of its action — is not related to it, but is independent
of it and under distinct and antagonistic laws, is an assumption at
variance with scientific truth and reason.

Doubtless one common source of error in the minds of the disciples
of " vitalism " is inaccurate definition, confounding, as they do, the
scientific meaning of a term with its philosophical or metaphysical
significance. Thus, the term " life," when applied to the higher ani-
mals, is, to the metaphysical philosopher, often related to, or made
synonymous with, the " soul " ; while to the physiologist it refers
only to the sum of phenomena arising in organized bodies. If what
" can not be explained by chemistry or physics " constitutes the vital
functions, then, by simply eliminating the known or non-vital factors,
we may easily learn the exact amount of the vital element.

766 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Science has already " banished the vital force from the entire prov-
ince of organic chemical compounds, proving them to be subject to the
same physical and chemical forces which determine the composition of
mineral matter," and it now remains to test by analysis and synthesis
the problem of organization itself.

It may very properly be asked, If the vital force has been banished
from the entire province of organic chemical compounds, as asserted
and demonstrated, in what it now resides, where is it located and what
are its functions ?

Chemical science has already demonstrated that all "proximate
principles " and tissues of an organized body are, in an ultimate analy-
sis, reducible to some of the elementary substances ; and as, in inor-
ganic bodies, morphological differences result from the various com-
binations of the ultimate elements, so, too, is it with organized bodies.
So far as form alone is concerned, it is no more difficult to understand
why organic compounds, under conditions of vital relations, take on
the special form of a single speck of bioplasm in one case, of a vege-
table in another, or of an animal form in another case, than it is to
understand why the same elements will produce substances either allo-
tropic or isomeric.

The phenomena are classified and thus explained, but in neither
example is the ultimate nature or condition which causes the morpho-
logical difference known. There is no known force in nature capable
of lifting the elements to the plane of animal organisms, except
through the intermediate planes of the mineral and the vegetable
kingdoms. Chemism is sufficient to form the mineral kingdom from
the simple elements, which are under physical force alone. As the
elementary combinations necessary to form a mineral involve an ex-
penditure of force, which is transformed from a lower to a higher
expression, so, in resolving the mineral back again to its elementary
state, the force conserved in a higher state represents the original
larger but weaker force of lower grade. The same is true when
chemical compounds, as represented in the mineral kingdom, are lifted
to the plane of the vegetable kingdom, or when the members of this
class are raised to the highest class of the animal kingdom. In all
cases the higher conditions depend upon the conditions of the next
lower plane ; and the conserved forces of the higher plane, when
liberated by decomposition, represent the special functions of the
organization.

There is not a phenomenon in animal life, from the earliest stage
of germ-growth to the final stage of human development, but is sus-
ceptible of classification. The monera — mere specks of bioplasm —
organisms without organs, so far as can be determined in their power
to move, to receive nourishment, to react on external impressions and
to reproduce their kind — not only manifest the fundamental properties
of life, but display them under conditions so simple, so free from all

PHYSIOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF VITAL FORCE. 767

morphological complications, that the way seems prepared by nature
herself for the inquirer to enter the portals which open into the mys-
teries of life. They are on the border-land of the living and the not-
living, blending on the one side with colloidal matter and on the other
with vegetable forms, all so intimately related with simple "matter"
as to justify if not necessitate the conclusion of genetic correlation.

We see this simple hyaline particle of bioplasm expand and con-
tract, accompanied with chemical composition and decomposition, and
the conclusion is irresistible that these simplest forms of motion,
expansion and contraction, follow in orderly sequence of cause and
effect.

Motility, arising from chemical disintegration and reintegration,
represents, therefore, a fundamental expression of living organized
matter, and impresses us with the idea of energy transformed. Indeed,
all the functions of the higher organisms testify to the truth of the
proposition that every manifestation of energy of organized bodies has
its mechanical equivalent, and follows an orderly sequence of events.

The nutrition of the body, through all the intricate processes of
external and internal digestion under the action of the digestive fer-
ments, involves only physical and chemical forces in the transforma-
tion of the various foods received. The entire animal body is com-
posed of modified protoplasm, as represented in the three classes
known as proteids, carbohydrates, and fats, with their respective
derivatives.

The proteids are exceedingly complex in character, and are not as
yet definitely classified among organic compounds. They unite with
acids and alkalies, and yet " do not play the part of an acid toward
the base," or conversely. They are not crystallizable, and, having no
combining equivalent, do not possess an absolute ultimate constitution,
and therefore their molecular reactions and changes in the body can
not be expressed by exact chemical symbols.

Here, then, we see the formidable list of " proximate principles "
that are known to belong to the animal body as nutrient elements, and
which are necessary for tissue development. They are all organic
compounds, from which science has "banished the vital force" by
"proving them to be subject to the same physical and chemical forces
which determine the composition of universal matter." "Where, then,
shall we seek this " indefinable something " which exists and acts in
the organism independent of and antagonistic to the physical and
chemical forces of nature, as affirmed by the doctrines of " vitalism "
taught by Stahl and Bichat ?

The position held by these distinguished men and their followers
has been demonstrated to be untrue, because, whatever may be the
essential nature of this vital force, certain it is that it is known only
by and through its manifestations. These present themselves to the
mind only through organizations which immediately depend on chemi-

768 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

cal and physical forces for those proximate constituents which go to
nourish and build up the tissues and enable the organs of the body to
perform their respective functions.

In nutrient action, by which lifeless material or pabulum is trans-
formed into living tissues, evidence of this vital entity should be dis-
covered, if anywhere, for here we have the primal seat of life, the very
fountain of genetic power.

Analysis, however, finds room for it in nutrient action no more
than in the mysteries which lie concealed in every expression of energy
throughout nature's domain. Why will friction of glass produce a
condition or property which will repel pith-balls, while friction of
sealing-wax produces a condition which will attract them ? Are these
movements caused by some kind of life-principle developed in so sim-
ple a way ? No ; they come from positive and negative electricity
evolved by friction, and, with this answer, science asserts that the ex-
planation is complete. When asked, What is electricity, beyond a
special display of energy ? there is no answer.

If we question the various organic functions of the body, physical
and chemical forces alone confront us. A muscle contracts according
to mechanical laws, and its work is expressed in mechanical equiva-
lents. Electric tension is lost, heat is evolved, carbon dioxide appears,
and the muscular tissue, before neutral in reaction, is now acid. What-
ever may be the nature of the vital force, if such there be, operating
in muscular contraction, it at least is not independent of physical and
chemical forces, and the evidence is cumulative that these will alone
explain the phenomenon. Respiration is purely a chemical process, in
harmony with the laws of gaseous diffusion. Circulation, with its
pumps, pipes, and valves, is an hydraulic operation. Absorption is os-
motic, and a similar selective affinity for special things is exhibited in
inorganic material as well as in animal membranes.

There seems no good reason why we should hesitate to regard the
vital force as correlated with the physical forces known to us as heat,
light, electricity, and actinism. That some relation exists there can
be no doubt, for the effect of physical forces upon organic life is
marked, and their energy is made potential in the tissues of both vege-
tables and animals. This potential energy is, after a time, transformed
into active energy, and new phenomena result.

Organic forms do not generate energy, they simply transform or
evolve it from that which has been supplied from the outer world.
Heat in the body results from combustion the same as in a furnace.
- Contractility is a special function of muscular tissue, and is inde-
pendent of nerve-force. This attribute exists in the tissue for a time
after death, lasting longer in cold-blooded than in warm-blooded ani-
mals, because of the slowness of the process of the destructive assimi-
lation of the tissues. Longet demonstrated that contractility is closely
related to the supply of arterial blood in the capillary vessels, for, on

PHYSIOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF VITAL FORCE. 769

diminishing the supply, contractility was lessened, and the temperature
of the muscles reduced ; while Matteucci proved that increased heat
accompanies muscular contraction. The heat produced by muscular
contraction is divided into two complementary portions, one part ap-
pearing as sensible heat, and the other part being converted into me-
chanical work.

It matters not whence comes the heat, whether from the chemical
transformations which take place in the body, or from the sun-force
which has for ages lain locked in the coal-strata of the earth, when
liberated or made dynamic, it represents a definite amount of mechani-
cal power.

Nerve-energy is transformed into motion, as evidenced in muscular
action ; it is also transformed into heat, but it is not known whether
it is an immediate or a secondary result. There are some instances
recorded which seem to show its transformation into light, and it is
well known that in certain animals electricity is the direct result of its
metamorphosis.

From these data the conclusion seems authorized that at least a
partial correlation exists between the physical forces and the energy
resulting from nerve-action. I say a partial correlation, because, while
the evidence may permit the conclusion that nerve-force is transformed
into motion, heat, light, and electricity, it does not yet authorize the
assertion that these can be reconverted into nerve-force.

This correlation doubtless extends to the higher manifestations of
nerve-energy, feeling, and thought, for their exercise causes disin-
tegration of nerve-tissue, as shown by the excreted products of decom-
position and increased muscular action, as evidenced in the increased
circulation of the blood. Physical conditions, therefore, determine
mental results. The higher nerve-tissue of the brain operates under
physical and chemical conditions in its nutrition, the same as does the
tissue of any other organ, and hence its transformed energy, as ex-
pressed in nervous or mental action, has its physiological representation
and measurable force.

To extend this subject further in the line of analysis, though it
might be interesting, is unnecessary for the object proposed, which is
to show that chemical, physical, and biological sciences have over-
thrown the vitalistic doctrines of the past, and demonstrated by analy-
sis a relationship between the forces which rule the inorganic world
and the " vital force " which is manifested in living forms. At this
point the question is properly asked, if chemical synthesis confirms the
results and conclusions of chemical analysis. ■

If the morphology and physiology of organisms are the products
simply of physical molecules under chemical and physical forces which
are revealed by analysis, then the assumption seems justified that syn-
thesis, by combining these same molecules and restoring these same
forces, should be able to reproduce the forms and functions of life.
vol. xxiv. — 49

77o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Synthesis requires exact knowledge of all the elements and forces
involved in the object of its investigation, and looks to the inductive
or analytic method to furnish these data. There must be no unknown
quantities in the problem to be solved, for synthesis seeks not to build
from the unknown but only to re-form the known. Hence it properly
awaits to receive verified facts from chemical analysis, which has yet
been able to compass but a fractional part of the organic compounds.

Chemical elements are the basis of chemical science ; they are
neither produced nor destroyed, but are the enduring and constant
factors in the many series of changes in the properties of matter,
which represent the desideratum of this science. And yet the knowl-
edge of molecules is very meager ; the weights of but a few are known,
even among the commonest elements and compounds ; and but little
account has been taken of atomic motion, which furnishes the most
perfect explanation of chemical reaction.

Of the highly complex series of albuminoid substances, which
neither crystallize nor possess any combining equivalent, and therefore
can not be expressed by exact symbols, analytic chemistry knows but
little, and hence it would be in vain to attempt their reproduction by
synthesis. Notwithstanding our ignorance of essential facts, the prog-
ress of synthetic chemistry has been great, and the prospect is favor-
able for more brilliant achievements in the future.

Wohler, in 1828, first, by synthesis, formed urea from ammonia
cyanate. It was claimed by the critics that urea, being a nitrogenous
metabolite, a product of animal decomposition, was a mineral, rather
than an element of the animal tissues ; but when Fownes, in 1841,
prepared cyanogen itself direct from its elements, and, from this salt,
urea, the fact was recognized and accepted, although it was affirmed
that a " vital force " was necessary to account for the more complicated
organic compounds, of which series urea was a member having only
simple combinations. This was disproved by Berthelot in 1856, when
he obtained the potassium salt of formic acid. Then followed the pro-
duction of acetylene, marsh-gas, ethylene, and other hydrocarbons,
from inorganic materials. Marsh-gas was converted into methyl alco-
hol, and ethylene into ethyl alcohol, and from these alcohols formic
and acetic acids were made.

Startling as these results were, the substances formed were, rela-
tively, simple in nature, and the " vital force " still ruled in the more
complicated bodies of organic origin.

Synthetic work continued to achieve brilliant results and added to
its list of vegetable compounds oxalic, valeric, malic, citric, tartaric,
and salicylic acids, the oils of garlic, mustard, and wintergreen, also
conine, alizarine, and indigo.

Of animal compounds, leucin, creatin, sarcosin, and taurin are
added to the large and growing list of substances from which analysis
and synthesis have banished the vital force, and harmonized the facts

PHYSIOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF VITAL FORCE. 771

of their existence with the physical and chemical forces of the inor-
ganic world.

Over one thousand organic compounds, which but a few years since
were supposed to be formed within the vegetable or animal body only
by the action of a " vital force," are now produced synthetically from
the elements which constitute them, and " there is every reason to ex-
pect," says the conservative but able author of " The New Chemistry,"
Professor Cooke, " that in the no distant future the chemist will be able
to prepare, in his laboratory, both the material of which the cell is
fashioned and the various products with which it becomes filled during
life."

It is true that the knowledge of man has not yet enabled him to
make a vegetable or an animal cell, but this is no evidence in favor of
a " vital force " per se, but an indication of ignorance relative to the
ultimate constitution of the cell. Indeed, pseudo-organic forms, which
resemble living cells, having heterogeneous contents, and true inclos-
ing membranes possessing dialyzing power, have already been reported
as produced by Monnier and Vogt.

It is well, however, to remind ourselves of the fact that the " cell,"
as commonly understood, embracing a cell-wall and an internal nucleus,
represents in itself an advanced condition of organization, and not, as
is so often inferred, the most primitive and simplest of life-forms.
" Cell," in biology, "is a technical term used to denote a unit of living
tissue," and the fact that the chemist can not make it is not proof that
an independent life-principle resides in it, but is proof of ignorance of
its organic formation.

If the fact of a " vital force," distinct from physical and chemical
forces, is to be established because of inability to make by synthesis a
living cell, then, in logical fairness, should this force, or some other
equally independent of physical and chemical laws, be declared to pre-
side over the genesis and potencies of those inorganic elements and
bodies which thus far have defied, not synthesis only, but analysis
also.

In germinal matter is found the apparent seat of life, for this it is
that transforms pabulum to build the tissues at first, and in it lies the
potency of restoring to physical completeness portions of the body
that may be injured or diseased. The repair of living tissues after
mutilation is not, however, positive evidence of the existence of a
special principle, for the same action occurs in inorganic materials.

Pasteur records the fact that " when a crystal is broken on any one
of its faces, and replaced in the fluid of crystallization, we remark that
while the crystal increases in all directions by the deposit of crystal-
line particles, a very decided simultaneous action takes place at the
broken or injured part, and this action suffices in a few hours, not
merely for the general, regular formation of increase over all parts of
the crystal, but also for the restoration of regularity in the injured

772 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

part." Shall we ascribe a " vital principle " to the unorganized crystal
as well as to the organized vegetable or animal tissue ?

The mysteries of nature are not all confined to life-expressions.
Who shall explain the ultimate nature of crystallization, which, under
the laws of fixed axial ratios, gives to each variety such definite and
invariable form ? Who shall explain the flower's perfume ? Where
is the " vital force " in the seed which lies for ages in the tomb of
some Pharaoh ? Does " vital force," as an independent entity, which
works contrary to physical and chemical laws, thus imprison itself and
voluntarily submit to what must be, to it, a death ? If it acts independ-
ently of the physical forces of nature, why has it not furnished evi-
dence thereof in some way or at some time ? How is life made active
in this seed so long dried and practically dead ? Not by any occult
influence at discord with organic growth, but simply by environing the
seed with conditions favorable to physical well-being. Heat, light,
and moisture — all physical and chemical agents — soon revivify this
seed, and evidence is added to sustain the proposition that, while " the
present state of knowledge furnishes us with no link between the liv-
ing and the not-living," yet are both actuated by forces of the same
kind. " Vital force," therefore, is, in reality, only another term for
the properties of matter ; it denotes simply the causes of certain great
groups of natural operations, as we employ the terms " electricity "
and " electrical force " to denote others. But to use the term " vital-
ity " or " vital force " in the sense of an entity, which acts as an effi-
cient cause of vital phenomena, is an assumption as absurd as to assume
that " ' electric,' ' attractive,' and ' chemical ' forces are entities which
determine the phenomena of electricity, chemism, and gravitation."

" If we knew all the laws of the composition of matter, and all the
changes of which it is capable, every phenomenon which any given
substance presents must be caused either by something taking place
in the substance or by something taking place out of it, but acting
upon it. Those mysterious forces, whether they be emanations from
matter or whether they be merely properties of matter, must, in an
ultimate analysis, depend either on the internal arrangement or on the
external locality of their physical antecedents. However convenient,
therefore, it may be, in the present state of our knowledge, to speak of
vital principles, imponderable fluids, and elastic ethers, such terms can
only be provisional, and are to be considered as mere names for that
residue of unexplained facts which it will be the business of future
ages to bring under generalizations wide enough to cover and include
the whole."

As mechanical energy manifests different powers and results as it
operates through differently constructed mechanisms, so vital energy
becomes more complex in its manifestations as the organism through
which its work is displayed is more complicated in structure.

Jevons has well defined the physiological significance of "vital

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY. 773

force " thus : " We are at freedom to imagine the existence of a new-
agent, and to give it an appropriate name, provided there are phe-
nomena incapable of explanation from known causes. We may speak
of vital force as occasioning life, provided that we do not take it to be
more than a name for an undefined something giving rise to inexplica-
ble facts, just as the French chemists called iodine the substance x, so
long as they were unaware of its real character and place in chemistry.
Encke was quite justified in speaking of the resisting medium in space
so long as the retardation of his comet could not be otherwise ac-
counted for.

" But such hypotheses will do much harm whenever they divert us
from attempts to reconcile the facts with known laws, or when they
lead us to mix up discrete things.

" Because we speak of vital force we must not assume that it is a
really existing physical force like electricity. We do not know what
it is ; we have no right to confuse Encke's supposed resisting medium
with the bases of light without distinct evidence of identity. The
name protoplasm, now so familiarly used by physiologists, is doubtless
legitimate so long as we do not mix up different substances under it,
or imagine that the name gives us any knowledge of the obscure ori-
gin of life. To name a substance protoplasm no more explains the
infinite variety of forms of life which spring out of the substance than
does the vital force which may be supposed to reside in the proto-
plasm. Both expressions are mere names for an inexplicable series of
causes which, out of apparently similar conditions, produce the most
diverse results."

-♦ « ♦■■

THE CHEMISTEY OF COOKEKY.

By W. MATTIEU WILLIAMS.

XXVI.

THERE is one more constituent of animal food that demands at-
tention before leaving this part of the subject. This is the fat.
We all know that there is a considerable difference between raw fat
and cooked fat ; but what is the rationale of this difference ? Is it
anything beyond the obvious fusion or semi-fusion of the solid ?

These are very natural and simple questions, but in no work on
chemistry or technology can I find any answer to them, or even any
attempt at an answer. I will therefore do the best I can toward
solving the problem in my own way.

All the cookable and eatable fats fall into the class of " fixed oils,"
so named by chemists to distinguish them from the " volatile oils,"
otherwise described as " essential oils." The distinction between these
two classes is simple enough. The volatile oils (mostly of vegetable

774 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

origin) may be distilled or simply evaporated away like water or
alcohol, and leave no residue. The fixed oils similarly treated are
dissociated more or less completely.

Otherwise expressed, the boiling-point of the volatile oils is below
their dissociation-point. The fixed oils are those which are dissociated
at a temperature below their boiling-point.

My object in thus expressing this difference will be understood
upon a little reflection. These volatile oils, when heated, being dis-
tilled without change are uncookable ; while the fixed oils if similarly
heated suffer various degrees of change as their temperature is raised,
and may be completely decomposed by steady application of heat in a
closed vessel without the aid of any other chemical agent than the
heat itself. This " destructive distillation " converts them into solid
carbon and hydrocarbon gases, similar to those we obtain by the de-
structive distillation of coal.

If we watch the changes occurring as the heat advances to this
complete dissociation-point, we may observe a gradation of minor
or partial dissociation proceeding gradually onward, resembling that
which I have already described as occurring when sugar is similarly
treated (see No. XIII of this series).

But in ordinary cooking we do not go so far as to carbonize the
fat itself, though we do brown or partially carbonize the membrane
which envelops the fat. What, then, is the nature of this minor dis-
sociation, if such occurs ?

Before giving my answer to this question, I must explain the
chemical constitution of fat. It is a compound of a very weak base
with very weak acids. The basic substance is glycerine, the acids
(not sour at all, but so named because they combine with bases as the
actually sour acids do) are stearic acid, palmitic acid, oleic acid, etc.,
and bear the general name of fatty acids. They are solid or liquid,
according to temperature. When solid, they are pearly, crystalline
substances ; when fused, they are oily liquids.

To simplify, I will take one of these as a type, and that the one
which is the chief constituent of animal fats, viz., stearic acid. I have
a lump of it before me. Newly broken through, it might at a distance
be mistaken for a piece of Carrara marble. It is granular like the
marble, but not so hard, and, when rubbed with the hand, differs from
the marble in betraying its origin by a small degree of unctuousness,
but can scarcely be described as greasy.

I find by experiment that this may be mixed with glycerine with-
out combination taking place ; that when heated with glycerine just to
its fusing-point, and the two are agitated together, the combination is
by no means complete. Instead of obtaining a soft, smooth fat, I ob-
tain a granular fat, small stearic crystals with glycerine among them.
It is a mixture of stearic acid and glycerine, not a chemical compound ;
it is stearic acid and glycerine, but not a stearate of glycerine.

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY. 775

A similar separation is what I suppose to occur in the cooking of
animal fat. I find that mutton-fat, beef -fat, or other fat when raw,
is perfectly smooth, as tested by rubbing a small quantity, free from
membrane, between the finger and thumb, or by a still more delicate
test of rubbing it between the tip of the tongue and the palate. But
dripping, whether of beef, or mutton, or poultry, is granular, as any-
body who has ever eaten bread and dripping knows well enough, and
the manufacturers of " butterine," or " bosch," know too well, as the
destruction or prevention of this granulation is one of the difficulties
of their art.

My theory of the cookery of fat is simply that heat, when continued
long enough, or raised sufficiently high, effects an incipient dissocia-
tion of the fatty acids from the glycerine, and thus assists the digest-
ive organs by presenting the base and the acids in a condition better
fitted (or advanced by one stage) for the new combinations demanded
by assimilation. Some physiologists have lately asserted that the fat
of our food is not assimilated at all — not laid down again as fat, but
is used directly as fuel for the maintenance of animal heat. If this is
correct, the advantage of the preliminary dissociation is more decided,
for the combustible portion of the fat is its fatty acids ; the glycerine
is an impediment to combustion, so much so that the modern candle-
maker removes it, and thereby greatly improves the combustibility of
his candles.

It may be that the glycerine of the fat we eat is assimilated like
sugar, while the fatty acids act directly as fuel. This view may recon-
cile some of the conflicting facts (such as the existence of fat in the
carnivora) that stand in the way of the theory of the uses of fat food
above referred to, according to which fat is not fattening, and those
who would " Bant " should eat fat freely to maintain animal heat, while
very abstemious in the consumption of sugar and farinaceous food.

The difference between tallow and dripping is instructive. Their
origin is the same ; both are melted fats — beef or mutton fats — and
both contain the same fatty acids and glycerine, but there is a visible
and tangible difference in their molecular condition. Tallow is smooth
and homogeneous, dripping decidedly granular.

I attribute this difference to the fact that, in rendering tallow, the
heat is maintained no longer than is necessary to effect the fusion ;
while, in the ordinary production of dripping, the fat is exposed in
the dripping-pan to a long continuance of heat, besides being highly
heated when used in basting. Therefore the dissociation is carried
further in the case of the dripping, and the result becomes sensible.
I have observed that home-rendered lard, that obtained in English
farm-houses, where the " scratchings " (i. e., the membranous parts)
are frizzled, is more granular than the lard we now obtain in such
abundance from Chicago and other wholesale hog-regions. I have
not witnessed the lard-rendering at Chicago, but have little doubt that

776 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

economy of fuel is practiced in conducting it, and therefore less disso-
ciation would be effected than in the domestic retail process.

Some of the early manufacturers of "bosch" purified their fat by
the process recommended and practiced by the French Academicians
MM. Dubrunfaut and Fua (see " Comptes Rendus," vol. lxxi) during the
siege of Paris, when they and others read papers on the manufacture
of "siege-butter" without the aid of the dairy. This consisted in
frying the refuse fat from slaughter-houses until the membranous
matter and other impurities were carbonized, and thus could be strained
away. I wrote about it in 1871, and consequently received some sam-
ples of artificial butter thus made in the midlands. It was pure fat,
perfectly wholesome, but, although colored to imitate butter, had the
granular character of dripping. Since that time great progress has
been made in this branch of industry. I have lately tasted samples of
pure " bosch " or " oleomargarine " undistinguishable from churned
cream or good butter, though offered for sale at S^d. per pound in
wholesale packages. In the preparation of this I understand high tem-
peratures are carefully avoided, and by this means the smoothness of
pure butter is obtained. I mention this now merely in confirmation
of my theory of the rationale of fat-cookery, but shall return to this
subject of " bosch " or " butterine " again, as it has considerable intrin-
sic interest in reference to our food-supplies, and should be better un-
derstood than it is.

XXVII.

The cookery of milk is very simple, but by no means unimportant.
That there is an appreciable difference between raw and boiled milk
may be proved by taking equal quantities of each (the boiled sample
having been allowed to cool down), adding them to equal quantities
of the same infusion of coffee, then critically tasting the mixtures.
The difference is sufficient to have long since established the practice
among all skillful cooks of scrupulously using boiled milk for making
cafe au lait. I have tried a similar experiment on tea, and find that
in this case the cold milk is preferable. Why this should be, why
boiled milk should be better for coffee and raw milk for tea, I can not
tell. If any of my readers have not done so already, let them try
similar experiments with condensed milk, and I have no doubt that
the verdict of the majority will be that it is passable with coffee, but
very objectionable in tea. This is milk that has been very much
cooked.

The chief definable alteration effected by the boiling of milk is
the coagulation of the small quantity of albumen which it contains.
This rises as it becomes solidified, and forms a skin-like scum on the
surface, which may be lifted with a spoon and eaten, as it is perfectly
wholesome and very nutritious.

If all the milk that is poured into London every morning were to

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY. 777

flow down a single channel, it would form a respectable little rivulet.
An interesting example of the self-adjusting operation of demand and
supply is presented by the fact that, without any special legislation or
any dictating official, the quantity required should thus flow with so
little excess that, in spite of its perishable qualities, little or none is
spoiled by souring, and yet at any moment anybody may buy a penny-
worth within two or three hundred yards of any part of the great
metropolis. There is no record of any single day on which the supply
has failed, or even been sensibly deficient.

This is effected by drawing the supplies from a great number of
independent sources, which are not likely to be simultaneously dis-
turbed in the same direction. Coupled with this advantage is a serious
danger. It has been unmistakably demonstrated that certain microbia
(minute living abominations) which disseminate malignant diseases
may live in milk, feed upon it, increase and multiply therein, and by
it be transmitted to human beings with very serious and even fatal
results.

I speak the more feelingly on this subject, having very recently had
painful experience of it. One of my sons went for a holiday to a
farm-house in Shropshire, where many happy and health-giving holi-
days have been spent by all the members of my family. At the end
of two or three weeks he was attacked by scarlet fever, and suffered
severely. He afterward learned that the cow-boy had been ill, and
further inquiry proved that his illness was scarlet fever, though not
acknowledged to be such ; that he had milked before the scaling of
the skin that follows the eruption could have been completed, and it
was therefore, most probable, that some of the scales from his hands
fell into the milk. My son drank freely of uncooked milk, the other
inmates of the farm drinking home-brewed beer, and only taking milk
in tea or coffee hot enough to destroy the vitality of fever-germs. He
alone suffered. This infection was the more remarkable, inasmuch as
a few months previously he had been assisting a medical man in a
crowded part of London where scarlet fever was prevalent, and had
come in frequent contact with patients in different stages of the
disease.

Had the milk from this farm been sent to London in the usual
manner in cans, and the contents of these particular cans mixed with
those of the rest received by the vender, the whole of his stock would
have been infected. As some thousands of farms contribute to the
supplying of London with milk, the risk of such contact with infected
hands occurring occasionally in one or another of them is very great,
and fully justifies me in urgently recommending the manager of every
household to strictly enforce the boiling of every drop of milk that
enters the house. At the temperature of 212° the vitality of all dan-
gerous germs is destroyed, and the boiling-point of milk is a little
above 212°. The temperature of tea or coffee, as ordinarily used,

778 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

may do it, but is not to be relied upon. I need only to refer gener-
ally to the cases of wholesale infection that have recently been traced
to the milk of particular dairies, as the particulars are familiar to all
who read the newspapers.

It is an open question whether butter may or may not act as a dan-
gerous carrier of such germs ; whether they rise with the cream, sur-
vive the churning, and nourish among the fat. The subject is of vital
importance, and yet, in spite of the research-fund of the Royal Society,
the British Association, etc., we have no data upon which to base even
an approximately sound conclusion.

We may theorize, of course ; we may suppose that the bacteria,
bacilli, etc., which we see under the microscope to be continually
wriggling about or driving along, are doing so in order to obtain fresh
food from the surrounding liquid, and therefore that, if imprisoned in
butter, they would languish and die. We may point to the analogies
of ferment-germs which demand nitrogenous matter, and therefore
suppose that the pestiferous wanderers can not live upon a mere hydro-
carbon like butter. On the other hand, we know that the germs of
such things can remain dormant under conditions that are fatal to
their parents, and develop forthwith when released and brought into
new surroundings. These speculations are interesting enough, but in
such a matter of life and death to ourselves and our children we re-
quire positive facts, direct microscopic evidence.

In the mean time the doubt is highly favorable to boseh. To illus-
trate this, let us suppose the case of a cow grazing on a sewage-farm
manured from a district on which enteric fever has existed. The cow
lies down and its teats are soiled with liquid containing the germs
which are so fearfully malignant when taken internally. In the course
of milking, a thousandth part of a grain of the infected matter con-
taining a few hundred germs enters the milk, and these germs increase
and multiply. The cream that rises carries some of them with it, and
they are thus in the butter, either dead or alive, we know not which,
but have to accept the risk.

Now, take the case of bosch. The cow is slaughtered. The waste
fat, that before the days of palm-oil and vaseline was sold for lubri-
cating machinery, is skillfully prepared, made up into two-pound rolls,
delicately wrapped in special muslin or prettily molded and fitted
into " Normandy " baskets. What is the risk in eating this ?

None at all, provided always the bosch is not adulterated with
cream-butter. The special disease-germs do not survive the chemistry
of digestion, do not pass through the glandular tissues of the follicles
that secrete the living fat, and therefore, even though the cow should
have fed on sewage-grass, moistened with infected sewage-water, its
fat would not be poisoned.

What we require in connection with this is commercial honesty,
that the thousands of tons of bosch now annually made be sold as

THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY. 779

bosch, or, if preferred, as "oleomargarine," or "butterine," or any-
other name that shall tell the truth. In order to render such commer-
cial honesty possible to shopkeepers, more intelligence is demanded
among their customers. A dealer, on whom I can rely, told me lately
that if he offered the bosch or butterine to his other customers as he
was then offering it to me at S^d. per pound in twenty-four-pound
box, or 9d. retail, he could not possibly sell it, and his reputation
would be injured by admitting that he kept it ; but that the same
people who would be disgusted with it at 9d. will buy it freely at
double the price as prime Devonshire fresh butter ; and he added,
significantly, " I can not afford to lose my business and be ruined be-
cause my customers are f ools." To pastry-cooks and others in business,
it is sold honestly enough for what it is, and used instead of butter.

Before leaving the subject of animal food I may say a few words
on the latest and perhaps the greatest triumph of science in reference
to food-supply — i. e., the successful solution of the great problem of
preserving fresh meat for an almost indefinite length of time. It has
long been known that meat which is frozen remains fresh. The
Aberdeen whalers were in the habit of feasting their friends on re-
turning home on joints that were taken out fresh from Aberdeen and
kept frozen during a long Arctic voyage. In Norway, game is shot
at the end of autumn, and kept in a frozen state for consumption dur-
ing the whole winter and far into the spring.

The early attempts to apply the freezing process for the carriage
of fresh meat from South America and Australia by using ice, or
freezing mixtures of ice and salt, failed, but now all the difficulties
are overcome by a simple application of the great principle of the
conservation of energy, whereby the burning of coal may be made to
produce a degree of cold proportionate to the amount of heat it gives
out in burning.

Carcasses of sheep are thereby frozen to stony hardness immedi-
ately they are slaughtered in New Zealand and Australia, and then
packed in close refrigerated cars, carried to the ship, and there stowed
in chambers refrigerated by the same means, and thus brought to
England in the same state of stony hardness as that originally pro-
duced. I dined to-day on one of the legs of a sheep that I bought a
week ago and which was grazing at the antipodes three months be-
fore. I prefer it to any English mutton ordinarily obtainable.

The grounds of this preference will be understood when I explain
that English farmers who manufacture mutton as a primary product
kill their sheep as soon as they are full grown, when a year old or
less. They can not afford to feed a sheep for two years longer merely
to improve its flavor without adding to its weight. Country gentle-
men who do not care for expense occasionally regale their friends on
a haunch or saddle of three-year-old mutton, as a rare and costly
luxury.

78o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

The antipodean graziers are wool-growers. Until lately, mutton
was merely used as manure, and even now it is but a secondary prod-
uct. The wool-crop improves year by year until the sheep is three
or four years old ; therefore, it is not slaughtered until this age is
attained, and thus the sheep sent to England are similar to those of
the country squire, and such as the English farmer could not send to
market under eighteen pence per pound.

There is, however, one drawback ; but I have tested it thoroughly,
having supplied my own table during the last six months with no
other mutton than that from New Zealand, and find it so trifling as to
be imperceptible unless critically looked for. It is simply that, in
thawing, a small quantity of the juice of the meat oozes out. This is
more than compensated by the superior richness and fullness of flavor
of the meat itself, which is much darker in color than young mutton.
— Knowledge.

■♦•»»

A DEFENSE OF MODEKN THOUGHT *

By WILLIAM D. LE SUEUK, B. A.

FROM the point of view of the present writer, there are good
reasons for believing that a general readjustment of thought is
now in progress, and that it is destined to go on until old forms of
belief, inconsistent with a rational interpretation of the wTorld, have
been completely overthrown. This progressive readjustment is not a
thing of yesterday ; it is simply that gradual abandonment of the
theological stand-point which has been taking place throughout the
ages. As a modern philosopher has remarked, the very conception of
miracle marks the beginnings of rationalism, seeing that it recognizes
an established order of things, a certain "reign of law," with which
only supernatural power can interfere. The progress beyond this
point consists in an increasing perception of the universality of law,
and an increasing disposition to be exacting as to the evidences of
miracle. No candid person can read the history of modern times
without arriving at the conclusion that the whole march of civilization
illustrates, above everything else, this gradual change of intellectual
stand-point. Man's power keeps pace ever with his knowledge of nat-
ural law and his recognition of the uniformity of its operations. What
we see to-day is simply the anticipation by thousands of the conclusion
to which all past discoveries and observations have been pointing, that
the reign of law is and always has been absolute. This is really what
" agnosticism," so called, means. It means that thinking men are tired
of the inconsistencies of the old system of belief, and that they de-

* From a pamphlet reply to a lecture on " Agnosticism," delivered by the Lord Bishop
of Ontario.

A DEFENSE OF MODERN THOUGHT. 781

sire to rest in an order of conceptions not liable to disturbance. The
great Faraday, who had not brought himself to this point, used to say
that when he had to deal with questions of faith he left all scientific
and other human reasonings at the door, and that when he had to deal
with questions of science he discarded in like manner all theological
modes of thought. The region of science was one region, that of
faith was another ; and between these he placed a wall so high that
once on either side he could see nothing that lay on the other. He
did not attempt to reconcile faith with science, as some do ; he sepa-
rated them utterly, feeling them apparently to be irreconcilable.
Thus he virtually lived in two worlds — one in which no miracles took
place, but in which everything flowed in an orderly manner from rec-
ognized antecedents, and another in which the chain of causation
might be broken at any moment by supernatural power. Since Fara-
day's time, however, men of science have grown bolder. They have
renounced the attempt to live a divided life. They do not believe in
insuperable barriers between one field of thought and another. They
believe in the unity of the human mind and in the unity of truth.
They have made their choice — those of them at least whom the Bishop
of Ontario designates as agnostics — in favor of a world in which cause
and effect maintain constant relations. In doing so they do not act
willfully, but simply yield to the irresistible weight of evidence. Miracle
is a matter of more or less uncertain testimonv, while the unchangeable-
ness of natural law is a matter of daily observation. Miracles never
happen in the laboratory. Supernatural apparitions do not haunt the
museum. Distant ages and countries or lonely road-sides reap all the
glory of these manifestations. What wonder, then, that the man of
science prefers to trust in what his eyes daily see and his hands handle,
rather than in narratives of perfervid devotees, or in traditions handed
down from centuries whose leading characteristic was an omnivorous
credulity ? There is nothing negative in this attitude of mind. On
the contrary, it is positive in the highest degree. The true man of
science wants to know and believe as much as possible. He desires
to know what is and to adapt his thoughts to that ; and the universe
is to him simply an inexhaustible treasure-house of truths, all of more
or less practical import.

It is right, however, before proceeding further, to examine this
word "agnosticism" a little, to see whether it is one that is really ser-
viceable in the present controversy. That some have been willing to
apply the term to themselves and to regard it as rather ben trovato, I
am quite aware ; but I think there are good reasons why serious
thinkers should decline to call themselves by such a name, and should
object to its application to them by others.

A question proposed for discussion either can or can not be settled ;
it either lies within or beyond the region in which verification is pos-
sible. If it lies within that region, no man should call himself an

782 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

agnostic in regard to it. He may withhold his judgment until the
evidence is complete, but suspension of judgment is not agnosticism,
which, if it means anything, means a profession of hopeless and, so to
speak, invincible ignorance in regard to certain matters. But if it
would be absurd for a man to profess himself an agnostic in regard to
problems admitting or believed to admit of solution, is it not idle for
any one to accept that designation because he believes that there are
other problems or propositions which do not admit of solution ? All
one has to do in relation to the latter class of problems is to recognize
their unreal or purely verbal character. It is the nature of the prob-
lem that requires to be characterized, not our mental relation thereto.
The latter follows as a matter of course from the former. Moreover,
why should any one wish or consent to be designated by a term purely
negative in its meaning ? It is what we know, not what we do not
know, that should furnish us with a name, if it is necessary to have
one. The little that a man knows is of vastly more consequence to him
than all the untrodden continents of his ignorance. The chemist calls
himself so because he professes to have a knowledge of chemistry : he
does not invent for himself a name signifying his ignorance of political
economy or metaphysics. Why, then, should any man adopt a name
which defines his relation not to things that he knows or to questions
to which he attributes a character of reality, but to things that he
does not know and to questions which, so far as he can see, have no
character of reality ? Let others give him such a name if they will,
but let no man voluntarily tie himself to a negation.

There are some, as I believe, who have adopted the appellation of
agnostic thoughtlessly : some through indolence, as appearing to ex-
empt them from the necessity of a decision in regard to certain diffi-
cult and, in a social sense, critical questions ; and some possibly for
the reason hinted at by the Bishop of Ontario, namely, lack of the
courage necessary to take up a more decided position. Whatever the
motive may be, however, I am persuaded that the term is a poor one
for purposes of definition ; and I should advise all earnest men, who
think more of their beliefs than of their disbeliefs, to disown it so far
as they themselves are concerned. If it be asked by what appellation
those who do not believe in " revealed religion " are to be known, I
should answer that it is not their duty to coin for themselves any sec-
tarian title. They are in no sense a sect. They believe themselves
to be on the high-road of natural truth. It is they who have cast
aside all limited and partial views, and who are opening their minds
to the full teaching of the universe. Let their opponents coin names
if they will : they whom the truth has made free feel that their creed
is too wide for limitation.

The Bishop of Ontario stands forth in the pamphlet before us sim-
ply as the champion of the two great doctrines of God and immortal-
ity. In reality, however, he is the champion of much more, for he

A DEFENSE OF MODERN THOUGHT. 783

does not profess that these doctrines can stand by themselves apart
from a belief in revelation. The issue between the bishop and those
whom he styles agnostics is not really as to these two abstract doc-
trines, but as to the validity of the whole miraculous system of which
his lordship is a responsible exponent. If we can imagine a person
simply holding, as the result of his own individual reasonings or other
mental experiences, a belief in God as a spiritual existence animating
and presiding over the works of Nature, and a further belief in a fu-
ture existence for the human soul, I do not see that there would neces-
sarily be any conflict between him and the most advanced representa-
tives of modern thought. No, the trouble does not begin here. The
trouble arises when these beliefs are presented as part and parcel of a
supernatural system miraculously revealed to mankind, and embracing
details which bring it plainly into conflict with the known facts and
laws of Nature. To detach these two doctrines, therefore, from the
system to which they belong, and put them forward as if the whole
stress of modern philosophical criticism was directed against them in
particular, is a controversial artifice of a rather unfair kind.

We are reminded by the right reverend author that no chain is
stronger than its weakest link, and we are asked to apply the principle
to the doctrine of evolution, some of the links of which his lordship
has tested and found unable to bear the proper strain. The principle
is undoubtedly a sound one ; but has it occurred to his lordship that it
is no less applicable to the net-work of doctrine in which he believes
than to the doctrine of evolution ? Some links of that net-work are
snapping every day under no greater strain than the simple exercise of
common sense by ordinary men. It is a beautiful and well-chosen
position that his lordship takes up as champion of the doctrines of
God and immortality against " agnostic " science ; but it would have
argued greater courage had the banner been planted on the miraculous
narratives of the Old and New Testament. A gallant defense of the
scriptural account of the taking of Jericho, of the arresting for a some-
what sanguinary purpose of the earth's rotation, of the swallowing of
Jonah by a whale, and his restoration to light and liberty after three
days and nights of close and very disagreeable confinement, of the
comfortable time enjoyed by Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in
the fiery furnace, of the feeding of five thousand men with five loaves
and two fishes and the gathering up of twelve basketfuls of the frag-
ments— a gallant defense, I say, of these things would be very much
more in order ; for these are the links that criticism has attacked and
which the common judgment of the nineteenth century is daily invali-
dating. Modern philosophy in its negative aspect is simply a revolt
against the attempt to force such narratives as these upon the adult
intelligence of mankind — against the absurdity of assigning to Hebrew
legends of the most monstrous kind a character of credibility which
would be scornfully refused to similar productions of the imagination

784 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

of any other race. Let there, then, be no misunderstanding : science is
not concerned to prove that there is no God, nor even that a future
life is an impossibility ; it simply obeys an instinct of self-preservation
in seeking to repel modes of thought and belief which, in their ulti-
mate issues, are destructive of all science.

One has only to reflect for a moment, in order to see how much
theological baggage the orthodox disputant throws away, when he
confines his arguments to the two points of God and a future life.
Were it thrown away in sincerity, argument might cease ; but no, the
manoeuvre is first to make a formidable demonstration as champion of
two cardinal doctrines which in themselves arouse little opposition,
even where they do not commend assent, and then to apply the results
of the proceeding to the benefit of those parts of the system which
had been kept in the background. It is not in the interest of a simple
theistic belief, unconnected with any scheme of theology, that the
Bishop of Ontario writes : what he has at heart, I venture to say, is
that men may believe as he does. The theism of Francis Newman, or
of Victor Hugo, or Mazzini — all convinced theists — would be very
unsatisfactory in his eyes, and it may be doubted whether he would
take up his pen for the purpose of promoting theism of this type. It
should, therefore, be thoroughly understood that, while his lordship is
professedly combating agnosticism, he is really waging war on behalf
of that elaborate theological system of which he is an exponent — that
system which bids us look to the Bible for an account of the creation
of the world and of man ; and which requires us to believe that the
Creator found it necessary in former times, for the right government
of the world, to be continually breaking through the laws of physical
succession which he himself had established. In arguing against the
doctrine of evolution, he labors to establish the opposite doctrine of
the creation and government of the world by miracle.

The question therefore is, Can science be free and yet accommo-
date itself to the whole elaborate scheme of Christian orthodoxy?
The great majority of those who are most entitled to speak on behalf
of science say No ; and it is this negative which his lordship of On-
tario converts into a denial of the two doctrines above-mentioned.
But let those who are at all familiar with the course of modern thought
ask themselves if they recall in the writings of any leading philosopher
of the day arguments specially directed against the hypothesis of God,
or even against that of a possible future state of existence for human-
ity. What every one can at once remember is, that the writers who
are called " agnostics," the Spencers, Huxleys, Tyndalls, and Darwins,
plead for the universality of Nature's laws and the abiding uniformity
of her processes. That is what they are concerned to maintain, be-
cause it is upon that that all science depends. Scientific men in gen-
eral are but little disposed to disturb any one's faith in God or immor-
tality, so long as these doctrines are not associated with or put for-

A DEFENSE OF MODERN THOUGHT, 785

ward as involving others which really invade the domain of science
and tend to cast uncertainty upon its methods and results.

In seeking to account for " the modern spread of agnosticism," the
bishop finds that it is to " the widely-spread popularity of the theory
of evolution, leading as it does to materialism," that the phenomenon
is to be attributed. CoDsequently the theory of evolution must be de-
stroyed. The Episcopal edict has gone forth, and the Episcopal bat-
teries are raised against this later Carthage of infidelity. But, alas ! it
does not sufliciently appear that the right reverend director of the
siege understands either the nature of the task he has undertaken or
the significance which would attach to success could he achieve it. To
take the latter point first : science was making very rapid progress
before the evolution theory had acquired any wide popularity, before
in fact anything was known of it outside of one or two speculative
treatises ; and already the opposition of science to a scheme which
makes this earth the theatre of miracle-working power was well
marked. Twenty-two years ago, when " The Origin of Species " was
but two years old, and had still a great deal of opposition to encounter
even from men of science, before even the term evolution had any
currency in the special sense it now bears, a leading prelate of the
Church of England, Bishop Wilberforce, discerned a skeptical move-
ment " too wide-spread and connecting itself with far too general con-
ditions " to be explained otherwise than as " the first stealing over the
sky of the lurid lights which shall be shed profusely around the great
Antichrist." * To charge the present intellectual state of the world,
therefore, on the doctrine of evolution is to ignore that general move-
ment of thought which, before the idea of evolution was a factor of
any importance in modern speculation, had already, as the Bishop of
Oxford testified, carried thousands away from their old theological
habitations, and which, with or without the theory of evolution, was
quite adapted to produce the state of things which we see to-day in
the intellectual world.

The doctrine of evolution is simply the form in which the domi-
nant scientific thought of the day is cast. As a working hypothesis
it presents very great advantages ; and the thinkers of to-day would
find it hard to dispense with the aid it affords. But supposing it
could be shown that the doctrine, as at present conceived, was untena-
ble— what then ? Would men of science at once abandon their belief
in the invariability of natural law and fly back to mediaeval supersti-
tions ? By no means. If there is any class of men who have learned
the lesson that the spider taught to Bruce, it is the class of scientific
workers. Destroy one of their constructions and they set to work
again, with unconquerable industry, to build another. In fact, they
are always testing and trying their own constructions ; and we may
be sure that if the evolution theory is ever to be swept away it will

* Vide preface to " Replies to Essays and Reviews."
vol. xxiv. — 50

786 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

be by scientific not theological hands. It holds its ground now, be-
cause it is a help to thought and investigation ; if it should ever be-
come so beset with difficulties as to be no longer serviceable, it will be
withdrawn from use, as many a theory has been before it, and as many
a one will be in the days to come. Among contemporary men of
science there is probably none who believes more strongly in the doc-
trine in question than the editor of " The Popular Science Monthly " ;
yet in a recent number of his magazine he has marked his attitude
toward it in a manner which for our present purpose is very instructive.
" It is undeniable," he writes, " that the difficulties in the way of the
doctrine of evolution are many and formidable, and it will no doubt
take a long time to clear them up ; while the solution of still unresolved
problems will very possibly result in important modifications of the
theory as now entertained. But the establishment of the doctrine of
evolution, as a comprehensive law of nature, is no longer dependent
upon its freedom from embarrassments, or that absoluteness of proof
which will only become possible with the future extension of knowl-
edge. Notwithstanding these drawbacks, the evidence for it is so
varied, so consistent, and so irresistible, as to compel its broad accept-
ance by men of science, who, while disagreeing upon many of its
questions, find it indispensable as a guide to the most multifarious in-
vestigations."

We now come to the further question of the validity of the criti-
cisms directed in the pamphlet before us against the doctrine of evolu-
tion, in discussing which the competency of the critic for his self-im-
posed task will necessarily come more or less under consideration. Let
us first notice the quotations which his lordship brings forward, remem-
bering that the doctrine of evolution in its present shape may be said
to be the work of the last twenty years. Well, his lordship quotes
three leading scientific authors — Owen, Agassiz, and Lyell ; but it is
noticeable that in no case does he give the date of his quotation, and
in the case of the first two does not even mention the work in which
the passage he refers to is to be found. The quotations are intended
to show that these eminent authors rejected the doctrine of the " origin
of species by natural selection." As regards Agassiz, who died ten
years ago, every one knows that this was the case ; and most are also
aware that the great Swiss naturalist left behind him a son, a natu-
ralist almost equally great, who supports the Darwinian theory as strong-
ly as his father opposed it. Owen, though not a Darwinian in the full
sense, held views which were clearly in the direction of natural selec-
tion. It is, however, when we come to Lyell that we have cause for
astonishment. Here we have the most eminent of English geologists,
whose adhesion to the Darwinian theory, announced for the first time
in 1863 — the date of the publication of the first edition of his "An-
tiquity of Man" — created such a sensation in the scientific world,
quoted, at this time of day, as an anti-Darwinian ! What are we to

A DEFENSE OF MODERN THOUGHT. 787

think of this ? I can not and do not believe, nor would I wish to sug-
gest, that the Right Reverend the Bishop of Ontario was carried so
far in his zeal against evolution as deliberately to misrepresent Sir
Charles Ly ell's attitude toward that doctrine. The only other hy-
pothesis, however, is that of extreme ignorance. Of this his lordship
must stand, not only accused, but convicted. The fact of Sir Charles
Lyell's conversion to the views of Darwin on the origin of species was
one of which the whole reading world took note at the time, and which
has been known to every tyro in general science from that day to this.
His lordship, quoting from the " Principles of Geology," but without
any mention of edition, represents Sir Charles as holding " that spe-
cies have a real existence in nature, and that each was endowed at the
time of its creation with the attributes and organization by which it
is now distinguished." That these icere Sir Charles Ly ell's views when
the earlier editions of his " Principles " were published every one is
aware ; but it is a most extraordinary thing that any one should have
quoted them as his full twenty years after he had distinctly abandoned
them. The preface to the fourth edition of the " Antiquity of Man "
opens as follows : "The first edition of the 'Antiquity of Man' was
published in 1863, and was the first work in which I expressed my
opinion of the prehistoric age of man, and also my belief in Mr. Dar-
win's theory of the * Origin of Species ' as the best explanation yet
offered of the connection between man and those animals which have
flourished successively on the earth." In the tenth edition of his
" Principles," published in 1868, he says (page 492) that " Mr. Darwin,
without absolutely proving this (theory), has made it appear in the
highest degree probable, by an appeal to many distinct and inde-
pendent classes of phenomena in natural history and geology." Dar-
win himself would not have claimed more for his theory than this.
Professor Huxley would not claim more for it to-day. Enough for
either of them the admission that, by arguments drawn from many
quarters, it had been rendered " in the highest degree probable." In
his "Antiquity of Man,"* Sir Charles Lyell expressly acknowledges
the inconclusiveness of the arguments he had used at an earlier date
to prove that " species were primordial creations and not derivative."
His reasonings, he frankly confesses, could not hold their ground " in
the light of the facts and arguments adduced by Darwin and Hooker."
As regards the " descent of man," after quoting a passage from Dar-
win to the effect that " man is the co-descendant with other mammals
of a common progenitor," he observes that "we certainly can not
escape from such a conclusion without abandoning many of the
weightiest arguments which have been urged in support of variation
and natural selection considered as the subordinate causes by which
new types have been gradually introduced into the world." On every
point, therefore, the real views of Sir Charles Lyell, as formed in the

* See fourth edition, p. 469.

788 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

light of the facts adduced by Darwin and of his own maturer reason-
ings, were totally opposed to those quoted in the bishop's pamphlet.
Is it not remarkable, such being the case, that not one member of the
reverend and learned clergy of the diocese of Kingston, by whose
special request this document was given to the world, should have
suggested a correction on this point ? Was there not a lay delegate
who could have done it ; or were they all — bishop, clergy, and laymen
— equally in the dark ? It would really seem so. Who can wonder
that the doctrine of evolution does not make much progress in certain
quarters ?

Sir Charles Lyell unfortunately is not the only author misrepre-
sented. Huxley is said to " discredit " the origin of life from non-
living matter. Huxley does nothing of the kind ; he simply says that
the experiments heretofore made to show that life can be so developed
have not been successful. On the page of the pamphlet immediately
preceding that on which this statement is made in regard to Huxley,
we are informed, correctly, that the same great naturalist professes " a
philosophic faith in the probability of spontaneous generation." Surely
his lordship could not have understood the force of these words, or he
would not have said, almost immediately after, that " the origin of life
on earth ... is not only discredited * by Huxley but by many other
great scientists." A writer who finds such comparatively simple lan-
guage beyond his comprehension is not, one would judge, very well
fitted to enter the lists against the leading thinkers of the day, except
perhaps for strictly diocesan purposes.

That his lordship is really hopelessly at sea in discussing this ques-
tion is evident by many signs. Such sentences as the following speak
volumes for the mental confusion of their author : "Agnosticism takes
refuge in evolution in order to get rid of the idea of God as unthink-
able and unknowable." Here, again, inaccuracies of language. An
idea may be unthinkable in the sense of not admitting of being thought
out, but can an idea be said to be " unknowable " ? What is an un-
knowable idea ? An idea must be known in order to be an idea at all.
But this mere verbal inaccuracy is not the worst. We had been told
that agnosticism was a form of opinion according to which nothing
could be known of God. Now, it seems that agnosticism has to fall
back on evolution, " in order to get rid of the idea of God as unthink-
able and unknowable." Now, the so-called agnosticism could not have
been agnosticism in reality, otherwise it would not have required the
help of evolution in such a matter. If we ask how evolution helps
agnosticism to regard " the idea of God as unthinkable and unknow-
able," we shall only find the confusion growing worse confounded.

* His lordshfp means " discredited not only by Huxley, but by etc." The inaccuracy
of expression observable here is paralleled in many other passages of the pamphlet. For
example, his lordship says, page 5, " They are not content to speak for themselves, but
for all the world besides." A bishop should write better English than this.

A DEFENSE OF MODERN THOUGHT. 789

Evolution has nothing to do with such questions : it is a simple theory
as to the mode of generation and order of succession of different forms
of existences.

It is, however, when his lordship comes to discuss the doctrine of
the survival of the fittest that his sad want of acquaintance with the
whole subject shows itself most conspicuously. Let me quote : " By
some means or other ' the survival of the fittest in the struggle for ex-
istence ' is assumed to be a law of Nature, and if it be so our faith is
severely taxed. Survival of the fittest — fittest for what ? If the an-
swer be, fittest for surviving, we argue in a circle, and get no informa-
tion whatever. The only rational answer must be, they survive who
are fittest for their environments in size, strength, and vigor." Let
me here ask what sense the learned author can possibly attach to these
last words execpt the very one he had just discarded as meaningless —
" fitness to survive " ? How is fitness to environment proved except by
the actual fact of survival ? Do environments always require " size "
as an element of fitness ? By no means, they sometimes require small-
ness. When a mouse escapes into a hole, where the cat can not follow,
it survives not by reason of its size, but by reason of its smallness.
Strength, again, is one element of adaptation to environment, but only
one ; and it may fall far below some other element, swiftness, for ex-
ample, or cunning, in practical importance. The fact, however, that
the learned author sees no meaning in the answer "fitness to sur-
vive," tells the whole story of his own unfitness for the special envi-
ronment in which he has placed himself in attempting to discuss the
doctrine of evolution, and rather tends to create doubt as to the sur-
vival of the work he has given to the world. This is a matter in
which no aptitude in quoting Horace is of any avail. The road to an
understanding of the terms and conceptions of modern science lies in a
careful study at first hand of the works in which these terms and con-
ceptions are expounded. His lordship assumes that, if we say that
those survive who are fit to survive, we utter a barren truism. It is a
truism we may grant, but not a barren one, any more than the axioms
of geometry are barren. The simple word " fitness " implies a definite
external something, adaptation to which is the price of existence. The
definiteness of the mold involves the definiteness of that which is
molded ; and all the miracles of life and organization we see around
us are in the last resort merely examples of adaptation to fixed condi-
tions of existence. " Born into life we are," says Matthew Arnold,
" and life must be our mold." By " life " understand the universe, and
we have a poetical version of the doctrine of the survival of the fittest.
It so happens, and this is a further truth which it would not be well to
pass over, that adaptation does more or less imply excellence even from
the human stand-point. All those adaptations that favor human life
and happiness we of course call excellent, even though they may not be
favorable to the life and happiness of other living creatures. And as

79o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

man has thriven mightily and prevailed, adaptation in general presents
itself to him in a favorable light. Occasionally, when his crops are
destroyed by some insect-pest wonderfully adapted for its work, or
when his cattle are infested with deadly parasites, or when some germ
of disease is multiplying a million-fold in his own frame, he sees that
all adaptations are not yoked to his especial service.

His lordship seems to suppose that the believers in the doctrine of
the survival of the fittest are bound to show that there has been a
steady improvement of type from the first dawn of life. To show how
gross and inexcusable a misunderstanding this is, I need only quote
two sentences from Sir Charles Lyell's "Antiquity of Man": "One
of the principal claims," observes the great geologist, " of Mr. Dar-
win's theory to acceptance is that it enables us to dispense with a law
of progression as a necessary accompaniment of variation. It will
account equally well for what is called degradation or a retrograde
movement toward a simpler structure, and does not require Lamarck's
continual creation of monads ; for this was a necessary part of his sys-
tem in order to explain how, after the progressive power had been at
work for myriads of ages, there were as many beings of the simplest
structure in existence as ever." *

Writing thus in ignorance of what the law of the survival of the
fittest, as formulated by Darwin, and accepted by modern men of sci-
ence, really means, his lordship is able to ask such pointless questions
as whether the law is illustrated in the slaughtering of the flower of a
nation in war, and whether it is the fittest who survive famines, pesti-
lences, shipwrecks, etc. His lordship evidently does not himself be-
lieve there is any provision for the survival of the fittest in the provi-
dential government of the world ; yet, strange to say, he taunts
evolutionists with this lack in the general scheme of things. If it be
an embarrassment to their theory, how much more should it be to the
bishop's theology ! The evolutionist might, however, turn round and
instruct the divine out of his own pocket Bible, where it is expressly
stated that the wicked shall not live out half his days ; and then out
of the newspapers which continually show us what happens to the
violent and bloody man, to the intemperate, and to various other classes
of evil-doers. The evolution philosophy does not guarantee, as has
been already shown, continuous progress in what, from the human
stand-point, may seem the best directions ; but evolutionists are able
to note, and do note with satisfaction, that the qualities which the
moral sense of mankind most approves do in point of fact tend to the
survival of their possessors. War itself illustrates the principle ; see-
ing that the most important element of strength abroad is cohesion at
home, a condition which must depend on a relatively high develop-
ment of social justice. To take an example from our own history :
English arms would not have been so successful as they have been

* Fourth edition, p. 459.

A DEFENSE OF MODERN THOUGHT. 791

abroad, Lad there not been a united country behind them. It was
the virtues, not the vices, of the Roman people that enabled them to
conquer the world. It was their vices, not their virtues, that led to their
fall. Fitness to survive is a quality the import of which varies accord-
ing to circumstances. In shipwrecks (to pursue his lordship's illustra-
tions) the fit to survive are those who can swim, or who have readiness
of resource or strength of constitution. In famines and pestilences
the physically stronger will as a rule survive ; though here prudence
and self-control become also most important elements of safety. Let
it always be remembered that the problem with which evolutionary
philosophy has to grapple is not how to account for a perfect world,
or a perfect state of society, but how to account for just such a
mingling of good and evil (accompanied by general tendencies
toward good) as we actually witness. This once settled, most of
the objections of the theologians would be seen to fall wide of the
mark.

To persons unfamiliar, or but slightly familiar, with the present
subject, it is possible that the Bishop of Ontario may appear to have
touched a weak point in the doctrine under discussion where he says :
" Laws of nature should be obeyed and co-operated with, not fought
against and thwarted ; and, if the survival of the fittest be one of those
laws, we ought to abolish all hospitals and asylums for the blind, the
deaf, the drunkard, the idiot, and the lunatic, and we ought to expose
to death all sickly, puny, and superfluous infants." A word, therefore,
in regard to this objection may not be thrown away. The first obser-
vation to make is, that there is nothing whatever in the law of the
survival of the fittest, as understood by men of science to-day, which
could possibly be converted into a rule of conduct. The scientific
world is not aware that Nature has any ends in view, or is capable of
having any ends in view, which she needs the help of man to enable
her to realize. Science does not attribute purpose to Nature. Science
has simply obtained a glimmering of how, in point of fact, Nature
works. It sees that survival is a question of fitness, in other words a
question of the fulfillment of the conditions on which continued exist-
ence depends. In some cases, as is well known, superiority of type
becomes an impediment, not a help, to the preservation of life ; and
in a vast number of cases the differentiations on which survival de-
pends imply neither progress nor retrogression.* What moral guid-
ance, therefore, can possibly be found in a simple perception of the
fact that in the realm of Nature there are conditions attached to sur-
vival ? We may ask, in the next place, whether there is any single
law of Nature which men " obey," or ever have obeyed, in the sense in
which his lordship bids us obey the law of the survival of the fittest.

p

* Vide Spencer, " Principles of Sociology," vol. i, pp. 106, 107 ; and Haeckel, " His-
tory of Creation," vol. i, p. 285.

79 2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

When a conflagration rages, do we " obey " and " co-operate " with
Nature by adding fuel to the flames ? When pestilence is abroad, do
we try to increase its deadly activity ? When we stumble, do we
make a point of yielding to the law of gravitation and throwing our-
selves headlong ? When the winter winds are howling, do we throw
open doors and windows that we may feel all the force and bitterness
of the blast ? Or do we, in these and all other cases, seek to modify
the action of one law by that of another — a process his lordship calls
" thwarting " — in order that their combined or balanced action may
yield us, as nearly as possible, the results we desire ? We throw water
on the fire. We use disinfectants and prophylactics against the plague.
We set muscular force against that of gravitation. We oppose warmth
to cold. In none of these cases do we ask what Nature wants ; we are
content to know what we want. We don't really believe that Nature
wants anything ; so we have no hesitation or compunction in letting
our wants rule. In the matter of the weak and sickly, they might per-
ish if unconscious forces alone were at work, or even in certain con-
ditions of human society ; but it does not suit our interests, for very
obvious reasons, to let them perish. To do so would strike at all hu-
man affections, and would so far weaken the bonds of society and ren-
der the whole social fabric less secure. Moreover, a sick man is very
different from a sick animal. The latter is inevitably inferior as an
animal, whereas the former may not only not be inferior, but may be
superior as a man, and capable of rendering much service to society.
Two instances occur to me as I write — that of the late Professor
Cairnes, in England, and of the late Professor Ernest Bersot, in
France, both smitten with cruel and hopeless maladies, but both ful-
filling, in an eminent degree, the highest intellectual and moral offices
of men. What the well do for the sick is of course obvious, and at-
tracts sufficient attention ; but what the sick do for the well, not being
so obvious, attracts less attention than it deserves. Yet how many
lessons of patience, fortitude, and resignation — lessons that all require
— come to us from the sick-bed, or at least from those whom weakness
of constitution or perhaps some unhappy accident has robbed of a
normal activity and health ! At times we see superiority of intellectual
and moral endowment triumphing over the most serious physical disa-
bilities ; as in the case of the present Postmaster-General of England,
who accidentally lost his sight when quite a youth. The late M. Louis
Blanc, a man of splendid talents, never advanced beyond the stature
of a child. The ancient Spartans might have exposed one of so feeble
a frame on Taygetus ; for with them every man had to be a soldier ;
but, in modern life, with its greatly diversified interests, many a man
too weak to be a soldier can yet render splendid service to the commu-
nity. It will, therefore, I trust, be sufficiently obvious, first, that Na-
ture has no commands to give us in this matter ; and, secondly, that
there are excellent reasons why we should not treat the sick and

THE FACULTY OF SPEECH. 793

weakly, as the lower animals commonly, but not universally, treat the
sick and weakly of their own kind.*

There is, however, another view of this question which should not
be overlooked. While human beings in civilized countries manifest,
and always have manifested, more or less sympathy with the physically
afflicted, their steadfast aim has been to get rid of physical evil in all
its forms. No care that is taken of the sick has for its object the per-
petuation of sickness, but rather its extirpation. We do not put idiots
to death ; but when an idiot dies there is a general feeling of relief
that so imperfect an existence has come to an end. Were idiots per-
mitted to marry, the sense of decency of the whole community would
be outraged. Public opinion blames those who marry knowing that
there is some serious taint in their blood ; and commends, on the other
hand, those who abstain from, or defer, marriage on that account.
There is probably room for a further development of sentiment in this
direction. We need to feel more strongly that all maladies and ail-
ments are in their nature preventable, inasmuch as they all flow from
definite physical antecedents. As long as our views on this subject
are tinged in the smallest degree with supernaturalism, so long will
our efforts to track disease to its lair and breeding-grounds be but half-
hearted. How can we venture to check abruptly, or at all, the course
of a sickness sent expressly for our chastisement ? Is it for us to say
when the rod has been sufficiently applied ? How do we dare to for-
tify ourselves in advance against disease, as if to prevent the Almighty
from dealing with us according to our deserts ? We vaccinate for
small-pox, we drain for malaria, we cleanse and purify for cholera, we
ventilate and disinfect, we diet and we exercise — and all for what ?
Precisely to avoid the paternal chastenings which we have been taught
are so good for us, and the origin of which has always been attributed
by faith to the Divine pleasure. Evidently our views are undergoing
a change. We all wish to be fit to survive, and all more or less believe
that it is in our power to be so and to help others to be so. We be-
lieve in sanitary science, and, if we attribute any purpose in the mat-
ter to the Divine mind, it is that all men should come to the knowl-
edge of the truth, as revealed by a study of Nature, and live.

•»>»

THE FACULTY OF SPEECH.f

By E. F. BEUSH, M. D.

"TTNTIL the beginning of this nineteenth century, the mind was

vJ considered as a unit. Early in the century, Gall, a distinguished

German physician, noted the fact that those students whose super-

* See Romanes, " Animal Intelligence," pp. 471, 475, as to the sympathy exhibited by
the monkey tribe toward their sick.

\ Read at a meeting of the Mount Vernon Athenaeum, January 24, 1883.

794 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

orbital plates were depressed sufficiently to produce protruding eyes
and baggy under-lids excelled in memory, oratory, philology, and the
ability to acquire languages. This observation may be called the
foundation of phrenology, for it led Gall to divide the mind into
faculties, and to locate the faculty of speech in the anterior lobes of
the cerebral hemisphere. This was the basis of his system. But the
enthusiasm with which he constructed this system, and the sweeping
deductions which he and his follower, Spurzheim, drew from this one
prominent fact, failed to interest the scientific mind. Soon after this,
without paying any regard to the conclusions of Gall and Spurzheim,
the pathologists discovered how frequently the loss of speech co-
existed with diseases or injuries of the anterior lobes of the brain, and
that sometimes the only symptom of cerebral lesions was a loss of the
power of articulate language. These observations led Bouillaud, in
1825, to divide the faculty of speech into two phenomena, internal
speech — the faculty to create and to represent ideas — and external
speech, or the co-ordinating power necessary to articulate the words
created. In medical literature, the loss of the faculty of speech is
termed aphasia, and when it affects the internal speech it is designated
as amnesic aphasia, and when external speech is affected the term
ataxic aphasia expresses it.

But without going into detail respecting the weighty pros and cons
in the discussion of this subject during the last fifty years up to the pres-
ent time, it is safe to state that the power of speech is twofold, namely,
mental and motor. Now, as a mental fact, the faculty of articulate lan-
guage implies perception, intellectual distribution of perception, excita-
tion of emotion, will to enunciate. As an illustration : we see a man
across the street; we recognize him as John Jones, from Johnsonville ;
we experience pleasure, and say, " My dear friend, I am glad to see you."
Thus it will be seen that the mind as regards sj)eech can be divided into
perception, intellect, emotion, and will. These are the mental attri-
butes, and the impairment of any one of them will interfere with the
culminating act of speech. The perception may be impaired, then the
friend across the street would not start the mental train. Further-
more, if perception was perfect and the intellect impaired, we would
see the man, perceive the color of his hair and eyes, the style of his
clothing, and so forth, but not be conscious that we had met him
before, and that he was a friend. Still further, if the emotion was
impaired and the two other faculties normal, we would see the man,
know he was a friend, but not be stimulated to further action. Again,
if the three above faculties were normal and will-power wanting, we
would see, recognize, and wish to speak to him, but be powerless to
do so. All the best evidence of recent times indicates that these
faculties reside in the gray matter which is spread over the surface
of the cerebral hemispheres, with their manifold sulci and convolu-
tions, and the depth of which is an index of the intellectual power,

THE FACULTY OF SPEECH. 795

rather than the mere mass of the brain, as was previously supposed.
Now, this gray matter may be intact and, consequently, all the func-
tions above enumerated may be perfect, and still the ability to articu-
late may be wanting, because the motor power which is supposed to
reside in the white matter, and to preside over the co-ordinating power,
controlling the nerves and muscles of articulation, may be impaired,
and then, although our ideas may be correct, the ability to express
them would be wanting. Medical literature abounds with cases which
illustrate this condition. I select the following instance as a perfect
illustration of this state : An intelligent man, sixty years old, sud-
denly became incoherent and quite unintelligible to those around him.
He had forgotten the names of every object in nature ; his recollec-
tion of things seemed to be unimpaired, but the words by which men
and things were designated were entirely obliterated from his mind,
or rather he had lost the faculty by which they were called up at the
control of will. He was, however, by no means inattentive to what
was going on, and he recognized friends and acquaintances quickly,
but their names, or even his own, or his wife's name, or the names of
any of his domestics appeared to have no place in his recollection.
One morning, much against the wishes of his family, he went to his
workshop, and, when visited by his physician, gave him to understand
by a variety of signs that he was perfectly well in every respect, with
the exception of some slight sensations referable to the eyes and eye-
brows. He was so well in bodily health that he could not be confined
to the house, and his judgment, so far as an estimate could be formed
of it, was unimpaired, but his memory of words was so much a blank
that the monosyllables of affirmation and negation were the only two
words of the language the use and signification of which he never
entirely forgot. He comprehended perfectly every word that was
spoken or addressed to him, and, although he had ideas adequate to
form a full reply, the words by which these ideas are expressed seemed
entirely obliterated from his mind. By way of experiment, the name
of a person or thing was mentioned to him, his own name for example,
or that of one of his domestics ; he would repeat it once or twice dis-
tinctly, but generally before he could do so a third time the word was
gone from him as completely as though he had never heard it pro-
nounced. When any one read to him from a book he had no difficulty
in perceiving the meaning of the passage, but he could not himself
then read. He had forgotten the elements of written language. He
became very expert in the use of signs, and his convalescence was
marked by his imperceptibly acquiring some general terms which were
with him at first of very extensive and varied application. All future
events and objects before him were, as he expressed it, "next time" ;
but past events and objects behind him were designated " last time."
One day being asked his age, he pointed to his wife and uttered the
words "Many times" repeatedly, as if he meant that he had often

796 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

told her his age. When she said " Sixty," he answered in the affrma-
tive. Some months afterward he suddenly became paralyzed on the
right side, and a few months later died from an attack of apoplexy.
His brain was found extensively diseased in the white portion of the
anterior lobe of the left hemisphere.

This case was purely and simply an impairment of external speech.
On looking over the medical literature on the subject I have been un-
able to find as striking a case of impairment of internal speech, and
this fact can be readily understood when we consider that a lesion
necessary to produce this condition would be a destruction of the gray
or cortical matter of the brain, and when this is injured the whole in-
tellect becomes disjointed, as we see in the maniac, where the simple
mechanical power of speech is perfect, but the incoherency and the
wroug interpretation of external impressions are evident. I have said
that these cases of the derangement of the faculties of internal speech
are chiefly found in lunatic asylums. But, when I think, I remember
to have met many mild cases outside of asylums, cases which can be
best described by our Americanism of " talking too much with their
mouth."

I have said the faculty of speech resides in the anterior lobes of the
brain. But the evidence gleaned from pathology is convincing that
the faculty is confined to a comparatively limited portion of the fron-
tal lobe of the left cerebral hemisphere. This localization of a func-
tion to a single side of the brain is a curiously interesting fact. But
when it is known that the left side of the brain presides over the mo-
tions and sensations of the right side of the body, it may be conceived
that because we are right-handed we are left-minded. Why we are
right-handed involves a discussion which would be beyond the limits
of the present essay. But that the left side of the brain is almost
always larger than the right is a well-known fact, and this asymmetry
of the encephalon was prominently brought before the public during
the Guiteau trial, with its prominent, ghastly rhombo-cephalic.

A curiously complicated and wonderful adaptation is this faculty
of speech, sometimes bearing weighty loads of truth, at other times
the veriest dregs of gorged society — words, windy words. The high-
est and best result of education is to form our ideas into words, to
crystallize them into speech. We all feel that here we fail. Our
thoughts well up and almost burst their limits, but faulty speech will
not give the color and glow which the soul infuses into the thoughts.
We can all say with the poet :

" Our whitest pearls we never find,
Our ripest fruit we never reach ;
The flowering moments of the mind
Drop half their petals in our speech."

BIBLICAL AND MODERN LEPROSY. 797

BIBLICAL AND MODEKN LEPROSY.

By GEORGE HENRY FOX, M. D.,

CLINICAL PKOFESSOB OF DISEASES OF THE SKIN-, COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS,

NEW YOKE.

THE diseases which prevailed among the children of Israel were
doubtless as numerous and as varied as those which now exist,
and to a great extent they were probably identical with those affecting
humanity at the present time. The most notable one spoken of in the
Old Testament is called leprosy. As there exists at the present day
a disease called by the same name, a consideration and comparison of
the two may prove of interest.

The leprosy of the present day is found not only in distant parts
of the world, but also in our own country. In Egypt, where it doubt-
less originated, and has prevailed for several thousand years, it still
occurs. In Syria, India, China, and Japan, it is quite common. In
Europe it is endemic chiefly along the shores of the Mediterranean
and in Norway, although occasional cases are met with from time to
time in many of the larger cities. In the West Indies and portions of
South America it is also common, and in the Sandwich Islands it has
increased rapidly in recent years, and now afflicts a large proportion
of the native population. Coming nearer home, we find the disease
existing among the Chinese in California, among the Norwegians in
Minnesota, among the French and negroes in Louisiana, and among
certain French Canadians in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Dur-
ing the past ten or fifteen years there have constantly been from
one to a half-dozen or more cases in the hospitals of New York city,
while other cases have been reported from Boston, Philadelphia, Bal-
timore, and other cities. Most of these cases have occurred among
sailors or others, who have spent considerable time in the tropics or in
regions where leprosy is common, and there contracted the disease.
In New York there has occurred but one case in a person who had not
been outside of the State, and in this case the origin of the disease
could not be explained. It is an extremely difficult matter to deter-
mine beyond all doubt whether leprosy spreads only through heredi-
tary transmission, or only through direct contagion, or in both ways.
The disease is considered, by many who have had the best opportunities
for studying it, to be hereditary in some cases, and at the same time
capable of being propagated through inoculation. When leprosy once
becomes prevalent in a community where vice, ignorance, and filth
abound, it usually tends to increase, but it is far from being a highly
contagious disease, as is commonly imagined. Physicians and hos-
pital nurses have no hesitancy in caring for leprous patients, and the
fear of the disease spreading through an intelligent community is

79S THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

based mainly upon sensational reports which have appeared from time
to time in the newspapers.

I will not enter upon a detailed description of this dread malady.
It is one which profoundly affects the constitution of its victim, and
usually terminates fatally in from five to fifteen years. It can not be
said to be an absolutely incurable disease, although the most that
medical skill has succeeded in accomplishing, save in a few exceptional
instances, has been to cause a temporary disappearance of the symp-
toms at the outset, or to mitigate the suffering of the patient in the
later stages. In some cases, the disease appears in the form of dull,
brownish spots upon the skin, with loss of its natural sensibility.
This is the macular form of leprosy. In other cases the disease is
characterized by the formation of dark, reddish-brown lumps upon the
face and other parts of the body, which give the leper a peculiarly
unsightly expression. This constitutes the more severe or tubercular
form of the disease. In all cases the nerve-trunks are more or less
affected, and the sense of touch in the extremities is greatly impaired.
The hands shrivel, the fingers become bent like claws, ulceration takes
place in some cases, and the joints drop off one by one. The leper
now becomes an utterly helpless and pitiable object.

Such is leprosy as met with at the present day, and at once the
interesting question arises, "Is this the leprosy of olden time — the
tsaraath of the Old Testament ? " Without doubt the disease of which
I have been speaking existed among the Egyptians and the Israelites
in Moses's day, and from Egypt gradually made its way along the
coasts of the Mediterranean to Greece and later to Italy. There is
doubt, however, as to whether Moses was perfectly familiar with the
leprosy which we now recognize, and distinguished it from other affec-
tions of a severe and contagious character. Certainly there are no
scriptural references to any disease which is unmistakably the leprosy
of the present day. We read that when Moses put his hand into his
bosom and took it out again at the command of the Lord, " Behold his
hand was leprous as snow." When the anger of the Lord was
kindled against the sister of Moses, " Behold, Miriam became leprous,
white as snow." Again, Gehazi, the servant of Elisha, was told by
the prophet : " The leprosy, therefore, of Naaman shall cleave unto thee
and unto thy seed forever. And he went out from his presence a
leper as white as snow." Now, there are certain affections of the
skin, met with at the present day, to which the expression " white as
snow " would be applicable, but leprosy is not one of them. Indeed,
in this disease, the skin usually becomes dark rather than light in color,
and in none of the few score of cases which I have had the oppor-
tunity of observing would the phrase " white as snow " be other than
highly inappropriate.

The somewhat detailed description of leprosy which is found in the
thirteenth chapter of Leviticus is almost unintelligible in the light of

BIBLICAL AND MODERN LEPROSY. 799

our present knowledge, and, after making due allowance for the neces-
sarily imperfect translation of the Hebrew scriptures, we are forced to
believe that Moses associated leprosy with other diseases, as many dis-
tinguished medical writers have done in later years. Indeed, it is only
during the past few decades that the disease has been carefully studied
in various parts of the world and its identity thoroughly established.

In studying the Mosaic laws respecting leprosy, we find statements
made and directions given for its recognition by the priests who
could not have referred to the disease which we now call leprosy. For
instance, it is stated that if the leprosy cover the whole skin of him
that hath the plague, the priest shall pronounce him clean. This would
hardly apply to modern leprosy, which never involves the whole skin,
as far as my observation goes. But there are other cutaneous affec-
tions which frequently do cover the afflicted subject "from his head
even to his foot." Why the leper should have been pronounced un-
clean while the disease was spreading, and clean when it had reached
that point where further spreading was impossible, I will leave for
others to determine, merely remarking that a law which permitted
only such lepers within the camp as were covered by the disease from
head to foot could certainly not have had a sanitary origin. Further-
more, the rule that the leper should be shut up for seven days, and
then examined by the priest, with a view to noting the change that had
taken place in the mean time, would seem to indicate some other dis-
ease than modern leprosy, for the latter is extremely chronic in its
course, and never presents any noticeable change in so short a time
even under the most active treatment. What was meant by the ref-
erence to leprosy of clothing and of houses is now difficult to under-
stand. There are infectious diseases at the present day, the germs of
which may dwell for a time in clothing and the walls of houses, but
there is nothing in connection with the modern leprosy which would
justify us in believing that it ever infects an inanimate object.

On the other hand, if we assume that the leprosy of ancient times
was identical with that of the present day, it seems strange that Moses
failed to mention the loss of sensation, the deformity of the hands, and
other features which are the most striking characteristics of the dis-
ease. That the leprosy which I have described has not changed its
type in the course of centuries, as other diseases have done in a com-
paratively short time, is shown by the fact that some of the earliest
medical descriptions are so correct that they might answer their pur-
pose in a modern text-book, and we are therefore led to the conclusion
that Moses, though possessing all the learning of the Egyptian priests,
including the highest medical knowledge of his age, did not note the
distinctive characteristics of leprosy, but classed it under one name
with other prevalent diseases.

In this connection, it may be of interest to consider very briefly
the character of the disease mentioned as leprosy in the New Testa-

800 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ment. However uncertain we may be as to the precise nature of
the Mosaic disease, it appears to me to be almost certain that the
leprosy cured by our Saviour, after his sermon on the mount, was not
the leprosy of the present day, but a far more common disease which
is now known as psoriasis. The earliest Greek writers on medicine
were unacquainted with Egyptian leprosy, except by hearsay. Hip-
pocrates, writing over four hundred years before Christ, speaks of it
as " the Phoenician disease," and even at the time of the Septuagint
translation of the Pentateuch this leprosy was practically unknown
to the Greeks. The Hebrew word tsaraath was translated by the
Greek word lepra, which was the name of a disease characterized by
white scaly patches upon the skin. This differed totally in its nature
from the disease which is now called leprosy, and which prevailed at
that time in Egypt and Palestine. This disease, being subsequently
introduced into Greece, was designated by a different name, elephan-
tiasis. At the time when the Gospels were written, the Greek medi-
cal writers recognized two distinct diseases under these names, lepra
and elephantiasis. The former was the psoriasis, or white, scaly dis-
ease of the present day; the latter was the modern leprosy. The
description of each of these diseases by Greek writers is explicit and
readily recognizable, and the Gospels of Matthew and Mark agree in
the statement that it was lepra and not elephantiasis which was cured
by our Saviour. In other words, it was psoriasis, and not the modern
leprosy.

-♦♦♦-

THE EEMEDIES OF NATUKE.

By FELIX L. OSWALD, M. D.
MISCELLANEOUS EEMEDIES.

ANAESTHETICS. — The inductive study of Nature has often
proved the shortest way to discoveries which other methods can
reach only by a circuitous route. The ancient Greeks, recognizing the
significance of the fact that malarial complaints vanish at the approach
of winter, cured their fever-patients by refrigeration, and this century
of research will perhaps close before some experimenting Pasteur
stumbles upon the fact that the proximate cause of ague and yellow
fever can be traced to the agency of microscopic parasites whose de-
velopment may be arrested by the influence of a low temperature. More
than two thousand years ago the movement-cure, the fasting-cure, and
other reactions against the baneful tendencies of the drug-delusion,
were anticipated by the school of the natural philosopher Asclepiades.
The principle of the best natural anaesthetic, too, was practically
applied, if not theoretically understood, by our rude ancestors. No one
who has watched the contest of a pair of rough-and-tumble fighters —

THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 801

biped or quadruped — or participated in a scuffle of that sort, can doubt
that the excitement of the fight temporarily blunts the feeling of pain.
Count Ranzau, the " Streit-Hans " — " Rowdy Jack," as his comrades
used to call him — once received three dagger-stabs before he knew
that he was wounded at all. Soldiers, storming a battery, have often
suddenly broken down from the effects of wounds which they had
either not felt, or suspected only from a growing feeling of exhaustion.
Olaf Rygh, the Norwegian Herodotus, tells us that, when the old
Baresarks felt the approach of their end, they robbed death of its sting
by drifting out to sea in a scuttled or burning boat, and thus expired,
" screaming the wild battle-songs of their tribe." The Roman gladia-
tors shouted and laughed aloud while their wounds were being dressed.
A scalded child sobs and gasps for a therapeutical purpose : instinct
teaches it the readiest way to benumb the feeling of pain. The physi-
ological rationale of all this is that rapid breathing is an anaesthetic.
In a paper read before the Philadelphia Medical Society, May 12, 1880,
Dr. W. A. Bon will ascribes that effect to the influence of the surplus
of oxygen which is thus forced upon the lungs, just as by the inhala-
tion of nitrous-oxide gas (which is composed of the same elements as
common air, but with a larger proportion of oxygen), and mentions a
large variety of cases in his own practice where rapid breathing pro-
duced all the essential effects of a chemical pain-obtunder, without
appreciably diminishing the consciousness of the patient. Persons
who object to the use of chloroform (perhaps from an instinctive dread
that in their case the ether-slumber might prove a sleep that knows no
waking), can benumb their nerves during the progress of a surgical
operation by gasping as deeply and as rapidly as possible. " One of
the most marked proofs of its efficacy," says Dr. Bonwill, "was the
case of a boy of eleven years of age for whom I had to extract the
upper and lower first permanent molars on both sides. He breathed
rapidly for nearly a minute, when I removed in about twenty seconds
all four of the teeth. He declared there was no pain, and we needed no
such assertion, for there was not the slightest indication that he was
undergoing a severe operation."

The administration of chloroform often produces distressing after-
effects, nausea and sick-headaches, that sometimes continue for days
together ; and I remember two instances in the records of a French
military hospital where it resulted fatally in the case of patients who
had in vain protested and offered to forego the benefits of the anaes-
thetic— perhaps actually from an instinctive consciousness of some
constitutional peculiarity which in their case increased the risks of its
use. Ether-spray, on the other hand, is a legitimate application of the
principle that cold benumbs the feeling of pain. Death by freezing is
preceded by an absolute anaesthesia ; and the painfulness of bruises,
wasp-stings, etc., can be diminished by the topical application of an
ice-poultice.

VOL. XXIY. — 51

8oz THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Apoplexy. — The proximate cause of apoplexy is due to a con-
gestion of the cerebral blood-vessels, induced by alcoholism, dietetic
excesses, combined with the influence of sedentary habits. Conscious-
ness, at least, can generally be restored by lessening the tendency of
the circulation toward the head. The patient should be propped up
in a sitting posture, with his head erect, his neck bared, and his tem-
ples and occiput moistened with cold water, while friction or a warm
foot-bath should determine the circulation toward the extremities.
Open every window of the sick-room, and, after the patient has suffi-
ciently recovered to sit up in his bed, direct him to turn his face
toward the cool draught, and now and then cool his temples with a
cataplasm of crushed ice. For the first twenty-four hours let him ab-
stain from all solid food.

Persons with an apoplectic diathesis should adopt a frugal and
aperient diet, and avoid prolonged sedentary occupations, especially in
a heated room. They should also avoid superfluous bedclothing, and
open their bedroom- windows in all but the stormiest nights. The feet,
however, ought to be kept warm under all circumstances. Plethoric
gourmands ought at least to renounce late suppers and alcoholic stimu-
lants.

Burns and Scalds. — Loose cotton, slightly moistened with lin-
seed-oil, has an almost magical effect in relieving the pain of severe
burns. When inflammation has supervened, the feverish condition of
the patient requires cooling ablutions and the free use of ice-water,
both topically and as a sedative beverage. Slight burns can be treated
with any emollient application, and a piece of common court-plaster is
sufficient to protect the sore till a new skin has formed under the
blister.

Chilblains. — The effect of frost-bites is often aggravated by a
too sudden, change of temperature, or rather by the application of
the wrong kind of caloric. The restoring warmth should come from
within rather than from without. It is not necessary to scrape a frost-
bitten person with icicles, after the Russian plan ; friction of any kind
above or around the affected part will restore, as far as possible, the
suspended circulation of the blood, and thus initiate the remedial func-
tions of Nature. Deep foot-sores should be bandaged with linen rags
and clean, warm tallow.

Dropsy. — It is a suggestive fact that the prevalence of dropsy
has decreased since bleeding has gone out of fashion. There was a
time when venesection was resorted to in nine out of ten kinds of dis-
eases, and at that time a complaint which in its chronic form appears
now almost only as a consequence of outrageous dietetic abuses was
nearly as frequent as consumption. Bleeding impoverishes the blood,
and dropsy, in any of its forms, can nearly always be traced to a dep-
ravation of the humors by unwholesome food or drink, or a disorder
of the blood-making organs. As a symptomatic complaint, for in-

THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 803

stance, dropsy frequently appears in the last stage of pulmonary con-
sumption, when the wasted lungs have become unable to fulfill the
chief purpose of respiration. Next to the alcohol-habit, the habitual
breathing of impure air is the present main cause of dropsy, for air is
gaseous food, and a sufficient supply of oxygen a chief preliminary in
the conditions of the blood-making process. Malarial diseases likewise
impoverish the blood by a direct process of disintegration ; * and
dropsy appears as an occasional after-effect of a long-continued ague.
Remedies : Mountain-air, a light but nourishing diet, and strict ab-
stinence from alcoholic stimulants.

Emetics. — Tepid water is a prompt, and the most harmless, emetic.
In urgent cases (poisonings, etc.) add a modicum of white mustard
(Sinapis alba), and tickle the fauces with the wing-feather of a pigeon,
or any similar object. Excessive vomiting can be checked by stimu-
lating applications to the pit of the stomach and the extremities.

Epilepsy. — Epilepsy, or the falling-sickness, is a complication of
nervous derangements,! and results more frequently from sexual ex-
cesses than from all other causes combined. In young children, how-
ever, epilepsy is sometimes a consequence of teething-difficulties, of
acidity in the stomach, and of worms, and in such cases can be readily
cured by a change of regimen, J or, in malignant cases, by a protracted
fast. For adults, strict continence and out-door exercise is the best
prophylactic. Excessive heat, however, should be carefully guarded
against, as well as all exciting passions.

Excoriation. — Infants are apt to become " galled " in particular
parts of their bodies, about the groins, the lower part of the neck, and
under the arms — especially in consequence of the condemnable prac-
tice of tight swaddling. To dry up such sores, " galling-plasters "
(acetate of lead, etc.) often lead to worse complications, and the best
remedy is cleanliness, and fine lint, smeared with spermaceti-ointment
or warm tallow.

Fainting-Fits, or Syncope. — Syncope, or " fainting," " Ohn-
macht," " Desmayo" as three nations have called it with a correct
appreciation of its chief cause, as distinct from that of apoplexy and
convulsions, results from a general deficiency of vital strength. Cold
water, applied to the neck, the feet, and the palms of the hands, by
means of a bathing-brush, is the best restorative. In severe cases in-
flation of the lungs by mechanical means has often proved effective.
Dr. Engleman mentions the case of a lady in child-bed, who, " after
being happily delivered, suddenly fainted and lay upward of a quarter
of an hour apparently dead. A physician had been sent for ; her own
maid, in the mean while, being out of patience at his delay, attempted
to assist her herself, and, extending herself upon her mistress, applied

* " Climatic Fevers," " Popular Science Monthly," vol. xxiii, p. 47'7.
■f- " Nervous Maladies," " Popular Science Monthly," vol. xxiv, p. 454.
\ "Enteric Disorders," "Popular Science Monthly," vol. xxiv, p. 196.

804 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

her mouth to hers, blew in as much breath as she possibly could, and
in a very short time the exhausted lady awakened as out of a deep
slumber, when, proper things being given her, she soon recovered.
The maid being asked how she came to think of this expedient, said
she had once seen it practiced by a midwife with the happiest effect."

A little stream of water falling from a height on the face and
neck, the irritation of the olfactory nerves by means of snuff or pun-
gent smells (burned pepper, etc.), the motion of a rumbling cart, have
now and then sufficed to restore suspended animation. Persons sub-
ject to fainting-fits can use no better prophylactic than gymnastics in
winter, and cold baths and pedestrian excursions in summer-time.

Febrile Affections. — In all disorders of a malarial and typhoid
character, as well as in scarlet fever, measles, small-pox, and epidemic
erysipelas, refrigeration * is more efficacious than any medicine. In
several zymotic diseases, besides cholera and yellow fever, the action
of antiseptic drugs is annulled by the inversion of the digestive proc-
ess : the chyle is forced back upon the stomach, and, mingled with the
red corpuscles of the disintegrated blood, is voided in that discharge
of cruor known as the black-vomit. Bleeding, instead of reducing the
virulence of the fever, is apt to exhaust the little remaining strength
of the patient. Lord Byron, for instance, was bled to death as surely
as if the surgeon had cut his throat.

Gout. — A paroxysm of this dread penalty of idleness and intem-
perance is preceded by certain characteristic symptoms — lassitude,
eructations, a dull headache, involuntary tears, a shivering sensation
about the groins and thighs. If the lassitude has not yet taken the
form of an unconquerable lethargy, the patient may obviate the crisis
of his affection by severe and unremitting physical exercise, a prophy-
lactic which, though doubly grievous in a debilitated condition, is in-
comparably preferable to the hellish alternative. I knew an old army
officer who kept a spade in his bedroom, and, at the slightest premoni-
tory symptoms, fell to work upon a sandy hill-side, and once dug a deep
trench of forty-five feet in a single night, and toward morning stag-
gered to his quarters and had barely time to reach his bed before he
sank down in a deliquium of exhaustion, and awakened late in the
afternoon as from a fainting-fit, with sore knees and sorer hands, but
without a trace of the gout from which his compact with the powers of
darkness proved to have respited him for a full month. The racking
pain can be somewhat relieved by such counter-irritants as blisters,
violent friction with hot flannel, etc., or actual cautery and the topical
application of opiates. The experiments of sixteen carnivorous and
alcohol-drinking nations have revealed dozens of similar palliatives,
but only two radical remedies — frugality and persistent exercise.

Headache. — Chronic headache is generally a symptom of dis-
ordered digestion. To attempt the suppression of the effect while the

* " Climatic Fevers," " Popular Science Monthly," vol. xxiii, p. 477.

THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 805

cause remains can bring only temporary relief, or even increases the
subsequent malignity of the disorder. Strong black tea may thus act
as a charm — for a day or so ; but with the next morning the trouble
not only returns, but returns aggravated by the supposed remedy, for
chronic headache has no more potent single cause than the habitual use
of narcotic drinks. A frugal, non-stimulating regimen, on the other
hand, brings help more slowly but permanently, unless the patient
abuses the restored vigor of his digestive organs. Acute headaches can
generally be traced to influences which tend to obstruct the free circu-
lation of the blood — tight clothing, coldness of the extremities, op-
pressive atmospheric conditions, etc. — and can be cured only by a
direct removal of the cause. As a symptomatic result of a vitiated
state of the humors, as in scrofula and venereal diseases, headaches
that defy all medicine often yield to a grape-cure.*

Heart-burn, or Cardialgia. — Both words are misnomers, the
seat of the pain being the pit of the stomach, and the cause gastric
acidity ; remedies — fasting and " passive exercise," a ride in a jolting
cart, kneading of the abdomen, etc.

Hypochondria, Chronic Melancholy, Spleen. — Robert Burton,
in his "Anatomy of Melancholy," enumerates some six thousand
causes of chronic despondency, and about as many different remedies,
of which only six or seven are apt to afford permanent relief : fru-
gality, temperance, early rising, life with a rational object (altruistic,
if egotism palls), constructive exercise in the open air, a sunny cli-
mate, and social sunshine — the company of children and optimists.

Insomnia. — The proximate cause of sleeplessness is plethora of
the cerebral blood-vessels, and a palliative cure can be effected by
anything that lessens the tendency of the circulation toward the head..
But a permanent cure may require time and patience. By night-stud-
ies brain-workers sometimes contract chronic insomnia in that worst
form which finds relief only in the stupor of a low fever, alternating
with consecutive days of nervous headaches. Reforming topers often
have to pass through the same ordeal, before the deranged nervous
system can be restored to its normal condition. Fresh air, especially
of a low temperature, pedestrian exercise, and an aperient diet, are
the best natural remedies. Under no circumstances should sleepless-
ness be overcome by narcotics. An opium torpor can not fulfill the
functions of refreshing sleep ; we might as well benumb the patient
by a whack on the skull.

Jaundice. — Jaundice aDd chlorosis are kindred affections, and
the yellow tinge of the skin is often in both cases due to an impover-
ished state of the blood — especially a deficiency in the proportion of
the red blood-corpuscles — rather than to a diffusion of bilious secre-
tions. Jaundice, as a consequence of obstinate agues, is evidently the
result of a catalytic process which disintegrates the constituent parts

* " Enteric Disorders," " Popular Science Monthly," vol. xxiv, p. 457.

806 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

of the blood. The bite of poisonous animals has often a similar ef-
fect. The most frequent predisposing cause, however, is want of sun-
light and out-door exercise. Jaundice and chronic melancholy are
often concomitant affections, and both a penalty of our dreary, sedent-
ary modes of life. The ancients, indeed, ascribed both complaints to
the same cause, for melancholy is derived from a word which means
literally " atrabilious," or black-biled. But the truth seems to be that
functional disorders of the liver are the result rather than the cause
of a general torpor of the vital process. Remedy — outdoor sports,
combined with as much fun and sunshine as possible. Alcoholic
jaundice-cures may restore the ruddiness of the complexion by keep-
ing the system under the influence of a stimulant fever ; but we
might as well congratulate ourselves on the return of health when
pulmonary affections mimic its color with their hectic glow.

Mental Disorders. — The Lalita Vistara says that on the day
when Buddha, the savior, was born, all the sick regained their health
and the insane their memory. Insanity might, indeed, be defined as
a partial derangement or suspension of the faculty of recollection.
Nature takes that method of obliterating the memory of impressions
which the soul is unable to bear, and thus preserves life at the expense
of its intellectual continuity. Lunatics are generally monomaniacs /
their judgment may be sound in many respects, but, at the mention
of a special topic, betrays the partial eclipse of its light. It may be
possible that people have been killed by the sudden announcement of
good news, but, for one person who has lost his reason from an excess
of joy, millions have lost it from an excess of sorrow — a crushing ca-
lamity, or the oppressive and at last unbearable weight of the dreari-
ness, the soul-stifling tedium of modern life in many of its phases.
The sick soul may have stilled its hunger with a long-hoarded hope,
till the evident exhaustion of that hoard leaves only the alternative of
despair or refuge in the Lethe of dementation. Where insanity is at
all curable it can be cured by the removal of its chief cause — sorrow ;
and the best remedies are kindness, mirth, and a pleasant occupation.
In the middle ages, when both lunacy and the love of earthly happi-
ness were ascribed to the machinations of the devil, lunatics were
chained and horsewhipped for the double benefit of their souls, and
with results which almost justified the demon hypothesis. Breughel's
best illustrations for Dante's hell were made after studies in an Aus-
trian mad-house. The extreme antithesis of such infernos is perhaps
the State Lunatic Asylum at Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where the shadow
of gloom has been so successfully banished that the happiest results of
the cure have almost been anticipated by its methods : the restora-
tion of reason itself could hardly give the patients an additional rea-
son for being happy. They Tiave a park, a flower-garden, and a pet
nursery of their own ; they have books and music, gymnasia, bath-
rooms, and amateur workshops. Wherever their road leads, they can

THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 807

travel it in sunshine, even on hobby-back if they choose, for they
have a philosophical weekly of their own, with full permission to ex-
plain the revelation of St. John.

Myopia — short-sightedness, and far-sightedness (presbyopia), were
formerly regarded as absolutely incurable affections, because they
were evidently not amenable to the influence of any known drug.
But " drug " and " remedy " have at last ceased to be synonymous
terms ; and, though constitutional defects of the eye may preclude the
possibility of a complete cure, there is no doubt that those defects
can be modified by a judicious treatment, especially by a mode of life
tending to restore the general vigor of the system, by out-door exer-
cise, and by rambles in green, sunny woods, for the colors of the sum-
mer forest are as beneficial to the eye as its atmosphere to the lungs.
Weak eyes can be strengthened by gradually exercising the capacity
of the optic nerve, scrutinizing small objects, first at a moderate and
by-and-by at a greater distance, but withal guarding against a fa-
tiguing effort of the eye.

Pimples. — The best cosmetic is a grape-cure, i. e., a frugal, sac-
charine, and sub-acid diet,, combined with out-door exercise in the
bracing air of a highland country.

Rheumatism. — Rheumatism, like gout, is a consequence of dietetic
abuses. Counter-irritants, hot baths, etc., can effect a brief respite,
but the only permanent specific is fasting. Before the end of the sec-
ond day a hunger-cure benumbs the pain ; the organism, on being
obliged to feed upon its own tissues, seems to undergo a process of
renovation which alone can reach the root of the complaint. Ex-
ercise and great abstemiousness will prevent a relapse.

Scrofula. — A scrofulous taint is in some cases hereditary, and
yields only to years of dietetic reform, but, on the whole, there is no
more perfectly curable disease. In all but its most malignant forms
it yields readily to the influence of pure air and pure food — out-door
life, and a wholesome, vegetable diet. Skin-cleaning nostrums only
change the form of the disease by driving it from the surface to the
interior of the body.

Toothache. — The extraction of every unsound tooth and the
insertion of a " new set " would certainly remove, in ipsa radice, the
seat, if not the cause, of the evil. But the trouble is, that the func-
tion of proper mastication is an indispensable preliminary of diges-
tion, and that for practical efficacy the last stump of a natural tooth
is infinitely preferable to the best artificial substitute. The best
plan would, therefore, be to let the stumps remain, and get rid of the
pain, and the latter end can be attained by a slow but infallible
method. Within half a year after the change of regimen, absolute
abstinence from hot drinks (especially boiling hot, sweet tea) and a
very sparing use of animal food will benumb the sensitiveness of the
irritated nerves. I knew an old-Mestizo who had learned to chew apples

808 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

with his bare gums, but only after necessity had reduced him to a
frugal regimen. A saccharine diet in the form of sweet ripe fruit has
certainly nothing to do with the decay of the teeth, and it is a sug-
gestive fact that toothache is almost exclusively an affliction of the
northern nations.

Warts and Corns. — The predisposing cause of warts is unknown,
and the popular remedies are rarely permanent. I have known
warts to reappear after they had been thoroughly removed by the
use of corrosive acids. The popular belief that they " spread " if
the operation involves bleeding seems not to be wholly unfounded,
and large warts can be more effectually cured by means of a tight
ligature that gradually deadens the tissue. Warts on the upper side
of the fingers can generally be atrophied by exerting a long-continued
strain upon the adjoining muscles, as in holding up a heavy weight,
or seizing the rings of a grapple-swing and dangling by one hand as
long as the fingers can support the strain. A callous skin is thus formed
under the wart, and before long the excrescence disappears. Corns are
entirely owing to the pressure of tight shoes, and can be cured by the
use of more commodious foot-wear. To suppress the symptom, while
the cause remains, is of little avail, and, before a chiropodist could
keep his promise to " remove corns with the root," he would have to
eradicate the folly of heeding the mandates of fashion rather than the
appeals of Nature.

-♦♦♦-

THE MOKALITY OF HAPPINESS.

By THOMAS FOSTEK.
EVOLUTION OF CONDUCT. — (CONTINUED.)

THERE is only one way of escape from the conclusion reached in
our last — that conduct is good or bad according as its total ef-
fects are pleasurable or painful — in which statement be it understood
the word total means total, and is not limited in its application to the
person whose conduct is spoken of. If it is supposed that men were
created to suffer, that a power which they were bound to obey had
planned such suffering, so that any attempt either to take pleasure or
to avoid pain was an offense, then of course the conclusion indicated
is an erroneous one.

No system of religion has ever definitely taught so hideous a doc-
trine. Even where sorrow and suffering are recognized as the lot of
man, and even where self-inflicted anguish and misery are enjoined
as suitable ways of pleasing Deity, it is never said that such sufferings
are the ultimate desire of the Supreme Power. These tribulations
are all intended for our good : we are to torture ourselves here and

THE MORALITY OF HAPPINESS. 809

now, that hereafter we may avoid much greater pains or enjoy much
greater pleasures than here and now we could possibly experience.

Yet underlying this doctrine of greater and longer-lasting happi-
ness as the result of temporary suffering or privation, there has been
and is in many so-called religions the doctrine that pain and suffering
are pleasing to the gods of inferior creeds and even to the Supreme
Power of higher beliefs. The offerings made systematically by some
races to their deities imply obviously the belief that the gods are
pleased when men deprive themselves of something more or less val-
ued. Sacrifices involving slaughter, whether of domestic animals or
of human beings, mean more, for they imply that suffering and death
are essentially pleasing to Deity. Even when such gross ideas are
removed and religion has been purified, the symbolization of sacrifice
in most cases takes the place of sacrifice itself. The conception may
and often does remain as an actually vital part of religious doctrine
that pleasure is offensive to the Supreme Power and pain pleasing.

If this conception is really recognized, and any men definitely hold
that to enjoy or to give pleasure is sinful, because displeasing to God,
while the suffering or infliction of pain is commendable, then for them
— but for them only — the doctrine is not established that conduct is
good or bad according as its total effects are pleasurable or painful.
But if there are such men, then they are mentally and morally the
direct descendants of the savage of most brutal type, who, because
he himself delights to inflict pain, deems his gods to be of kindred
nature and immolates victims to them (or, if necessary to gain his
ends, shows the reality of his belief by self-torture) to obtain their
assistance against his enemies.

If there are such men among us still, then, as Mr. Herbert Spencer
says, " we can only recognize the fact that devil- worshipers are not
yet extinct." The generality of our conclusions is no more affected
by such exceptions as these than it is by the ideas which prevail in
Bedlam or Earlswood.

But on the one hand the doctrine thus reached may be passed over
as a truism (which it ought to be and indeed is, though, like many
truisms, unrecognized) ; and on the other it may be scouted as Epi-
curean (which is unmeaning nonsense, however) and as mere pig-
philosophy. For it sets happiness as the aim of conduct, and, whether
self -happiness or the happiness of others is in question, many find in
the mere idea of pleasure as a motive for conduct something unworthy
— thereby unconsciously adopting the religious doctrine which has
been justly compared with devil-worship.

This expression — Pig-philosophy — has indeed been applied to the
doctrine we are considering, by a philosopher who, with Mr. Ruskin
and Mr. Matthew Arnold, may be regarded as chief among the won-
ders of our age — and standing proof of the charm which the British
race finds in Constant Grunt, Continual Growl, and Chronic Groan.

8 io THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

It must be considered, therefore, as certain that to some minds a
philosophy which sets the happiness of self and others as a worthy-
end must appear unworthy. Such minds find something pig-like in
the desire to see the happiness of the world increased. Yet grunting
and groaning are at least as characteristic of the porcine race as any
desire to increase the comfort of their fellow-creatures or even their
own. Mr. Herbert Spencer's lightsome pleasure-doctrine, the essence
of which is that we should strive to diminish pain and sorrow (our
own included) and to increase joy and happiness, is less suggestive
of porcine ways (at least to those who have noted what such ways
are) than — for instance — the following cheerful address to Man :
" Despicable biped ! what is the sum total of the worst that lies be-
fore thee ? Death ? Well, Death ; and say the pangs of Tophet,
too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will, or can do against
thee ! Hast thou not a heart ; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it
be ; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet
itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee ? " Were this but stern
resolution to endure patiently, and even cheerfully, such sorrows as
befall man, it were well. Nay, it would fall in with the philosophy
of happiness, which enjoins that for their own sake as for the sake of
those around them men should bear as lightly as they may their burden
of inevitable sorrow. But what Carlyle calls the New-birth or Ba-
phometic Fire-baptism is not Patience but Indignation and Defiance.
This is the veritable Pig-philosophy : the " Everlasting No " (das
ewige Nein) is in truth the Everlasting Grunt of dyspeptic disgust,
the constant Oh-Goroo-Goroo of a jaundiced soul.

Are the teachings of living professors of the Everlasting Groan
school brighter than those of the gloomy Scotsman ? Here are some
of the latest utterings of the chief among them : " Loss of life ! "
exclaims Mr. Ruskin, cheerfully. " By the ship overwhelmed in the
river, shattered on the sea ; by the mine's blast, the earthquake's
burial — you mourn for the multitude slain. You cheer the life-boat's
crew ; you: hear with praise and joy the rescue of one still breathing
body more at the pit's mouth ; and all the while, for one soul that is
saved from the momentary passing away (according to your creed, to
be with its God), the lost souls yet locked in their polluted flesh
haunt, with worse than ghosts, the shadows of your churches and the
corners of your streets ; and your weary children watch, with no
memory of Jerusalem, and no hope of return from their captivity, the
weltering to the sea of your Waters of Babylon." Oh! Goroo !
Goroo-oo !

Any philosophy which hopes for other than misery and disgust in
life must indeed seem strange doctrine to teachers such as these —
even as the smiles of the cheerful seem unmeaning and offensive to
those whose souls are overcast with gloom and discontent. Sir Walter
Scott tells a story of his childhood which well illustrates the unreason-

THE MORALITY OF HAPPINESS, 811

ing hatred felt by the Everlasting Growl school for the doctrine that
conduct should be directed to the increase of happiness. One day,
his healthy young appetite made him enjoy very heartily the brose
or porridge of the family breakfast. Unluckily, he was tempted to
say aloud how good he found his food. His father at once ordered
a pint of cold water to be thrown in, to spoil the taste of it ! Possibly
he meant to inculcate what he regarded as a high moral habit ; but
rather more probably Mr. Walter Scott, Sen., objected to his son's
enjoying what he had no taste for himself. Much of the sourness of
the Growl Philosophy may be thus interpreted.

V. — SELF VERSUS OTHERS.

We teach our children, the preacher tells his flock, but few follow
the precept — Care more for others than for self. It sounds a harsh
doctrine to say, instead — Each must care for himself before others.
Yet it is not only true teaching, it is a self-evident truth. It would
not be even worth saying, so obviously true is it, were it not that in
putting aside the doctrine because of its seeming harshness men over-
look, or try to overlook, the important consequences which follow
from it.

If a man's whole soul — nay, let me speak for a moment in my proper
person — if my whole soul were filled with the thought that my one
chief business in life is to make those around me, as far as I can make
my influence felt, as happy as possible, to increase in every possible
way the stock of human (nay, also of animal) happiness, I must still
begin by taking care of myself. For if, through want of care, I my-
self should cease to exist, I can no longer, in any way, serve others ;
nay, it is even conceivable that my immature disappearance from the
scene of my proposed exertions for others' benefit might cause some
diminution of the totality of happiness.

If the very thought of care for self should suggest that there can
be no real love or care for others where self -care comes first (self-evi-
dent though the proposition be that care of self must come first), let us
replace the case rejected as imaginary by a concrete and familiar illus-
tration.

None can question the unselfishness of the love which a mother feels
for her infant babe. None can doubt that, if question arose between
the babe's life and hers, her own life would be willingly sacrificed. Of
course there are exceptions, perhaps many, but no one can doubt, and
multitudes of cases have proved, that the rule holds generally. Now,
the nursing mother not only has, in her very love for her babe, to take
care of herself, but to care for herself first, and to take more care of
herself than, but for her pure, unselfish love for her child, she would
have troubled herself to take.

Let this case suffice to show that care of self before others (not,
therefore, necessarily more than others), besides being a self-evident

812 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

duty (which many may regard as a mere trifle), may be not only per-
fectly consistent with regard for others, and even with devotion to
others, but may be absolutely essential to the proper discharge of our
duties toward others. In fact, it is little more than a truism, instead
of being, as many would at a first view imagine, a paradox, that the
more earnest our wish to increase the happiness of others, the more
carefully must we look after our own welfare.

If we take a wider view, and, instead of considering a single life,
study the development of families and races, we still find the same les-
son. As the man who wishes his life to be useful to his fellows and to
increase their happiness must take care of that life, so he who would
wish to benefit humanity through his family or race must not only
nourish his own life and strength, but must develop those activities
which advance his own welfare and the welfare of his family. Other-
wise come, inevitably, the dwindling of the faculties on which his
own value depends, and the loss in his descendants of good qualities
which they might otherwise have inherited from him. Or it may be
that such qualities are inherited in less degree than had he duly exer-
cised powers and capacities which were in a sense held in trust for them.
"We are apt to overlook the importance of individual action in such
cases, not noticing that the progress of a race depends on the aggre-
gate of acts by the individual members of the race.

To take a concrete instance here, as of the simpler case : If a num
ber of persons in any nation or at any epoch, impelled by a desire to
benefit their fellows, devote their lives to celibacy, they influence in
important degree the qualities of the next and succeeding generations.
They diminish the proportion in which their personal qualities — pre-
sumably valuable — will appear in future generations, and relatively
increase the proportion of other and less desirable qualities. This is
obvious enough. It should, however, be almost as clear that, in what-
ever degree such persons in a community as possess the best qualities
fail to advance, in all things just, their personal interests, they dimin-
ish the influence of the better qualities, not only in their own time, but
in times to come. If, to take another concrete example, all persons of
the better sort, forgetting their duties to themselves and their race,
enter of set purpose on lives of poverty, asceticism, and dreariness,
they not only diminish in large degree the good they might do during
life, but they injure their offspring, and, through them, posterity.*

Under its biological aspect, then, the doctrine that care of self
must necessarily take precedence of care and thought for others, is
incontestable — it is the merest truism — though many speak, and some
act, as if the doctrine were iniquitous.

* Many would probably be startled if a just estimate could be formed of the degree in
which the qualities of the civilized races of the world have suffered through the well-
meant but mistaken zeal which led large classes of men in former ages to sacrifice their
power to do good in order to do good.

WHY EYES OF ANIMALS SHINE IN THE DARK. 813

But this doctrine has its moral aspect also. The question of duty
comes in at once and very obviously so soon as the actual consequences
of conduct have been shown to be good or bad. But it may be well
to show more definitely what the true line of duty is in regard to self.
I shall, therefore, next consider cases where self-abnegation leads
directly to the diminution of general happiness. — Knowledge.

+•»

WHY THE EYES OF ANIMALS SHINE IN THE DAKK.

By SWAN M. BUENETT, M. D.

THAT the eyes of some animals, particularly the cat, are luminous
when they are in the dark, is a fact established from time imme-
morial. It is surprising, however, to find the exact nature of the
phenomenon entirely misunderstood even by scientists whose lines of
investigation lie in the particular field to which it belongs. In con-
versing, not long ago, for instance, with one of the first physicists of
this country, who is at the same time an ardent sportsman, he gave
me a graphic description of a " still hunt " for deer. This method of
hunting, as is well known, consists in placing a bright light in the bow
of a boat and propelling it noiselessly through the water. The deer is
attracted by the light and goes toward it, but is prevented by its glare
from seeing his enemies who are concealed in the shadow. The
hunter, looking straight ahead, sees in the outer darkness — rendered
Egyptian by contrast with the bright light immediately in front of his
own eyes — two large, luminous bodies, like balls of fire. These are
the eyes of his victim ; and, making his calculation as to the distance
from the eyes down to the breast, the valiant sportsman (who proba-
bly is also a strong anti-vivisectionist) fires, intending to send his bul-
let through the heart. The eminent physicist, in speaking of this
luminosity, referred to it as due to the phosphorescence of the eyes, in
that final way in which we are accustomed to speak of things beyond
dispute.

But it is hardly less surprising to read in the article " Light," in
the ninth edition of the " Encyclopaedia Britannica," the following
remarkable statement by Professor P. G. Tait, on the sources of light :
" 3. A third source [of light] is physiological ; fire-flies, glow-worms,
medusae, dead fish (?) — the eye of a cat" (vol. xiv, p. 379).

If these are the opinions of acknowledged authorities in optics, we
can hardly expect the mass of even ordinarily intelligent and informed
persons to have more correct ones, and should expect thorough cre-
dence to be given to the story of the man who claimed that he was
able to recognize an antagonist who struck him in the dark by means of
the light emitted from his own eye as the result of the blow.

8 h THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY,

The fact is, there is no phosphorescence in the eyes of animals —
at least, so far as my knowledge extends, none has been demonstrated ;
and, that it is absent from the eyes of the cat, Professor Tait can dem-
onstrate conclusively for himself, by taking a cat, be it ever so black
(and these I believe are supposed to have the luminous power in the
greatest degree), into a completely dark room where there can come no
ray of extraneous light, and he will find that the eyes can not generate
enough light to make even the darkness visible.

The real cause of the luminosity of the eyes of animals in the dark
is now thoroughly understood by physiological opticists and by many
practical oculists, and depends upon the well-demonstrated laws of
the refraction and reflection of light. For a clear apprehension of the
phenomenon, however, it is necessary to understand the properties of
the eye as an optical instrument.

The office of the eye as an optical instrument, pure and simple, is
to bring rays of light to a focus on the membrane at the back part
known as the retina, in such a manner that small and inverted images
of external objects shall be formed there. For this purpose there is
a general plan, which is subj ect,f however, to more or less variation
in different animals. The basis of this plan is the camera-obscura,
in which the box is represented by the hollow globe or ball of the
eye, the small aperture through which the light enters, by the pupil,
and the lens by which the inverted and reduced images of external
objects are formed, by the refracting surfaces of the eye, which are
usually two — the cornea, or clear part of the front of the eye, and the
crystalline lens.

Now, the eye, in its capacity of optical instrument, is obedient to
the same laws as any other apparatus reflecting and refracting light.
It may astonish some to be told that the eye reflects the light passing
into it. It was for a long time believed that all light that entered the
eye was in some manner consumed there, and that none ever found its
way out again. It was considered one of the functions of the choroid
or pigmented coat of the eye to absorb such light as was not used in
the formation of the image. The basis of this opinion was that, under
ordinary circumstances, no matter how bright the light may be in
which the eye is looked at, the pupil always appears black. But no
fact is more clearly demonstrated now than that the eye does throw
back a large part of the light which enters its pupil.

One of the fundamental principles of optics is what is called the
law of conjugate foci. This is readily understood by means of the
accompanying diagram (Fig. 1). If the object is at a, the lens I will
form an image of that object at c. The law of conjugate foci is
that the image can exchange places with the object and the object
with the image, and the result be still the same. That is to say, if
the object were placed at c, its image would be formed at a. Or,
expressing it in another way, the rays of light follow the same lines,

WHY EYES OF ANIMALS SHINE IN THE DARK. 815

whether going from the image to the object or from the object to the
image.

Let us now apply this law to the case of the eye. We will suppose
the eye to be in a normal optical condition ; that is, that the retina
on which the image is formed is to be found exactly at the focus of

the lenses by which the light is refracted. By consulting Fig. 2, we
can follow the course of the rays of light in both directions. We
have rays going from a in the flame a b, which after refraction by
the lenses of the eye are brought to a focus at c, and form the lower
end of the inverted image ; whereas, these going from b are united
again at d. But, since the bottom of the eye is a reflecting surface,
and sends back a part, at least, of the light which falls on it, some of
these rays pass out again, but, in accordance with the law of conju-
gate foci, they must follow the same lines as in entering ; therefore,
the rays from c will come back to a, and those from d will come

back to b. If we could place our eye at a b, then we would catch
some of these rays, and the bottom of the eye would appear illu-
minated just as any other surface from which light was reflected.
But our eye and the candle can not occupy the same place at the
same time, and if we place it behind the candle, the flame itself
cuts off the rays of light, and if we place it in front, our head
obstructs the passage of the light to the eye to be observed. So,
under these circumstances, it is impossible for an eye, at 0, for in-
stance, to get any of the light that is constantly coming from the bot-

816 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

torn of an eye which has been illuminated. But, if we were able by
any contrivance to place our eye in the position of the source of
light, we would be able to catch the rays coming from the bottom
of the observed eye, and it would appear illuminated. Now, there is
such a contrivance, and it is called the ophthalmoscope, and it owes
its existence to the genius of Professor Helmholtz. The principle
of its construction is so simple that the wonder is that no one ever
thought of it before ; but never, until the year 1851, had any one
ever seen in anything like detail the interior of a living eye. If you
take a piece of bright tin and punch a small hole in it, and, placing the
hole directly in front of your own pupil, throw the light from a lamp
into the eye of a child, the pupil, instead of appearing black as it
usually does, will be of a beautiful yellowish-red color. This is be-
cause you have, to all intents and purposes, put your eye in the place
of the source of light. For the light reflected from the surface of
the tin is that which passes into the eye, and it must come back to it
after reflection. The eye placed behind the hole catches the small
quantity which would fall on that part, and therefore sees the surface
from which it comes, illuminated. This is the principle of illumina-
tion of the bottom of the eye, and, when you have your object suffi-
ciently well lighted, it is only a matter of optical appliance to see it
distinctly and in great detail. This digression is designed to show
that, when we have favoring circumstances, by the action of well-
known optical laws, the eyes of animals appear illuminated, and that
it is not necessary to call in the supposition of phosphorescence to
account for the phenomenon.

But, in the case of some animals, the eyes appear to shine without
the intervention of any optical means, however simple. This, how-
ever, is only apparent, for the principle of illumination is applicable
here as in the other cases.

In the case we have supposed, the retina, which in this instance is
the reflecting surface as well as the membrane on which the image is
formed, was found at the focus of the refracting surfaces of the eye.
But this condition is met with only in what is accepted as the per-
fect optical state of the eye. As can be readily understood, the retina
may lie either in front or behind the focus of the refracting media —
that is, the eye may be too long or too short for its focus, and unfor-
tunately such conditions are but too common. When an eye is too
long, it is said to be near-sighted or myopic ; when too short, it is far-
sighted or hypermetropic.

The change in the position of the retina, then, must exercise an
influence on the direction of the rays that are reflected from it. From
the well-demonstrated properties of lenses we know that, when rays of
light coming from a point at the focus of a lens pass through it, they
are rendered parallel ; when they come from a point within the focus,
they are spread out, or rendered divergent ; and when from beyond

WHY EYES OF ANIMALS SHINE IN THE DARK. 817

the focus, they are rendered convergent, or brought toward another
focus.

In accordance with these laws, therefore, we must expect the rays
of light to take a different course in coming out of an eye according as
it is near- or far-sighted. The course of the rays coming from the
far-sighted or hypermetropic eye is shown in Fig. 3.

If the retina lay in the focus of the refracting surfaces of the eye
at E, then the light from the inverted image c d of the flame would
travel back, in the same direction in which it came, to the flame a b

itself. If, however, it meets the reflecting surface of the retina within
the focus at H, then the rays from the confused image e i would come
out in a divergent manner, and form a cone of light, F G, like that
from the head-light of a locomotive.

It is now easy to see that if an observing eye is placed anywhere
in the vicinity of the source of illumination, as at o, it will take in some
of the rays coming from e i, and see it illuminated. There are very
few human eyes so accurately adjusted as to their focus that all the
rays come back to the source of light ; some of them are scattered,
and by a very simple arrangement it is possible to catch them in sufli-
cient number to show the bottom of the eye illuminated.

Place a child (because the pupils of children are large), and by pref-
erence a blonde, at a distance of ten or fifteen feet from a lamp which
is the only source of light in a room, and cause it to look at some ob-
ject in the direction of the lamp, turning the eye you wish to look at
slightly inward toward the nose. Now, put your own eye close behind
the lamp-flame, with a card between it and the flame. If you will then
look close by the edge of the flame covered by the card into the eye
of the child, you will see, instead of a perfectly black pupil, a reddish-
yellow circle. If the eye happens to be hypermetropic, you will be
able to see the red reflex when your own eye is at some distance to
one side of the flame.
vol. xxiv. — 52

818 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

This is the true explanation of the luminous appearance of the eyes
of some animals when they are in comparative obscurity. It is simply
the light reflected from the bottom of their eyes, which is generally of
a reddish tinge on account of the red blood in the vascular layer of
the choroid back of the semitransparent retina, and not light that is
generated there at all. This reflection is most apparent when the ani-
mal is in obscurity, but the observer must be in the light, and some-
what in the relative position indicated in the above-described experi-
ment— that is, the eye of the. observer must be on the same line with
the light and the observed eye. The eyes of nearly all animals are
hypermetropic, most of them very highly so, so that they send out the
rays of light which have entered them in a very diverging manner.

The circumstances under which the phenomena of luminosity are
usually seen are, it will be noted, those most favorable for the success
of the experiment. The animal is always in an obscure corner, under
a table or chair, as in the case of the cat, while the deer is in the outer
darkness of the night. It is well known that the pupils dilate when
in the dark, and they often attain an immense size in the eyes of those
animals with nocturnal habits, and the size of the cone of light is gov-
erned by the size of the pupil, since its circumferential boundary is
formed by it.

In making some experiments on dogs and cats, for the purpose of
determining the size of this cone of light, I found that it had actually
about twice the diameter it should have theoretically, from the amount
of hypermetropia present, as determined by means of the ophthalmo-
scope. This I can account for only by the great dispersion of light
at the periphery of the lens and cornea, rendered possible by the im-
mense dilatation of the pupil ; and this I think, too, is the reason why
the phenomenon is not more frequently observed in the higher animals
affected with hypermetropia. The pupil in man never attains the size,
under the same circumstances, as that of the cat, for example ; and,
moreover, it is most likely that the surfaces of the cornea and lens are
more regular in their curve, even at their more peripheral parts, and
consequently disperse the light in a very much less degree.

•♦>»

PKEHISTOEIC AET IN AMEEICA.

By the Marquis de NADAILLAC.

THE world of science was astonished a quarter of a century ago
by the discovery made in the caves of Vezere, France, of works
of art executed by the prehistoric troglodytes. The specimens con-
sisted of representations of mammals, birds, fishes, and of man him-
self, sculptured in relief or engraved upon elephants' tusks, bears'

PREHISTORIC ART IN AMERICA. 819

teeth, the shoulder-blade of a reindeer, the long bones of deer, or on
stones or beach-pebbles, and included the huge cave-bear, the mam-
moth with its heavy mane and upturned tusks, the seal, the croco-
dile, and the horse. These drawings, the first efforts of man, are
crude in shape, but suggestive of vital action. One of the stag-horns,
engraved with representations of reindeer and fishes, is a almost a mas-
terpiece. The deer are following one another, and one of them has
turned to look back, doubtless so as to see her fawn ; the heads are all
drawn in profile and without foreshortening, as in the Egyptian paint-
ings and sculptures ; sometimes the lines are light, at other times they
are cut deeply to bring out certain parts. By a curious caprice the
artist, after having completed his first design, has put fishes in all the
vacant spaces, and they too are wonderfully truthful. M. Massenat
has discovered, at Laugerie Basse, a piece of reindeer-horn about ten
inches long, on which was plainly engraved an aurochs running from
a young man who is about to shoot an arrow at it. The animal has
its head down with its horns in a position of menace, expanded nos-
trils, and tail raised and curved, all being signs of terror and irrita-
tion. The man is naked and has a round head, with coarse hair, which
is brought up over the top of his head, and an obvious beard on the
chin. His whole physiognomy expresses joyousness and the excite-
ment of the chase. The women have flat breasts and prominent hips.
One of them, very hairy, is drawn between the legs of a deer, and
wears a collar around her neck. Unfortunately, her head is wanting.
A considerable number of engraved stones and bones have been
brought to light in the excavations of the cave of Thayngen, Switzer-
land. Among them is a reindeer, standing with its head inclined
toward the ground, and drawn with a precision showing a really re-
markable acquaintance with the form of the animal. The artist had
attained such perfection that observers were at first tempted to ask if
they had not been invited to look at one of the archaeological frauds
that have unhappily become so common. But the excavations had
been watched with unremitting care ; the witnesses of the discovery
were honorable men of science ; the calcareous deposit of more than
a yard thick had been taken up under their eyes ; there were found
in the cave reproductions of animals which had disappeared centuries
ago — the musk-ox, for instance ; and the engraving was so faithful
that it could have been made only from nature. It was necessary,
then, to surrender to the evidence. Away back in the quaternary ages,
in the midst of the hardest conditions of life, of the struggle for
existence, and of incessant conflicts against the great pachyderms, the
bears, and the feline animals that swarmed around him, man already
had the feeling or the instinct of art. He tried to draw the likenesses
of the animals he saw and of the trees that shaded the cave he lived
in ; and the productions of his industry, found again after so many
ages, are all the more interesting from the fact that the extemporiz-

820 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ing artist had, to assist him in his work, only some wretched flints or
roughly-sharpened bones. The inquiry whether these discoveries made
in the west of Europe are verified in other countries, and whether this
art-feeling was innate in man and has characterized him always and
everywhere, is one of much interest. The excavations in Asia and
Africa are still too few, and the discoveries that have been made there
are of too little importance, to warrant the drawing of serious conclu-
sions respecting those quarters. We must, then, turn to America,
where eminent archaeologists and enthusiastic collectors have eagerly
studied all that relates to the past of the human race. With the aid
of their publications and the photographs they have distributed with
rare liberality, we are able to follow the ancient populations in their
migrations from the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific, to study
their habits and their progress, and to show that among them also art
was born at a very early epoch, and that it grew up with the generations.
It has now been ascertained that man lived in America during the
quaternary ages, contemporaneously with the mastodons and the huge
edentates and pachyderms, which had no other resemblances with the
mammals of the Eastern continents than those of size. Like their con-
temporaries in Europe, the primitive Americans wandered in the soli-
tary wilderness, and disputed with animals for the prey on which they
fed and the caves that sheltered them, having for weapons of offense
and defense only the flints that lay at their feet. Their barbarism ap-
pears to have been lower than that of the troglodytes of Europe, and
to have been destitute of all artistic feeling and taste for ornament.
Ages passed, the duration of which we can not compute ; the quater-
nary animals disappeared, and man became sedentary ; and he has left
as evidences of his long abode in the same place the heaps of refuse
exemplified in the shell-mounds and kitchen-middens of the Atlantic
coast, the Gulf of Mexico, the banks of the Mississippi and the Ama-
zon, the Pacific coast, and Tierra del Fuego. Excavations made at
several points have brought out hatchets, knives, harpoons, and tools
of every shape, of stone, bone, and horn, all bearing witness to a back-
ward social condition, fragments of carbonized wood, bones of ani-
mals, and fish-bones, all having evidently been accumulated by men
who knew nothing of agriculture and lived by hunting and fishing.
Occasionally a few shards of pottery have been found among the re-
mains, made of clay mixed with pounded shells, fashioned by hand,
and dried in the sun. Sometimes plaited vines or canna-stems have
been impressed on the wet parts, or lines have been scratched on the
vessel with the point of a shell or a flint. These are the first efforts at
ornamentation, and are singularly like those of the most ancient pot-
teries of Europe. Ornaments designed for the decoration of the per-
son are more rare than the potteries. We can only cite a few bears'
or cats' teeth and shells bored for the purpose of being hung from the
neck, except in the sambaquis or kitchen-middens of Brazil, where a

PREHISTORIC ART IJST AMERICA. 821

few figures of fishes and idols in gold and silver have been found in
very ancient deposits of guano.

We can form only the most imperfect estimates of the dates
of these remains. Geological evidences give no definite clew. The
growth of trees over the kitchen-middens may fix dates previous to
which they certainly existed, but when we have admitted the five or
six centuries it took the trees from the time the wind wafted the seed
to the spot, how are we to compute the number of generations of
plants that were required to furnish the soil on which they could grow ?
One point only is ascertained, and that is that no bones of quaternary
animals have been met under the kitchen-middens, and, with the ex-
ception of the figures we have mentioned, no metallic objects. The
remains must, then, have been accumulated between the period of the
disappearance of the larger animals and the time when the metals
came into habitual use. Must we say, then, that during that long se-
ries of ages no artistic tendency revealed itself in man ? Yes, if we
judge by the individual objects that have been collected ; no, if we
attribute to that epoch the pictographs, or the figures, scenes, hiero-
glyphics, or rebuses, as we might call them, which are painted, en-
graved, and sculptured on the cliffs, the sides of caves, the bowlders,
and erratic rocks, or wherever a vacant space may have been offered
to the artist. Men have at all times with a childish vanity endeavored
to delineate their migrations, their contests, their hunts, and their vic-
tories. Egypt has transmitted its ancient history to us on granite ;
the rocks of Scandinavia still wear the likeness of the Vikings' ves-
sels ; and those around the lac des Merveilles, near Nice, bear pictures
of men extremely primitive in design ; curious engravings have been
noticed in Algeria ; the Bushmen, who are among the most degraded
populations of the globe, have drawn on stone, with wonderful fidelity,
their hunting scenes and their loves ; and the rock-paintings of New
Zealand, the work also of a barbarous race, but evidently superior in
execution to the scratches of the Bushmen, have been described before
the London Society of Anthropology. These are isolated facts, though
curious ones ; but in the two Americas the number of pictographs and
the extent of surface they cover give them an exceptional importance.
The desire, not only to reproduce striking events, but also to give pre-
cision to their sense by conventional signs, by graphic strokes, or by
hieroglyphics or phonetic or symbolical characters, is one of the most
remarkable traits of the different races that have succeeded each other
on the new continent. Although the initial date of these engravings
is unknown, we can nevertheless affirm that they continued to be exe-
cuted through many ages, and that while the most ancient ones ascend
to remote epochs, in some instances these historic drawings only a lit-
tle while preceded the arrival of the Europeans. Pictographs are
especially abundant in the regions that formerly constituted Spanish
America : in Nicaragua, near the extinct volcano of Masaya ; in the

822 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLT.

United States of Colombia, on the banks of the Orinoco ; and in Vene-
zuela, where in consequence of their antiquated condition they will
soon cease to be distinguishable. The rocks of Honduras are covered
with sharply-cut designs ; the co?iquistadores, in 1520, remarked simi-
lar works in the Isthmus of Darien ; and in the State of Panama en-
tire cliffs were charged with hieroglyphics that might afford matter
for very interesting studies. In the Sierra Nevada, between Colum-
bus, Nevada, and Benton, California, are hosts of figures of men and
animals and uninterpretable signs. About twenty miles south of Ben-
ton, the road follows a narrow defile, bounded on both sides by nearly
perpendicular rocks, and these are covered with figures in respect to
which no clew exists as to the people that designed them.

Pictographs are little less numerous in Arizona, New Mexico, and
Colorado — in parts of the country which, though now desolate, were
formerly inhabited by a considerable population. The glacier-polished
bowlders of the valley of the Gila River have figures that may be
compared with those of Thuringia. On the banks of the Mancos and
the San Juan, and in the deep canons stretching up toward the east,
the figures are visible at dizzy heights, some deeply engraved, others
drawn in red or white. Among them is a procession of men, animals,
and birds with long necks and legs, all going in the same direction.
Two of the men are standing on a sledge drawn by a deer, while oth-
ers direct the march of the drove. The artist evidently intended to
represent a migration of his tribe. In another pictograph on the banks
of the San Juan, among figures of strange forms and of drawing in-
correct but full of movement and life, may be recognized a number of
flint hatchets, exactly similar in pattern to the symbolical hatchets
that are cut on the megaliths of Brittany. At another spot, a cliff is
covered, for a space of more than sixty square feet, with figures of
men, deer, and lizards ; and M. Bandelier has seen, near the ruins of
Pecos, pictographs, the high antiquity of which is attested by the de-
gree of effacement they have undergone. They represent the tracks
of men or children, a human figure, and a tolerably regular circle. On
the banks of the Puerco and the Zuni, two of the affluents of the Colo-
rado Chiquito, designs have been remarked having the appearance
of hieroglyphics, but their significance is unknown, and we can not
even affirm that they had any. The cliffs near Salt Lake in Utah
are adorned with sculptures, among which are human figures of the
natural size, cut in a hard rock more than thirty feet above the ground.
All together show an amount of labor of which the Indians are inca-
pable, and a sum of difficulties which they could not have overcome ;
and the height at which some of the sculptures appear allows the sup-
position that some geological phenomenon, perhaps a depression of
the lake, may have occurred since they were executed. Many draw-
ings on stone have also been observed in the eastern parts of the
United States.

PREHISTORIC ART IN AMERICA. 823

Pictographs to which we are disposed to accord a great antiquity
are to be seen on the sides of caves in Nicaragua. Some grottoes in
the mountains of Oajaca also bear witness to the labor of man, in the
shape of coarse paintings in red ochre. Among them is frequently re-
peated the imprint in black of a human hand. This imprint, which is
probably borrowed from some myth, seems to have played a great
part in America. It is found reproduced in regions very remote from
one another, standing out on the potteries, sometimes in red on a black
ground, sometimes in black on a red ground. In our own days it is
occasionally found in use among Indians as a totem or coat-of-arms.

All that we have just said bears witness to a still primitive condi-
tion of art. The men who executed the works, barbarous as they seem
to have been, were capable of rising higher. This is proved by works
of a manifestly later epoch. Guatemala, the ancient land of the
Quiches and the Cakchiquels, abounds in ruins. Bas-reliefs, statues,
and monoliths covered with arabesques to the height of twenty feet,
meet the traveler frequently. At Quirigua, a small port on the Bay
of Honduras, a statue of a woman has been found, footless and hand-
less, with a crowned idol on its head ; excavations by the side of it
have brought to light a tiger's head in porphyry. At Santa Lucia
Cosumalhuapa, at the foot of the Volcan de Fuego, among the Cyclo-
pean stones and the statues of tapirs and caymans, lie colossal stone
heads, of a strange type, hitherto unknown. Two of these heads wear
the immense ear-rings peculiar to the ancient Peruvians, and a head-
dress similar to the Asiatic turbans. Farther on are bas-reliefs in hard
porphyry, larger than nature, representing personages as odd in con-
ception as in execution, and mythological scenes that have no relation
to any known form of worship. The most interesting bas-relief rep-
resents a human sacrifice. The principal personage is a priest ; he is
naked and, according to the custom of the Aztec priests, wears a garter
around his left leg ; only the left foot is shod. The head-dress is a
crab. One hand holds a flint, doubtless the sacrificial knife, while the
other hand grasps the head of the victim to be slain. On a second
plane, two acolytes are carrying human heads. One of them is a
skeleton, a sinister symbol of death. Its head is of a simian shape,
mingling the grotesque with the terrible. To cite more similar facts
would merely involve unpleasant repetitions. We shall only add, then,
that the figures are of a grinning aspect and a repulsive ugliness. The
ancient American races did not seek for the beautiful, or, rather, did
not comprehend it as we do, who have been taught by the immortal
creators of the high art of Greece.

We have just occasion to be surprised when we think of the time
that was required to execute these works, and consider what inefficient
mechanical means the artists had to use. They had to detach blocks
of hard stone by means of wretched tools of quartzite and obsidian,
and to saw granite and porphyry with agave-fibers and emery. A

824 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

coarse outline design indicated the part to be removed. The labor
was executed either by sawing partly through the stone and deftly
breaking off the fragment, or by pecking it away with a flint-point.
Lastly, the surface of the planes was rubbed with flat stones or polish-
ers to remove the traces of the chippings. Other processes also appear
to have been employed. The artist drew his figure in coarse tracings,
and covered with ashes the lines he desired to bring out in relief. The
whole surface was then heated with fire ; the parts which were sub-
jected to the direct action of the flames were decomposed, and left
hollow places, while those that were protected by the ashes remained
intact.*

For finishing his work, the sculptor had nothing better than a flint-
point or a copper chisel,f the only tools in use, for iron was unknown.
He was obliged, in order to execute those colossal figures and the bas-
reliefs which now make such an impression of astonishment upon us,
to cut with those imperfect tools in a very hard rock to a depth of
three or four centimetres. The fact of the performance of a labor of
such length is a certain indication of the infancy of the society in
which it was done, where man had not yet learned to appreciate the
value of time.

The region of the piedras pintadas (painted stones) in South
America extends from Guiana to Patagonia. They are found in the
wilds of Brazil and La Plata as well as in the more civilized districts
of Peru and Chili, and they betray everywhere a remarkable analogy.
In the solitudes of Para and Piauhy, Brazil, are numerous intaglio-
sculptures, executed by unknown peoples ; they represent animals,
birds, and men, in various attitudes. Some of the men are tattooed ;
others wear crowns of feathers ; and the picture is finished off with
arabesques and scrolls. At la Sierra da Onca are drawings in red
ochre, isolated and in groups, without apparent order, and the rocks of
the province of Ceara and those of Tejuco are covered with tracings
not unlike those on the rocks of Scandinavia. Humboldt describes
intaglios on the right bank of the Orinoco, representing the sun and
moon, pumas, crocodiles, and serpents, ill-formed figures defined most
frequently by a simple outline and declaring little advancement in art.
Nevertheless, since they are cut in the hardest kind of granite, it is

* Mr. Wiener saw the natives excavating an irrigation canal in the valley of Chi-
cama de Sausal, through a rock which stood in the way. The workmen piled ashes along
the line of the edges of the canal, covered them with dried manure and burned it. After
eight days they succeeded in forming by this process a channel through a granite rock
containing a vein of basalt 1'20 metre wide, 0*80 metre deep, and 2-30 metres long.

\ There has been found near Quito a chisel that was used in working the large blocks
of trachyte employed in paving the roads of the Incas' empire. It weighed 198 grammes.
The surface was worn, the edge was nicked, and the head appeared to have been ham-
mered upon, all indicating that it had been subjected to long use. An analysis of a piece
of it by M. Damour gave ninety-five parts of copper, a little more than four parts of tin,
and slight traces of iron, lead, and silver..

PREHISTORIC ART IN AMERICA. 825

impossible to attribute them to the barbarous tribes that inhabited the
country at the time of the arrival of the Europeans. These tribes were
incapable of executing works of this kind, and even of comprehending
any art, however crude it may appear to us. Who, then, were the
peoples to whom we can attribute the painted stones ? What was
their origin ? The illustrious German traveler tells us nothing that can
diminish our ignorance on this point.

There are mentioned as among the works in the country of the
Chibkas, in the United States of Colombia, a stone probably designed
for sacrificial purposes, and sustained by caryatides, a jaguar sculp-
tured at the entrance to a cave near Neyba, and gigantic llamas. In
the land of the allied tribe of the Muiscao, the granitic and syenitic
rocks are adorned with colossal figures of crocodiles and tigers, guard-
ians doubtless of the images of the sun and moon, the supreme gods
of the South American natives. All of these figures are coarsely exe-
cuted, and betray, like the North American figures, an extreme ab-
sence of taste and an absolute inability to reproduce objects faithfully.

Abundant examples occur on the Pacific coast of an art which
we can best compare with that of Guatemala. A granite block near
Macaya, known as the Piedra de Leon, is covered with sculptures
which all are agreed are very ancient. The most important group
represents a face-to-face struggle of a man and a puma. The figures
suggest movement, and the man and the animal appear to be really
struggling. Near the little city of Nepen may be seen a colossal ser-
pent ; a short distance from Arequipa, trees and flowers ; farther on,
bisons with bored noses are wearing movable rings cut in the same
stone. At the Pintados de las Rayas, geometrical figures, circles, and
rectangles, the meaning of which can not be defined, take the place
of figures from life. In the province of Tarapaca, considerable sur-
faces are covered with figures of men and animals mostly fairly good
specimens of work, and with a kind of characters arranged vertically.
The lines are from twelve to eighteen feet long, and each character
is quite deeply engraved. This is not an isolated instance. Inscrip-
tions very much worn have been found near Huara, and between
Mendoza and La Punta, Chili, is a large pillar on which letters have
been imagined analogous in some respects with the Chinese alphabet.
These evidences are very vague, and, however well disposed to dis-
cover in them the beginnings of graphic art, we can not as yet found
so important a conclusion upon them.

The use of colors was certainly known to the Americans from the
most remote antiquity. The ochres, soot-black, and lime doubtless
furnished them their first coloring elements, and there was nothing in
the idea of using these pigments above the most primitive conceptions.
Experiment induced a rapid progress, and men learned to extract
vegetable colors from leaves, fruits, roots, stems, and seeds. A color-
ing-matter was also borrowed, like the Tyrian purple, from sea-mol-

826 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

lusks. The Peruvians and the Mexicans knew how to place the
colors upon their cloths. The goods were then exposed to the action
of the light, and tints varying from a delicate rose-color to a dark
violet were obtained. The colors were so well fixed that they were
not even modified by the decomposition of dead bodies. In the col-
lection of cloths from the Peruvian huacas at the museum of the Tro-
cadero, in Paris, wrappings of mummies that have been buried for
centuries still retain the primitive color on their time-eaten threads.

The Mexicans probably obtained the remarkably brilliant coloring
of their pictographs by somewhat analogous processes. These picto-
graphs, manuscripts of which only a smaller number have reached us,
embrace the history of the country, its national traditions, the geneal-
ogies of its kings and nobles, the rolls of provincial tributes, the laws,
the calendar, religious festivals, and the education of the children — a
complete summary, in fact, of all that concerns the manners, customs,
and life of the people. They were painted in various colors on cotton
cloth, on prepared skins, or on a strong and tough paper made from
the fibers of the agave. At times the artist depicts scenes from real
life ; at other times he records facts by means of hieroglyphical,
symbolical, or phonetic characters, conventional signs that have been
handed down for generations, and on which innovation is prohibited.
Another series of pictures illustrates the education of children and
their food and punishments. The father teaches his son to carry bur-
dens, to steer a canoe, or to manage the fishing-tackle. The mother
instructs her daughter in domestic duties ; she sweeps the house, pre-
pares tortillas, and weaves cloths. These pictures present the distinct
outlines and bright colors which the Americans sought first of every-
thing. Evidently we must not ask them for models of decorative
painting. Their complete ignorance of proportions and the laws of
perspective demonstrates that their art was the exclusive product of
their own genius, or of the instinct of their race, and that they had
not been subject to any foreign influence. — Translated for the Popular
Science Monthly from the Revue des Deux Mondes.

-+*+-

RECENT GEOLOGICAL CHANGES IN WESTERN

MICHIGAN.

By C. W. WOOLDE1DGE, B. S., M. D.

WESTERN Michigan is a region noted for its lumber, its peaches,
and its sand. It has other claims, however, to the attention
of those who are interested in the workings of Nature, that are not
nearly so well known as they deserve to be, for it bears the marks
of very extensive geological changes in recent times, which are even
yet in progress, but have not attracted the attention that their im-

GEOLOGICAL CHANGES IN MICHIGAN. 827

portance merits, and have been overlooked altogether by some geolog-
ical writers, whose observations might be expected to cover their
field. Let us take a look at this region and examine briefly some of
the marks in which Nature has written its history. We find it in
the main a sandy plain, wooded with white-oak, beech, maple, hem-
lock, and pine, varying in the proportion which they bear to one
another, and interspersed with other trees and undergrowth in all the
variety which the prolific flora of that region affords. In places the
land sinks so low as to constitute a timbered swamp, and in others
it rises to a moderate height above ground-water ; often it appears, as
indicated by the vegetation it bears, to be very fertile, but occasion-
allv it is almost naked in its barrenness. Taken as a whole, it is of a
lower degree of fertility than the heavier soils found in the more cen-
tral and southern parts of the State, and for this reason it is less gen-
erally under cultivation than it otherwise would be.

This plain is, however, interspersed with tracts of land of a very
different character. These consist mostly of a clayey loam, contain-
ing bowlders, as the sandy levels generally do not, having a more roll-
ing and irregular surface, and, so far as it has been the writer's privi-
lege to observe them, lying at a higher level than the sandy plain by
which they are surrounded.

On scanning the map of Michigan, it will strike one as a peculiar
feature of this west side of the State, that nearly every stream, large
or small, that flows into Lake Michigan, expands into a small lake near
its mouth, a fact that may have given rise to a query in some as to
why such a peculiar feature should exist, especially in a country all of
whose features are post-glacial — carved, indeed, out of the glacial drift
or built upon it everywhere ; and it is with the hope to throw some
light on this matter, as well as other peculiarities of the region, that
this article is written.

Our principal field of observation is the country near Whitehall,
Muskegon County, Michigan, where the writer began to reside in the
summer of 1878. This village is situated at the head of White Lake,
on White River, which opens into Lake Michigan some six miles to the
southwest.

In this river-lake one may see in many places an old water-line on
piling, which at that time was at an elevation of three feet or more
above the water. The fact that this line was continuous at a uniform
level on lines of piling that were apparently undisturbed rendered the
theory of uplifting by ice that was often given in explanation of it
exceedingly unsatisfactory ; and when old residents of the neighbor-
hood were heard to speak, as they often did, of schooners loading and
unloading, a few years before, in places where there was not at this
time water enough to float a raft, it left very little room for doubt that
this old water-line recorded a real change of relative level between the
water and the land.

8z8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

On passing along the borders of the lake, however, another phe-
nomenon was observed that seemed to contradict this hypothesis, or
to indicate that the change of level had been the other way. This was
the existence of the stumps of large trees, evidently in the position
where they had grown, but at this time standing in the water. And
again, a living witness was found to corroborate the testimony of the
stumps, in the person of an old resident who tells of the willows grow-
ing far out on what is now a shallow in the lake, and forming a haunt
that the deer used to frequent in the years when this country was first
settled.

That summer (1878), a new trestle was built across the head of the
lake for the Chicago and West Michigan Railroad. In building it
piles were driven and sawed off beneath the surface of the water for
the bottom sill of each bent to rest upon, but before the next spring
these piles began to lift their heads out of the water, and, before the
summer of 1879 had passed, the sills that rested on them were lifted
from ten to fourteen inches above the water-level. During the sum-
mer of 1879 an iron swing-bridge was built across the mouth of White
River, at the head of the lake, and, as a foundation for the turn-table,
a bed of piling was driven in the center of the channel, which was
sawed off at a considerable depth below the surface of the water. On
this piling a platform of lumber was built, so that its surface, when
completed, was at a depth of some six inches below the surface of the
water, and on that a tower of stone-work was built for the turn-table
to rest on. As the lake was considered to be at a low level at this
time, it was supposed that this platform would be perpetually un-
der water ; but the bridge was not yet completed when it began
to rise above the surface, and, by the next spring, it was some eight
inches above the water-level. At this point, however, the water
again began to rise, and at present this platform is again under
water.

Another matter must now claim our attention, that speaks of a
time somewhat more remote ; but first, perhaps, it will be as well to
glance briefly at the immediate border of Lake Michigan. Here,
along the border of the low-lying, sandy country, there is generally a
strip, varying from a few rods to half a mile or more in width, on
which the sand has been piled up by the wind into dunes. Here the
surface of the ground is fantastically irregular. Sharp crests, gorges,
valleys, and crater-like depressions abound everywhere, and the whole
is generally covered with forest and filled in with a rank undergrowth.
In places, however, especially at the foot of the river-lakes, the sand
is yet without vegetation, except here and there, on some sheltered
slope, a few bunches of beach-grass or a stunted shrub ; white and
shining, its surface rippled by the wind, and traced at times with the
strangely varied tracks of insects, birds, small creatures from the
neighboring woods, turtles from the water, and, most numerous of all,

GEOLOGICAL CHANGES IN MICHIGAN. 829

the mimic tracks made by light objects that are moved along by the
wind, such a scene is in itself a study for a naturalist.

In some places, Lake Michigan is year by year building out the
land with fresh deposits of sand, but oftener it is cutting it away with
every storm. A reach of coast, extending perhaps a mile and a half
southward from the foot of White Lake, is particularly interesting to
one who wishes to study the structure of the country. Here, of late
years, the lake has been eating away the land. The bluff facing the
water is from fifty to one hundred and fifty feet high ; sometimes its
face is covered from top to bottom with earth that has slid down so as
to conceal its structure, at other times this is all swept away and the
strata are revealed. At such times an old surface-line of vegetable
mold may be seen through the entire extent of the section at a height
of from ten to twenty feet above the lake. Above this line all is sand,
below it all is a heavy solid earth, of which clay forms the principal
part. In the depressions of this line, where channels of drainage in
this ancient line of surface may be supposed to be cut across, springs
flow out. In one such depression there is a bed of peat, marking the site
of an ancient swamp, and near each edge of this bed it is full of timber
that has fallen into it when a swamp and there been preserved. Some
of this wood seems to be but little changed, while other pieces have
almost the color and texture of charcoal. Here we have found elm,
oak, and black-ash, the species of which might be recognized as easily
as if just from the forest. Some branches had been charred by fire,
and altogether the deposit is exactly what we might expect to find in
the edge of a Michigan swamp of the present day, with the difference
that this has been compacted and hardened by time and pressure and
drainage. The clay soil in which this old swamp was situated seems
to underlie the sand everywhere in this region at varying depths, but
on excavating to it we do not everywhere find the vegetable mold
that here marks its surface. From these facts the conviction has grown
that here in Western Michigan the condition of things has varied some-
what like this : First succeeding the introduction of the present order
of things at the close of the last Glacial epoch, the entire country was
at an elevation above Lake Michigan much greater than at present,
great enough to drain the bottoms of all these river-lakes which, it
should be noticed, are deepest near the great lake, and generally termi-
nate in a swamp at their head, and each of which is elongated in the
same general direction as the valley the foot of which it occupies.
This condition of things lasted until the configuration of the land had
become substantially what it is at present ; then a subsidence took
place, until all the lower levels of the country were beneath the waters
of Lake Michigan. Again the country began to rise, and as the sub-
merged lands were lifted above the water they were covered with
sand, exactly as the lake now deposits sand on a retreating coast.
When this uplifting reached such a degree that the action of the

830 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

waves was disturbed by the bottom near the edge of the deep water
marking the ancient boundary of the lake, sand-bars would be de-
posited there as we find them, and these would stretch across the
mouths of the submerged river-valleys, and on further uplifting they
would separate the waters occupying them from those of the great
lake, which, meanwhile, would go on adding more sand to them from
without. This is the condition of things existing at present. The
changes of level that have brought it about have not been uniform
and constant ; they may have consisted of a single sinking and rising,
but more probably there were many. Even yet we see that the solid-
seeming earth is sinking and swelling there in a most capricious manner.
It is hard to tell to what the present movements are tending even —
whether for a long period the land is to remain substantially at its
present level, whether it is to rise until the river-lakes are drained and
the Western Michigan lake-ports are left stranded inland, or whether
the country is to be again submerged. We see, within the memory of
those now living there, a variation of level to the extent of six feet at
least, and in both directions. Forty years ago the land seems to have
been at a higher level than it is at present, and to have continued so
long enough to permit the growth of large trees on land since sub-
merged. Then there was a subsidence to an extent of several feet,
then an uplift until the waters were below their present level, and at
last accounts another subsidence seemed to be in progress. Who can
tell us its limits, either as to time of continuance, rapidity, or extent ?
What is the nature of this movement ? There are difficulties in the
way of accounting for it that would not exist if Lake Michigan were
the ocean. A rising and falling of the land as a whole would include
the bed of the lake, and would not produce these changes of relative
level. To lift the bed of Lake Michigan, might pour out a part of its
contents, and so cause an enormous increase in the volume of the St.
Clair, Detroit, and St. Lawrence Rivers, with a corresponding diminu-
tion when a subsidence was taking place, the rivers rising as the lake
was going down, and falling as the waters of the lake were rising ;
but this, we believe, has not taken place. Is it a shrinking and swell-
ing of the upper strata of Western Michigan, leaving the deeper strata
in which the bed of the lake rests comparatively undisturbed ? Is
it a rocking of the lake-bed from side to side, one part sinking as
another rises ? What is the extent of the country through which these
movements are felt ? These questions, and others relating to the mat-
ter, would seem to be of interest. Perhaps, if the Government would
take the subject in hand and cause a record to be kept of the water-
level at all light-houses and life-saving stations, a few years might
throw light upon it.

SKETCH OF AUGUST WILHELM HOFMANN. 831

SKETCH OF AUGUST WILHELM HOFMANK

By EDWARD J. HALLOCK, Ph. D.

THE recent visit of this distinguished scholar and chemist to our
city is worthy of more than a passing notice, and we would com-
memorate it in a feeble manner by placing before our readers a sketch
and portrait of the man who has contributed so much to the advance-
ment of science and of human progress.

August Wilhelm Hofmann was born in Giessen, April 8, 1818.
After completing the usual gymnasium course, he entered the Univer-
sity of Giessen at the age of eighteen. Having acquired a taste for
the modern languages during his travels in Italy and France, he at
first took up the study of philology, to which he devoted himself as-
siduously for several years. To this we may undoubtedly attribute
much of his power as a writer and speaker. At this time his father,
who was an architect, was engaged on the plans for Liebig's new labo-
ratory, and thus young Hofmann became acquainted with that famous
chemist. His influence turned the whole course of Hofmann's life, for
he at once took up the study of chemistry, and we next hear of him as
the assistant of Liebig. He remained in this position until the spring
of 1845, when he was appointed professor in Bonn, but he was not
destined to remain long upon the Rhine, for, in the latter part of the
same year, he was called to London and placed in charge of the newly
established Royal College of Chemistry. Through the exertions of
Professor Hofmann, and his popularity as a lecturer and teacher, this
school soon acquired such a prominence that, in 1853, the Govern-
ment united it with the Royal School of Mines. It was during this
time that he made several of those important researches which have
resulted in discoveries of the greatest importance. In addition to his
other labors, he found time to deliver courses of lectures to working-
men, which were well attended, and to investigate various technical
and sanitary questions upon which his opinion was sought. His suc-
cess in solving difficult expert problems soon won for him an influ-
ential position in England. In 1856 he was appointed "Warden of the
English Mint, which position he continued to hold until he left Eng-
land. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1861, and ten
years later was nominated President of the London Chemical Society.
He served on the jury in the International Exhibitions held in Lon-
don in 1851 and 1862. Among the important investigations of public
interest was a chemical examination of the waters of London, and,
with Professor Graham, an investigation of the bitter ales at a time
when the brewers were suspected of using strychnine as an adul-
terant.

832 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

His early philological studies enabled him rapidly to master the
intricacies of the English language, so that he became a fluent speaker
and a correct writer in our tongue. Several of his works have appeared
in English first, and subsequently been translated into German.

His reputation as one of the most successful teachers of chemistry
of the present day brought him many offers from German govern-
ments, for at that time he stood almost alone as a teacher of organic
chemistry according to modern ideas. In 1862 he was called to Bonn,
where he undertook the building of a fine chemical laboratory, but he
was not permitted to finish his undertaking, for in 1803 he was ap-
pointed the successor to Mitscherlich at the Frederick William Uni-
versity in Berlin.

His first work in Berlin likewise consisted in the planning, erecting,
and equipping of a new chemical laboratory, which was opened in 1868.
It consists of a substantial brick edifice, built in the form of a hollow
square, in the center of which is a large, airy, and well-lighted lecture-
room, capable of seating about two hundred students. Two large
courts, one on each side of the lecture-room, afford abundant light
to the various work-rooms, laboratories, and smaller lecture-rooms.
The entire structure occupies a lot of ground one hundred and forty
by one hundred and sixty-five feet on Georgen Strasse, with an ex-
tension seventy feet wide running through to the Dorothean Strasse.
On the latter are the library and residence of the professor. The situ-
ation is a central one, near the principal station of the elevated rail-
road (Stadtbahn), and but five minutes' walk from the university
building on Unter den Linden.

Professor Hofmann's lectures are illustrated by very elaborate ex-
periments, and the fundamental laws of the science are demonstrated
by means of apparatus devised by himself for this special purpose.
No other living chemist, Bunsen perhaps excepted, has invented so
many new and useful forms of lecture apparatus as Hofmann. Besides
his earlier papers on this subject, a season rarely passes, even now,
without some new contribution to this kind of literature from his
fertile pen. His lectures are so interesting, his manner so animated,
that his lecture-room is thronged with students from all parts of the
globe.

Soon after his removal to Berlin, Professor Hofmann founded the
German Chemical Society, of which he has several times been presi-
dent, and the growth of which has been largely due to his efforts.
Although German in name and in language, it numbers among its
twenty-seven hundred members persons of every nation where chemis-
try is cultivated, and its proceedings are the chief means of commu-
nication between a large portion of the chemists of this and other
countries. The number of original papers published by it is larger
than that of the English, French, and American chemical societies
combined.

SKETCH OF AUGUST WILHELM HOFMANN. 833

Although Hofmann excels as a lecturer and teacher, his reputation
rests chiefly on his valuable and numerous contributions to the science
of organic chemistry, foremost among which are his investigations on
the coal-tar colors.

He first began the study of the bases in coal-tar under the direction
of Liebig, and in 1843 we find him publishing his first original paper
on this subject. One of these bases, then known as "cyanol," at-
tracted his special attention, and by working over half a ton of coal-
tar he succeeded in obtaining this rare base in sufficient quantity to
investigate its properties, which he found to be the same as those of
"benzidam." Further investigation also enabled him to prove that
" aniline," the name then given to a substance that had only been ob-
tained from indigo by distillation, was identical with both cyanol and
benzidam. Here, then, were three sources for obtaining this rare ma-
terial. Evidently there could not be much of it in coal-tar, when only
three pounds could be separated from half a ton of tar ; indigo, too,
was an expensive source ; hence it was a fortunate circumstance that
Zinin had discovered another method of making it, and that too from
a far more abundant constituent of coal-tar, namely, benzol ; it is from
that all the aniline of the present day is prepared.

Hofmann, it is said, noticed that aniline gave rise, under certain
conditions, to the production of a red color, but he failed to publish
the fact, and to Perkin belongs the credit of having discovered the
first aniline dye — mauvine. This took place in 1856, and two years
later Hofmann discovered a red dye, then called Hofmann's red, which
was formed by the action of chloride of carbon upon aniline. Aniline
was beginning to attract the attention of manufacturers as well as of
chemists, and many different methods were devised for making what
seemed to be the same substance, a fine red dye variously known as
magenta, solferino, fuchsine, and aniline red. Hofmann undertook a
careful investigation of the dye, which resulted in his discovery of the
surprising fact that the red dye was in reality the salt of an organic
base, like an alkaloid, and that this base, to which he gave the name of
" rosaniline," was colorless. From this base he prepared another which
he called " leucaniline " by reducing it with zinc. Turning his atten-
tion to the blues, greens, and purples, he found them to be derivatives
from this same base, but of more complex construction. The impor-
tance of these investigations can scarcely be overestimated. The pro-
duction of dyes from aniline was no longer a matter of blind experi-
mentation ; empirical methods gave place to scientific ones, and the
process of making dyes has gone on to the present day nearly in the
same direction. One of the earliest practical results of this discovery
was the invention of a series of most beautiful purples which still
bear the name of Hofmann. Like Leverrier's discovery of Neptune,
their elements had been calculated beforehand, their existence fore-
told, and they needed only to be made.

YOL. XXIV. — 53

834 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Before taking up the investigation of the aniline dyes, Hofmann
had been engaged in a line of research, which, though apparently of
mere theoretical interest, had especially fitted him for this work,
namely, the study of organic ammonias, or amines. In 1849-'50 Hof-
mann made the discovery that when ammonia was acted upon by
certain alcoholic iodides, such as methyl iodide, one, two, or three of
the hydrogen-atoms of the ammonia could be replaced by the alco-
holic radical. In this way he prepared trimethylamine, a substance
which he subsequently found to exist ready formed in herring-pickle,
and from which it is still obtained for medicinal purposes. For his
investigations on the molecular constitution of the organic bases, he
was awarded the Royal Medal in 1854, and in 1887 he received the
great prize of the World's Fair at Paris.

Engaged in studies of this sort, the resemblances between aniline
oil and ordinary ammonia, and more especially between their respective
salts, could not escape his notice. Each contains one atom of nitro-
gen ; the substitution of a certain group of atoms known as the phe-
nyl group for one of hydrogen will convert ammonia into aniline.
In the more complex molecule of rosaniline, with its three atoms of
nitrogen, he naturally sought for a triple ammonia, but he found the
phenyl group alone incompetent to form this base, which led to his
discovery of the very important fact that no dyes can be made from
pure aniline, an admixture of its homologue, toluidine, being essential
to the production of the rosaniline and its derivatives.

Organic bases, containing other elements than nitrogen, have also
attracted his attention, and through his labors much has been added
to our knowledge of the " phosphines," phosphonium, etc.

Another class of subjects, to which Hofmann has devoted much
attention, includes the mustard-oils, both natural and artificial, and
the sulpho-cyanides of organic bodies. These researches have resulted
in the artificial production or synthesis of many pungent oils and
ethers. He has also fearlessly attacked the cyanides themselves, and
succeeded in producing some new organic compounds that fairly rival
Bunsen's well-known cacodyle in their repulsive odors.

Among the analytical processes introduced by Dr. Hofmann are
several of importance, including the separations of arsenic from anti-
mony, and of copper from cadmium, and the detection and estimation
of carbon disulphide. Hofmann's method of determining the specific
gravity of vapors is as remarkable for its simplicity as for its accu-
racy.

Although a fertile writer, Professor Hofmann is not given to writing
books. He has, however, contributed a great many original papers to
various chemical journals, of which the " Journal of the London Chem-
ical Society " contains more than ninety, and nearly two hundred more
are to be found in the " Berichte " of the Berlin Chemical Society.
He was for a time one of the editors of Fowne's " Manual of Chemis-

SKETCH OF AUGUST WILHELM HOFMANJST. 835

try," and since 1874 has also been one of the editors of the " Annalen
der Chemie und Pharmacie," established by Liebig.

A portion of the course of lectures upon inorganic chemistry,
which he had delivered so acceptably before the Royal College of
Chemistry in London, was published in book form in 1866, under the
title of " Lectures on Chemistry." It was soon after translated into
German, and has passed through several editions under the more appro-
priate title of an " Introduction to Modern Chemistry." We know
of no other book in any language on this trite subject that exhibits
so much originality of treatment, or that is more pleasing in style,
convincing in its demonstrations, and logical in method. Taken
in connection with the ingenious apparatus therein described, it
has had avery beneficial effect upon the methods of teaching chem-
istry.

The substance of his lectures upon organic chemistry was published
in 1872 by one of his former assistants, Dr. A. Pinner, and during the
past year it has been translated into English by Professor P. T. Aus-
ten, one of his American pupils.

Hofmann's " Life-Work of Liebig" is a worthy monument to the
great chemist ; while his biography of the great French chemist, Jean
Baptiste Andre Dumas, in the "Nature " series of scientific worthies,
is a charming specimen of English composition. His memorials of
deceased scientists are worthy of more than passing mention. Among
those whose memories have been perpetuated by his pen are Thomas
Graham, Gustav Magnus, and last of all Friedrich Wohler.

Several of his addresses delivered upon special occasions have been
published, among which are two academical orations delivered recently
in Berlin, which have appeared under the title of " Chemische Erinne-
rungen aus der Berliner Yergangenheit." His inaugural address upon
assuming the rectorship of the Berlin University has provoked some
discussion, owing to the position taken in regard to classical studies,
and has already been referred to in our pages. His largest and most
important work is his " Report on the Development of Chemical In-
dustries," which first appeared in 1875-'76.

836

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY,

CORRESPONDENCE.

OLD STUMP-WELLS IN THE MISSISSIPPI
"BOTTOM."

Messrs. Editors '

IT is a fact well known to all who have
made any study of the "Bottom," or
alluvial plain, formed during the lapse of
ages by the great Mississippi Kiver, that
the river channel, or bed, is forever shift-
ing, and in its mighty contortions it has
moved laterally eastward and westward over
vast spaces. Many of the abandoned chan-
nels are now curved lakes, with no con-
nection with the river ; others, connected
with it more or less during floods, are called
" old rivers." So thoroughly the river does
its work in forming the land that, besides
these crescent-shaped lakes and old rivers,
there is little in view to indicate where
the bed of the river lay one hundred or
one thousand years ago. When the river
changes its channel, by suddenly or grad-
ually cutting through a point of land, or
when one chute of an island is closed by a
bar, a lake or an old river is formed ; but,
when the river shifts its position, by con-
tinued abrasion on one side, and by corre-
sponding deposit of sediment on the other,
the latter slowly but steadily rises to the
average height of the neighboring land, and
in a few years is covered by a heavy forest-
growth, and there is no visible sign left to
show that it has not been thus since the
creation, or at least since the Gulf of Mex-
ico deserted that particular point on its ever-
lasting retreat southward.

The tract of land on which I reside, and
which I have owned for more than forty
years, was washed, up to about the year
1855, by the main body of the Mississippi
River, swinging around the western side of
a plano-convex-shaped island; at that pe-
riod three fourths of all the water of the
river passed my door, but about that time,
the exact year I do not remember, the chan-
nel began to change, and in a very few
years the main body of water was, and has
since then been, running down the piano
and eastward side of the island, and the
head of the western chute is largely ob-
structed by bars. Whether the bars formed
first, and forced the channel eastward, or
whether the change of the channel caused
the bars to form, has not, so far as I know,
been satisfactorily answered. At all events,
my land now lies on an " old river," which
is never entirely dry, although often very
nearly so, and the growing obstructions
threaten to cut me off, at no distant day,
from outside communication, at least by
water, except at very high stages. I will

add, in passing, that it is in contemplation
by the National Kiver Improvement Com-
mission (which is spending millions in the
interest of navigation, with no especial
thought as to riparian interests) to hurry
up this consummation by piling, willow-mat-
tressing, etc., so as to force the entire body
of water, even in its highest stages, through
the eastern or shorter chute.

In addition to being located on an " old
river," my land lies, as I believe, just where
a river-formed lake existed at a remote pe-
riod, but which has in process of time, long
before memory goes, been filled up by de-
posits from overflows, until now it is some-
what higher than the general level of the
neighboring sections, and I will give my
reasons for so thinking as briefly as I can.
At certain periods of the year, as there are
no small running streams in this section,
cattle suffer from thirst, although the great
river runs by our doors, for then the stream
is low, and the banks are either precipitous,
or, when sloping, terminate in a quicksand,
in which many uncared-for cattle are lost
every year ; hence the necessity for abundant
wells and cisterns.

Seeing some water standing in an old,
hollow cypress-stump, about four fee tin diam-
eter, the surface of which water was at least
fifteen feet above the surface of the river at
the time, I was curious enough to investigate
the matter. An outside rim of the stump,
about four inches in thickness, remained
sound, but the interior portion (all except a
hollow of about a foot in diameter, down
which I had observed the water) was com-
posed of dry-rotted wood, still clinging close-
ly in place. I had the rotted portion taken
out down to the surface of the water, and
the water pumped out, finding the reservoir
to extend down sixteen feet. In about six
hours the water had returned to its former
level. Pumping it out again, I had the rot-
ten wood removed ; this was done with very
little trouble. With a little more digging,
and removing the old wood, which had pre-
viously fallen to the bottom, I discovered
where the main roots of the tree started at
a distance of about seventeen feet below the
surface of the ground, plainly showing that,
when the tree first sprang from the seed, the
surface of the ground was many feet lower
than at present. After thoroughly clean-
ing out the well, I permitted the water again
to rise, and found it cool and wholesome,
with a slightly brackish taste, but not at all
offensive.

Subsequent investigation showed me that
every hollow cypress-stump (and there are a

CORRESP ONDEN CE.

837

large number of them) on my place is a nat-
ural well, but varying in depth, proving that
the ground on which these trees sprouted
was not level, or at least that the level was
changed from time to time. I have one of
these wells in my stable-yard ; it is about
four feet in diameter and nine feet in depth.
I cut the stump off level with the ground,
floored it over, and placed a pump in it, and
in the driest seasons it furnishes abundant
water for my stock. I have about fifteen
dug wells on my place, all within the space
of two square miles ; the depth of the water-
surface in these varies from eight to fifteen
feet. A large curbed well stands in my gin-
house, within twenty feet of the bank of the
river, and to-day the water stands in this
well at least fifteen above the surface of the
stream, and is in no manner affected by its
rise or fall. It would not be difficult to
form a reasonable theory to account for the
deeply-rooted cypresses, but the formation
and existence of the wells require the pre-
sumption of an enormous deposit of clay,
and to account for the presence of the lat-
ter is the difficulty. The Mississippi brings
down in suspension a comparatively small
portion of argillaceous material, but it is
certainly here in a solid stratum, and it
came at a period subsequent to the sprout-
ing of the old cypress-trees, for it is highly
improbable that a tree should send down a
tap-root eighteen feet, and then spread out
its lateral supports. The cypresses, forty
years old, make no such indications, but
have their radical processes corresponding
with those of the other trees of the forest.
James B. Craighead.
Nodena, Arkansas, August 1, 1883.

WORK OF SHOD AND UNSHOD HORSES.
Messrs. Editors :

In the February number of your maga-
zine appears an article, by Arthur F. Ast-
ley, on the " Working Capacity of Unshod
Horses," in which the writer states, "J»
New Mexico, horses are ridden barefoot forty
miles day after day, and perhaps twenty miles
of this xoill be over a rough mountain-track.'1''
Now, I have served with my regiment in New
Mexico for several years, most of the time
as post-quartermaster, having large numbers
of both horses and mules under my charge.
While it is true that most horses are ridden
unshod by the natives in the valleys, where
the roads are sandy and soft, it should be
borne in mind that even there the majority
do so simply because they are too poor to
have their horses shod ; but, when it comes
to traveling over rough mountain-tracks, the
writer's statement is simply absurd. The
Indians (Apaches) understand the inability
of unshod horses to travel over mountain-
trails so well, that they cover their horses'
feet with raw-hide bags, and, when the latter

wear out, the horses soon become disabled,
and I have frequently found Indian horses
abandoned on the trail, with their hoofs
bleeding and worn, and the poor animals in
a most pitiful plight. Again, when Indians
are enlisted as scouts, they furnish their own
mount, and, when reaching the post, they
always request to have their horses shod.
There can be no question that a properly-
shod horse has a superior working capacity,
but I confess that most shoeing, from the
ignorance of the average farrier, is simply a
process of torture and violation of nature,
and crippled horses are the result. Most
farriers place the horse upon an iron tripod,
the weight of the animal resting entirely
upon three points of the foot, and those not
the parts intended to bear the shock of
travel, or to sustain his weight. The posi-
tion of the frog becomes one of hopeless
inaction, and the motion of the unsupported
bones within the hoof produces inflamma-
tion at the points of extreme pressure. But
I did not intend to write an essay on horse-
shoeing.

Respectfully, yours,

Theodore Smith,
Lieutenant, United States Army.
"Washington, D. C, February 17, 1884.

AMERICAN LOESS-DEPOSITS.
Messrs. Editors:

I have just read Mr. D. W. Williams's
interesting article in your December issue
on " The Loess-Deposits of Northern China,"
and am rather surprised to find no allusion
therein, by way of comparison or otherwise,
to the very extensive loess-deposits of the
United States — especially, since it was here,
in the valley of the Mississippi, that this
peculiar soil was first studied and named
loess by Sir Charles Lyell, during his second
visit to the United States in 1846.

Mr. Williams speaks of the loess-beds
of China as among the most remarkable
and important geological phenomena hith-
erto brought to light in Middle Asia, and
says " the term loess has been used to des-
ignate a tertiary deposit appearing in the
Rhine Valley, along the Danube, and in
several isolated sections of Europe," etc.
But the loess-beds of Nebraska, alone, ex-
ceed in extent of area those of all Europe
combined ; and their aggregate extent with-
in the States of Nebraska and Minnesota
and the Territory of Dakota falls but little,
if any, below that of the loess-beds proper
of Northern China. It is believed that the
total extent in square miles of this deposit
within the* States and Territories drained by
the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers exceeds
that within the Chinese provinces drained
by the Yellow, the Wei, and the northern
tributaries of the Tangtse.

Mr. Williams does not give any analyses

838

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

of the Chinese loess, but it appears to be
not essentially unlike that of the Rhine,
which, as analyzed by Bischoff, contains a
larger proportion of alumina than the sam-
ples hitherto analyzed from Nebraska. Bis-
choff found in four analyses of Rhine loess :

NTJMBEB OF ANALYSIS.

1.

2.

8.

4.

Silicic acid

58-97
9-97
4-25
0-02
0-04
Oil
0-84

20-16

4-21
1-37

79-53
18 45
4-81
0-02
006
1-05
1-14

78-61
j- 15-26

6:09
j- 331

i:89

62-43

Alumina

Peroxide of iron

(7-51
"i 514

6:21

Soda

Carbonate of lime..
Carbonate of mag-
nesia

1-75
11-63

3-02

Loss by ignition

2-31

Dr. Hayden, in his "Final Report on
the Geology of Nebraska," gives, on page
12, two analyses of the loess from Hanni-
bal, Missouri, made by Dr. Lytton, as fol-
lows : in one hundred pai'ts, there were of —

No. 1.

No. 2.

Silica

76-98

11-54

3-87

1-68

undetermin'd

2-01

77-02

Alumina and

peroxide

of iron . . .

12-10
3-25

Magnesia

1-63

Carbonic acid

2-83

Water

2-43

Total . . .

9617

99-26

Dr. Aughey, in his " Report on the
Superficial Deposits of Nebraska " (United
States Geological Survey, 1874), gives the
analyses of five samples of the Nebraska
loess taken from widely-separated sections,
showing the wonderful homogeneity of the
deposit over the large area which it covers
in that State — estimated at not less than
fifty-eight thousand square miles. His anal-
yses are as follows :

Insoluble («ili
ceous) matter

Ferric oxide . . .

Alumina

Lime, carbonate

Lime, phosph'te

Magnesia, car-
bonate

Potassa

Soda

Organic matter.

Moisture

Loss in analysis

No. 1.

81-
3-

6-
3-

Total 100-00

No. 2.

•82

81-

•86

3-

•75

•07

6-

•58

3-

•29

1

•27

•15

•07

1-

•09

1-

•59

28
29

K>

06
08
54

No. 3.

81
3

85

83

•74

6-03

3-58

1-31

•35

•14

1-05

1-09

•53

No. 4. No. 5,

81

•30

3

•85

•73

6

•05

3

•57

1

•31

34

16

1

06'

1

0 s

55

81
3

6
3

32
86
74
09
59

1-29
•32
•16

106

1-09

•47

00-00 100-00 100-00 100-00

It will be seen from these several anal-
yses that the loess of the Rhine and that
of the Republican and the upper and lower
Missouri are not chemically dissimilar. The
latter is thoroughly homogeneous and of
uniform color from whatever depth taken.

Dr. Aughey says : " I have compared many
specimens taken three hundred miles apart,
and from the top and bottom of the de-
posits, and no difference could be detected
by the eye, or by chemical analysis. Over
eighty per cent of this deposit is finely-
comminuted silica. ... So fine, indeed, are
the particles of silica that its true character
can alone be detected by analysis or under
the microscope." The tendency, noted by
Mr. Williams, in the Chinese loess to crys-
tallize spontaneously, and form the cylin-
drical and spherical concretions which the
Chinese call "ginger-stones," is also no-
ticeable over all the loess-regions of the
West. Wherever the sod is broken or the
earth freshly disturbed from any cause,
whether by the plow, or "prairie-dogs,"
these "ginger-stones" literally cover the
ground. This feature is presumably due to
the richness of the soil in the phosphates
and carbonates of lime, which constitute
about one tenth of the entire mass.

In their structural as well as chemical
characteristics our Western loess-beds seem
to be identical with those of China. They
present, also, the same striking peculiari-
ties of landscape-contour, erosion-products,
and surpassing fertility, so well described
by Mr. Williams. The unique and often
exceedingly fantastic forms assumed by the
loess-bluffs wherever they have been sub-
ject to erosion, as along the Missouri and
lower Platte, have long excited the curiosity
of tourists. Indeed, so quaint and striking
are many of these natural carvings — now
stately and now grotesque — that it is not
easy on first acquaintance to accept them
as the products of natural causes merely,
and not rather as the gigantic labors of
past generations. In point of architectural
adaptability, too, these Nebraska bluffs are
the fellows of their Chinese congeners, and
fulfill the same generous function of afford-
ing cheap and healthful domiciles to whom-
soever will carve out their homes in them.
Many are the happy and well-to do families,
scattered over these fertile regions — espe-
cially in Nebraska, Dakota, and Southwest-
ern Minnesota — who have known no other
home since " coming West " than the
smoothly-hewed walls of the facile loess.
Nor, for ends of comfort, cleanliness, or
health, do they need to seek better homes
—only at the behest of taste or fashion ;
though, as wealth increases, the American
squatter, unlike the Mongolian, soon builds
for himself a more pretentious dwelling, and
converts his old home into a stable or pig-
gery. I have sometimes had occasion to
seek shelter from a storm in one of these
" dug-outs," and in traveling have often
spent a night in them, and can testify as to
the excellent quarters they afford for both
man and beast. Like the " adobe " houses
of the Mexicans and Pueblo Indians, they

EDITOR'S TABLE.

839

are cool in summer and warm in winter,
but are superior to "adobe" dwellings in
point of dryness and cleanliness. This su-
periority is due to the fact that wherever
the soil is smoothly cut the slight chemical
union, which speedily takes place under the
influence of the atmosphere between the
silica and the carbonate of lime, coats the
surface as if with a light washing of cement,
and so prevents crumbling. One may note
spade-marks as clean-cut and fresh-looking
as if newly made on the walls or ceiling of
"dug-outs" that have been occupied for
years. When the threatened (?) "Mongo-
lian invasion " comes, what hosts of happy
Celestials will find here congenial homes !
And if, for their better contentment, they
rechristen the Missouri the Yellow River, it
will be no serious misnomer.

In point of fertility our Western loess-
beds are the counterpart of those described
by Mr. Williams, except that they do not
seem to suffer equally in seasons of drought.
The greater depth of the Nebraska deposits
— exceeding in many places two hundred
feet — and, possibly, their more perfect cap-
illary structure, may explain this difference.

As to the origin of the loess-beds of the
United States, the belief of Dr3. Hayden,
Aughey, and others that they are lacustrine
deposits has been hitherto accepted. But
it is curious to note how many of their
peculiar characteristics are explained, and
their general features harmonized with the
geological and meteorological phenomena
of the great region lying between them and
the summit of the Rocky Mountains, by the
hypothesis that they are subaerial rather
than subaqueous deposits. Nearly all the
arguments adduced by Baron von Richtho-
fen in support of his theory of the origin
of the loess-beds of Asia may be adduced
with equal force, mutatis mutandis, in sup-
port of a like theory here. Of more than
one hundred and twenty species of shells
found and identified in the loess-deposits of
Nebraska, as given by Dr. Aughey on pages
267 and 268 of " United States Geological

Report" for 1874, it will be seen that a
large proportion are land-shells. And it
appears from the same " Report " that, while
the deposits are rich in the remains of land-
animals, no considerable number of aquatic
species have ever been identified.

Dr. Aughey says, page 254 : " Occasion-
ally I have found the teeth and a stray bone
of a fish, but have not been able to identify
any species. The remains of rabbits, go-
phers, otters, beavers, squirrels, deer, elk,
and buffalo are frequently found. Through
the entire extent of these deposits are many
remains of mastodons and elephants." To
one who has ever encountered a dust-storm
on the great plains west of these deposits,
when the landscape to either horizon is ob-
scured with flying clouds of powdery dust,
like drifting fog, and has noted the almost
continuous belt of sand-hills extending from
Western Kansas through Eastern Colorado
and Wyoming and Western Nebraska, evi-
dently formed by these high winds, whose
prevailing direction is always eastward, and
marking the deposit of the heavier particles
dropped from the flying mass of dust-freight
which they had gathered in their fury from
the arid foot-hills and high plains still far-
ther westward, the theory of Von Richtho-
fen commends itself with peculiar force.
And if a period of still greater aridity be
conceived of, before these high regions, the
American analogues of the Asiatic steppes,
had received their present scant protection
of stunted grasses, the conviction arises
that, even assuming the volume and velo-;
city of the wind to have been no greater
then than now, its prevailing direction being
the same, our loess-deposits of the North-
west, like those of China, may be accounted
for, both as to their origin and chief pecul-
iarities, by reference to known causes still
existing, whose action has been, indeed,
greatly modified but not wholly suspended ;
and without recourse, necessarily, to the la-
custrine hypothesis.

William T. Holt.
Denyeb, Colorado, January 4, 1S84.

EDITOR'S TABLE.

THE EDINBURGH REVIEW ON THE
SPENCERIAN PHILOSOPHY.

THERE is obviously a decline in the
influence of malign criticism in re-
cent times. Even the savage " quarterly
reviewer " has lost many of the terrors
with which he used to be invested. An
excellent example of this is afforded by
the history of Spencer's " Synthetic Phi-

losophy." It has been tempting game
for the critical sports, and they have
pursued it nnweariedly. It had but
few friends and multitudes of enemies.
A new departure in philosophy, it in-
curred the hostility of the devotees of
all old philosophies. Dealing with the
larger aspects of science, it kindled the
jealousy of narrow-minded scientific

840

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

specialists. Antagonizing established
political opinion and cherished religious
beliefs, it provoked the wrath of all
who rest contented in tradition. Ap-
pearing in successive parts and volumes
for twenty-five years, it was constantly
before the public, and has been all that
time subject to a degree of abuse, ridi-
cule, and detraction, which is quite with-
out parallel in the past history of such
enterprises.

And yet during all that time Spen-
cer's system of thought has increased
in recognition, appreciation, and power
over the mind of the age. Its doc-
trines permeate our serious literature,
as is widely shown by the periodicals ;
many books are written for and against
them ; and their author stands to-day
the representative man of the most in-
fluential and growing school of thought
in modern times. This view is further
verified by the increasing public de-
mand for his works, more of the solid
volumes of the " Synthetic Philosophy"
Laving been called for during the last
twelvemonth than in any former year.
The inexorable critical resistance Spen-
cer's works have met with has no
doubt hindered their spread, but it has
failed to arrest them, and has only
served to test and demonstrate the in-
herent strength of his systematic work.

And now the sluggish old "Edin-
burgh Review " has at last awakened,
girded itself up, and entered the lists
against Mr. Spencer. The current num-
ber contains an article entitled " The
Spencerian Philosophy," to which Ave
here call attention, not because it has
the slightest value as a contribution to
the subject, but because we may gather
from it an instructive lesson regarding
the decline of the influence of vindic-
tive criticism. It happens that the
" Edinburgh Review " has a history in
this matter. This is not the first time
it has practiced its bludgeon upon the
representatives of advancing knowledge.
Let us, therefore, first notice its early
record in relation to one of the most

important steps in the progress of mod-
ern science — the establishment of "the
undulatory theory of light " by Dr.
Thomas Young. We give the "Re-
view " full credit for consistency in an
unprincipled course ; the instinctive
meanness of its infancy, long since exe-
crated by the world, is not in the least
abated in its senile dotage.

The " Novum Organon Renovatum "
of Dr. William Whewell is an able work
devoted to the philosophy of the induc-
tive sciences, of which the same au-
thor is also the eminent historian. Dr.
Whewell has selected the two most
conspicuous examples of comprehen-
sive and valid induction afforded by
physical science, and by means of
charts he has illustrated in a very strik-
ing way the extent of the observed and
experimental facts, and the minor in-
ductions, that are brought into unity
by all-embracing theories. The first
chart is an "Inductive Table of As-
tronomy," and it shows in a very inter-
esting manner how completely astro-
nomical phenomena are explained and
brought into harmony by "the theory
of universal gravitation." The second
chart is "An Inductive Table of Optics,"
and in a corresponding way it exem-
plifies the elucidation of luminous phe-
nomena, and the explication of general
optical effects which result from " the
undulatory theory of light." What-
ever may be the imperfection of these
theories, they have fulfilled the pur-
poses of giving rational interpretation
to wide ranges of natural phenomena,
and of guiding the human mind in the
pathway of new discovery by the pow-
er of prediction that they have con-
ferred, and the two theories stand to-
gether as eminent triumphs of physical
reasoning. The name of Newton will
be forever associated with the law of
universal gravitation, and in the same
way Dr. Thomas Young will be im-
mortal as the man whose genius estab-
lished the undulatory theory of light,
and who has hence been very appro-

EDITOR'S TABLE.

841

priately designated as the Newton of
the science of optics.

The optical theory which reigned
in the scientific world until the begin-
ning of the present century was known
as the theory of emission, which as-
sumed that all luminous effects are due
to the darting, rebounding, and deflect-
ing of some kind of material corpuscles
or particles. The idea of vibratory or
undulatory action as the cause of light
was early broached by Huygens and
maintained later by Euler, but was gen-
erally regarded as a crude speculation
without scientific value. Dr. Young,
devoting his great powers to optical
research, soon perceived that the evi-
dence was decisive in favor of the un-
dulatory view ; and, in the case of the
interference of light, he proved that
it affords a complete interpretation of
the effects where the emission theory
wholly breaks down. He developed
his ideas in elaborate papers published
in the "Proceedings of the Royal Soci-
ety," and gave them mature expression
in the Bakerian Lecture of 1802. It
was at once seen by a few discerning
scientific men that the old controversy
between the theories of light was vir-
tually brought to an end. But the old
explanation, long accepted, and sanc-
tioned by the great authority of New-
ton, was, of course, still supreme, while
the new explanation had its way to
make in scientific circles and in the
general mind.

The " Edinburgh Review " now ap-
pears upon the scene. This quarterly
had just been established, and was sup-
ported by a brilliant corps of writers
who attracted wide attention, and gave
to the periodical an extensive and pow-
erful influence. Henry Brougham, af-
terward Lord Chancellor of England,
was among its founders, and was one
of its most versatile and effective writ-
ers, and he had himself dabbled some-
what in optical science. He reviewed
Young's Bakerian Lecture on " The
Theory of Light and Colors,'1 which

appeared in the " Philosophical Trans-
actions," and the article was published
in the first volume of the new Edin-
burgh quarterly issued in 1803. It was
an insulting and malignant attack upon
Dr. Yroung, whom he ridiculed in the
coarsest manner. Mr. Brougham char-
acterized the Bakerian Lecture as worth-
less, and bitterly denounced the authori-
ties of the Royal Society for degrading
science by admitting such foolish specu-
lations into their published proceedings.
The event is so memorable that we shall
be excused for making some quotations
from the article. It opens with these
words: " As this paper contains noth-
ing which deserves the name either of
experiment or discovery, and as it is in
fact destitute of every species of merit,
we should have allowed it to pass among
the multitude of those articles which
must always find admittance into the
collections of a society which is pledged
to publish two or three volumes every
year. . . .

".We wish to raise our feeble voice
against innovations that can have no
other effect than to check the progress
of Science, and renew all those wild
phantoms of the imagination which
Bacon and Newton put to flight from
her temple. . . .

" It is difficult to argue with an au-
thor whose mind is filled with a me-
dium of so fickle a vibratory nature.
Were we to take the trouble to refute
him, he might tell us, ' My opinion is
changed, and I have abandoned that
hypothesis, but here is another for
you.' . . .

" We demand if the world of sci-
ence, which Newton once illuminated, is
to be as changeable in its modes as the
world of taste, which is directed by the
will of a silly woman or a pampered
fop. Has the Royal Society degraded
its publications into new and fashion-
able theories for the ladies who attend
the Royal Institution? Proh pudorf
Let the professor continue to amuse his
audience with an endless variety of

842

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

such harmless trifles ; but in the name
of Science let them not find admittance
into that honorable repository which
contains the works of Newton, Boyle,
Cavendish, and Herschel. . . .

" From such a dull invention noth-
ing can be expected. It only removes
all the difficulties under which the
theory of light labored to the theory
of this new medium which assumes its
place. It is a change of name ; it
teaches no truth, reconciles no contra-
dictions, arranges no anomalous facts,
suggests no new experiments, and leads
to no new inquiries. It has not even
the pitiful merit of affording an agree-
able play of the fancy. It is infinitely
more useless and less ingenious than the
Indian theory of the elephant and the
tortoise. We have a right to demand
that the hypothesis shall be so consist-
ent with itself and so applicable to the
facts as not to require perpetual mend-
ing and patching — that the child which
we stoop to play with shall be tolerably
healthy, and not of the puny, sickly na-
ture of Dr. Young's productions which
have scarcely stamina to subsist until
the fruitful parent has furnished us with
a new litter ; to make way for which,
he knocks on the head or more bar-
barously exposes the first."

This is certainly poor stuff, read in
the light of subsequent history. Of the
man so shamefully vilified by a reck-
less critic, Professor Helmholtz thus
speaks : " His was one of the most pro-
found minds that the world has ever
seen ; but he had the misfortune to be
too much in advance of his age. He
excited the wonder of his contempo-
raries, who, however, were unable to
follow him to the heights at which his
daring intellect was accustomed to soar.
His most important ideas lay, therefore,
buried and forgotten in the folios of the
Koyal Society until a new generation
gradually and painfully made the same
discoveries, and proved the exactness
of his assertions and the truth of his
demonstrations."

Nevertheless, the " Edinburgh Re-
view " had power to extinguish the in-
fluence of this extraordinary genius, and
it was the article from which we have
quoted that did the work. Eubbish as it
now appears, it was accepted as truth,
and the effect was to close the channels
of reply to Dr. Young, and push him
into obscurity as nothing better than
a shallow pretender. As Professor Tyn-
dall remarks : " For twenty years this
man of genius was quenched — hidden
from the appreciative intellect of his
countrymen — deemed, in fact, a dream-
er, through the vigorous audacity of a
writer who had then possession of the
public ear, and who, in the ' Edinburgh
Eeview,' poured ridicule upon Young
and his speculations."

Such was the power of base-mind-
ed criticism at the beginning of the
century; and such the first great ex-
ploit of the " Edinburgh Review " in
relation to the progress of scientific
thought.

Eighty years have since passed away,
but the old Scotch quarterly has learned
nothing. Oblivious of the great changes
that have taken place in the world of
thought, it undertakes to repeat upon
Herbert Spencer the tactics which
proved so effectual in suppressing the
greatest scientific man of the opening
century. It will fail, and not only this,
but the absurd anomaly of its action
will be certain to defeat the end it
proposes to accomplish. There could
hardly be a greater compliment to the
work of Spencer than that the "Edin-
burgh Review " should at this time have
printed so incompetent and ridiculous
an assault upon it.

The reviewer entitles his article
"The Spencerian Philosophy," but it
is false to its title in that it makes not
the slightest attempt to deal with that
philosophy. It shows no appreciation
of it, and conveys no shadow of an idea
of its real character. The discussion is
confined to " First Principles," the open-
ing volume of the philosophical sys-

EDITOR'S TABLE.

843

tern, which was published twenty-two
years ago, and the article is character-
ized throughout by the most inexcus-
able ignorance of the subjects consid-
ered. It is spiteful, contemptuous, and
flippant in spirit, vicious in misrepre-
sentation, and mean in its covert in-
sinuations and outright imputations.
Brougham's assault upon Young is its
model, and the phraseology of dispar-
agement is almost identical in the two
papers, as we illustrate by italicized pas-
sages. The reviewer says of Spencer:
" He has not ascertained or discovered
a single new fact, nor put any old ones
together in such a way as to justify any
new inference as to their causes, either
immediate or ultimate. He has only
applied new and fanciful terms to the
collections he has made." And this is
the way he sums the matter up : "This
is nothing but a philosophy of epithets
and phrases introduced and carried on
with an unrivaled solemnity, and affec-
tation of precision of style concealing
the loosest reasoning, and the haziest
indefiniteness on every point except the
bare dogmatic negation of any ' know-
able' or knowing author of the uni-
verse ; which, of course, is the reason
why this absurd pretense of a philoso-
phy has obtained the admiration of a
multitude of people who will swallow
any camel that pretends to carry the
world standing on the tortoise that
stands on nothing, provided only it has
been generated by a man out of his
own brains, and asserted in imposing
language with sufficient confidence."
The philosophy of the universe, it may
be remarked, which is tacitly held by
the writer, is simply mathematics and
physics plus Scotch orthodoxy.

We have no space to go into par-
ticulars in regard to this performance,
but may give one illustration of its
looseness and lack of decent regard for
truth. Its fragmentary quotations are
made in the most slovenly manner, and
mixed up with the language of the
writer so as to convey his own pervert-

ed meaning; and, as if conscious of this,
he seems to think it necessary to make
at least one fair extract. So he says :
"This time we will not omit a word
for brevity. We ought to give at
least one specimen of Mr. Spencer's
most careful and precise style unre-
duced." Then follows an extract of
eighteen lines, and, if the reader will
believe it, the passage was reduced oy
the dropping of whole clauses, which
were not only significant, but made the
entire statement unintelligible. And if
the reader hesitates to believe this on
our authority, as too improbable a
thing, then let us say that Mr. Proc-
tor has exposed it in his London jour-
nal, and convicted the reviewer of mu-
tilation by publishing the extract, with
the omissions bracketed.

The " Edinburgh Review " will not
succeed at this late day in the revival
of its old tactics. Its " slashing " article
will be rated at its true worthlessness
because there are now multitudes who
have some intelligent understanding of
the Spencerian philosophy, even if the
chosen reviewer knows nothing about
it, cares nothing about it, and only
takes it up to make a sensational cari-
cature of it. In confirmation of this,
we quote a passage from a recent letter
of Mr. Richard A. Proctor to the " New
York Tribune " :

The " Edinburgh Keview" makes a savage
assault on Herbert Spencer this quarter, in
an article written in a style so familiar that it
might as well have been signed. Those who
admire the work which has already been
achieved and is in progress of achievement
hy the leading philosopher of the centuiy,
"will be scarcely less pained by this unfair and
acrimonious attack than those who have a re-
gard for the reputation of Sir Edmund Beck-
ett. Sir Edmund has attacked the Bacon of
this day in terms that would be hardly ap-
propriate if applied to one of those absurd
persons who go about with theories that the
earth is flat, the law of gravity a gigantic
blunder, and the squaring of the circle child's
play. Belonging myself to both categories
above mentioned, I am doubly grieved. I
value Sir Edmund Beckett as a kind personal
friend, a masterly reasoner within certain

844

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

lines, and one of the most skillful advo-
cates, whether of a good or of a mistaken
cause, that I have ever met. Herbert Spencer
I esteem, I may almost say reverence, as the
teacher of the soundest system of philosophy
the world has yet, in my judgment, known.
That a man whose researches reach so widely
should at times fall into error in matters of
detail may be readily admitted. Only a few
weeks ago I pointed out in the pages of my
weekly journal, "Knowledge," what I hold
to be an entirely erroneous view of Herbert
Spencer's respecting the probable origin of
the system of asteroids. Yet even in matters
of detail belonging to the work of specialists
he has been singularly clear-sighted. He first
pointed out the fallacies underlying the long-
accepted teaching respecting the stellar sys-
tem, star-clusters, nebulas, etc., which men
like Arago and Humboldt had dealt with
without detecting error. In every depart-
ment of science, in fact, though a specialist
in none, Herbert Spencer has left his mark.

The attack in the "Edinburgh Keview"
leaves Spencer's fame untouched. It is evi-
dent in every line of this sour production that
the enmity which Sir Edmund Beckett has
always felt and expressed toward the teach-
ings of the school of which Spencer has been
the Bacon, the Darwin, and the Newton, has
made it impossible for him to read with even
average attention the work which he pretends
to criticise. He has not caught the veriest
glimmer of a notion of Mr. Spencer's real
meaning. From the only passage which he
claims to quote entire he has allowed several
important words to drop — by accident doubt-
less, but yet not by mere accident in tran-
scribing what he had already carefully read
and understood ; for the reasoning which fol-
lows falls to the ground so soon as the omit-
ted words are restored.

Let one example suffice to show how ut-
terly Sir Edmund Beckett either has missed
or misrepresents the meaning of the famous
contemporary whom he assaults. Herbert
Spencer, speaking of the Great First Cause,
transcending all laws, Absolute, Uncondi-
tional, says that we only perceive It, can only
recognize It, by the persistence of force which,
as it were, symbolizes It. Sir Edmund re-
gards this as equivalent to saying that the
Great First Cause is nothing else but persist-
ent Force. Beckett rebukes Spencer for speak-
ing of the " laws of motion " as the results of
experience, saying that Newton regarded them
as self-evident. He must have forgotten New-
ton's " Principia," where these laws are pre-
sented by Newton as now spoken by Spen-
cer.

LITERARY NOTICES.

Hand-Book of Sanitary Information for
Householders, containing Facts and Sug-
gestions about Ventilation, Drainage,
Care of Contagious Diseases, Disinfec-
tion, Food, and Water. With Appen-
dices on Disinfectants and Plumbers'
Materials. By Roger S. Tracy, M. D.,
Sanitary Inspector of the New York City
Health Department. New York : D. Ap-
pleton & Co. Pp. 110. Price, 50 cents.

There are now but few persons who
have the hardihood to say that hygienic
knowledge, or information concerning the
preservation of health, is without value.
But if it have any value whatever for its
purpose, then is it of very great importance,
for the maintenance of health and life is
the supremest earthly interest. It may of
course be said that our fathers got along:
very well without all this bother about ven-
tilation, drainage, and other hygienic mat-
ters, but this is only an apology for igno-
rance, or a plea for indolence. Through the
whole history of the world, and everywhere,
long life and vigorous health have been de-
pendent upon the necessary conditions, and,
where these have been wanting, feebleness,
invalidism, severe sickness, premature death,
and the destruction of countless thousands
by pestilence, have been the results. In the
ignorant ages — the theological ages, when
the phenomena of sickness and death were
accounted for by the providence of God,
against which it was in vain to strive — little
was known of the real causes of disease,
and it was therefore a subject that attracted
but slight attention either privately or pub-
licly. But in this more scientific age, de-
voted so assiduously to the extension and
diffusion of knowledge, men are beginning
to feel the importance of a better under-
standing of those physical conditions and
physiological laws upon which health is de-
pendent, and there is, of course, a good deal
said about their urgency, and the need of
reducing them to practical application. Ig-
norant and stupid people, and often excel-
lent and pious people, are no doubt much
bored by all this modern hygienic agitation,
but in the happy order of the world this class
of persons are certain to be gradually got
out of the way, and they are to be replaced
by others who will regard these subjects as
not only of the first importance, but full of

LITERARY NOTICES.

845

the liveliest interest. A good sanitary edu-
cation involves a very considerable under-
standing of the method of Nature.

We heartily -welcome, therefore, the in-
creasing hygienic literature of the age, and
are glad to see that the best minds are de-
voting themselves to it, and giving the pub-
lic the results in various forms of their seri-
ous and careful studies. The little volume
now before us is a timely and most valu-
able contribution to the subject in its prac-
tical, every-day aspects for the use of house-
holders. First of all, it is a careful and
trustworthy book by a thoroughly prepared
man, who has had large experience of hy-
gienic subjects as Sanitary Inspector of the
New York City Health Department. It has
been Dr. Tracy's business to apply sanitary
science to the art of living under our pres-
ent domestic constructions and arrange-
ments. He has had to meet actual difficulties
that arise from the influence of bad air, bad
sewerage, bad drainage, bad house-construc-
tion, bad precautions respecting infectious
diseases, bad food, bad water, and bad
plumbing. It seemed to him that there was
needed a little book simply of facts and re-
sults, free from theory, discussion, or specu-
lation, and written in the plainest style, that
would serve for every-day guidance in rela-
tion to all these sanitary subjects. It is
full of brief rules and directions, and useful
information regarding sanitary contrivances,
how they are to be obtained and what they
cost, and from this point of view it may be
regarded a3 a practical summing up of the
most urgent requirements, the best facilities,
and the clearest directions, that will be of
service every day and to everybody. We
have read the book with care, and can rec-
ommend it, without hesitation or qualifica-
tion, as one that should be kept for constant
reference in every house.

INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC SEEIES.

The Concepts and Theories op Modern
Physics. Second edition, revised ; with
an Introductory Essay. By J. B. Stallo.
New York : D.Appleton & Co. Pp. 358.
Price, $1.75.

The first edition, and a pretty large one,
of this profound work was exhausted some
time ago, which speaks well for the interest
of American readers in the thorough discus-
sion of the fundamental ideas that are at the

basis of science and philosophy. The con-
tinued demand for the work making neces-
sary a second edition, the author has sub-
jected the text to a close revision, and pre-
fixed to it a masterly introduction of forty-
four pages. He here avails himself of the
criticisms passed upon the work, both in
this country and abroad (where several edi-
tions of it have also appeared), to restate
the purpose of the volume, which has been
a good deal misunderstood, and to reply to
such objections as seemed to require atten-
tion. The effect of this lucid and brilliant
discussion will be to greatly facilitate the
general apprehension, and to enhance the
interest of the work to those who take it up
for the first time.

In our review of Judge Stallo's book
upon its first appearance, we pointed out
that it is a philosophical study of the rela-
tions of metaphysics to physics, designed to
show that many of the leading physicists of
the age are by no means as far emancipated
from old metaphysical influences as it is
customary to believe. He attacks some of
the fundamental ideas of modern physics as
being strictly metaphysical assumptions, and
shows historically how they have survived,
and performed their old duties in new rela-
tions. But the book was construed as an
onslaught upon the foundations of modern
physics in the interests of a bad metaphys-
ics, and the author was called upon to offer
his substitutes for the fundamental doctrines
he aimed to sweep away. We quote some
passages from the new introduction, which
leave no room for further misunderstand-

ing:

The misapprehension I speak of is very surpris-
ing, in view of the explicit declaration, contained in
the very first sentence of my preface, that the book
is " designed as a contribution not to physics, nor
certainly to metaphysics, but to the theory of cog-
nition." Notwithstanding this declaration, most of
my critics assume it to be my purpose to expose the
short-comings and defects of particular theories a9
devices for the colligation of facts, or as instruments
of research, and suppose that my endeavor is sim-
ply, as one of my critics expresses it, "to pick
flaws in these theories," or, in the language of an-
other critic, " to classify and develop contradic-
tions " between them, to " set facts by the ears,"
and " bump friendly heads together " — in short, in
the spirit of a sort of scientific pyrrhonism, to dis-
credit the familiar methods of physical science, if
not to invalidate its results. And they complain
that I fail to apprehend what one of them is pleased
to term the "laboratory function" of a physical

846

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

theory or hypothesis, and to appreciate the distinc-
tion between a " working hypothesis " and a theory
advanced with the claim of its final validity or
truth.

Now, the fact is, that for the purposes of the in-
quiry to which my book i3 devoted, I am not di-
rectly concerned with the "'laboratory function" of
"working hypotheses" or physical thories at all.
My object is to consider current physical theories
and the assumptions which underlie them in the
light of the modern theory of cognition — a theory
which has taken its rise in very recent times, and is
founded upon the investigation, by scientific meth-
ods analogous to those employed in the physical sci-
ences, of the laws governing the evolution of thought
and speech. Among the important truths devel-
oped by the sciences of comparative linguistics and
psychology are such as these : that the thoughts of
men at any particular period are limited and con-
trolled by the forms of their expression, viz., by lan-
guage (using this term in its most comprehensive
sense) ; that the language spoken and " thought in "
by a given generation is to a certain extent a record
of the intellectual activity of preceding generations,
and thus embodies and serves to perpetuate its er-
rors as well as its truths ; that this is the fact hint-
ed at, if not accurately expressed, in the old obser-
vation according to which every distinct form or
6ystem of speech involves a distinct metaphysical
theory ; that the metaphysical systems in vogue at
any particular epoch, despite their apparent differ-
ences and antagonisms, on proper analysis are found
to be characterized by certain common features in
which the latent metaphysics of the language in
which such systems have originated, or are pre-
sented, are brought to view ; that philosophers as
well as ordinary men are subject to the thralldom of
the intellectual prepossessions embodied in their
speech as well as in the other inherited forms of
their mental and physical organizations, and are un-
able to emancipate themselves from this thralldom
otherwise than by slow and gradual advances, in
conformity to the law of continuity which governs
all processes of evolution whatever. It being my
belief that all this applies to the votaries of science
as well as to the devotees of metaphysics or ontology,
I sought to enforce this belief by an examination of
the general concepts and theories of modern phys-
ics. According to the opinion of contemporary men
of science, these concepts and theories are simply
generalizations of the data of experience, and are
thus not only independent of the old a priori no-
tions of metaphysics, but destructive of them. But,
although the founders of modern physical science at
the outset of their labors were animated by a spirit
of declared hostility to the teachings of mediaeval
scholasticism— a fact which is nowhere more con-
spicuous than in the writings of Descartes — never-
theless, when they entered upon the theoretical dis-
cussion of the results of their experiments and ob-
servations, they unconsciously proceeded upon the
old assumptions of the very ontology which they
openly repudiated. That ontology— founded upon
the inveterate habit of searching for M essences ' by
the interpretation of words and the analysis of the
concepts underlying them, before the relations of
■words to thoughts and of thoughts to things were
properly understood — was characterized by three

great errors : its hypostasis of concepts (notwith-
standing the protest of the nominalists against the
reification of universals) ; its disregard of the two-
fold relativity of all physical phenomena ; and its
confusion of the order of intellectual apprehension
with the order of Nature. These errors gave rise to
a number of cardinal doctrines respecting the "sub-
stance of things," among which were the assertion
of its existence as a distinct thing or real entity,
apart from its properties ; the further assertion of
its absolute permanence and immutability ; and,
finally, the assertion of the absolute solidity and in-
ertia of its parts and their incapacity to act upon
each other otherwise than by contact. And all these
doctrines he at the base, not only of Cartesian phys-
ics and metaphysics, but of the scientific creed of
the great majority of the physicists of the present
day. The eminent physicist and physiologist who
declares that "before the differential equations of
the world-formula could be formed" (i.e., before
the ultimate, true, and exhaustive theory of the uni-
verse could be constructed), "all processes of Nature
must be reduced to the motions of a substratum sub-
stantially homogeneous, and therefore totally desti-
tute of quality, of that which appears to us as het-
erogeneous matter — in other words, all quality must
be explained by the arrangement and motion of such
a substratum,1' and the equally distinguished physi-
cist and mathematician who enters upon the at-
tempt at a solution of the problem thus stated by
endeavoring to deduce the phenomenal diversities
and changes of the universe from imaginary vortical
motions of the undistinguishable parts of an as-
sumed universal, homogeneous, continuous, and in-
compressible fluid, are both as truly instinct with
the spirit of the old scientia ends quatenus entis
as the most ardent disciple of the Stagirite in the
times of Erigena or Aquinas. The physicist who in-
sists upon impact theories of gravitation, cohesion,
or chemical affinity, has the same intellectual blood
in his veins which coursed in those of the old dis-
putants about " first matter " or " substantial
forms." When the Professor of Physics in the
University of Edinburgh teaches that matter is ab-
solutely passive, dead, that all physical action is
action by contact, that nothing is real which is not
indestructible, etc., he stands as unmistakably upon
scholastic ontological ground as did Descartes or
any cf his ecclesiastical contemporaries. The prop-
osition of the modern kinematist, that the true ex-
planation of the phenomena of heat, light, electricity,
magnetism, etc., consists in their reduction to the
elements of matter and motion, differs in little else
than its phraseology from the metaphysical theorem
that all the " secondary qualities " of the universal
substance are mere specifications or derivatives of
its " primary qualities."

Aboriginal American Authors and their
Productions ; especially those in the
Native Languages. By Daniel G. Brin-
ton. Philadelphia: 115 South Seventh
Street. Pp. 63. Price, $1.
The present memoir is an enlargement
of a paper which the author presented to the
International Conference of Americanists at

LITERARY NOTICES.

847

its last meeting in Copenhagen, in August,
18S3. In it Dr. Brinton shows that the na-
tive Americans had a literary faculty, which
is indicated by a vivid imagination, a love
of narration, and an ample, appropriate, and
logically developed vocabulary. They have
left behind them a creditable literature of
considerable extent which would have been
larger, but much of it was wantonly de-
stroyed by their self-styled civilized con-
querors. They wrote in their own language,
in Spanish, and in Latin, narrative, didac-
tic, and oratorical works, poems, and dra-
mas, the general character of which is brief-
ly sketched and a partial list given. The
Northern Indians are less fully represented
in this literature than the Mexican and South
American.

Cassell's Family Magazine, American edi-
tion. January and February, 1884. New
York: Cassell & Co., Limited. Pp. 64
each. Price, 15 cents a number ; $1.50
per year.

" Cassell's Magazine" is conducted with
reference to the taste3 of the family, and is
designed to furnish that which will profit as
well as amuse. Well-selected fiction is pro-
vided, in serial stories as well as in those
that are completed in one number ; and in
addition to this are given, regularly, papers
on " Household Management," " Domestic
Cookery," " Gardening," " Education and
Recreation," the " Family Doctor's Papers " ;
a department for the discussion of social
questions of the day, papers on remunera-
tive employment for women, records of use-
ful inventions and discoveries, and numer-
ous illustrations.

Natural Philosophy. By Isaac Sharp-
less, Sc. D., and G. M. Philips, A. M.
Philadelphia : J. B. Lippincott & Co.
1884. Pp. 350.

So many text-books on natural philoso-
phy have appeared within the past few years
that the teacher of to-day is embarrassed by
the surplus of riches. In most of these an
effort may be observed to introduce the only
true method, that of personal experimenta-
tion. Many difficulties remain to be over-
come, and the task is not an easy one. Al-
though the authors state in their introduc-
tion that this treatise differs from others in
the large number of practical experiments

and exercises which it contains, we are some-
what disappointed at the small number of
novel and simple experiments adapted to
the average school-room, while more diffi-
cult and dangerous experiments are given in
detail, such as the preparation of cyanide of
silver from a silver coin for electro-plating.
In other cases there is a lack of fullness, as
for example, under electrolysis of water no
mention is made of the kind or size of bat-
tery required ; under electrophorus the com-
position of the rosin-cake is not given, and
the pupil is led to infer that it is pure rosin.
Neither the Holtz nor Windhurst electrical
machines is pictured and described, but the
old cylindrical machine takes their place.
The Morse registering apparatus is illus-
trated instead of the sounder actually in use,
and the duplex, quadruplex, and ocean-cable
systems are referred to in a manner neither
satisfying nor instructive. Notwithstanding
these obvious defects, there is much to
recommend the book as quite equal to the
average text-books on this subject, and in
some respects it is an improvement on
them. The illustrations are excellent, the
type clear, and the paper good.

Transactions of the American Dermato-
logical Association at the Seventh An-
nual Meeting, August, 1883. By Dr.
Arthur Van Harlingen. Baltimore :
Thomas & Evans. Pp. 49.

The pamphlet contains the official report
of the proceedings of the Association, with
abstracts of the papers read, a list of publi-
cations and writings of members of the As-
sociation during the year ending in July,
1883, and a statistical report of cases treat-
ed.

The "Winter Resorts of Florida, South
Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, California,
Mexico, and Cuba. By John Temple
Graves. Published by the Passenger
Deparment of the Savannah, Florida, and
Western Railway Company. Pp. 103,
with Maps and Illustrations.

An attractive and popular guide-book to
a whole region of health resorts and winter
residences that are every year attracting
more attention. It furnishes brief descrip-
tions of the points of interest to the tourist,
invalid, immigrant, or sportsman, and of the
way to reach them.

848

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

God and the State. By Michael Bakou-
nine, Founder of Nihilism and Apostle
of Anarchy. Translated by Benjamin R.
Tucker. Boston : Benjamin R. Tucker.
Pp. 52. 15 cts.

The name of the author of this pam-
phlet ought to give a sufficient indication of
its character. His apostleship of anarchy
appears to have been as active in a reli-
gious as in a social and political aspect. We
are informed that the work "contains an
attack upon the theistic idea from a new
stand-point, which, if successful, will result
in tremendous consequences." It is certainly
of interest to the student of mental phenom-
ena, and of the order of social movements
of which the author is a most conspicuous
representative. A preface is furnished by
Carlo Cafiero and Elisee Reclus.

Popular Essays on the Movements of the
Atmosphere. By Professor William Fer-
rel. Washington: Government Print-
ing-Office. Pp. 59.

The papers that make up this volume
were originally published in the " Nashville
Journal of Medicine and Surgery," "The
American Journal of Science," and "Na-
ture." They relate to the winds and cur-
rents of the ocean; the motions of fluids
and solids relative to the earth's surface ;
the cause of low barometer in the polar re-
gions and in the central part of cyclones ;
the relation between the barometric gra-
dient and the velocity of the wind ; and re-
searches on cyclones, tornadoes, and water-
spouts.

Elementary Botany, with Student's Guide
to the Examination and Description of
Plants. By George Macloskie, D. Sc,
LL. D., Professor of Natural History in
the J. C. Green School of Science, Prince-
ton, N. J., and Medalist of Queen's and
London Universities. New York : Henry
Holt & Co. 1883.

Macloskie's " Botany " is a marked de-
parture from our cherished models of botan-
ical text-books, and we confess that it has
taken considerable time for us to get accus-
tomed to its novelty. It is a wholly modern
work, and conforms to the revolution of
method that followed the translation of
" Sachs's Botany," from the German. The
body of the book, which is devoted to the
general principles of the science, is unusu-

ally free from the technicalities of text-
books. The treatment is very fresh and
interesting, and in his aim to supply a read-
able sketch of botany the author has well
succeeded.

As a "guide to work in the field and
laboratory," if supplemented by the further
guidance of the master, the work will no
doubt prove a success ; but as a manual for
private study it strikes us as unattractive
and unsatisfactory. But such a use of it
was probably not in the author's mind in its
preparation.

Many people will object to Macloskie's
innovations in descriptive botany. If any-
thing in science is firmly settled it is thought
that botanical technology might make the
claim. But our author has not scrupled to
alter and amend its time-honored usages;
yet, if improvement be a sufficient war-
rant for change, we suspect that he can jus-
tify himself. He has certainly gained in
brevity, if not in greater precision of state-
ment, by which beginners in the study will
be gainers. Old botanists, however, will be
slow to adopt the new terms. We cordially
commend the volume to that large class of
readers who wish to know something of the
fundamental principles and philosophical
bearings of this important science.

The Sun changes its Position in Space,
therefore it can not be regarded as
being " in a Condition of Rest." By
August Tischner. Leipsic: Gustav
Fock. Pp. 37.

The obvious truth expressed in the title
is used as a basis of attack upon the ade-
quacy of the received theories of astrono-
my. " The smallest movement of the sun,"
says the author, "overthrows the entire
fabric of Copernicus." If the sun is mov-
ing, the orbits traversed by the planets can
not be closed ; and the astronomical dictum
that, with reference to the planets, we may
regard the sun as being in a state of rest,
involves absurdity, for it assumes a motion
which is at rest.

A Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Edited by George Grove, D. C. L. Parts
XVII and XVIII. London and New
York : Macmillan & Co. Pp. 240. $2.
The present double part of the " Diction-
ary " contains the titles from "Sketches"
to " Sumer is icumen in," with the title-page

LITERARY NOTICES.

849

and a list of contributions to Volume III.
The article in the midst of which the part
opens, on " Sketches," is one of great inter-
est, and is liberally illustrated with musical
citations. " The Sonata " is fully consid-
ered. Forty-eight pages are given to the sub-
ject of " Song," which is treated historically
and systematically with reference to the
characteristic features of the songs of differ-
ent nationalities. The work appears des-
tined to be one that no musician will be will-
ing to be without.

Evolution : A Summary of Evidence. By
Robert C. Adams. New York : G. P.
Putnam's Sons. Pp. 44.

This paper is the substance of a lecture
delivered in Montreal, in which the evidence
in favor of the doctrine of evolution is re-
viewed and stated in brief in a very clear
and forcible manner. Concerning the orders
of life, the author shows that animals and
plants appear as they would have done if
one race sprang from another; that each
being does spring from (embryonic) forms
common to the races below it ; and that life
has appeared on the earth in the order that
it would have done if each higher race had
been developed from a lower one. Brief
consideration is also given to the evolution
of mind and of the universe as postulated
by the nebular hypothesis ; and, finally, the
author, admitting that evolution does not
solve all the mystery of life, asserts that it
does not either question the existence of
God, but "only concerns itself as to the
manner in which the Supreme Power works,
and claims that it acts through natural law,
and not through miracle.

Lessons in Qualitative Chemical Analy-
sis. By Dr. F. Beilstein. Translated,
with Copious Additions, by Charles 0.
Curtman, M. D. St. Louis Stationerv
and Book Co. 1883. Pp. 164, and Thir-
teen Woodcuts. Price, $1.50.

Dr. Beilstein's little work is the text-
book in several German and Russian uni-
versities, and more than one English trans-
lation has already appeared in this country.
The present translation differs essentially
from the previous ones in the amount of
new matter added. The short introduction
on chemical manipulations will prove valu-
able to the student who is working alone or

vol. xxiv. — 54

in laboratories imperfectly supplied with in-
structors, and in any case saves a great deal
of oral teaching and demonstration. Next
follow the special examples of the original
with several additional ones, but rearranged
so as to place the reactions for bases and
acids under separate headings, and elimi-
nating those which require too long a time
in preparation. A new chapter is then in-
troduced to serve as a guide in the various
practical examinations during the course.
An excellent table of spectra accompanies
the book, with a chapter on the use of the
spectroscope. Directions are also given for
the detection of a few organic substances
such as alcohol, chloroform, glucose, phenol,
and the alkaloids. The book closes with a
j chapter of thirty- eight pages on volumetric
1 analysis, in which very full directions are
given for preparing test solutions, with de-
I scription of apparatus employed. The course
1 embraced in Dr. Curtman's book is sufficient
: for physicians and others who do not intend
i to become chemists, while it is a useful in-
I troduction to a more thorough course for the
latter.

A Manual of Chemistry, Physical and In-
organic. By Henry Watts, B. A., F.
R. S. Philadelphia: P. Blakiston, Son
& Co. 1884. Pp. 595.

The name of Watts is already familiar
to the chemists of all countries, not only as
the author of the only complete dictionary
of chemistry in the English language, but
also as the editor of the leading English
journals of that science, " The Chemical
News" and the "Journal of the London
Chemical Society." In 1868 Mr. Watts
revised Fowne's well-known "Manual of
Chemistry," and from time to time new edi-
tions of that work have appeared under his
editorial care. The book continued to in-
crease in size until it became necessary to
divide it into two volumes, the one contain-
ing the inorganic and physical portion, the
other being devoted to organic chemistry.
The work before us is but a new edition of
the first volume of Fownes's, having the same
ancient woodcuts, and in most cases the
same matter accompanies them. We notice,
however, new cuts of a Holtz machine and
a Ruhmkorff's coil, but none of any modern
dynamo, although the obsolete cylinder ma-
chine is still paraded before the reader. In

850

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

matters more intimately associated with the
chemical laboratory there is less to criticise.
Sprengel's air-pump is illustrated and de-
scribed (Bunsen's modification is not) ; the
modern methods of determining vapor den-
sities, devised by Ilofmann and Victor Meyer,
are illustrated and explained. The theoreti-
cal portions have been mostly rewritten, and
many improvements are noticed. The order
of studying the non-metals has been changed
so that the halogens precede oxygen and
other dyads. The metals are grouped in
their natural order, so that silver no longer
finds itself in the same box with sodium, as
it did in the artificial grouping according to
quantivalence adopted in previous editions.

Abstract of Report on the Geology of
the Eureka District, Nevada. By
Arnold Hague. Washington: Gov-
ernment Printing-Office. Pp. 48, with
Map and Sections.

The Eureka District embraces a region
about twenty miles square, situated on the
Nevada Plateau, in Central Nevada, midway
between the basins of Lake Lahontan and
Lake Bonneville. It is doubtful, in the
opinion of Mr. Hague, if there is any region
of equally restricted area in the Great
Basin that surpasses it in its grand expos-
ures of palaeozoic formations, especially of
the lower and middle portions of the series.
It also possesses a great economic interest
as the seat of an active mining industry,
and has been, moreover, the center of in-
tense volcanic action. It is therefore se-
lected for a more careful survey and study
than had heretofore been given to any re-
gion of sedimentary rocks in Nevada. The
results of this survey and study are recorded
in the present memoir.

United States Geological Survey. Sec-
ond Annual Report, 1«80-'81. Pp. 588,
with 61 Plates; Third Annual Report,
1881-'82. Pp. 564, with 32 Plates. By
J. W. Powell, Director. Washington :
Government Printing-Office.

Many of the special papers included in
the second volume of the report have al-
ready been noticed in the " Monthly," as
monographs. The whole list includes Cap-
tain Dutton's " Tertiary nistory of the
Grand Canon District," Mr. Gilbert's " His-
tory of Lake Bonneville," Mr. Hague's
11 Geology of the Eureka District,"" Mr. S.

F.Emmons's "Geology of Leadville," Mr.
G. F. Becker's " Geology of the Comstock
Lode," Professor Pumpelly's "Statistics of
Coal and Iron," Dr. Irving's Copper-bear-
ing Rocks of Lake Superior," Mr. Clarence
King's " Precious Metal Statistics," Mr.
Eliot Lord's " History of the Comstock
Lode," and Mr. G. K. Gilbert's " New Meth-
od of Hypsometry." The other volume
(third report) contains papers on " Birds
with Teeth," by Professor 0. C. Marsh;
" The Copper-bearing Rocks of Lake Supe-
rior," by Roland D. Irving ; the " Geologi-
cal History of Lake Lahontan," by Israel C.
Russell ; " The Geology of the Eureka Dis-
trict, Nevada," by Arnold Hague ; a pre-
liminary paper " On the Terminal Moraine
of the Second Glacial Epoch," by Thomas
C. Chamberlin ; and " A Review of the
Non-Marine Fossil Mollusca of North Ameri-
ca," by Dr. C. A. White.

The Natural Genesis. By Gerald Mas-
sey. New York : Scribner & Welford.
2 vols. Pp. 552 and 535.

Mr. Massey has given his critics a hard
task to perform. He states that Mr. Alfred
Russel Wallace, having read the previous
volumes of his scries, expressed the fear
that there might not be a score of people in
England who were prepared by their pre-
vious education to understand the book ;
and he intimates that few of its review-
ers could be included among that number.
Herr Pietschmann, a German Egyptologist,
was startled by the " unheard-of sugges-
tions " the book contained, and thought it
was " inspired by an unrestrained lust for
discovery." " The Natural Genesis " is the
second part of " A Book of the Beginnings,"
of which two volumes had previously been
published, the whole containing "an at-
tempt to recover and reconstitute the lost
origins of the myths and mysteries, types
and symbols, religion and language, with
Egypt for the mouth-piece and Africa as
the birthplace." It is written " by an evo-
lutionist for evolutionists," is intended to
trace the natural origins and teach the doc-
trine of development, and is based upon the
new matter supplied by the ancient monu-
ments. The predominant argument of the
book is, that Africa and not Asia was the
birthplace of articulate man, and therefore
the primordial home of all things human;

LITERARY NOTICES.

851

and that the human race and human develop-
ment started from the interior of the dark
continent, and went out down the Nile and
through Egypt, confessedly the oldest civil-
ized nation, to all the quarters of the earth.
As a corollary to this, all customs, all
myths, all civilization, all speech, and all re-
ligion, had their origin in Egypt, and are
traceable directly back there. Another corol-
lary is that all the sociological science and
comparative philology that have been built
up on the theory of a primitive Aryan race
and civilization and language are idle specu-
lations, except as these Aryan institutions
are admitted to be children of the Egyptians.
The Christian religion also suffers at Mr.
Massey's hands ; for this work, to use his
own language, " culminates in tracing the
transformation of astronomical mythology
into the system of equinoctial Christology
called Christianity, and demonstrating the
non-historic nature of the canonical gospels
by means of the original myths in which
the Messianic mystery, the Virgin mother-
hood, the incarnation and birth, the miracu-
lous life and character, the crucifixion and
resurrection of the Saviour Son, who was
the Word of all ages, were altogether alle-
gorical." Having devoted a dozen years ex-
clusively to his work, Mr. Massey has been
able to bring to his aid a vast amount of
learning, and has used it with considerable
ingenuity. His text abounds with interest-
ing facts and citations not to be found
elsewhere in a whole library, and with skill-
ful applications. If his conclusions do not
carry conviction, it is not for lack of bravery
and address on the part of their champion.

On the Contents of a Bone-Cave in the
Island of Anguilla (West Indies).
Bv Edward D. Cope. Washington:
Smithsonian Institution. Pp. 30, with
Five Plates.

Attention was first called to the inter-
esting bone-deposit described in this memoir
in 1868, when a load of the cave-earth was
brought to Philadelphia as a fertilizing ma-
terial, and the bones were examined by
Professor Cope. Together with the bones
was found a chisel of human manufacture,
made from a shell. The quantity of ani-
mal remains in the deposit and their dimen-
sions point to the former existence of a
more extensive and larger fauna than the

island as it now stands could have supported.
This fact is regarded as confirmatory of the
hypothesis that the Antilles were once con-
nected by ranges which have been sub-
merged since Pliocene times. In the light
of these facts, Professor Cope claims that
the study is of importance, because it is the
first investigation of the life of the cave age
in the West Indies ; because it gives the
first reliable indication of the period of the
submergence by which the islands were
separated ; because it furnishes the first
evidence as to the antiquity of man there ;
and because it describes some peculiar forms
of life not previously known.

Cruise of the Revenue Steamer Corwin
in Alaska and the Northwest Arctic
Ocean, in 1881. Notes and Memoranda.

Washington

Government Printing-of-

fice. Pp. 120.

The notes include a very interesting
paper by Dr. Irving C. Rosse, on the medi-
cal features of the expedition, with anthro-
pological memoranda respecting the Esqui-
maux, and the effects of the Arctic climate
on the members of the expedition and the
natives ; botanical observations, by Mr. John
Muir ; description of the birds of Behring
Sea and the Arctic Ocean, by E. W. Nel-
son ; and a list of fishes, by Tarleton n.
Bean. The text is illustrated with heliotype
and colored lithographic plates.

Report on the Otster-Beds of the James
River, Virginia, and of Tangier and
Pocomoke Sounds, Maryland and Vir-
ginia. 1881. By Francis Winslow,
U. S. N. Washington: Government
Printing-Office. Pp. 87, with Plates.

This monograph is one of the series of
" Methods and Results " of the United States
Coast and Geodetic Survey. In it, Captain
Winslow presents the results of an inves-
tigation which he was ordered in 1878 to
make with the schooner Palinurus, and
which should include the determination of
the positions and areas of the oyster-beds
and the depth of water over them, at both
high and low water; the determination of
the character of the beds, whether natural
or artificial, and how the oysters were dis-
tributed ; the determination of the tempera-
tures of the surface and bottom water, and
the velocity of currents ; the preservation
of specimens of oysters ; the determination

852

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

of the characters of bottoms and of the ex-
istence of any sediment or deposit ; of the
sources of sediment and the means of turn-
ing it away; the examination of the effects
of ice on the beds ; and the determination
of the density of the water, with special ref-
erence to the displacement of salt water by
fresh water from adjacent streams and riv-
ers. The plan of the work was to make
the investigation exhaustive over a limited
area, and extend it afterward as circum-
stances should permit. The results are
given in the present memoir.

Explosive Materials. By M. P. E. Ber-
thelot. Translated from the French by
Marcus Benjamin. New York : D. Van
Nostrand. (Science Series.) 1883. Pp.
180. Price, 50 cents.

In these lectures M. Berthelot has
summed up the results of his researches upon
explosives, and indicated the theory of their
action which they seem to him to warrant.
He is mainly concerned in considering how
an explosive is set in operation by means
of shock, and reaches the conclusion that in
all cases, whether the explosive influence be
propagated from particle to particle of an
explosive, or from one explosive body to an-
other, not in contact with it, the action con-
sists in the transformation of the energy of
the shock into heat. Before an explosion
can occur, some portion of the substance
must be raised to the temperature necessary
for the chemical reaction between its con-
stituents. That this temperature should be
reached, it is necessary that the impact be
sudden, as otherwise the transformation into
heat will take place so slowly that this heat
will be distributed through too great a mass
of material to raise its temperature to the
requisite point. The explosion of one par-
ticle of the substance produces a sudden
pressure, the energy of which, transformed
into heat, causes the next particle to explode,
and so on, the disturbance being thus prop-
agated through the entire mass of the ex-
plosive. M. Berthelot rejects the synchro-
nous theory of explosions by influence —
where a body is exploded by another at a
distance — of Abel, holding that the theory
of transformation of mechanical energy into
heat, and the retransformation of this into
mechanical energy, is competent to explain
all the phenomena. In discussing the con-

ditions of maximum effect in explosion, he
points out the reason for the extremely low
velocity of propagation of the explosive wave
in gases, obtained by Bunsen, and shows that
this in reality moves with great rapidity.

Mr. Benjamin's translation appears to be
accurate, and, despite occasional roughness,
is fairly well done. The volume contains
also a short historical sketch of gunpowder,
translated from the German of Karl Braun,
and a bibliography of works on explosives.

The Ores of Leadville and their Modes
of Occurrence, as illustrated in the
Morning and Evening Star Mines.
With a Chapter on the Methods of their
Extraction as practiced at those Mines.
By Louis D. Eicketts, B. S., Princeton,
N. J. Pp. 68, with Six Plates.

The author, in order to comply with the
requirements of the W. S. Ward Fellowship
in Economic Geology, in connection with
Princeton College, devoted four months at
Leadville to the study of the ores and their
modes of occurrence, and to the extraction
of the ores in the mines named in the title
we have cited. The result of this study is
given in the present paper, of which the
first part considers the scientific and the
second part the practical side.

J. A. Berly's British, American, and Con-
tinental Electrical Directory and Ad-
vertiser. London : William Dawson
& Sons ; New York : George Cumming,
219 East Eighteenth Street. Pp. 664.
Price, $2.50.

This volume, which embodies a record
of all the industries directly or indirectly
connected with electricity and magnetism,
and the names and addresses of manufac-
turers in England, the United States, Cana-
da, and the European Continent, is a valu-
able book of reference for all persons inter-
ested in electrical art. The increased size
and importance of this, the second edition,
over the volume published a year previously,
which was chiefly limited to England, is one
of many signs of the rapidly expanding de-
velopment of the applications of electricity.
Another similar sign is afforded by the va-
riety of trades — some of them appearing
at first sight only very remotely related to
electricity — that have been included within
its scope. The relation is nevertheless real,
for all these trades have been brought in to

LITERARY NOTICES.

853

comply with some demand. A brief, com-
prehensive record of the progress in the
applications of electricity and of events
illustrating it, during 1882, adds value to
the work. Classified indexes are provided,
and reference is further facilitated by dif-
ferences in the coloring of the leaf-edges of
the several departments.

Recherches sur la Structure de quelques
dlatomees contenues dans le " cement-
stein " du Jutland (Researches on the
Structure of some Diatoms contained in
the " Cementstein " of Jutland). By MM.
W. Prinz and E. Van Ermengen. Brus-
sels: A. Manceaux. Pp. 74, with Four
Plates.

A record of a minute and careful ex-
amination of the curious organic structures
designated, of particular interest to micro-
scopists and students of the Diatomacce.
The authors claim, moreover, a kind of edu-
cational interest and utility for studies of the
class to which this one belongs, because ac-
quaintance with the exact forms of the va-
ried and delicate designs that adorn the si-
liceous envelopes of the microscopic algae
facilitates the. interpretation of similar im-
ages that appear in other microscopic inves-
tigations, and furnishes a safeguard against
the causes of error and illusions to which
microscopists are exposed from the presenta-
tion of figures under their instruments which
do not conform to the reality.

Geological Survey op Alabama. Report
for 1881 and 1882. By Eugene Allen
Smith, Ph. D., State Geologist. Mont-
gomery, Alabama : W. D. Brown & Co.
Pp. 614, with Maps.

The present volume of the reports is
devoted chiefly to an account of the agricult-
ural features of the State. The author was
commissioned to prepare the cotton report of
Alabama in connection with the tenth cen-
sus, and by joining the two works has been
able to make both more complete than he
could have made either separately. Special
attention is given to the descriptions of the
soils, as to the State and by counties, of tim-
ber-trees and other plants, and to cotton pro-
duction. Excellent graphic, colored maps
are inserted, showing the soils, the rainfall
and temperature by the seasons and by the
year, and the percentages of land in differ-
ent parts of the State cultivated in cotton.

First Annual Report on the Injurious and
other Insects of the State of New York.
By J. A. Lintner, State Entomologist.
Albany : Weed, Parsons & Co. Pp. 383.

Dr. Lintner has given a large amount of
information on the subject of his report.
Beginning with an exposition of the impor-
tance of entomological study, he considers
the extent of insect depredations and the
losses from them, particularly in the United
States, the immense number of insects, and
the necessity, for the sake of contending
with them, of acquiring knowledge of their
habits. He then reviews the progress that
has been made in economic entomology,
estimates the value of the various insecti-
cides that have been introduced and of other
remedies for and preventives of insect dep-
redations, after which he furnishes descrip-
tions and life-histories of the more injurious
insects. Among the preventives of insect
depredations suggested by Dr. Lintner is one
which we believe is new : it depends upon
the theory that insects are attracted to the
plants they infest by the odor, and consists
in the use of some substance by which that
odor may be overcome or neutralized.

Hints on the Drainage and Sewerage of
Dwellings. By William Paul Ger-
hard, Civil Engineer. New York : Will-
iam T. Comstock, 6 Astor Place. 1884.
Pp. 302. Price, $2.50.

This little work has grown out of a se-
ries of articles contributed by the author,
under the signature " Hippocrates," to the
periodical " Building." Its object is to give
an account of the usual condition in which
plumbing-work done years ago, and some
quite recently done, may be found, and to
give suggestions on the proper manner of
doing the work. A valuable report on "Filth
Diseases and their Prevention," by medical
officer John Simon, of Great Britain, and
other works on dwelling-house sanitation are
referred to to fortify conclusions. The book
is frequently illustrated with examples of
bad work to be avoided and of good work to
be patterned after.

The Trichiniasis Question. — D. Ap-
pleton & Co., of New York, will publish
shortly a work on " The Relation of Animal
Diseases to the Public Health, and their

854

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Prevention," by Frank S. Billings, V. S.,
Boston. The trichiniasis question, now a
snbject of congressional investigation, is
fully discussed by the author, whose re-
searches on this subject have been thorough
and long continued. He has also compiled
many valuable statistics having a direct
bearing on the question, and which are con-
tained in no other volume in the English
language. The book should be read by all
who have an interest in the settlement of
this most important question.

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.

The Correspondence University : Announcement
for 1884, January. Ithaca, N. Y. : Lucien A. Wait.
Pp. abcut 50.

Archaeological Excursions in Wisconsin and Ohio.
By F. W. Putnam. Pp. 16.

Massachusetts Agricultural College : Twenty-first
Annual Report. Boston : Wright and Potter Print-
ing Company. Pp. 73.

Pilot Chart of the North Atlantic for February,
with Supplement of 3 pages showing position and
detail of floating wrecks.

Inaugural Addresses of Stephen A. Walker,
President of Board of Education, etc., of the City of
New York. Pp. 22.

Beitrag zur Kenntniss der Kobalt,- Nickel,- und
Eisen-Kiese. (Contribution to the Knowledge of
Cobalt, Nickel, and Iron Stones.) By Leroy W.
McCay, M. A. Freiberg (Saxony). Pp. 46.

Out-Door Relief, State of New York : Report of
Standing Committee. Albany, N. Y. Pp. 15.

New Y"ork State Board of Charities : Report on
Establishment of a State Asylum for Indigent Blind.
Albany, N. Y. Pp. 9.

Value of the Nearctic as one of the Primary Zoo-
logical Regions: Reply to Criticisms. By Professor
Angelo Heilprin. Philadelphia. Pp. 10.

Radiation : A Function of Gravity. By I. E.
Craig. Camden, Ohio. Pp. 21.

Renal Circulation during Fever. By Walter
Mendelson, M. D., of New York. Pp. 24.

Recent School-Law Decisions. By Lyndon A.
Smith. Washington : U. S. Bureau of Education.
Pp. 82.

Bulletin of the Buffalo Society of Natural Sci-
ences. Vol. IV, No. 4. Julius Pohlman. M. D.,
Corresponding Secretary. Buffalo, N. Y. Pp. 138.

Medico-Lepal Society of New York : Inaugural
Address of President Clark Bell, Esq., etc. Pp. 24.

Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station :
Annual Report for 1883. New Haven, Conn. Pp.
120

Diccionario Tecnol6gico : Tmrles-Espafiol y Es-
panol-Ingles. (Technological Dictionary: Enerlish-
Spanish and Spanish-English.) Bv Nestor Ponce
de Leon. No. 5. New York: N. Ponce de Leon.
Pp. 48. 50 cents.

" Reception -Day." No. 3. (Readings and Recita-
tions.) Quarterly, No. 3. New York : E. L. Kel-
logg & Co. Pp. 152. 80 cents each ; $1 a year.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Presi-
dent's Report, 1883. Boston : J. S. Cushlng & Co.
Pp.31.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology : Annual
Catalogue, etc., lSS3-'84. Boston : George II. Ellis.
Pp. 144.

The Book of Plant Descriptions and Record of

Plant Analyses, etc. By George G. Groff, A. M.,
M. D. Lewisburg, Pa. /Science and Health Pub-
lishing Company. Pp. 100. 30 cents.

Absence of Design in Nature. By Professor H.
D. Garrison. Chicago. Pp. 19.

Manual Training - School of Washington Uni-
versity, St. Louis : Annual Catalogue, 18b3-"S4.
Pp. 42.

The Teaching of Drawing in Grammar-Schools.
By Walter S. Perry. Boston : The Prang Educa-
tional Company. Pp. 26.

The World's Industrial Cotton Centennial Ex-
position at New Orleans, Louisiana, to be opened in
December, 1S84: Announcement. Pp.18.

"The Cornell University Register," lSS3-'84
Ithaca, N. Y. Pp. 134.

Administrative Organization. By LL. B. Wash-
ington, D. C. : William H. Morrison. Pp. 108.

Woman Suffrage. By John George Hertwig.
Pp 16. Sunday Laws. By John George Hertwig.
Washington, D. C. Pp. 12. 10 cents each.

Reports of School Committee and of Superin-
tendent of Schools of the City of Gloucester, Massa-
chusetts, for 1883. Pp. 75.

Energy in Nature By William Lant- Carpenter.
London, Paris, and New York : Cassell & Co. 1883.
Pp. 212. $1.25.

Merv : A Story of Adventures and Captivity.
Bv Edmnnd O'Donovan. New York : Funk & Was-
sails. 1S84. Pp.313. $1.

Martin Luther : A Study of Reformation. By
Edwin D. Mead. Boston : George H. Ellis. 1884.
Pp. 194. $1.25.

The Land Laws. By Frederick Pollock. Lon-
don : Macmillan & Co. 1SS3. Pp. 215. $1.

Bleaching, Dyeing, and Calico-Printing. Phila-
delphia : P. Blakiston, Son & Co. 1884. Pp. 203

$1.75.

Momu and the Diary of a Superstitious Man.
By Ivan Turgenieff. Translated by Henry Gersoni.
New Y'ork: Funk & Wagnalls. 1SS4. Pp. 131.
75 cents.

Prusias : A Romance of Ancient Rome. By
Ernst Eckstein. Two vols. New York: William
S. Gottsberger. 18S4. Pp. 355 and 335.

Clavis Eerum. Norwich, Conn. : F. A. Robinson
& Co. 1883. Pp. 142. $1.

Memorie and Reine. By Joaquin Miller. New
York : Funk & Wagnalls. 18S4. Pp. 237.

The Topographer : His Instruments and Meth-
ods. By Lewis M. Haupt, C. E. New York : J.
M. Stoddart. 1883. Pp. 184. Illustrated.

" Patents and Inventions : A Quarterly Patent-
Law Review." By Henry Connett and Arthur 0.
Fraser. Vol. I. New York : Burke, Fraser & Con-
nett. 1S84. Pp. 214.

First Annual Report of the Provincial Board of
Health of Ontario. Toronto : C. Blackett Robinson.
18S3. Pp. 187.

Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the Na-
tional Educational Association of the United States,
Session of 13S3. Boston: J. E. Farwell & Co
printers. 18S4. Pp. 210.

Record of Family Faculties, consisting of Tabu-
lar Forms and Directions for entering Data, pp.
62. 90 cents ; and Life-History Album. By Francis
Galton, F. R. S. London : Macmillan & Co. 1884.
Pp. 172. $1.25.

Bacteria. By Dr. Antoine Magnin and George
M. Sternberg, M. D. New York: William Wood
& Co. 1SS4. Pp. 454.

A Svstem of Rhetoric. By C. W.Bardeen. New
York : *A. S. Barnes Jc Co. 1884. Pp. 673. $1.50.

Life and Times of the Right Hon. John Bright.
Bv William Robertson. London and .New York:
Cassell & Co. Pp. 668. $2.50.

The Unitv of Nature. Bv the Duke of Argyll
New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1884. Pp. 571.
$2.50.

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

«55

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

Durability of Building - Stones. — Dr.

Alexis A. Julien has made examinations of
buildings of various ages, and of tombstones
in some of the older grave-yards around
New York city, to assist in determining the
durability of the various stones used in
building. The coarse brown-stone, which
is largely employed, appears to be one of
the most perishable materials in use, so
that many builders are returning to brick,
although the finer varieties of brown-stone
are better and compare favorably with other
materials. Among the causes for the decay
of this stone are mentioned, erection on
the edge of lamination, the heat of the
sun on exposed sides, and imperfect point-
ing, with poor mortar, which falls away
and leaves the joints exposed to the
weather. The presence of sea-salt in the
atmosphere has exerted no appreciable ef-
fect, and lichens growing on the stone do
not appear to have occasioned any decay or
corrosion. The light-colored Nova Scotia
sandstones have been too recently intro-
duced to show marked defect, but evidences
of exfoliation and of slight moldeiing in
damp spots have begun to appear. Build-
ings constructed of the Amherst (Ohio) sand-
stone show little decay, only discoloration ;
and that is regarded as a favorable sign
rather than otherwise, for it indicates dura-
bility, while a stone that cleans itself does
so by disintegration of its surface, the
grains dropping out and carrying away the
dirt. The coarse fossiliferous limestone
from Lockport has disintegrated rapidly
within the last ten years, chiefly on account
of careless arrangement in masonry. The
oolitic stone from Ellettsville, Indiana, shows
an almost immediate and irregular discolor-
ation, said to be produced by the exudation
of oil. The oolite from Caen, France, has
shown decay in several instances where it
was not protected by paint. The dolomitic
marble of Westchester County has decayed
considerably after sixty years of use, but
much of this is owing to the stone having
been improperly laid. Often marbles, of
various kinds, in tombstones, are in fairly
good condition. Horizontal slabs show a
tendency to bend. The frequent oblitera-
tion of inscriptions, the general and often

rapid granulation of the surface, and the
occasional Assuring of slabs, show that the
decay of marble — in the varieties hitherto
long used in New York city — is steady, in-
evitable, and but a question of time ; and,
if unprotected, this material is likely to
prove utterly unsuitable for out-of-door use,
at least for decorative purposes or cemete-
ry records, within the atmosphere of a city.
A blue-stone, or graywacke, is yearly com-
ing into more general use, and, though some-
what somber in tone and difficult to dress,
seems likely to prove a material of remark-
able durability. The bluish Quincy granite
has been used in many buildings, and rarely
shows as yet many signs of decay. A fine-
grained granite from Concord, New Hamp-
shire, also promises to be durable. The
light-colored and fine-grained granite of Hal-
lowell, Maine, in which the white feldspar
predominates, has shown some exfoliation,
but in the single building in which this is
remarked the stones appear to have been
set on edge, and, as their structure is lami-
nated, that is an important matter. u The
weathering of granite does not proceed by
a merely superficial wear, which can be
measured or limited by fractions of an inch,
but by a deep insinuation along the lines
of weakness, between grains, through cleav-
age-planes, and into latent fissures. Thus,
long before the surface has become much
corroded or removed, a deep disintegration
has taken place by which large fragments
are ready for separation by frost, from the
edges and angles of a block. When directly
exposed to the heat of the sun, an addi-
tional agency of destruction is involved,
and the stone is suddenly found ready to
exfoliate, layer after layer, concentrical-
ly." The following is an approximative
estimate of the "life" of different kinds
of stone, signifying by the term life, without
regard to discoloration or other objectiona-
ble qualities, merely the period after which
the incipient decay of the variety becomes
sufficiently offensive to the eye to demand
repair or renewal : coarse brown-stone, five
to fifteen years ; laminated fine brown-stone,
twenty to fifty years ; compact fine brown-
stone, one hundred to two hundred years ;
blue-stone, untried, probably centuries; Nova
Scotia stone, untried, perhaps fifty to two
hundred years ; Ohio sandstone (best sili-

856

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ceous variety), perhaps from one to many
centuries ; coarse fossiliferous limestone,
twenty to forty years ; fine oolitic (French)
limestone, thirty to forty years ; fine oolitic
(American) limestone, untried here; coarse
dolomite marble, forty years ; fine dolomite
marble, sixty to eighty years ; fine marble,
fifty to two hundred years ; granite, seventy-
five to two hundred years ; gneiss, fifty
years to many centuries. Many of the best
building-stones in the country have never
yet been brought to the city.

Peroxide of Hydrogen. — Peroxide of
hydrogen, though it was discovered in 1818,
has only recently, by the aid of cheapened
processes of preparation, come into general
use. When pure, it is a colorless liquid,
which in decomposing gives off four hundred
and seventy-five times its volume of oxygen.
Diluted solutions of it, kept in the dark
at a temperature of not more than 80°, may
be preserved for a very long time without
decomposing. It is obtainable pure, in
large quantities, and cheaply, in solutions
of three per cent by weight or ten per cent
by volume ; and it has come into extensive
use as a bleaching agent, for disinfection,
household purposes, and the toilet. It is
the really operative agent in air-bleaching
on the grass, which has been in use from time
immemorial, and is well adapted for bleach-
ing substances of animal origin, in which
chlorine agents often fail. In using it the
substance to be bleached must first be care-
fully cleansed from dirt and oil. It may
be applied as a bath in the shape of a
weakly acid solution neutralized with a few
drops of ammonia, or the substance may be
dipped in it, and afterward slowly dried in
the air. As the water evaporates, the con-
centration of the peroxide of hydrogen in-
creases, and the bleaching goes on more
energetically. Dumas and Pettenkoferhave
applied peroxide of hydrogen with much
success and satisfaction to the clean-
ing of oil-paintings and engravings. This
substance has recently been found to be
one of the most valuable and effective dis-
infecting agents. In the household it has
proved to be equal to the best of other
known substances for purposes of washing
and cleansing the person. It is adapted to
the most tender skins. It has been pro-

nounced preferable as a tooth-wash to all
powders and to all other preparations which
do not depend upon it. In bathing, with
the addition of a drop or two of hartshorn,
it quickly disintegrates and removes the
dead skin without affecting the living tissue,
except to make it more healthy and hardy.
It is a salutary hair-wash, provided the hair
has been prepared for it by previous wash-
ing with soap or spirit. Professors Alex.
Classen and 0. Bauer have found it a pow-
erful agent in analytical chemistry. — Die
Natur.

Fact and Fancy regarding Fingal's Cave.

— At the Montreal meeting of the American
Association in 1882, Mr. F. Cope Whitehouse
offered a paper on " The Caves of Staff a,
and their Connection with the Ancient Civ-
ilization of Iona." The Committee on Pa-
pers, having heard Mr. Whitehouse in ex-
position of his views, and examined his
maps and drawings, and the testimonials
which he was able to produce from men of
authority in science, adjudged that there
were sufficient merit and originality in his
paper to justify giving it a hearing. The
article was also regarded by us of enough
interest to be given to the readers of
" The Popular Science Monthly " in De-
cember, 1882 ; and a summary of it was
published in " Notes and Queries," Decem-
ber 28, 1883. In it the author, regarding
the situation of the Island of Staffa, which
is shown in the map, the character of its

rocks, the form of Fingal's Cave, and the
shape and direction of its exposure, con-
cluded that it was extremely unlikely that
the cave could have been hollowed out
by the natural action of the waves, and
suggested the question whether it might
not have been artificially excavated. The
paper has not yet been adequately an-

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

857

swered. But the author was held up to
ridicule, in a leading article in " Nature " of
January 25, 1883, as the victim of " a thirst
for scientific renown," who knew nothing
of the subject concerning which he had
given the result of his studies, but had
succeeded in imposing himself upon a re-
spectable scientific body, and upon a scien-
tific journal. Mr. Whitehouse has taken
his time to answer this attack, and has
replied to it with vigor and to the point
in a late number of the " Manhattan."
Setting by the side of one another photo-
graphs of the Island of Staffa and Fingal's
Cave, and the representations of them given
in the current works on geology, he shows
that a wonderful ignorance of what they
are like exists in the scientific mind, and is
transmitted to students. German works ex-
hibit a structure supposed to have been ex-
posed for millions of years to waves capable
of hollowing out two hundred and twenty-
eight feet of basalt, and open at both ends,
which Fingal's Cave is not, compared with
which u a wall of bricks without mortar
would be solidity itself." Hitchcock's " Geol-
ogy " long gave a view that did not show
any part of Staffa, but the adjoining Island
of Boo-sha-la. Dr. A. Geikie, Director of the
Geological Survey of Scotland, gave, in his
"Primer" in 1881, ua tolerable engraving
of part of the island" ; but, in 1882, he of-
fered to more advanced students, in his
"Text-Book of Geology," "a problem in
physics and drawing which has hitherto
passed uncriticised," " the bad copy of a
picture for which its author apologized in
1819," " which picture was no more Staffa
than a view inside the railings at the head of
Wall Street would be Trinity Church." If
our young American has been too hasty in
his theories, upon which we do not under-
take to decide, it certainly behooves his crit-
ics, and especially those who are on the spot
and wear official titles, to attempt some ap-
proach to accuracy in fact.

Why some Bodies feel colder than oth-
ers.— It is a familiar fact that, when we
touch with the fingers different substances
of the same temperature, some will feel
colder than others. The differences of the
feeling are commonlv ascribed to differences
in the heat-conducting powers of the several

bodies. A correspondent of " La Nature "
suggests that, besides this, the specific heat
of the bodies and the degree of polish of
their surfaces should be taken into account.
The effect of specific heat may be observed
by pouring alcohol upon water and plung-
ing the finger in so that a part of it shall be
in the water and a part in the alcohol. The
part in the water will feel much colder than
that in the alcohol. So brandy may be
taken, with safety, at a degree of cold at
which water would infallibly irritate the
skin. The effect of the degree of polish
may be tried with a piece of marble or glass
one side of which is smooth and another
rough, with a file one side of which has
been ground down, or with glazed and un-
glazed paper. In every case the smooth
side or substance, at ordinary temperatures,
will appear colder than the rough one. The
fact may be accounted for by remembering
that the smooth body presents vastly more
points of contact with the fingers, and con-
sequently more conductors for the heat than
the rough one. In like manner a liquid al-
ways seems colder than the vessel contain-
ing it, because it is in closer contact with
the skin.

Are there Birds with Teeth 1 — The

"Transactions" of the Natural History Soci-
ety of Leipsic contains a paper by Dr. Paul
Fraisse, on teeth and tooth-papillae in birds.
It is generally admitted that there is a se-
ries of birds having real teeth in their bills.
Among these are the fossil archaeopteryx of
Solenhofen, and the odontornithes, discov-
ered by Professor Marsh in the North Ameri-
can cretaceous. The jaws of the latter birds
were furnished with teeth, and also with
cavities containing supplementary teeth, like
those of crocodiles. The curious relations
which these birds exhibit with reptiles, as a
kind of transitional stage between the two
orders, suggest the question whether any
living birds have teeth. On this point,
Dr. Fraisse remarks that Geoffroy Saint-Hi-
laire in 1821 discovered in two embryos
of the parrot (Palceornis torquatus) papillae
which he regarded as tooth-sacs and as ho-
mologous with the rudimentary teeth of oth-
er animals. In one of the jaws there even
seemed to be duplicate rudiments, as among
the mammalia. Cuvier accepted this an-

858

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

nouncement with a kind of reserve, and re-
marked that the horny texture of the bill
seemed to spread over these vascular papil-
lae much in the same manner as the enamel
over mammals' teeth. Blanchard resumed
the investigation in 1860, and found in cer-
tain birds, among them some parrots, for-
mations imbedded in the jaws, which when
microscopically examined presented consid-
erable similarity in composition with den-
tine and in structure with teeth ; and he
concluded that those birds possessed a real
dental system. Dr. Fraisse believes that pa-
pillae are frequently present in the horny
bill of the parrot, that they are rich in ves-
sels and covered with a veneer of peculiarly
adapted horn-cells which Blanchard took to
be dentine, and which in microscopic sec-
tions have quite a resemblance to that for-
mation ; but that real teeth do not exist in
birds. " Whether any first rudiments of
teeth may have been the origin of the growth
of horn-teeth is very doubtful ; but in all
probability the horn-teeth should be regard-
ed as secondary formations." The teeth of
the odontornithes, in which Professor Marsh
has found dentine and enamel, are excepted
from this conclusion.

Alcohol regarded as a Beneficial Agent.

— Dr. William Sharpe, an English physi-
cian, has published a pamphlet in which he
seeks to demonstrate that alcohol is a fac-
tor in human progress. Looking into the
history of the subject, he finds that the vine
and the product of the vine have been in
olden times more intimately associated with
man's intellectual growth and development
than with his purely physical wants. The
stimulus of alcohol, when judiciously con-
trolled, "always leads to active and higher
mental efforts on the part of individuals,"
thus producing a contrary effect to that
of other stimulants, which tend rather " to
bring about a contented state of dreamy in-
action " and to repress effort. " To under-
stand fully," he says, " the beneficial action
of alcohol as regards mental development,
we must first get a clear view of the value
of those states of cerebral excitement which
most people, though in varying degrees, ex-
perience something of, rising as they then
do mentally above the level of what may
be called their ordinary every-day thoughts.

This is not difficult, if we bear in remem-
brance that it is during such periods of high
mental activity, in which the mind, tran-
scending the more circumscribed limits of
reason, sweeps intuitively into the veiled and
distant regions of universal truth, that all
great conceptions arise and have arisen in
times past, crudely at first it may be, but
which, nevertheless, when reduced to order
and embodied in works, have been of ines-
timable value to mankind. . . . The stimu-
lus produced by alcoholic liquors, if not
nearly of so high an order, is more easily
called into play, while in a practical sense,
the latent ability being present, it is more
vigorous and effective as regards actual
work. Hence the value of alcohol, as a
stimulant, lies in the fact that it produces
artificially and sustains temporarily that
state of mental excitement or exaltation ne-
cessary to the conception and projection,
though not to the detailed elaboration, of
those enduring works that, whether in the
domains of art, architecture, or engineer-
ing, are remarkable for boldness of execu-
tion, originality, and grandeur of design ;
and further, that it is the only manageable
stimulant which, when used in moderation,
and in the form of wine or spirits, is not
only not injurious, but conduces to the gen-
eral health, while it favors both mental and
physical development." Dr. Sharpe also as-
signs to alcohol a beneficial agency in stimu-
lating genial thoughts and feelings.

Japanese Lacqners. — The Japanese dis-
tinguish in lacquers between crude lacquer,
which is obtained from the trunks of live
trees and forms the basis of nearly all the
mixtures used in making lacquer-ware ;
branch lacquer ; and black lacquer, a prep-
aration. The yield of branch lacquer is only
about one per cent in comparison with that
of other lacquers, while the proportion of
ninety per cent is required in working.
Hence a mixture is made of various kinds of
lacquers, sea-weed jelly, finely grated sweet-
potatoes, and as much soot as is needed to
color the mass. Each manufacturer has his
own special mixture, but the extraneous ad-
ditions are believed not to injure the qual-
ity of the whole. True branch lacquer be-
comes extremely hard when dry ; but, since
when used alone it will not dry under some

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

859

twenty days, the pure sap is now but little
used. The black lacquer is made by adding
to crude or branch lacquer about five per
cent of the tooth-dye used by women, a
liquor formed by boiling iron filings in rice-
vinegar, exposing to the sun, and stirring
frequently for several days. In preparing
all the lacquers it is an essential object to
get rid of the water that exudes from the
tree with the sap. This can not be effected
without adding water, which is done in small
quantities, three times a day, for two or
three days. All the water then evaporates
together. No lacquer will dry till this pro-
cess has been gone through. If crude lac-
quer, which is originally of the color and
consistency of cream, is exposed to the sun
for a few days without adding water, it be-
comes black, or nearly so, thinner and trans-
lucent, but will not dry if applied to an ar-
ticle. If, now, water is mixed with it, it at
once loses its black color and its transpar-
ency, becomes again of a creamy color, only
slightly darker, and can be used after evapo-
ration of the water, like any ordinary lac-
quer, and will dry. The greatest difficulty
the lacquer-workers have to contend with is
that of obtaining a clear, transparent var-
nish. What is called transparent varnish is
really black to the eye, and has to be ground
and polished after application before it will
present a brilliant surface.

Superstitions about Stone Implements.

— Richard Andree, a German anthropologist,
has remarked that, wherever prehistoric stone
implements have been found, whether in
Europe, Asia, Africa, or America, identical
ideas, agreeing frequently in the minutest
particulars, have been associated with them
in the popular mind. It is really astonish-
ing to find the negroes, the South American
Indians, the Burmese, and the different Eu-
ropean stocks entertaining the same super-
stitions respecting the origin and supposed
wonderful properties of the stone axes. Such
conceptions must be regarded as compara-
tively new, for they can only have origi-
nated after the implements had gone out of
use, and the casual finding of them would
be capable of exciting a mystified curiosity.
They would naturally appear to the finders,
who had no idea of their use, as something
wonderful, perhaps having their origin in

another world ; and it would also be natural
to attribute mysterious properties to them.
The fall of meteoric stones would give a kind
of a justification to such notions. People
everywhere have thought the stone imple-
ments were the product of the lightning, or
its bolts, and that the noise of thunder was
caused by their striking the earth ; and the
belief is very common that the " thunder-
axe," which is driven deep into the ground,
will gradually rise to the surface again in
the course of some definite period, as seven
days, weeks, or years. The finder of one of
these mysterious objects esteems it highly
on account of the peculiar properties attrib-
uted to it, and transmits it to bis posterity.
Such stones are regarded as amulets in Asia
and Europe, and as fetiches on the Guinea
coast. They are believed to preserve one
against harm, to prevent sterility in women,
to give protection against fire and lightning ;
treasures are sought with them, and most
effective medical properties are attributed
to them. They have been believed to have
a kind of life, and to sweat on the approach
of a storm. These superstitions have no
footing among people who are still in the
stone age and acquainted with the use of
stone implements. Thus, no trace of them
is found in the South Seas and Australia ;
although a foundation for them appears to
be laid among the West Australians, in the
shape of a belief that certain smooth, oval
stones have fallen from the sky.

A Subterranean River in Austria.— One

of the recent publications of the Austrian
Tourists' Club contains a description of the
" Recca Cave," which it is claimed must be
ranked among the greatest natural curiosi-
ties of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.
The cave is situated near the middle of the
Karst mountain-land, in the bare and sterile
plateau that spreads out above Trieste, in a
region rich with caves, and has been formed
by the flow of the Recca River under the cre-
taceous hills. Similar river-excavations are
common in the region, but that made by the
Recca surpasses all the others in extent.
Near the railroad-station of Vistrica-Ter-
novo, the Recca is a stream some fifteen or
twenty paces broad and two or three feet
deep. Thence it flows along the border of
the chalk and tertiary formations in a deep-

86o

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ly cut but pleasant valley, till it comes to
a point where the chalk crosses its course
in a semicircular range, and seems as if it
would stop its further progress with a dam
nearly four hundred feet high. The river
has, however, conquered this wall by boring
under it a tunnel fifty feet high and half as
wide, through which it rushes in a very live-
ly torrent. In the course of a little over a
hundred yards, it passes a chimney-shaped
shaft, which extends to the whole height of
the mountain end presents an opening more
than thirty feet in diameter at the surface.
After another hundred yards the stream
crosses the floor of a doline (or sink-hole)
four hundred feet broad, and then, after
crossing a narrow ledge, enters the great
doline of St. Canzian. Here the steep, fre-
quently impending rocks on three sides form
a gigantic kettle, the western wall of which
falls perpendicularly more than five hundred
feet. On the southern side a turf-covered
slope descends toward the bed of the river,
to end abruptly in a precipice of nearly two
hundred and fifty feet. Having twice bored
the hills for relatively short distances, the
Recca continues its course till it meets the
rock-wall a third time and excavates a third
subterranean channel, this time of thirty-
five kilometres, or twenty-two miles. This
is the Recca Cave proper, and from it the
stream emerges near San Giovanni di Duino
into the important river, though a short
one, the Timavo, the mystery of the origin
of which has been solved by this tracing of
the course of its main affluent.

Scottish and Irish Crannogs.— Dr. Rob-
ert Munro, in his "Ancient Scottish Lake-
Dwellings or Crannogs," draws a parallel
between the island-fortifications of the west-
ern Celts and the lake-dwellings of Switz-
erland, and then suggests a connection of
development between the crannog and the
moated castle of the middle ages. "Cran-
nog " is a Gaelic term, from crann, a mast
or tree, and seems to point to the fact that
wooden piles or tree-trunks formed an im-
portant part in the structure. While the
crannogs have several features in common
with the Swiss pile-dwellings, they exhibit
also some important points of difference,
whereas the Irish and Scottish structures
are essentially similar. The latter were

really fortified islands, sometimes natural)
but generally artificial. When complete
and in use, they would present the appear-
ance of small islands surrounded by strong
palisades for defense, with buildings of va-
rious kinds on their surface, dug-out canoes
ready for use, and in some cases a causeway
or gangway communicating with the shore.
They were certainly built with great skill,
and with a solidity of which the endurance
of parts of them to the present time is the
best evidence. Stone weapons have been
found in the crannogs, but the bulk of the
remains they yield are of bronze and iron,
and some of the coins and pottery point to
Roman influences. It is generally admitted
that even the Irish crannogs are long sub-
sequent in date to the earlier Swiss lake-
dwellings. The crannogs, moreover, con-
tinued much longer in use than the cor-
responding lake-dwellings in Switzerland ;
those of Ireland down to the seventeenth
century, those of Scotland to a century or
two earlier. They were evidently used
mainly for defense. In the more northern
and wilder parts of Scotland the wooden
structures gave way to stone castles, and in
the end, as Dr. Munro points out, instead
of the castle being brought to the water,
the water was brought to the castle in the
shape of a moat. It is certainly possible
that some individual castles may be the di-
rect representatives of former crannogs, but
it would be very hard to prove that there
has been, as Dr. Munro seems inclined to
think, any general connection of the kind
between the two structures.

Effects of Gases on Insects. — Mr. L. P.

Gratacap reports, in the " American Natu-
ralist," respecting experiments he has made
upon the power of different insects to live
in various gases. The Colorado beetle
proved the hardiest of them ; it was killed
outright in the vapor of prussic acid, which
it, however, stood longer than any other in-
sect experimented with, while it was para-
lyzed for a time in illuminating gas, and died
after two hours' imprisonment in nitrous
oxide. The effects of oxygen were not very
marked ; hydrogen produced lethargy in flies,
and was bad for snapping beetles, moths,
and a wasp ; carbonic acid killed flies at
once, and threw Colorado beetles on their

POPULAR MISCELLANY.

861

backs ; carbonic oxide killed ants, but not
Colorado beetles ; prussic-acid vapors and
nitrous-acid fumes destroyed everything, as
did chlorine everything but Colorado bee-
tles ; nitrous oxide exhibited but slight ef-
fects ; and illuminating gas appeared to
produce death if the exposure was long
enough. Mr. Gratacap recommends charg-
ing from time to time with illuminating gas
as probably, and charging with diluted prus-
sic-acid fumes as certainly, an efficient pre-
ventive of the ravages of insects in cabinet
cases.

Backsheesh in Areadia. — " How much to
be envied are you Singalese ! " says Ilerr
Haeckel, in his " Indian Letters of Travels."
"You are not troubled either about the
cares of to-morrow or of the distant future.
What you require for your own life and your
children's grows of itself at your mouth ;
and whatever else you may want in the way
of luxury you can get with the slightest
exertion. You are, indeed, like the lilies
of the field, that grow around your simple
huts ; they sow not, neither do they reap,
and still heavenly Nature feeds them. You
are not excited with political or military am-
bitions ; no anxious thoughts about busi-
ness, or the rise and fall of stocks, disturb
your sleep. The highest honors, titles, and
orders of civilized men are unknown to you.
Yes, I believe it fully, you do not envy us
Europeans for our thousand superfluities ;
you are happy in being simple men, Nature-
men, living in a paradise, and enjoying that
paradise. Yes, what care -burdened civil-
ized man would not envy you your simple
condition, and your paradisiacal content-
ment ? " A few moments after indulging in
these reflections, Herr Haeckel reached the
last post-station before arriving at Point de
Galle, and was still thinking he had come
upon a place where the struggle for exist-
ence had no being. His porters awakened
him from his dream by speaking to him of
their "backsheesh." It was now time to
attend to that matter, for it might be for-
gotten, in the hurry and confusion, if it was
put off till they got to the city. Herr
Haeckel had remarked that a native gentle-
man had given each of the porters a " double
anna," and reasoned that, in consideration of
bis superior distinction as a u white man,"

it would be proper to quadruple the amount
and give a shilling. The porters returned
the coins with irritation, and gave their pa-
tron a very flattering lecture about the dis-
tinction to which he was entitled by reason
of his purely white skin. The main point
which they presented was, that every white
man ought to give double what he had given,
or a rupee ; but that as white a man as he
was, with his light hair, must belong to the
very highest caste, the dignity of which
would be suitably maintained by a still
larger gift. Without acceding to the full
force of this complimentary argument, Herr
Haeckel yielded so far as to give the full
white man's backsheesh of a rupee to each
man, and had the pleasure of hearing himself
pronounced a perfect gentleman.

The Chinese Superstition of Severed
Queues. — Dr. D. J. MacGowan, in a report
on the health of Wenchow, has published
some facts concerning " epidemic frenzies,"
or " popular crazes," which frequently pre-
vail among large portions of the Chinese
population. One of them raged very exten-
sively in 1876, when it was believed super-
natural agencies were at work cutting off
the queues of the people. A sorcerer, get-
ting possession, with the aid of a spirit, of
one of these queues, was believed to be able
thereafter to evoke at will the soul of the
owner and use it as a servile demon, while
the man was fated to die. The only remedy
within the reach of a person who has lost
his queue is to cut off an inch or more of
what hair he has left and soak it for eighty
days in a cesspool ; by this means the mys-
terious connection between the hair remain-
ing on his head and that in possession of the
sorcerer is severed. Amulets and charms
are, moreover, relied on for the prevention
of disaster to the queue. A charm for this
purpose was invented by the Governor of
Kiang-Su, who also recommended an anathe-
ma attributed to Tao Tse, which was to be
chanted while copying it on yellow paper
with the blood of a cock mixed in vermil-
ion, after which the paper was to be burned
and the ashes swallowed. The panic was
created by some revolutionists, who secretly
cut off the queues of a few passers-by in
each large city, and then proclaimed that a
diabolical agency was at work.

862

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

The Pygmies. — Dr. Emin Bey gives in a
recent number of Petcrmann's " Mittheil-
ungen " some later notices of the Akkas,
the pygmy race discovered in Africa, and
first described by Schweinfurth. They are
a hunting people, divided up into numer-
ous tribes that do not mingle "with one
another. They have no fixed abodes, but
wander around in the countries of the Mon-
butte and the Amadi. When a small soci-
ety of them sojourns temporarily around the
settlement of some chief, they build little
huts for the married ones, while the unmar-
ried satisfy themselves with mere shelters
from the sun. Usually they live in the
groves that line the streams, which afford
them game and good hiding-places. The
chiefs provide them with grain and roots,
and take their pay in the proceeds of the
hunt. The Akkas are vengeful and dan-
gerous when offended, and are skilled in the
use of the bow and arrow. Emin Bey's
measurements gave heights of between four
and four and a half feet for full-grown Ak-
kas. The color of their skin varies from a
clear yellow to a glistening red. The whole
body is covered with a thick, stiff, filthy
growth of hair. A disposition of the skin
to wrinkle, peculiarly observable in the eye-
lids, makes them look much older than they
are.

Origin of Fires in London. — The statis-
tics of fires in London for the thirteen
years, 1870-'S2, state the origin and nature
of 22,262 fires, of which ten per cent at-
tained serious proportions. The most fires
were started in private houses, but they
were the least dangerous ones, for only 2*4
per cent of them became serious, while in
such establishments as saw-mills, furniture
ware-rooms, rag-stores, and builders' shops,
more than one fourth of the fires were de-
structive. No particular influence of sea-
sons in promoting or diminishing the dan-
ger of fires appears from the London re"
ports, where the difference in the number
of outbreaks in the several months is com-
paratively small and irregular, but in agri-
cultural districts the most fires seem to take
place in July and August. According to
the facts presented by Mr. W. G. McMillan,
in a lecture before the Society of Arts, the
distribution of fires over the hours of the

day seems to be governed by a distinct and
well-defined law. The curves illustrating
the hourly distribution, through several
years, show a remarkable symmetry and a
wonderful agreement in general form. The
most outbreaks occur between eight and
nine in the evening, whence the numbers
fall somewhat rapidly to a minimum at be-
tween six and nine in the morning. Thence
the curves rise gradually to the evening
maximum. By far the greatest number of
the fires recorded originated in the use or
abuse of light- and heat-giving apparatus.
The most prolific source of danger still ap-
pears to be the candle, less dangerous than
when the old-fashioned, spark-emitting tal,
low-candles were in use, but still operative
by means of the ease with which it may be
set under a shelf or carried within reach
of light drapery. Surrounding the candles
with tall shades like lamp-chimneys is rec-
ommended as a precautionary device. Pe-
troleum is, with due precautions, a safe
fluid, but there are other burning-fluids, and
some kinds of petroleum, that are highly
dangerous. Coal-gas is entirely safe, except
from the danger of leaks at the joints of
the pipes, which may be guarded against;
but all burners should be fixed, else they
may be carelessly brought within reach of
drapery. Many fires are caused by careless-
ness in throwing away matches after they
have been used. Directly and indirect^,
artificial heating is responsible for a large
proportion of fires. It operates through
sparks shot out from open grates ; through
defects in flues ; through the proximity of
wooden beams and planks to flues, steam-
pipes, or register- furnaces ; and through
carelessness in disposing of hot ashes. The
red fire used in theatres is very liable to
spontaneous combustion ; plumbers some-
times allow their portable furnaces to set
fires ; and the sun shining through a body
so shaped as to act as a lens to concentrate
its rays, has been known to set papers on
fire. Water is still the cheapest and most
effective extinguisher ; and other agents in
use are good in their way. Gypsum, used as
a plaster and in concrete, is an excellent
fire-proofing material. Wood may be made
uninflammable by painting it with asbestus ;
by impregnating its fibers with such sub-
stances as tungstate or silicate of soda, or

NOTES.

863

with two soluble substances which, coming
together, will form an insoluble one. If
wood is impregnated, too, with a substance
capable of volatilization, its taking fire will
be delayed till the volatile substance has
been driven off. Warning of fires is auto-
matically and surely given by means of de-
vices by which the expansion of a column of
mercury by the developed heat is made to
close the circuit of a galvanic battery and
sound an electric bell.

The Sunny Skies of Kamchatka. — M.

Leonhard Stejneger has published in the
Norwegian journal, " Naturen," a paper on
the fauna and flora of Eastern Kamchatka
and the Commander Islands, which adjoin
our own Aleutian Islands. While the cli-
mate of the islands is foggy and their vege-
tation scanty, Kamchatka is represented as
rejoicing in Italian skies, smooth seas, and
a mild temperature. The flora is so exu-
berant that some species, which only grow
to be three feet high in Norway, there at-
tain the height of a man. Among them
are the birch, alder, willow, and service-tree,
whose berries as well as those of a honey-
suckle are finely flavored, and well relished
by the inhabitants. The flowers of the wild
rose, rhododendron, potentillas, and taraxa-
cum, might be mistaken for Norwegian spe-
cies. The birds are also well represented,
and one of them, a warbler, is distinguished
by a plumage that suggests the tropics, and
a voice comparable with that of the nightin-
gale. The fauna is generally palie-Arctic,
and few American forms are found.

NOTES.

Mr. James Stevenson, of the United
States Geological Survey, has discovered
some new cave and cliff cities in which a
few peculiar features have been observed.
One of them is a village of sixty-five under-
ground dwellings situated near the top of
one of the volcanie foot-hills of the San
Francisco Mountains in Arizona. A com-
mon roof was furnished for the whole com-
munity by the hardened surface stratum of
the hill.

Mr. Herbert McLeod has determined,
by experiments instituted for the purpose,
that India-rubber is altered under the com-
bined influence of light and oxygen — ab-
sorbing oxygen and becoming cracked — but
not by either agent alone.

Last year included the fiftieth anniver-
sary of the lucifer-match, which was first
made, in England, by John Walker, of
Stockton-on-Tees, and also at Vienna, in
1833. In 1847 the red amorphous phos-
phorus was substituted for the more dan-
gerous, corroding, ordinary phosphorus.

Professor Cohn has called attention to
the fact that bacteria were first seen two
hundred years ago, by the Dutch microsco-
pist, Leeuwenhoek, who, in 1683, gave to the
Royal Society a description of " very little
animals moving in a very lively fashion,"
which he had detected, with his instrument,
in the white substance adhering to his teeth.
His drawings are very correct, and have
never been surpassed till within the last ten
years.

Captain T. G. Een, a well-known Swed-
ish explorer, died from heart-disease on the
Congo, while on his way to join Mr. Stanley.

M. Fatal, directing engineer of the coal-
mines of Commentry, France, has published
an account of his discovery of coal at that
place, which has preserved to the very cen-
ter of the beds the histological structure of
the plants from which it is formed. The
preservation is said to have been so distinct
that M. Renault has been able to make
specific determinations of several species of
the carbonized plants.

A great impulse has been given to fruit-
growing within the last ten years. The
area of land devoted to this purpose in
England increased, between 1S72 and 1882,
26,696 acres ; while the importations of
fruit from different countries increased from
1,218.668 bushels in 1871 to 4,045,690
bushels in 1882. Much of this fruit is used
for making jam. The acreage of fruit-land
in Canada has been largely extended within
the last fifteen years, and great interest in
the promotion of the industry is taken by
the Government and the land-owners. In
the United States, two million acres were
under cultivation as apple-orchards in 1878,
and the value of the products had increased
in twenty years from $6,600,000 to over
$50,000,000. The drying and the canning of
fruits have become very prominent branches
of industry.

The author of the work on " World-
Life," recently reviewed in our pages, re-
grets that the book contains a number of
errata, and desires us to announce that slips
of corrections will be mailed to any who will
kindly signify their desire to receive them.
Address Alexander Winchell, Ann Arbor,
Michigan.

M. Arthur Roche, Professor in the
Lycee of Montpellier, France, who died a
few months ago, was well known for his
researches on the figures of planets and

864

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

comets and the cosmogonic theory of La-
place. He was the author of various mem-
oirs on the equilibrium of a homogeneous
fluid mass in rotation ; on the effect, upon
the figure of equilibrium, of attraction ex-
erted by a center situated at a great dis-
tance ; on the physical constitution and in-
ternal condition of the globe, in which he
held that the density of the earth at the
center is nearly double the mean density,
and pronounced against the theory of the
complete fluidity of the interior ; on the fig-
ures of comets ; and on the constitution of
the solar system.

Archaeological investigations in the Af-
rosnab suburb of Samarcand have brought
many interesting relics to light. Among
them are marble ornaments, mosaics, and
articles of bronze, clay, and glass, belong-
ing to the Arabian, Grseco-Bactrian, or old
Iranian schools, all of which have in their
time flourished at that place. Chinese
coins have been found at a depth of three
or four metres.

At the December meeting of the Natu-
ral Science Association of Staten Island,
New York, Mr. Hollick gave a description
of the leaf-fossils which have been found
at Tottenville. The fossils occur in three
kinds of rock, all supposed to be cretaceous
— a hard red or gray ferruginous sandstone,
a soft gray sandstone, and a conglomerate
composed chiefly of vegetable remains ce-
mented with an oxide of iron. They are car-
bonaceous in the soft gray sandstone, only
impressions in the other rocks. The rocks
are found scattered, in blocks not more than
a foot square, along the beach. The leaves
are of willow, arbor-vitEe, viburnum, sour-
gum, grass, a small fruit or nut, an equi-
setum, and indistinguishable fragments.
Similar sandstones with similar fossils oc-
cur near Glen Cove, Long Island. At the
January meeting of the Association, Mr. C.
W. Lcng read a paper on the " Cicindelidae "
(beetles) of Staten Island, of which he dis-
tinguished eight species

New pests are appearing, to consume our
apples. The apple-maggot {Trypeta Pomo-
nella), leaving the outside of the apple fair
to look upon, honey-combs its interior till
nothing is left of it. The marauder is of a
greenish-white color about one fifth of an
inch long, and comes from a fly not unlike
our house-fly, having whitish glassy wings,
with dusky bands shaped somewhat like the
letters IF. It comes from Illinois, where
it feeds upon the hawberries, but has learned
the merits of Eastern summer apples, and
is said to be trying the virtues of later varie-
ties. Information is wanted by Professor
J. A. Lintner, State Entomologist, of New
York, concerning its life-history, and all
assistance that observers can give him in

studying its habits and learning the best
method of contending against it.

The International Electrical Exhibition,
to be held in Philadelphia under the au-
spices of the Franklin Institute, will open on
the 2d of September and close on the 11th
of October. The exhibits will be classified
under seven heads or sections, viz. : I. Pro-
duction of Electricity ; II. Electric Conduct-
ors ; III. Measurements ; IV. Applications
of Electricity (A, apparatus requiring cur-
rents of comparatively low power; and B,
apparatus requiring currents of compara-
tively high power) ; V. Terrestrial Physics ;
VI. Historical Apparatus ; and, VII. Edu-
cational and Bibliographical. The build-
ing will be opened for the reception of
articles for exhibition on the 11th of Au-
gust. Applications for space must be made
before the 30th of August. Exhibitors are
required to pay five dollars as entrance-
fee, and space-charges for their exhibits in
addition. Address Committee on Exhibi-
tions, Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pa.

The life-saving stations of the United
States Signal Service are now designated by
name, the former designation by numbers
having been abandoned on the first day of
June last. As the new names are for the
most part descriptive, or refer to some
locality in the immediate neighborhood, the
identification of them is greatly facilitated
to persons who are not connected with the
service, while it is not made any harder to
those who are connected with it. The cir-
cular of the Bureau gives, together with the
names, exact descriptions of all the stations.

A remarkable story of canine partial-
ity is told in the English papers. Two men
were out from Milford Haven in a boat,
which was swamped. A dog, who was with
them, caught one of them to help him out
of his trouble, but, finding he was not his
master, dropped him to drown, sought his
master, and rescued him.

Successful experiments have been made
at Coblenz, in Germany, into the practica-
bility of substituting ravens for carrier-
pigeons. Ravens, being stronger and bolder
birds than pigeons, are less liable to be at-
tacked and destroyed by birds of prey.

The people of Doll, M. Pasteur's native
village, have set up a memorial tablet in the
house where the great microbe-hunter was
born. M. Pasteur was present on the occa-
sion of the inauguration of the monument,
and made a short address.

M. E. Peyrusson has called attention to
the danger following the use of delf-ware
in cases of infectious disease. It is liable
to be marred by cracks and flaws in which
germs may lurk. Only glass or porcelain
should be trusted.

INDEX.

PAGE

Acids, Effect of Watering Plants with 570

Africa, The Stone Age in 717

Alcohol regarded as a Beneficial Agent 858

Allen, Professor Grant 387, 606

Alloys, New Serviceable Metallic 143

Alps, The, in Roman Times 134

America, Prehistoric Art in 818

Animal Friendships 264

Animals, Defenses of the Lesser 484

Anthropological Studies, Scope and Value of 282

Anthropology and Philanthropy 283

Anthropology in Italy 718

Asthma and its Treatment 262

Astley, A. F 542

Athletics, College 446, 587

At Lee, Samuel Yorke 357

Aurora Borealis, The 474

Backsheesh in Arcadia 861

Baldwin, A. S., M. D 554

Big Trees, The, of Turkistan 283

Birds, The Ancestry of 606

Birds with Teeth? Are there 857

Birth-Rate in a New Hampshire Town 555

Bixby, Professor J. T 6

Black, Dr., Dr. Oswald again replies to 112

Bleunard, M. A 574

Boardman, A. G. 410

Bodies, why some feel colder than others 857

Bodin, Dr. Th 234

Book Notices :

" French and German Socialism in Modern Times " (Ely) 122

" The Vertebrates of the Adirondack Region " (Merriam) 123

" Dynamo-Electric Machinery " (Thompson) 125

" Local Government in Illinois " (Shaw) 125

" Local Government in Pennsylvania " (Gould) 125

" Local Government in Michigan and the Northwest " (Bemis) 125

" The Sciences among the Jews before and during the Middle Ages "

(Schleiden) 125

" Lake Agassiz " (Upham) 126

vol. xxiv. — 55

866 INDEX.

Book notices : page

" The Iroquois Book of Rites " (Hale) 126

" The Homoeopathic Leader " (Cowl) 126

" A Practical Arithmetic " (Wentworth and Hill) 126

" The Yellowstone National Park " (Winser) 127

" How can we escape Insanity ? " (Page) , 127

" Chemistry, Inorganic and Organic " (Bloxam) 127

" Manual of Taxidermy " (Maynard) 127

" Revista de Agricultura " (De Adan) 127

" Brain-Rest " (Corning) 128

" On the Conservation of Solar Energy " (Siemens) 128

" A New Theory of the Origin of Species " (Ferris) 128

u The American Citizen's Manual " (Ford) 128

" Faust's Laws of Health " (Kopp) 128

" Cobbett's How to get on in the World " (Waters) 129

" French Forest Ordinance of 1669 " (Brown) 129

" The Pine Moth of Nantucket " (Scudder) 129

" A Book about Roses " (Hale) 129

" Authors and Publishers " 130

" Record for the Sick-Room " 130

" Contributions to the History of Lake Bonneville " (Gilbert) 130

" Libraries and Readers " (Foster) 130

" Libraries and Schools " (Green) 130

" Handsaws, their Use, Care, and Abuse " (Hodgson) 131

" Studies in Logic " 131

" Deep Breathing " (Ciccolina) 131

" Books for the Young " (Hewins) 131

" The Modern Sphinx " (Savage) 131

" On the Relations of Micro-organisms to Disease " (Belfield) 132

" Hand-Book of Vertebrate Dissection " (Martin and Moale) 132

" Die Kupferlegirungen," etc. (Reyer) 132

" Die Korperliche Eigenschaften der Japaner " (Baelz) 132

" What Social Classes owe to each other " (Sumner) 271

" Report, New York State Experiment Station," 1882 272

" Report, Connecticut State Board of Health " 272

" Report, Smithsonian Institution," 1881 273

" God and Creation " (Howison) 273

" Worcester's New School Dictionary " 273

" Historical Studies" (Coan) 274

" The Factors of Civilization" 2^4

" History of the New York State Teachers' Association " (Kirk) 274

" Verbal Pitfalls " (Bardeen) 274

" Astronomy " (Newcomb and Holden) 2 • 4

M Finland ; its Forests and Forest Management " (Brown) 274

" God out and Man in" (Piatt) 275

A Correction (Spencer's " Descriptive Sociology ") 275

" The Law of Heredity " (Brooks) 416

" Cobbett's English Grammar " (Ayres) 417

" Das Studium der Staatswissenschaften in Amerika " (James) 418

" Twelfth Report Geological and Geographical Survey of Territories "

(Hayden) 4]8

INDEX. 867

Book notices : page

" Sea-Sickness " (Hudson) 418

" Cumulative Method for learning German " (Dreyspring) 418

" Questoes Hygienicas " (Farinha) 418

" Dangers to Health " (Teale) 419

" Limestones and Marbles " (Burnham) 419

" Muster Altitalienischer Leinenstickerei " (Lipperheide) 420

" Keport on Division of Philosophical Faculty " (University of Berlin) . 420

" Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission " 421

" Animal Life " (Wright) 421

" Mineral Resources of the United States " (Williams) 421

" Ueber das Galvanische Verhalten der Amalgame des Zinkes und des

Cadmiums" (Robb) 421

"Physician's Visiting List for 1884" 422

" Handy Book of Object-Lessons " (Walker) 422

" King's Hand-Book of Boston " 422

" World-Life " (Winchell) 561

" Man a Creative First Cause " (Hazard) 564

" The Organs of Speech " (Von Meyer) 565

" Ocean Grove Camp-Meeting Association " (Report) 566

" The Evolutionary Significance of Human Character " (Cope) 567

" Horses, their Feed and their Feet " (Page) 567

" Photo-Micrographs " (Sternberg) 567

" Pamphlets on Sewer-Gas and Typhoid Fever " (Hamilton and Ayer) 568

" The Influence of Athletic Games upon Greek Art " (Waldstein) 568

"Index to Articles on History, Biography, Literature, Society, and

Travel " (Griswold). 568

" A Physician's Sermon to Young Men " (Pratt) 568

" Hydraulic Tables " (Flynn) 569

" The Oyster Epicure " 569

" Excursions of an Evolutionist " (Fiske) 706

" Fallacies " (Sidgwick) 707

" A Natural History Reader " (Johonnot) 708

" Lectures on Painting " (Armitage) 709

" Archivos do Museu National do Rio de Janeiro " (Netto) 709

" Tertiary History of the Grand Cafion District " (Dutton) 710

" Electricity in Theory and Practice " (Fiske) 710

M Mounds of the Mississippi Valley " (Carr) 711

" Materia Medica and Therapeutics " (Bartholow) 711

" Human Proportion and Anthropometry " (Fletcher) 711

" Motions of Fluids and Solids " (Ferrel) 712

M Meteorological and Physical Observations " (Sherman) 712

" Report of United States Life-saving Service," 1882 712

" Distribution of Rainfall in United States " (Dunwoody) 712

" North Atlantic Cyclones of August, 1883 " (Southerland) 712

u Horological and Thermometrical Bureau of Yale College Observa-
tory" (Waldo) 712

" Chemical Problems " (Foye) 713

" Steam-Heating" (Briggs) 713

" Hand-Book of Sanitary Information " (Tracy) 844

" Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics " (Stallo) 845

868 INDEX.

Book notices : . page

" Aboriginal American Authors " (Brinton) 846

" Cassell's Family Magazine " 847

" Natural Philosophy " (Sharpless and Philips) 847

" Transactions of the American Dermatological Association " (Van

Harlingen) 847

u Winter Resorts of Florida," etc. (Graves) 847

" God and the State " (Bakunin) 848

" Movements of the Atmosphere " (Ferrel) 848

M Elementary Botany " (Macloskie) 848

" The Sun not at Rest " (Tischner) 848

" Dictionary of Music and Musicians " (Grove) 848

" Evolution " (Adams) 849

" Qualitative Chemical Analysis " (Beilstein) 849

" Manual of Chemistry " (Watts) 849

" Geology of the Eureka District " (Hague) 850

" United States Geological Survey, Second Report " (Powell) 850

" The Natural Genesis " (Massey) 850

" Contents of a Bone-Cave " (Cope) 851

" Cruise of the Revenue Steamer Corwin " 851

" Report on Oyster-Beds " (Winslow) 851

" Explosive Materials " (Berthelot) 852

" Ores of Leadville " (Ricketts) 852

" Berly's Electoral Directory " 852

" Recherches sur des Diatomees " (Prinz and Van Ermengen) 853

" Geological Survey of Alabama " (Smith) 853

" Report on Injurious Insects of New York " (Lintner) 853

" Drainage and Sewerage of Dwellings " (Gerhard) 853

" The Trichiniasis Question M 853

Boys and Girls, Growth of 571

Brazil, Science in 428

British Association, The 278

Brush, E. F., M. D 793

Bulbs, The Poisonous Principle of 282

Building-Stones, Durability of 855

Burnett, Swan M., M. D 813

Buzzards, How, find their Prey 425

Caribs, The, and the Greeks 716

Caro, M. E , 191

Carter, Joseph 90

Chad, Lake, Trees of 137

Chance, The Illusion of 209

Changes, Recent Geological, in Western Michigan 826

Check-Reins, Use and Abuse of 281

Child, A. L., M. D 259

China, Deforestization and Floods in 142

Choate, J. B 248

Cholera, Bacteria and 429

Circumstances, The Control of 335

City, Magnetism of a Great 429

INDEX. 869

PAGE

Classical Question, The, in Germany 289

Classical Schools, Science in 409

Classics, Queer Defenses of the 269

Classics, Science versus the 674

Classics, The Current Study of, a Failure 117

Clouston, T. S., M.D 214, 319

Cold, Catching 368

" Colds " 714

College Athletics 446, 587

Collegiate Influence upon the Lower Education 702

Combustion-Products from Different Lights 575

Comet, The, of 1812 and 1883 488

Cooke, Professor Josiah P 1

Cookery, The Chemistry of 98, 228, 361, 496, 686, 773

Copper, Antiseptic Qualities of 135

Correspondence 112, 262, 409, 554, 700, 834

Craighead, James B , 836

Crannogs, Scotch and Irish 860

Crystals, The Natural Setting of. 248

Date-Palm, the, Cultivation of 281

Daubr6e, M 515

Dawson, Dr. J. W 61

Dead Languages, " Church-and-State " Function of 412

Dead Languages, Education without 538

Dead-Language Studies necessarily a Failure 265

Decay, Sub-aerial, of Kocks 714

De Saporta, M. Antoine 474

Disease, Communicability of, by Food 138

Dogs, Can, be taught to read ? 715

Du Bois-Reymond, Emil 145

Dyspepsia, Infantile 115

Earthquakes, The Causes of 515

East-African Tribes, Two 719

Eclipse, The Recent, of the Sun 573

Eddy, William A 209, 335

Editor's Table 117, 265, 412, 556, 702, 839

Education, Collegiate Influence upon the Lower 702

Education, Female, from a Medical Point of View 214, 319

Education without Dead Languages 558

Eggert, Professor C. A 674

Egyptian, Ancient and Modern, Schools and Libraries 141

Electricity from Gas 286

Electric Railway, The 742

Elephants' Tricks 411

Energy, Muscular, The Source of 377

Engineering, Mechanical, Fifty Years of 530

Erie, Lake, Origin of the Eastern End of 423

Evolution, The Physician's Part in 141

870 INDEX.

PAGE

Eye-sight, Defective 357

Eyes, Why the, of Animals, shine in the Dark 813

Farming in Japan 284

Fairer, J. A 53

Feet, the, Fashion and Deformity in 645

Female Education from a Medical Point of View 214, 319

Fernald, F. A 491

Fever and Ague, The March of. 425

Fingal's Cave, Fact and Fancy regarding 856

Fires, Origin of, in London 862

Fishes, Food-, of Lake Erie 426

Fiske, Lieutenant Bradley A 742

Fluid Currents, Carrying Power of 555

Fodders, Artificial Drying of 285

Food, Communicability of Disease by 139

Food-Fishes of Lake Erie 426

Foot-prints, Human, in Stratified Rock 262

Forbes, George J 409

Force, Vital, Physiological Significance of < 760

Forel, F. A " 306

Forests, The Geographical Distribution of 115

Fossils, Ideas about 279

Foster, Thomas 187, 311, 808

Fox, George Henry, M. D ?97

France, The Check in the Growth of 718

Function and Structure 573

Funeral-Weddings, Karen 427

Gas, Electricity from 286

Gases, Effect of, on Insects 860

Genius and Heredity 191

Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Etienne, Sketch of 403

Geology, Some Unsolved Problems in 61

Germany, The Classical Question in 289

Glacial Period, the, Temperature of 671

Glacial Theories at the American Association 276

Glaser, Professor L 484

Greek in the Colleges 424

" Greek Question," The 1

Greeks, The Caribs and the ?16

Greer, Henry 254

Grim, George W 207, 411

Growth of Boys and Girls 671

Habitation, The, and the Atmosphere 169

Hallock, Edward J., Ph. D 831

Happiness, The Morality of 187, 311, 469, 808

Harding, A. C 530

Hasheesh, An Overdose of 509

INDEX. 871

PAGE

Hearing, Defective, in School-Children 280

Hedgehogs and their History 428

Heredity, Genius and 191

Higgins, Dr. P. J 639

Hofmann, August Wilhelm, Sketch of 831

Holt, William T 837

Honey, Ancient Love of 137

Horses, Work of Shod and Unshod 837

Horses, Working Capacity of Unshod 542

House-Building in the East 544

Hubbell, Herbert P 262

Humr.n Foot-prints in Stratified Rock 262

Humboldt, Alexander von 145

Humboldt, Professor Virchow on 140

Hungerford, Mary C 509

Hydrogen, Peroxide of 856

Hygiene in Schools 425

Ice Age, The 570

Idiosyncrasy 387

Iguanodon, The 351

Infants, Superstitions about 429

Infection, Inlets for 73

Insects, Effects of Gases on 860

Ischia and its Earthquakes 24

Jackal, The, Fox Fables, and the Dog-Star 142

Jacques, Dr. William W 503

James, Davis L 411

James, E. J., Ph. D 289

Jury System, The 676

Kamchatka, The Sunny Skies of 863

Karen Funeral-Weddings 427

Kepley, Ada H 645

Kerosene, Dangerous 461

Kirkwood, Professor D 488

Lacquers, Japanese 858

Lakes, Early Colonists of the Swiss 306

Larrabee, W. H 598

Lamarck, Sketch of 105

Land-Birds in Mid-Ocean 207

Language, Learning one, by studying others 414

Leaves, Transparent Points in 286

Le Conte, Joseph 555

Leprosy, Biblical and Modern 797

Le Sueur, William D 780

Lightning, Photographing a Streak of 752

Lightning without Audible Thunder 575

872 INDEX.

PAGE

Lights, Combustion Products from Different 575

Limbs, Centripetal and Centrifugal Movements of the 136

Literary Notices 122, 271, 416, 561, 706, 844

Loess-Deposits, American 837

Loess, The, Deposits of Northern China 243

Luders, M. A 539

Malaria and the Progress of Medicine 238

Malaria, How and where it thrives 715

Malaria, Mosquitoes and 700

Malaysian Ideas, Fogginess of 286

Mars, Surface Characters of the Planet 249

Massage and Mental Hygiene as Curative Agents 139

McFarland, R. TV 555

McGee, TV. J 115

Mechanical Engineering, Fifty Years of 530

Mexico and its Antiquities 618

Michigan, Western, Recent Geological Changes in 826

Microphone, A Home-made 574

Mineralogy, Methods of Instruction in 754

Mitchel, Ormsby Macknight, Sketch of 695

Modern Thought, A Defense of 780

Moner, From, to Man 577

Mounds, The Aboriginal Significance of 280

Muscular Energy, The Source of. 377

Nadaillac, The Marquis de 818

Nature, The Remedies of 45, 196, 454, 628, 800

Notes 143, 287, 431, 575, 719, 863

Omahas, Parental Rights and the Gens among the 277

Oswald, Dr., again replies to Dr. Black 112

Oswald, Felix L., M. D 45, 112, 196,454, 628, 800

Pacific Slope, The Extinct Volcanoes of the 572

Page, C. E., M. D 115, 368

Pear, the, Pathology of 571

Philanthropy, Anthropology and 283

Physician's, The, Part in Evolution 141

Pigs as TVine-Bibbers 426

Plagues, Animal 284

Plants, Phosphorescence in 140

Politics, Science as a Hope in 656

Pond-Mud as a Diarrhcoa-Breeder 426

Popular Miscellany 133, 276, 423, 570, 714, 855

Proctor, Richard A 692

Profession, The New 254

Pyburu, George , 85

Pygmies, The. 862

INDEX, 873

PAGE

Queues, Severed, The Chinese Superstition of. 861

Race Divisions, Indistinctness of 717

Radau, M. R 169

Rainbows, On 659

Raisins, How, are dried 135

Randall, 0. E 555

Religion, Influence of the Environment on 6

Religious Retrospect and Prospect 340

Remedies, The, of Nature 45, 196, 454, 628, 800

Reply, A, to Editorial Statements 701

Richards, Professor E. L 446, 587

River, A Subterranean, in Austria 859

Rocks, Sub-aerial Decay of 714

Rowland, Professor H. A 30

Salt, Use of 430

Salts in Rivers and in the Sea 716

Sands, The Singing, of Manchester, Massachusetts 280

School-Children, Defective Hearing in 280

School Examinations 133

School-Recesses, The Utility of 90

Schools and Libraries, Egyptian, Ancient and Modern 141

Schools, Hygiene in 425

Science and Jack-Puddings 572

Science and Safety at Sea 692

Science in Classical Schools 409

Science, Pure, A Plea for 30

Science, Remarks on the Influence of 82

Science versus the Classics 674

Sea, Science and Safety at 692

Serviss, Garrett P 180

Sewage, Disposition of 138

Sidereal System, The Study of our 279

Siemens, Sir Charles William, Sketch of 549

Slavery, The Coming 721

Smith, Theodore 837

Snakes, The Venom of 134

Sneeze, How we, laugh, stammer, and sigh 491

Social Subjects, Suggestions on 160

Speech, The Faculty of 793

Spencer, Herbert 340, 433, 721

Spencerian Philosophy, The Edinburgh Review on the 839

Spider, Turret-, Intelligence of a 430

Stebbins, F. R 700

Steel-Iron 427

Stephen, Leslie 82

Stevenson, William G., M. D 760

Stillman, J. M., Ph. B 377

Stoddard, Professor John T 461

874 INDEX.

PAaE

Stone Age, The, in Africa 717

Stone Implements, Superstitions about 859

Structure, Function and 573

Study, Physiologically considered 639

Stump-Wells, Old, in the Mississippi Bottom 836

Sumner, Professor W. G 160

Suns, Green, and Red Sunsets 598

Sun-Spots, A Belt of. 180

Sun, The Recent Eclipse of the 573

Superstitions, Vinous 234

Sutphen, Joseph W 520

Tarantula-Bites and the Dancing-Cure 277

Telescope, A Home-made 85

Telescope, The Home-made 410

Thorne, R. T 73

Thought, A Defense of Modern 780

Tidal Anomalies 411

Time, The New Standard of 423

Tissandier, Gaston 752

Toryism, The New 433

Trees, Concentric Rings of 259

Trees, The Age of 53, 554

Trees, The Big, of Turkistan , 283

Tyndall, John, F. R. S 659

Under-ground "Wires 503

Velain, M. Ch 24

Vinous Superstitions 234

Vital Force, Physiological Significance of 760

Volcanoes, The Extinct, of the Pacific Slope 572

Wadsworth, M. E 754

Water-System, A Prehistoric 539

White, Frances Emily, M. D 577

Williams, F. W 243

Williams, W. Mattieu 98, 228, 361, 496, 686, 773

Wills, Last, and Testaments 520

Wilson, Henry H 676

Wind-Sounds in the Desert 285

Wires, Under-ground 503

Wooldridge, C. W., M. D 826

END OF VOL. XXIV.

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