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Title: Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, January 1899
Volume LIV, No. 3, January 1899
Author: Various
Editor: William Jay Youmans
Release Date: November 2, 2013 [EBook #44097]
Language: English
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Established by Edward L. Youmans
APPLETONS'
POPULAR SCIENCE
MONTHLY
EDITED BY
WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS
VOL. LIV
NOVEMBER, 1898, TO APRIL, 1899
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1899
COPYRIGHT, 1899,
BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
VOL. LIV. ESTABLISHED BY EDWARD L. YOUMANS. No. 3.
APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.
JANUARY, 1899.
_EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
I. The Evolution of Colonies. VI. Industrial Evolution. By
JAMES COLLIER 289
II. The Mind's Eye. By Prof. JOSEPH JASTROW. (Illustrated.) 299
III. Nature Study in the Philadelphia Normal School. By L. L. W.
WILSON, Ph. D. 313
IV. Principles of Taxation. XX. The Diffusion of Taxes. By the
Late Hon. DAVID A. WELLS 319
V. Our Florida Alligator. By I. W. BLAKE. (Illustrated.) 330
VI. The Racial Geography of Europe. The Jews. II. By Prof.
WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY. (Illustrated.) 338
VII. True Tales of Birds and Beasts. By DAVID STARR JORDAN 352
VIII. Glacial Geology in America. By Prof. DANIEL S. MARTIN 356
IX. Modern Studies of Earthquakes. By GEORG GERALAND 362
X. A Short History of Scientific Instruction. By Sir J. N.
LOCKYER 372
XI. Should Children under Ten learn to Read and Write? By Prof.
G. T. W. PATRICK 382
XII. Soils and Fertilizers. By CHARLES MINOR BLACKFORD, Jr.,
M. D. 392
XIII. Sketch of Friedrich August Kekulé. (With Portrait.) 401
XIV. Editor's Table: A Voice from the Pulpit.--Lessons of
Anthropology.--An Example of Social Decadence.--The
Advance of Science 409
XV. Scientific Literature 415
XVI. Fragments of Science 425
NEW YORK:
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY,
72 FIFTH AVENUE.
SINGLE NUMBER, 50 CENTS. YEARLY SUBSCRIPTION, $5.00.
COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
Entered at the Post Office at New York, and admitted for
transmission through the mails at second-class rates.
[Illustration: AUGUST VON KEKULÉ.]
APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.
JANUARY, 1899.
THE EVOLUTION OF COLONIES.
BY JAMES COLLIER.
VI.--INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION.
The earliest nomadic stage of mankind has left traces in many of the
colonies. The first age of French Canada, of New York, of great part
of North America, was one of hunters and trappers, and it has
continued in the Northwest till recent times. The first brief period
of Rhodesia was that of the big-game hunter. The Boers of the
Transvaal are still as much hunters as farmers. The American
backwoodsman who clears a patch, then sells his improvements to the
first newcomer, and, placing his wife and children and scanty
belongings on a cart, proceeds _da capo_ elsewhere, is a nomadic
pioneer. The stage is in one way or another perpetual, for the class
never quite dies out. The drunken English quarryman who, driven by a
demon of restlessness, continually goes "on tramp," and in his
wanderings covers on foot a space equal to twice the circumference of
the globe, is a demi-savage whose nomadism is only checked by the
"abhorred approaches of old age." If he emigrates, he repeats the old,
wild life as a pick-and-shovel man in Queensland or a quarryman in New
South Wales. The soberer colonial youth, who more luxuriously canters
from farm to farm in New Zealand on the back of a scrub, is a tamer
specimen who settles down when he marries. Nay, the "restless man" who
periodically applies for leave of absence from a colonial legislature
in order to travel in India, China, and Timbuctoo, is a still milder
but not less incorrigible example of the same indestructible type.
The pastoral stage is all but universal. Wherever grass grows (and
there is wild grass almost everywhere) sheep can graze, and where
there are succulent twigs cattle will fatten on them. The South
American _estancias_ and the ranches of Colorado, the cattle runs of
Queensland and northern New Zealand, the sheep runs of Victoria and
New South Wales repeat and perpetuate this stage. The genesis of it
may even now be daily observed. A Manchester accountant who has never
before been astride a horse will in twelve months learn the mysteries
of cattle and sheep farming, then purchase a hundred acres or two from
the colonial Government, gradually clear it of timber, build of his
own trees, with no skilled assistance, a weatherboard cottage, and
take home a swiftly wooed wife to lead with him a rather desolate
existence in "the bush." Or (on a larger scale) a squatter,[1] who is
commonly a gentleman by birth and education, comes out from England
with inherited wealth, buys or leases from the Government a large
inland tract of grazing land, takes with him flocks and herds,
shepherds and stockmen, builds a bark or wooden manor house, and
settles down to the life of Abram on the plains of Mamre. In earlier
days, when the colony was in its infancy, he would not have had to
purchase or lease his "run." One country after another saw the golden
age of a would-be landed aristocracy. As Norman William parceled out
all England among his nobles and knights, rulers of conquered
countries were then mighty free with what did not belong to them.
Possessing the authority of a sovereign, Columbus made lavish grants
of land, and thus pacified his rebels. Charles II presented Carolina
to eight proprietors. Baronies of twelve thousand acres in South
Carolina, manors of twenty thousand acres in Maryland, were dwarfed by
territorial principalities of more than a million acres in New York.
The absolute governors of early Australia gave away wide tracts. When
land was not given it was taken, on Rob Roy's principle. During the
interregnum that followed the recall of the first Governor of New
South Wales, military robbers seized fifteen thousand acres, and under
subsequent administrations they continued their depredations. Land was
held on various tenures. The first American forms were varieties of
belated feudalism; of a hundred often strange and ridiculous emblems
of suzerainty perhaps a dozen repeated Old World customs.[2] Sir H. S.
Maine has proved that nearly all the feudal exactions that maddened a
whole people to mutiny in 1789 were then in force in England. How
shadowy they must have grown is shown by the fact that none of them
was transported to Botany Bay in that or later years. They were
atrophied portions of the British land system when Australia was
founded in 1788. For fully sixteen years the possession of lands
granted or seized was as absolute as the English law ever allows it to
be. Then the landholders, finding the large tracts already conceded
insufficient for the development of the pastoral industry, applied for
more, and themselves suggested in 1803 a plan of leasing crown lands
which in the following year was legalized as "the first charter of
squatterdom"; it was the beginning of a system that has brought under
pastoral occupancy territories as extensive as the largest European
countries. The land system formed part of or gave birth to a political
organization. A host of so-called _seigneurs_ imported into old Canada
as much of the _ancien régime_ as would bear the voyage. Manors in
Maryland reproduced the feudal courts-baron and courts-leet. The great
New York landowners, as inheriting both English and Dutch
institutions, presided in such courts and were at the same time
hereditary members of a powerful legislative order.[3] The courts were
dropped on the way out to Australia, but the political influence of
the English landed aristocracy inhered in their representatives at the
antipodes. As the Southern slavearchy, through its Washingtons and
Jeffersons, Clays and Calhouns, was for three quarters of a century
the driving force in American politics, the Australian squatterarchy
for one generation or more ruled the seven colonies with a sway that
waxed as the absolute power of the governor waned. It composed the
legislature, appointed the judges, controlled the executive, and if
the governor was refractory it sent him home. In both southern
countries social life reflected its tastes and was the measure of its
grandeur. It constituted "society," ran the races, gave the balls, and
kept open house; the surrounding villages lived in its sunshine. Why
could not this patriarchal state last, as it has lasted in Arabia for
thousands of years and in Europe for centuries? In the Southern States
it was brought to bankruptcy by the civil war. In Australia it
collapsed before two enemies as deadly--a succession of droughts and a
fall in the price of wool. The banker has his foot on the squatter's
neck. If one may judge from the published maps, three fourths of the
freehold land in the older colonies is in the hands of the money
lenders. The once lordly runholder, who would have excluded from his
table, or at least from his visiting circle, any one engaged in
commerce, is now the tenant of a mortgage company which began by using
him too well and ended by crushing him unmercifully.
It is also brought to a close by the rise of the agricultural stage.
The colonial _latifundia_ gets broken up for the same economic reasons
as that of the mother country. Whenever from the increase of
population wheat-growing becomes more profitable than grazing, land
rises in value, and vast sheep walks are subdivided into
two-hundred-acre farms, which are put under the plow. The transition
may be retarded in some countries and altogether arrested in others.
Nasse has shown that, in consequence of the moisture of the climate,
there was in the sixteenth century a continual tendency in England to
revert from agriculture to pasture. The light rainfall, high
temperatures, and unfertilized soil will forever keep nine tenths of
Australia under grass. Most of the mountainous north and the
glacier-shaved portions of the south of New Zealand must be perpetual
cattle runs and sheep walks. A century or perhaps centuries will pass
before much of the light soil of Tasmania, hardly enriched by the
scanty foliage of the eucalyptus, is sufficiently fertilized by
grazing to grow corn. Rich alluvial or volcanic lands are put under
the plow, without passing through the pastoral stage, as soon as
markets are created by the advent of immigrants. There is a cry for
farm lands. Companies that have bought large estates break them up
into allotments. When they or other large landholders still resist
pressure, the radical colonial legislature accelerates their
deliberations by putting on the thumbscrew of a statute which
confiscates huge cantles of their land. Or the colonial Government, if
socialist-democratic, purchases extensive properties, which it breaks
up into farms and communistic village settlements. Over wide tracts
the agriculturist, great and small, takes the place of the
pastoralist. He holds his lands under a variety of tenures. New South
Wales, in its search for an ideal form, has flowered into fifteen
varieties. Other colonies are stumbling toward it more or less blindly
through a succession of annual statutes. Where land is abundant the
tenure will be easy. In North America nominal quitrents were general;
the system was long since introduced into South Africa, and it has
lately been imported into New Zealand in spite of all previous
experience to the effect that such rents can not be collected. Mr.
Eggleston remarks that in the United States the tendency was to "a
simple and direct ownership of the soil by the occupant." Since those
days Henry George has come and (alas!) gone. A craze for the
nationalization of the land buzzes in the bonnets of all who have no
land. There is an equal reluctance on the part of colonial
legislatures to grant waste lands as freeholds and on the part of
purchasers to accept them on any other terms. Hence the constant
effort to devise a tenure which shall reserve the rights of the colony
and yet not oppress the tenant. One legislature has blasphemed into
the "eternal lease," which would seem to be almost preferable to
absolute ownership in a country subject to earthquakes! But the
tenure in the early days is unimportant. With a virgin soil yielding
at first seventy and then regularly forty bushels to the acre, and
high prices ruling, the farmer can stand any tenure. Seen at market or
cattle show, his equine or bovine features and firm footing on mother
earth suggest a sense of solidity in the commonwealth to which he
belongs. He gives it its character. The legislature consists of his
representatives. Laws are passed in his interest. He controls the
executive. His sons fill the civil service. Judges sometimes come from
his ranks, and lawyers easily fall back into them. He supports the
churches and fills them. Small towns spring up in place of the
pastoral villages to supply his wants. As the period of the Golden
Fleece was the colonial age of gold, when Jason, the wool king, made a
fortune, received a baronetcy, and, returning to the mother country,
founded a county family and intermarried with the British aristocracy,
so the agricultural stage is the colonial age of silver, in money as
in morals. It lasted in England till well into the century, in Germany
till the other day, in France till now. It is, in the main, the stage
of contemporary colonies. What brings _it_ to an end? The soil gets
exhausted, prices fall, and a succession of wet seasons in New Zealand
or of dry seasons in Australia or South Africa sends the farmer into
the money market. Nearly every province of almost every colony gets
mortgaged up to the hilt. The foot of the land agent is on the neck of
the farmer, who becomes his tenant or serf--_adscriptus glebæ_ as much
as the Old English villeins who were the ancestors of the farmer, or
the Virginia villeins who repeated in the seventeenth century the Old
English status. But tenancy does not always arise out of bankrupt
proprietorship. A capitalist may drain an extensive marsh (like that
along the valley of the Shoalhaven River in New South Wales) and
divide the rich alluvial soil into hundreds of profitable dairy farms.
More inland marshes, like the Piako Swamp in New Zealand, have been so
completely drained as to make the soil too dry to carry wheat, and so
have swamped both capitalists and banker. Where the squatter owner
keeps the land in his own hands, he may lease an unbroken-up tract for
three or five years to a farmer who plows and fences it, takes off
crops, pays a light rent of from five to fifteen bushels per acre, and
leaves it in grass. On one tenure or another the whole colony
gradually comes into cultivation.
The predominance of the agricultural interest is long threatened and
at length shaken by the rise of the industrial stage. It is partly
evolved from the pastoral and agricultural stages and partly
independent. Nor do these stages at once and necessarily give rise to
collective industry. In all young colonies where the population is
scanty and processes are simple there are no division and no
association of labor. The account that one of the best of American
historians gives of the Northwest Territory might be accepted as a
description of this primitive state, and realizes Fichte's ideal of a
_geschlossener Handelstaat_ (closed trade state). Shut in by
mountains, the people raised their own flax and sometimes grew their
own wool, which they spun and wove at home. They made their own
spinning wheels and looms, as they made their own furniture. They
tanned their own leather and cobbled rude shoes of it. Of Indian-corn
husks they spun ropes and manufactured horse collars and chair
bottoms. Barrels and beehives were formed of sawn hollow trees. They
extracted sugar from the maple and tea from the sassafras root. Their
boats were dug-out canoes. In colonies of later foundation this
self-sufficing stage, which repeats an earlier period in the mother
country than the time when the colony was given off, is dropped,
though there are traces of it everywhere to be found. Sheep countries
give birth to the woolen industry. New Zealand reduplicates the woolen
manufactures of England and, owing to protective duties, has attained
a deserved success. New South Wales, with finer wools, has not
succeeded, for no other apparent reason than that she refuses to
impose such duties. For it is to be observed that it is under
legislative protection--bounties, bonuses, drawbacks, export and
especially import duties--that almost every colonial industry has
grown up, as the industries of the mother country grew up. Sometimes
the profit in a particular undertaking is exactly equal to the amount
of the import duty, and it is seldom greater. By taking extravagant
advantage of the liberty long refused (as leave to manufacture was
long refused to the North American colonies), but at length conceded,
to impose import duties, an Australasian colony, misled as much by its
own splendid energy as by evil counselors (Carlyle among them), built
up a whole artificial system of industries which sank in ruinous
collapse when the boom had passed. Independent industries spring first
from the soil. Gold and silver mining lose their wild adventurous
character, and become regular industries, worked by companies with
extensive plants. The digging of gum in Auckland (bled from the
gigantic Kauri pine) is operated by merchants who keep the gum diggers
in a species of serfage. The discovery of coal makes native industries
possible or remunerative, but till iron has been found the system is
incomplete. All countries, and therefore all colonies, are late in
reaching this stage; the most advanced contemporary colonies have not
yet reached it. None the less have they followed England with swifter
steps, if with less momentum, into the modern age of iron--that
Brummagem epoch which has the creation of markets for its war cry,
state socialism for its gospel, Joseph of Birmingham for its prophet,
and the British Empire for its deity.
The iron age is fitly inaugurated by the most degraded relationship
that man can bear to man--that of slavery. Only the oldest of modern
colonies imitate the mother countries in passing through this stage;
in those of later foundation a mere shadow of it remains, or it takes
other shapes. Colonists first enslave the natives of the country where
they settle. In the South American colonies, where they went to find
gold, they would work for no other purpose; they therefore needed the
natives to till the soil; they needed them also as carriers. For these
purposes they were used unscrupulously. They were distributed among
the Spaniards under a system of _repartimientos_ which repeated the
provisions of Greek and Roman slavery, and was itself reduplicated
three centuries later in the convict assignment system of New South
Wales. With such savage cruelty was it worked that, according to the
testimony of Columbus, six sevenths of the population of Hispaniola
died under it in a few years. The same form of slavery, but of a very
different character, prevailed in Africa down almost to our own times.
In the British colonies it was submerged in 1834, from causes exterior
to itself, by the humanitarian wave that wrecked the West Indies; in
the French colonies it was abolished by the revolutionary government
of 1848; in the Dutch colonies it possibly subsists to this day.
Theoretically abolished or not, the relationship between civilized
whites and savage blacks must be everywhere a modified form of
slavery; and a white colonization of the African tropics can only take
place under conditions indistinguishable from a limited slavery. In
colder or younger colonies, even if a more refined sentiment had
permitted it, there could be no question of enslaving the fierce red
Indians, the warlike Maoris, or the intractable Australian blacks. The
Indians rendered some services to the northern colonists. The Maoris
worked for the first immigrants into Canterbury, but as free laborers,
and the phase soon passed away as more valuable labor arrived. Blacks
were in the early years employed by the Australian settlers, but like
nearly all savages they were found incapable of continuous industry.
The next step is to import slaves. To lighten the oppression of the
Mexicans, negroes were introduced, as they had previously been into
Europe. There, and still more in the southern colonies of North
America, they were the chief pioneers. They cut down forests, cleared
the jungles, drained the swamps, and opened up the country. For the
best part of two hundred years the world's sugar, rice, cotton,
tobacco, and indigo were grown by negro labor. The effect on the negro
himself has been to raise him one grade in the scale of being. If, as
Mr. Galton believes, he is naturally two grades below the European, a
place in the "organization of labor" will have to be found for him
midway between the white workman and the slave. It is, indeed, being
found. As a farmer the negro has totally failed. "But he is a good
laborer under supervision. He is a success in the mines. He has found
acceptance in the iron furnaces and about the coke ovens. He is in
great demand in periods of railroad construction," and he is a Western
pioneer. Above born and bred slaves for life there is the status of
imported slaves for a term. For years Kanakas, hired or captured from
the Melanesian Islands of the Pacific, were used as slaves by the
sugar planters of Queensland, until the outcry in England put a stop
to an ill-conducted traffic. It has since been resumed under humaner
conditions, which make it as defensible as slavery can ever be.
Coolies from India are imported into Fiji and Hongkong practically as
free laborers. They are also employed on board the great liners that
ply between India, China, Australia, and England, much to the
discontent of the working class and to the great satisfaction of the
well-to-do, who thus gain cheaper passages and lower freights. The
radical opposition is no more likely to prevent this form of native
labor from spreading to all suitable environments than the
conservative opposition has prevented women from filling the
employments within their improved capacities. The ubiquitous Chinaman,
again, has imported himself into most colonies, and so long as he
takes a place that the white laborer refuses to occupy, he will
present the ugly problem of the coexistence of an indestructible alien
race with a civilized people whose type of civilization and his are
irreconcilable.
European colonies have also known white slavery, as Greek and Roman
colonies knew it, and slavery of their own race and nation, as
European countries knew it. Its most degraded type has doubtless been
Spanish, English, and French convictism. The Australian-English is the
most familiar and the worst. The Australian convict was a slave for
life or a long term. Like the slave, he was at the mercy of his
master, excepting that corporal punishment could not be inflicted by
the master's hands. The lash was none the less kept going; in a single
year, in New South Wales, nearly three thousand floggings were
administered. The Roman _ergastula_ were pleasure bowers compared with
the convict hells of Parramatta, in New South Wales, and Port Arthur,
in Tasmania. Marcus Clarke's terrible fiction proves to be still more
terrible fact. Convicts were herded together like pigs; kindness was
rare, oppression general, and many fine men died inch by inch. Such
was the state of things even after the introduction of the assignment
system. According to that system, convicts were assigned as
agricultural laborers and shepherds to settlers who cried out for
them, as the American planters did for slaves. Craftsmen were allotted
to high officials in lieu of salary or to influential persons who
hired them to others (herein repeating English serfdom) or permitted
them to work for themselves, receiving a portion of their earnings
(herein repeating Greek slavery). Mechanics were employed on public
works, and hundreds of buildings were erected by convict masons,
bricklayers, and carpenters. Day laborers were employed on roads, and
hundreds of miles of solid highway are a durable monument to the
memory of the convict. They were the true pioneers of the country,
braving the dangers of the "bush," resisting the aborigines, clearing
and cultivating the land, and developing the resources of the
colonies. For themselves they did well and ill. Many reformed, and
after manumission, which was at first special and at length general,
became respectable citizens, dealers, and traders. Some grew to be
prosperous merchants, wealthy squatters, editors, legislators, and all
but ministers. Their sons are judges, legislators, solicitors,
Government officials, newspaper proprietors. After lasting for sixty
years the system of transportation was at length abolished in
consequence of the opposition of the working class, who objected to
competition, and of the respectable classes generally. The legislative
body and the large landowners were rather in favor of its perpetuity,
and there are still members of the old "slave-driving party" in
Tasmania who regret its discontinuance.
The bond servants, who were common in New England and at first more
numerous than slaves in the Southern States, repeated the status of
the English serfs. Their origin was various. Crime, debt, sale by
parents, voluntary surrender, and kidnapping all contributed their
quota. The period of indentured service was at first from seven to ten
years, and was ultimately reduced to a fixed term of four years. They
were exchanged and sold like any other commodity. Their treatment
seems to have been often harsh. Like the Australian convicts, many of
them prospered. Leading families in the United States trace their
origin to bondmen. Not a few of the Southern overseers, free laborers,
and small farmers are believed to be descended from them. The vagabond
element in all the States, the "white trash" of the South, and the
criminal and pauper inhabitants of certain regions in the North are
also affiliated on the more degraded sections of the class.[4]
The worst of modern inventions, it has been said, is the invention of
the workingman. The workingman, however, has a pedigree; he is the son
of the bondman or the serf, and the grandson of the slave, who would
have been still more discreditable "inventions" if they had not been
the outgrowth of their time and place. The servile character of the
workman long survived in European countries; it was not till the
beginning of this century that the last trades were emancipated in
England. While in North America and New South Wales the transition is
plainly traceable, all vestiges of it have disappeared in the younger
colonies. In these, almost from the first, the mechanic is master of
the situation. The carpenter who can put up a wooden cottage commands
regular work and high wages, while the preacher who builds him a house
not made with hands is starved. The anomaly is in perfect consistency
with the biological analogy; the brain is everywhere of late
development. As the colony grows, wages fall, and the position of
professional men becomes more tolerable, but, _en revanche_, the
workman acquires and at length almost monopolizes political power. The
premier and cabinet ministers are sometimes former peddlers, gold
diggers, coal miners, shepherds, etc. The legislative bodies consist
largely of labor representatives. Laws are passed in the interest of
labor. Not content with a share of political power out of all
proportion to their numbers or importance, the regimented trades,
under the command of unscrupulous leaders, deliver a pitched battle
against the employers, with the object of gaining practical possession
of the agencies of production and distribution. They are necessarily
defeated. The value of labor and the importance of the mechanic
decline with the application of machinery to all industrial processes.
Accumulated wealth, subsidizing inventions, acquires an increasing
ascendency. The industrial system is in no greater danger from the
onslaughts of labor than civilized countries from the invasion of
barbarians.
Only the beginnings of the commercial epoch, or age of bronze, are to
be found in colonies. In production we witness the same supersession
of individual enterprise by the limited liability company. This is
also the case in distribution, where many obsolete Old World stages
are recapitulated. We may still see the long, slow bullock team, the
wearied pack horse (the fur trade in Canada was carried on by
"brigades of pack horses"), the hawker, purveyor of news and gossip.
We easily trace the evolution of the shop: at first a ship, then
landed, with everything inside--groceries, meat, bread, fruit, and
vegetables, clothes, crockery, ironmongery, stationery, and tobacco;
the butcher first hives off, then the baker, the grocer; in course of
time reintegration takes place, and shops are to be found in the
colonial cities which reduplicate Whiteley's in London, where
everything may again be had as in the beginning. The processes of
exchange likewise recapitulate the past. Barter is long universal, and
is still common in colonial villages. Even then a standard is needed.
In the Old English period the "currency" consisted of cattle, named by
a facetious writer "the current _kine_ of the realm." In Virginia and
Maryland tobacco was the circulating medium for a century and a half,
supplemented in Maryland with hemp and flax; taxes were paid in
tobacco, and rent in kind. In Illinois and Canada, skins and furs,
with wampum for small coin; in New England the latter singular
currency was used far into the eighteenth century. New South Wales has
the demerit of inventing the destructive medium of rum; wages were
paid in it or in wheat; meal or spirits were taken at the doors of
theaters. Store receipts for produce were given by the Government and
passed current, not without depreciation; military officers issued
bills for all sums up to one hundred pounds; private individuals, in
the lack of specie, gave promissory notes. Fixed prices were long
unknown; extortioners in the early days of all the colonies made a
profit of a thousand per cent; and in quite recent days usurious
attorneys exacted interest at the rate of a hundred per cent.
Colonies sometimes anticipate the development of the mother country.
The communistic dreams of the forties in France and England were for a
brief while realized in old Virginia, as they are at this hour being
realized in the village settlements of South Australia; and the state
socialism rendered popular by the German victories of 1870 was perhaps
more thoroughly embodied in convict New South Wales than anywhere else
outside of Peru under the Incas, as it is now sweeping all of the
Australasian colonies onward to an unknown goal.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] In its primary American sense the word _squatter_ denotes the
backwoodsman described in the foregoing paragraph. In its secondary
Australian sense it means the large landholder now described.
[2] See an instructive article by Mr. Edward Eggleston, Social
Conditions in the Colonies. Century Magazine, 1884, pp. 849, 850.
[3] Eggleston, _op. cit._, p. 850.
[4] Eggleston, _op. cit._, p. 858.
THE MIND'S EYE.
BY JOSEPH JASTROW.
HAMLET.--My father,--Methinks, I see my father.
HORATIO.--O, where, my lord?
HAMLET.--In my mind's eye, Horatio.
It is a commonplace taught from nursery to university that we see with
our eyes, hear with our ears, and feel with the fingers. This is the
truth, but not the whole truth. Indispensable as are the sense organs
in gaining an acquaintance with the world in which we live, yet they
alone do not determine how extensive or how accurate that acquaintance
shall be. There is a mind behind the eye and the ear and the finger
tips which guides them in gathering information, and gives value and
order to the exercise of the senses. This is particularly true of
vision, the most intellectual of all the senses, the one in which mere
acuteness of the sense organ counts least and the training in
observation counts most. The eagle's eye sees farther, but our eyes
tell us much more of what is seen.
The eye is often compared to a photographic camera, with its eyelid
cap, its iris shutter, its lens, and its sensitive plate--the retina;
when properly adjusted for distance and light, the image is formed on
the retina as on the glass plate, and the picture is taken. So far the
comparison is helpful; but while the camera takes a picture whenever
and wherever the plate happens to be exposed, the complete act of
seeing requires some co-operation on the part of the mind. The retina
may be exposed a thousand times and take but few pictures; or perhaps
it is better to say that the pictures may be taken, but remain
undeveloped and evanescent. The pictures that are developed are
stacked up, like the negatives in the photographer's shop, in the
pigeonholes of our mental storerooms--some faded and blurred, some
poorly arranged or mislaid, some often referred to and fresh prints
made therefrom, and some quite neglected.
In order to see, it is at once necessary that the retina be suitably
exposed toward the object to be seen, and that the mind be favorably
disposed to the assimilation of the impression. True seeing,
observing, is a double process, partly objective or outward--the thing
seen and the retina--and partly subjective or inward--the picture
mysteriously transferred to the mind's representative, the brain, and
there received and affiliated with other images. Illustrations of such
seeing "with the mind's eye" are not far to seek. Wherever the
beauties and conformations of natural scenery invite the eye of man
does he discover familiar forms and faces (Fig. 1); the forces of
Nature have rough-hewn the rocks, but the human eye detects and often
creates the resemblances. The stranger to whom such curiosities of
form are first pointed out often finds it difficult to discover the
resemblance, but once seen the face or form obtrudes itself in every
view and seems the most conspicuous feature in the outlook. The
flickering fire furnishes a fine background for the activity of the
mind's eye, and against this it projects the forms and fancies which
the leaping flames and the burning embers from time to time suggest.
Not all see these fire-pictures readily, for our mental eyes differ
more from one another than the physical ones, and perhaps no two
persons see the same picture in quite the same way. It is not quite
true, however, as many have held, that in waking hours we all have a
world in common, but in dreams each has a world of his own, for our
waking worlds are made different by the differences in what engages
our interest and our attention. It is true that our eyes when open are
opened very largely to the same views, but by no one observer are all
these views, though visible, really seen.
[Illustration: FIG. 1.[5]--The man's face in the rocks is quite
distinct, and is usually readily found when it is known that there is
a face somewhere. (For this view from the Dalles of the St. Croix,
Minn., I am indebted to the courtesy of Mr. W. H. Dudley, of Madison,
Wis.)]
This characteristic of human vision often serves as a source of
amusement. The puzzle picture with its tantalizing face, or animal, or
what not, hidden in the trees, or fantastically constructed out of
heterogeneous elements that make up the composition, is to many quite
irresistible. We turn it about in all directions, wondering where the
hidden form can be, scanning every detail of the picture, until
suddenly a chance glimpse reveals it, plainly staring us in the face.
When several persons are engaged in this occupation, it is amusing to
observe how blind each is to what the others see; their physical eyes
see alike, but their mental eyes reflect their own individualities.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.--In order to see the lion's head, hold the
dollar exactly inverted and the head will be discovered facing the
left, as above outlined. It is clearer on the dollar itself than in
this reproduction.]
Thousands upon thousands of persons handle our silver dollar, but few
happen to observe the lion's head which lies concealed in the
representation of the familiar head of Liberty; frequently even a
careful examination fails to detect this hidden emblem of British
rule; but, as before, when once found, it is quite obvious (Fig. 2).
For similar reasons it is a great aid in looking for an object to know
what to look for; to be readily found, the object, though lost to
sight, should be to memory clear. Searching is a mental process
similar to the matching of a piece of fabric in texture or color, when
one has forgotten the sample and must rely upon the remembrance of its
appearance. If the recollection is clear and distinct, recognition
takes place when the judgment decides that what the physical eye sees
corresponds to the image in the mind's eye; with an indistinct mental
image the recognition becomes doubtful or faulty. The novice in the
use of the microscope experiences considerable difficulty in observing
the appearance which his instructor sees and describes, and this
because his conception of the object to be seen is lacking in
precision. Hence his training in the use of the microscope is
distinctly aided by consulting the illustrations in the text-book, for
they enable his mental eye to realize the pictures which it should
entertain. He may be altogether too much influenced by the pictures
thus suggested to his mental vision, and draw what is really not under
his microscope at all; much as the young arithmetician will manage to
obtain the answer which the book requires even at the cost of a resort
to very unmathematical processes. For training in correct and accurate
vision it is necessary to acquire an alert mental eye that observes
all that is objectively visible, but does not permit the subjective to
add to or modify what is really present.
[Illustration: FIG. 3.--Observe the appearance of these letters at a
distance of eight to twelve feet. An interesting method of testing the
activity of the mind's eye with these letters is described in the
text.]
[Illustration: FIG. 3_a_.]
[Illustration: FIG. 3_b_.]
The importance of the mind's eye in ordinary vision is also well
illustrated in cases in which we see or seem to see what is not really
present, but what for one cause or another it is natural to suppose is
present. A very familiar instance of this process is the constant
overlooking of misprints--false letters, transposed letters, and
missing letters--unless these happen to be particularly striking. We
see only the general physiognomy of the word and the detailed features
are supplied from within; in this case it is the expected that
happens. Reading is done largely by the mental eye; and entire words,
obviously suggested by the context, are sometimes read in, when they
have been accidentally omitted. This is more apt to occur with the
irregular characters used in manuscript than in the more distinct
forms of the printed alphabet, and is particularly frequent in reading
over what one has himself written. In reading proof, however, we are
eager to detect misprints, and this change in attitude helps to make
them visible. It is difficult to illustrate this process
intentionally, because the knowledge that one's powers of observation
are about to be tested places one on one's guard, and thus suppresses
the natural activity of the mind's eye and draws unusual attention to
objective details. Let the reader at this point hold the page at some
distance off--say, eight or twelve feet--and draw an exact
reproduction of the letters shown in Fig. 3. Let him not read further
until this has been done, and _perhaps_ he may find that he has
introduced strokes which were not present in the original. If this is
not the case, let him try the test upon those who are ignorant of its
nature, and he will find that most persons will supply light lines to
complete the contours of the letters which in the original are
suggested but not really present; the original outline, Fig. 3_a_,
becomes something like Fig. 3_b_, and so on for the rest of the
letters. The physical eye sees the former, but the mental eye sees the
latter.
[Illustration: FIG. 4.--For description, see text.]
I tried this experiment with a class of over thirty university
students of Psychology, and, although they were disposed to be quite
critical and suspected some kind of an illusion, only three or four
drew the letters correctly; all the rest filled in the imaginary light
contours; some even drew them as heavily as the real strokes. I
followed this by an experiment of a similar character. I placed upon
a table a figure (Fig. 4) made of light cardboard, fastened to blocks
of wood at the base so that the pieces would easily stand upright. The
middle piece, which is rectangular and high, was placed a little in
front of the rest of the figure. The students were asked to describe
precisely what they saw, and with one exception they all described, in
different words, a semicircular piece of cardboard with a rectangular
piece in front of it. In reality there was no half-circle of
cardboard, but only parts of two quarter-circles. The students, of
course, were well aware that their physical eyes could not see what
was behind the middle cardboard, but they inferred that the two side
pieces were parts of one continuous semicircle. This they saw, so far
as they saw it at all, with their mind's eye.
[Illustration: FIG. 5.--The black and white portions of this design
are precisely alike, but the effect of looking at the figure as a
pattern in black upon a white background, or as a pattern in white
upon a black background, is quite different, although the difference
is not easily described.]
There is a further interesting class of illustrations in which a
single outward impression changes its character according as it is
viewed as representing one thing or another. In a general way we see
the same thing all the time, and the image on the retina does not
change. But as we shift the attention from one portion of the view to
another, or as we view it with a different mental conception of what
the figure represents, it assumes a different aspect, and to our
mental eye becomes quite a different thing. A slight but interesting
change takes place if we view Fig. 5 first with the conception that
the black is the pattern to be seen and the white the background, and
again try to see the white as the pattern against a black background.
I give a further illustration of such a change in Fig. 6. In our
first and natural view of this we focus the attention upon the black
lines and observe the familiar illusion, that the four vertical lines
seem far from parallel. That they are parallel can be verified by
measurement, or by covering up all of the diagram except the four main
lines. But if the white part of the diagram is conceived as the design
against a black background, then the design is no longer the same, and
with this change the illusion appears, and the four lines seem
parallel, as they really are. It may require a little effort to bring
about this change, but it is very marked when once realised.
[Illustration: FIG. 6.--When this figure is viewed as a black pattern
on a white background, the four main vertical lines seem far from
parallel; when it is viewed as a white pattern on a black background
this illusion disappears (or nearly so), and the black lines as well
as the white ones seem parallel.]
A curious optical effect which in part illustrates the change in
appearance under different aspects is reproduced in Fig. 7. In this
case the enchantment of distance is necessary to produce the
transformation. Viewed at the usual reading distance, we see nothing
but an irregular and meaningless assemblage of black and white
blotches. At a distance of fifteen to eighteen feet, however, a man's
head appears quite clearly. Also observe that after the head has once
been realized it becomes possible to obtain suggestions of it at
nearer distances.
[Illustration: FIG. 7.--This is a highly enlarged reproduction taken
from a half-tone process print of Lord Kelvin. It appeared in the
Photographic Times.]
A much larger class of ambiguous diagrams consists of those which
represent by simple outlines familiar geometrical forms or objects. We
cultivate such a use of our eyes, as indeed of all our faculties, as
will on the whole lead to the most profitable results. As a rule, the
particular impression is not so important as what it represents. Sense
impressions are simply the symbols or signs of things or ideas, and
the thing or the idea is more important than the sign. Accordingly, we
are accustomed to interpret lines, whenever we can, as the
representations of objects. We are well aware that the canvas or the
etching or the photograph before us is a flat surface in two
dimensions, but we see the picture as the representation of solid
objects in three dimensions. This is the illusion of pictorial art. So
strong is this tendency to view lines as the symbols of things that if
there is the slightest chance of so viewing them, we invariably do so;
for we have a great deal of experience with things that present their
contours as lines, and very little with mere lines or surfaces. If we
view outlines only, without shading or perspective or anything to
definitely suggest what is foreground and what background, it becomes
possible for the mind to supply these details and see foreground as
background, and _vice versa_.
[Illustration: FIG. 8.--This drawing may be viewed as the
representation of a book standing on its half-opened covers as seen
from the back of the book; or as the inside view of an open book
showing the pages.]
[Illustration: FIG. 9.--When this figure is viewed as an arrow, the
upper or feathered end seems flat; when the rest of the arrow is
covered, the feathered end may be made to project or recede like the
book cover in Fig. 8.]
[Illustration: FIG. 10.--The smaller square may be regarded as either
the nearer face of a projecting figure or as the more distant face of
a hollow figure.]
[Illustration: FIG. 11.--This represents an ordinary table-glass, the
bottom of the glass and the entire rear side, except the upper
portion, being seen through the transparent nearer side, and the rear
apparently projecting above the front. But it fluctuates in appearance
between this and a view of the glass in which the bottom is seen
directly, partly from underneath, the _whole_ of the rear side is seen
through the transparent front, and the front projects above the back.]
[Illustration: FIG. 12.--In this scroll the left half may at first
seem concave and the right convex, it then seems to roll or advance
like a wave, and the left seems convex and the right concave, as
though the trough of the wave had become the crest, and _vice versa_.]
A good example to begin with is Fig. 8. These outlines will probably
suggest at first view a book, or better a book cover, seen with its
back toward you and its sides sloping away from you; but it may also
be viewed as a book opened out toward you and presenting to you an
inside view of its contents. Should the change not come readily, it
may be facilitated by thinking persistently of the appearance of an
open book in this position. The upper portion of Fig. 9 is practically
the same as Fig. 8, and if the rest of the figure be covered up, it
will change as did the book cover; when, however, the whole figure is
viewed as an arrow, a new conception enters, and the apparently solid
book cover becomes the _flat_ feathered part of the arrow. Look at the
next figure (Fig. 10), which represents in outline a truncated pyramid
with a square base. Is the smaller square nearer to you, and are the
sides of the pyramid sloping away from you toward the larger square in
the rear? Or are you looking into the hollow of a truncated pyramid
with the smaller square in the background? Or is it now one and now
the other, according as you decide to see it? Here (Fig. 13) is a
skeleton box which you may conceive as made of wires outlining the
sides. Now the front, or side nearest to me, seems directed downward
and to the left; again, it has shifted its position and is no longer
the front, and the side which appears to be the front seems directed
upward and to the right. The presence of the diagonal line makes the
change more striking: in one position it runs from the left-hand
_rear_ upper corner to the right-hand _front_ lower corner; while in
the other it connects the left-hand _front_ upper corner with the
right-hand _rear_ lower corner.
[Illustration: FIGS. 13, 13_a_, and 13_b_.--The two methods of viewing
Fig. 13 are described in the text. Figs. 13_a_ and 13_b_ are added to
make clearer the two methods of viewing Fig. 13. The heavier lines
seem to represent the nearer surface. Fig. 13_a_ more naturally
suggests the nearer surface of the box in a position downward and to
the left, and Fig. 13_b_ makes the nearer side seem to be upward and
to the right. But in spite of the heavier outlines of the one surface,
it may be made to shift positions from foreground to background,
although not so readily as in Fig. 13.]
[Illustration: FIG. 14.--Each member of this frieze represents a
relief ornament, applied upon the background, which in cross-section
would be an isosceles triangle with a large obtuse angle, or a space
of similar shape hollowed out of the solid wood or stone. In running
the eye along the pattern, it is interesting to observe how variously
the patterns fluctuate from one of these aspects to the other.]
[Illustration: FIGS. 15, 15_a_, and 15_b_.--The two views of Fig. 15
described in the text are brought out more clearly in Figs. 15_a_ and
15_b_. The shaded portion tends to be regarded as the nearer face.
Fig. 15_a_ is more apt to suggest the steps seen as we ascend them.
Fig. 15_b_ seems to represent the hollowed-out structure underneath
the steps. But even with the shading the dual interpretation is
possible, although less obvious.]
Fig. 15 will probably seen at first glimpse to be the view of a flight
of steps which one is about to ascend from right to left. Imagine it,
however, to be a view of the under side of a series of steps; the view
representing the structure of overhanging solid masonwork seen from
underneath. At first it may be difficult to see it thus, because the
view of steps which we are about to mount is a more natural and
frequent experience than the other; but by staring at it with the
intention of seeing it differently the transition will come, and often
quite unexpectedly.
[Illustration: FIG. 16.--This interesting figure (which is reproduced
with modifications from Scripture--The New Psychology) is subject in a
striking way to interchanges between foreground and background. Most
persons find it difficult to maintain for any considerable time either
aspect of the blocks (these aspects are described in the text); some
can change them at will, others must accept the changes as they happen
to come.]
[Illustration: Fig. 17_a_.]
[Illustration: Fig. 17_b_.]
[Illustration: Fig. 17.
FIGS. 17, 17_a_, and 17_b_.--How many blocks are there in this pile?
Six or seven? Note the change in arrangement of the blocks as they
change in number from six to seven. This change is illustrated in the
text. Figs. 17_a_ and 17_b_ show the two phases of a group of any
three of the blocks. The arrangement of a pyramid of six blocks seems
the more stable and is usually first suggested; but hold the page
inverted, and you will probably see the alternate arrangement (with,
however, the black surfaces still forming the tops). And once knowing
what to look for, you will very likely be able to see either
arrangement, whether the diagram be held inverted or not. This method
of viewing the figures upside down and in other positions is also
suggested to bring out the changes indicated in Figs. 13, 13_a_,
13_b_, and in Figs. 15, 15_a_, 15_b_.]
The blocks in Fig. 16 are subject to a marked fluctuation. Now the
black surfaces represent the bottoms of the blocks, all pointing
downward and to the left, and now the black surfaces have changed and
have become the tops pointing upward and to the right. For some the
changes come at will; for others they seem to come unexpectedly, but
all are aided by anticipating mentally the nature of the
transformation. The effect here is quite striking, the blocks seeming
almost animated and moving through space. In Fig. 17 a similar
arrangement serves to create an illusion as to the real number of
blocks present. If viewed in one way--the black surface forming the
tops of the blocks--there seem to be six arranged as in Fig. 18; but
when the transformation has taken place and the black surfaces have
become the overhanging bottoms of the boxes, there are seven, arranged
as in Fig. 19. Somewhat different, but still belonging to the group of
ambiguous figures, is the ingenious conceit of the duck-rabbit shown
in Fig. 20. When it is a rabbit, the face looks to the right and a
pair of ears are conspicuous behind; when it is a duck, the face looks
to the left and the ears have been changed into the bill. Most
observers find it difficult to hold either interpretation steadily,
the fluctuations being frequent, and coming as a surprise.
[Illustration: FIG. 18.]
[Illustration: FIG. 19.]
[Illustration: FIG. 20.--Do you see a duck or a rabbit, or either?
(From Harper's Weekly, originally in Fliegende Blätter.)]
All these diagrams serve to illustrate the principle that when the
objective features are ambiguous we see one thing or another according
to the impression that is in the mind's eye; what the objective
factors lack in definiteness the subjective ones supply, while
familiarity, prepossession, as well as other circumstances influence
the result. These illustrations show conclusively that seeing is not
wholly an objective matter depending upon what there is to be seen,
but is very considerably a subjective matter depending upon the eye
that sees. To the same observer a given arrangement of lines now
appears as the representation of one object and now of another; and
from the same objective experience, especially in instances that
demand a somewhat complicated exercise of the senses, different
observers derive very different impressions.
Not only when the sense-impressions are ambiguous or defective, but
when they are vague--when the light is dim or the forms obscure--does
the mind's eye eke out the imperfections of physical vision. The vague
conformations of drapery and make-up that are identified and
recognized in spiritualistic _séances_ illustrate extreme instances of
this process. The whitewashed tree or post that momentarily startles
us in a dark country lane takes on the guise that expectancy gives it.
The mental predisposition here becomes the dominant factor, and the
timid see as ghosts what their more sturdy companions recognize as
whitewashed posts. Such experiences we ascribe to the action of
suggestion and the imagination--the cloud "that's almost in shape like
a camel," or "like a weasel," or "like a whale." But throughout our
visual experiences there runs this double strain, now mainly outward
and now mainly inward, from the simplest excitements of the retina up
to the realms where fancy soars freed from the confines of sense, and
the objective finds its occupation gone.
FOOTNOTE:
[5] In order to obtain the effects described in the various
illustrations it is necessary in several cases to regard the figures
for a considerable time and with close attention. The reader is
requested not to give up in case the first attempt to secure the
effect is not successful, but to continue the effort for a reasonable
period. Individuals differ considerably in the readiness with which
they obtain such effects; in some cases, such devices as holding the
diagrams inverted or at an angle or viewing them with the eyes half
closed are helpful.
NATURE STUDY IN THE PHILADELPHIA NORMAL SCHOOL.
BY L. L. W. WILSON, PH. D.
When it was first proposed to me to write for the Popular Science
Monthly a brief account of the biological laboratories in the
Philadelphia Normal School, and of the Nature work carried on under my
direction in the School of Observation and Practice, I felt that I
could not do justice either to the place or the work; for, in my
judgment, the equipment of the laboratories and the work done in
connection with them are finer than anything else of the kind either
in this country or abroad--a statement which it seemed to me that I
could not make with becoming modesty. But, after all, it is not great
Babylon that I have built, but a Babylon builded for me, and to fail
to express my sense of its worth is to fail to do justice to Dr. W. P.
Wilson, formerly of the University of Pennsylvania, to whom their
inception was due; to Mr. Simon Gratz, president of the Board of
Education, who from the beginning appreciated their value, and without
whose aid they never would have taken visible form; to the principals
of the two schools, and, above all, to my five assistants, whose
knowledge, zeal, and hard work have contributed more than anything
else to the rapid building up of the work.
THE LABORATORIES AND THEIR EQUIPMENT.--The rooms occupied by the
botanical and zoölogical departments of the normal school measure each
seventy by twenty feet. A small workroom for the teachers cuts off
about ten feet of this length from each room. In the middle of the
remaining space stands a demonstration table furnished with hot and
cold water. Each laboratory is lighted from the side by ten windows.
From them extend the tables for the students. These give plenty of
drawer space and closets for dissecting and compound microscopes.
Those in the zoölogical room are also provided with sinks. Each
student is furnished with the two microscopes, stage and eyepiece
micrometers, a drawing camera, a set of dissecting instruments,
glassware, note-books, text-books, and general literature.
The walls opposite the windows are in both rooms lined with cases, in
which there is a fine synoptic series.
In the botanical laboratory this systematic collection begins with
models of bacteria and ends with trees. In other cases, placed in the
adjoining corridor, are representatives, either in alcohol or by means
of models, of most of the orders of flowering plants, as well as a
series illustrating the history of the theory of cross-fertilization,
and the various devices by which it is accomplished; another, showing
the different methods of distribution of seeds and fruits; another,
of parasitic plants; and still another showing the various devices by
means of which plants catch animals.
As an example of the graphic and thorough way in which these
illustrations are worked out, the pines may be cited. There are
fossils; fine specimens of pistillate and staminate flowers in
alcohol; cones; a drawing of the pollen; large models of the flowers;
models of the seeds, showing the embryo and the various stages of
germination; cross and longitudinal sections of the wood; drawings
showing its microscopic structure; pictures of adult trees; and
samples illustrating their economic importance. For the last, the
long-leaved pine of the South is used, and samples are exhibited of
the turpentine, crude and refined; tar and the oil of tar; resin; the
leaves; the same boiled in potash; the same hatcheled into wool; yarn,
bagging and rope made from the wool; and its timber split, sawn, and
dressed.
The series illustrating the fertilization of flowers begins with a
large drawing, adapted by one of the students from Gibson, showing the
gradual evolution of the belief in cross-fertilization from 1682, when
Nehemiah Grew first declared that seed would not set unless pollen
reached the stigma, down to Darwin, who first demonstrated the
advantages of cross-fertilization and showed many of the devices of
plants by which this is accomplished. The special devices are then
illustrated with models and large drawings. First comes the dimorphic
primrose; then follows trimorphic _Lythrum_, to the beautiful model of
which is appended a copy of the letter in which Darwin wrote to Gray
of his discovery:
"But I am almost stark, staring mad over Lythrum.... I
should rather like seed of Mitchella. But, oh, Lythrum!
"Your utterly mad friend,
"C. DARWIN."
Models of the cucumber, showing the process of its formation, and the
unisexual flowers complete this series. Supplementing this are models
and drawings of a large number of flowers, illustrating special
devices by which cross-fertilization is secured, such as the larkspur,
butter and eggs, orchids, iris, salvia, several composites, the
milkweed, and, most interesting of all, the Dutchman's pipe. This is a
flower that entices flies into its curved trumpet and keeps them there
until they become covered with the ripe pollen. Then the hairs wither,
the tube changes its position, the fly is permitted to leave, carrying
the pollen thus acquired to another flower with the same result.
Pictures and small busts of many naturalists adorn both of the rooms.
Of these the most notable is an artist proof of Mercier's beautiful
etching of Darwin. Every available inch of wall space is thus
occupied, or else, in the botanical laboratory, has on it mounted
fungi, lichens, seaweeds, leaf cards, pictures of trees, grasses, and
other botanical objects.
The windows are beautiful with hanging plants from side brackets
meeting the wealth of green on the sill. Here are found in one window
ferns, in another the century plant; in others still, specimens of
economic plants--cinnamon, olive, banana, camphor. On the tables are
magnificent specimens of palms, cycads, dracænas, and aspidistras, and
numerous aquaria filled with various water plants. Most of these
plants are four years old, and all of them are much handsomer than
when they first became the property of the laboratory. How much
intelligent and patient care this means only those who have attempted
to raise plants in city houses can know.
The zoölogical laboratory is quite as beautiful as the botanical, for
it, too, has its plants and pictures. It is perhaps more interesting
because of its living elements. Think of a schoolroom in which are
represented alive types of animals as various as these: amoeba,
vorticella, hydra, worms, muscles, snails and slugs of various kinds,
crayfish, various insects, including a hive of Italian bees, goldfish,
minnows, dace, catfish, sunfish, eels, tadpoles, frogs, newts,
salamanders, snakes, alligators, turtles, pigeons, canaries, mice,
guinea-pigs, rabbits, squirrels, and a monkey! Imagine these living
animals supplemented by models of their related antediluvian forms, or
fossils, by carefully labeled dissections, by preparations and
pictures illustrating their development and mode of life; imagine in
addition to this books, pamphlets, magazines, and teachers further to
put you in touch with this wonderful world about us, and you will then
have some idea of the environment in which it is the great privilege
of our students to live for five hours each week.
In addition to these laboratories there is a lecture room furnished
with an electric lantern. Here each week is given a lecture on general
topics, such as evolution and its problems, connected with the work of
the laboratories.
THE COURSE OF STUDY PURSUED BY THE NORMAL STUDENTS.--Botany: In
general, the plants and the phenomena of the changing seasons are
studied as they occur in Nature. In the fall there are lessons on the
composites and other autumn flowers, on fruits, on the ferns, mosses,
fungi, and other cryptogams. In the winter months the students grow
various seeds at home, carefully drawing and studying every stage in
their development. Meanwhile, in the laboratory, they examine
microscopically and macroscopically the seeds themselves and the
various food supplies stored within. By experimentation they get
general ideas of plant physiology, beginning with the absorption of
water by seeds, the change of the food supply to soluble sugar, the
method of growth, the functions, the histology, and the modifications
of stem, root, and leaves. In the spring they study the buds and
trees, particularly the conifers, and the different orders of
flowering plants.
The particular merit of the work is that it is so planned that each
laboratory lesson compels the students to reason. Having once thus
obtained their information, they are required to drill themselves out
of school hours until the facts become an integral part of their
knowledge.
For the study of fruits, for example, they are given large trays, each
divided into sixteen compartments, plainly labeled with the name of
the seed or fruit within. Then, by means of questions, the students
are made to read for themselves the story which each fruit has to
tell, to compare it with the others, and to deduce from this
comparison certain general laws.
After sufficient laboratory practice of this kind they are required to
read parts of Lubbock's Flower, Fruit, and Leaves, Kerner's Natural
History of Plants, Wallace's Tropical Nature, and Darwinism, etc.
Finally, they are each given a type-written summary of the work, and
after a week's notice are required to pass a written examination.
Zoölogy: The course begins in the fall with a rather thorough study of
the insects, partly because they are then so abundant, and partly
because a knowledge of them is particularly useful to the grade
teacher in the elementary schools.
The locust is studied in detail. Tumblers and aquaria are utilized as
vivaria, so that there is abundant opportunity for the individual
study of living specimens. Freshly killed material is used for
dissection, so that students have no difficulty in making out the
internal anatomy, which is further elucidated with large, home-made
charts, each of which shows a single system, and serves for a text to
teach them the functions of the various organs as worked out by modern
physiologists.
They then study, always with abundant material, the other insects
belonging to the same group. They are given two such insects, a bug,
and two beetles, and required to classify them, giving reasons for so
doing. While this work is going on they have visited the beehive in
small groups, sometimes seeing the queen and the drone, and always
having the opportunity to see the workers pursuing their various
occupations, and the eggs, larvæ, and pupæ in their different states
of development. Beautiful models of the bees and of the comb, together
with dry and alcoholic material, illustrate further this
metamorphosis, by contrast making clearer the exactly opposite
metamorphosis of the locust.
At least one member of each of the other orders of insects is compared
with these two type forms, and, although only important points are
considered at all, yet from one to two hours of laboratory work are
devoted to each specimen. This leisurely method of work is pursued to
give the students the opportunity, at least, to think for themselves.
When the subject is finished they are then given a searching test.
This is never directly on their required reading, but planned to show
to them and to their teachers whether they have really assimilated
what they have seen and studied.
After this the myriapods, the earthworm, and peripatus are studied,
because of their resemblance to the probable ancestors of insects. In
the meantime they have had a dozen or more fully illustrated lectures
on evolution, so that at the close of this series of lessons they are
expected to have gained a knowledge of the methods of studying
insects, whether living or otherwise, a working hypothesis for the
interpretation of facts so obtained, and a knowledge of one order,
which will serve admirably as a basis for comparison in much of their
future work.
They then take up, more briefly, the relatives of the insects, the
spiders and crustaceans, following these with the higher
invertebrates, reaching the fish in April. This, for obvious reasons,
is their last dissection. But with living material, and the beautiful
preparations and stuffed specimens with which the laboratory is
filled, they get a very general idea of the reptiles, birds, and
mammals. This work is of necessity largely done by the students out of
school hours. For example, on a stand on one of the tables are placed
the various birds in season, with accompanying nests containing the
proper quota of eggs. Books and pamphlets relating to the subject are
placed near. Each student is given a syllabus which will enable her to
study these birds intelligently indoors and out, if she wishes to do
so.
In the spring are taken up the orders of animals below the insect, and
for the last lesson a general survey of all the types studied gives
them the relationships of each to the other.
THE COURSE OF STUDY PURSUED IN THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICE.--In addition to
the plants and animals about them, the children study the weather,
keeping a daily record of their observations, and summarizing their
results at the end of the month. In connection with the weather and
plants they study somewhat carefully the soil and, in this connection,
the common rocks and minerals of Philadelphia--gneiss, mica schist,
granite, sandstone, limestones, quartz, mica, and feldspar.
As in the laboratories, so here the effort is made to teach the
children to reason, to read the story told by the individual plant, or
animal, or stone, or wind, or cloud. A special effort is made to teach
them to interpret everyday Nature as it lies around them. For this
reason frequent short excursions into the city streets are made. Those
who smile and think that there is not much of Nature to be found in a
city street are those who have never looked for it. Enough material
for study has been gathered in these excursions to make them a feature
of this work, even more than the longer ones which they take twice a
year into the country.
Last year I made not less than eighty such short excursions, each time
with classes of about thirty-five. They were children of from seven to
fourteen years of age. Without their hats, taking with them
note-books, pencils, and knives, they passed with me to the street.
The passers-by stopped to gaze at us, some with expressions of
amusement, others of astonishment; approval sometimes, quite
frequently the reverse. But I never once saw on the part of the
children a consciousness of the mild sensation that they were
creating. They went for a definite purpose, which was always
accomplished.
The children of the first and second years study nearly the same
objects. Those of the third and fourth years review this general work,
studying more thoroughly some one type. When they enter the fifth
year, they have considerable causal knowledge of the familiar plants
and animals, of the stones, and of the weather. But, what is more
precious to them, they are sufficiently trained to be able to look at
new objects with a truly "seeing eye."
The course of study now requires general ideas of physiology, and, in
consequences, the greater portion of their time for science is devoted
to this subject. I am glad to be able to say, however, that it is not
"School Physiology" which they study, but the guinea-pig and The
Wandering Jew!
In other words, I let them find out for themselves how and what the
guinea-pig eats; how and what he expires and inspires; how and why he
moves. Along with this they study also plant respiration,
transpiration, assimilation, and reproduction, comparing these
processes with those of animals, including themselves.
The children's interest is aroused and their observation stimulated by
the constant presence in the room with them of a mother guinea-pig and
her child. Nevertheless, I have not hesitated to call in outside
materials to help them to understand the work. A series of lessons on
the lime carbonates, therefore, preceded the lessons on respiration;
an elephant's tooth, which I happened to have, helped to explain the
guinea-pig's molars; and a microscope and a frog's leg made real to
them the circulation of the blood.
In spite of the time required for the physiology, the fifth-year
children have about thirty lessons on minerals; the sixth-year, the
same number on plants; and the seventh-year, on animals; and it would
be difficult to decide which of these subjects rouses their greatest
enthusiasm.
PRINCIPLES OF TAXATION.[6]
BY THE LATE HON. DAVID A. WELLS.
XX.--THE LAW OF THE DIFFUSION OF TAXES.
PART I.
No attempt ought to be made to construct or formulate an economically
correct, equitable, and efficient system of taxation which does not
give full consideration to the method or extent to which taxes diffuse
themselves after their first incidence. On this subject there is a
great difference of opinion, which has occasioned, for more than a
century, a vast and never-ending discussion on the part of economic
writers. All of this, however, has resulted in no generally accepted
practical conclusions; has been truthfully characterized by a leading
French economist (M. Parieu) as marked in no small part by the
"simplicity of ignorance," and from a somewhat complete review
(recently published[7]) of the conflicting theories advanced by
participants one rises with a feeling of weariness and disgust.
The majority of economists, legislators, and the public generally
incline to the opinion that taxes mainly rest where they are laid, and
are not shifted or diffused to an extent that requires any
recognition in the enactment of statutes for their assessment. Thus,
a tax commission of Massachusetts, as the result of their
investigations, arrived at the conclusion that "the tendency of taxes
is that they must be paid by the actual persons on whom they are
levied." But a little thought must, however, make clear that unless
the advancement of taxes and their final and actual payment are one
and the same thing, the Massachusetts statement is simply an evasion
of the main question at issue, and that its authors had no intelligent
conception of it. A better proposition, and one that may even be
regarded as an economic axiom, is that, regarding taxation as a
synonym for a force, as it really is, it follows the natural and
invariable law of all forces, and distributes itself in the line of
least resistance. It is also valuable as indicating the line of
inquiry most likely to lead to exact and practical conclusions. But
beyond this it lacks value, inasmuch as it fails to embody any
suggestions as to the best method of making the involved principle a
basis for any general system for correct taxation; inasmuch as "the
line of least resistance" is not a positive factor, and may be and
often is so arranged as to make levies on the part of the State under
the name of taxation subservient to private rather than public
interests. Under such circumstances the question naturally arises,
What is the best method for determining, at least, the approximative
truth in respect to this vexed subject? A manifestly correct answer
would be: _first_, to avoid at the outset all theoretic assumptions as
a basis for reasoning; _second_, to obtain and marshal all the facts
and conditions incident to the inquiry or deducible from experience;
_third_, recognize the interdependence of all such facts and
conclusions; _fourth_, be practical in the highest degree in accepting
things as they are, and dealing with them as they are found; and on
such a basis attention is next asked to the following line of
investigations.
It is essential at the outset to correct reasoning that the
distinction between _taxation_ and _spoliation_ be kept clearly in
view. That only is entitled to be called a tax law which levies
uniformly upon all the subjects of taxation; which does not of itself
exempt any part of the property of _the same_ class which is selected
to bear the primary burden of taxation, or by its imperfections to any
extent permits such exemptions. All levies or assessments made by the
State on the persons, property, or business of its citizens that do
not conform to such conditions are spoliations, concerning which
nothing but irregularity can be predicated; nothing positive
concerning their diffusion can be asserted; and the most complete
collection of experiences in respect to them can not be properly
dignified as "a science." And it may be properly claimed that from a
nonrecognition or lack of appreciation of the broad distinction
between taxation and spoliation, the disagreement among economists
respecting the diffusion of taxes has mainly originated.
With this premise, let us next consider what facts and experiences are
pertinent to this subject, and available to assist in reaching sound
conclusions; proceeding very carefully and cautiously in so doing,
inasmuch as territory is to be entered upon that has not been
generally or thoroughly explored.
The facts and experiences of first importance in such inquiry are that
the examination of the tax rolls in any State, city, or municipality
of the United States will show that surprisingly small numbers of
persons primarily pay or advance any kind of taxes. It is not probable
that more than one tenth of the adult population or about one
twentieth of the entire population of the United States ever come in
contact officially with a tax assessor or tax collector. It is also
estimated that less than two per cent of the total population of the
United States advance the entire customs and internal revenue of the
Federal Government.
In the investigations made in 1871, by a commission created by the
Legislature of the State of New York to revise its laws relative to
the assessment and collection of taxes, it was found that in the city
of New York, out of a population of over one million in the above
year, only 8,920 names, or less than one per cent of this great
multitude of people, had "any household furniture, money, goods,
chattels, debts due from solvent debtors, whether on account of
contract, note, bond, or mortgage, or any public stocks, or stocks in
moneyed corporations, or in general any personal property of which the
assessors could take cognizance for taxation"; and further, that not
over _four_ per cent, or, say, forty thousand persons out of the
million, were subject to any primary tax in respect to the ownership
of any property whatever, real or personal; while only a few years
subsequent, or in 1875, the regular tax commissioners of New York
estimated that of the property defined and described by the laws of
the State as personal property, an amount approximating two thousand
million dollars in value was held in New York city alone. Later
investigations show that this state of things has continued. Thus, in
1895, out of a population of about two million, it was estimated that
only seventy-nine thousand, or not over four per cent of the
inhabitants of the city, were subject to primary taxation, and that
one half the whole amount collected in that year was paid by less than
a thousand persons. In the city of Boston, where the tax laws are
executed in the most arbitrary manner, the ratio of population
directly assessed is somewhat greater, but aside from the poll tax,
which is a per capita and not a property tax, only 7.27 per cent of
residents paid a property tax in 1895 out of a population of 494,205.
In one of the smaller cities of Massachusetts, where persons and
property are capable of more thorough supervision than larger numbers
and areas--namely, the city of Springfield, with a population of about
fifty thousand--the report of its tax officials shows that for the
year 1894-'95 the number of persons and corporations assessed on
property (mainly real estate) was 7,745, or one for every 6.4 of its
citizens, while 10,560 other citizens were assessed for a poll tax of
two dollars only. Of the total amount of taxes assessed--namely,
$735,948--the above number, 10,560, paid only $21,120; and this is the
experience generally throughout the United States, as it will be in
every country under a free popular government, where arbitrary
inquisitions and arrests of persons and seizures of property are not
allowed, and where a soldier does not practically stand behind every
tax assessor and collector.
The time (1871) when the personal investigations above referred to
were made was when the masses of the city of New York were moved with
indignation at the misuse and private appropriation by a few officials
(Tweed and his associates) of the municipal revenues raised by
taxation, under cover of instituting public improvements, and which
finally led to their prosecution, imprisonment, or self-imposed exile;
and the questions which naturally suggested themselves were: If only
some forty thousand of the million in New York city paid the taxes,
what interest had the other nine hundred and sixty thousand who never
saw the face of a tax assessor or collector in opposing corruption?
What, in an honest administration of the city government and in a
reduction of taxes? Must it not be for the interest of the many that
the expenditures of the State shall always be as large as possible?
Must they not be benefited by exorbitant taxes on the owners of
property, and a distribution of the money collected, even if stolen by
corruptionists, but spent by them lavishly on enterprises that will
furnish new opportunities for employment or amusement for the masses?
Clearly, so far as any personal experience growing out of any _direct_
assessment and levy was concerned, ninety-six per cent of the
population of the city had no more cause of personal grievance by
reason of the unlawful taking of money from the city treasury than
they would have had at the taking of an equivalent amount from the
municipal treasuries of London, Paris, or any other city.
The answer to these questions is to be found in the fact, as John
Adams once remarked, that "if the Creator had given man a reason that
is fallible, he has also impressed upon him an instinct that is sure."
And this instinct teaches the masses everywhere, though they have
never read a book on political economy, or heard any one discourse
learnedly on the principles of taxation, that if taxes are increased,
either by a lawful or unlawful expenditure of public money, they can
not in any possible way avoid paying some portion of its increase; or,
in other words, that increased taxes meant increased cost of living,
through increased rents, increased price of fuel, clothing, and
provisions, and possibly diminished opportunity to labor through such
increased cost of the products of labor as would limit and restrict
markets or consumption. In short, that taxes inevitably fall upon them
through the increased price of all they consume, even if they pay
nothing to the tax collector directly. A large proportion of the
masses of the city of New York in 1871-'72, who paid no taxes
directly, accordingly and spontaneously joined hands with the
comparatively few of their fellow-citizens who did pay in resisting
extravagance and corruption.[8]
We are thus led up and forced to the recognition of two propositions,
or rather principles, in respect to taxation that can not be
invalidated. The _first_ is, that it is not necessary that a tax
assessor or collector should personally assess and levy upon every
citizen of a State or community in order that all should be compelled
to contribute of his property for the support of such State or
community; _second_, that there is an inexorable law by which every
man must bear a portion of the burden of public expenditures, even
though the official assessors take no direct cognizance of him
whatever.
The following incident may here be cited as instructive: In one of the
recent official hearings before a legislative committee of one of the
States, a strenuous advocate of the popular doctrine that there was
and could be no such thing as equality in taxation except by rigidly
taxing everybody directly for all his property, of every description,
both real and personal, and that to not tax immediately and directly
was, in at least a great degree, to exempt from taxation, expressed
himself as entirely opposed to any system of restricting assessments
to a comparatively few things, on the ground that it would be a
recognition in the United States of a system which in Great Britain
had ground down the masses into poverty. He, however, obtained some
new light on the subject of nondiffusion by being reminded that if the
masses of England had been grievously oppressed by taxation, it had
been under a system of many years' standing, which never in any way
brings the tax collector in direct contact with nineteen twentieths of
the entire population; the customs taxes of Great Britain being
practically levied on only four articles--spirits, tea, coffee, and
tobacco; and the inland revenue also on practically four--spirits,
beer, legacies and successions, and stamps (on deeds, insurance
policies, bills of exchange, receipts, drafts, etc.). Generalizing,
then, on the basis of so broad a fact, how illogical and unscientific
was the assumption that whatever persons, property, or business are
not taxed directly are exempt from taxation!--and yet the practical
exemplification of such a system, in the case of England, was a most
efficient instrumentality for grinding the masses of her people down
to poverty.
On the other hand, to generalize from the experience of an individual
or a class in place of that of a nation or community, let us take the
case of a person who passes all the year _in transitu_--moving
backward and forward, for example, in a boat on the line of the Erie
Canal, or between the head waters of the Mississippi and its mouth; a
citizen of no one State, a resident in no one town, and buying all
that he eats, drinks, and wears wherever he can buy cheapest. Does
this man escape taxation because he has no permanent _situs_
(residence as a citizen), and is unknown by any assessor? If he does,
then his occupation is more profitable to the extent of the taxes he
avoids than is that of the individual who, following analogous
occupations, resides permanently in one location, and pays taxes
regularly; or else some notable, easily discernible cause, as undue
competition to obtain situations, will account for his exemption.
Let us next consider how practical experience definitely indicates the
line of least resistance, in conformity with which those contributions
of property or service which the State requires its citizens to make
for its support, and are worthy of designation as taxes, diffuse
themselves. Let us take first that form of indirect taxation which is
known as customs, or taxes on imports, one from which the Federal
Government of the United States has derived in recent years more than
half of its revenue, and Great Britain more than one fourth of its
total receipts from all forms of imperial taxes. That all such taxes
as a rule diffuse themselves, and ultimately fall upon and are paid by
final consumers, is capable of demonstration by a great variety of
evidence. Every remission of customs duties on the imports into any
country of its staple articles of consumption is followed by a
reduction of cost approximately equal to such reduction, and a
consequent increase in consumption. On the other hand, nothing is
better settled than that an increase in customs taxes on imported
articles as a rule increases prices and tends to reduce consumption.
When Great Britain, in 1863, reduced her taxes (duties) on her imports
of tea from 1_s._ 5_d._ to 1_s._ per pound, her importation of tea
increased from 114,000,000 pounds in 1862 to 139,000,000 in 1866, and
her per capita consumption during the same period from 2.70 pounds to
3.42 pounds; and again, when the duty was further reduced in 1865 from
1_s._ to 6_d._ per pound, the annual importations increased from
139,000,000 in 1866 to 209,000,000 in 1881, and the per capita
consumption from 3.42 pounds to 4.58.
When by the act of October, 1890, the tax was removed from the imports
of crude sugars into the United States, the price of the same went
down almost immediately to an equal extent in all American markets;
while the consumption of sugar in the country increased from an
average of about fifty-four pounds per capita in 1890 to more than
sixty-seven pounds in 1892. A like result has attended a similar
experience in respect to this in other countries, and especially in
Great Britain. Thus, the aggregate consumption of sugar by the British
people in 1844 was returned at 237,143 tons. A reduction of taxes on
its importation in 1864 increased its domestic use to 528,919 tons; a
reduction of fifty per cent on existing rates in 1870 made it 695,029
tons; another reduction of fifty per cent in 1873 carried up
consumption to 779,000 tons; and when, in 1874, all taxes on the
imports of sugar were abolished, the annual domestic consumption
increased in little more than a year's period to 930,000 tons. On the
other hand, when by the tariff act of 1890 an additional tax of half a
cent per pound was imposed on the import of tin plate into the United
States, tin plate went up to an equal extent in price all over the
country; and so also on pearl buttons, linen goods, and other articles
of foreign production on the importations of which the tariff taxes
were largely increased. By the tariff act of 1890, also, eggs, which
could formerly be imported into the United States free of duty, were
made subject to a tax of five cents per dozen. Since then the price of
eggs imported from Canada into districts of the United States within
the same sphere of territorial competition has been increased to the
American consumers to almost exactly the extent of the import tax to
which they are subjected. Thus, when the price of eggs was ten and a
half cents per dozen in Toronto, they were sixteen cents in Buffalo
and sixteen and a half to seventeen cents in New York. Such a result
would be unaccountable if the Canadian farmers paid the duty on eggs
sent by them to the United States.
It is interesting to here ask attention to the opinions entertained
and expressed by those whose situation and experience have qualified
them to speak with authority: "The duty constitutes the price of the
whole mass of the article in the market. It is substantially paid on
the article of domestic manufacture, as well as that of foreign
production" (John Quincy Adams). "I said it, and I stand by it, that
as a general rule the duties paid on imports operate as a tax upon the
consumer" (John Sherman). Mr. Blaine, in his Twenty Years in
Congress, says, speaking of the increase of duties on imports by the
tariff act of July 14, 1862, that it "shut out still more conclusively
all competition from foreign fabrics. The increased cost was charged
to the consumer." Mr. McKinley, in 1890, in a report introducing a
bill for revision of the tariff of the United States, in the direction
of increased rates of duties on imports, said it was not the intent of
the bill "to further cut down prices," that the people were "already
suffering from low prices," and would not be satisfied "with
legislation which will result in lower prices." In an elaborate
opinion given by the New York Court of Appeals in 1851 (see vol. iv,
New York Reports), in which there was no suspicion of any issue of
free trade or protection, the courts, in carefully considering the
relative powers of the legislature and the judiciary in respect to
taxation, assumed the proposition that "_all duties on imported goods
are taxes on the class of consumers_" to be in the nature of a
self-evident truth or economic axiom.
Henry Clay, in a celebrated speech in the United States House of
Representatives in 1833, in advocacy of a protective tariff policy,
candidly admitted that "in general it may be taken as a rule that the
duty upon an article forms a portion of its price." But he
subsequently qualified such admission by claiming that it does not
follow that any consequent enhancement of its price is a tax on
consumers, inasmuch as "directly or indirectly, in one form or
another, all consumers of protected articles, enhanced in price," will
get an equivalent. But this may be equally affirmed of all necessary
and equitable taxation, and does not in any way antagonize the theory
that the final incidence of the class of taxes under consideration
falls on consumption.
But, notwithstanding these conclusions and the incontrovertible
evidence by which they are supported, not a few persons occupying
places of great legislative influence, and no small part of the
general public, hold to the view that taxes on imports are really in
the nature of premiums paid by foreigners for the privilege of selling
their goods in the markets of the importing country, and do not fall
on its people who consume them. That means that if the foreigner has a
yard of cloth, or other commodity, which he sells at home for one
dollar, and the United States imposes a tariff of fifty cents on it,
he will then sell it for export to America at fifty cents. There is no
instance mentioned in history where this has ever been done, but
history unfortunately is rarely taken into account by the public in
the discussion of these questions. In this connection the following
historical incident is interesting and instructive: In 1782 an attempt
by the Congress of the Confederation of the several American States to
provide a system of revenue to defray the general expenses of the
Confederation by duties on imports, which then was not permissible,
was blocked by the refusal of the State of Rhode Island to concur in
it, the Legislature of that State unanimously rejecting the measure
for three reasons--one of which was that it would bear hardest on the
few commercial States, particularly Rhode Island, which in virtue of
their relations with foreign commerce monopolize imports, and lightest
on the agricultural States, that directly imported little or nothing.
Congress appointed Alexander Hamilton to draft a reply to Rhode
Island, and in his answer he relied mainly on what he regarded as an
incontrovertible fact, that duties on imports would not prove a charge
on an importing State, but on the final consumers of imports, wherever
they may be located.
If the theory and assumption so confidently and generally asserted are
to be accepted as correct, that the foreigner pays the protective
taxes which a country levies on its imports, and that they do not fall
upon or are not paid by its people who consume them, then it must
follow that to the extent that a country taxes its imports it lives at
the expense of foreign nations; and that, as Great Britain is the
country with which the United States has the largest foreign trade, it
must pay the largest share of the customs taxes of the United States,
or a good share of its annual revenue from all sources. Attention is
further asked to the exact practical application of this theory. Thus,
the United States in 1895 imported $36,438,196 worth of woolen
manufactures, on which it assessed and collected duties (taxes) to the
amount of $20,698,264, or 56.80 per cent of the value of such imports.
Certainly this was a pretty heavy tax on foreign nations in respect to
the sales of only one class of these commodities; but it represented
but a tithe of what the tariff taxes of the United States, if paid by
foreigners, cost them. Thus they had to sell their woolens to the
people of the latter country at less than half their value in order to
compensate for the 56.8 per cent tax. But a nation engaged in foreign
trade can not as a rule have two prices for the product of its
industries; or one price for what it sells at home and another and
different price for what it sells to foreigners. So the fifty-six per
cent deducted from the cost of the woolens sold by foreigners to the
United States necessarily had to be deducted not only from so much of
their product consumed at home, but also from what they sent for sale
to all foreign countries. A further practical application of this
theory is worthy of consideration. As Great Britain imposes no
protective duties or taxes on its imports, it evidently can not
collect anything from other nations by the system of taxation under
consideration. On the other hand, the aggregate value of its exports
sent to foreign nations during the year 1892 was $1,135,000,000, and
if these several nations taxed this value at the average rate which
the United States imposed in 1894 on all its dutiable imports--namely,
fifty per cent--Great Britain obviously had to pay some $557,000,000
in that year for the support of foreign governments; and while this
has been the experience of Great Britain for more than forty years of
this century, she has as a nation been increasing in wealth during
this whole period.
Some of the recent official experiences of the Government of the
United States that are pertinent to the topic under consideration are
sufficiently curious to make them worthy of an economic record. In a
speech introducing a bill into the United States House of
Representatives, which subsequently resulted in the tariff act of
1890, the then chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means laid down
the following proposition: "The Government ought not to buy abroad
what it can buy at home. Nor should it be exempted from the laws it
imposes upon its citizens."
This would seem to warrant the characterization of a discovery that
the United States had some reliable and important source of revenue
independent of taxation,[9] and that, by compelling the application of
a part of this income to the payment of taxes to itself, the
Government is placed upon an equality with the citizens. A legitimate
criticism on this proposition is that the idea that all the income of
the Treasury is derived from the people, and that to transfer portions
of this income from one official recipient to another can have hardly
any other result than an additional cost of bookkeeping, seems never
to have entered the mind of the speaker.
Again, the United States tariff act of 1883 contained in its free list
a provision for the admittance of "articles imported for the use of
the United States, provided that the price of the same did not include
the duty" imposed on such importations. Under the tariff act of 1890
this provision was stricken out of the statute, with the result that
when the Government imported any articles for its own use which were
subject to duties (as, for example, materials to be used in the
National Bureau of Printing and Engraving), it was obliged, in virtue
of its nonexemption from the laws which it imposed on its own
citizens, to pay such duties itself. But as the Government has no
authority to expend money for any purpose without the authority of
Congress, the latter body accordingly authorized the Federal Treasury
to appropriate money from its tax receipts and make payments with the
same to the customhouse, which the customhouse was to immediately pay
back into the Treasury. Just what process was gone through with to
effect such a result the public was not informed, but probably the
collector of customs drew his warrant on the Treasury, had the amount
credited to his account, and then recredited to the Treasury. But, be
this as it may, it is clear that the Government, under the conditions
above stated, paid the tax on its imports; that the tax may be
regarded in the light of a penalty on the Government for importing
articles for its own use; and that the action of Congress in
authorizing the Treasury to appropriate money for the payment of such
taxes was a recognition or admission by that body that a tax upon
imports neither puts anything _in_ nor takes anything _from_ the
pocket of the foreigner. Does it not, moreover, invest with a degree
of comicality a law enacted by the Congress of the United States for
the purpose of taxing foreign importers, which necessitated the
enactment by it of another law appropriating money to enable the
United States to pay customs taxes every time on everything that it
may import for its own use?[10] Finally, if the foreigner and not our
citizens pays our customs taxes on imports, what is the object of
placing by specific statutes any article on the free list? Why not let
him continue to pay millions of taxes for us, as, for example, on
sugar?
FOOTNOTES:
[6] It is fortunate that Mr. Wells had practically completed his
essays on taxation before death put an end to his activity. The
manuscript of two chapters was found among his papers--one on the Best
Methods of Taxation, and the other on the Law of the Diffusion of
Taxes, begun in this number. The first manuscript has some pages
missing, and it has been thought best to postpone its publication, in
the hope that the missing pages may be found. It is evident that the
last touches were yet to be put upon the chapter on the diffusion of
taxes--a chapter that was to sum up the theory of taxation developed
by the writer. So much of that summary is contained in it as to make
the meaning of Mr. Wells unmistakable, and its publication is further
amply justified by the number of practical illustrations and happy
application of theory to fact, in the selection and explanation of
which the author excelled. The entire series, which has been running
in the Popular Science Monthly for more than three years, will now be
collected in a volume--a worthy memorial to one whose powers of
popular exposition of abstract problems placed him among the first of
economists in the United States.
[7] On the Shifting and Incidence of Taxation, by Prof. Edwin R.
Seligman, 1892.
[8] The assertion would not be warranted that the masses of New York
were wholly unanimous in condemning Tweed, for a portion of them were
undoubtedly well content with the situation. He had curried favor with
the very poor and ignorant by distributing coal and flour, and making
ostentatious presents of money; and these "charities" are remembered
to this day in the poorer parts of New York city, and Tweed is
esteemed by many as the victim of injustice, and a man who suffered
because he was the friend of the people.
[9] Of the net ordinary receipts of the Federal Government
($385,819,000) in 1893, only about $12,000,000 was derived from
sources that could not be regarded as taxes, and were mainly receipts
from the sales and surveys of public and Indian lands ($4,120,000) and
of other Government property.
[10] In 1897 the merchant tailors of the United States, who ought to
know something about the incidence of a custom tax on imported
clothing, united in a petition to Congress asking that Americans
returning from Europe be permitted to introduce only two suits of
foreign-made clothes free of duty; and in support of their request
they comment as follows on a ruling of the Treasury in respect to this
matter: "Under this ruling it was possible to enter free of duty vast
quantities of foreign-made garments which had never been actually in
use, and which were so imported solely because there exists a relative
difference of at least fifty per cent in values between the cost of
made-up garments in the United States and Europe, thus saving to the
purchaser of garments abroad one half of their actual value upon
arrival within the United States duty free." But if the foreigner who
made and sold the goods in question was liable to pay the duty on
dutiable clothing, and attended to his duty, there would be no profit
to the returning tourist in importing clothing free of duty. It is
further evident also that American tailors agree in opinion with
Alexander Hamilton that the consumers of imported articles pay the
customs taxes.
The records of the commercial relations between the United States and
Canada are exceedingly instructive on this matter. They all show that
for the products which the Canadian sends to the United States, and on
which somebody pays the duty, he receives exactly the same price as
for those products which he sends to England, on which nobody pays any
duty. This experience is exactly the same as that of the farmers of
the Northwestern States of the Federal Union, who usually get the same
price for their wheat furnished to a Minnesota flour mill, or for
shipment to free-trade England, as to countries like France and
Germany, where heavy duties are assessed upon its import. The term
"usually" is employed, for producers in the United States and Canada
alike do not always get as large a price for the articles they export
as for the same articles they sell to their fellow-countrymen. Again,
if it be true, as the advocates of extreme protection assert, that the
foreign exporter and not the consumer pays the duties on goods sent by
him for sale in this country, how does it happen that it is not true
concerning the farm produce and live stock exported from Canada? And
why should American farmers be exempt from this rule in sending their
grain to Europe? Has anybody ever known of England buying American
products any cheaper in New York than France or Germany, and is it not
also true that the French or German or Italian consumer usually pays
at least the amount of the duty levied by his Government more for
American products than his English competitor has, whose imports are
subjected to no duty? During the period from 1854 to 1866 there was,
under the reciprocity treaty, practically free trade between Canada
and the United States in live stock, wool, barley, rye, peas, oats,
and other farm products, while subsequent to 1866, when the
reciprocity treaty had been repealed, duties were imposed on all these
articles on their import from Canada into the United States. During
the first period Canadian horses, for example, sold under free trade
for shipment to the United States at from sixty-five to eighty-five
dollars each, while during the years next subsequent to 1866 the value
of the Canadian horses imported into the United States was returned at
from ninety-two to one hundred and four dollars each; thus showing
that the United States tariff did not force the Canadian horse
breeders to lower their prices in order to compensate American
purchasers for the duties exacted. And as regards the other products
mentioned, the official data show that in no case did the imposition
of duties under the United States tariff reduce the prices paid by
American purchasers to the Canadian farmers for their products. These
are very commonplace, very familiar, and very convincing facts which
ought to silence all this talk about the foreign exporter or anybody
else but the consumer paying the duty; but it is not at all probable
that they will.
OUR FLORIDA ALLIGATOR.
BY I. W. BLAKE.
An alligator is not an attractive creature. He has not a single virtue
that can be named. He is cowardly, treacherous, hideous. He is neither
graceful nor even respectable in appearance. He is not even amusing or
grotesque in his ungainliness, for as a brute--a brute unqualified--he
is always so intensely real, that one shrinks from him with loathing;
and a laugh at his expense while in his presence would seem curiously
out of place.
His personality, too, is strong. Once catch the steadfast gaze of a
free, adult alligator's wicked eyes, with their odd vertical pupils
fixed full upon your own, and the significance of the expression "evil
eye," and the mysteries of snake-charming, hypnotism, and hoodooism
will be readily understood, for his brutish, merciless, unflinching
stare is simply blood-chilling.
Zoölogically the alligator belongs to the genus _Crocodilus_, and he
has all the hideousness of that family, lacking somewhat its
bloodthirstiness, although the American alligator is carnivorous by
nature, and occasionally cannibalistic. Strictly speaking, however,
the true alligator is much less dangerous than his relatives of the
Old World, and he is correspondingly less courageous.
One would suppose the saurians, or crocodilians, from their general
appearance to be huge lizards, but the resemblance is superficial. The
whole internal structure differs widely, and, subdivided into
gavials, crocodiles, and alligators, they form a family by themselves
which is widespread, extending into considerable areas of the
temperate regions.
All crocodilians are great, ungainly reptiles, having broad, depressed
bodies, short legs, and long, powerful, and wonderfully flexible tails
which are compressed--that is, flattened sideways. Upon the upper
surface of the tail lie two jagged or saw-toothed crests, which unite
near the middle of the appendage, continuing in a single row to the
extremity.
All have thick necks and bodies protected by regular transverse rows
of long, horny plates or shields, which are elevated in the center
into keel-shaped ridges, forming an armor that is quite bullet-proof.
The throat, the under side of the neck, and belly are not thus
protected, and it is at these places, as well as at the eyes, and also
just behind the ears, that the hunter directs his aim.
The principal points of difference between a gavial and a crocodile
are these: the former has very long, slender jaws, set with
twenty-seven teeth in each side of the upper jaw and with twenty-five
teeth in the under, while at the extremity of the snout there are two
holes, through which pass upward the lower large front teeth, but all
the remaining teeth are free, and slant well outward; whereas a
crocodile has a head that is triangular, the snout being the apex; a
narrow muzzle, and canine teeth in the lower jaw, which pass freely
upward in the notches in the side of the upper jaw.
An alligator has a broad, flat muzzle, and the canine teeth of the
lower jaw fit into sockets in the under surface of the upper jaw. It
is strictly an American form of the family. Its feet being much less
webbed, its habits are also less perfectly aquatic, and, preferring
still or stagnant fresh-water courses or swamps, it is rarely found in
tide-water streams.
The crocodile, on the contrary, is commonly found in swift-running,
fresh and salt water rivers. He is a sagacious brute, and ferocious,
often attacking human beings without provocation; but the alligator,
as a rule, is not disposed to fight, although in South America, where
it goes by the name of _caiman_ or _cayman_, it grows to an enormous
size, and is said to be fully as dangerous as the crocodile. There is
also a variety of the family--that is, a true crocodile--found in
Florida, but it is very rare, and smaller than its Asiatic relative.
The mouths of all these reptiles, which are large and extend beyond
the ears, present a formidable array of sharp, conical teeth of
different sizes, set far apart in the crocodile and the alligator,
some being enlarged into tusks. All are implanted in separate sockets,
and form a single row upon each jaw. When a tooth is shed or broken,
a new one promptly comes up beneath the hollow base of the old one;
and in this way, all ready for the need, sometimes three or four
waiting teeth, packed together like a nest of thimbles, may be seen in
the jaw of a dead alligator.
[Illustration: YOUNG PET ALLIGATOR. From photograph by E. L. Russell,
Palm Beach.]
The alligator is at best an awkward brute. Slow and ungainly upon
land--although even there his powerful tail can, when necessary,
assist the scuffling paws to an astonishing extent if the creature is
in haste--he shows to better advantage in the water. There he turns
his clumsy body with wonderful dexterity and swiftness, when, at the
sight of a swimming muskrat or a wading dog, he instantly changes from
what has resembled a drifting log idly floating upon the calm surface
of the swamp, into a thing of life--fierce and horrible.
The general food of an alligator is fish, turtles, and frogs, with an
occasional heedless dog or fowl. A number of adult alligators will
quickly deplenish a small, clear-water lake of its finny inhabitants,
which statement to would-be Florida fishermen will readily account for
the lack in many localities. There is also a curious belief in the
South that the creature has an especial liking for a "darkey steak,"
and for this reason he is feared by the negroes. That he becomes
carnivorous to a dangerous extent when pressed by hunger, there is no
doubt, for, the supply of fish exhausted, he must look for larger
game.
Partially concealed by rubbish, or floating idly close to the
bank--always only a short distance from his retreat--he so closely
resembles an old and weather-worn log that no suspicion is aroused.
Presently a razorback comes down the narrow trail that meanders
through the scrub and passes close to the reptile. Let it pass between
the alligator and the water--that is, between the creature and his
_cave_--and the end has come. An alligator seldom misses, and one
spring, leap, or plunge, or whatever the swift, clumsy movement may be
called, and the wretched animal is seized and held fast, either by the
nose or leg, as a rule. Then the struggle begins, for the razorback
loves its life, despised pig of the Florida flatwoods though it is.
Alligators drown their prey. Their own nostrils and throats are so
arranged that they themselves can sink to the bottom without danger of
suffocation, although their mouths, or rather their jaws, may be
widely stretched with the body of their victim. Indeed, they can
reascend to the surface to breathe without releasing the prize; and,
as this power is so closely connected with their method of killing the
larger animals, a description of the latter, repulsive though it is,
may not be out of place.
The teeth of an alligator are better adapted for crushing and
crunching than for biting. Therefore, for him to eat a struggling
animal would be difficult. Instinct teaches him that it must first be
killed.
To dispose of a dog or a chicken is a small matter, for when the
alligator meets it upon the bank one strong, far-reaching sweep of the
powerful tail tosses it far out upon the lake. The alligator simply
follows, grasps the half-stunned creature in his jaws, and disappears
beneath the surface, where he remains until all is quiet. With a
larger animal, however, he proceeds differently, for the reason that a
yearling, a colt, or a razorback is not so easily handled. First,
therefore, a description of an alligator's cave must be given, since
it is to this grewsome retreat that the hideous brute takes his booty.
Selecting some spot where the water is deep--usually beneath some
overhanging bank--an alligator excavates what is called a "cave." Any
one, standing upon the border of a lake or swamp in Florida, may, all
unconsciously, be directly over one of these places. He makes it
sufficiently large to accommodate one or more of his kind, by dragging
out the mud and roots with the strong claws or nails that arm his fore
paws or legs. These "caves" serve in winter for hibernation, and at
other times for the purpose that will be explained.
Once in the water, then--to return to the unhappy razorback--the
alligator does not rely wholly upon his teeth and jaws to hold the
desperate animal. He can not yet sink, for the victim is too strong.
It must first be drowned, and a furious struggle for the mastery then
begins.
By degrees the brute finally succeeds in dragging the animal out into
water sufficiently deep to suit his purpose, and then he clasps it
firmly with his paws, precisely like the hugging of a bear. He then
begins to roll over and over. Now beneath the surface, now out, he
turns and turns, first the alligator uppermost, then his prey,
alternately, until the poor animal is drowned literally by inches.
Before long the razorback weakens, his struggles lessen, and then the
alligator sinks to the bottom, and when all motion has ceased he
deposits the body in his cave, well pleased with the prospect of a
full larder for some time to come.
One might naturally ask just here whether or not this scene would be
the same were a human being the victim. The reply would be--precisely.
The alligator undoubtedly prefers his food in a partly decomposed
condition, although it is an undecided point whether this preference
arises from a natural taste, or for the reason that food in that state
is softer and more easily torn apart. Whichever may be the case,
Nature unasked supplies the remedy, and the alligator takes advantage
of her assistance, and deposits his victim in his hiding place,
confident that at the proper time it will rise to the surface in the
condition best adapted to his needs.
Although by nature the alligator is amphibious, he passes the greater
part of his time upon land during the breeding season. At such times,
also, he migrates from one clear-water lake or swamp to another,
should he not find a mate in his own locality, and he may not
infrequently be met in his overland journeyings. Alligators are not
strictly gregarious, although large numbers are found in the same body
of water; while, on the contrary, there will often be but one or two
that will haunt a certain tract for a long period.
During this season the bull alligator is very noisy, and his deep
bellowing may be heard for a long distance. To state that this noise
causes the ground to vibrate may seem an exaggeration, but the fact
may easily be proved by visiting a swamp where the reptiles have
congregated. The water in the vicinity will plainly show the jarring
of the ground.
This bellow is a thundering, rumbling sound; and when it is combined
with the startling hisses, blowings, sighs, and deep-breathed snorts
which the creature can produce at will, no one will be likely to
dispute that his collection of diabolical noises is quite complete.
During the period of incubation the female alligator is a devoted
mother. She does not desert her nest from the time that the eggs are
laid until they are hatched--lying concealed in the scrub close
by--and she is naturally, at this time, most dangerous to approach,
although her vigilance does not always save a portion of her unhatched
progeny from the numerous enemies that have a fondness for alligator
omelet.
[Illustration: GROUP OF CAPTIVE ALLIGATORS. From photograph by O. P.
Hareus, Jacksonville.]
The nest is a large, well-rounded heap or mound, composed of sand and
rubbish, which she drags and pushes together with her claws.
Throughout this mound she deposits her eggs, from forty to seventy and
over. These eggs resemble those of a goose, only that they are larger;
they have a thick, tough shell, and are of about the same size at both
ends. In about sixty days, the heat of the sun, combined with the
warmth and moisture generated by the fermentation of the rubbish,
completes the process of incubation, and the little ones begin to come
forth.
Forcing their way through the sand, they hurry down the sloping sides
of the mound, straightway seeking the water by instinct. While these
baby 'gators are thus kicking and flinging off their shell overcoats
as they emerge from their incubator, perfect little duplicates of
their mother--only that they are rather pretty in their clean, glossy,
black or dark-brown skins, which have orange-colored stripes that
completely ring their miniature tails and bodies--she wanders
anxiously about, probably wondering how many of her family will
succeed in running the very uncertain gantlet of life.
For, eaten while in the egg stage by birds and animals, and swallowed
by open-mouthed, expectant fishes, and by other alligators--often led,
if the truth must be told, by the interesting father himself--as soon
as they reach the water, the early days of an alligator are full of
trouble. That enough escape to prevent extinction, however, goes
almost without saying.
Alligators are hunted for their teeth, which find a ready market when
made up into pretty ornaments; and of late years extensively for their
hides, which make a very handsome leather. For this purpose the older
specimens are not valuable, their hides being too gnarled, knotty, and
moss-grown to tan well. After ten or fifteen years the hide coarsens.
It is always the skin from the under side of the body and head which
is used, that from the back being so heavily armored with tough, horny
plates and shields as to be practically useless. The flesh for food
finds but few admirers. Like the eggs, it is permeated by a strong,
musky flavor, too rank to find appreciation from a refined palate; but
in some places the steaks from the reptile are eaten by the negroes
and pronounced good.
To successfully hunt the alligator requires experience, for quick work
is necessary, the brute disappearing at the least suspicion of danger.
Hunting by "jack" is the usual method pursued, for the light seems to
charm the creature, so that he may be more easily detained until a
properly directed bullet speedily puts an end to his existence.
A professional alligator hunter, or a "'gator man," as he is called,
leads a life full of adventure, but his business is upon the wane,
since the fad for alligator leather is being pushed aside to make way
for something later and more novel. Nevertheless, a description of his
outfit may not be uninteresting.
A most important adjunct to this outfit is the man who usually
accompanies the 'gator man upon his expeditions. He might properly be
called the silent partner, for his duty is to instantly and silently
obey the different hand signals, meaning "To the right," "To the
left," "Stop," "Back," "Hurry," "Forward," "Spurt," "Slow," given by
the hunter, while standing erect in the bow of the boat, when out with
the "jack." Indeed, upon his alertness depends much of the success or
failure of the night's work.
The other tools used by the 'gator man are a light, strong boat, a
pair of light oars and a broad-bladed paddle with a four-foot handle,
neatly coiled rope, a jack lamp furnished with a powerful reflector,
an axe, a long, keen-bladed hunting knife, two guns (twelve-bore
breech-loaders, for a heavy charge at one delivery is absolutely
necessary), bags of ammunition, some strong chains, rawhide rope, and
a 'gator pole. This last-mentioned "tool" is a stout pole about ten
feet long, armed with a heavy hook of quarter-inch iron, bearing a
barbed shank of two inches or more, and it is used for hauling the
dead alligators from the bottom, for the creatures sink as soon as
killed.
The brilliant rays from the "jack" reveal a curious and a grewsome
sight when thrown upon a bank or island upon which a group of the
creatures have congregated. The shining waters of the swamp, so still
and black at that hour of midnight; the hideous tangle of huge gray
forms, as a dozen or more alligators, fairly intoxicated by the gleam
of the mysterious light, steadfastly watch its incomprehensible
presence. Gazing intently, their evil eyes blood-red in the glare from
the powerful reflector, some lie motionless, others roar and hiss and
snort with thrilling fierceness as the mystery deepens, incessantly
arching their bodies, then alternately depressing them to the ground.
Still others, crawling from beneath their companions, scuffle angrily
to the front, and stand with jaws partly open--now and then slowly
inflating their lungs, until their throats and sides puff out like
bellows. Yet, strange to say, instinct seems to warn the mother
alligator, for there she may be seen quietly creeping away with her
young.
Then, the loud reports from the guns, and the mystery is dispelled!
The island is deserted, and the work of raising the successfully shot
saurians begins.
* * * * *
Boards of rural engineering, syndicates of specialists
organized in several of the countries of northern Europe to
look after drainage and irrigation, have rendered great
services to the populations of the country districts. With
their aid 591 villages in Alsace-Lorraine were provided with
water between 1881 and 1895, and 516 communes in Baden have
been benefited by their assistance. The expense of the
improvement has not exceeded $6.61 (33 francs) per
inhabitant. The Agricultural Bureau in Prussia has in the
past five years drawn the plans and directed the work of 554
hydraulic syndicates, covering a total surface of more than
600,000 acres. A numerous body of these agricultural
engineers is formed every year in Germany, 517 students
having pursued the course of the section of rural
engineering in 1893 in the agronomical institutes of Bonn
and Berlin alone.
It is generally accepted that the spider is a solitary
animal, that will tolerate no companions, even the male
being in danger of being devoured by his female. But a
spider--the _Stregodyphus gregarius_--is described as living
in the Transvaal in communities, including males and
females, young and old. The nests are sometimes voluminous
and have partitions and numerous passages running through
them. The spiders usually escape observation by wrapping
themselves in dry leaves that hang from stems.
THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE.
A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY.
(_Lowell Institute Lectures, 1896._)
BY WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY, PH. D.,
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF
TECHNOLOGY; LECTURER IN ANTHROPO-GEOGRAPHY AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
SUPPLEMENT.--THE JEWS (_continued_).
Tradition has long divided the Jewish people into two distinct
branches: the Sephardim, or southern, and the Ashkenazim, or north,
European. Mediæval legend among the Jews themselves traced the descent
of the first from the tribe of Judah; the second, from that of
Benjamin. The Sephardim are mainly the remnants of the former Spanish
and Portuguese Jews. They constitute in their own eyes an aristocracy
of the nation. They are found primarily to-day in Africa; in the
Balkan states, where they are known as Spagnuoli; less purely in
France and Italy. A small colony in London and Amsterdam still holds
itself aloof from all communion and intercourse with its brethren. The
Ashkenazim branch is numerically far more important, for the German,
Russian, and Polish Jews comprise over nine tenths of the people, as
we have already seen in our preceding article.
Early observers all describe these two branches of the Jews as very
different in appearance. Vogt, in his Lectures on Man, assumes the
Polish type to be descended from Hindu sources, while the Spanish
alone he held to be truly Semitic. Weisbach[11] gives us the best
description of the Sephardim Jew as to-day found at Constantinople. He
is slender in habit, he says; almost without exception the head is
"exquisitely" elongated and narrow, the face a long oval; the nose
hooked and prominent, but thin and finely chiseled; hair and eyes
generally dark, sometimes, however, tending to a reddish blond. This
rufous tendency in the Oriental Jew is emphasized by many observers.
Dr. Beddoe[12] found red hair as frequent in the Orient as in Saxon
England, although later results do not fully bear it out.[13] This
description of a reddish Oriental type corresponds certainly to the
early representations of the Saviour; it is the type, in features,
perhaps, rather than hair, painted by Rembrandt--the Sephardim in
Amsterdam being familiar to him, and appealing to the artist in
preference to the Ashkenazim type. This latter is said to be
characterized by heavier features in every way. The mouth, it is
alleged, is more apt to be large, the nose thickish at the end, less
often clearly Jewish, perhaps. The lips are full and sensual, offering
an especial contrast to the thin lips of the Sephardim. The complexion
is swarthy oftentimes, the hair and eyes very constantly dark, without
the rufous tendency which appears in the other branch. The face is at
the same time fuller, the breadth corresponding to a relatively short
and round head.
Does this contrast of the traditional Sephardim and Ashkenazim facial
types correspond to the anthropometric criteria by means of which we
have analyzed the various populations of Europe? And, first of all, is
there the difference of head form between the two which our
descriptions imply?[14] And, if so, which represents the primitive
Semitic type of Palestine? The question is a crucial one. It involves
the whole matter of the original physical derivation of the people,
and the rival claims to purity of descent of the two branches of the
nation. In preceding papers we have learned that western Asia is quite
uniformly characterized by an exceeding broad-headedness, the cephalic
index--that is to say, the breadth of the head in percentage of the
length from front to back--often rising to 86. This is especially
marked in Asia Minor, where some of the broadest and shortest crania
in the world are to be found. The Armenians, for example, are so
peculiar in this respect that their heads appear almost deformed, so
flattened are they at the back. A head of the description appears in
the case of our Jew from Ferghanah on our second portrait page, 344.
On the other hand, the peoples of African or negroid derivation form a
radical contrast, their heads being quite long and narrow, with
indices ranging from 75 to 78. This is the type of the living Arab
to-day. Its peculiarity appears in the prominence of the occipital
region in our Arab and other African portraits. Scientific research
upon these Arabs has invariably yielded harmonious results. From the
Canary Islands,[15] all across northern Africa,[16] to central Arabia
itself,[17] the cephalic indices of the nomadic Arabs agree closely.
They denote a head form closely allied to that of the long-headed
Iberian races, typified in the modern Spaniards, south Italians, and
Greeks. It was the head form of the ancient Phoenicians and Egyptians
also, as has recently been proved beyond all question.[18] Thus does
the European Mediterranean type shade off in head form, as in
complexion also, into the primitive anthropological type of the negro.
The situation being thus clearly defined, it should be relatively easy
to trace our modern Jews, if, indeed, as has so long been assumed,
they have remained a pure and undefiled race during the course of
their incessant migrations. We should be able to trace their origin if
they possess any distinctive head form, either to the one continent or
the other, with comparative certainty.
-------------------------+--------------------+----------+------------
AUTHORITY. | Place. | Number. | Cephalic
| | | Index.
-------------------------+--------------------+----------+------------
Lombroso, 1894 a |Turin, Italy. | 112 | 82.0
Weisbach, '77 |Balkan states. | 19 | 82.2
Majer and Kopernicki, '77|Galicia. | 316 | 83.6
Blechmann, '82 |W. Russia. | 100 | 83.2
Stieda, '83 (Dybowski) |Minsk, Russia. | 67 | 82.2
Ikof, '84 |Russia. | 120 | 83.2
Ikof, '84 |Constantinople. |17 crania | 74.5
Ikof, '84 |Crimea. |30 crania | 83.3
| | (Karaim).|
Majer and Kopernicki,'85 |Galicia. | 100 | 81.7
Jacobs, '90 |England. | 363 | 80.0
Jacobs, '90 |England (Sephardim).| 51 |
Talko-Hyrncewicz, '92 |Lithuania. | 713 |
Chantre, '95 |Caucasia. | 34 | 85.0
Weissenberg, '95 |South Russia. | 100 | 82.5
Weissenberg, '95 |South Russia. |50 women. | 82.4
Glück, '96 |Bosnia (Spagnuoli). | 55 | 80.1
Livi, '96 |Italy. | 34 | 81.6
Elkind, '97 |Poland. | 325 |{Men, 81.9
| | |{Women, 82.9
Deniker, '98 |Daghestan. | 19 | 87.0
-------------------------+--------------------+----------+------------
During the last quarter of a century about twenty-five hundred Jews
have submitted their heads to scientific measurement. These have
naturally for the most part been taken from the Great Russian and
Polish branch; a few observers, as Lombroso, Ikof, Jacobs, Glück, and
Livi, have taken observations upon a more or less limited number from
southern Europe. For purposes of comparison we have reproduced in our
footnote a summary of all the results obtained thus far. Inspection of
the table shows a surprising uniformity. Ikof's limited series of
Spagnuoli from Constantinople, and that of the Jews from Caucasia and
Daghestan, are the only ones whose cephalic index lies outside the
limits of 80 to 83. In other words, the Jews, wherever found in
Europe, betray a remarkable similarity in head form, the crania being
considerably broader than among the peoples of Teutonic descent. As we
know, the extremes of head form in Europe, measured by the cephalic
index, extend from 74 to 89; we thus observe that the Jews take a
place rather high in the European series. They are about like the
northern French and southern Germans. More important still, they seem
to be generally very closely akin in head form to the people among
whom they reside. Thus, in Russia and Poland scarcely an appreciable
difference exists in this respect between Jews and Christians. The
same is true in Turin, while in the direction of Asia our Jews are as
bullet-headed as even the most typical Armenians and Caucasians round
about them.
[Illustration: ARAB. Index, 76.
MUSSULMAN, TUNIS. Index, 75.
JEW, TUNIS. Index, 75.
AFRICAN SEMITIC TYPES.]
This surprising similarity of head form between the Jews of North and
South Europe bears hard upon the long-accepted theory that the
Sephardim is dolichocephalic, thereby remaining true to the original
Semitic type borne to-day by the Arabs. It has quite universally been
accepted that the two branches of the Jews differed most materially in
head form. From the facial dissimilarity of the two a correlative
difference in head form was a gratuitous inference. Dr. Beddoe
observes that in Turkey the Spagnuoli "seemed" to him to be more
dolichocephalic. A few years later Barnard Davis (1867) "suspected" a
diversity, but had only three Italian skulls to judge from, so that
his testimony counts for little. Then Weisbach (1877) referred to the
"exquisitely" long heads of the Spagnuoli, but his data show a
different result. Ikof, with his small series of crania from
Constantinople, is the only observer who got a result which accords in
any degree with what we know of the head form of the modern Semitic
peoples. On the other hand, Glück in Bosnia and Livi in Italy find no
other sign of long-headedness than a slight drop in index of a point
or two. Jacobs, in England, whose methods, as Topinard has observed,
are radically defective, gives no averages for his Sephardim, but they
appear to include about eleven per cent less pure long-headed types
than even their Ashkenazim brethren in London. This, it will be noted,
is the exact opposite of what might normally be expected. This tedious
summary forces us inevitably to the conclusion that, while a
long-headed type of Sephardim Jews may exist, the law is very far from
being satisfactorily established.
Thus, from a study of our primary characteristic--the proportions of
the head--we find our modern Jews endowed with a relatively much
broader head than that of the average Englishman, for example: while
the best living representative of the Semitic race, the Arab, has a
head which is even longer and narrower than our own type. It is, in
short, one of the longest known, being in every way distinctly
African. The only modern Jews who even approach this type would seem
to be those who actually reside to-day in Africa, as in the case of
our two portrait types from that region. Two possible explanations are
open to us: either the great body of the Jews in Europe
to-day--certainly all the Ashkenazim, who form upward of ninety per
cent of the nation, and quite probably the Sephardim also, except
possibly those in Africa--have departed widely from the parental type
in Palestine; or else the original Semitic type was broad-headed, and,
by inference, distinctly Asiatic in derivation; in which case it is
the modern Arab which has deviated from its original pattern. Ikof is
the only authority who boldly faces this dilemma, and chooses the
Asiatic hypothesis with his eyes open.[19] Which, we leave it to the
reader to decide, would be the more likely to vary--the wandering Jew,
ever driven from place to place by constant persecution, and
constantly exposed to the vicissitudes of life in densely populated
cities, the natural habitat of the people, as we have said; or the
equally nomadic Arab, who, however, seems to be invariable in type,
whether in Algeria, Morocco, the Canary Islands, or Arabia Felix
itself? There can be but one answer, it seems to us. The original
Semitic stock must have been in origin strongly dolichocephalic--that
is to say, African as the Arabs are to-day; from which it follows,
naturally, that about nine tenths of the living Jews are as widely
different in head form from the parent stock to-day as they well could
be. The boasted purity of descent of the Jews is, then, a myth. Renan
(1883) is right, after all, in his assertion that the ethnographic
significance of the word Jew, for the Russian and Danubian branch at
least, long ago ceased to exist. Or, as Lombroso observes, the modern
Jews are physically more Aryan than Semitic, after all. They have
unconsciously taken on to a large extent the physical traits of the
people among whom their lot has been thrown. In Algiers they have
remained long-headed like their neighbors, for, even if they
intermarried, no tendency to deviation in head form would be provoked.
If, on the other hand, they settled in Piedmont, Austria, or Russia,
with their moderately round-headed populations, they became in time
assimilated to the type of these neighbors as well.
Nothing is simpler than to substantiate the argument of a constant
intercourse and intermixture of Jews with the Christians about them
all through history, from the original exodus of the forty thousand
(?) from Jerusalem after the destruction of the second temple. At this
time the Jewish nation as a political entity ceased to exist. An
important consideration to be borne in mind in this connection, as
Neubauer suggests very aptly, is that opposition to mixed marriages
was primarily a prejudice of religion and not of race. It was
dissipated on the conversion of the Gentile to Judaism. In fact, in
the early days of Judaism marriage with a nonbeliever was not
invalid at all, as it afterward became, according to the Jewish
code. Thus Josephus, speaking of the Jews at Antioch, mentions that
they made many converts, receiving them into their community. An
extraordinary number of conversions to Judaism undoubtedly took place
during the second century after Christ. As to the extent of
intermarriage which ensued during the middle ages discussion is still
rife. Renan, Neubauer, and others interpret the various rigid
prohibitions against intermarriage of Jews with Christians--as, for
example, at the church councils of 538, 589, at Toledo, and of 743 at
Rome--to mean the prevalent danger of such practices becoming general;
while Jacobs, Andree, and others are inclined to place a lower
estimate upon their importance. Two wholesale conversions are known to
have taken place: the classical one of the Khozars, in South Russia,
during the reign of Charlemagne, and that of the Falashas, who were
neighboring Arab tribes in Yemen. Jacobs has ably shown, however, the
relatively slight importance of these. It is probable that the
greatest amount of infusion of Christian blood must have taken place,
in any event, not so much through such striking conversions, as
insidiously through clandestine or irregular marriages.
[Illustration: FERGHANAH, TURKESTAN.
HÉRAULT, FRANCE.
ELIZABETHGRAD, RUSSIA.
SPAGNUOLI, BOSNIA.
ELIZABETHGRAD, RUSSIA.
JEWISH TYPES.]
We find, for example, much prohibitive legislation against the
employment of Christian servants by Jews. This was directed against
the danger of conversion to Judaism, by the master, with consequent
intermarriage. It is not likely that these prohibitions were of much
avail, for, despite stringent laws in Hungary, for example, we find
the archbishop of that country reporting in 1229 that many Jews were
illegally living with Christian wives, and that conversions by
thousands were taking place. In any case, no protection for slaves was
ever afforded. The confinement of the Jews strictly to the Ghettos
during the later centuries would naturally discourage such
intermixture of blood, as also the increasing popular hatred between
Jew and Christian; but, on the other hand, the greater degree of
tolerance enjoyed by the Israelites even during this present century
would be competent speedily to produce great results. Jacobs has
strenuously, although perhaps somewhat inconclusively, argued in favor
of a substantial purity of the Jews by means of a number of other
data--such as, for example, by a study of the relative frequency of
Jewish names, by the supposed relative infecundity of mixed marriages,
and the like. Experience and the facts of everyday observation, on the
other hand, tend to confirm us in the belief that racially no purity
of descent is to be supposed for an instant. Consider the evidence of
names, for example. We may admit a considerable purity, perhaps, to
the Cohns and Cohens, legitimate descendants of the Cohanim, the sons
of Aaron, early priests of the temple. Their marital relations were
safeguarded against infusion of foreign blood in every possible way.
The name is, perhaps, in its various forms, the most frequent among
Jews to-day. But how shall we account for the equally pure Jewish
names in origin, such as Davis, Harris, Phillips, and Hart? How did
they ever stray so far from their original ethnic and religious
significance, unless the marital bars were lowered to a large degree?
Some of them certainly claim a foremost position numerically in our
Christian English directories. We have an interesting case of
indefinite Jewish delimitation in our portraits. The middle portrait
at page 341 is certainly a Jewish type. Dr. Bertholon writes me that
all who saw it immediately asserted it to be a Jew. Yet the man was a
professed Mussulman, in fact, even though his face was against him.
There is, as we have sought to prove, no single uniform type of head
peculiar to the Jewish people which may be regarded as in any sense
racially hereditary. Is this true also of the face? Our first
statement encounters no popular disapproval, for most of us never,
perhaps, happened to think of this head form as characteristic. But
the face, the features! Is this another case of science running
counter to popular belief?
The first characteristic to impress itself upon the layman is that the
Jew is generally a brunette. All scientific observers corroborate this
impression, agreeing in that the dark hair and eyes of this people
really constitute a distinct racial trait. About two thirds of the
Ashkenazim branch in Galicia and Russia, where the general population
is relatively quite blond, is of the brunette type, this being
especially marked in the darker color of the hair. For example, Majer
and Kopernicki,[20] in Galicia, found dark hair to be about twice as
frequent as the light. Elkind,[21] in Warsaw, finds about three fifths
of the men dark. In Bosnia, Glück's observations on the Sephardim type
gave him only two light-haired men out of fifty-five. In Germany and
Austria[22] this brunette tendency is likewise strongly emphasized.
Pure brunette types are twice as frequent in the latter country, and
three times as frequent in Germany, among Jewish as among Christian
school children. Facts also seem to bear out the theory, to which we
have already alluded, that the Oriental Jews betray a slightly greater
blond tendency, thus inclining to rufous. In Germany also the blond
tendency becomes appreciably more frequent in Alsace-Lorraine, a
former center of gravity of the nation, as the map in our previous
article has shown. This comparative blondness of the Alsatian Jew is
not new, for in 1861 the origin of these same blondes was matter of
controversy. Broca believed them to be of northern derivation, while
Pruner Bey traced them from a blondish Eastern source. The English
Jews seem also to be slightly lighter than their continental brethren,
even despite their presumably greater proportion of Sephardim, who are
supposed to be peculiarly dark. As to the relative red blondness of
the Oriental Jew, the early observations of Dr. Beddoe, and those of
Langerhans (1873) as to the blue eyes and red-brown hair of the Druses
of Lebanon, do not seem to be borne out; or, as Jacobs puts it, the
"argument may be dismissed with costs." Certainly the living Semites
are dark enough in type, and the evidence of the sacred books bears
out the same theory of an original dark type. Thus "black" and "hair"
are commonly synonymous in the early Semitic languages. In any case,
whatever the color in the past, we have seen that science corroborates
the popular impression that the Jews as a people are distinctively of
a brunette type. This constitutes one of the principal traits by which
they may be almost invariably identified. It is not without interest
to notice that this brunetteness is more accentuated, oftentimes,
among the women, who are, the world over, persistent conservators of
the primitive physical characteristics of a people.[23]
Secondly, as to the nose. Popularly the humped or hook nose
constitutes the most distinctive feature of the Jewish face.
Observations among the Jews, in their most populous centers, do not,
however, bear out the theory. Thus Majer and Kopernicki (1885), in
their extended series, found only nine per cent of the hooked type--no
greater frequency than among the Poles; a fact which Weissenberg
confirms as to the relative scarcity of the convex nose in profile
among his South Russian Jews. He agrees, however, that the nose is
often large, thick, and prominent. Weisbach (1877) measured the facial
features of nineteen Jews, and found the largest noses in a long
series of people from all over the earth; exceeded in length, in fact,
by the Patagonians alone. The hooked nose is, indeed, sometimes
frequent outside the Jewish people. Olechnowicz found, for example,
over a third of the noses of the gentry in southeast Poland to be of
this hooked variety. Running the eye over our carefully chosen series
of portraits, selected for us as typical from four quarters
of Europe--Algeria, Russia, Bosnia, and the confines of
Asia--representing the African, Balkan Spagnuoli, and Russian
Ashkenazim varieties, visual impression will also confirm our
deduction. The Jewish nose is not so often truly convex in profile.
Nevertheless, it must be confessed that it gives a hooked impression.
This seems to be due to a peculiar "tucking up of the wings," as Dr.
Beddoe expresses it. Herein lies the real distinctive quality about
it, rather than in any convexity of outline. In fact, it often
renders a nose concave in profile, immediately recognizable as Jewish.
Jacobs[24] has ingeniously described this "nostrility," as he calls
it, by the following diagrams: Write, he says, a figure 6 with a long
tail (Fig. 1); now remove the turn of the twist, and much of the
Jewishness disappears; and it vanishes entirely when we draw the lower
continuation horizontally, as in Fig. 3. Behold the transformation!
The Jew has turned Roman beyond a doubt. What have we proved, then?
That there is in reality such a phenomenon as a Jewish nose, even
though it be differently constituted from our first assumption. A
moment's inspection of our series of portraits will convince the
skeptic that this trait, next to the prevalent dark hair and eyes and
the swarthy skin, is the most distinctive among the chosen people.
[Illustration: _Fig. 1._]
[Illustration: _Fig. 2._]
[Illustration: _Fig. 3._]
Another characteristic of the Jewish physiognomy is the eyes. The
eyebrows, seemingly thick because of their darkness, appear to be
nearer together than usual, arching smoothly into the lines of the
nose. The lids are rather full, the eyes large, dark, and brilliant. A
general impression of heaviness is apt to be given. In favorable cases
this imparts a dreamy, melancholy, or thoughtful expression to the
countenance; in others it degenerates into a blinking, drowsy type;
or, again, with eyes half closed, it may suggest suppressed cunning.
The particular adjective to be applied to this expression varies
greatly according to the personal equation of the observer. Quite
persistent also is a fullness of the lips, often amounting in the
lower one almost to a pout. The chin in many cases is certainly rather
pointed and receding, Jacobs to the contrary notwithstanding. A
feature of my own observation, perhaps not fully justified, is a
peculiar separation of the teeth, which seem to stand well apart from
one another. But a truce to speculations. Entering into greater
detail, the flat contradictions of different observers show that they
are vainly generalizing from an all too narrow base of observations.
Even the fancied differences in feature between the two great branches
of the Hebrew people seem to us to be of doubtful existence. Our
portraits do not bear it out. It seems rather that the two
descriptions of the Ashkenazim and Sephardim types which we have
quoted denote rather the distinction between the faces of those of the
upper and the lower classes. Enough for us to know that there is a
something Jewish in these faces which we instantly detect. We
recognize it in Rembrandt's Hermitage, or in Munkaczy's Christ before
Pilate. Not invariable are these traits. Not even to the Jew himself
are they always a sure criterion. Weissenberg gives an interesting
example of this.[25] To a friend, a Jew in Elizabethgrad, he submitted
two hundred and fifty photographs of Russian Jews and Christians in
undistinctive costume. Seventy per cent of the Jews were rightly
chosen, while but ten per cent of the Russians were wrongly classed as
Jews. Of what concern is it whether this characterization be entirely
featural, or in part a matter of expression? The first would be a
matter of direct heredity, the second hypothesis partakes more of the
nature of a characteristic acquired from the social environment. Some
one--Jacobs, I think--speaks of it as the "expression of the Ghetto."
It certainly appears in the remarkable series of composite Jewish
portraits published in his monograph. It would not be surprising to
find this true. Continued hardship, persecution, a desperate struggle
against an inexorable human environment as well as natural one, could
not but write its lines upon the face. The impression of a dreary past
is deep sunk in the bodily proportions, as we have seen. Why not in
the face as well?
We are now prepared, in conclusion, to deal with what is perhaps the
most interesting phase of our discussion. It is certainly, if true, of
profound sociological importance. We have in these pages spoken at
length of the head form--primary index of race; we have shown that
there are Jews and Jews in this respect. Yet which was the real Jew it
was not for us to decide, for the ninety-and-nine were broad-headed,
while the Semite in the East is still, as ever, a long-headed member
of the Africanoid races. This discouraged our hopes of proving the
existence of a Jewish cephalic type as the result of purity of
descent. It may indeed be affirmed with certainty that the Jews are by
hereditary descent from early times no purer than most of their
European neighbors. Then we discovered evidence that in this head form
the Jews were often closely akin to the people among whom they lived.
In long-headed Africa they were dolichocephalic. In brachycephalic
Piedmont, though supposedly of Sephardim descent, they were quite like
the Italians of Turin. And all over Slavic Europe no distinction in
head form between Jew and Christian existed. In the Caucasus also they
approximate closely the cranial characteristics of their neighbors.
Hypnotic suggestion was not needed to find a connection here,
especially since all history bore us out in our assumption of a large
degree of intermixture of Gentile blood. Close upon this disproval of
purity of type by descent came evidence of a distinct uniformity of
facial type. Even so impartial an observer as Weissenberg--certainly
not prejudiced in favor of cephalic invariability--confesses this
featural unity.
How shall we solve this enigma of ethnic purity, and yet impurity, of
type? In this very apparent contradiction lies the grain of comfort
for our sociological hypothesis. The Jew is radically mixed in the
line of _racial descent_; he is, on the other hand, the legitimate
heir to all Judaism as a matter of _choice_. It is for us a case of
purely artificial selection, operative as ever only in those physical
traits which appeal to the senses. It is precisely analogous to our
example of the Basques in France and Spain. What we have said of them
will apply with equal force here. Both Jews and Basques possessed in a
high degree a "consciousness of kind"; they were keenly sensible of
their social individuality. The Basques primarily owed theirs to
geographical isolation and a peculiar language; that of the Jews was
derived from the circumstances of social isolation, dependent upon the
dictates of religion. Another case in point occurs to us in this
connection. Chantre,[26] in a recent notable work, has shown the
remarkable uniformity in physical type among the Armenians. They are
so peculiar in head form that we in America recognize them at once by
their foreshortened and sugar-loaf skulls, almost devoid of occiput.
They too, like the Jews, have long been socially isolated in their
religion. Thus in all these cases, Basques, Armenians, and Jews, we
have a potent selective force at work. So far as in their power lay,
the individuality of all these people was encouraged and perpetuated
as one of their dearest possessions. It affected every detail of their
lives. Why should it not also react upon their ideal of physical
beauty? and why not influence their sexual preferences, as well as to
determine their choice in marriage? Its results became thus
accentuated through heredity. But all this would be accomplished, be
it especially noted, only in so far as the physical traits were
consciously or unconsciously impressed upon them by the facts of
observation. There arises at once the difference between artificial
selection in the matter of the head form and that concerning the
facial features. One is an unsuspected possession of individuality,
the other is matter of common notice and, it may be, of report. What
Jew or Christian, till he became anthropologist, ever stopped to
consider the shape of his head, any more than the addition of a number
of cubits to his stature? Who has not, on the other hand, early
acquired a distinct concept of a Jewish face and of a distinctly
Jewish type? Could such a potent fact escape observation for a moment?
We are confirmed in our belief in the potency of an artificial
selection, such as we have described, to perpetuate or to evolve a
Jewish facial type by reason of another observation. The women among
the Jews, as Jacobs[27] notes, in confirmation of our own belief,
betray far more constantly than the men the outward characteristics
peculiar to the people. We have already cited Weissenberg's testimony
that brunetteness is twice as prevalent among Russian Jewesses as
among the men. Of course this may be a matter of anabolism, pure and
simple. This would be perhaps a competent explanation of the
phenomenon for physiologists like Geddes and Thompson. For us this
other cause may be more directly responsible. Artificial selection in
a social group, wherein the active choice of mates falls to the share
of the male, would seem to tend in the direction of an accentuated
type in that more passive sex on which the selective influence
directly plays. At all events, observations from widely scattered
sources verify the law that the facial individuality of a people is
more often than otherwise expressed most clearly in the women. Thus,
for example, the women betray the Mongol type more constantly than the
men among the Asiatic tribes of eastern Russia.[28] On the other hand,
Mainof, best of authority, confirms the same tendency among those of
Finnic descent.[29] The _Setti Communi_ in northern Italy still
preserve their German language as evidence of a historic Teutonic
descent. They seem to have lost their identity entirely in respect of
the head form,[30] but Ranke[31] states that among the women the
German facial type constantly reappears. This, I confess, is not
altogether easy to understand, unless the Lombards, of whom these
colonies are supposedly the remnants, brought their native women with
them across the Alps. Perhaps, however, not bringing their women, a
new Teutonic resemblance has been evolved out of whole cloth. A better
example than this is offered among the Hamitic peoples of Africa north
of the Sahara. These peoples, from Abyssinia to Morocco, really belong
to the white races of Europe. Among nearly all their tribes the
negroid traits are far more accentuated among the women, according to
Sergi.[32] It is not necessary to cite more specific testimony. The
law occupies a respected place among anthropologists. That the Jews
confirm it, would seem to strengthen our hypothesis at every point.
Our final conclusion, then, is this: It is paradoxical, yet true, we
affirm. The Jews are not a race, but only a people, after all. In
their faces we read its confirmation, while in respect of their other
traits we are convinced that such individuality as they possess--by no
means inconsiderable--is of their own making from one generation to
the next, rather than as a product of an unprecedented purity of
physical descent.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] 1877, p. 214.
[12] 1861 b, pp. 227 and 331.
[13] Glück, 1896 a. Jacobs, 1890, p. 82, did not find a trace of it in
the Sephardim congregation in London. See Andree, 1878, in this
connection.
[14] The cephalic index by which we measure the head-form is merely
the breadth of the head in percentage of its length from front to
back. The index rises as the head becomes relatively more broad.
[15] Verneau, 1881 a, p. 500.
[16] Pruner Bey, 65 b; Gillebert d'Hercourt, 1868, p. 9; and
especially Collignon, 1887 a, pp. 326-339; Bertholon, 1892, p. 41;
also Collignon, 1896 b.
[17] Eliséev, 1883.
[18] Bertholon, 1892, p. 43; Sergi, 1897 a, chapter i, and even more
recently Fouquet, 1896 and 1897, on the basis of De Morgan's
discoveries.
[19] Compare Brinton, 1890 a, p. 132, and 1890 b, for interesting
linguistic data on the Semites.
[20] 1877, pp. 88-90; 1885, p. 84.
[21] Centralblatt für Anthropologie, vol. iii, p. 66.
[22] Virchow, 1886 b, p. 364; Schimmer, 1884, p. xxiii.
[23] Weissenberg, 1895, p. 567, finds brunettes twice as frequent
among the south Russian Jewesses as among the men.
[24] 1886 a, p. xxxii.
[25] 1895, p. 563.
[26] Recherches anthropologiques dans l'Asie Occidentale (Archives du
Museum d'histoire naturelle, Lyons, vol. vi, 1895).
[27] 1886 a, p. xxviii.
[28] Sommier, 1887, reprint, p. 116. Cf. Zograf, 1896, p. 50, on
crania from the sixteenth century in Moscow.
[29] Congrès int. des sciences géographiques, Paris, 1875, p. 268.
[30] Livi, 1896 a, pp. 137 and 146.
[31] Beiträge zur Anth. Bayerns, vol. ii, 1879, p. 75.
[32] Africa, Antropologia della stirpe Camitica, Torino, 1897, p. 263.
TRUE TALES OF BIRDS AND BEASTS.
BY DAVID STARR JORDAN.
I.--SEÑOR ALCATRAZ.
He was just a bird when he was born, and a very ugly bird at that. For
he had big splay feet, with all the toes turned forward and joined
together in one broad web, and his wings were thick and clumsy, and
underneath his long bill there was a big red sack that he could fill
with fishes, and when it was full he could hardly walk or fly, so
large the sack was and so great was his appetite.
But he kept the sack well filled and he emptied it out every day into
his stomach, and so he grew very soon to be a large bird, as big as a
turkey, though not as fat, and each day uglier than ever.
But one morning, when he was walking out on the sand flat of the
Astillero at Mazatlan, Mexico, where he lived, he saw a big fish which
had been left by the falling tide in a little pool of water. It was a
blue-colored fish with a big bony head, and no scales, and a sleek,
slippery skin. He did not know that it was a _bagre_, but he thought
that all fishes were good to eat, so he opened his mouth and slipped
the fish, tail first, down into his pouch. It went all right for a
while, but when the fish woke up and knew he was being swallowed, he
straightened out both of his arms, and there he was. For the bagre is
a kind of catfish, and each arm is a long, stiff, sharp bone, or
spine, with a saw edge the whole length of it. And all the bagre has
to do is just to put this arm out straight and twist it at the
shoulder and then it is set, and no animal can bend or break it. And
it pierced right through the skin of the bird's sack, and the bird
could not swallow it, nor make it go up nor down, and the bagre held
on tight, for he knew that if he let go once he would be swallowed,
and that would be the last of him.
So the bird tried everything he could think of, and the fish held on,
and they kept it up all day. In the afternoon a little boy came out on
the sands. His name was Inocente, and he was the son of Ygnacio, the
fisherman of Mazatlan. And Inocente took a club of mangrove and ran up
to the struggling bird and struck it on the wing with the club. The
blow broke the wing, and the bird lay down to die, for with a broken
wing and a fish that would not go up nor down, there was no hope for
him.
When Inocente saw what kind of a fish it was, he knew just what to do.
He reached down into the bird's sack and took hold of the fish's
spines. He gave each one a twist so that it rolled over in its socket,
the upper part toward the fish's head, and then they were not stiff
any more, but lay flat against the side of the fish, just as they
ought to lie. Then the fish knew that it had found a master, and lay
perfectly still. So the bird gave a great gulp, and out the bagre went
on the sand, and when the tide came up it swam away, and took care
never to go again where a bird could get hold of it. And the bird with
the broken wing had learned something about fishes, too. But he could
not fly away, so he waited to see what the boy was going to do.
The boy took the bird into his boat and brought him home. And old
Ygnacio put a splint on his wing and covered it with salve, and by and
by it healed. But the bone was set crooked, and the bird could not fly
very well. So the boys called the bird Señor Alcatraz, which is the
Spanish for Mr. Pelican, and Señor Alcatraz and all the boys and dogs
and goats became good friends, and all ran about on the streets
together. And when the boys would shout and the dogs bark, all Señor
Alcatraz could do was to squawk and hiss and open his big mouth and
show the inside of his red fish sack.
And when the boys would go fishing on the wharf, Alcatraz would go,
too, and he would stow away the fishes in his pouch as fast as the
boys could catch them. But if they caught a bagre fish, he would turn
his head the other way and then run away home just as fast as his
splay feet would take him.
And when the men drew the net on the beach Alcatraz would splash
around inside the net, catching whatever he could, and having a great
deal of fun in his clumsy pelican fashion. Then he would run along the
street with the boys, squawking and flapping his wings and thinking
that he was just like the rest of them. And if you ever go to
Mazatlan, ask for Dr. Rogers, and he will show you the way to
Ygnacio's cabin on the street they call Libertad. And there in the
front yard, in a general scramble of dogs, goats, and little Indian
boys, you will see Señor Alcatraz romping and squabbling like the best
of them. And you will know which he is by the broken wing and the red
sack under his throat. But if you say "Bagre" to him, he will run
under the doorstep and hide his face till you go away.
II.--THE LITTLE BLUE FOX.
Once there was a little blue fox, and his name was Eichkao, and he was
a thief. So he built his house down deep among the rocks under the
moss on the Mist Island, and his little fox children used to stay down
among the rocks. There they would gurgle, gurgle, gurgle, whenever
they heard anybody walking over their heads. Eichkao and his fox wife
used to run all round over the rocks to find something for them to
eat, and whenever Eichkao saw anybody coming he would go clin-n-n-g,
cling-g-g, and his voice was high and sharp, just like the voice of a
buzz saw.
One day he walked out on the rocks over the water and began to talk to
the black sea parrot, whose name is Epatka, and who sits erect on his
carelessly built nest with one egg in it, and wears a great big bill
made of red sealing wax. He has a long white quill pen stuck over each
ear, and over his face is a white mask, so that nobody can know what
kind of a face he has, and all you can see behind the mask is a pair
of little foolish twinkling white glass eyes. What the two said to
each other I don't know, but they did not talk very long, for in a few
minutes when I came back to his house among the rocks Eichkao was
gone, and there lay out on the bank a bill made of red sealing wax, a
white mask, and two little white quill pens. There were a few bones
and claws and some feathers, but they did not seem to belong to
anything in particular, and the little foxes in the rocks went gurgle,
gurgle, gurgle.
One day I lay down on the moss out by the old fox walk on the Mist
Island, and Eichkao saw me there and thought I was some new kind of
walrus which might be good to eat, and would feed all the little foxes
for a month. So he ran around me in a circle, and then he ran around
again, then again and again, always making the circle smaller, until
finally the circle was so narrow that I could reach him with my hand.
As he went around and around, all the time he looked at me with his
cold, gray, selfish eye, and not one of all the beasts has an eye as
cruel-cold as his. When he thought that he was near enough, he gave a
snap with his jaws, and tried to bite out a morsel to take home to the
little foxes; but all I offered him was a piece of rubber boot. And
when I turned around to look at him he was running away as fast as he
could, calling klin-n-g-g, klin-n-g, klin-n-g, like a scared buzz saw
all the time as he went out of sight. And I think that he is running
yet, while the little foxes still go gurgle, gurgle under the rocks.
III.-HOW THE RED FOX WENT HUNTING.
(_With acknowledgment to Mr. A. C. Bassett, of Menlo Park,
California._)
Once on a time there was a great tall rabbit, the kind the miners call
a "narrow-gauge mule"; but he was not a mule at all, and his real name
was "Jack Rabbit." His home was in Montana, and he lived by the river
they call the Silver Bow. He could run faster than any of the other
beasts, and he went lickety-clip, lickety-clip, bounding over the tops
of the sagebrush, for he had no brush of his own to carry.
And there was a red fox who lived on the Silver Bow, too, and he went
hunting because he wanted rabbit for dinner. But while he could run
very fast he could not bound over the tops of the sagebrush, for his
own brush, which he always carried with him because he was so proud of
it, would catch on the thorns of the other kinds of brush and so would
keep him back.
So he sent for his cousin, the coyote, to come and help him. Now, the
coyote lived out in the country by Emigrant Mountain. He was not proud
at all, for he hadn't much of a brush, and nobody flattered him for
his beauty. But for all that the coyote could run very fast, as he had
Indian blood in him. The only trouble was that his hind feet ran
faster than his fore feet. So he had to stop every little while and
run sidewise to unkink himself and give his fore feet a chance to
catch up.
When the coyote came up the rabbit was bounding along through the
bushes, going around in a great circle so that he always came back to
the same place, for that is the way of the rabbit-folk. So the fox lay
low and hid his brush in the sage, and the coyote followed the rabbit
around the circle. And he just kept up with the rabbit all the way,
for the rabbit wasn't scared, and didn't run very fast. And when they
had gone once around the circle the rabbit passed the hidden fox. Then
the fox got up and chased him, and was only a few feet behind. And the
coyote stopped and ran sidewise for a while to unkink himself, and
then he lay down in the bushes and waited for the rabbit to come back.
The rabbit was much scared when he saw the fox close behind him, so he
ran and bounded very fast, and the fox kept falling behind because he
had his long brush to carry. But he kept at it just the same, and when
the rabbit came around the circle to where he started there was the
coyote waiting for him. The rabbit had to make a great jump to get
over the coyote's head. Then they went around again and the coyote
kept close behind all the way, and the rabbit began to get tired. When
the coyote's hind legs got tangled up then the fox was rested, and he
took up the chase; and so they kept on, each one taking his turn,
except the rabbit, who had to keep his own turn all the time.
When the race was over there was nobody there to see how they divided
up what they caught. But I saw the coyote the next day, and he looked
so very empty that I think that the red fox must have taken all the
rabbit meat for himself. Most likely he left his cousin just the ears
for his part, with a rabbit's foot to carry in his pocket for good
luck.
GLACIAL GEOLOGY IN AMERICA.
BY PROF. DANIEL S. MARTIN.
Under this title the vice-president of Section E (Geology) of the
American Association--Prof. Herman L. Fairchild, of the University of
Rochester, New York--gave an admirable _résumé_ of the whole history,
progress, and scope of the study of ice phenomena in North America, as
the opening address before the section at the recent Boston meeting.
Apart from the interest of the subject in itself considered, this
address was a model of what such addresses should be. While strictly
scientific, without the least attempt at rhetorical effect, it was at
the same time so clear, so well arranged and so simple in language,
that any intelligent auditor could enjoy it and grasp it, and carry
away a distinct impression of the gradual development and present
status of this great department of geological study. Professor
Fairchild's choice of his subject was happy also in its fitness to the
occasion, as covering almost exactly the half century of the life of
the association, though going back indeed a few years further, into
the period of the earlier society which developed into the association
in 1848.
The great body of phenomena comprised under the term "drift," and the
smoothed and scratched surfaces of rock, etc., had been by no means
unnoticed by the early students of American geology, but they were
attributed to violent and widespread water action, and were spoken of
in general as "diluvial" formations. When the agency of ice began to
be recognized, it was regarded as that of floating and stranding
bergs; and this view for a long time contended with the theory of
glacial action, even when the latter had been adopted and advocated by
eminent students of the subject.
The first allusion to drifting ice as the agent of transportation of
bowlders, etc., appears to have been made as early as 1825, by one
Peter Dobson, of Connecticut, in a letter to Prof. Benjamin Silliman,
of Yale College. Sir Roderick Murchison, who became the great champion
of this view, credits Mr. Dobson's letter with giving him the first
suggestion of it. Twelve years later, in 1837, T. A. Conrad made the
earliest reference to land ice as the cause of our drift phenomena; he
does this in very striking words when read in the light of the studies
and determinations of later years, although of course imperfectly and
vaguely.
Meanwhile, however, Agassiz and others had been working among the
glaciers of the Alps, and their views as to a great period of former
extension, in Europe and the British Isles, were finding some
acceptance abroad. In this country, Prof. Edward Hitchcock, in his
address as retiring president of the Association of American
Geologists, in 1841, gave a broad and careful review of the drift
phenomena in eastern North America, and referred to the work of
Agassiz, Buckland, and Lyell with great interest, as having given him
"a new geological sense" in observing these phenomena, and said, with
prophetic foresight, "Henceforth, glacial action must form an
important chapter in geology."
But the time was not ripe for the understanding and acceptance of the
glacial theory as a later generation has come to know it. The studies
of Agassiz and his _confrères_ had been among glaciers upon mountain
slopes, and hence, while many of the drift phenomena were strikingly
accounted for, others were not and could not be. So it came to pass
that, while Professor Hitchcock and others in this country were
strongly impressed, they were not satisfied, and held for years an
uncertain position. The glacial indications conformed in some aspects
to the theory, but not in others; the striæ and groovings, instead of
following valleys, all had a general trend to the southward, and the
bowlders were carried across great depressions and deposited upon
heights. How could these conditions be due to glaciers? Could ice flow
uphill, or move long distances over level areas? These and other
phenomena, such as the peculiar distribution of drift material, in
"drumlin" ridges and the like, had no explanation. Hence,
notwithstanding President Hitchcock's utterances above quoted, and his
similar Postscript on the subject of drift and moraines, appended in
the same year to his volume on the Geology of Massachusetts, we find
him in 1843, when again addressing the Association of Geologists,
adopting a modified tone, dwelling upon these points of difficulty,
and seeking a compromise view, which he called "glacio-aqueous." The
great influence also of Murchison and Lyell had been thrown into the
scale in favor of the iceberg theory, and this fact doubtless had much
to do with the slow development of true conceptions. Lyell visited
America in 1842, and was present at the American Geologists' meeting,
advocating the floating-ice doctrine, to which most of our observers
already leaned; and so the views of Agassiz and the glacial school had
to wait for a decade before they found general acceptance or even
audience.
This, we may note in passing, is but one marked instance out of many
in the history of science, wherein the personal influence of eminent
leaders has obstructed and retarded the advance of true knowledge. The
whole recognition of the Cambrian system, as pre-Silurian and
distinct, was suppressed and prevented for many years by Murchison's
intense opposition to the views of Sedgwick. Similar facts might be
cited in this country, did we care to mention names. Science can not
claim, as is sometimes asserted, that it possesses or imparts any
entire exemption from the influence of authority, and bestows complete
independence from the tendency to "swear to the words of a master."
Of the New York geologists, Vanuxem alone, in his Geology of the Third
District, 1842, inclined to the glacial theory; the others--Emmons,
Mather, and Hall--advocated floating ice, the latter urging as a chief
objection the absence of any great northern highlands from which
glaciers could extend southward. Prof. Henry D. Rogers advocated De la
Beche's view, of great catastrophic waves or _débacles_ of water and
ice, produced by sudden uplifts of the floor of a circumpolar ocean,
and sweeping southward with tremendous power over the middle
latitudes. These views were presented by him in 1844, at the
Washington meeting of the geologists, and are to us a most curious
illustration of the old "cataclysmic" phase of geological conceptions.
Two years later Agassiz came to America, and at once set about
studying the ice evidences here, first in the White Mountains and then
around the Great Lakes. At the first meeting of the American
Association, in 1848, he presented his views as to the identity of our
phenomena with those studied by himself, Desor, and Guyot abroad. His
views were not very warmly received, however, and he did not attempt
their public presentation again for some years, turning his attention
more to the field of zoölogy. In 1850, in a work on Lake Superior, he
refers somewhat sharply to the prejudice that seemed to prevail in
relation to this subject.
From this time, however, the aqueous theories began to be less
strongly presented; and a new generation of geologists was coming on,
largely under the training of Guyot and Agassiz, and more open to
their observed results. C. B. Adams, in 1850, presented a view nearly
akin to that adopted by Dana a few years later, of an elevation of the
high northern latitudes, resulting in a southward-moving glacial
sheet, and a subsequent depression connected with its retreat, to
account for the stratified deposits. Professor Dana accepted this
doctrine in his presidential address before the association in 1855,
adding the "Terrace period" of partial re-elevation. From this time he
became the leader of the American glacialists, and his great Manual,
issued in 1862, carried these views into all the colleges of the
country.
In 1857 Prof. Edward Hitchcock published an important treatise on
Surface Geology, particularly of the Connecticut Valley, in the
Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. In this paper he noted the
distinction, so important and now so familiar, between local striæ and
those with the general southward course of the "drift." Two years
later his son, Prof. C. H. Hitchcock, extended this distinction
widely over New England. In 1863 the report of progress of the
Geological Survey of Canada gave an extended review of the surface
geology, by Prof. Robert Bell, in which he fully adopted the glacial
theory. Meantime, also, Professor Ramsay, in England, had abandoned
the iceberg doctrine for that of glaciers.
In 1866 and 1867 important papers appeared by Charles Whittlesey, and
one by Edward Hungerford; this last, read before the association,
adopted the general views of Agassiz, with some important limitations
now generally received. In the same year the revised edition of Dana's
Manual gave yet fuller statement and wider diffusion to the generally
accepted views as held to-day.
Professor Fairchild sums up this historical sketch as comprising four
periods--viz., prior to 1841, undisputed reign of diluvial hypotheses;
1841 to 1848, suggestion and discussion of glacial hypotheses; 1849 to
1866, gradual acceptance of the latter view; from 1867 onward,
development of glacial geology.
From this point, the address was occupied with consideration of the
various aspects of the subject as studied and wrought out during the
past twenty years by numerous observers. These are grouped under four
main heads, each with various subdivisions--viz., (1) the ice sheet,
as to its area, its thickness, its centers of dispersion, its
migration of centers, etc.; (2) the ice period, as to its cause, its
divisions, its duration, its distance in time; (3) the interpretation
of special phenomena, such as moraines, drumlins, eskers, "kettles,"
and the like, valley drift, terraces, loess, etc.; and (4) existing
glaciers, as discovered on our high mountains of the far West, and as
studied in closer relation to the ancient phenomena in the great ice
cap of Greenland and the immense glacier development in Alaska.
It is impossible to go into a detailed review of the numerous points
of interest covered in this discussion. Suffice it to say that one who
heard or who reads it finds an admirably clear and condensed account
of all the problems and phenomena that have been and that are now
encountered in the study of glacial geology on this continent, and of
their gradual interpretation and solution by the combined labors of
many students. The progress of knowledge over this wide field,
advancing step by step, amid conflicting views and perplexing
conditions, is beautifully shown, and leaves a very striking
impression on the mind, of the difficulties and the successes of
scientific research. Nor is Professor Fairchild disposed to claim too
much or assert too strongly. He recognizes that, with all that has
been met and mastered, there are still questions unsolved, and laurels
to be won by others.
Among the facts brought out, a few may be briefly alluded to. The
early abandonment of Agassiz's original view of a vast extension of
the polar snow caps, and the recognition of separate centers of
continental glaciation, now distinctly determined as three in
number--a western, a central, and an eastern--the former being the
earliest, and the others following in succession; the recognition by
the Western geologists of the twofold character of the Glacial epoch,
as also determined in western Europe, but less markedly traceable in
our Eastern States, though now generally admitted; in close relation
to this the determination of the line of the great terminal moraine,
traced by successive observers from the Atlantic seaboard to
Minnesota, and the subsequent recognition of an older, eroded, and
fragmentary morainal "fringe," marking the line of the earlier ice
sheet, somewhat beyond the later. With regard to the actual distance
of the last glacial retreat, as expressed in years, Professor
Fairchild is both cautious and frank. He notes the general consensus
of recent observers toward a much shorter period than was formerly
supposed--from five to ten or perhaps fifteen thousand years. At the
same time, there are many elements of uncertainty involved, and the
problem is by no means settled. The Niagara gorge, so long looked upon
as a possible chronometer, grows more complicated as it is further
studied; the rate of erosion has evidently varied much with the volume
of water carried by the river; and this, in turn, has varied with the
changes of level, and consequently of drainage routes, in the basin of
the Great Lakes. There have been times when only the Erie waters
flowed through the Niagara outlet, the upper lake drainage passing
eastward independently, until a gradual northern rise of the land,
which is proved to be still going on, turned the entire drainage into
the present St. Clair route from Lake Huron into Lake Erie, and so
through Niagara.
This point leads us to digress for a moment from the address under
consideration to allude to a very interesting department of study that
is now growing into prominence--to wit, the restoration of pre-glacial
geography and hydrography, and the genesis of our existing river and
lake systems throughout the northern part of the country. The
discussions and results in regard to Niagara and the Great Lakes are
somewhat familiar, but the work on the rivers and smaller lakes is not
so widely known. Professor Fairchild himself has done much in relation
to the "central lakes" of New York State; and one very interesting
paper of this kind on The Development of the Ohio River was read
before the section by Prof. William G. Light, of Granville, Ohio,
besides many papers by others on similar topics.
The work done within a few years upon the glaciers of Arctic America
has proved peculiarly fruitful in results. Here, again, the whole
subject is reviewed historically, and the name and work of each
observer are impartially noted. Much of the difficulty encountered by
the glacial theory arose, as we have seen, from the fact that only
mountain glaciers had been studied, so that many of the phenomena
produced by continental ice could not be explained. Professor
Fairchild says, as to this aspect: "More has been learned of the
structure, behavior, and work of our ancient ice sheets by the study
of the Alaskan glaciers during the last ten years, and especially by
the study of the Greenland ice cap during the last four years, than by
all the study of the Alpine glaciers for the seventy years since they
have been observed." Prominent among those who have worked in this
field are the names of Professors Chamberlain and Salisbury in
Greenland, and Professors H. F. Reid and I. C. Russell in Alaska;
other important contributors are Prof. W. P. Blake, the pioneer
geologist in Alaska, 1867; Dall and Baker, who discovered and named
the Malaspina Glacier in 1874; and John Muir, 1878, for whom the Muir
Glacier was named; Wright, Baldwin, Schwatka, Libbey, and others, and
Barton and Tarr in Greenland.
Professor Russell, in 1891, recognized and named a type of glacier
that was before unknown. In his studies on the Malaspina he found a
condition that does not occur, so far as yet observed, anywhere else
than on the northwest coast of America; this is where a number of
mountain glaciers debouch upon a low, flat coast plain, and unite to
form a great sluggishly moving sheet of ice. This particular
development he called the Piedmont type.
In closing his address, Professor Fairchild remarks that the word
"theory," as applied to the glacial origin of the drift and its
phenomena, may and should now be abandoned. The subject has passed
beyond the stage of theory, and is as well understood and as clearly
established as the volcanic origin of the cone of Vesuvius or the
sedimentary origin of stratified rocks.
* * * * *
In the center of the artificial platforms or platform
mounds, characteristic of many of the ancient Peruvian
towns, Mr. Bandelier has observed features that recall
forcibly the New Mexican Indian custom of giving to each
inanimate object its heart. In some instances, says Mr. F.
W. Hodge, in his paper, round columns formed a kind of an
interior niche; in others, a small chamber contained urns or
jars with maize meal. A remarkable and very significant
feature was observed by the explorer in a partly ruined
mound at Chanchan. The core of this structure when opened
showed two well-preserved altars of adobe. In such interior
apartments, figurines of metal, clay, or wood are almost
invariably found; and the materially valuable finds made in
Peruvian ruins in earlier times came from the "heart" of one
or the other of the artificial elevations described.
MODERN STUDIES OF EARTHQUAKES.
BY GEORG GERALAND.
The investigation of earthquakes, seismology, has become in the
present day an independent subject of scientific interest. In lands
where earthquakes are frequent, as in Italy and Japan, seismic
observations have been officially systematized over the whole country,
with central and branch stations at which the work is never still. A
net of seismic observations of all nations is being more and more
closely woven over the whole earth, and there are yearly and monthly
collations of observations of even the slightest shocks. Seismic
literature is, therefore, nearly inexhaustible, and theory and praxis
are in constant vogue; in short, seismics has grown to be a separate
branch of science, and to demand independent treatment, calling for
the energy and labor of many students. What gives it so great
importance? What is the condition of our present knowledge and its
history? What will be reached in the future through the competition of
the nations? These questions possess a high scientific as well as
culture-historical interest. We here attempt to answer them.
The first really scientific description of an earthquake--that of
Lisbon--with its far-reaching accompanying phenomena, was the work of
the greatest contemporary thinker, Kant, and it is not too much to say
that his paper opened a new epoch in the knowledge of earthquakes.
That terrible event and the extreme terror which it caused everywhere
were followed in 1783 by the likewise extremely destructive earthquake
of Calabria. The attention of the people was thus directed to this
mysterious mighty activity of the earth, and was kept especially
lively in Italy, the country of Europe most subject to earthquakes.
The newly rising science of geology therefore found in the last third
of the last century in these phenomena a problem of prominent
importance. Geologists were the first to apply themselves to seismic
studies, as the most widely current explanation of the phenomena is
still a geological one. The scientific interest of the question
prevailed over the practical. More attentive observation was given to
earthquakes, the accounts of them scattered through the ancient
chronicles were collated, and the already very numerous seismic notes
of great earthquake manifestations--such as those by Hoff, Perry,
Mallet, Volger, Fuchs, etc.--constituted a very important factor in
the study. One of the earliest results of the inquiry was to show that
directly perceptible earthquakes are not perceptible everywhere; that
they are most common on the great upfoldings of the earth's crust on
the mountain chains, such as the Andes, Alps, and Himalayas; and that,
further, they are connected with the shores of the Pacific, the
Antilles, and the Mediterranean, and with places also where great
breaches and various disturbances are evident; that they are at home
likewise in volcanoes; and that they are most frequent in the northern
hemisphere, and when the earth is nearest to the sun. The descriptions
of powerful shocks furnish us evidence of a double movement of the
earth's crust--an alternate up-and-down vibration and an often very
marked wave motion. The destruction which earthquake shocks and waves
inflict on buildings, and the remarkably rapid and wide spread of the
tremblings over the surface of the earth, have been very diligently
inquired into; and when, in 1856, Naples and Calabria were visited by
a great earthquake, an English investigator, Robert Mallet, made a
full study of it, and believed that by comparing the direction of the
rents in walls and buildings, which were assumed to correspond with
that of the tremblings, he could identify the focus of the shocks in
the earth's interior, and the course of the wave movement over its
surface--a view which has long prevailed in seismology. Still more
important was the work of the geologist Karl von Seebach, of
Göttingen, on the great earthquake in central Germany, which kept the
northern part of the plains of the upper Rhine, around Mayence,
Grossgerau, and Darmstadt, disturbed for several years after 1869. Von
Seebach's chief effort was to obtain the most exact data possible as
to the time of the beginning of the shocks from as many places as
possible, from which he might deduce the spot where the shocks began
and were strongest, the epicenter which lay directly over the point in
the earth's interior where the movement originated. From them he also
deduced a series of localities where the shocks were simultaneous and
of equal intensity, which could be connected by certain nearly
circular lines called _homoseists_. As the distance of these from the
epicenter increases, the undulations take place later and are weaker,
and facts may be thus furnished from the velocity of propagation of
the shocks can be computed. The observations are also important
because von Seebach undertook through a simple mathematical
calculation to determine from them the situation of the forces of the
subterranean point where the undulations originated.
With these investigations, the process of annihilating time and space
by steam and the applications of electricity was also going on. By the
effect of this great event, the conditions of earthquake investigation
were revolutionized. A comparative study of the phenomena, fundamental
and essential to a science of seismology, on the basis of material
furnished from all the regions of the earth, was rendered possible. An
earthquake service was organized in Japan, by J. Milne, of England;
one had already been organized for a considerable time in Italy, and
the results obtained at the two places of observation so widely
separated corresponded. Japanese, Indian, and American earthquakes
could be simultaneously studied in Italy, Russia, Germany, and
England; and thus a new, hitherto undeveloped field was gained, the
scope of which has already extended far beyond its merely geological
aspect.
This could have happened only through another advance that has been
made in our century, which has first rendered a real seismology, a
scientific knowledge of the seismic conditions of the earth, possible
through the immense development of technics, by which a system of
instrumental observation of earthquakes was established. Only through
this could the acquisitions of recent times be utilized. While
formerly observations were macroscopic and touched only earthquakes
that could be directly felt, they now cover essentially microscopic
tremors of the earth's crust, of less than a thousandth of a
millimetre, that are wholly imperceptible to human senses; and we can
read them, enlarged at our pleasure, on our photographically
registering seismometers. We already had instruments which correctly
indicated the time of the beginning and possibly the direction of a
shock; but we needed and have invented new instruments--various sorts
of horizontal and vertical pendulums--for the observation and
representation of the whole course of the movement. The vertical
indicating instruments are much used in Italy, and the horizontal ones
almost exclusively in England, Japan, and Germany. The horizontal
pendulum was invented in Germany in 1832 by Hengler, adapted to
scientific use by Professor Zöllner, of Leipsic, and afterward applied
in that form by English, German, and other observers. The most
complete shape and the one best adapted to extremely delicate seismic
observations was given to it by the late German astronomer and
geographer Dr. Ernst von Rebeur Paschnitz, of Merseburg. Having
undergone a few small changes, fixed in a threefold combination it
serves as our most sensitive and accurate seismometer. Its movements
and its very exact time markings are photographically represented. The
pendulum box is only forty centimetres in diameter. In consequence of
its convenience and cheapness, its self-action and its serviceability,
it is becoming adopted more and more generally as an international
instrument.
Microseismic investigation and its wide extension over the earth have
raised seismology another step during the last twenty years, so that
it may be said that really exact seismic research began with it.
Modern seismology has confirmed many of the older results, such as the
localization of earthquakes on the shores of the Pacific, the
Mediterranean and in the mountain chains of the earth, and also the
importance of homoseists and the epicenter. It has, on the other hand,
greatly modified the former estimates of the velocity of propagation
of the shocks. It has cast much doubt on speculations as to the
seasons in which earthquakes are more or less frequent; and it has
demonstrated the inadequacy of former methods of determining the
central focus. It has furthermore brought us much that is new. First
is the momentous fact that the earth's crust is never at rest; that it
undergoes a multitude of very diversified movements besides those of
the earthquake. Thus a periodical swelling, a flood wave, is produced
by the attraction of the moon; and other heavings are induced by the
daily and annual course of the sun's heat. But such movements and
other similar ones do not come within the scope of this article.
Real earthquakes, or movements that originate in the depths of the
earth, also appear in very different forms. First are the directly
perceptible shocks, from the powerful ones that create great
disturbances to the merely local ones often hardly remarked. Of the
immediate workings of these shocks, microscopic instruments have
taught us nothing essentially new. But very many macroscopic
movements, often continuing for several hours, but which are not felt,
have been revealed, that have been shown in many instances to be
distant effects of other strong earthquakes; effects which are
sometimes propagated over the whole surface of the earth. There is,
furthermore, another series of movements, only partly explained as
yet, of a peculiar sort: first, small, quickly passing disturbances,
which appear in the photographic reproductions of the curves as larger
or smaller knots, and which are regarded with great probability as
distant effects of minor seismic movements most likely imperceptible
anywhere. They can not be local earthquakes, for they give entirely
different curves. There also appear, with considerable regularity, at
certain seasons of the year, very slow movements of the ground, called
pulsations; and finally the multitude of vibrations called tremors,
which assume various forms. Sometimes they come as forerunners,
accompaniments, or followers in close association with those great
disturbances that originate in distant earthquakes; sometimes as
shocks of minute intensity in separate groups, which it has not yet
been possible to account for; and in other cases they are traced to
the shaking of the ground by the wind. It is hardly necessary to
observe that the seismic apparatus should be most carefully guarded
against disturbance by the movements of trade, wagons, etc., so that
the problem shall not be complicated by them.
The theory of the nature of earthquake shocks, their transmission and
their velocity, has been set in a new light by the labors of Augustus
Smith, of Stuttgart. From some calculations of their velocity made by
G. von Nebeur, it is found that the earthquake of April 17, 1889, in
Tokio, Japan, was perceived in Potsdam, Prussia, nine thousand
kilometres distant, in thirteen minutes; that of October 27, 1894, in
Santiago, Chili, in Rome, eleven thousand five hundred kilometres
distant, in seventeen minutes, and in Charkow, Russia, two thousand
kilometres from Rome, between one and two minutes later. It reached
Tokio at the same time, after a transit of seventeen thousand four
hundred kilometres.
Still another task of modern seismology is the investigation of
earthquakes at sea, or seismic movements of the bottom of the ocean,
and the manner in which they are propagated through the water, of
which a very fine cartographic representation has been published by
Dr. C. Rudolph, of Strasburg.
The question of the origin of earthquakes stands in constant
connection with this external development of seismology. It is
significant and remarkable that the answers to it, though they may be
given differently from different scientific points of view, are always
consistent in one fact, that earthquakes are a phenomenon of the whole
earth. Some of the investigators seek to explain them, aside from
those that occur in volcanic regions, as a part of the great changes
in the earth's crust which have taken place during the last geological
epoch, and are still, perhaps, taking place; others find their seat
and cause in the unstable condition of the interior of the earth,
beneath its solid and red-hot envelope. The former explanation, the
older and heretofore the prevalent one, is called the tectonic theory,
because it is based, leaving out volcanic earthquakes, on the
structure of the earth's crust; the second, which is gaining ground,
and requires no separate explanation for volcanic earthquakes, may be
called, reviving an expression used by L. Fr. Naumann, of Leipsic, the
Plutonic theory, because it goes down into the unexplored depths of
the earth. If seismic manifestations depend upon the action of the
whole earth, a single explanatory principle, as is always the case
with great natural phenomena, is not sufficient, and tectonic as well
as Plutonic earthquakes must be recognized, and the reverse.
The tectonic theory is of geological origin, and properly supplanted
the older Plutonic theory of Humboldt, which was only an unverified
supposition. As a whole it was first worked out by Otto Volger in
1858, after various similar hypotheses had been set forth by other
investigators. He was confirmed by the independent researches of
Rudolf Hoernes, Edouard Suess, and most of the German, French, and
English seismologists.
Their theory supposes that there are large hollow spaces in the crust
of the earth, into which immense falls of material take place, and
that these are the cause of a part of the earthquakes; that the crust
of the earth is often and variously disturbed in consequence of the
constant contraction dependent upon the cooling of the globe. It is
broken up into separate masses which in their turn are dislocated
horizontally or vertically; is lifted up and folded into immense
mountain ranges, the arches of which, breaking, may again suffer
dislocation. Thus continuous action in movement of masses and foldings
is constantly going on in the earth. Edouard Suess, the distinguished
Austrian geologist, has indeed constituted a special earthquake type
to correspond with this type of mountain formation. Since, in
consequence of this condition, tension is present everywhere in the
crust of the earth, it may come to pass that it shall be relieved by a
distant earthquake, and another earthquake, which may be called a
relay or transmission earthquake, be produced thereby. Hence we have,
besides the volcanic, the landfall, the tectonic (in the strict
sense), and the transmission earthquakes. The sources of earthquake
force lie, then, according to this theory, in the incompleteness of
the earth's crust, the effects of gravity, and the earth's loss of
heat.
And is the supposition not very probable? Do we not see similar
processes going on over the whole earth, in the shape of earthquakes,
landslides, fissures, subsidences of land, and the like? And as the
Alps were lifted up, and the plain of the Rhine was depressed between
the Vosges and the Black Forest, may not mightier dislocations,
breaches, and destruction occur? Why may not the processes which took
place in the earlier epochs of the earth's history and were so
powerful in the more recent Tertiary be still going on? All this seems
so plausible that, with a few exceptions, the theory has been almost
universally agreed in.
I briefly mention here Falb's theory, which, accepting the earlier
views, ascribes earthquakes to periodical swellings of the fiery fluid
interior of the earth, only because of the effect it has had on the
public in connection with some wholly unscientific predictions. More
worthy of consideration is the theory of Daubrée, the late
distinguished master of French and especially Alsatian geology, who
did not attribute the similar phenomena of volcanic and nonvolcanic
earthquakes to different causes, but maintained that all earthquakes
were produced by superheated steam issuing from surface waters. But
this theory needs no refutation. There are, however, some serious
objections to the tectonic theory of earthquakes, plausible as it may
seem. In order to weigh them as we ought, we must as briefly as
possible construct a picture of the constitution of the earth's
interior.
The average distance from the earth's surface to its center is
sixty-three hundred and seventy kilometres. The temperature of the
earth increases with the depth, at the rate, on a moderate estimate,
of about one degree centigrade for every forty metres. Hence, at a
depth of one thousand kilometres we would have a temperature of
25,000° C.; even if we call it only 15,000°, we should expect to find
there only gases, and those in a simple state, for with that heat all
the compound gases would be dissociated. The zone of fluidity for all
rocks lies at a depth of about one hundred kilometres, where the
temperature is 2,500° C. While the crust of the earth is between 2.5
and three times as heavy as distilled water at 4° C., its specific
gravity rises toward the center of the earth to more than eleven, or
about fourfold. Iron has a specific gravity of 7.8, or about threefold
that of the crust of the earth; but the specific gravity of the earth
at the greatest depth is considerably higher than this. Hence must
arise an enormous pressure, steadily increasing toward the center,
where, according to the English geophysicist, the Rev. Osmond Fisher,
it reaches about three million atmospheres to the English square inch.
It results from these conditions that with the enormous pressure and
heat, and specific gravity, the interior of the earth consists of
dissociated gases compressed to great rigidity, which exert an immense
counter-pressure--for their tendency is always to expand. They pass
out continuously into a zone of fluid matter, and this again is held
by the pressure of the interior gases in a like compact condition.
Thus a very high pressure still prevails in the lower parts of the
solid crust of the earth, which is so high that even the most solid
rocks there are in a latent plastic condition--that is, they behave
toward different forces like plastic clay, and like it can be deformed
without breaking. Rents, slides, caves, and clefts are out of the
question there; things of that kind can exist only in the upper
strata.
This fact constitutes a very strong objection to the tectonic theory
of earthquakes, and thus the very depths of the earth speak against
it. We have already mentioned that K. von Seebach estimated the depth
of the earthquake focus from the movements of the waves, and found it
not very great. But his estimates, as Prof. August Schmidt has shown,
rest upon physically incorrect premises; according to Schmidt's more
correct calculation, the center of the Charleston earthquake of 1886
lay at a depth of one hundred and twenty kilometres, where there can
be no question of tectonic movements, because general fluidity is
reached at one hundred kilometres. Further, the earthquake at Lisbon,
if the tectonic theory is valid, might, taking the character of the
region into consideration, have been occasioned by a slide. But how
large must the plunging mass, how deep the plunge or slide have been
to produce such shocks as destroyed Lisbon and shook Europe to beyond
Bohemia! Where can we find room in the closely compressed interior of
the earth for such irruptions? Even if such a sudden sinking had left
no trace in the interior, it should have left its marks on the
surface. Mr. John Milne counts up not less than 8,331 considerable
earthquake shocks in Japan between 1885 and 1892; Julius Schmidt,
former director of the observatory in Athens, enumerated three hundred
severe and dangerous and fifty thousand light shocks for Phocis alone
between 1870 and 1873, of which not a trace of land changes or
depressions can be perceived, aside from superficial avalanches (on
Parnassus, for example) and subsidence of meadows and other spongy
soil, like the famous depression of the Molo at Lisbon.
All this speaks so emphatically against the tectonic origin of
earthquakes that it can not be considered as a general cause. Even the
mighty disturbances and shocks of the times when such ranges as the
Alps and Himalayas were lifted up can prove nothing for the present
time; for the conditions, the mechanical work and acting forces, of
the earth were quite different, and the latter much greater and more
acute than in our time, as the number and magnitude of the volcanoes
of those ages show, before which ours are almost as nothing. We have
no adequate comprehension of the way that mechanical work was done. A
depression like that of the plain of the Rhine could certainly not
have taken place without severe earthquakes; but we do not know how
they may have come to pass, for we have nothing analogous to them. The
upper strata of the earth's crust are broken up, fissured, and
cavernous; hence purely local minor earthquakes may undoubtedly be
produced by cavings-in, landslides, and settlings of small extent. But
this explanation, in view of the nature of the crust, is not possible
for strong earthquakes, even in the upper layers, which send their
waves far over the land; their origin must be, almost of necessity, in
the greater deeps beneath the crust, far down where the immense gas
globe of the interior is constantly forcing its way into the fluid
band, and this into the solid stone; in those zones of changing
conditions a mighty movement must be incessantly prevailing. The
pressure upon the gases of the interior diminishes here, and the
excessive temperature as well. This can not take place without
changes. Temperature and pressure now fall, now rise again, but
continue very high through it all. The dissociated gases unite and
separate again, and most violent explosions are infallibly produced
thereby. Water exists in the interior in immense masses, and that not
solely in consequence of percolation from the surface. Vapor at very
high pressure separates into its elements--hydrogen and oxygen--the
reunion of which ensues with violent explosions, similar to our gas
explosions, which must be very numerous in the interior of the earth,
and accompanied with great development of force. The principal effect
of such explosions is, of course, against the cooler and more weakly
resisting sides, and therefore not toward the interior but toward the
crust and the weakest parts of it, toward the rupture lines of the
zones of disturbance, the synclinals. Such attacks, striking the
earth's crust from within, occasion most earthquakes, especially
violent, destructive, deep-seated outbursts like those of Lisbon and
Charleston. The relation of the seismic and the volcanic phenomena is
clearly to be seen.
One series of seismic phenomena remains to be explained--the lighter
undulations, the tremors, and the remarkable irregularity of the
movements of the ground. The indications of the vertical pendulum
apparatus which represent these movements form an inextricable tangle
of lines running over and crossing one another. The late Japanese
professor of seismology, Sekiya, prepared an enlarged model of the
tracings of the seismic movements of a point of the earth's surface,
which has been much copied. It represents an extremely confusing
vibration of the lines.
Now we have to confront a very important fact which adds much to the
difficulty of seismic research. We never feel and observe the
earthquake shocks themselves, never directly in their simplicity or
multiplicity, but only the wave movements that are sent out from them
in the elastic crust of the earth. These, however multifold their
origin, proceed in an immense spherical wave which moves in more or
less numerous repetitions through the earth's interior. It is this
shaking of the earth by the spherical waves that our instruments
represent as earthquakes. We can not include as the earth's crust the
surface of the earth on which we live, and which consists of loose
materials disintegrated by weathering, breaking, and numerous causes,
but the solid crust, often lying at a considerable distance beneath
us, which bears these materials, and from which the spherical waves
emerge. As the waves of the sea, beating upon the coast, are turned,
split up, divided, thrown up, etc., in their surging, so surge, too,
the seismic waves upon the disintegrated surface of shingle, pebbles,
broken rocks, sand, and earth, in clefts and gorges. We thus never
observe the original spherical waves, but only their fragmentary
derivative forms, their resolution into numerous single waves which
come to us diverted into the most various directions. It is thus most
plainly shown that Mallet's effort to determine the center and origin
of the earthquake from the direction of the shock was futile. We can
only draw scientific conclusions respecting the time of beginning, the
duration, and force of the movement. It is thus evident that many of
the tremors (not all, by any means) originate in this division; that a
fixed point of the earth's surface must describe a very complicated
path in so intricate a wave movement; that the division is less marked
on firm ground than on loose; that the former, in consequence of the
more evenly protracted movement, is less dangerous than the latter;
and that multiplied waves interfere, overlay, weaken, or strengthen
one another just as water waves do. Thus are explained the earthquake
bridges or spots which always remain unmoved through repeated
earthquakes, either because they are firmer, or because the progress
of the waves is arrested at them by interference.
The sounds, too, which so frequently accompany earthquakes are
likewise simply results of this division of the waves and their escape
into the air, for we perceive wave motions in the air as sound. The
admirable delicacy of our sense of hearing is here manifested, for
seismic movements are not rarely perceptible, or heard, as air waves,
which we can not perceive as movements of the ground. Earthquake
thunder is caused, like storm thunder, by shocks to the air, of which
we hear the nearest and latest first, and the farthest and earliest
last. The different tone shades of the earthquake sound depend upon
their various sources, as from small, sharp fragments, clinking,
rattling, and humming; from sand and earth, dull rumbling; from trees,
whistling, etc. The echo in ravines not rarely operates to add
strength to them. Earthquake sounds that seem to come out of the air
from above are caused by earthquake waves reaching us by way of trees,
houses, etc.; the different directions and degrees of force which they
seem to indicate in different houses or in different rooms of the same
house are explainable by the different elasticity conditions of the
houses and rooms. But not the most insignificant conclusion can be
drawn from these sounds concerning the nature and causes of
earthquakes. It is important to emphasize this fact, for errors have
often originated in conclusions drawn from such things.--_Translated
for the Popular Science Monthly from the Deutsche Rundschau._
* * * * *
Examples of a race of curiously protectively colored mice
which inhabit the sandy island, the North Bull, in the Bay
of Dublin, were exhibited by Dr. H. Lyster Jameson in the
Zoölogical Section of the British Association. A
considerable percentage of them were distinctly lighter hued
than the ancestral type of house mouse, though every
possible gradation occurred between the typical house mouse
and the palest examples. The speaker regarded the marked
predominance of sand-colored specimens as due to the action
of natural selection. The hawks and owls which frequent the
island, and are the only enemies the mice have to compete
against, most easily capture the darkest examples, or those
that contrast most strongly with the color of the sand. Thus
a protectively colored race is becoming established. The
island came into existence only about a hundred years ago.
Consequently it is possible to fix a time limit within which
the sandy-colored race has been evolved. Its evolution also,
as Professor Poulton observed in his comment on Dr.
Jameson's paper, gives additional evidence to that afforded
by the shore crabs described by Professor Weldon in his
presidential address to the section, that the transmutation
of species is not necessarily so slow as to be
indiscernible.
A SHORT HISTORY OF SCIENTIFIC INSTRUCTION[33]
BY J. NORMAN LOCKYER, K. C. B., F. R. S.
The two addresses by my colleagues, Professors Judd and
Roberts-Austen, have drawn attention to the general history of our
college and the details of one part of our organization. I propose to
deal with another part, the consideration of which is of very great
importance at the present time, for we are in one of those educational
movements which spring up from time to time and mold the progress of
civilization. The question of a teaching university in the largest
city in the world, secondary education, and so-called technical
education are now occupying men's minds.
At the beginning it is imperative that I should call your attention to
the fact that the stern necessities of the human race have been the
origin of all branches of science and learning; that all so-called
educational movements have been based upon the actual requirements of
the time. There has never been an educational movement for learning's
sake; but of course there have always been studies and students apart
from any of those general movements to which I am calling attention;
still we have to come down to the times of Louis Quatorze before the
study of the useless, the _même inutile_, was recognized as a matter
of national concern.
It is perhaps the more necessary to insist upon stern necessity as
being the origin of learning, because it is so difficult for us now to
put ourselves in the place of those early representatives of our race
that had to face the problems of life among conditionings of which
they were profoundly ignorant: when night meant death; when there was
no certainty that the sun would rise on the morrow; when the growth of
a plant from seed was unrecognized; when a yearly return of seasons
might as well be a miracle as a proof of a settled order of phenomena;
when, finally, neither cause nor effect had been traced in the
operations of Nature.
It is doubtless in consequence of this difficulty that some of the
early races have been credited by some authors with a special love of
abstract science, of science for its own sake; so that this, and not
stern necessity, was the motive of their inquiries. Thus we have been
told that the Chaldeans differed from the other early races in having
a predilection for astronomy, another determining factor being that
the vast plains in that country provided them with a perfect horizon.
The first historic glimpses of the study of astronomy we find among
the peoples occupying the Nile Valley and Chaldea, say 6000 B. C.
But this study had to do with the fixing of the length of the year,
and the determination of those times in it in which the various
agricultural operations had to be performed. These were related
strictly to the rise of the Nile in one country and of the Euphrates
in the other. All human activity was, in fact, tied up with the
movements of the sun, moon, and stars. These, then, became the gods of
those early peoples, and the astronomers, the seers, were the first
priests; revered by the people because as interpreters of the
celestial powers they were the custodians of the knowledge which was
the most necessary for the purposes of life.
Eudemus of Rhodes, one of the principal pupils of Aristotle, in his
History of Geometry, attributes the origin of geometry to the
Egyptians, "who were obliged to invent it in order to restore the
landmarks which had been destroyed by the inundation of the Nile," and
observes "that it is by no means strange that the invention of the
sciences should have originated in practical needs."[34] The new
geometry was brought from Egypt to Greece by Thales three hundred
years before Aristotle was born.
When to astronomy and geometry we add the elements of medicine and
surgery, which it is known were familiar to the ancient Egyptians, it
will be conceded that we are, in those early times, face to face with
the cultivation of the most useful branches of science.
Now, although the evidence is increasing day by day that Greek science
was Egyptian in its origin, there is no doubt that its cultivation in
Greece was more extended, and that it was largely developed there. One
of the most useful and prolific writers on philosophy and science who
has ever lived, Aristotle, was born in the fourth century B. C. From
him, it may be said, dates a general conception of science based on
_observation_ as differing from experiment. If you wish to get an idea
of the science of those times, read his writings on Physics and on the
Classification of Animals. All sought in Aristotle the basis of
knowledge, but they only read his philosophy; Dante calls him the
"master of those who know."[35]
Why was Aristotle so careful to treat science as well as philosophy,
with which his master, Plato, had dealt almost exclusively?
The answer to this question is of great interest to our present
subject. The late Lord Playfair[36] in a pregnant passage suggests the
reason, and the later history of Europe shows, I think, that he is
right.
"We find that just as early nations became rich and prosperous, so
did philosophy arise among them, and it declined with the decadence of
material prosperity. In those splendid days of Greece when Plato,
Aristotle, and Zeno were the representatives of great schools of
thought, which still exercise their influence on mankind, _Greece was
a great manufacturing and mercantile community_; Corinth was the seat
of the manufacture of hardware; Athens that of jewelry, shipbuilding,
and pottery. The rich men of Greece and all its free citizens were
actively engaged in trade and commerce. The learned class were the
sons of those citizens, and were in possession of their accumulated
experience derived through industry and foreign relations. Thales was
an oil merchant; Aristotle inherited wealth from his father, who was a
physician, but, spending it, is believed to have supported himself as
a druggist till Philip appointed him tutor to Alexander. Plato's
wealth was largely derived from commerce, and his master, Socrates, is
said to have been a sculptor. Zeno, too, was a traveling merchant.
Archimedes is perhaps an exception, for he is said to have been
closely related to a prince; but if so, he is the only princely
discoverer of science on record."
In ancient Greece we see the flood of the first great intellectual
tide. Alas! it never touched the shores of western Europe, but it
undoubtedly reached to Rome, and there must have been very much more
observational science taught in the Roman studia than we generally
imagine, otherwise how account for Pliny, the vast public works, their
civilizing influence carried over sea and land from beyond
Bab-el-Mandeb to Scotland? In some directions their applications of
science are as yet unsurpassed.
With the fall of the Roman Empire both science and philosophy
disappeared for a while. The first wave had come and gone; its last
feebler ripples seem to have been represented at this time by the
gradual change of the Roman secular studia wherever they existed into
clerical schools, the more important of which were in time attached to
the chief cathedrals and monasteries; and it is not difficult to
understand why the secular (or scientific) instruction was gradually
replaced by one more fitted for the training of priests.
It is not to be wondered at that the ceaseless strife in the center of
Europe had driven what little learning there was to the western and
southern extremities, where the turmoil was less--I refer to Britain
and South Italy--while the exiled Nestorians carried Hellenic science
and philosophy out of Europe altogether to Mesopotamia and Arabia.
The next wave--it was but a small one--had its origin in our own
country. In the eighth century England was at its greatest height,
relatively, in educational matters, chiefly owing to the labors of two
men. Beda, generally called the Venerable Bede, the most eminent
writer of his age, was born near Monkwearmouth in 673, and passed his
life in the monastery there. He not only wrote the history of our
island and nation, but treatises on the nature of things, astronomy,
chronology, arithmetic, medicine, philosophy, grammar, rhetoric,
poetry, music, basing his work on that of Pliny. He died in 735, in
which year his great follower was born in Yorkshire. I refer to
Alcuin. He was educated at the Cathedral School at York under
Archbishop Egbert, and, having imbibed everything he could learn from
the writings of Bede and others, was soon recognized as one of the
greatest scholars of the time. On returning from Rome, whither he had
been sent by Eaubald to receive the pallium, he met Karl the Great,
King of the Franks and Lombards, who eventually induced him to take up
his residence at his court, to become his instructor in the sciences.
Karl (or Charlemagne) then was the greatest figure in the world, and
although as King of the Franks and Lombards, and subsequently Emperor
of the Holy Roman Empire, his court was generally at Aachen, he was
constantly traveling throughout his dominions. He was induced, in
consequence of Alcuin's influence, not only to have a school always
about him on his journeys, but to establish, or foster, such schools
wherever he went. Hence it has been affirmed that "France is indebted
to Alcuin for all the polite learning it boasted of in that and the
following ages." The universities of Paris, Tours, Fulden, Soissons,
and others were not actually founded in his day, but the monastic and
cathedral schools out of which they eventually sprang were
strengthened, and indeed a considerable scheme of education for
priests was established--that is, an education free from all sciences,
and in which philosophy alone was considered.
Karl the Great died in 814, and after his death the eastward traveling
wave, thus started by Bede and Alcuin, slightly but very gradually
increased in height. Two centuries later, however, the conditions were
changed. We find ourselves in presence of interference phenomena, for
then there was a meeting with another wave traveling westward, and
this meeting was the origin of the European universities. The wave now
manifested traveling westerly, spread outward from Arab centers first
and finally from Constantinople, when its vast stores of Greek lore
were opened by the conquest of the city.
The first wavelet justified Eudemus's generalization that "the
invention of the sciences originated in practical needs," and that
knowledge for its own sake was not the determining factor. The year
had been determined, stone circles erected almost everywhere, and
fires signaled from them, giving notice of the longest and shortest
days, so that agriculture was provided for, even away from churches
and the festivals of the Church. The original user of geometry was not
required away from the valleys of the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates, and
therefore it is now medicine and surgery that come to the front for
the alleviation of human ills. In the eleventh century we find
Salerno, soon to be famed throughout Europe as the great medical
school, forming itself into the first university. And medicine did not
exhaust all the science taught, for Adelard listened there to a
lecture on "the nature of things," the cause of magnetic attraction
being one of the "things" in question.
This teaching at Salerno preceded by many years the study of the law
at Bologna and of theology at Paris.
The full flood came from the disturbance of the Arab wave center by
the crusades, about the beginning of the twelfth century. After the
Pope had declared the "Holy War," William of Malmesbury tells us "the
most distant islands and savage countries were inspired with this
ardent passion. The Welshman left his hunting, the Scotchman his
fellowship with vermin, the Dane his drinking party, the Norwegian his
raw fish." Report has it that in 1096 no less than six millions were
in motion along many roads to Palestine. This, no doubt, is an
exaggeration, but it reflects the excitement of the time, and prepares
us for what happened when the crusaders returned. As Green puts
it:[37] "The western nations, including our own, 'were quickened with
a new life and throbbing with a new energy.' ... A new fervor of study
sprang up in the West from its contact with the more cultured East.
Travelers like Adelard, of Bath, brought back the first rudiments of
physical and mathematical science from the schools of Cordova or
Bagdad.... The long mental inactivity of feudal Europe broke up like
ice before a summer's sun. Wandering teachers, such as Lanfranc or
Anselm, crossed sea and land to spread the new power of knowledge. The
same spirit of restlessness, of inquiry, of impatience with the older
traditions of mankind, either local or intellectual, that drove half
Christendom to the tomb of its Lord, crowded the roads with thousands
of young scholars hurrying to the chosen seats where teachers were
gathered together."
_Studium generale_ was the term first applied to a large educational
center where there was a guild of masters, and whither students
flocked from all parts. At the beginning of the thirteenth century the
three principal studia were Paris, Bologna, and Salerno, where
theology and arts, law and medicine, and medicine almost by itself,
were taught respectively; these eventually developed into the first
universities.[38]
English scholars gathered in thousands at Paris round the chairs of
William of Champeaux or Abélard, where they took their place as one of
the "nations" of which the great middle-age university of Paris was
composed.
We have only to do with the arts faculty of this university. We find
that the subject-matter of the liberal education of the middle age
there dealt with varied very little from that taught in the schools of
ancient Rome.
The so-called "artiens," students of the arts faculty, which was the
glory of the university and the one most numerously attended, studied
the seven arts of the trivium and quadrivium--that is, grammar,
rhetoric, dialectic and arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy.[39]
This at first looks well for scientific study, but the mathematics
taught had much to do with magic; arithmetic dealt with epacts, golden
numbers, and the like. There was no algebra, and no mechanics.
Astronomy dealt with the system of the seven heavens.
Science, indeed, was the last thing to be considered in the
theological and legal studia, and it would appear that it was kept
alive more in the medical schools than in the arts faculties.
Aristotle's writings on physics, biology, and astronomy were not known
till about 1230, and then in the shape of Arab-Latin translations.
Still, it must not be forgotten that Dante learned some of his
astronomy, at all events, at Paris.
Oxford was an offshoot of Paris, and therefore a theological studium,
in all probability founded about 1167,[40] and Cambridge came later.
Not till the Reformation (sixteenth century) do we see any sign of a
new educational wave, and then we find the two which have had the
greatest influence upon the history of the world--one of them
depending upon the Reformation itself, the other depending upon the
birth of experimental inquiry.
Before the Reformation the universities were priestly institutions,
and derived their authority from the Popes.
The universities were for the few; the education of the people, except
in the various crafts, was unprovided for.
The idea of a general education in secular subjects at the expense of
the state or of communities is coeval with the Reformation. In
Germany, even before the time of Luther, it was undreamed of, or
rather, perhaps, one should say, the question was decided in the
negative. In his day, however, his zeal first made itself heard in
favor of education, as many are now making themselves heard in favor
of a better education, and in 1524 he addressed a letter to the
councils of all the towns in Germany, begging them to vote money not
merely for roads, dikes, guns, and the like, but for schoolmasters, so
that all children might be taught; and he states his opinion that if
it be the duty of a state to compel the able-bodied to carry arms, it
is _a fortiori_ its duty to compel its subjects to send their children
to school, and to provide schools for those who without such aid would
remain uninstructed.
Here we have the germ of Germany's position at the present day, not
only in scientific instruction but in everything which that
instruction brings with it.
With the Reformation this idea spread to France. In 1560 we find the
States-General of Orleans suggesting to Francis II a "levée d'une
contribution sur les bénéfices ecclésiastiques pour raisonablement
stipendier des pédagogues et gens lettrés, en toutes villes et
villages, pour l'instruction de la pauvre jeunesse du plat pays, et
soient tenus les pères et mères, à peine d'amende, à envoyer les dits
enfants à l'école, et à ce faire soient contraints par les segnieurs
et les juges ordinaires."
Two years after this suggestion, however, the religious wars broke
out; the material interests of the clerical party had predominated,
the new spirit was crushed under the iron heel of priestcraft, and the
French, in consequence, had to wait for three centuries and a
revolution before they could get comparatively free.
In the universities, or at all events alongside them, we find next the
introduction not so much yet of science as we now know it, with its
experimental side, as of the scientific spirit.
The history of the Collége de France, founded in 1531 by Francis I, is
of extreme interest. In the fifteenth century the studies were chiefly
literary, and except in the case of a few minds they were confined
merely to scholastic subtleties, taught (I have it on the authority of
the Statistique de l'Enseignement Supérieur) in barbarous Latin. This
was the result of the teaching of the faculties; but even then,
outside the faculties, which were immutable, a small number of
distinguished men still occupied themselves in a less rigid way in
investigation; but still these studies were chiefly literary. Among
those men may be mentioned Danès, Postel, Dole, Guillaume Budé,
Lefèvre d'Étaples, and others, who edited with notes and commentaries
Greek and Latin authors whom the university scarcely knew by name.
Hence the renaissance of the sixteenth century, which gave birth to
the Collége de France, the function of which, at the commencement, was
to teach those things which were not in the ordinary curriculum of the
faculties. It was called the Collége des Deux Langues, the languages
being Hebrew and Greek. It then became the Collége des Trois Langues,
when the king, notwithstanding the opposition of the university,
created in 1534 a chair of Latin. There was another objection made by
the university to the new creation: from the commencement the courses
were free; and this feeling was not decreased by the fact that around
the celebrated masters of the Trois Langues a crowd of students was
soon congregated.
The idea in the mind of Francis I in creating this Royal College may
be gathered from the following edict, dated in 1545: "François, etc.,
savoir faisons à tous présents et à venir que Nous, considérant que le
sçavoir des langues, qui est un des dons du Saint-Esprit, fait
ouverture et donne le moyen de plus entière connaissance et plus
parfaite intelligence de toutes bonnes, honnêtes, saintes et
salutaires sciences.... Avons fait faire pleinement entendre à ceux
qui, y voudraient vacquer, les trois langues principales, Hébraïque,
Grecque, et Latine, _et les Livres esquels les bonnes sciences_ sont
le mieux et le plus profondément traitées. A laquelle fin, et en
suivant le décret du concile de Vienne, nous avons piéça ordonné et
establi en nôtre bonne ville de Paris, un bonne nombre de personnages
de sçavoir excellent, qui lisent et enseignent publiquement et
ordinairement les dites langues et sciences, maintenant
florissantautant ou plus qu'elles ne firent de bien longtemps ...
auxquels nos lecteurs avons donné honnêtes gages et salaires, et iceux
fait pourvoir de plusieurs beaux bénéfices pour les entretenir et
donner occasion de mieux et plus continuellement entendre au fait de
leur charge, ... etc."
The Statistique, which I am following in this account, thus sums up
the founder's intention: "Le Collége Royal avait pour mission de
propager les nouvelles connaissances, les nouvelles découvertes. Il
n'enseignait pas la science faite, il la faisait."
It was on account of this more than on account of anything else that
it found its greatest enemy in the university. The founding of this
new college, and the great excitement its success occasioned in Paris,
were, there can be little doubt, among the factors which induced
Gresham to found his college in London in 1574.
These two institutions played a great part in their time. Gresham
College, it is true, was subsequently strangled, but not before its
influence had been such as to permit the Royal Society to rise
phoenixlike from its ashes; for it is on record that the first step in
the forming of this society was taken after a lecture on astronomy by
Sir Christopher Wren at the college. All connected with them felt in
time the stupendous change of thought in the century which saw the
birth of Bacon, Galileo, Gilbert, Hervey, Tycho Brahe, Descartes, and
many others that might be named; and of these, it is well to remark,
Gilbert,[41] Hervey, and Galileo were educated in medical schools
abroad.
Bacon was not only the first to lay down _regulæ philosophandi_, but
he insisted upon the far-reaching results of research, not forgetting
to point out that "_lucifera experimenta, non fructifera
quærenda_,"[42] as a caution to the investigator, though he had no
doubt as to the revolution to be brought about by the ultimate
application of the results of physical inquiry.
As early as 1560 the Academia Secretorum Naturæ was founded at Naples,
followed by the Lincei in 1609, the Royal Society in 1645, the Cimento
in 1657, and the Paris Academy in 1666.
From that time the world may be said to have belonged to science, now
no longer based merely on observation but on experiment. But, alas!
how slowly has it percolated into our universities.
The first organized endeavor to teach science in schools was naturally
made in Germany (Prussia), where, in 1747 (nearly a century and a half
ago), Realschulen were first started; they were taken over by the
Government in 1832, and completely reorganized in 1859, this step
being demanded by the growth of industry and the spread of the modern
spirit. Eleven hours a week were given to natural science in these
schools forty years ago.
TEACHING THE TEACHERS.--Until the year 1762 the Jesuits had the
education of France almost entirely in their hands, and when,
therefore, their expulsion was decreed in that year, it was only a
necessary step to create an institution to teach the future teachers
of France. Here, then, we had the École Normale in theory; but it was
a long time before this theory was carried into practice, and very
probably it would never have been had not Rolland d'Erceville made it
his duty for more than twenty years, by numerous publications, among
which is especially to be mentioned his Plan d'Education, printed in
1783, to point out not merely the utility but the absolute necessity
for some institution of the kind. As generally happens in such cases,
this exertion was not lost, for in 1794 it was decreed that an École
Normale should be opened at Paris, "ou seront appelés de toutes les
parties de la République, des citoyens déjà instruits dans les
sciences utiles, pour apprendre, sous les professeurs les plus habiles
dans tous les genres, l'art d'enseigner."
To follow these courses in the art of teaching, one potential
schoolmaster was to be sent to Paris by every district containing
twenty thousand inhabitants. Fourteen or fifteen hundred young men
therefore arrived in Paris, and in 1795 the courses of the school were
opened first of all in the amphitheater of the Museum of Natural
History. The professors were chosen from among the most celebrated men
of France, the sciences being represented by Lagrange, Laplace, Haüry,
Monge, Daubenton, and Berthollet.
While there was this enormous progress abroad, represented especially
by the teaching of science in Germany and the teaching of the teachers
in France, things slumbered and slept in Britain. We had our coal and
our iron, our material capital, and no one troubled about our mental
capital, least of all the universities, which had become, according to
Matthew Arnold (who was not likely to overstate matters), mere _hauts
lycées_, and "had lost the very idea of a real university";[43] and
since our political leaders generally came from the universities,
little more was to be expected from them.
Many who have attempted to deal with the history of education have
failed to give sufficient prominence to the tremendous difference
there must necessarily have been in scientific requirements before and
after the introduction of steam power.
It is to the discredit of our country that we, who gave the perfected
steam engine, the iron ship, and the locomotive to the world, should
have been the last to feel the next wave of intellectual progress.
All we did at the beginning of the century was to found mechanics'
institutions. They knew better in Prussia, "a bleeding and lacerated
mass";[44] after Jena (1806), King Frederick William III and his
councilors, disciples of Kant, founded the University of Berlin, "to
supply the loss of territory by intellectual effort." Among the
universal poverty money was found for the Universities of Königsberg
and Breslau, and Bonn was founded in 1818. As a result of this policy,
carried on persistently and continuously by successive ministers,
aided by wise councilors, many of them the products of this policy,
such a state of things was brought about that not many years ago M.
Ferdinand Lot, one of the most distinguished educationists of France,
accorded to Germany "a supremacy in science comparable to the
supremacy of England at sea."
But this position has not been obtained merely by founding new
universities. To Germany we owe the perfecting of the methods of
teaching science.
I have shown that it was in Germany that we find the first organized
science teaching in schools. About the year 1825 that country made
another tremendous stride. Liebig demonstrated that science teaching,
to be of value, whether in the school or the university, must consist
to a greater or less extent in practical work, and the more the
better; that book work was next to useless.
Liebig, when appointed to Giessen, smarting still under the
difficulties he had had in learning chemistry without proper
appliances, induced the Darmstadt Government to build a chemical
laboratory in which the students could receive a thorough practical
training.
It will have been gathered from this reference to Liebig's system of
teaching chemistry that still another branch of applied science had
been created, which has since had a stupendous effect upon industry;
and while Liebig was working at Giessen, another important industry
was being created in England. I refer to the electric telegraph and
all its developments, foreshadowed by Galileo in his reference to the
"sympathy of magnetic needles."
Not only then in chemistry, but in all branches of science which can
be applied to the wants of man, the teaching must be practical--that
is, the student must experiment and observe for himself, and he must
himself seek new truths.
It was at last recognized that a student could no more learn science
effectively by seeing some one else perform an experiment than he
could learn to draw effectively by seeing some one else make a sketch.
Hence in the German universities the doctor's degree is based upon a
research.
Liebig's was the _fons et origo_ of all our laboratories--mechanical,
metallurgical, chemical, physical, geological, astronomical, and
biological.--_Nature._
[_To be continued._]
FOOTNOTES:
[33] An address delivered at the Royal College of Science on October
6, 1898.
[34] Greek Geometry from Thales to Euclid, p. 2. Allman.
[35] Inferno, canto iv, p. 130 _et seq._
[36] Subjects of Social Welfare, p. 206.
[37] History of the English People, vol. i, p. 198.
[38] See Histoire de l'Université de Paris. Crévier, 1791, _passim_.
[39] Enumerated in the following middle-age Latin verse:
"Lingua, tropus, ratio, numerus, tonus, angulus, astra."
[40] Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, by Rashdall, vol. ii,
p. 344.
[41] William Gilbert, of Colchester, on the Magnet. Mittelag, p. x.
[42] Novum Organum, vol. 1, p. 70. Fowler's edition, p. 255.
[43] Schools and Universities on the Continent, p. 291.
[44] University Education in England, France, and Germany, by Sir
Rowland Blennerhassett, p. 25.
SHOULD CHILDREN UNDER TEN LEARN TO READ AND WRITE?
BY PROF. G. T. W. PATRICK.
There are certain propositions about education so evidently true that
probably no parent or teacher would question them. For instance, the
best school is one in which the course of study is progressively
adapted to the mental development of the children. Again, certain
subjects are adapted to children of certain ages or stages of
development, and others are not. One would not recommend the study of
logic or of the calculus to the average child of ten, nor would the
teaching of English be wisely deferred until the age of fifteen.
Finally, if the courses of study in our present school system shall be
found to be arranged without regard to the order of mental
development, they will sooner or later be modified in accordance with
it.
Now the educational system in practice in the two or three hundred
thousand public schools in the United States is a somewhat definite
one, with a somewhat fixed order of studies through the different
years or grades. In a majority of the States children are admitted to
the schools at the age of six; in more than one third of the States
children of five are admitted. In a general way we may say that during
the first four years of school life the principal subjects occupying
the time of the children are reading, writing, and arithmetic. To be
more exact, we may cite, for instance, the city schools of
Chicago.[45] Exclusive of recesses and opening exercises, there are in
these schools thirteen hundred and fifty minutes of school work per
week. Of this time, in the first and second grades, six hundred and
seventy-five minutes are devoted to reading, seventy-five minutes to
writing, and two hundred and twenty-five minutes to mathematics.
Seventy-two per cent of the total time is therefore consumed by these
subjects. In the third grade the proportion is the same; in the fourth
grade it is somewhat more than fifty per cent. I have mentioned the
Chicago schools because this is one of those school systems where a
liberal introduction of other subjects, such as Nature study, physical
culture, singing, and oral English, has somewhat lessened the time
given to reading, writing, and arithmetic. Other cities, with few
exceptions, will be found to give more rather than less time to these
subjects. In the country schools, and indeed in a vast number of town
and city schools, practically all the time during these early years is
given to reading, writing, and arithmetic.
We must conclude, therefore, if our educational system is a rational
one, that reading, writing, and arithmetic are the subjects peculiarly
adapted to the mind of the child between the ages of five and ten. It
is worth while to inquire from the standpoint of child psychology
whether this be true. It should be observed, in the first place, that
the manner in which our educational system has grown up is no
guarantee that it rests upon a psychological basis. Our schools are
exceedingly conservative. Any innovations or radical changes are
resisted by the parents of the children even more strenuously than by
school boards, superintendents, and teachers. Notwithstanding numerous
and important minor improvements, the school system as a whole remains
unchanged. Our children of seven and eight years are learning to read
and write because our grandfathers were so doing at that age.
We can not here discuss the origin of our present school curriculum,
but, as explaining the prominence given to reading, writing, and
arithmetic, it is worthy of notice that originally the elementary
school existed to teach just these three subjects. The primitive
schoolmaster was not superior to the parents of the child, usually not
their equal, in anything except his knowledge of "letters." So the
child was sent to school for a short time to learn letters. It was not
at all the function of the school to _educate_ the child in all that
was necessary to fit him for the duties of life. Afterward, as the
scope of the school was enlarged, other subjects were added, and these
were put _after_ the original ones, and the schoolmaster, furthermore,
came rather to take the place of an educator than a mere teacher of
letters. It is conceivable, therefore, that the present accepted order
of studies in our elementary schools rests upon an accidental rather
than upon a psychological basis. It is true that modern educators have
expressly considered the subject of the order and correlation of
studies, as, for instance, in the case of the Committee of Fifteen,
and that, while recommending minor changes in the school curriculum,
they have not usually thought of questioning the position so long held
by reading, writing, and arithmetic. In the report of the committee
just referred to we find this expression: "The conclusion is reached
that learning to read and write should be the leading study of the
pupil in his first four years of school." But, again, it was not the
function of this committee to suggest sweeping changes, nor to raise
the inquiry whether the system itself rests upon a psychological
basis. Even if it did not rest upon such a basis, expressions like the
above would not be unnatural on the part of committees appointed by
bodies representing the system as a whole.
We may not, then, conclude _a priori_ that our system of primary
education is a sound one. There have indeed been other wholly
different systems giving excellent results in their time, as, for
instance, that of the ancient Greeks, where music and gymnastics, not
reading, writing, and arithmetic, were the principal subjects
occupying the time of the pupils.
Much attention has recently been given to the subjects of the
physiology and psychology of children. These studies have been
systematic, painstaking, and exact. It seems, indeed, to many people
improbable that anything very new or very remarkable should just at
this time be found out about children, and there have not been wanting
either prominent educators or psychologists who have given public
expression to warnings against the new "child study." But this, again,
is not conclusive, for students of history may recall that every
advance in science has met just such opposition--for instance,
bacteriology, organic evolution, chemistry, and astronomy.
Furthermore, when we reflect that scientific advance in this century
has ever been, and inevitably, from the simple to the complex, and,
further, that the brain of the child is the most complex thing in the
whole range of natural history which science will ever have to
attempt, it is not difficult to understand that scientific knowledge
of it with its pedagogical implications has not belonged, at any rate,
to the past. It will belong to the future, having, perhaps, its
beginnings in the present. An educational system which has not
reckoned with an accurate knowledge of the brain of the child may by
accident be a correct one, but until such reckoning is made we can not
be sure.
Our increasing knowledge of the child's mind, his muscular and nervous
system, and his special senses, points indubitably to the conclusion
that reading and writing are subjects which do not belong to the early
years of school life, but to a later period, and that other subjects
now studied later are better adapted to this early stage of
development. What is thus indicated of reading and writing may be
affirmed also of drawing and arithmetic. The reasons leading to this
conclusion can be only very briefly summarized here.
As regards reading, writing, and drawing, they involve, in the first
place, a high degree of motor specialization, which is not only
unnatural but dangerous for young children. Studies in motor ability
have shown that the order of muscular development is from the larger
and coarser to the finer and more delicate muscles. The movements of
the child are the large, free movements of the body, legs, and arms,
such as he exhibits in spontaneous play. The movements requiring fine
co-ordination, such as those of the fingers and the eyes, are the
movements of maturer life. If we reverse this order and compel the
child to hold his body, legs, and arms still, while he engages the
delicate muscles of the eyes and fingers with minute written or
printed symbols, we induce a nervous overtension, and incur the evils
incident to all violation of natural order. The increasing frequency
of nervous disorders among school children, particularly in the older
countries, is probably due in part to these circumstances. If we
consider the brain of the child of seven or eight years, our
conclusions are strengthened that he should not be engaged in reading
and writing. At this age the brain has attained almost its full
weight, and is therefore large in proportion to the body. Its
development is, however, very incomplete, particularly as regards its
associative elements--that is, the so-called association fibers and
apperception centers. Such a brain constantly produces and must expend
a large amount of nervous energy, which can not be used
centrally--that is, psychologically speaking--in comparison, analysis,
thought, reflection. It must flow out through the motor channels,
becoming muscular movement. The healthy child is therefore incessantly
active in waking hours, the action being of the vigorous kind
involving the larger members. Hence we can understand that, of all the
ways in which a young child may receive instruction, the method
through the printed book is pre-eminently the one ill fitted to him.
The evil of this method is aggravated by the fact that, before the
child can receive instruction through the book, a long time--several
years, in fact--is spent in the confining task of learning to read. It
comes about, therefore, that the child, at the very age when he should
be leading a free and expansive life, is obliged to fix his eyes upon
the narrow page of a book and decipher small printed symbols, in
themselves devoid of life and interest. With respect to writing and
learning to write the case is worse. A considerable amount of motor
specialization is involved in forming letters upon the blackboard, but
when the pencil and pen are used it becomes of an extreme kind. In the
whole life history of the man there are no movements requiring finer
co-ordination than those of writing with pencil or pen, yet our school
system requires these of the child of six or seven years, makes them,
indeed, a prominent part of elementary school life. In addition to the
motor specialization of reading and writing is the physical
confinement in the narrow seat and desk which is necessarily connected
with them. The child of six or seven has not reached the age when such
confinement is natural or safe.
The injuries which I have mentioned relate to the nervous system as a
whole. There are other injuries resulting from the reading habit in
young children which concern the eyes directly. So much has been said
and written lately about the increase of myopia and other defects of
the eye among school children, that I shall merely refer to this
subject here. Upon entering school, children are practically free from
these defects. Upon leaving school, a strikingly large percentage are
suffering from them, more, however, as yet, in European countries than
in America. The causes are many, but it is scarcely doubted that the
chief cause is found in bending over finely printed books and maps,
and fine writing, pencil work, and drawing. If pencils, pens, paper,
and books could be kept away from children until they are at least ten
years of age, and their instruction come directly from objects and
from the voice of the teacher, this evil could be greatly lessened.
If the above reasons for not teaching reading and writing to young
children were the only ones, the objections could to a certain extent
be overcome. Writing might, for instance, be practiced only on the
blackboard with large free-hand movements, and letters could be taught
from large forms upon charts. But we have to consider the questions
whether reading and writing are in themselves branches of instruction
which belong to the early years of school life, whether they may not
be acquired at a great disadvantage at this period, and whether more
time is not spent upon them than is necessary. It is a well-known
fact that a child's powers, whether physical or mental, ripen in a
certain rather definite order. There is, for instance, a certain time
in the life of the infant when the motor mechanism of the legs ripens,
before which the child can not be taught to walk, while after that
time he can not be kept from walking. Again, at the age of seven, for
instance, there is a mental readiness for some things and an
unreadiness for others. The brain is then very impressionable and
retentive, and a store of useful material, both motor and sensory, may
be permanently acquired with great economy of effort. The imagination
is active, and the child loves to listen to narration, whether
historical or mythical, which plays without effort of his will upon
his relatively small store of memory images. The powers of analysis,
comparison, and abstraction are little developed, and the child has
only a limited ability to detect mathematical or logical relations.
The power of voluntary attention is slight, and can be exerted for
only a short time. All this may be stated physiologically by saying
that the brain activity is sensory and motor, but not central. The
sensory and motor mechanism has ripened, but not the associative. The
brain is hardly more than a receiving, recording, and reacting
apparatus. It would be inaccurate, however, to express this
psychologically by saying that perception, memory, and will are the
mental powers that have ripened at the age of seven. This would be
true only if by perception we mean not apperception, which involves a
considerable development of associative readiness, but mere passive
apprehension through the senses, and if by memory we mean not
recollection, but mere retentiveness for that which interests, and if
by will we mean not volition, but only spontaneous movement and
readiness to form habits of action, including a large number of
instinctive movement psychoses, such as imitation, play, and language
in its spoken form.
Following out, then, somewhat as above, the psychology of the child,
what kind of education would be particularly adapted to his stage of
development? We ask not what _can_ the child be taught, but what
studies are for him most natural and therefore most economical. In the
first place, from the development of the senses and the perceptive
power above described, we infer that the child is ready to acquire a
knowledge of the world of objects around him through the senses of
sight, hearing, touch, temperature, taste, and smell. His education
will have to do with real things and their qualities, rather than with
symbols which stand for things. If we wish a general term for this
branch of instruction, we may call it natural science, or, to
distinguish it from science in its more mature form as the study of
laws and causes, we may call it natural history, or, more briefly,
Nature study. Although the appropriateness and economy of this study
for young children has been known and proclaimed for more than a
century, it is still in practice the study of later years, while young
children study _letters_.
In the second place, from the development of the retentive powers of
the child we infer that he is qualified to gain acquaintance not only
with the real world around him, but with the real world of the past.
We may call this history. History is now studied later by means of
text-books. It may be studied with far greater economy during earlier
years by means of direct narration by parent or teacher. It is
wonderful how eagerly a child will listen to historical narration, and
how easily he will retain it. This method of teaching history forms a
striking contrast to the perfunctory manner in which it is often
studied in the upper school grades, with the text-book "lesson,"
"recitation," and the "final examination." Upon the minds of many
young people the study of history has a deadening effect when the
history epoch is passed and the mathematical epoch has arrived. It has
already been proposed, at a conference of educators lately held in
Chicago, to extend the study of history downward into the lower
grades, a proposition fully sanctioned by psychological pedagogy. In
what I have here said about history for young people I refer not to
the philosophy of history, which comes much later in the life of the
student, but to history as a mere record of facts and events, the kind
of history which is now studied in the grammar and high schools, the
kind which many educators who would make all children philosophers are
now saying should not be studied at all.
In the third place, what studies correspond to the development of the
will in the child from five to ten? It is the habit-forming epoch. It
is the time when a large and useful store of motor memory images may
be acquired, and when permanent reflex tracts may be formed in the
spinal cord and lower brain centers. This is the time to teach the
child to do easily and habitually a large number of useful things. If
we use the term in its broadest sense, we may call this branch of
instruction morals, but it will also include, besides habits of
conduct, various bodily activities, certain manual dexterities, and
correct habits of speech, expression, and singing. But here some
restrictions must be observed. The habit-forming period begins at
birth and continues far beyond the age of ten, and the period from
five to ten is not the time for the formation of all habits. The order
of muscular development must be observed, and all dexterities
involving finely co-ordinated movements of the fingers, or strain of
the eyes, should be deferred beyond this period, or at most begun only
in the latter part of it; such, for instance, as writing, drawing,
modeling, sewing, knitting, playing upon musical instruments, and
minute mechanical work, as well, of course, as the plaiting, pricking,
stitching, weaving, and other finger work still practiced in some
kindergartens and primary schools.
We have thus seen that there are certain branches of instruction for
which the mind of the child from five to ten has ripened, and which
may therefore be taught most economically and safely during this
period. Concerning the teaching of language I shall speak presently,
but thus far we have found that from the psychological standpoint
there are at any rate three subjects which are strikingly adapted to
this period, namely, natural science, history, and morals, using these
terms with the latitude and restriction already explained. Certain
branches of Nature study and one branch of what we have called
morals--namely, manual training--have in recent years been introduced
into our best elementary city schools, and in a few schools history is
taught systematically in the lower grades by means of stories. They
have not, however, crowded out reading, writing, and arithmetic so
much as crowded into them. But if we consider the great mass of
schools in city, town, and country throughout the land, the subjects
which practically complete the elementary school curriculum--reading,
writing, arithmetic, and geography--are, with the exception of the
latter, found to be subjects which do not naturally belong to this
period at all. Mathematics in every form is a subject conspicuously
ill fitted to the child mind. It deals not with real things, but with
abstractions. When referred to concrete objects, it concerns not the
objects themselves, but their relations to each other. It involves
comparison, analysis, abstraction. It calls for a fuller development
of the association tracts and fibers of the cerebral hemispheres. The
grotesque "number forms" which so many children have, and which
originate in this period, are evidence of the necessity which the
child feels of giving some kind of bodily shape to these abstractions
which he is compelled to study. Under mathematics I do not of course
include the mere mentioning or learning a number series, such as in
the process called "counting," or the committing to memory of a
multiplication table. Furthermore, in this and in all discussions of
this kind it must be remembered that there are exceptional children in
whom the mathematical faculty, or musical faculty, or literary
faculty, develops much earlier than with the average child. If
possible, they should have instruction suited to their peculiarities.
But it is evident that, so long as children are educated in "schools,"
there must be a general plan of education, and that it can not be
based upon exceptional children.
What we learn from physiology and psychology about the ripening of the
child's mind is confirmed by the theory of the "culture epochs." I can
not discuss here the doctrine of "recapitulation," with its great
truths and its minor exceptions, but it is well known that in a
general way the development of the child, both physical and mental, is
an epitome of the development of the race. If we compare the physical
and mental activities of the modern civilized man with those of the
more primitive member of the race, we may learn what forms of physical
and mental activity are natural in the different periods of child
life. Some of the things which are characteristic of the modern as
contrasted with the primitive man are sedentary habits, manual
dexterities requiring finely co-ordinated movements both of the eyes
and fingers, increasing devotion to written language and books as
contrasted with spoken language, the lessened dependence upon the
memory, the increasing subjectivity of mental life as contrasted with
the purely objective life of the savage, and the increased importance
of reflection, deliberation, and reasoning, with decrease of impulsive
and habitual action. These things, then, we should expect to belong to
the later period of child life, and studied which involve these
activities will not be economically pursued in the elementary school
grades. These laws are wholly overlooked in our traditional school
curriculum. In practice we are saying to the young child: "Man is a
sedentary, reading, writing, thinking, reasoning being, possessing the
power of voluntary attention. I am to educate you to be a man.
Therefore you must learn to sit still, to read, write, think, reason,
and give attention to your work." The child of six or eight years is
therefore given a book or pen, and put into a closely fitting seat and
left to give attention to his work. This is precisely as if the mother
should say to the infant at the beginning of the period of creeping:
"You are a man, not a brute. Men go upright, not on all fours. You
must walk, not creep."
I wish to call especial attention to the fact that it is only late in
the history of the race that language has passed to its written form.
Man is indeed now a reading and writing animal, but only recently has
he become so. It is only since the invention of printing and the wide
dissemination of books, magazines, and newspapers that reading has
become a real determining factor in the life of the people. Even now
the human organism is engaged in adapting itself to the new strain
brought upon the eyes and fingers in reading and writing. We can
understand, therefore, that it will demand a considerable maturity in
the child before he is ready for that which has developed so late in
the history of the race. The language of the child, like that of the
primitive man, is the language of the ear and tongue. The child is a
talking and hearing animal. He is ear-minded. There has been in the
history of civilization a steady development toward the preponderating
use of the higher senses, culminating with the eye. The average adult
civilized man is now strongly eye-minded, but it is necessary to go
back only to the time of the ancient Greeks to find a decided
relative ear-mindedness. Few laboratory researches have been made upon
the relative rapidity of development of the special senses in
children, but such as have been made tend to confirm the indications
of the "culture epochs" theory, and to show that the auditory centers
develop earlier than the visual.
More and more attention is given in our elementary schools to the
subject of language--more, as some think, than the relative importance
of the subject warrants; but without discussing this question, it is
indubitably shown by child psychology that it is the spoken language
which belongs to the elementary school. The ear is the natural medium
of instruction for young children, and all the second-hand knowledge
which it is necessary that the child should receive should come to him
in this way. It should come from the living words of the living
teacher or parent, not through the cold medium of the printed book. In
the elementary school, then, the child may be instructed in language
as it relates to the ear and the tongue, and this is the real
language. He may be taught to speak accurately and elegantly, and he
may be taught to listen and remember. He may study in this way the
best literature of his mother tongue, and get a living sympathetic
knowledge of it, such as can never come through the indirect medium of
the book. Indeed, this language study need not be limited to the
mother tongue. There is no age when a child may with so great economy
of effort gain a lasting knowledge of a foreign language as when he is
from seven to eleven years old.
When the spoken language has been mastered in this way, and when the
child has arrived at the reading and writing age, language in its
written form may be acquired in a very short time, and that which now
fills so many weary years of school life will sink into the position
of comparative insignificance in which it rightfully belongs. Reading
and writing have usurped altogether too much time. In the schools of
to-day there is a worship of the reading book, spelling book, copy
book, and dictionary not rightfully due them. By dropping the study of
letters from the lower grades much needed time may be found for other
timely and important subjects, such as Nature study, morals, history,
oral language, singing, physical training, and play.
One of the greatest goods which would follow the banishing of the book
from the primary and elementary schools would be the cultivation of
better mental habits. Children suffer lasting injury by being left
with a book in their seats and directed to "study" at an age when the
power of voluntary attention has not developed. They then acquire
habits of listlessness and mind-wandering afterward difficult to
overcome. They read over many times that which does not hold their
attention and is not remembered. Lax habits of study are thus
acquired, with the serious incidental result of weakening the
retentive power which depends so much upon interest and concentration.
With the substitution of the oral for the book method, reliance upon
the memory during the memory period will permanently strengthen the
child's power of retention.
The period between the ages of five and ten years is an important one
in the child's life. It is the time when the "let-alone" plan of
education is of most value, for the reason that nearly all our
educational devices beyond the kindergarten are more or less attempts
to make men and women out of children. If the child at this age must
be put into the harness of an educational system, his course of study
will not be impoverished by the omission of reading and writing. To
teach him to speak and to listen, to observe and to remember, to know
something of the world around him, and instinctively to do the right
thing, will furnish more than enough material for the most ambitious
elementary school curriculum.
FOOTNOTE:
[45] See the article on Courses of Study in the Elementary Schools of
the United States, by T. R. Crosswell, Pedagogical Seminary, April,
1897.
SOILS AND FERTILIZERS.[46]
BY CHARLES MINOR BLACKFORD, JR., M. D.
The word "soil" is used in several arts and sciences to denote the
material from which something derives nourishment. The meat broths and
jellies on which bacteria are grown are soils for them, as the earth
of a field is a soil for the ordinary farm crops; but in general we
mean by soils the various mixtures of mineral and organic substances
that make up the surface of the earth.
The object of this paper is to show as briefly as possible the way it
was formed, of what it is composed, the manner in which it nourishes
plants, and the rules that should guide us in replenishing its
nutritious matter when exhausted. So broad a field can be but lightly
touched, and the effort will be to give only hints from which rules
for specific cases may be deduced.
When a sample of ordinary fertile soil is analyzed, it is found to
consist of a number of minerals, of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus
in various combinations, water, and certain other ingredients
dependent on the locality. Among the minerals the most important are
potassium, sodium, lime, iron, and silicon, and the history of these
is of the greatest interest.
Scientific students are generally agreed that the surface of the earth
is but a shell inclosing a liquid, or at all events a highly heated
interior. Originally the whole mass was fluid, but the surface has
cooled more rapidly than the interior, and so a firm crust has been
formed. As the central mass cooled, it contracted, and the crust
became wrinkled and folded, as does the skin of an apple as its pulp
dries, and, by this folding, great ridges were thrown up in some
places and vast depressions formed in others. When the crust became
cool enough for water to remain on it, most of the depressions were
filled by it, and the "dry land appeared," not only on the crests of
the ridges, but on the elevated plateaus about them, and thus oceans
and continents were formed.
Had one of us seen the earth at that time he would have been loath to
select it as a residence. Rugged, rocky ranges of precipitous
mountains surrounded by stretches of naked rock made the landscape.
Dense clouds from the tepid oceans dashed against the icy peaks, and
torrents of water rushed back to the sea. Where the slopes permitted,
the glaciers spread over wide areas, for no vegetation checked the
rapid radiation of heat, and night brought bitter cold. The crust
waved and fluctuated over the liquid interior as does thin ice under a
daring skater, and as it fell the sea rushed over the land, only to
flow elsewhere as the depressed area rose again. The freezing and
thawing and the effects of wind and water in time produced a change.
The rocks were riven and broken to powder, their nearly vertical
slopes became less steep, and instead of bare rock the earth showed
dreary morasses and stretches of sand.
Over these marshes vegetation began to thrive. In the sea there lived
then, as now, a teeming population, animal, vegetable, and living
beings that can with difficulty be assigned to either of these
classes. Each of them, however, contained carbon, and many had built
lime, phosphorus, nitrogen, and other valuable substances into their
bodies. Where food was abundant these grew in vast numbers, and though
many are infinitely small singly, their aggregate mass is enormous.
Among the tiny organisms is one called the _Globigerina_, a being so
small as to require a microscope to study it, but in the past, as now,
growing in great numbers in the sea. The animal is soft and jellylike,
but it forms an outside skeleton of shell of carbonate of calcium or
chalk, a structure that protects it living, but entombs it dead. When
death comes, the little _Globigerina_ sinks to the bottom, and its
tiny shell helps to cover the sea floor.
In the days of long ago these lived as now, and when some convulsion
of Nature lifted the bottom of prehistoric seas, the _Globigerina_
ooze was lifted as well, and thus the "limestone" formed. In our land
a bed of this kind extends from Alabama to Newfoundland; thence, as
the "telegraphic plateau," it passes under the Atlantic, rising into
the chalk downs and cliffs of England; then, again dipping under the
sea, it passes through Europe, and finally furnishes the marble
quarries of Greece. Heat, water, and chemical action give a ceaseless
variety to the forms of the limestone, but wherever found it shows the
former seat of an ocean.
As soon as the "ooze" was lifted from below the sea it began to
change. Some has been exposed to heat and has crystallized into
marble, but for our purposes the most interesting changes have been
wrought by water. Chalk, limestone, and marble--for these are
chemically the same--are almost insoluble in pure water. But water is
rarely pure; it dissolves many things, and among them the
carbonic-oxide gas that every fire, every animal, every decaying scrap
of wood is pouring into the atmosphere. The rain, charged with this
gas, dissolves the limestone, but when the gas escapes the lime falls,
as you know happens when "hard" water is boiled, for the heat drives
off the gas. By this solution, however, the lime is scattered widely
through the soil, and is rarely lacking in untilled earth.
Besides lime, phosphorus is necessary in a good soil. This is widely
spread in Nature, but its great reservoir is the ocean, that boundless
mine of wealth. Many marine animals have the power of building it into
their tissues, and the shells of oysters and other mollusks, the bones
of nearly all animals, terrestrial and marine, and parts of other
organisms, are composed of phosphates to a greater or less degree. In
the ceaseless changes of level the primal oyster beds and coral reefs
are raised to the surface or far above it, and the slow action of time
begins to tear down the deposits and spread them wide-cast. Since that
far-off time "in the beginning" no new matter has been put on earth
save the small amounts of the meteorites, and the economy of Nature
can allow not one atom to lie in idleness, but calls on each one to
play its part ceaselessly, "without haste and without rest." A certain
amount of a substance is disseminated through the earth; by rains it
is washed into the streams, and thence to the sea. Here plants or
animals eagerly await it, and by means of them it is again restored to
the land, to begin again its endless round.
The metals most necessary for plant life are potassium, sodium, and
iron; indeed, the very name of the first shows its importance. If the
ashes which contain all the mineral constituents of plants be put in a
vessel and water poured on them, a solution of lye will percolate
through the mass. The word lye is an abbreviation for alkali, and when
chemistry became sufficiently advanced, a metal was discovered in this
lye to which the name potassium--i. e., potash-metal--was given. If
seaweeds be burned and leeched in the same way we can obtain from the
lye another metal, sodium, that is much like potassium, and that is
one of the most widely spread substances on earth as its chloride, or
common salt.
Potassium and sodium enter into the composition of many rocks, and as
these become eroded by weather they are scattered through the soil,
whence their salts are extracted by rootlets and enter into the
formation of vegetable tissue.
Behind these stands iron. The green coloring matter of plants is a
very complex substance known as chlorophyll, the duty of which is to
take carbonic oxide from the air, utilize the carbon, and restore the
oxygen. Iron enters into the composition of chlorophyll, and to it is
due the brown color of dead leaves. This metal is well-nigh universal,
all the reds and browns in soils and rocks being made by it, and so it
is rarely lacking anywhere.
So much for the metals in soils; but, important as they are, plants
can not live on them alone. Among the nonmetallic bodies phosphorus
stands high among essentials, and for it we are indebted to the sea
and the interior of the earth. Many living creatures extract
phosphorus from the sea water--combine it chiefly with lime, and use
the phosphate for making skeletons or shells, as the case may be.
After the death of the possessors the bones or shells sink to the
bottom, as do the _Globigerina_, and in time are either lifted up, as
were the limestones, and form "phosphate beds" like those of Georgia
and Florida, or are dredged up and ground into powder with bones of
land animals.
Much of the matter forced up from the interior of the earth contains
phosphorus; indeed, it is the bane of Southern iron ores; but though
iron masters dread it, farmers welcome it, as the rains and frosts
crumble the phosphatic rocks and add them to the mass of _débris_ that
forms our soil.
Now let us take a test tube and put into it lime, potash, soda, iron,
silicon, or sand, and phosphorus, add to it a grain of corn, and watch
results. Under suitable conditions of warmth and moisture the grain
will sprout, but when the store of food laid up in it is exhausted our
little plant will die. It is obvious that something else is needed for
a soil, and analysis shows that it is nitrogen, the gas that forms
nearly four fifths of our atmosphere--a gas useless, as such, to
animals, but essential to plants. Nitrogen is abundant in Nature.
Besides being nearly four fifths of the air, it forms twenty-two per
cent of nitric acid, forty-five per cent of saltpeter or niter,
eighty-two per cent of ammonia, and about twenty-five per cent of sal
ammoniac. Plants can not use nitrogen in its pure form, but one or
another of these forms will be found in the soil, whence it may be
extracted.
Now we have the chief articles of plant food, and it is necessary to
know how they are to be used. A plant usually consists of two parts,
one that appears above ground, bearing branches, twigs, and leaves,
and another that remains below ground. It is this latter that concerns
us now, and it is worth study. This lower part consists of a number of
twigs called rhizomes, from which proceed a vast number of fine,
threadlike rootlets, and these are the mouths of the plant, through
which it draws nourishment from the earth about it.
Before any living thing can use nourishment from without, it must be
dissolved, and this solution requires much preparation at times. Men,
and other animals with a wide range of food stuffs, effect this by the
secretions of the digestive organs; but most plants have no digestive
apparatus, strictly speaking, and were they supplied with an abundance
of the foods they most need, they would starve unless the food were in
a suitable state for absorption.
The way in which Nature effects this solution is the key to many of
her secrets, and it has been understood only within the past few
years. If we have a piece of meat freshly taken from an animal we find
it firm, coherent, and almost odorless. If it be put into a warm,
moist chamber for a few days a great change comes over it, and it
becomes soft, offensive in odor, and liable to fall to pieces. We say
that it is rotten or putrid. If a bit of it be put under a microscope,
it is seen to be teeming with bacteria, and these are responsible for
the decay. Now, if a specimen of earth be examined, we find that it
contains bacteria, that attack all kinds of organic matter, tearing it
to pieces to get their food, and making many different things out of
what is left. There is one sort of ferment that grows in apple juice
and splits the sugar into alcohol and carbonic acid, forming "hard
cider," and if the fermentation stops at this point the well-known
drink results. However, there is another ferment called "mother of
vinegar" that may get in, and, if so, a different kind of fermentation
is started that forms acetic acid instead of alcohol; or the bacteria
of decomposition may come in and the whole go back to its elements.
There is a wonderful provision of Nature shown in these stages. The
bacteria--the organisms that produce decay--can not live in a strong
sugar solution, but the ferments, like common yeast, can live in it,
and they split the sugar into alcohol, carbonic oxide, and other
things. In these another set can live, and when the first have died of
starvation or from the alcohol they form, the second set step in and
turn the weak alcohol into acetic acid. Acetic acid is a preserving
agent, as our sour pickles show, but if it is not too strong there are
some organisms that can live in it, and the whole process ends in
decay. Now, it should be noticed that each of these organisms paves
the way for the next by converting an unsuitable food stuff into a
suitable one.
This familiar example indicates the lines on which Nature works. It is
the same everywhere, and shows the advantage of specialization, of
allowing some one with peculiar facilities for performing an act to do
that exclusively, that others may profit by his skill. So long as each
man sought and killed his food, cooked his meals, made his own
clothing, weapons, and implements--in a word, lived alone--advance was
impossible. It was only when he who was most skillful with the needle
made garments for the hunter in exchange for a haunch of venison, that
the hunter could practice marksmanship, and the tailor design a new
cut for the mantle with which the warrior might dazzle the daughter of
the arrow maker. It is the same in Nature. Some organisms possess
powers of elaborating certain materials of which others are quick to
avail themselves. Plants can manufacture starch, an article needed by
animals, but of which their own capacity, so far as producing it is
concerned, is very limited, and thus animals find it advantageous to
avail themselves of these stores instead of taxing their own
resources. Similarly, plants need the organic matters of the animal
bodies, and wise agriculture supplies carbon, nitrogen, and other
articles of food in the shape of animal and vegetable refuse. But this
matter requires digestion; it must be made soluble before it can be
absorbed, and but few plants can effect this solution unaided. The
"Venus's flytrap," the sundew, the wonderful "carrion plant," and
others, are equipped with elaborate apparatus by which they are
enabled to capture, kill, and literally digest the insects that supply
them with nitrogeneous food, but these are exceptional cases. Nature
usually employs other agents.
The action of bacteria in causing decay has been said to be in general
similar to fermentation--that it is effected by the bacteria in
seeking their food. If oxygen be abundant, putrefaction occurs; if it
be scant or absent, then fermentation takes place, for the tiny
organisms require oxygen, and, if the air fails them, they pull to
pieces the organic matters near them to obtain it. In doing this they
get the nitrogen into such shape that the plants can use it, and thus
digest their food for them. All organic matter contains carbon,
hydrogen, and oxygen as a general rule, and to these are often united
phosphorus, sulphur, nitrogen, and others, making very complex
arrangements, veritable houses of cards, in fact, only held together
by the strange power of life. When a leaf falls or a bird dies, some
of these combinations are broken, and then the bacteria and other
lowly organisms have full sway, for living matter is impregnable to
all save a few of them. As oxygen or something else is taken out of
the complex molecules, the compound falls to pieces, but as in the
kaleidoscope the bits of colored glass tumble into endless varieties
of symmetrical figures, so do the atoms fall into new combinations. If
the keystone of an arch be removed, the stones fall apart; but atoms,
unlike bricks or stones, can not stand alone as a rule; they must be
united to something, and so, as soon as old associations are
dissolved, new ones are formed. These new ones are those needed by
plants, and thus is plant food digested.
The term "plant food" has been frequently used, and should now be
distinctly explained, for merely stating the chemical elements is not
describing the food. When a physician tells a nurse to feed a patient
he does not order so much carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and the like,
but specifies a soup, certain vegetables, and so on, detailing every
particular; and the same should be done for vegetable invalids.
In medical practice a condition is recognized that is called scurvy.
It is not exactly starvation, but is produced by lack of some food
materials usually supplied by fresh vegetables. If scurvy appears at
sea, no amount of meat, bread, cakes, or pastry will stop it;
vegetables, and they only, will stay it. Sometimes a similar condition
prevails among crops: some ingredient in a soil is lacking, and the
others may be supplied indefinitely without giving the desired relief.
To this may be attributed much of the fault found with fertilizers;
for if the soil does not need a particular compound it is useless to
apply it, and an excellent fertilizer is often blamed for not
producing a crop on land already overstocked with it and crying for
something else.
Let us suppose a field on which cotton has been grown for many
successive years until it has become exhausted. Analysis shows that a
crop yielding one hundred pounds of lint to the acre removes from the
soil:
Nitrogen 20.71 pounds;
Phosphoric acid 8.17 "
Potash 13.06 "
Lime 12.60 "
Magnesia 4.75 "
-----
Total 59.29 "
The weight of the whole crop from which these figures were taken was
eight hundred and forty-seven pounds, so that cotton exhausts land
less than any staple crop, if the roots, stems, leaves, etc., be
turned under and only the lint and seed be removed. Of these the lint
(one hundred pounds) takes 1.17 pound from the soil, and the seed
13.89 pounds, making 15.06 pounds net loss.[47] But ignoring returns
that may be made in the shape of cotton-seed meal, etc., and lime,
with which our soils are abundantly supplied, we see that nitrogen,
phosphoric acid, and potash have been removed. Suppose the owner puts
bone meal on his exhausted land: the phosphoric acid in the bone will
supply one need, and an improvement results. On the strength of this,
bone meal will be loaded into the soil again, and let us suppose the
deficit not yet made up, the crop again shows improvement. Now,
phosphoric acid abounds in the soil, though the deficiency in nitrogen
and potash has become steadily greater; so, when the customary bone
meal is applied, the crop falls back, because the plants are starving
for potash and nitrogen. They are like scurvy-smitten sailors, but
many thoughtless farmers would attribute the decline to the maker of
the bone meal, and say that its quality was not so high as
formerly--an opinion similar to that of a sea captain who would
ascribe to the poor quality of salt beef an outbreak of scurvy on his
vessel.
As crops of any description extract potash, nitrogen, and phosphoric
acid from soils, the question how they are to be replaced is an
important matter, and its answer may be most readily found by studying
Nature's methods. In parts of the Old World there are fields that are
fertile in the extreme after thousands of years of tillage, and it is
apparent that mere cultivation does not prove injurious. The tropical
forests have something growing wherever a plant can find foothold--a
population in which the struggle for food is secondary to that for
light and air, and yet the soil supporting this vegetation is
marvelously rich. Every leaf that falls remains where it fell until in
the warm, moist, half-lighted forest it becomes a little heap of mold.
The bacteria of decomposition require warmth and moisture for their
life; light is deleterious to them, but they thrive in the dense shade
of the jungle. The tangled web of roots, weeds, and vines retains the
rainfall, retarding evaporation, and preventing both droughts and
freshets. Receiving dead and broken leaves, boughs, and other
vegetable products, and spared the washing of violent torrents, the
forest is inestimably fertile.
On a smaller scale this goes on universally. The annual weeds,
deciduous leaves, and such matter, fall prey to molds and bacteria, by
which they are made soluble. Snows and rains bear the products into
the soil, and there other bacteria, clustering around the roots, form
the acids needed to complete solution. Every one knows that
"well-rotted" manure is better than that which is fresh, and many
wonder at this, but the reason is apparent. In feeding delicate
patients, physicians often prescribe predigested foods or the
digestive ferments to aid enfeebled assimilation; and similarly the
manures that have been thoroughly acted on by bacteria, or containing
those capable of producing the matters that plants need, are of most
value for nourishing vegetation.
In producing an article of any sort, the cheapness and ease with which
it can be made is largely dependent on the shape in which the raw
material reaches the factory. If a foundry can procure iron that needs
only to be melted and cast, the owner can fill his orders more
readily than would be possible if he had to reduce the metal from the
ore; and Nature uses this principle over and over again. The
importance of nitrogen to plants and its abundance in Nature have been
mentioned, but it has also been said that plants can not use it
directly, as most animals do with oxygen. The tiny bacteria intervene,
and this they do in two ways: first, by causing decay of animal or
vegetable matter containing nitrogen, and by this decay producing
substances that plants can absorb; and, secondly, by producing little
nodules or "tubercles" on the rootlets, through which the plant can
take up nitrogen.[48] Now, when a plant is sated with nitrogen, it
ceases to form these tubercles, and their formation is a sure sign
that the plant is craving this article of food. When it is supplied,
and its own life is ended, these form reservoirs from which other
plants may be supplied, as new castings may be made from broken
wheels. The great value of "green manuring" depends on the store of
available nitrogen so laid up, but it is open to failure in one
direction. The liability of fermentation to go to the acid stage from
contamination with acid-forming ferments has been mentioned, an
accident the possibility of which is impressed on us from time to time
by sour bread; and similarly the organic matter turned under may
undergo acid fermentation, rendering the ground "sour" and unfit for
cultivation.
The limits of this paper forbid the consideration of special
fertilizers, but from the general principles laid down the rules for
any special case may be deduced. A soil should contain a sufficient
amount of potash, soda, lime, iron, and a few other minerals;
phosphoric acid, nitrogen, organic matter, and, for some special
crops, some other ingredients may be needed. When the soil needs
renewing, there are two ways of accomplishing it. One way is to guess
at what is needed; to buy fertilizers at high prices, without
inquiring whether the soil needs the substances in that particular
brand or not. Though very common, this is not a good plan. It is as
though a physician were to give a patient any drug that was
convenient, without inquiring into the disorder or the needs of the
system, and it is followed by much the same result. That acid
phosphate gave Farmer A a good crop, is no reason that Farmer B's land
is also deficient in phosphorus. The same reasoning would teach that a
heart stimulant that rouses a patient from shock would benefit one in
danger of apoplexy, where the least increase in heart force might be
fatal. A physician using such reasoning as the basis of his practice
would not be considered a master of his art; and were he to attribute
the fatal outcome of his logic to the poor quality of his stimulant,
he would display criminal ignorance of drugs as well as disease; yet
it is very common to see farmers put guano on a soil begging for
potash, and then heap execration on the head of the dealer who sold
the guano when the crop failed. To revert to a simile used above, a
captain must not blame the salt pork for scurvy.
The other way to buy and use fertilizers is to ascertain what a
certain crop needs; then find out whether these be in the soil, and to
what extent. With these data the deficiency may be made good without
the wasteful cost of the former method. State and Federal Departments
of Agriculture furnish their aid freely and gladly, and already the
signs are seen of the day when agriculture will take its place among
the semiexact sciences, and the present haphazard methods will become
obsolete.
FOOTNOTES:
[46] An address delivered before the Richmond County (Georgia)
Agricultural Society, on February 19, 1898.
[47] United States Department of Agriculture. Farmers' Bulletin, No.
48.
[48] Leguminous Plants for Green Manuring and for Feeding. E. W.
Allen, Ph. D. United States Department of Agriculture. Farmers'
Bulletin, No. 16.
SKETCH OF AUGUST KEKULÉ.
"This news," said Herr H. Landrelt, president, announcing Kekulé's
death in the German Chemical Society at Berlin, "will be received with
sorrow not only by our society but by the whole chemical world.
Science has again lost one of its greatest representatives, one of
those extremely rare spirits who were called upon to found a new epoch
in it and push it mightily forward."
FRIEDRICH AUGUST KEKULÉ was born at Darmstadt, September 7, 1829, and
died, after a long illness, at Bonn, July 13, 1896. He was originally
destined by his father for the profession of an architect; and some
houses, he told his students in a festival address, still existed (in
1892) in Darmstadt of which he drew the plans when, a youth, he was
attending the gymnasium. The leading events of his life were very
tersely told by himself in an address responding to an ovation from
the students of the University of Bonn on the twenty-fifth anniversary
of his professorship there; a translation of which, from the
_Kölnische Zeitung_, was published by Mr. J. E. Martin in Nature, June
30, 1892.
At Giessen, he said, where he went to study architecture, he attended
Liebig's lectures, and was thereby attracted to chemistry. But his
relatives would not at first hear of his changing his profession, and
he was given a half-year's grace to think over it. He spent his time
in the Polytechnicum at Darmstadt. His first teacher in chemistry at
Darmstadt was Moldenhauer, the inventor of lucifer matches. His
leisure time was spent in modeling in plaster and at the lathe. He was
then permitted to return to Giessen. "I attended," he said, "the
lectures, first of Will and then of Liebig. Liebig was at work on a
new edition of his letters on Chemistry, for which many experiments
had to be carried out. I had to make estimations of ash, of albumen,
to investigate gluten in plants, etc. The names of the young chemists
who helped Liebig were mentioned in the book, among them mine. The
proposal was then made to me, just at the time Liebig intended to make
me his assistant, that I should go for a year abroad, either to
Berlin, which was at that time to Giessen a foreign land, or to Paris.
'Go,' said Liebig, 'to Paris; there your views will be widened; you
will learn a new language; you will get acquainted with the life of a
great city; but you will not learn chemistry there.' In that, however,
Liebig was wrong. I attended lectures by Frémy, Wurtz, Pouillet,
Regnault; by Marchandis on physiology, and by Payen on technology. One
day, as I was sauntering along the streets, my eyes encountered a
large poster with the words _Leçons de philosophie chimique par
Charles Gerhardt, ex-professeur de Montpellier_. Gerhardt had resigned
his professorship at Montpellier, and was teaching philosophy and
chemistry as _privat docent_ in Paris. That attracted me, and I
entered my name on the list. Some days later I received a card from
Gerhardt; he had seen my name in Liebig's Letters on Chemistry. On my
calling upon him he received me with great kindness, and made me the
offer, which I could not accept, that I should become his assistant.
My visit took place at noon, and I did not leave his house till
midnight, after a long talk on chemistry. These discussions continued
between us at least twice a week for over a year. Then I received the
offer of the post of assistant to von Plauter, at the Castle of
Reichenau, near Chur, which I accepted, contrary to Liebig's wish, who
recommended me as assistant to Fehling, at Stuttgart. So I went to
Switzerland, where I had leisure to digest what I had learned in Paris
during my intercourse with Gerhardt. Then I received an invitation
from Stenhouse, in London, to become his assistant, an invitation I
was loath to accept, since I regarded him, if I may be allowed the
expression, as a _Schmierchemiker_. By chance, however, Bunsen came to
Chur on a visit to his brother-in-law, at whose house I first met him.
I consulted Bunsen as to Stenhouse's offer, and he advised me by all
means to accept it. I should learn a new language, but I should not
learn chemistry. So I came to London, where as Stenhouse's assistant I
did not learn much. By means of a friend, however, I became acquainted
with Williamson. The latter had just published his ether theory, and
was at work on the polybasic acids (in particular on the action of
PCl_{5} on H_{2}SO_{4}). Chemistry was at one of its turning points.
The theory of polybasic radicals was being evolved. With Williamson
was also associated Odling. Williamson insisted on plain, simple
formulæ, without commas, without the buckles of Kolbe or the brackets
of Gerhardt. It was a capital school to encourage independent
thought. The wish was expressed that I should stay in England and
become a technologist, but I was too much attached to home. I wished
to teach in a German university. But where? In order to get acquainted
with the circumstances at several universities, I became a traveling
student. In this capacity I came, among other universities, to Bonn.
Here there was no chemist of eminence, and hence there were no
prospects. Nowhere did there seem so much promise and so great a
future as at Heidelberg. I could ask no help of Bunsen. 'I can do
nothing for you,' he said, 'at least not openly. I will not stand in
your way, but more I can not promise.' I fitted up a small private
laboratory in the principal street of Heidelberg at the house of a
corn merchant--Gross, by name--a single room with an adjoining
kitchen. I took a few pupils, among whom was Baeyer. In our little
kitchen I finished my work on fulminate of silver, while Baeyer
carried out the researches, which subsequently became famous, on
cacodyl. That the walls were coated thick with arsenious acid, and
that silver fulminate is explosive, we took no thought about. After
two years and a half I received a call to Ghent as ordinary professor.
There I stayed nine years, and had to lecture in French. With me to
Ghent came Baeyer. Through the kindness of the then Prime Minister of
Belgium, Rogier, I obtained the means to establish a small laboratory.
I had there with me a number of students, among whom I may name
Baeyer, Hübner, Ladenburg, Wichelhaus, Linnemann, Radzizewski. There
was not so much a systematic course of instruction as a free and
pleasant academic intercourse. After nine years' work I received the
call to Bonn." Professor Kekulé concluded his address with some
account of his work at Bonn, and of the great attention he had always
received from his pupils. For a full account of Kekulé's scientific
career and achievements, we are indebted to the memorial address made
by President Landelt to the German Chemical Society on the occasion of
his death, of which we translate the more important passages from the
_Berichte_:
"The works which Kekulé has left behind him belong, as we all know, to
the bases of all chemistry. His teachings have so passed into our
flesh and blood that it seems almost superfluous to remind a circle of
professional chemists of them. I shall be able to present only in the
most general outlines this evening the immense influence which the
dead master has exercised upon science; a complete view of all his
labors is a subject for a biography, which we must wait for.
"Kekulé's scientific work began in 1854, with the discovery of
thiacetic acid, by which he at once separated from the old school of
chemistry that was still prevailing, and, founding a new one,
revealed himself as an adherent of the new doctrine of types. After
his habilitation at Heidelberg, which followed in 1856, came the essay
on fulminating mercury, in which the view so important for the future
was expressed, that to the three typical combinations of
chlorhydrogen, water, and ammonia, hitherto recognized, might be added
a fourth, marsh gas. In the next essay, on binary combinations and the
theory of polyatomic radicals, he put forward the conception of mixed
types, and first reached the knowledge of various atomicity or valency
of the radicals. These researches were continued, and there appeared
shortly afterward, in the spring of 1858, the two great treatises
which have since exercised so powerful an influence on chemistry--that
on the constitution and metamorphoses of chemical combinations, and
that on the chemical nature of carbon. In these theses Kekulé passed
from the valency of the radicals to that of the elements themselves,
and showed that the composition of all those compounds that contain
one atom of carbon lead to the conclusion that that element is
quadrivalent; and that, further, the relations of combination of a
complex of carbon atoms are explainable if we suppose that the latter
are mutually bound by a certain number of their four unities of
attraction. This idea was suggested very carefully, and the words
which the author added at the end of his essay read very curiously
to-day: 'Finally, I think I ought still to insist that I attach only
little value to speculations of this sort. Since one delving in
chemistry must once in a while, in the lack of exact scientific
principles, content himself with probabilities and temporary
hypotheses, it seems proper to communicate these conceptions, because,
as it appears to me, they furnish a simple and fairly general
expression for the newest discoveries, and because, therefore, the use
of them may assist in the discovery of new facts.' How diffident the
words sound, and how far have the expectations been exceeded! We all
know that the theory of valency is to-day the leading guide through
all our science; and, although another investigator had a share in its
origination, no one disputes that its main foundation and its eminent
value in organic chemistry are primarily due to Kekulé's idea of the
quadrivalency of carbon.
"After he was called to the University of Ghent, in 1858, Kekulé
exhibited an indefatigable activity. He began the great series of
investigations of the organic acids which, beginning with succinic
acid, malic acid, and tartaric acid, and extending afterward to many
others, have given complete conclusions as to the nature of these
bodies. Contemporaneously, in 1860, appeared the first number of the
_Lehrbuch der organischen Chemie_, which was soon followed by other
numbers, so that the whole first volume was completed in 1861. All his
fellow-chemists who are acquainted with the events of that period
will remember the enthusiasm with which the work was received. For the
first time, in place of the former system of organic chemistry based
on the old radicals of Berzelius, a system of treatment appeared which
in the dress of the theory of types had the doctrine of valency as its
foundation, and exposed the construction as well as the isomeric
relations of the numerous carbon compounds with wonderful clearness.
The work, the first two published volumes of which contained the
substances designated by Kekulé as the fatty compounds, is still
recognized as the prototype of many text-books that followed it.
"In 1855 Kekulé put forth the second of his great theories. First in
the Bulletin of the Chemical Society of Paris, and afterward in fuller
form in Liebig's _Annalen_, appeared the essay, Researches among the
Aromatic Compounds, in which he showed that the substances so
designated all contain six or more atoms of carbon, and that they
could be described as derivatives of the simplest of them, benzene. He
proposed two hypotheses to explain the constitution of this substance,
one of which, the only one afterward pursued, supposed that the six
carbon atoms are associated in a ring, and alternately linked by one
and two valencies. By replacing the hydrogen atoms corresponding to
each carbon atom by other elements or radicals one could arrive at the
knowledge of the constitution of a large number of aromatic bodies
which now figure as benzol derivatives. These considerations led,
however, to another question--namely, whether or not the supplied
places of the six hydrogen atoms are chemically equivalent. The
question of space relations in chemistry first came up in connection
with this investigation, and Kekulé at once endeavored to solve it.
All these ideas were, however, expressed at first with reserve, and
this essay closes with the words, 'I place no more value on these
views than they are worth, and I believe that much labor must still be
applied before such speculations can be regarded as anything else than
more or less elegant hypotheses; but I believe, too, that at least
experimental speculations of this kind must be used in chemistry.'
"In this case, again, Kekulé's modest expectations have been
surpassed. The wonderful results that have accrued from the benzol
theory are patent to all of us. We know that it was the instigation to
the carrying out of an innumerable multitude of researches which are
still pursued with undiminished industry. Rarely has a thought
exercised so fructifying and forwarding an influence on chemistry, and
so redounded to the advantage of both pure science and art.
Thankfulness for this gift, as you know, prompted our society to honor
the author of the benzol theory and the twenty-fifth year of the
announcement of it by a public festival; and the Kekulé celebration,
which took place in this house on the 11th of March, 1890, is
memorable to all for the brilliant and witty speech with which the
master responded to the many addresses made to him. It is preserved in
our reports (_Berichte_ 23, 1892), and the repeated reading of it
always affords rich enjoyment."
Kekulé assumed his last position, as professor at the University of
Bonn, in the fall of 1867. He there devoted his attention for a period
to the erection of a new institute building, but it was not long
before numerous works began again to appear--some of them by himself
alone, like the important investigation of the condensation products
of aldehyde; and others in co-operation with his many students. The
continuation of his _Lehrbuch_ was taken in hand at the same time. In
1867 he gratified his fellow-chemists by the publication of the first
volume of his Chemistry of the Benzol Derivatives. This was followed
from 1880 to 1887 by single numbers, prepared with the help of
co-workers, of the second and third volumes.
Prof. F. R. Japp, in the Kekulé memorial lecture before the Chemical
Society of London, speaking of Kekulé's residence in that city,
September, 1897, said that he always acknowledged the influence which
Liebig and Odling and Williamson, with whom he became acquainted in
London, exercised on the formation of his opinions. Kekulé's theories,
Professor Japp said, were based on Gerhardt's type theory; on
Williamson's theory of polyvalent radicals, which by their power of
linking together other radicals render possible the existence of
multiple types; and Odling's theory of mixed types, which was a
deduction from Williamson's theory. Less consciously, perhaps, his
opinions were influenced by E. Frankland's theory of the valency of
elementary atoms, and by Kolbe's speculation on the constitution of
organic compounds. Kekulé gathered together the various ideas which he
found scattered throughout the writings of his predecessors, added to
them, and welded the whole into the consistent system which forms our
present theory of chemical structure. In 1857, in the course of a
memoir on the constitution of fulminic acid, he gave a tabular
arrangement of compounds formulated on the type of marsh gas, this
being the earliest statement, though put forward only in an imperfect
form, of the tetravalency of carbon. In the same year he published an
important theoretical paper On the So-called Conjugated Compounds and
the Theory of Polyatomic Radicals, which contains a complete system of
multiple types and mixed types. In 1858 the celebrated paper, On the
Constitution and Metamorphoses of Chemical Compounds, and on the
Chemical Nature of Carbon, appeared. It embodies the fully developed
doctrine of the tetravalency of carbon, together with Kekulé's views
on the linking of atoms and on the valency of such chains of atoms,
the foundation on which our modern system of constitutional chemistry
rests. In 1865 Kekulé put forward his well-known benzene
theory--pronounced by Professor Japp the crowning achievement, in his
hands, of the doctrine of the linking of atoms, and the most brilliant
piece of scientific prediction to be found in the whole range of
organic chemistry. The conception of closed chains, or cycloids, which
he thus introduced, has shown itself to be capable of boundless
expansion.
Kekulé's students all speak admiringly of his qualities as a teacher.
The memorialist of the German Chemical Society said: "All of us who
have attended his lectures or heard him in other places will ever
remember what a teacher Kekulé was. With incomparable lucidity and
sometimes with the happiest humor, he could go playfully through the
theme he was considering, masterfully presenting it in new and often
surprising aspects. The charm of his personality affected all who came
in contact with him; it was the geniality which shone out of his whole
being, and involuntarily commanded admiration. Numerous pupils flocked
to him, and many of those who to-day fill chairs of chemistry in
Germany and other countries have made his name highly honored."
Professor Thorpe, of London, who spent a little time in Kekulé's
laboratory, describes him as having been one of the very best
expositors, with the single possible exception of Kirchhoff, to whom
it had been his lot to listen. As a laboratory teacher he was
excellent. He was a most severe judge of work, striving to exact the
same high manipulative finish, the same neatness and order, which he
invariably bestowed on everything he did, and he was absolutely
intolerant of anything slovenly or "sloppy." "But it was as a lecturer
that he was seen at his best. He was singularly luminous as a thinker,
a close and accurate reasoner, with a remarkable power of concentrated
expression.... His language was apt and well chosen, and his delivery
easy and natural"; and his whole address showed that every detail had
been carefully considered.
At a distance of thirty years, Professor Dewar said, at the London
memorial meeting, that to look back and call to mind the presence and
personality of the great chemist as he knew him was indeed a pleasure.
He was a man of noble mien, handsome, dignified, and yet of a homely
and kindly disposition. He was a severe critic, having a haughty
contempt for the accidental and bizarre in scientific work. His
originality and suggestiveness seemed endless, so that he had no need
to commit trespass or to follow just in the wake of other people's
ideas. "Everything that passed through the Kekulé alembic was indeed
transmuted into pure gold. His precision of thought and diction
rendered his papers profoundly suggestive to other workers."
"The last years of the master's life," his German eulogist says, "were
often troubled by illness, but there were not wanting bright days
which the love of his students and colleagues prepared for him." Such
a one was the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his
professorship at Bonn, June 1, 1892, in which the students and
officers participated with cordial unanimity. The ceremony began in
the morning with an enthusiastic ovation by the students. The chemical
theater was decorated with plants; the benzene hexagon was figured on
the blackboard with garlands of flowers, in the midst of which the
letters A. K. were wrought in a monogram of roses. Alfred Helle, one
of the chemical students, delivered a felicitous address, in which he
congratulated his fellow-students on being privileged to sit at the
feet of the greatest of living chemists, after which three cheers were
given to the professor. Kekulé responded to the offering in an address
giving some of the details of his life, from which we have already
quoted. Kekulé's personal staff and the officers of the university
then presented their congratulations.
In the evening the students honored him with a torchlight procession,
it being the third time he had received this, the most conspicuous
honor which is bestowed by German students. The first occasion was in
1875, when he declined the professorship at Munich; the second was in
1878, when he was rector of the university, and was given in
celebration of the restoration of unity among the students, after a
long period of disunion. Among the torchbearers on that occasion was
the present Emperor of Germany.
During the later period of his life Kekulé was comparatively sterile.
Those who knew him, however, Professor Thorpe says, "would be the
first to affirm that this seeming apathy sprang from no natural
indifference. There is no doubt that he suffered, even in the early
period of middle life, from the intense stress and strain of his
mental labors prior to the Ghent period. He too surely exemplified the
sad truth of Liebig's saying that he who would become a great chemist
must pay for his pre-eminence by the sacrifice of his health. There is
reason to know that it was the consciousness of failing power which
prevented him from finishing much to which he had put his hand, and
that his fastidiousness and his sense of 'finish,' amounting almost to
hypercriticism, restrained him from publishing much which he realized
fell short of his ideal."
The last time Kekulé's name was brought before the public was on the
occasion of the renewal of the ancient title of nobility of his
family, as August Kekulé von Stradowitz.
Editor's Table.
_A VOICE FROM THE PULPIT._
We called attention last month to a weak attack on the doctrine of
evolution by a certain Mr. A. J. Smith, Superintendent of Public
Schools in the city of St. Paul. The only thing which gave any
consequence to the deliverance in question was that it was addressed
to a large gathering of public-school teachers, who might possibly
have been unduly influenced in their appreciation of it by the
speaker's official position. We are glad now to learn that, very
shortly after the publication of Superintendent Smith's address, an
excellent statement of the true relation of the doctrine of evolution
to education was made in one of the city pulpits by the Rev. S. G.
Smith, who did not boast, as the superintendent had done, of having
made an exhaustive study of the subject, but who, nevertheless, showed
that he had a grasp of it which the other altogether lacked. The Rev.
Mr. Smith's discourse would have merited attention wherever it might
have been delivered; but, considered as a pulpit utterance, it seems
to us to possess a special and very encouraging significance. We need
hardly say that the pulpit has not always been friendly to broad
scientific views, but in this case it has spoken with a candor, a
breadth, and an intelligence which the lecture platform can not do
more than equal, and which it would certainly be too much to look for
in all our colleges.
"The law of evolution," said the reverend gentleman, "is as universal
in its application as the law of gravitation. It holds that in every
realm the simple tends to become complex, and that the complex is more
stable than the simple. Motion and matter have a history in which the
simple and the indefinite take on variety of organization and
definiteness of adaptation." This is a statement in which the author
of the Synthetic Philosophy would probably have very little change to
suggest. Mr. Smith does not, like so many who discuss the subject in a
superficial manner, confound evolution with Darwinism. Darwinism, he
recognizes, may, in its particular explanations as to the origin of
species and the descent of life, be in error; but evolution is
universal in its scope, and can only fail if it can be shown that the
fundamental postulates on which it rests, such as the instability of
the homogeneous, the continuity of motion, the law of rhythm, etc.,
are not to be depended on. Must a person have made the circle of the
sciences and comprehended all knowledge before he can reasonably
profess a belief in evolution? No, says Mr. Smith; when the
foundations of a doctrine have been clearly laid, when they have been
tested by many different investigators from many different points of
view, and when these, almost without exception, affirm that the
doctrine is not only in harmony with, but lends a new and deeper
significance to, the several orders of fact with which they are
individually concerned, any person of ordinary intelligence is
justified in considering that doctrine as satisfactorily proved and
giving it his personal adhesion.
What chiefly excited the ire of Superintendent A. J. Smith was the
contention of evolutionists that the modern child reflects the earlier
stages of human development. He asked his audience if they really
thought the children of to-day were young savages, and quoted Emerson
and Longfellow as authorities on the question. The Rev. S. G. Smith
takes up the point and expresses himself as follows: "When it is
stated that the child has many points of contact with primitive man,
it is not meant that the child is a savage, but that 'in its
immaturity' we can learn much respecting it from the study of child
races. The child has neither the virtues nor the vices of the savage,
but he has many of the mental characteristics. Embryology does not
teach that in prenatal life the child passes into the form of every
animal in a menagerie, but that its life passes through the stages
that mark the great subdivisions of all life. Nor do the comparisons
of the child with primitive man imply that he must pass through all
the activities of savage races, but that the development of his
faculties, the tendencies of his desires, the state of his ignorance,
all illustrate the history of the development of the race. Primitive
man may be understood by a study of the child, and, conversely, the
child may be illustrated by primitive man."
It must be borne in mind that the child is in constant contact with
its elders, that it is subject to the restraints which they impose,
and that it lives more or less in an atmosphere of affection and care.
There is excellent reason, therefore, why it should not resemble
primitive man in all points. Its daily life is really controlled and
guided by a higher power. In some cases there is even too much control
and guidance; the conditions are made too artificial, and the
development of the child's nature suffers in consequence. When the age
of manhood or womanhood is reached there is something lacking,
precisely because enough scope was not left for the primitive or, as
we may very properly say, the "savage" instincts of childhood. A great
French writer, Joseph de Maistre, quotes a popular saying to the
effect that "spoilt children always turn out well."[49] So far as
there is any truth in it, the explanation is that the spoilt child is
one that has a great deal of its own way, and is left to work out the
savage and so acquire a sounder foundation for its future life. In how
many of us are there not chained savages that might have made their
escape in earlier years if they had only been allowed! It is a
dangerous thing to try to make little angels of children.
The Rev. Mr. Smith is quite right in what he says as to the
predominance of the imagination in children, this being another strong
point of resemblance to primitive man. "The beginnings of history and
institutions," he truly says, "can only be understood when we remember
that races in their early development do not have clearly marked
activities of imagination, reason, and memory. They mix the three. So
legends, myths, and heroics are earnest efforts of the undeveloped
mind to make objective the truth, and are not clumsy lies at all."
Applying this to the child, the conclusion is that "he must be fed
through his imagination or he will not grow." A very imaginative child
is apt to be accused of falsehood, when he simply fails to distinguish
between things imagined and things remembered. Neither the child nor
the savage can concentrate his attention, and to force either to do so
beyond a certain very limited measure is simply to injure and deform
such natural powers as he possesses. The amount of mischief which a
dogmatic and over-logical teacher, wholly ignorant of the psychology
of the child, can do is beyond all calculation.
It is needless, however, to pursue the parallel further, though the
Rev. Mr. Smith very properly carries it into the region of morals,
where it is no less close than in that of intellectual action. There
is another interesting aspect of evolution which the reverend
gentleman glances at, and that is its bearing on general courses of
study. History and literature, considered as departments of research,
it has largely transformed by substituting for conventional categories
and abstract notions the perception of a genetic process pervading all
the works of the human spirit and linking them into an organic unity.
In conclusion, we may observe that, if Superintendent A. J. Smith had
not made some foolish remarks in a rather ostentatious manner, it is
probable the Rev. S. G. Smith would not have delivered the excellent
discourse on which we have commented, and which we feel sure will far
outweigh in general effect the performance which called it forth. The
conclusions to be drawn are the pleasing ones that good may sometimes
come out of evil, and that a free pulpit is admirably adapted to guard
the interests of liberty and common sense.
FOOTNOTE:
[49] "Les enfans gâtés réussissent toujours."
_LESSONS OF ANTHROPOLOGY._
The address delivered at the last meeting of the British Association
by the president of the Anthropological Section contained nothing that
was strikingly novel--it is not every year that striking novelties can
be announced--but it dealt in an interesting manner with several
phases of a most important subject. The speaker, Professor Brabrook,
took the position that the order of the universe is expressed in
continuity, not cataclysm, and that this principle will be found
illustrated in every branch of anthropological research, in direct
proportion to the completeness of the data obtained. He admitted the
vastness of the gap which still separates the remains of palaeolithic
from those of neolithic man, but expressed the belief that further
explorations would bring intermediate relics to light. To quote the
speaker's words: "The evidence we want relates to events which took
place at so great a distance of time that we may well wait patiently
for it, assured that somewhere or other these missing links must have
existed, and probably are still to be found."
Reference was made to the labors which are now being usefully expended
in gathering what is called the folklore of various communities, and
to the result which continually appears with fuller evidence, namely,
that the tendency of mankind everywhere is to develop like fancies and
ideas at a like stage of intellectual development. Full of detail as
these stories are, they are found to contain but a few primitive
ideas; and it seems not improbable that to a large extent they are
essentially Nature myths. Mr. Brabrook happily quotes Lord Bacon's
description of such narratives as "sacred relics, gentle whispers and
the breath of better times." The "better times" are a part of the
general system of myth; but who will deny that there is a special
charm in these early documents of our race? "Let one of our literary
exquisites," said a thoughtful French writer, "try to write a fairy
tale which shall neither be a pretentious apologue nor a tiresome and
transparent allegory, and he will soon feel that mere cleverness does
not suffice to create these marvelous narratives, and will conceive a
just admiration for those who constructed them, that is to say,
everybody and nobody."
The progress of anthropology, according to the president of the
section, seems more and more to confirm the theory adopted by Fustel
de Coulanges in France and Spencer in England, that the belief in
spirits lies at the basis of all religious systems. We thus see, to
use his words, "that the group of theories and practices which
constitute the great province of man's emotions and mental operations
expressed in the term 'religion' has passed through the same stages,
and produced itself in the same way, from rude early beginnings, as
every other mental exertion." Mr. Brabrook mentions a work lately
published by "a distinguished missionary of the Evangelical Society of
Paris," the Rev. Mr. Coillard, in which an account is given of the
superstitions prevailing among the natives of the upper Zambesi. The
reverend gentleman tells of their belief in witchcraft, and gives a
story of a young woman who was condemned to penal labor on suspicion
of having bewitched, or tried to bewitch, another young woman who had
taken her husband from her; the evidence of the crime being found in a
dead mouse, which had been discovered in the second young woman's
chamber. The missionary says: "She was made a convict. A few years ago
she would have been burned alive. Ah, my friends, paganism is an
odious and a cruel thing!" On which the president of the
Anthropological Section observes: "Ah, Mr. Coillard, is it many years
ago that she would have been burned alive or drowned in Christian
England or Christian America? Surely the odiousness and the cruelty
are not special to paganism any more than to Christianity." This is
much to the point. If witchcraft is no longer a recognized crime in
England or America, it is not because these lands are Christian, but
because science is mixed with their Christianity. Even missionaries
ought to know this.
A great many different sciences are grouped under the name
"anthropology," but they all have their rallying point in man, whose
nature and history they seek to explore. The fact is that all sciences
should have the same rallying point; and we trust that the greater
interest which is visibly being taken year by year in anthropological
studies will tend to humanize in a beneficial degree the whole circle
of human knowledge.
_AN EXAMPLE OF SOCIAL DECADENCE._
That the incessant encroachment of the Government upon the rights of
the individual will produce social decadence is a truth that most
Americans have yet to learn. With a light heart they are constantly
approving scheme after scheme for social regeneration that involves
some restriction upon freedom, or an increase of taxation, or both. It
is not perhaps singular that the history of similar schemes in the
past should possess no lesson for them. When President Eliot, of
Harvard University, says that the experience of the Italian republics
has no value for us, it is not to be expected that persons with less
capacity to interpret the records of other times should attach little
or no importance to them. But they ought not most certainly to
maintain the same attitude toward the experience of the nations of
to-day. It is to blind their eyes to what does not rest upon hearsay
or upon dubious documents--to what admits of the clearest
demonstration at the hands of living witnesses.
For this reason we urge upon all students of social science the study
of the condition of the inhabitants of the black-earth region of
Russia. In that field, one of the largest and most fruitful in the
world for investigation, they will find the amplest evidence of the
frightful havoc wrought by the abridgment of individual freedom and
the seizure of private property in the form of taxes for public
purposes. If it be said that Russia is an autocracy, and can not
therefore furnish instruction to a democracy like the United States,
the answer is easy, if not obvious. Despotism, like gravitation, is
the same all over the world. It makes no difference in the long run
whether a law abridging freedom issues from the palace of a czar or
from the legislative halls of a popular assembly. The individual
objecting to it is obliged to regulate his life, not in accordance
with his own notions, but in accordance with the notions of some one
else. It makes no difference, either, whether taxation is imposed by
an imperial edict or by a legislative vote. The citizens that have to
bear it against their will contribute money for purposes that some one
else only approves of. The only difference between Russia and the
United States is that this kind of despotism has been carried to much
greater lengths in one country than in the other. If, therefore, we
can find out what the effect has been in Russia, we will be able to
predict what the effect will be in the United States.
As every person familiar with Russia knows, the black-earth region is
one of the richest and most productive in the world. It ought to be
inhabited by one of the wealthiest and happiest of peoples. Yet such
is not the case. According to Count Tolstoi, who contributed recently
a letter to the London Times on the subject, the inhabitants are among
the poorest and most miserable in the world. They are in a state of
chronic starvation. They are obliged to content themselves with nearly
a third less food than is sufficient to maintain normal health. The
physical effect of this insufficiency of food is a decrease in
vitality, a diminished stature, and a check to the growth of
population. It is proved, first, by the failure of the peasants of the
region to meet the requirements for military service, and, second, by
the statistics of population, which show that the increase of births
over deaths has fallen from the maximum reached twenty years ago to
zero.
But the mental effects of the destitution wrought by the robberies of
the Government are more distressing even than the physical. It gives
birth to a stolidity and despair that tend to paralyze all effort
toward betterment. The people subjected to it come to feel that there
is no use of making any struggle beyond the maintenance of mere
existence. Whatever they get in excess of this requirement will be
taken from them. "A peasant," says Tolstoi, illustrating this fact,
"feels that his position as an agriculturalist is bad, but he believes
that it can not be improved; and, consequently, adapting himself to
this hopeless position, he no longer fights against it, but lives and
acts only in so far as he is stirred by the instinct of
self-preservation. Moreover, the very wretchedness of his condition
increases still more his depression of spirit. The lower the economic
condition of a population sinks, like a weight on a lever, the more
difficult it becomes to raise it again; the peasants feel this, and,
as it were, throw away the helve after the hatchet. 'Why should we
trouble ourselves?' they say. 'We sha'n't get fat. If we can only keep
alive.'"
The fruits of this mental state are as palpable as those of the lack
of food. They are to be found in every direction. In manners, habits,
and customs the peasants are hopelessly conservative. They belong, not
to the nineteenth century, but to the ninth. Instead of adopting new
and improved methods of agriculture, they cling to those of the
subjects of Rurik. They use the old plow, distribute tillage in three
crops, and divide their fields into long, narrow strips. So slowly do
they toil with primitive implements and debilitated animals, and so
indifferent are they to what they are doing, that it takes them a day
to do the work that a well-fed and alert peasant would do in half the
time. A more deplorable sign of demoralization is the prevalence of
family discord and loss of interest in a higher life. The aggressions
of the state have stimulated selfishness, bad temper, and incipient
rebellion. The children disobey their parents, the younger brothers
reject the primacy of the older, and money earned elsewhere is kept
from the family treasury. With the decadence of family life there is a
decadence of religious life. Although the peasants are nominally
orthodox, they care nothing for religion. Even the clergy confirm the
fact that they are becoming more and more indifferent to the church.
What they seek is not to penetrate the mysteries of life, but to
obliterate consciousness of them. "Under these circumstances," says
Tolstoi, alluding to the economic and mental decadence, "the craving
for forgetfulness is natural, and accordingly spirits and tobacco are
being consumed in ever greater and greater quantities." He adds that
"even quite young boys drink and smoke."
Since the loss of freedom due to the seizure of property is the same
in the last analysis as that due to an abridgment of the right to
think and act, the evils of ecclesiastical and bureaucratic despotism
do not differ from those of excessive taxation. Nevertheless, they
receive separate attention at the hands of Tolstoi. As a proof of the
blight of a church that the peasants have no part in directing, he
points to the profound and beneficent change wrought the moment they
fall in with a sect of dissenters. "Their spirits at once rise," he
says, "and at the same time the foundation of their material
prosperity is laid." A blight of the same kind can be traced to the
attempt of the state to play the paternal rôle. "Nominally," says
Tolstoi again, "there exist for the peasants special laws with regard
to the possession and division of land, to inheritance, and to all the
duties connected with it, but in reality there is a kind of
hodge-podge of regulations, explanation, customary laws, decrees of
courts of cassation, and so on, which naturally makes the peasants
feel their absolute dependence on the will of innumerable officials."
Knowing that they are powerless to resist the Government, which is
constantly flogging them for disobedience or stupidity, they comply as
best they can with the thousand rules and regulations made for them.
Seldom do they think of acting upon their own responsibility. Thus
they lose the power of private initiative. What the impoverishment of
taxation has not done to ruin them is left to ecclesiastical and
bureaucratic despotism to complete.
It is curious to note that Tolstoi's remedy for these evils is the one
that Herbert Spencer himself might have suggested. With one stroke he
dismisses the prescriptions that the social reformer in the United
States as well as in Russia attaches so much importance to. It is not,
in his opinion, "the ministry of agriculture, with all its
contrivances," that will reclaim the peasants, nor is it "exhibitions
nor schools for rural economy," nor that "unfailing" remedy "for all
evils," i. e., parish schools. The thing they need is freedom. "It is
necessary," says Tolstoi, "to give them religious liberty, to subject
them to common instead of special laws--the will of rural officials;
it is necessary to give them liberty of education, liberty of reading,
liberty of moving about, and, above all, to remove the power to
torture brutally by flogging grown-up people simply because they
belong to the peasant class." But to give them such freedom means to
deliver them not only from excessive taxation but from vexatious rules
and regulations. It is to apply to them the same remedy that must be
applied in the United States to save the American people, now so
heavily taxed and so oppressed by countless laws, from the same social
decadence that afflicts Russia.
_THE ADVANCE OF SCIENCE._
The paper by Sir J. Norman Lockyer, which we publish in this number,
recounts in an interesting manner the steps by which science gained a
place for itself in the educational systems of the world. To us, in
the latter years of the nineteenth century, it is apt to seem strange
that the recognition of science as an essential element in all
education should have come so late in the world's history; but
reflection shows that it could not well have been otherwise. To view
and examine any subject scientifically involves not only a deliberate
and prolonged mental effort, but the holding in check of some of the
most active propensities of the human mind, such as imagination and
what Bagehot has called "the emotion of belief." In a certain sense
imagination is the precursor of science; but, in the early stages of
human development the precursor is mistaken for the true teacher. The
lesson that there is no royal road to truth, nothing but a highway on
which much wearisome plodding must be done, is one which human nature
in general does not take to kindly. Even in the present day how many
there are who chafe at the restraints which Science imposes on belief,
whose disposition is to break her bonds asunder and have none of her
reproof! When we think, indeed, of what the intellectual condition of
the world is to-day, with the wonders which science has wrought
raising their testimony on every hand, it is hardly surprising that, a
couple of centuries ago, it was difficult to get any systematic
provision made for the teaching of science. However, that battle has
been fought and won, and Science has long since definitely entered on
her career of beneficent conquest. Systems founded on imagination, or
on merely abstract reasoning, come and go, wax and wane; but the
empire of science once set up can never be subverted. We must hope
that some day it will rule in the realm of morals as now it does in
that of material things. Not till then will its perfect work be done.
Scientific Literature.
SPECIAL BOOKS.
Prof. _Dean C. Worcester_, of the University of Michigan, spent eleven
months, beginning in September, 1887, in the Philippine Islands in
connection with the second scientific expedition of Dr. J. B. Steere.
He went there again, with an expedition of which he was chief, in
July, 1890, and spent two years and eight months. His object in both
expeditions was the study of birds. In the course of them he visited
twenty-two islands. The first expedition was unofficial and was
regarded suspiciously by the authorities of the islands; the second
was armed with a special permission from the Spanish Minister of the
Colonies and enjoyed every advantage. The scientific results of both
were reported to the United States National Museum, and the
collections were deposited in its cabinet. The general results, the
story of the adventures of the members of the expedition, with their
observations on the geographical features of the islands, their
peoples, and the social conditions prevailing there, are given in a
popular style in the volume before us.[50] The account is preceded by
a short sketch of the history of the islands, as an aid to the better
comprehension of their present condition and the reasons for it. Of
the natives, who form the bulk of the 8,000,000 of the population of
the islands, there are more than eighty distinct tribes, each with its
own peculiarities, scattered over hundreds of islands. The more
important of these islands may be reached by lines of mail and
merchant steamers, which afford tolerably frequent communication
between them. The difficulties begin when one attempts to make his way
into the interior of the large and less explored of them, or desires
to reach ports at which vessels do not call. Roads are scarce and to a
large extent impracticable, while enemies and dangers are many, and
such boats as one can find off the regular routes are precarious. As
to climate, if one is well, able to live as he pleases, and most
scrupulously observes all sanitary rules, keeping the most healthy
spots, he may escape disease; but if he steps a little aside at any
point he is in danger. It is very doubtful, in the author's judgment,
if many successive generations of European or American children could
be reared there. Evidences of the action of earthquakes and volcanoes
are seen almost everywhere, and elevation and subsidence are going on
with great rapidity at the present time. Hence it is not safe to build
substantial houses in Manila. The soil is astonishingly fertile:
fruits--in about fifty varieties--are the chief luxury; the value of
the forest products is enormous; the mineral wealth is great, but has
never been developed. Professor Worcester speaks of five millions of
civilized natives of the Philippines. They belong for the most part to
three tribes: the Tagalogs, Ilocanos, and Visayans. Without drawing
fine distinctions between these, they are regarded as showing
sufficient homogeneity to be treated as a class. They have their bad
qualities and their good, which are reviewed with an apparent
inclination on the part of the author to like them, and the conclusion
that, having learned something of their power, they will now be likely
to take a hand in shaping their own future. There are also barbarians,
of whom the Moros of Sulu are a type--bloodthirsty and faithless, and
as careless of human life as one would be of weeds in a field; and
savages of all degrees, down to the lowest. The government is various,
according to the particular governor and the people he has to deal
with, but all of the Spanish or Moro type. The clergy are the dominant
class; and of these the friars or brethren of the orders exert an evil
influence, while the Jesuits are believed to be a distinctive power
for good. Much can be said in favor of the insurgents' demand that the
friars be expelled from the colony and their places taken by secular
clergymen not belonging to any order. Professor Worcester has made a
very lively, interesting, and instructive book, which is marred,
however, by occasional evidences that, while begun with serious
purpose, it has been hurried to meet a passing demand, and by the too
frequent intrusion of trivialities and slang.
* * * * *
We are often surprised at manifestations of individuality and
intelligence in domestic animals and pets, and are accustomed to
attribute extraordinary qualities to the beasts in which we perceive
them; as if each animal could not have its peculiar traits and talents
as well as each man. We hardly imagine that there are any special
differences in wild animals, and that idiosyncrasies of character and
diversities of gifts and powers of adaptation may run through the
whole animal kingdom. A closer acquaintance with Nature would teach us
better. Certain stories and myths of savages show that they had a fair
appreciation of the individual peculiarities of animals, and farmers'
boys, who live in natural surroundings, know something of these
things. The subject is now presented to us in a fairly clear light by
Mr. _Ernest Seton Thompson_, as illustrated in the careers of a number
of typical specimens of animals and birds whose characters and acts,
as they came under his observation, are related in _Wild Animals I
have Known_.[51] The stories, he avers, are true; the animals in the
book are all real characters. They lived the lives he has depicted,
and showed the stamp of heroism and personality more strongly by far
than it has been in the power of his pen to tell. Among them was Lobo,
the wolf, of the Corrumpaw Cattle Range, New Mexico, the leader of a
gang, who exhibited some of the qualities of an able general, and was
a beast of influence, powerful, vigilant, crafty, and the terror of
the settlement; and who was only trapped when grief for the loss of a
female companion deprived him of the wit by which he had escaped all
previous efforts to take him. Silverspot, the crow, was the leader of
a large band. He had his calls, which the other crows obeyed, and was
always to be seen at the head of his company in their incursions into
the fields, and guiding them in their journeys northward and
southward. Raggylug, the rabbit, is acknowledged to be a composite,
embodying in one the ways of several rabbits, their nesting habits and
ways of concealment and devices to baffle pursuers. Bingo, the dog,
had associates as well as enemies among the wolves, and different
characters by day and by night. In a similar way to these, the traits
of the fox, the pacing mustang, other dogs than Bingo, and the
partridge are portrayed. In all the stories the real personality of
the individual and his view of life are the author's theme, rather
than the ways of the race in general, as viewed by a casual and
hostile human eye. The moral is suggested by the lives and emphasized
by Mr. Thompson, that "we and the beasts are kin. Man has nothing that
the animals have not at least a vestige of; the animals have nothing
that man does not at least in some degree share. Since, then, the
animals are creatures with wants and feelings differing only in degree
from our own, they surely have their rights." It would be hard to
speak too well of the graphic expressiveness of the illustrations.
FOOTNOTES:
[50] The Philippine Islands and their People. A Record of Personal
Observation and Experiences, with a Short Summary of the More
Important Facts in the History of the Archipelago. By Dean C.
Worcester. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 529. Price, $4.
[51] Wild Animals I have Known, and 200 Drawings. By Ernest Seton
Thompson. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 358. Price, $2.
GENERAL NOTICES.
"An unscientific account of a scientific expedition" is what Mrs.
Mabel Loomis Todd happily styles the story of the Amherst Eclipse
Expedition, told in _Corona_ and _Coronet_[52]--"Corona" being what
the expedition went to see, and "Coronet" the vessel that took it to
the observing station. Professor Todd was the astronomer of the party,
and Mrs. Todd, who has published a work on astronomy, was his
companion. She believes that certain aspects of the trip, covering as
it did more than ten thousand miles of sailing for the party, and at
least forty-five thousand miles of deep-sea voyaging for the Coronet,
were worthy of narration. The astronomical purposes of the expedition,
the objects it sought to obtain, the scientific bearings of the
observations, and the methods, are intelligibly set forth in the
introduction to the book. The rest is devoted mostly to narrative, the
social aspects of the voyage, and the incidents. A short sojourn was
made at the Sandwich Islands, where the more interesting objects were
visited. Mrs. Todd was with Kate Field when she died there, and gives
an account of her last hours. A voyage of four weeks carried the party
to Yokohama, whence some of the members went to the capital and other
interesting points in Japan, while the rest were preparing the
observing station at Esashi, eleven hundred miles north of
Yokohama--"a village on the shores of the Sea of Okotsk, among the
hairy Ainu," in a region so remote that the native steamers had only
recently begun to go there at all. Besides the account of the
observations, descriptions are given of such Japanese experiences as
life in Kioto, cormorant fishing, yachting in the Inland Sea, the
tidal wave, and observations among the Ainu, with a visit on the way
home to an Arizona copper mine.
The late Prof. _James D. Dana_ had begun a revision of his _Text-Book
of Geology_ a short time before his death. Prof. William North Rice
was requested by his family to complete the revision, and the result
is the present volume.[53] It was intended in the original plan of
revision to preserve as far as possible the distinctive
characteristics of the book. It was to be brought down to date as
regards its facts, but was still to express the well-known opinions of
its author, with the general plan of arrangement kept unchanged. It
soon became evident, however, that more and greater changes than had
been contemplated would be required. The zoölogical and botanical
classifications would have to be modified; the theory of evolution
must have more recognition than it had received, especially as
Professor Dana himself had adopted some of its features before his
death; and the treatment of metamorphism was believed to require
considerable modification. In the present edition the bearing of
various events in geological history upon the theory of evolution is
pointed out in the appropriate places, and the general bearing of
paleontology upon evolution is discussed in the concluding chapter.
All these changes seem to be in the line of continuing the usefulness
of Professor Dana's most excellent and standard work, and of keeping
his name before students as that of "one of the greatest of geologists
and one of the noblest of men."
A true son of Nature is Mr. _F. Schuyler Mathews_, and he shows
himself at his best in his _Familiar Life in Field and Forest_.[54]
"There are few things," he says, "more gratifying to the lover of
Nature than these momentary glimpses of wild life which he obtains
while passing through the field or forest. Wild animals do not confine
themselves exclusively to the wilderness; quite frequently they
venture upon the highway, and we are apt to regard the meeting of one
of them there as a rare and fortunate occurrence. The daisy and the
wild rose appear in their accustomed places on the return of summer,
and the song sparrow sings in the same tree he frequented the year
before; but the wood-chuck, the raccoon, and the deer are not so often
found exactly where we think they belong. To seek an interview with
such folk is like taking a chance in a lottery; there are numerous
blanks and but few prizes. But because wild life is not in constant
evidence, like the wild flower, is no proof that it is uncommon. To
those who keep in touch with Nature, it becomes a very familiar thing,
and to live a while where the wild creatures make their homes is to
cross their paths continually." Mr. Mathews is in touch with Nature.
He does not exactly know where to find the wild and shy, for they do
not come at call, but he can put himself where he will meet them if
they come around--and "one can never tell at what moment some
surprising demonstration of wild life will occur at one's very
doorstep." In this book Mr. Mathews records some of his meetings, at
home and in his daily walks, offering as his excuse for the record,
that he has lived long enough among wild animals to "respect their
rights of life, and speak a good word for them when occasion offers."
The _Short Manual of Analytical Chemistry_,[55] prepared by Mr. John
Muter, follows the course of instruction given in the South London
School of Pharmacy. Encouraged by the continued favor which the book
has received in Great Britain, the author offers a special edition of
it to American students, a concise and low-priced manual, designed to
introduce them to the chief developments of analytical chemistry from
the simplest operations upward. It includes many organic questions
generally overlooked in initiatory books. By working through it the
author claims the student may expect to become familiar with a great
variety of processes, and to be in a position to use with satisfaction
the more exhaustive treatises dealing with any special branch he may
desire to follow. In preparing it for American students, the
directions, wherever the British methods differ from the American,
have been modified to agree with the latter. The processes given
include the qualitative analysis, all the general operations and those
relating to detection of the metals, of acid radicals and their
separation, of unknown salts, of alkaloids and certain organic bodies
used in medicine--with a general sketch of toxicological procedure;
and in quantitative analysis, directions on weighing, measuring, and
specific gravity; gravimetric analysis of metals and acids, ultimate
organic analysis, special processes for the analysis of air, water,
and food; analysis of drugs, urine, and calculi; and analysis of
gases, polarization, spectrum analysis, etc.
The pure geometry of position is mainly distinguished, according to
Professor Reye's definition,[56] from the geometry of ancient times
and from analytical geometry, in that it makes no use of the idea of
measurement. Nothing is said in it "about the bisection of segments of
straight lines, about right angles and perpendiculars, about ratios
and proportions, about the computation of areas, and just as little
about trigonometric ratios and the algebraic equations of curved
lines, since all these subjects of the older geometry assume
measurement.... We shall be concerned as little with isosceles and
equilateral triangles as with right-angled triangles; the rectangle,
the regular polygon, and the circle are likewise excluded from our
investigations, except in the case of these applications to metric
geometry. We shall treat of the center, the axes, and the foci of
so-called curves of the second order, or conic sections, only as
incidental to the general theory; but, on the other hand, shall become
acquainted with many properties of these curves, more general and more
important than those to which most text-books upon analytical geometry
are restricted." Of all the other branches of geometry, the
descriptive is the most helpful in facilitating the study of the
geometry of position; and perspective or central projection plays an
important part in it. It stands in a certain antithetical relation to
analytical geometry on account of its method, which is synthetic, and
whence it is sometimes known as synthetic geometry. Since metric
relations are not considered in it, its theorems and problems are very
general and comprehensive. As presented in von Standt's complete work,
it is regarded by the author as an excellent aid to the exercise and
development of the imagination; and the important graphical methods
with which Professor Culmann has enriched the science of engineering
in his work on graphical statistics, being based for the most part
upon it, a knowledge of it has become important for students of that
science. In the present work, the outgrowth of his lectures, Professor
Reye has attempted to supply the want of a text-book which shall offer
to the student the necessary material in a concise form.
Prof. _Cyrus Thomas_ brings the qualification which a lifetime devoted
to study of the subject develops, to the preparation of an
_Introduction to the Study of North American Archæology_.[57] He is
known to all students in this branch as a careful, judicious
investigator whose work in the field has been supplemented by valuable
contributions to its literature. In this volume he presents a brief
summary of the progress that has been made in the investigation of
American antiquities--which has been recently great indeed, and well
calls for a new synopsis. His chief object has been to present the
data and arrange them so as to afford the student some means of
bringing his facts and materials into harmony, and of utilizing them.
He presents the theories that have been advanced, and mentions
opposing views; regarding it, he says, as important to the progress of
the student to know which of the questions that arise have been
answered, and which hypotheses have been eliminated from the class of
possibilities. The materials for the study and the methods are first
explained. The relics of ancient men and the mounds are then described
as under three divisions--the Arctic, the Atlantic, and the Pacific.
Local as well as regional characteristics and differences are pointed
out; as in the mounds as a whole, the special class of animal mounds,
the pueblos, the cliff dwellings, and the Mexican and Central American
monuments, the peculiar features of each are pointed out, and their
territorial limits are defined. All these various kinds of works are
ascribed to substantially the same people, who are supposed to have
come down from somewhere in the north or northwest (the extreme
northwest Pacific coast), although the different immigrations may
perhaps have arrived by various routes. The people were the present
Indians or their ancestors; the time of the immigration was not
extremely remote; and the "mound-building habit" is shown to have
persisted and been practiced till since the advent of the Europeans.
In entitling his book _The Art of Taxidermy_,[58] the chief of the
Department of Taxidermy in the American Museum of Natural History
evidently intends to use the word art in the high sense of a fine art;
for he speaks of the enormous strides toward perfection which it has
made from the former "trade of most inartistically upholstering a
skin"--stuffing it, we used to call it--and of its study having been
taken up of late years by a number of men of genius and education. It
is largely owing to the exertions of these men that the taxidermy of
the present day is so far in advance of what it was a decade since.
The proverb says that art is long, and accordingly Mr. Rowley takes
for the motto of his book a sentence from Thoreau, that "into a
perfect work time does not enter." To the possible objection that some
of his methods seem to involve considerable time and expense, the
author replies in substance that if the work is not worth this, it is
hardly worth while to take it up at all. If it is a proper work, and
one has the proper degree of energy and enthusiasm, let him give the
specimen all the time it demands. In preparing his treatise, the
author has aimed to eliminate all extraneous matter, and to give
mainly the results of his own experience, coupled with that of other
taxidermists with whom he has come in contact. He begins with
instructions about collecting tools and materials, and casting, and
treats further of the preparation of birds, of mammals, and of fish,
reptiles, and crustaceans; the cleansing and mounting of skeletons,
and the reproduction of foliage for groups. The appendix contains
addresses of reliable firms from whom tools and materials used in
taxidermy may be purchased.
The preparation of this book on _The Storage Battery_ was suggested to
Mr. Treadwell[59] by his finding a lack in working on these machines
of any compact data concerning their construction, and the paucity of
reliable discharge curves; and he concluded that a book containing
such data and curves, with rules for the handling and maintenance of
cells, would be valuable to all interested in storage batteries as
well as to the student and manufacturer. Among the points specially
mentioned by the author are the lists of American and foreign patents
given as footnotes for the various types, not complete but noticing
the principal patents for each cell; the chapter on the chemistry of
secondary batteries, which gives the latest and most generally
accepted theory concerning the chemical reactions taking place in an
accumulator, and which has been approved by Dr. Sewal Matheson; and,
in the appendix, tables of data comprising figures of all the
batteries, methods for the measurement of the E. M. F. and internal
resistance of a storage battery; and data from which the theoretical
and practical capacity of an accumulator may be determined.
The _Natural Advanced Geography_[60] is a successful application of
modern methods to the teaching of this science, and presents it with
the interest undiminished which really appertains to it. While in the
elementary book of this, the "natural" series, the pupil starts from
his own home and is introduced to the study of man in relation to his
environment, in the present work the fact is developed that
environment itself is the chief factor in the various activities and
economies of man. One of the salient features of the presentation of
the subject, marked throughout the work, and one that commands high
praise, is the arrangement of the facts into such order that their
correlation may be perceived and the unity of Nature recognized. The
isolated, barren, curt, unrelated statements that made the study of
many of the old geographies hard and tedious are conspicuously absent,
and the subject, studied in orderly sequence, "unfolds itself
naturally and logically, each lesson preparing the way for those which
follow." The first part of the work is devoted to a study of the world
as a whole. The second part, comprising about three fourths of the
volume, is an application of these laws to the various countries of
the globe, beginning with the United States. In the United States, for
instance, a general description of the whole is given, which presents
a real, comprehensive mental picture of the country; and the process
is repeated, in measure according to the conditions, for the several
States, so that the pupil is taught what are the factors that give the
characteristics and local features to each. A like method is pursued,
on a more general scale, with other countries. The colored maps are
drawn on a system of uniform scales, with reliefs plainly shown
according to the accepted conventions; graphic charts or sketch maps
showing the distribution of products and resources are employed; and
pedagogical exercises and aids are afforded abundantly.
A text-book on the _Differential and Integral Calculus_,[61] for
students who have a working knowledge of elementary geometry, algebra,
trigonometry, and analytical geometry, by Prof. _P. A. Lambert_, has
the threefold object of inspiring confidence, by a logical
presentation of principles, in the methods of infinitesimal analysis;
of aiding, through numerous problems, in acquiring facility in the use
of these methods; and, by applications to problems in physics,
engineering, and other branches of mathematics, to show the practical
value of the calculus. By a division of the matter according to
classes of functions, it is made possible to introduce these
applications from the start, and thereby to arouse the interest of the
student. By simultaneous treatment of differentiation and integration
and the use of trigonometric substitution to simplify integration it
is sought to economize the time and effort of the student.
_The Birds of Indiana_, by _Amos W. Butler_, lately published as part
of Willis S. Blatchley's Twenty-second Annual Report on the Geology
and Natural Resources of Indiana, is just at hand. It is one of the
most accurate, detailed, and satisfactory local catalogues yet
published. Three hundred and twenty-one species of birds have been
taken in Indiana, and of each of these is given a detailed
description, with a general account of its habits, song, migration,
and nesting. In the case of the more rare species, full records of the
dates and places of capture of the known specimens are appended.
Analytical keys to genera and species are also given, so that every
facility is furnished for the identification of species. This book is
a model of its kind, and is a worthy fruit of Mr. Butler's twenty
years of devoted study of the birds of his native State.
_Robert H. Whitten_, in his monograph on _Public Administration in
Massachusetts_--the relation of central to local activity--pursues a
parallel course with that taken by Mr. John A. Fairlie in a similar
essay on the Centralization of Administration in New York State, of
this same series of Columbia University studies in History, Economics,
and Public Law. Having found the systems and tendencies of
administration in the early settlement of Massachusetts all for
expansion and decentralization, Mr. Whitten now perceives the course
altogether changed, and centralization more and more the rule. The
change corresponds with changes in the conditions of life, and keeps
track with them step by step. Of great dynamic forces which have been
set to work and are bringing about a complete reconstruction of the
social structure, improvements in transportation and communication
were the most vital--first, turnpikes, then the steamboat, railroad,
and telegraph; then the horse railway, cheap postage, the telephone,
the electric railway, and the bicycle. The tendency at first was to
bring about a concentration which was attended by the congestion of
population in cities and the depopulation of the rural towns. "The
electric railway, the telephone, and the bicycle came in to counteract
these evils; while their tendency is strongly toward the
centralization of bureaus, it is also toward the diffusion of
habitations. These great socializing forces, going hand in hand with
the development of the factory system and improvement of machinery,
make possible a vastly higher organization of society than was
possible under a stagecoach _régime_."
The first volume of the Final Report of the State Geologist of New
Jersey, on Topography, Magnetism, and Climate, was published in 1888.
Other volumes embracing other topics have been published since, and in
the meantime the supply of the first volume has been exhausted, while
the demand has continued. It has been therefore necessary either to
reprint the volume or to publish a new work which should include the
important statistical matter of it. Accordingly, we have now _The
Physical Geography of New Jersey_, prepared by Prof. _Rollin D.
Salisbury_, with an appendix embodying "Data pertaining to the
Physical Geology of the State," by Mr. C. C. Vermeule, who was
formerly in charge of the topographic survey, and is author of the
volume on water supply. The two parts of the volume treat of the
topography of New Jersey as it now is, and the geological history of
the topography. The report is accompanied by a relief map of the
State, prepared by Mr. Vermeule on the basis of the topographical
survey, and presenting, therefore, an accurate picture of the relief.
It shows the great features of the State, its ranges of mountains,
hills, tablelands, plains, marsh lands, streams, and water areas in
their proper relations to one another; and it is contemplated to put
it in every schoolhouse in the State as an aid in the study of
geography.
M. _Imbert de Saint-Amand's_ series of books about the Second French
Empire furnish very interesting reading, are, so far as our
recollection of events goes, historically accurate, and fill a gap
which the literary world always has to suffer concerning any period
too recently passed for a competent judicial mind to have appeared to
tell its story. The second of the series--_Napoleon III and his
Court_--takes Louis Napoleon at the height of his success and
happiness, just after he had married the beautiful Eugénie, of whom
the world has nothing harsh to say, and carries him through the
period of his wonderful popularity and brilliant accomplishments to
the close of the Crimean War and the birth of the prince whose fate
was so unhappy. It deals, in a pleasant manner, and all favorable to
Napoleon, but not adulatory, with affairs social, political, and
military, in which it is hard to say whether the tact or the good
fortune of the subject of the history shone most brilliantly. We are
told how Eugénie won the French nation; of Napoleon's good will,
especially manifested toward all that could contribute to his
exaltation; of his dealings with the sovereigns around him, gradually
winning their recognition, including that of Nicholas of Russia; of
the darkening of the clouds of war, the Crimean campaigns; of the
interchanges of courtesies, gradually rising into close, firm
friendship, with the British court; and of the birth of the Prince
Imperial. Think what we may of the character of the reign of Louis
Napoleon and of its influence, it marked an epoch in nearly every line
of development of the world's history, and was as distinctly separated
from what came before it and from what followed it as if a broad line
were drawn around it; and it left some important results that are not
likely to be soon effaced. M. de Saint-Amand writes from personal
knowledge, having witnessed or participated in much of what he
describes, and has in Elizabeth Gilbert Martin a fully competent and
acceptable translator. (Published by Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 407.
Price, $1.50.)
The paper of the late Dr. _Theodor Eimer_ on _Orthogenesis and the
Impotence of Natural Selection in Species Formation_ is published by
the Open Court Company, Chicago, as No. 29 of their Religion of
Science Library. Pp. 56. Price, 25 cents.
The second volume of Uncle Robert's Geography, of Appletons'
Home-Reading Series--_On a Farm_--Mr. _Francis W. Parker_, the editor,
and _Nellie Lathrop Helm_, emphasizes the importance of parents and
teachers, giving full and complete recognition of the immense
educational value of spontaneous activities as displayed in motive and
interest; a recognition which "should be followed by active
encouragement and direction of the child's play, work, and
observations." The story deals entirely with the interests and life of
children in the environment of the country. A little girl is in her
playhouse in a Virginia fence corner, with her doll and mimic
housekeeping. Her shy, retiring companions are the birds who peep into
the playhouse, and, after she has gone away, come into it and pick up
the crumbs she has left. This leads to talks about different birds and
their nest building. A St. Bernard dog is introduced and furnishes the
opportunity for bringing in stories of the Alps, their glaciers and
snows, and the Hospice of St. Bernard, and then about other dogs. Susy
makes a garden in the woods, and the wild flowers become the subjects
of her spontaneous study. So with the rabbits, bread making and the
grain that furnishes the material for the bread, and other incidents;
with more birds' nests; the nature of bulbs, squirrels, etc.; and
finally Uncle Robert sets the child to finding out how the animals in
the woods spend the winter, and whether they are doing anything now in
preparation for it. (New York: D. Appleton and Company. Price, 42
cents.)
The _Thirty-fifth Annual Report_ of the Secretary of the State Board
of Agriculture of Michigan includes the Ninth Annual Report of the
Agricultural College Experiment Station, and is largely taken up with
the work of the latter institution, reviewing the records of the
college departments and presenting the reports and bulletins of the
station. The record of meteorological observations, the Proceedings of
the Farmers' Institutes, the Transactions of the Association of
Breeders of Improved Live Stock, and the Transactions of the State
Agricultural Society are also incorporated in the volume. An
interesting feature of the publication is the insertion of a portrait
and biographical notice of one of the pioneer farmers of the State,
Enos Goodrich, who was also prominent in public life.
The translation by _Eleanor Marx Aveling_ of Lissagaray's _History of
the Commune of 1871_ was made many years ago at the request of the
author from a contemplated second edition which the French Government
would not allow published. The work having been revised and corrected
by the translator's father, and for other reasons, no changes have
been made to adapt it to the time of its issue from the press. The
translator claims that Lissagaray's work is the only reliable and
accurate history that has yet been written of the Commune. He has not
attempted, she says, to hide the errors of his party, or to gloss over
the fatal weakness of the revolution. Of course, a very different view
of the movement is given from that presented in the French accounts,
as well as that generally held by English and Americans; but the
communists have a right to be represented and heard, and it is well
that they have so competent a spokesman. (Published by the
International Publishing Company, 23 Duane Street, New York.)
FOOTNOTES:
[52] Corona and Coronet: Being the Narrative of the Amherst Eclipse
Expedition to Japan, in Mr. James's Schooner Yacht Coronet, to observe
the Sun's Total Obscuration, August 9, 1896. By Mabel Loomis Todd.
Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Pp. 383. Price, $2.50.
[53] Revised Text-Book of Geology. By James D. Dana, LL. D. Fifth
edition, revised and enlarged. Edited by William North Rice. American
Book Company. Pp. 482.
[54] Familiar Life in Field and Forest. The Animals, Birds, Frogs, and
Salamanders. By F. Schuyler Mathews. New York: D. Appleton and
Company. Pp. 284. Price, $1.75.
[55] A Short Manual of Analytical Chemistry, Qualitative and
Quantitative, Inorganic and Organic. By John Muter. Second American
edition. Illustrated. Adapted from the eighth British edition.
Philadelphia: E. Blakiston, Son & Co. Pp. 228. Price, $1.25.
[56] Lectures on the Geometry of Position. By Theodor R. Reye.
Translated and edited by Thomas F. Halgate. New York: The Macmillan
Company. Pp. 148. Price, $2.25.
[57] Introduction to the Study of North American Archæology. By Prof.
Cyrus Thomas. Cincinnati: The Robert Clarke Company. Pp. 391.
[58] The Art of Taxidermy. By John Rowley. New York: D. Appleton and
Company. Pp. 244. Price, $2.
[59] The Storage Battery. A Practical Treatise on the Construction,
Theory, and Use of Secondary Batteries. By Augustus Treadwell. New
York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 257. Price, $1.75.
[60] Natural Advanced Geography. By Jacques W. Redway and Russell
Hinman. American Book Company. Pp. 100.
[61] Differential and Integral Calculus. For Technical Schools and
Colleges. By R. A. Lambert. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 245.
Price, $1.50.
PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.
Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Proceedings, 1898. Part
II. April to September. Pp. 224, with plates.
Agricultural Experiment Stations. Bulletins and Reports. Cornell
University: No. 152. Studies in Milk Secretion. By H. H. Wing and
Leroy Anderson. Pp. 56; No. 153. Impressions of our Fruit-growing
Industries. By L. H. Bailey. Pp. 18.--Iowa State College of
Agriculture, etc.: No. 10. Anatomical and Histological Studies. Pp.
25, with plates.--New Hampshire College: No. 53. The Farm Water
Supply. By Fred W. Morse. Pp. 12; The Winter Food of the Chickadee. By
Clarence M. Weed. Pp. 16.--United States Department of Agriculture:
The Chinch Bug. By F. M. Webster. Pp. 82; Some Books on Agriculture
and Sciences related to Agriculture published in 1896-'98. Pp. 45;
Forage Plants and Forage Resources of the Gulf States. By S. M. Tracy.
Pp. 55; List of Publications relating to Forestry in the Department
Library. Pp. 93.--University of Illinois: The Chemistry of the Corn
Kernel. By C. G. Hopkins. Pp. 52.
Austin, Herbert Ernest. Observation Blanks for Beginners in
Mineralogy. Boston: D. C. Heath & Co. Pp. 80. 50 cents.
Bailey, M. A. American Elementary Arithmetic. American Book Company.
Pp. 205.
Beddard, Frank E. The Structure and Classification of Birds. New York
and London: Longmans, Green & Co. Pp. 548.
Barnes's National Vertical Penmanship. Nos. A and B, and 1 to 6.
American Book Company.
Bookseller, The, Newsdealer, and Stationer. Semimonthly. New York: 156
Fifth Avenue. Pp. 38. $1 a year.
Boutwell, Hon. George S. Problems raised by the War. Boston: Woman's
Educational and Industrial Union. Pp. 20.
Bulletins, Reports, Proceedings, etc. Michigan Monthly Bulletin of
Vital Statistics, October, 1898. Pp. 16.--National Pure Food and Drug
Congress: Journal of Proceedings, March, 1898. Pp. 53.--United States
Department of Labor: Bulletin No. 18, September, 1898. Pp. 124; No.
19, November, 1898. Pp. 42.
Card, Fred W. Bush Fruits. A Horticultural Monograph of Raspberries,
Blackberries, etc. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 537. $1.50.
Carpenter, Frank G. Carpenter's Geographical Reader, North America.
American Book Company. Pp. 352.
Clark, William J. Commercial Cuba, with an Introduction by E. Sherman
Gould. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 514 with maps. $4.
Collyer, Rev. Robert. The Parable of "Lot's Wife." Pp. 13. 5 cents.
Earl, Alfred. The Living Organism. An Introduction to the Principles
of Biology. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 271. $1.75.
Fisher, George E., and Schwatt, Isaac J. Text-Book of Algebra, with
Exercises. Philadelphia: Fisher & Schwatt. Pp. 683. $1.75.
Hall, Fred S. Sympathetic Strikes and Sympathetic Lockouts. Columbia
University. (Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law) Pp. 118.
Hill, Frank A. How far the Public High School is a Just Charge on the
Public Treasury. Pp. 36.
Holman, Silas W. Matter, Energy, Force, and Work. New York: The
Macmillan Company. Pp. 257. $2.
Hornbrook, A. R. Primary Arithmetic. American Book Company. Pp. 253.
Geikie, James. Rock Sculpture, or the Origin of Land Forms. New York:
G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 397. $2.
Hurley, Denis M. The Metric System of Weights and Measures in the
Congress of the United States. Pp. 4.
Inglis, George E., Editor. The Anglo-Saxon Monthly. Chicago: The
Anglo-Saxon Publishing Company. 10 cents. $1 a year.
Jackman, Wilbur S. Nature Study for Grammar Grades. Danville, Ill.:
Illinois Printing Company. Pp. 407.
Jenkins, C. Francis. Animated Pictures. Washington, D. C.: C. Francis
Jenkins. Pp. 118.
Jordan, David Starr. Footnotes to Evolution. New York: D. Appleton and
Company. Pp. 392. $1.50.
Lassalle, Ferdinand. The Workingman's Programme. New York:
International Publishing Company. Pp. 62.
Macmillan Company, The. Catalogue of Books, Section VII, Scientific,
pp. 24; and Section IX, Classical and Educational, pp. 26.
Makato, Tentearo. Japanese Notions of European Political Economy.
Philadelphia. Pp. 42.
Marshall, Henry Rutgers. Instinct and Reason. New York: The Macmillan
Company. Pp. 575. $3.50.
Merriman, Mansfield. Elements of Sanitary Engineering. New York: John
Wiley & Sons. Pp. 216.
Metric System, The, of Weights and Measures. Hartford, Conn.: Hartford
Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company. Pp. 196.
Millennial Dawn, Vol. IV. The Day Of Vengeance. Allegheny, Pa.: The
Tower Publishing Company. Pp. 668. 35 cents.
Park. J. G. Language Lessons. American Book Company. Pp. 144.
Payne, Frank Owen. Geographical Nature Studies. American Book Company.
Pp. 144. 25 cents.
Peabody, J. E. Laboratory Exercises in Anatomy and Physiology. New
York: Henry Holt & Co. Pp. 79. 60 cents.
Preece, W. H. President's Address before the Institution of Civil
Engineers, November 1, 1898. Pp. 29.
Reprints. Coulter, John M. The Origin of Gymnosperms and the Seed
Habit. (Botanical Society of America.) Pp. 16.--Brinton, Daniel G. The
Peoples of the Philippines. Pp. 16.--Eckles, C. H. The Relation of
Certain Bacteria to the Production of Butter. Pp. 10.--Graziani, Dr.
Giovanni. A Sensitive Test for Kryofine in the Urine, etc. Pp.
81.--Keen, W. W. The Advantages of a Permanent Abdominal Anus, etc.,
in Operations for Cancer of the Rectum. Pp. 11; The Advantages of the
Trendelenburg Posture during Operations involving the Cavities of the
Mouth, etc. Pp. 7; Removal of Angioma of the Liver, etc. Pp.
12.--Keen, W. W., and Spiller, W. G. On Resection of the Gasserian
Ganglion, etc. Pp. 38, with plates.--Ladd, E. F. The Proteids of
Cream. Pp. 3; and Humates and Soil Fertility. Pp. 7.--Lloyd, James
Hendrie. A Study of the Lesions in a Case of Trauma of the Cervical
Region of the Spinal Cord simulating Syringomyelia. Pp. 18.--Sherwood,
W. L. The Frogs and Toads found in the Vicinity of New York City. Pp.
27.--Tromsdorff, Richard. Observations at the Clinic of Professor
Ebstein on Kryofine. Pp. 12.
Ripley, Frederic H., and Tappen, Thomas. A Short Course in Music. Book
Two. American Book Company. Pp. 175.
Russell, Israel C. Rivers of North America. New York: G. P. Putnam's
Sons. Pp. 327. $2.
Sands, Maniel. Opposites in Religion. New York: Peter Eckler. (Library
of Liberal Classics, Monthly). Pp. 138. 50 cents.
Savage, M. J. The Word of God: The Evils of Religious and Political
Pessimism. Boston: George H. Ellis. Pp. 18 each.
Schimmel & Co., Leipzig and New York Semiannual Report (fine
chemicals), October, 1898. Pp. 64, with map.
Seymour, A. T., Editor. The Science Teacher. Monthly. Orange, N. J.
Pp. 12. 15 cents. $1 a year.
Smithsonian Institution and United States National Museum. Annual
Report of the Board of Regents to July, 1896. Pp. 727.--Bean, Barton
A. Notes on a Collection of Fishes from Mexico, etc. Pp. 4.--Cook, O.
F. American Oniscoid Diploda, etc. Pp. 16, with plates.--Coquillet, D.
W. Report on Japanese Diptera. Pp. 36.--Enkle, Arthur. Topaz Crystals
in the Mineral Collection of the Museum. Pp. 10.--Gilbert, C. N.
Caulolepis Longidens, Gill, on the Coast of California. P. 1.--Jordan,
David Starr, and Evermann, Barton D. The Fishes of North and Middle
America. Part III. Pp. 978.--Marlatt, C. L. Japanese Hymenoptera of
the Family Teuthredonidæ. Pp. 16.--Mearns, Edgar A. Mammals of the
Catskill Mountains. Pp. 20.--Moore, J. Percy. The Leeches of the
United States National Museum. Pp. 20, with plates.--Oberholser, Harry
C. Revision of the Wrens of the Genus Thryomanes, Sclater. Pp.
30.--Rathbun, Mary J. Brachyura Collected by the Steamer Albatross
between Norfolk, Va., and San Francisco. Pp. 50, with plate; and
Fresh-Water Crabs of America. Pp. 30.--Smith, Hugh M. Amphiura, or the
Congo Snake, in Virginia. P. 1.--Smith, John B., and Dyar, Harrison G.
The Lepidopterous Family Noctuidæ of Boreal North America, etc. Pp.
194, with plates.--Starks, Edwin C. Osteology and Relationships of the
Family Zeidæ. Pp. 8, with plates.--Stearns, Robert E. C. A Species of
Actæon from the Quaternary Deposits of Spanish Height, San Diego, Cal.
Pp. 3; and Cythera (Tivala) Crassateloides, Conrad, etc. Pp. 8, with
plate.--Stejneger, Leonhard. A New Species of Spiny-tailed Iguana from
California. P. 1.--Test, Frederick C. Variations of the Tree Frog,
Hyla Regilla. Pp. 16, with plate.--True, Frederick W. Nomenclature of
the Whalebone Whales, etc. Pp. 20.--Walcott, C. D. Cambrian
Brachiopoda, Obolus, and Singulella, etc. Pp. 36.
Sue, Eugène. The Silver Cross, or the Carpenter of Nazareth. New York:
International Publishing Company. Pp. 151.
Sullivan, Christine Gordon. Elements of Perspective. American Book
Company. Pp. 96.
Terrestrial Magnetism. An International Quarterly Journal. L. A. Bauer
and Thomas French, Jr., Editors. University of Cincinnati. Pp. 46,
with plates. 60 cents. $2 a year.
Vines, Sidney H. An Elementary Text-Book of Botany. New York: The
Macmillan Company. Pp. 611. $2.25.
Volta Bureau, Washington, Publications of Catalogue of Books by Prof.
A. Melville Bell.--Some Differences in the Education of the Deaf and
the Hearing. Pp. 15.--International Reports of Schools for the Deaf.
Pp. 27.--Bell, A. G. Methods of Instructing the Deaf in the United
States. Pp. 4.--Gordon, J. C. The Difference between the Two Systems
of Teaching Deaf-mutes the English Language. Pp. 4.--Gilman, Arthur.
Miss Helen Adams Keller's First Year of College Preparatory Work. Pp.
14.--Bell, Mabel Gardiner. The Story of the Rise of the Oral Method in
America as told in the Writings of the Hon. Gardiner G. Hubbard. Pp.
50.
Voorhees, Edward B. Fertilizers. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp.
335. $1.
Wadden Turner, Susan, Prof. William, and Jane. In Memoriam. By
Caroline H. Dall. Pp. 19.
Weysse, Arthur W. An Epitome of Human Histology. New York: Longmans,
Green & Co. Pp. 90. $1.50.
Fragments of Science.
=The Huxley Lecture.=--The Charing Cross Medical School in London,
which had the good fortune some fifty-three years ago to number Huxley
among its pupils, had largely through this fact the honor of being
addressed on October 3d by Professor Virchow, the greatest living
pathologist and one of the greatest of living scientists. There was a
peculiar fitness in his delivering the Huxley lecture, for, while
Professor Virchow's work has been chiefly that of the specialist, his
co-operation with laborers in other fields, his continued efforts to
popularize science, and the prominent position which he has occupied
for the last thirty years in public life, have given him a standing in
Germany somewhat akin to that of Huxley in England. His career is a
striking illustration, as was also Huxley's, of the happy results to
humanity from a combination in one man of great ability as an
investigator with a facility for generalization and the practical
application of scientific truths to the concrete problems of science
and civilization. Professor Virchow is described as modest and
unassuming, and very much of a contrast in all ways to the ordinary
German professor. His address was on The Recent Advances in Science,
and their Bearing on Medicine and Surgery. It was inevitable that he
should refer to Huxley, of whom he was in some sense a pupil. In
speaking of the rapid growth of the latter during his four years on
the Beagle, he said: "How this was possible any one will readily
understand who knows from his own experience how great is the value of
personal observation.... Freed from the formalism of the schools,
thrown upon his own intellect, compelled to test each single object as
regards properties and history, we soon forget the dogmas of the
prevailing system, and become first a skeptic and then an
investigator." This paragraph is especially worthy of notice, because
it points out one of the invariable characteristics of the great man.
In whatever field his greatness may lie, he will be found to have
broken away from the formalism and conservatism of the schools, and
that his great work is based on personal observation and research.
This was notably the case with Professor Virchow's establishment of
the cellular pathology, as well as of Huxley's researches in
comparative anatomy. Our present school system is lamentably weak in
this particular, tending to stifle rather than stimulate originality
and self-dependence. Professor Virchow's address was, of course,
interesting and instructive, but, as he said, much too short for
anything like an adequate treatment of the subject. The chief interest
of the occasion lay in its associations. An address by Rudolph
Virchow, at a meeting presided over by Lord Lister on an occasion
commemorating Professor Huxley, left only one thing to be desired--the
presence of the latter. For a biologist, or in fact a modern scientist
of any description, one can not imagine a more delightful occasion.
=The Climate of Cuba.=--Systematic records of weather appear to be
wanting in Cuba. The meteorological observations kept up for several
years by Andre Poey are not accessible, no need of their being
published having been found. The chief source of information on the
subject is the observations which have been kept up at Belen College,
Havana, since 1859. From these and a few scattered observations of
brief periods at other towns, and by comparison with notes taken at
other West Indian stations, W. F. B. Phillips, of the United States
Department of Agriculture, has attempted to describe the climate of
Cuba. The average annual temperature of the past ten years at Havana
was 77° F., and the difference between the highest and the lowest
yearly means was only 1.1° F. The warmest month is July, with an
average temperature of 82.7° F., and the coldest is January, with an
average temperature of 70.3° F. The highest temperature recorded was
100.6° F., in July, 1891, and the lowest 49.6°. Brief intermittent
records at Matanzas, more than sixty years old, give a mean annual
temperature of about 78°, with 93° as the highest and 51° as the
lowest. At Santiago the annual mean appears to be about 80°, and the
difference between the warmest and coldest months about 6° F. Records
of temperature in the interior, such as they are, give annual means of
from 73.6° to 75°, apparently showing lower temperatures than on the
coast. The average daily range of temperature is about 10°, the
highest occurring between noon and two o'clock P. M., while sudden
variations in the temperature of the day are not unknown. The average
yearly rainfall at Havana is about fifty-two inches. The season of
heavy rainfall begins in the latter part of May and first of June, and
lasts till October, and during this period about sixty-three per cent
of the year's rain is precipitated. Rain occurs on about one day in
three, in heavy downpours of short duration. Notwithstanding the
frequency of rain during the summer months, these do not present the
greatest number of cloudy days. The days on which rain does not fall
are usually perfectly cloudless, and, in general, no clouds are seen
in summer except while the showers are falling; while in other months
cloudy days sometimes occur without rain. The average velocity of the
wind is about 7.5 miles an hour, with variations, according to the
season, from 8.5 miles in winter to 6.5 miles in summer. The diurnal
variation in wind velocity is much more pronounced than the seasonal
variation.
=The New Planet D Q.=--The number of minor planets discovered during
the last few years, and their lack of practical importance in
astronomy, has tended to distract astronomers' attention from the
search for them, as unprofitable, and the announcement of a new one
attracts little attention, as a rule. The planet D Q, however,
discovered by Herr Witt, of the Urania Observatory, of Berlin, on
August 13th last, has aroused from the first special attention through
its remarkable behavior. The orbit is a very unusual one. Mars has
always been considered our nearest neighbor, although it was known
that some of the minor planets were slightly nearer to the sun when at
perihelion than Mars is when at aphelion. But the mean distances of
the latter were in all cases much greater than that of Mars; while
that found for the new planet is only 1.46 as compared with 1.52 for
Mars, and, as the eccentricity amounts to 0.23, the perihelion
distance is only 1.13, and the least distance from the earth's orbit
only 0.15 as compared with 0.27 for Venus in transit, and 0.38 for
Mars in perihelion. The planet will thus be far closer to us than any
other member of the solar system, and will afford a most excellent
means of determining the sun's parallax. Its diameter is thought to be
about seventeen miles.
=Extra-Organic Factors of Evolution.=--Observing that our civilization
has made advances or "strides" in recent years out of all proportion
to any improvements that have taken place in our organic faculties,
Arthur Allin has insisted, in Science, on the importance of
extra-organic factors in human development. Our sense and motor
organs, he says, are essentially instruments and tools, and so is the
brain; and most if not all of the three hundred or more mechanical
movements known in the arts are found exemplified in the human body.
Our sense organs are thus indefinitely multiplied and extended by such
extra-organic sense organs as the microscope, telescope, resonator,
telephone, telegraph, thermometer, etc. Our motor organs are
multiplied by such agencies as steam and electrical machines, etc., in
the same manner. "The printing press is an extra-organic memory far
more lasting and durable than the plastic but fickle brain. Fire
provides man with a second digestive apparatus by means of which hard
and stringy roots and other materials for food are rendered digestible
and poisonous roots and herbs innocuous. Tools, traps, weapons, etc.,
are but extensions of bodily contrivances. Clothing, unlike the fur or
layer of blubber of the lower animals, becomes a part of the organism
at will. One finds himself more or less independent of seasons,
climates, and geographical restrictions." By organic heredity or the
transmission of the congenital characteristics of the parents to the
children, working alone, all progress depends upon the transmission of
variations occurring within the organism. "Moreover, these
advantageous organic variations die with the individual, and must be
born again, so to speak, with each new individual." This requires
time, and progress depending on it would be indefinitely protracted.
On the other hand, by means of social heredity, each new member of the
race has handed to him at birth the accumulated organic advantageous
variations of sense and motor organs, and the extra-organic
adaptations that have multiplied so indefinitely in the age of
civilized man. "The vast importance of accumulation of capital is
obvious."
=Fossils as criterions of Geological Ages.=--Prof. O. C. Marsh said in
a paper on The Comparative Value of Different Kinds of Fossils in
determining Geological Age, which was read at the meeting of the
British Association, that the value of all fossils as evidence of
geological age depends mainly upon their degree of specialization. In
invertebrates, for example, a lingula from the Cambrian has reached a
definite point of development from some earlier ancestor. One from the
Silurian or Devonian, or even a later formation, shows, however,
little advance. Even recent forms of the same or an allied genus have
no distinctive characters sufficiently important to mark geological
horizons. With ammonites the case is entirely different. From the
earliest appearance of the family the members were constantly
changing. The trilobites show a group of invertebrates ever subject to
modification, from the earliest known forms in the Cambrian to the
last survivors in the Permian. They are thus especially fitted to aid
the geologist, as each has distinctive features and an abiding place
of its own in geological time. In the fresh-water forms of
mollusca--the Unios, for example--there is little evidence of change
from the palæozoic forms to those still living, and we can therefore
expect little assistance from them in noticing the succeeding periods
during their life history. The same law as to specialization holds
good among the fossil vertebrates.
=Pedigree Photographs.=--Sir Francis Galton unfolded before the
British Association a plan for the systematic collection of
photographs of pedigree stock, particularly of cattle breeds, and of
more information about them than is now obtainable. He believes that a
system of this sort would greatly facilitate the study of heredity.
The author had previously shown how the general knowledge that
offspring can inherit peculiarities from their ancestry as well as
from their parents was superseded by a general law the nature of which
was first suggested to him by theoretical considerations, and this
ancestral law proves the importance of a much more comprehensive
system of records than now exists. The breeder should be able to
compare the records of all the near ancestry of the animals he
proposes to mate in respect to the qualities in which he is
interested. No present source for such information is comparable with
what the system proposed would furnish. A habitual study of the form
of each pure-bred animal in connection with the portraits of all its
nearest ancestry would test current opinions and decide between
conflicting ones, and could not fail to suggest new ideas. Likenesses
would be traced to prepotent ancestors, and the amount of their
several prepotencies would be defined; forms and features that
supplement one another or "nick in," and others that clash or combine
awkwardly, would be observed and recorded; and conclusions based on
incomplete and inaccurate memories of ancestry would give way to
others founded on more exact data. The value of the ancestral law
would be adequately tested, and it would be possible to amend it when
required.
=English Names for Plants.=--In the Proceedings of the Torrey
Botanical Club, published in its journal for July, Dr. V. Havard
suggested some principles which it would be well to follow in applying
English names to plants, predicating that an authorized vernacular
binomial should be assigned to each plant, so that ambiguity and
confusion may be avoided. In the absence of suitable English names
already recognized, it seems best to adopt the Latin genus name, if
short and easy, like _Cicuta_, _Parnassia_, _Hibiscus_, or a close
translation thereof, when possible, like astragal, chenopody,
cardamin, while the specific English name should be an equivalent of
the Latin one or a descriptive adjective. In case of all English
binomials clearly applying to well-known individual species and no
others, all substantives are capitalized without a hyphen, as in Witch
Hazel, May Apple, and Dutchman's Pipe. In all genera in which two or
more species must be designated, the genus name is compounded into one
word without a hyphen, as Peppergrass, Sweetbrier, Goldenrod,
Hedgenettle, etc.; except in long names, where the eye requires the
hyphen, as Prairie-clover, Forget-me-not. Genus names in the
possessive case (St. John's-wort) are written with the hyphen,
followed by a lower-case initial. Plants commemorating individual men
(Douglas Spruce, Coulter Pine) are written without the mark of the
possessive. In specific names participial endings are suppressed, the
participle becoming a substantive, which is added as a suffix without
the hyphen; thus Heartleaved Willow is changed to Heartleaf Willow. In
the discussion that followed this paper, President Addison Brown and
Dr. T. F. Allen deprecated the manufacture of book names. The
secretary defended the use of vernacular names, saying that they
deserved more attention, and adding that in their absence the generic
name should be used unchanged. Many Latin names, as _Portulacca_, win
their way without change as soon as they are fairly made familiar.
"Coined names seldom live. A name to be successful must be a growth,
as language is."
=Cooking Schools in Philadelphia.=--The establishment of schools in
Philadelphia for the teaching of cookery is mentioned, in the Annual
Report of the Superintendent of Public Schools in that city, among the
results of the general movement for manual training, as a means of
mental development and practical knowledge. The teaching was
introduced experimentally into the Girls' Normal School in 1887, and
was in the following year made a regular branch of the course. It was
later extended to other schools. There are now eight school kitchens
under the department of Public Instruction, situated in different
parts of the city. The question of the proper place for cookery in the
school course has been solved, for Philadelphia, by putting it in the
sixth school year, when the pupils are firmly established in the work
of the grammar grades, and their attention has not yet been directed
to preparation for admission to the High School. The course provides
between twenty-five and thirty lessons, and is completed in a single
year. It includes instruction in the care of the kitchen, and of the
stove or range, general lessons in the classification and nutritive
values of foods, the cooking of vegetables, breakfast cereals, bread,
eggs, soups, meats, simple cakes and desserts, lessons in invalid
cookery, and in table setting and serving. Special attention is given
to the preparation of nutritious and savory dishes from inexpensive
materials. About two thousand pupils, or less than one half of the
number of girls of the sixth year now in the schools, are accommodated
in the eight cookery schools. The pupils manifest an intelligent
interest in the instruction, and spend the half day per week in the
school kitchen without any appreciable loss in the other branches of
study. "It comes as a period of relaxation."
=A Trait Common to us All.=--The doctrine of the tendency of mankind
to develop the like fancies and ideas at the like stage of
intellectual infancy was mentioned by Mr. E. W. Brabrook in his
presidential address before the Anthropological Section of the British
Association, as a generalization for which we are fast accumulating
material in folklore. It is akin to the generalization that individual
savage races present in their intellectual development a marked
analogy to the condition of the earlier races of mankind. The fancies
and ideas of the child resemble closely the fancies and ideas of the
savage and the fancies and ideas of primitive man. Mrs. Gomme has
found that a great number of children's games consist of dramatic
representations of marriage by capture and marriage by purchase, and
that the idea of exogamy is distinctly embodied in them. There can be
little doubt that they go back to a high antiquity, and there is much
probability that they are founded upon customs actually existing, or
just passing away, at the time they were first played. Upon the same
principle, if we view children's stories in their wealth of details,
we shall deem it impossible that they could have been disseminated
over the world otherwise than by actual contact of the several peoples
with each other. But if we view them in their simplicity of idea, we
shall be more apt to think that the mind of man naturally produces the
same result under like circumstances, and that it is not necessary to
postulate any communication between the peoples to account for their
identity. It does not surprise us that the same complicated physical
operations should be performed by far-distant peoples without any
communication with each other; why should it be surprising that mental
operations, not nearly so complex, should be produced in the same
order by different peoples without any such communication?
=The Toes in Walking.=--An instructive discussion of the walking value
of the lesser toes by Dr. Heather Bigg is given in a recent copy of
the London Lancet. Dr. Bigg believes that the lesser toes of the human
foot are of little importance in walking--the great toe constituting
the important tread of the foot--and in proof of this he gives an
account of a patient, all of whose lesser toes it was found necessary
to amputate because of persistent contraction of the tendons. On
November 10, 1894, the toes were removed, especial care being taken to
keep the resulting scars well up on the dorsal aspect of the foot, so
as to be well away from the subsequent tread. In three weeks the
patient could stand on her feet, and, after her return home, sent the
following record of her progress toward complete recovery: December
30, 1894: "I am able to walk perfectly on my feet with little or no
pain, but can not yet wear either slippers or boots, as they are still
tender."--January 15, 1895: "I managed to get on my slippers yesterday
and wore them with ease for more than six hours."--January 28th: "I
put on my boots to-day for the first time. It still pains me slightly
to walk; otherwise my feet are going on all right."--February 18th: "I
ought to say that the steel plates only half way answer
splendidly."--March 24th: "You will be glad to hear that I can walk
splendidly now, just like a proper human being; it is just eighteen
weeks next Tuesday since the operation."--May 5th: "I have decided to
come to town next Monday week to let you see how well I can
walk."--June 17th: "I played two sets of tennis on Saturday, and my
feet were none the worse afterward."--July 24th: "You will be
surprised to hear that the big toes have lengthened half an inch since
the operation, and I have had all my boots lengthened and the toe line
made straighter."--August 30th: "I know that you will be interested to
hear that I have just accepted an invitation to a dance on September
13th. Whether I shall dance comfortably or not is another
thing."--September 14th: "I went to the dance on Tuesday evening and
thoroughly enjoyed myself after not dancing for so long. My feet were
on their best behavior, and did not pain me once during the evening. I
never realized before that I had no toes until I began to dance; then
it seemed so odd only to have one toe, but I suffered no inconvenience
whatever from the loss of them."--December 5th: "I get on so well with
my bicycle." Only two disadvantages showed themselves as the result of
the operation and these were temporary. One was that the great toes
tended to pervert themselves toward the middle line of the feet, a
thing which was readily remedied by the use of single-toed stockings,
and by packing the space in the boot left vacant by the missing toes
with cotton wool; the other was a loss of local sense on the outer
sides of the feet, which went to show that the lesser toes were missed
rather as tactile organs than anything else. This failure of feeling
righted itself in time, presumably by a vicarious and intenser sense
being acquired by the skin of the outer side of the foot. In all other
respects the loss of the toes discovered no inconvenience.
=Animals' Bites.=--That there is something more serious than the mere
wound in the bite even of a healthy animal is attested by Mr. Pagin
Thornton, from a chapter in his own experience, and in the testimony
of a number of his own friends who have suffered for weeks together
from having been bitten. "And what is more surprising to me," he says,
"is that some of us may have hands crippled for some time from bites
of a man's teeth." Dog bites are always dangerous, but largely from
the size of the wound which a dog biting in earnest will inflict. With
men they usually fail to do their best. Animals recover from wounds
more easily than men do; but Lord Ebrington says that deer bitten by
the dogs in Exmoor hardly ever recover. Much of the poisoning caused
by bites is supposed to be due to the state of the animal's teeth; and
in this way the bite of a herbivorous animal, whose teeth are usually
soiled, may cause worse after effects than that of a carnivore, whose
wet mouth and wet tongue keep its teeth fairly clean. A similar
difference is observable in the effects of being clawed and bitten by
carnivora. Wounds made by the claws of leopards are poisonous, while
those caused by the teeth are rarely septic. The force with which a
bite in earnest is inflicted is an important element in its dangerous
character. "It seems," says the London Spectator, "as if for the
moment the animal threw all its force into the combination of muscular
action which we call a 'bite.' In most cases the mere shock of impact,
as the beast hurls itself on its enemy, is entirely demoralizing, or
inflicts physical injury. A muzzled mastiff will hurl a man to the
ground in the effort to fasten its teeth in his throat or shoulder.
Then, the driving and crushing force of the jaw muscles is
astonishing." Sir Samuel Baker noticed that the tiger usually seized
an Indian native by the shoulder, and with one jaw on one side and the
other on the other bit clean through chest and back. In nearly all
cases the bite penetrates to the lungs. This kind of wound is
characteristic of the bites of the _felidæ_. Hardly any bird recovers
from a cat's bite, for the same reason. The canine teeth are almost
instantly driven through the lung under the wing.
=Doulton Potteries.=--Sir Henry Doulton, head of the Lambeth
potteries, whose death, November 17, 1897, has been recorded in the
Monthly, preferred devoting himself to the factory to engaging in the
study of a learned profession for which his parents intended him, and
himself did much of the largest work produced there in the earlier
days of his connection with it. As the factory was enlarged, it made
drain pipes, vessels and appliances of stoneware for chemical and
other similar uses, for which it gained prizes at the great
exhibitions of 1851 and 1862; ale pots and mugs of traditional and
original designs; terra-cotta vases; and first exhibited articles of
higher artistic merit at Paris in 1867. It showed a magnificent
collection at Vienna in 1873, and its exhibit at Philadelphia in 1876
was one of the marked features of our Centennial. The chief styles of
its work are the ornamental salt-glazed stoneware known as Doulton
ware, and the underglaze-painted earthenware called "Lambeth faïence."
Sir George Birdwood ascribes as the great merit of Sir Henry's life
work his adherence to the two principles of making, as far as
possible, every piece intended for decoration on the wheel, and of
giving the utmost scope to the designer into whose hands the piece
fell for ornamentation. Four hundred designers, mostly women, and some
of them real artists, are engaged at the potteries, and each has her
way and signs her name to her work; so that "Sir Henry Doulton
succeeded in creating a most prolific school, or rather several
schools, of English pottery, the influence of which has been felt in
the revival of the ceramic arts in all the countries of the Old
World"--where they had been demoralized by the use of machinery; and
through the influence of his example, working since 1871, the United
Kingdom now produces "the most artistic commercial pottery of any
country in the world."
MINOR PARAGRAPHS.
A little over a year ago Professor Fraser published the results of
some researches which showed that the bile of several animals
possessed antidotal properties against serpents' venom, and against
the toxines of such diseases as diphtheria and tetanus, and that the
bile of venomous serpents is an antidote to their venom. The results
from an extension of these first experiments have been recently
published in the British Medical Journal. The most important
conclusions are as follows: The bile of venomous serpents is the most
powerful antidote to venom, and is closely followed in efficiency by
the bile of innocuous serpents. Regarding the antidotal power of bile
on the toxines of disease, Professor Fraser found that the bile of
venomous serpents had more antidotal power than that of the majority
of the other animals examined. It is curious that among the
non-venomous animals the rabbit's bile is the most powerful in
antidotal properties.
Three ways are mentioned by Prof. W. A. Herdman in which disease may
be communicated through oysters to the consumer; viz., by the presence
in the animal of inorganic, usually metallic, poison; or of organic
poison; or of a pathological organism or definite disease germ. From
experiments in the inoculation and disinfection of oysters, it was
found that all traces of these organisms could be removed by proper
washing. Good currents passing the beds are an important factor in
keeping the oyster healthy, and make it possible for the animal to
absorb large quantities of sewage and dispose of it. The effect of
this is to purify the water; but in the sifting process, while the
sewage is passing through, the animal retains disease germs, and may
pass them on to the consumer. Oysters should therefore be given an
opportunity to purify themselves, as is done in France, where they are
kept for a time in clean tanks before being sent to market. Oysters
may be effectively washed in fresh water. Sea water is unfavorable to
disease germs. Greenness in oysters is caused by food administered to
improve their quality; by the presence of copper; and in some American
oysters by an inflamed condition of the mantle. Green spots are also
produced by wandering cells getting under the epithelium. These cells
are loaded with granules which give a copper reaction.
The most interesting result of the massacre and sack of Benin, the
Saturday Review says, was the capture of a large series of brass
plaques, statuettes, box lids, pipes, etc., which have been brought to
England. The various articles are all castings, and their elaborate
ornamentation bespeaks for their makers great skill in metal working.
Most African tribes have smiths who hammer pieces of brass rod and
wire into simple ornaments; but these Benin brasses represent a stage
of metal working far more advanced than anything recorded for the
native races of Africa. Nothing like them is being made by any negro
race at present, and nothing is known that can be regarded as a
precursor of them. A statuette in the Liverpool Museum of a negro
holding a flint gun fixes their date as not earlier than about 1630.
In trying to account for them, many think they were due to the
influence of some comparatively advanced tribe that reached Benin from
the central Soudan and brought with them a knowledge of brass work
derived from early, possibly Egyptian, sources; and others attribute
the work to some prisoner or trader who lived at Benin in the
seventeenth century.
NOTES.
The Committee of the British Association on Meteorological Photography
reported that the result of their determinations of the heights of
clouds showed the existence of greater altitudes in hot weather under
thunderstorm conditions, when clouds may occur at five or six
different levels, extending as high as ninety thousand feet. A rise of
cloud takes place in hot weather, also during the morning and early
afternoons, while the lowest altitudes are found during cyclones.
M. Maige, by varying the condition of exposure of plants to light, and
keeping flowering branches in the dark, has succeeded in transforming
the latter into sterile creeping or climbing branches. Inversely, he
has been able, by means of the localized action of light, to transform
creeping or climbing into flowering branches. These results were
obtained at the vegetable biological laboratory of Fontainebleau.
F. L. Washburn, of the State University of Oregon, reports that the
condition of the Eastern oysters introduced to the Oregon coast waters
two years ago leaves nothing to be desired. The specimens have
withstood two winters successfully, and have made phenomenal growth,
"far exceeding what they would have made in the same time in their
native waters. Further, they spawned." The experiments in artificial
fertilization were not so successful. The spawn suffer from the
serious difficulties of sudden variations in the temperature and
salinity of the water resulting from the change of tide and strong
winds. It is hoped that better conditions may be found at Yaquina Bay.
The population of Egypt has been gradually increasing during the past
hundred years. It is stated to have been about two and a half million
in 1800, and is now estimated at nearly ten million. There are about
112,000 foreigners, of whom 38,000 are Greeks; the remainder being
chiefly Italians, 24,000; English, 19,000; French, 14,000; Austrians,
7,000; Russians, 3,000; and Persians and Germans, about 1,000 each.
Only about five per cent of the population can read and write, and
nearly two thirds are without any trade or profession.
Our record of deaths among men known in science includes the names of
Dr. Henriques de Castro, a Dutch archæologist of Portuguese descent,
member of many learned societies of the Netherlands; John Eliza de
Vry, of the Netherlands, one of the chief authorities on the chemistry
and pharmacy of the cinchona alkaloids, at The Hague, July 30th, in
the eighty-sixth year of his age; Dr. Eugenio Bettoni, director of the
Fisheries Station at Brescia, Italy, August 5th, aged fifty-three
years; Professor Arzruni, mineralogist in the Polytechnic Institute at
Aix; Heinrich Theodor Richter, director of the School of Mines at
Freiberg, Saxony; Dr. J. Crocq, professor of pathology in the
University of Brussels; Dr. C. G. Gibelli, professor of botany and
director of the Botanical Institute at Turin; Don Francisco Coello de
Portugal, president of the Geographical Society of Madrid, and author
of an atlas of Spain and its colonies; Dr. B. Kotula, author of
Researches on the Distribution of Plants; Surgeon Major J. E. T.
Aitchison, a distinguished botanist, particularly in the botany of
India, and author of numerous papers on the subject, September 30th,
in his sixty-fourth year; M. Thomas Frédéric Moreau, a French
archæologist, author of a collection of Gallic, Gallo-Roman, and
Merovingian antiquities, in his one hundred and first year; M. Gabriel
de Mortillet, the eminent French anthropologist, in Paris, November
4th, aged sixty-seven years; Sir George Smyth Baden Powell, political
economist, aged fifty-one years; Sir John Fowler, engineer in chief of
the Forth Bridge, aged eighty-one years; Dr. James I. Peck, assistant
professor of biology in Williams College, and assistant director of
the Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole; George Vestal, professor of
agriculture and horticulture at the New Mexico Agricultural College,
October 24th, aged forty-one years; Dr. W. Kochs, docent for
physiology at Bonn; M. J. V. Barbier, a distinguished French
geographer; M. N. J. Raffard, an eminent French mechanical engineer,
author of many valuable inventions; Latimer Clark, F. R. S., an
eminent English electrician, one of the founders and a past president
of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, whose name is associated
with the history of electric telegraphy and with many inventions, and
author of several books that are standard with the profession, at
Kensington, London, October 30th, in his seventy-sixth year; Count
Michele Stefano de Rossi, a distinguished Italian seismologist; M. de
Meritens, a French electrical engineer, inventor of one of the first
practical dynamos, and of other valuable electrical apparatus, aged
sixty-five years.
Transcriber's Notes:
Words surrounded by _ are italicized.
Words surrounded by = are bold.
Obvious printer's errors have been repaired, other inconsistent
spellings have been kept.
Illustrations were relocated to correspond to their references in the
text.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Appletons' Popular Science Monthly,
January 1899, by Various
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, JAN 1899 ***
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