The Project Gutenberg EBook of Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, Vol.
56, March 1900, by Various
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Title: Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 56, March 1900
Nov. 1899 to April, 1900
Author: Various
Editor: William Jay Youmans
Release Date: August 1, 2014 [EBook #46473]
Language: English
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Established by Edward L. Youmans
APPLETONS'
POPULAR SCIENCE
MONTHLY
EDITED BY
WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS
VOL. LVI
NOVEMBER, 1899, TO APRIL, 1900
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1900
COPYRIGHT, 1900,
BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
[Illustration: EDWARD ORTON.]
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE TRANSPLANTATION OF A RACE. 513
MODERN CITY ROADWAYS. 524
TYPICAL CRIMINALS. 539
A CENTURY OF GEOLOGY. 546
"SALAMANDERS" AND "SALAMANDER" CATS. 556
WHAT MAKES THE TROLLEY CAR GO. 564
A SURVIVAL OF MEDIÆVAL CREDULITY. 577
"RIBBON LIGHTNING." 587
CROSS-EDUCATION. 589
THE MORBID "SENSE OF INJURY." 596
EARLY EXPERIMENTS IN AIR FLIGHT. 603
SKETCH OF EDWARD ORTON. 607
EDITOR'S TABLE. 614
FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 618
MINOR PARAGRAPHS. 622
PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED. 624
APPLETONS'
POPULAR SCIENCE
MONTHLY.
MARCH, 1900.
THE TRANSPLANTATION OF A RACE.
BY N. S. SHALER,
DEAN OF THE SCIENTIFIC SCHOOL OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
The experiments which have been intentionally or accidentally made in
transplanting organic species from the countries in which they have
been developed to others of diverse soil, climate, and inhabitants
are always of much interest to the naturalist--each of them affords
indications of some value as to the relations of species to what
we term "environment." In almost all instances we find that the
transplanted forms undergo changes in consequence of the alteration
of their circumstances. It is true that certain of our domesticated
animals, such as the horse, the dog, and most cattle, follow men from
the Arctic to the Antarctic Circle, and that sundry insect pests
appear to demand nothing of Nature save the presence of man; yet, as
a whole, the creatures we have turned to use, both plant and animal
alike, have shown themselves incapable of accommodating themselves to
conditions of temperature differing much from those in which they were
developed. With hardly an exception, species or varieties which have
been developed in the tropics perish when called on to withstand the
winter of higher latitudes. Few, indeed, do well when taken to stations
where the heat or the humidity differs greatly from that to which they
are accustomed.
The intolerance of organisms to climatal changes is nowhere more
evident than in the varieties, or species, as we would term them, of
mankind. It is a well-attested fact that none of the tropical races
has ever of its own instance colonized in the temperate zones. It
is also clear that none of the northern peoples have ever become
fully acclimated within the tropical realm. The colonies which have
been founded there by the Teutonic folk, including the English group
therein, have been lamentable failures, the pure-blooded strains dying
out in a few generations. The people of southern Europe have been a
little more successful in the equatorial regions, probably because
their blood has there to a great extent become mingled with that of
tropical origin. These general conclusions concerning the climatal
limitations of man would be unassailable were it not for the history
of the negro in North America. In his case we have the one masterful
exception to the rule, otherwise good, that creatures bred near the
equator can not endure boreal conditions.
The negroes who came to North America had to undergo as complete a
transition as ever fell to the lot of man, without the least chance to
undergo an acclimatizing process. They were brought from the hottest
part of the earth to the region where the winter's cold is of almost
arctic severity--from an exceedingly humid to a very dry air. They
came to service under alien taskmasters, strange to them in speech and
in purpose. They had to betake themselves to unaccustomed food and to
clothing such as they had never worn before. Rarely could one of the
creatures find about him a familiar face of friend, parent, or child,
or an object that recalled his past life to him. It was an appalling
change. Only those who know how the negro cleaves to all the dear,
familiar things of life, how fond he is of warmth and friendliness, can
conceive the physical and mental shock that this introduction to new
conditions meant to them. To people of our own race it could have meant
death. But these wonderful folk appear to have withstood the trials of
their deportation in a marvelous way. They showed no peculiar liability
to disease. Their longevity or period of usefulness was not diminished,
or their fecundity obviously impaired. So far as I have been able to
learn, nostalgia was not a source of mortality, as it would have been
with any Aryan population. The price they brought in the market and the
satisfaction of their purchasers with their qualities shows that they
were from the first almost ideal laborers. If we compare the Algonkin
Indian, in appearance a sturdy fellow, with these negroes, we see of
what stuff the blacks are made. A touch of housework and of honest toil
took the breath of the aborigines away, but these tropical exotics fell
to their tasks and trials far better than the men of our own kind could
have done.
At their first coming, or soon afterward, the negroes were distributed
along the coast of our country from the Carolinas to Nova Scotia.
So far as I have been able to find, there appears to have been no
distinct difference in their tolerance of the climate in any part of
this varied district. There are still negroes in the maritime provinces
who are said to be the descendants of those who came upon the ground
certainly more than a century ago. They are good specimens of their
stock. So, too, along the New England coast and in New York there is
a sufficient number of the progeny of those once held as slaves to
make it clear that the failure to become a considerable part of the
population in that district is not due to any incapacity to withstand
the climate. The failure of the negro to increase in this field can be
accounted for in other ways--by the effects of race prejudice, nowhere
stronger than in this part of the country, and by the vice and misery
that overtake a despised lower class.
It early became evident that slavery was to be of no permanent
economic advantage to any part of the colonies within the glaciated
district, say from central New Jersey northward. In that portion of the
coastal belt the state of the surface and the character of the crops
alike tended to make the ownership of slaves unprofitable. The farms
were necessarily small. They became in a natural way establishments
worked by the head of the house, with the help of his children. Such
other help as was needed was, in the course of two generations,
readily had from hired white men and women. It was otherwise in the
tobacco-planting region to the southward. The cultivation of that
plant, to meet the extraordinary demands that Europe made for it, gave
slavery its chance to become established in this country. But for
that industry the institution would most likely have taken but slight
root, and the territory as far south as North Carolina would have
been in social order not very different from Pennsylvania, New York,
and the New England settlements. But, owing to some peculiar, as yet
unrecognized, adjustments of climate and soil, tobacco for pipes has
a quality when grown in the Virginia district such as it has nowhere
else in the world, and the world turned to smoking it with a disregard
for expense that made each laborer in the field worth some hundred
dollars a year. Moreover, the production of good tobacco requires
much care, which extends over about a year from the time the seed is
planted. Some parts of the work demand a measure of judgment such as
intelligent negroes readily acquire. They are indeed better fitted for
the task than white men, for they are commonly more interested in their
tasks than whites of the laboring class. The result was that before
the period of the Revolution slavery was firmly established in the
tobacco-planting colonies of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. It
was already the foundation of their only considerable industry.
Although the production of tobacco had made slavery a great economical
success in the limited field where the best product was to be had, it
is doubtful if the institution would have attained to any widespread
importance but for the development of another form of planting--that
of cotton. Thus, in Kentucky, where the crops, with the exception of
a coarse tobacco, are the same as in the other Northern States of the
Union, the institution, despite the long-continued scarcity of labor,
never attained any very great development. The slaves were generally
used for household service, but to no great extent in the fields, and
in such employment only in the districts where the soil was of such
great fertility that large quantities of grain were raised for export.
In one third of that Commonwealth negroes were, and remain to this day,
quite unknown. The invention of the cotton gin ended all hope that
slavery might be limited to a part of the seacoast region, for nearly
all of the lowland regions of the South, as well as some of the upland
country north to the southern border of Kentucky and Virginia, are
admirably suited to that crop--producing, indeed, a better "staple"
than that of any other country. This industry, even more than that of
raising tobacco, called for abundant labor which could be absolutely
commanded and severely tasked in the season of extreme heats. For this
work the negro proved to be the only fit man, for while the whites can
do this work they prefer other employment. Thus it came about that the
power of slavery in this country became rooted in its soil. The facts
show that, based on an ample foundation of experience, the judgment
of the Southern people was to the effect that this creature of the
tropics was a better laborer in their fields than the men of their
own race. Much has been said about the dislike of the white man for
work in association with negroes. The failure of the whites to have
a larger share in the agriculture of the South has been attributed
to this cause. This seems to me clearly an error. The dislike to the
association of races in labor is, in the slaveholding States, less than
in the North. There can be no question that if the Southern folk could
have made white laborers profitable they would have preferred to employ
them, for the reason that the plantations would have required less
fixed capital for their operation. The fact was and is that the negro
is there a better laboring man in the field than the white. Under the
conditions he is more enduring, more contented, and more trustworthy
than the men of our own race.
The large development of the cotton industry in this country came after
the importation of negroes from Africa had ceased to be as completely
unrestricted as it was at first. The prohibition of the traffic came
indeed before the needs of laborers in the more Southern and Western
slave States had been met. For a while there was some surreptitious
importation, which in a small way continued down to the middle of
this century, but this smuggling was quite insufficient to supply the
market of the new States with slaves. The result was that the border
slaveholding States became to a considerable extent the breeding
grounds for men and women who were to be at maturity exported to the
great plantations of Alabama and Mississippi, there to be herded by
overseers in gangs of hundreds, with no hope of ever returning to their
kindred. With this interdiction of the foreign slave trade the evils of
the former situation became magnified into horrors. The folk who were
brought from Africa came from a state of savagery to one of relative
comfort. When once adjusted to their new conditions, their lot was
on the whole greatly bettered. But their descendants, who had become
attached to the places where they were born with the peculiar affection
the better of them had for their homes, being accustomed to masters who
on the whole were gentle, were now to undergo a worse deportation than
that which made them slaves. It is not too much to say that the deeper
evils of the system to the slaves themselves, as well as to their
masters, began with this miserable slave trade that went on within the
limits of this country, and was about at its height when the civil war
began.
It can not be denied that even in the best stages of slaveholding
there had been a good deal of commerce in slaves where the feelings of
these chattels were in no wise regarded. Still, there was a prevailing
sentiment among all the slaveholders of the gentler sort that it was
in a way disgraceful to part families. I distinctly recall, when I was
a lad, some years before the civil war, my maternal grandfather often
charged me to remember that I came of a people who had never bought or
sold a slave except to keep families together. I know that this was a
common feeling among the better men of Kentucky and Virginia, and that
the practice of rearing negroes for the Southern market filled them
with sorrow and indignation. Yet the change was the inevitable result
of the system and of the advancing commercialism which separated the
plantation life more and more from that of the owner's household. At
the time when the civil war began the institution of slavery was, from
the commercial point of view, eminently successful. Notwithstanding
the occasional appearance of the spendthrift slave owner in Northern
pleasure resorts or in Europe, the great plantations were generally
in charge of able business men, who won a large interest on their
investments and who were developing the system of planting in a way
which, though it appeared to those who were accustomed to close
tillage as shiftless, was really well adjusted to the conditions.
Not one fourth of the land of the Southern States that was well
fitted for the work of slaves had been brought into use. The blacks
who were carefully managed in all that regarded their health and
in their morals, so far as might affect their breeding, were in
admirable physical condition, and rapidly increasing in numbers. It
is doubtful if ever a peasant class was so well cared for or so freed
from avoidable diseases. The growing protest against the institution,
so far as it operated in the South, was practically limited to the
border States, mainly to Kentucky, where alone did a considerable
number of well-born men set themselves against it. There is good reason
to believe that if the civil war had not occurred the end of the
nineteenth century would have seen a negro population in the South much
more numerous than we now have there. Experience has shown that the
American cotton crop is little affected by foreign competition, so that
it would have maintained the success of the institution.
Although the system of slavery was by a chance of Nature so firmly
planted on the cotton fields as to give it entire dominance in the
South, and something like control of the Federal Union, there was
one geographic condition that menaced its future, and in the end did
much to insure its downfall in the events of the civil war, and most
likely would have brought about its end even if the Confederacy had
been established. This was the form and extent of the Appalachian
uplands between the Potomac and the Ohio on the north and Alabama and
Georgia in the South. In this area of nearly one hundred and fifty
thousand square miles in extent the surface lies at an average height
of some fifteen hundred feet above the sea; the good arable land
is found mostly in narrow valleys suited only for household farms,
totally unfit for the systematic agriculture in which alone negroes
could be profitably employed as slaves. Into this area drifted the
class of small farmers who by one chance and another had never been
able to enter or to maintain themselves in the aristocratic class of
slaveholders. These mountaineers--they may better be termed the hill
people of the South--were an eminently peculiar people. They are not
to be compared with the "poor white trash"--i.e., the downfallen and
dependent whites, who were broken men in spirit, scarce above the
slaves in quality. These poor whites were often, if not generally,
either the weaker strains of the militant families or the descendants
of the people who had been imported into this country by the land
companies or sent out as peons.
Partly because of their separation from the slaveholding class and
partly because of the circumstances of their origin, the people of
the Southern highlands formed a curiously separated class. They
retained the quality of their English stock, as they had brought it
with them--an independence, a carelessness as to life, and a humor for
quarreling with those who were set above them whenever their liberties
or their license seemed to be threatened. Even their customs and
utensils held with curious adhesion to the usages of earlier centuries.
Thus, in 1878, I found, in a secluded valley of southwestern Virginia,
men hunting squirrels and rabbits with the old English short bow.
These were not the contrivances of boys or of to-day, but were made
and strung and the arrows hefted in the ancient manner. The men, one
of them old, were admirably skilled in their use; they assured me
that, like their fathers before them, they had ever used the bow and
arrow for small game, reserving the costly ammunition of the rifle for
deer and bear. These hill folk were, in a passive but obdurate manner,
opposed to slavery, and even more to negroes. There are still many
counties in this district where a negro has never dwelt. In some parts
of it I have had people gather from twenty miles away to stare at my
black camp servants, as the folk of central Africa are said to do at a
white man.
At the outbreak of the civil war the Appalachian upland was still
thinly peopled; it was, however, fitted to maintain a population
of some millions. If the Confederacy had won its independence, its
plantation districts, with a relatively small voting population, would
soon have had to settle an account with the people of the hills. As it
was, the existence of this folk in a great ridge of country extending
from the Northern States to within two hundred miles of the Gulf of
Mexico was an element of weakness which went far to give success to the
Federal arms. It kept Kentucky from seceding, prevented the region of
West Virginia from being of any value to the rebellion, and weakened
its control in several other States. In all, somewhere near one hundred
thousand recruits came to the Federal army from this part of the South.
It is not improbable that to this folk we may attribute the failure of
the great revolt. That they turned thus against the people of their own
States to cast in their lot with those who were strangers to them shows
their feelings toward the institution of slavery; it indicated where
they would have stood if the Confederacy had been established.
It is not easy to picture the condition of the negro population in
1860. There is a common notion that it was consciously and bitterly
suffering from its subjugation--ready to rise in arms against its
oppressors. This view was indeed shared by the Southern people, who
lived in chronic fear of insurrections. The error of it arose from the
fallacious notion that the people of another race must feel and act as
we would under like circumstances. The facts showed that the negro mind
does not work in the fashion of our own. He had, it is true, suffered
from slavery, but not as men of our race would have suffered. Against
its deprivations and such direct cruelty as he experienced, not often
great, he could set the simple comforts and small pleasures which are
so much to him. That he was on the whole fairly contented with his
lot, that his relations with his masters were on the whole friendly,
is shown by his remarkable conduct during and since the civil war. If
the accepted account of the negro had been true, if he had been for
generations groaning in servitude while he passionately longed for
liberty, the South should have flamed in insurrection at the first
touch of war. We should have seen a repetition of the horrors of many a
servile insurrection. It is a most notable fact that, during the four
years of the great contention, when the blacks had every opportunity
to rise, there was no real mark of a disposition to turn upon their
masters. On thousands of Southern farms the fighting men left their
women and children in the keeping of their slaves, while they went
forth for a cause whose success meant that those slaves could never be
free.
That the negroes desired to be free is plain enough. The fact that
they fled in such numbers to our camps shows this. Their failure to
revolt must be taken as an indication that their relations with their
masters measured on their own instinctive standards were on the whole
affectionate. They had the strength to have made an end of the war
at a stroke. They were brave enough for such action. That they did
not take it after the manner of their kindred of Santo Domingo is
the best possible testimony as to the generally sympathetic relation
which existed between master and slaves. Of this no better test can be
imagined than that which the final stages of the institution afforded.
In taking account of the history of the slave in this Union it is
not amiss for me to bear testimony as to the spirit with which the
body of our slave owners met the singular obligations of their
positions. There were here and there base men who abused their trust
as masters--some, indeed, who never perceived its existence. But
of the very many slave owners whom I can remember I can recall but
three who failed to recognize the burden that fate had put upon them
and to deal with it much as they dealt with the other cares of their
households--conscientiously and mercifully, though often in the rude
whacking way in which parents of old dealt with their children; so far
as slavery was a household affair, and even where the farm employed no
more hands than could be gathered in a house "quarter," the people were
commonly subject to an anxious scrutiny as regarded their moral and
religious training. Here and there, especially when there were young
white men about, the result was the deplorable mixture of the races.
There is no question but that this was extensive, though the amount
of it is exaggerated. Yet it was common enough to degrade the whites
and to make of itself a sufficient reason for ending the institution,
however profitable it might otherwise have been. Men of no race are
safely to be trusted with such power. The social evil was the heaviest
part of the load which the high-minded slave owners had to bear. It was
shared in even larger measure by his wife and daughters. How heavy the
cross was can only be known to those who remember the conditions of
that unhappy time.
The result of the hopeless effort to keep the slaves in decent ways
and to prevent the pollution of their sons was to make nearly every
right-minded slaveholder at heart an abolitionist. Although the
men, and even the women, who suffered most would have been disposed
to slay any one who suggested that they shared the opinions of the
detested antislavery folk, nearly every one in his heart reprobated
the institution and in his mind was revolving some scheme, generally
fanciful, by which an end of it might be made. They were in the unhappy
position where overwhelming self-interest fought with their moral
sense. Now and then some one of them passed the critical point and
entered into the fold of the accursed abolitionists; but others, after
the manner of average men, paltered with the situation, waiting for
fate to decide the matter. In the meantime, they strove as best they
could to lift these people to a higher estate.
In many ways the standard of care by which the conduct of a master
in relation to his slaves was judged was high. He was expected to
clothe them in a fit manner, keep them from the nocturnal wanderings,
termed "running," so common a trait in these children of the tropics,
to see that they were decently married, that they went to church in
a dutiful way, and, above all, that they were not abused by other
whites, particularly by other slaveholders. To strike or even to vilify
the slaves of another was a very serious thing. The offended person
knew well that it was his part to make his complaint to the servant's
master. Where the negroes exceeded in number those needed for household
and personal service--there were often a dozen or two thus employed
in families of no great wealth--there was a division between the
house people and the "hands." Those in the former group were selected
folk, often belonging to families that had been associated with those
of their masters for a century or more. Such servants had rights
that none could dispute. Not uncommonly their elders were the actual
rulers of the establishment. These family slaves often received some
little schooling, even when the laws forbade that slaves should be
taught to read and write. The children of the household servants were
allowed freely to play with those of their masters until the young
people were about twelve years old. The boys of both often had their
rough-and-tumble games together until they were young men. The field
laborers, where the class was separate, had less perfect connection
with their masters. They usually came to the family storeroom for
the daily issued rations, which they received from the hands of the
mistress or the daughter of the house. They were visited when sick,
and their complaints were heard. They were free to all of the many
festivities of the holiday time.
It is impossible to conceive of a more effective schooling for the
African people than was given this adoption into the households, and
often into the hearts, of high-minded masters. A like opportunity never
before came and will never again come to so lowly a folk. The effect
of this educative contact with the superior race is, as before noted,
to be seen in the temper of the negroes during and after the civil
war. Upon the high-minded master the effect of the institution was in
many ways enlarging. A man is morally what his cares have made him,
and of these the dutiful slaveholder has more than an average share.
He grew in the power of command and in the habit of doing justice to
many fellow-beings. He lived a large life. The qualities bred of his
station have been of profit to his folk and time. All this is true of
slavery of the domestic sort. It is not so in like manner of the great
plantations which came with the development of the cotton and sugar
industries. It was characteristic of the northern part of the South
until it began to be the place of supply for the rapidly developing
plantation district.
So long as the negro could look forward to life in the place and
with the people of his birth his simple, careless nature opened to
him little to bring a sense of danger. He was to live on until he
passed in to the Elysium of the hereafter, of which he had no doubt
whatever. Gradually there came, in the overcrowding of the farms and
the diminishing fertility of the wasted land, the need of reducing
the number of slaves. Then each year came the dreaded visits of the
"trader," who was like a visible angel of death, to lead one or more
into the far unknown country. Before the plantation demand for slaves
began there were, of course, sales of slaves, but they commonly went as
families, and not to places to them inconceivably remote. These could
hope for Christmas reunions and other exchanges, but when the negro
was "sold South" the place and people that had known him would know him
no more. My first impression of the iniquity of slavery came from the
anxious questions of negroes as to the danger of their being sold to
Alabama, that State being then the supposed destination of all those
who were out of favor. They naturally strove to make interest with
children whom they thought could successfully intercede for them.
There were several very diverse consequences arising from the
exportation of slaves from the border States to the far South. It
shook the confidence of the negro as to his safety in all that was
dearest to him, and thus did much to degrade the relation between him
and his master. It served, cruel as it was, to elevate the relatively
uncivilized blacks of the more Southern districts, where the newly
imported laborers were mostly accumulated. It curiously operated to
elevate the quality of the blacks in what was termed the slave-breeding
States, those where the institution had longest been established. This
was due to the selection of those of lower grade for the market. As
it became necessary to part with slaves, a choice was naturally made
of men and women who had least endeared themselves to the household.
Save in rare cases, the trader sought rather the lusty youths for their
brawn than the more delicate, refined house people. Moreover, where
a fellow had shown a tendency to any vice, the choice fell on him.
In this way for two or three generations a weeding process went on,
with the result that the negroes who were left in the districts where
the work was done acquired a quality noticeably better than those on
the Southern plantations. The difference is almost that we would look
for between two distinct races. The faces of the selected folk are
more intelligent, the lines of their bodies finer, their moral and
intellectual quality very much above those of their lower kindred. They
are at their best, in very numerous instances, as gentle as the elect
of our own race.
Where, as in the Southern plantations, the institution of slavery was
deliberately made the basis of large commercial interests, the motives
were wholly different from whatever existed in the early and better
days, when the slaves were appendages of a household. Even on the
largest tobacco plantations the numbers were not such as to exclude a
share of contact with friendly whites. But on the great properties of
the South the negro was not to any extent subject to the influences
which had in the earlier stage of his apprenticeship done so much for
him. Worked in gangs that were counted by the hundreds, seeing no
whites except the overseers, they tended to lose what little culture
they had gained. Their peculiar but perfectly intelligible speech
began a degradation into a puzzling jargon. African superstitions,
little if any trace of which remained among their kindred in Virginia
and Kentucky, regained their hold. Marriage and a respect therefor,
which had been tolerably well affirmed, tended to disappear. All trace
of good thus vanished from the system.
Although the great plantation, of the Mississippi type, was a
relatively novel feature in American slaveholding, it was evidently the
only largely profitable method of using slave labor. In the household
system the care of the children, the aged, and the infirm, the
unbusinesslike management of the labor, and the tendency to slipshod
methods which with negroes can only be corrected by strict discipline,
made ordinary farming unremunerative. It is evident that the profit,
other than that in mere money, which the institution in the earlier
state had brought to master and slave was rapidly diminishing, and that
any further maintenance of it would have been calamitous. Though we may
regret that it was ended by the civil war, it is difficult to see any
other way in which it could have been terminated, or any profit which
could have been gained by postponing the crisis.
MODERN CITY ROADWAYS.
BY NELSON P. LEWIS,
ENGINEER OF HIGHWAYS, BOROUGH OF BROOKLYN.
One of the conspicuous results of cheapened transportation and the
facility with which the products of field, forest, mine, and factory
can be transferred to the consumer has been the rapid increase in
population of all our cities. In 1890 over forty-five per cent of the
population of New York State (nearly six millions) was concentrated in
four cities, while it is estimated that the greater city of New York
contains at present not less and probably more than fifty per cent of
the State's population. Nor is this tendency characteristic only of
American cities, though the general impression seems to be that it is
more conspicuous with us. In fact, many European cities (notably those
of Germany) have outstripped ours in growth. In 1870 Berlin had about
150,000 less people than New York; in 1890 it had over 73,000 more. In
1875 Hamburg exceeded Boston in population by but 6,000, while in 1890
the German city was more than 121,000 ahead.
Meanwhile the rural population the world over has increased very
slowly, or has positively decreased. The massing together of large
numbers of people, without proper regard to sanitary conditions, has
always resulted in great mortality, as witness the terrible plagues
which have swept over the old cities of Europe, and the disastrous
results during the summer of 1898 of concentrating large numbers of our
volunteers in camps not subjected to rigid sanitary regulations.
It has been amply demonstrated, however, that our cities can be made at
least as healthful as the country districts, and an increasingly large
number of engineers are engaged in such city building.
One branch of this municipal work will be considered in this
paper--that of street improvement. The first impression gained by a
stranger entering a city is undoubtedly that produced by the appearance
of its streets. If they are poorly paved, irregular, dirty, and
generally unkempt, he will consult his time table to see how soon
he can get away. If they are broad, smooth, clean, well shaded and
lighted, he will stay as long as possible.
[Illustration: SECTIONS OF ROMAN ROADS]
In spite of the pride of the American people in the development of our
cities, and notwithstanding the fact that their wealth enables them
to have only the best, they have been slow to appreciate the value of
thoroughly well-paved streets. As stated by Mr. Albert Shaw, European
cities have been ahead of us in accepting the doctrine that "smooth and
clean highways are a wise investment from every point of view, and that
so long as the work is done in a thorough and scientific manner the
result is worth having, regardless of cost. No city should think itself
rich enough to prosper without them, and no city is so poor that it can
not afford them if it has any reason whatever for continued existence.
Good roadways are cheap at any cost, and bad ones are so disastrously
expensive that only a very rich country, like the United States, can
afford them."
Space will not permit even a brief history of street paving, or an
attempt to sketch its development, but reference will be made to the
different kinds in general use, and the kind most in favor in various
cities. Probably no one has introduced the subject of pavements without
reference to the Roman roads.
While Carthage was probably the first city to boast of paved streets,
the Romans soon followed its example, and all over Europe, Asia, and
Africa, as far as the domain of their emperors extended, they built
with the greatest care and at enormous expense that magnificent system
of roads which were often supposed, in the middle ages, to be of
supernatural origin, and remain the wonder of our modern civilization.
These roads were generally from four to six metres in width, and were
constructed in this way: The roadbed was excavated; in it was placed a
layer of stones, which were sometimes united with mortar. These stones
were such as were most available, sometimes rounded stones similar to
the cobblestones with which we are familiar, and in some cases in the
Alps the foundation was a compact mass of angular stones, two feet or
more in their longest dimension, carefully fitted together.
[Illustration: A STREET IN POMPEII, SHOWING OLD ROMAN PAVEMENT.]
On this foundation was placed a layer of plaster made of stone or brick
pounded with mortar; then a course of sand and lime or sand and clay,
leveled and pounded until very hard. The top or wearing surface was
made of irregular flat stones, fitted together with nicety and united
with cement. The total depth of these roads, or pavements, as they can
properly be called, was from three to (in some cases) seven feet. It is
said that in the province of Hispania alone (Spain and Portugal) twenty
thousand miles of roads were built.
The first stone pavements to be laid in modern city streets were
those formed of stones in their natural condition, variously known as
bowlders, pebbles, or cobblestones.
The first attempt at a street pavement in this country was doubtless
that referred to by Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer, in the _Goede Vrouw
of Mana-na-ta_, where she says, in speaking of what was once called
Brower Street, because it passed by the great brewery built by one of
the first of the Van Cortlandts: "This street lies between Whitehall
and Broad, and was one of the first lanes laid out by the settlers, and
was commonly known as 'The Road.' In 1657 it was paved with small round
cobblestones, and the circumstance created such a sensation that the
country people visited it as a curiosity, and it was one of the sights
of the little dorp. The burghers laughingly nicknamed it Stone Street,
which name it still retains. The improvement was effected by Madame Van
Cortlandt, as she could not endure the dust that filled her tidy house,
caused by the heavy brewers' wains that were constantly passing her
door."
[Illustration: A STREET IN NAPLES, SHOWING LARGE PAVING STONES.]
This cobblestone pavement, laid on Stone Street nearly two centuries
and a half ago, has been a persistent type, and, on account of
their availability and cheapness, such stones continued to be used
in many cities until within a very few years. When they were well
shaped and uniform in size they made quite a durable pavement, and,
though rough and noisy, were capable, when well laid, of sustaining a
considerable traffic. Fortunately, the better class of these stones
are now so scarce and the poorer ones are so execrable that this type
of pavement is becoming obsolete, though there are many miles for
which more civilized pavements are yet to be substituted, two hundred
and thirty-eight miles of which are unfortunately in the Borough of
Brooklyn. The next step in advance was the use of stone shaped to
uniform size, or approximately so, and with a more or less smooth
surface. This is the pavement in most general use to-day, and for
permanency and, consequently, cheapness can not be surpassed. When
first used, these blocks were quite large, and the size has been
decreased until the best stone pavements laid at the present time in
Great Britain are six-inch cubes, or still smaller, with a surface four
inches square and a depth of seven inches.
[Illustration: COBBLESTONE PAVEMENT ON SARATOGA AVENUE, BROOKLYN.]
But stone pavement when most carefully laid and maintained is noisy and
unpleasant to ride over, and in these days we can never reconcile such
a pavement with a handsome residence street. The writer experienced a
distinct shock when on riding over Euclid Avenue, in Cleveland, last
year, he found it still paved with Medina sandstone blocks, and it
seemed that this famous street was still living on the reputation which
Bayard Taylor gave it years ago as the handsomest street in the world.
In looking about for something more quiet and smooth than stone, the
first material tried was wood. In London the first wood pavement was
laid in the Old Bailey in 1839, and was soon followed by many others.
None of these pavements lasted more than seven years, and, as they cost
more than granite and were so short-lived, a prejudice arose against
them, and as they wore out they were mostly replaced with granite.
Since that time wood pavement has become popular again, and a large
area is now covered with it. The material most generally in use is
Baltic fir, though there is quite a large amount of Australian hard
wood which is more durable. The people of London seem willing to bear
the greater expense and submit to the annoyance of more frequent
renewals for the sake of the quiet, and wood is certainly the least
noisy of all known pavements.
Paris had at the close of 1893 more wood than asphalt, the areas of
pavements of different kinds being as follows:
Stone 7,541,258 sq. yds., 71.5 per cent.
Wood 886,236 " 8.4 "
Asphalt 402,394 " 3.8 "
Gravel or macadam 1,724,632 " 16.3 "
Berlin also has some wood pavements, but asphalt seems more popular,
though by far the greatest area is still of stone pavements.
[Illustration: GRANITE PAVEMENT ON ROADWAY OF BROOKLYN BRIDGE AFTER
CONSTANT USE WITH VERY HEAVY TRAFFIC FOR SIXTEEN YEARS.]
The most durable wood pavements are those made of the hard woods of
Australia, which are especially adapted to this purpose. They are
mostly of the eucalyptus family, the red gum, blue gum, black butt,
tallow-wood, and mahogany. Mr. George W. Bell, in a pamphlet published
in 1895, gives some remarkable statistics as to the durability of
these pavements. He cites the case of George Street, in Sydney, which
sustains a very heavy traffic, and on which a wooden-block pavement
had been in constant use for over ten years, without repair of any
kind. The only piece of wood pavement of this class which has been
laid in this country, to the writer's knowledge, is on Twentieth
Street, between Broadway and Fifth Avenue, in the Borough of Manhattan,
where, in 1896, the Australian "kari" wood was laid. The work was done
with the greatest care, and the resulting pavement has proved quite
satisfactory. When Fifth Avenue was lately repaved the use of this
material was considered, but, on account of the popular prejudice
against all wood pavements and the delay which would be involved in
obtaining the blocks, the idea was abandoned.
[Illustration: LOOKING NORTH FROM BEVERLY ROAD AND EAST FIFTEENTH
STREET, BROOKLYN, IN MARCH, 1899.]
[Illustration: LOOKING NORTH FROM BEVERLY ROAD AND EAST FIFTEENTH
STREET, BROOKLYN, IN OCTOBER, 1899.]
When wood pavements are spoken of in most of our cities, the taxpayer
pictures to himself the round cedar block so generally in use in
Western cities. These are used on account of their cheapness. They are
usually laid on one or two courses of plank. The blocks are round,
from four to eight inches in diameter and six inches in depth, are
set as closely as possible to each other, and the joints are filled
with gravel, after which they are usually poured full of pitch. Such a
pavement, when new, is quite agreeable to ride over. It soon, however,
becomes uneven; the defective blocks quickly decay; the surface not
being impervious to water, the wet foundation under a pavement with so
little rigidity becomes soft, and the mud or slime works its way up
between the blocks, and the process of decomposition is expedited. We
hear sometimes of the floating pavements of Chicago. These are such
cedar-block pavements which are said to rise with the floods of water
filling the roadways after heavy rainfalls, and from specimens of the
pavement which may be seen in that city considerable sections must
have floated away. The round block has nothing to recommend it but
its cheapness, and this usually proves to be expensive economy. In
Galveston, Texas, creosoted yellow pine blocks have been laid for some
years with general satisfaction. They are laid directly on the fine
sand, which is water-rammed so as to be very compact. The surface is
formed with great care by a template to the exact grade and crown, and
the joints are filled with similar fine sand. In Indianapolis creosoted
blocks have been laid for several years, sixty thousand square yards
having been put down during the past season. They are laid as closely
as possible on a concrete foundation, with a sand cushion of one inch,
and the joints filled with paving cement, composed of ten per cent of
refined Trinidad asphalt and ninety per cent of coal-tar distillate,
after which the surface is covered with half an inch of clean coarse
sand or granite screenings.
[Illustration: A NEW CEDAR BLOCK PAVEMENT IN TORONTO.]
Improved wood pavements are a luxury. They have many points of
superiority over asphalt. They are so considered in London, where
their use is continued, although they require renewal oftener than
asphalt, and much more often than granite. They will undoubtedly be
used more frequently in this country when the people are willing to pay
the additional cost for the quiet and freedom from dust and from the
somewhat disagreeable glare of asphalt.
For a dozen years or more brick has been used for street pavements
in the cities of the middle West. The use of this material is by no
means new. It began in Holland in the thirteenth century, and in the
seventeenth century the highway from The Hague to Scheveningen was
paved with brick. In Amsterdam such pavements are said to last from ten
to twenty years, or an average of fourteen years. After about ten years
they are commonly turned over and relaid, after which they will last
about four years more. The size in common use is about the same as that
made in this country.
A good paving brick should be tough enough to withstand the wear to
which a street surface is subjected without chipping or cracking, and
should not absorb more than from two to four per cent of its weight
of water after submersion for forty-eight hours. It has not the
wearing qualities of granite, although there is one block on Ninth
Avenue, in the Borough of Manhattan, which has been subjected to very
heavy traffic for eight years, has had no repairs to speak of, and
its condition to-day compares very favorably with almost any street
pavement of equal age which has been subjected to similar traffic.
[Illustration: AN OLD CEDAR BLOCK PAVEMENT.]
Another kind of street improvement which must be considered is macadam.
In small towns, and some quite large cities, most of the streets are
improved in this way. When well maintained and kept smooth, but not too
hard, it forms a most agreeable surface for driving. It should not, in
the writer's judgment, be classed as a pavement at all, certainly not
as a permanent one, and its use should be restricted to park drives
and boulevards (for maintaining which liberal appropriations can be
secured), and to suburban roads, where sewers and subsurface pipes have
not yet been laid, and where temporary roads are required to furnish
convenient communication between centers of population, and to assist
in developing these districts.
Macadam has no place in a city street, nor is it wise to lay it on the
entire width of a roadway. It best serves its purpose when laid in a
comparatively narrow strip, leaving the sides of the road unimproved,
except for the formation of earth gutters, so that the surface water
can readily soak away where the soil is sufficiently porous.
Macadam is the most expensive of all street surfaces to keep in
thoroughly good condition, and in this country it is rarely, if ever,
so maintained, except in some of our park roads.
The pavement which is to-day, more generally than any other,
superseding stone on all streets where the traffic is not excessive
nor the grades extreme, is asphalt. It is scarcely necessary to attempt
to give a history of the use of this material, how its adaptability
to paving purposes was first discovered by the improved condition of
the roads over which it was hauled from the French mines for use in
reservoir and tank linings, etc. The drippings from the carts were
observed to have been compacted by travel until a smooth, hard roadway
resulted. The first street to be paved with it was Rue Bergera, in
Paris, in 1854, and it was so successful that in 1858 Rue St. Honore
was similarly treated. An asphalt pavement was laid in Threadneedle
Street, London, in May, 1869, and in Cheapside and Poultry in the fall
of 1870, while in Berlin its use began in 1873.
[Illustration: EIGHTEENTH AVENUE, BROOKLYN; MACADAMIZED FULL WIDTH OF
ROADWAY AND GUTTERS PAVED, WITH NO PROVISION FOR SURFACE DRAINAGE.]
The laying of bituminous pavements in this country began in 1869, and
they were first made of tar concrete, or Scrimshaw. Asphalt began
to be used within the next year or two, and its popularity has been
astonishing, as will be seen from the fact that on January 1, 1898, the
area of this kind of pavement laid in the United States was, as nearly
as could be ascertained, thirty million square yards.
There is a notable difference between the European and American
asphalts. The former may be called natural and the latter artificial
pavements. In the former the material, as it comes from the mine, is
ground to a powder, heated, placed upon the foundation prepared for
it, and tamped into approximately the same condition as before it
was disturbed, though usually the product of several mines is mixed
in order to obtain the best percentage of bitumen, but nothing is
added to or taken from the bituminous rock. In the pavement usually
laid in America, on the other hand, only a small proportion of the
material is brought from the asphalt deposits, the principal part of
it (sand) being obtained near at hand. In the one case the cost of
long ocean or rail transportation has to be paid on the entire mass
forming the pavement, while in the other this expense attaches to but
from twelve to fifteen per cent of the material. This, of course, is a
great advantage, and at recent prices it is scarcely possible for the
European rock asphalts to compete with the artificial ones.
The making of a pavement from one of the standard asphalts may be
briefly described as follows: The material as found in Nature has this
composition:
Bitumen 38.14 per cent.
Organic matter, not bitumen 7.63 "
Mineral matter 26.38 "
Water 27.85 "
------
100.00
This is cooked until the water has been driven off, and some of the
mineral matter has settled.
The above analysis is of Trinidad Pitch Lake asphalt, and is a
particularly favorable result. This material is too hard for use in
making a pavement, and it has to be softened or fluxed by the addition
of something which will accomplish this purpose. In order to do this
there is usually added to each one hundred pounds of refined asphalt
about eighteen pounds of heavy petroleum oil. After this addition we
have the asphaltic cement ready to combine with mineral matter, which
is so selected that when asphaltic cement is added at the rate of about
seventeen pounds of the cement to eighty-three pounds of the other
all the particles will be coated, and more could not be added without
making the pavement too soft. What is found to accomplish this best is
fine stone dust and sand.
The asphaltic cement and sand are heated separately to about 300° F.
The stone dust is then added to and mixed with the hot sand in the
proportion of from five to eighty in the case of fine, well-graduated
sand, to fifteen to sixty-seven for coarse sands, having less variation
in size. The asphaltic cement is then added, and the materials are
mixed to a homogeneous mass, which is ready to be taken to the street.
It should reach there at a temperature not less than 250°, and is
spread with hot iron rakes so as to give usually a thickness of two
inches after consolidation. After spreading, it is rolled with a hand
roller, after which a small amount of hydraulic cement is swept over
the surface, and it is thoroughly rolled with a steam roller of not
less than ten tons, the rolling to be continued as long as the roller
makes any impression on the surface.
The foundation is usually of cement concrete about six inches thick,
though asphalt pavements are often laid over old stone pavements.
Between the foundation and the wearing surface there is generally laid
what is called a binder course, one inch thick and formed of small
broken stone, to which has been added asphaltic cement, the same as is
used in making the wearing surface. Five or six pints of this cement
are used to each cubic foot of stone.
[Illustration: KING'S HIGHWAY, BROOKLYN; SIXTEEN FEET IN CENTER OF ROAD
MACADAMIZED.]
The pavement just described is made from Trinidad asphalt, the material
from which nearly all the earlier artificial asphalt pavements in this
country were made, and which was used almost exclusively until within
the last half dozen years.
Within that time, however, it has been discovered that there are a
number of other deposits of asphalt well adapted to use for street
pavements. A very large deposit containing a high percentage of bitumen
and very little mineral matter is located near the coast in the State
of Bermudez, in Venezuela. Large deposits have been found in several
places in California, and in Utah, Kentucky, and Texas, and a number
of other places. The Kentucky product is classed as a natural rock
asphalt, as it is a sandstone impregnated with bitumen. It has been
mixed with about an equal portion of German rock asphalt and used
with very satisfactory results in Buffalo. These asphalts are quite
different in their composition, and each requires somewhat different
treatment. The Bermudez, being richer in bitumen and softer, requires
the addition of very little flux. The California deposits furnish their
own flux in a liquid asphalt or maltha, which is almost absolutely
pure bitumen, and the use of petroleum residuum is thereby avoided
altogether.
[Illustration: ASPHALT PAVEMENT ON CLINTON AVENUE, BROOKLYN.]
It has been recognized since 1836 that the bitumen which forms the
greater part of natural asphalts can be separated into two substances,
which have been commonly known as petrolene and asphaltene, the former
of which possesses the cementitious qualities essential to the making
of a successful pavement. Instead of the arbitrary names--petrolene
and asphaltene--these substances are sometimes more aptly designated
as active and inert bitumen. It has been found that of the bitumen
extracted from asphalts which have given the most satisfactory results
in making street pavements, sixty-nine per cent or more is soluble in
petroleum naphtha having a specific gravity of 72° Beaumé.
An asphalt pavement can not be economically kept in good condition
unless every defect which may develop is immediately repaired. When
the smooth, hard surface is once broken, disintegration proceeds very
rapidly, and a large hole is soon formed. The more general distribution
of smooth pavements, however, will tend to distribute the traffic
more evenly, and the increasing use of rubber tires and rubber shoes
for horses, to say nothing of the probably quite general use of motor
vehicles, within the next decade will result in the elimination of the
forces at present most destructive to pavements.
Much regret is often expressed that asphalt pavements should be so
frequently opened for the purpose of laying or obtaining access to
subsurface pipes and conduits, and thereby mutilated. As a matter
of fact, there is no pavement at present in use which can be so
effectively and satisfactorily restored as asphalt. When skillfully
done, almost no trace of such an opening can be found.
The first question to arise, when it has been determined to pave a
street, will be the selection of material, or the kind of pavement to
be laid. In determining this, the governing considerations will be the
traffic to be sustained, its density and character, the rate of grade,
and the presence or absence of railroad tracks.
If the traffic be very heavy and the street given up wholly to
business, ease of traction, durability, and economy of maintenance are
of first importance, while quiet, comfortable riding, and beauty can
be sacrificed to them. Many efforts have been made to determine the
relative force required to draw a load over different kinds of surface
under similar conditions. The following is from a table compiled by
Mr. Rudolph Hering, from different authorities, the force being that
necessary to move one ton on a level grade at a speed of three miles an
hour:
KIND OF ROAD. Pounds.
Ordinary dirt road 224
Ordinary cobblestone 140
Good cobblestone 75
Common macadam 64
Very hard, smooth macadam 46
Good stone block 45
Best stone block (London) 36
Asphalt 17
Granite tramway 12½ to 13½
Iron railway 8 to 11½
The question of durability occurs next, and the different kinds of
pavement which may be considered for city streets may be rated as
follows, it being assumed that the traffic is not excessively heavy:
KIND OF PAVEMENT. Life in years.
Best granite block on concrete 30
Granite block laid on sand 20
Belgian trap 20
Cobblestone 18
Asphalt 15
Best wood--rectangular block 10
Vitrified brick 12
Macadam 8
Cedar block--round--on sand 5
No class of municipal work comes so near to the daily life of an
urban population--both the business and the home life--as the surface
improvement of city streets, and no expenditure is too great (provided
the work is skillfully and honestly done) to make them smooth, clean,
sanitary, and beautiful.
TYPICAL CRIMINALS.
BY SAMUEL G. SMITH, LL. D.
If the question of a criminal type, defined by certain marks of a
physical nature and emphasized by accompanying mental and moral
characteristics, were confined to the technical speculations of a
special craft of scientists, the public would have little interest in
the spread of the doctrines of Cesare Lombroso and his _confrères_ in
this country. When it is believed, however, that certain men and women
are committed to prison or condemned to death not on account of crimes
in any ethical sense, but because of spontaneous actions from vicious
impulses beyond their control, the subject affects the administration
of law, the theory of punishment, and the safety of society.
Lombroso and the Italian school say that they have discovered a
type of man who is born a criminal, and who may be recognized by a
Mongolian face, abnormal features, ill-shaped ears, unsymmetrical
skull, and various psychical peculiarities, which are the result of
bad organization. This doctrine is illustrated by descriptions of
criminals who have the abnormalities, and in the hands of skillful
writers the case is made very plausible. The theory is in harmony
with so much popular modern thought, which loosely interprets the
doctrine of evolution by a crass materialism, that it has infected
American prison literature, while it has never misled those men to whom
practical experience has given the most right to have an opinion on the
subject. The sense of personal responsibility is still the foundation
of social order, and if in truth there is no such thing, the world is
awake at last from its dream of morality; righteousness is resolved
into heredity, structure, and habit; living is a mere puppet show, and
the wreck of things impends. If Lombroso is right, modern scientific
methods are sure to prove him so, and we shall have at last sound
theories; but we shall have no world in which they can be used, for the
dissolution predicted by Herbert Spencer will have come.
[Illustration: Group 1, No. 1.]
[Illustration: Group 1, No. 2.]
[Illustration: Group 1, No. 3.]
Exceptional opportunities for the study of the abnormal classes in
the institutions of this country and Europe have given me a personal
interest in the question of the criminal type. I have discovered that
the criminal anthropologists do not choose for comparison with the
prison population their normal men from the ranks where the criminal
classes are recruited. Blackwell's Island has no more peculiar
inmates than abound in sections of New York near the East River; the
residents of the Whitechapel district of London may be compared with
the inmates of Pentonville, to the distinct credit of the latter; and
the man in Roquette is no worse off in body than scores whom I have
seen in certain localities south of the Seine. The fact is, no human
body exists which is not in some respects abnormal. The number of
abnormalities and their extent depend upon a variety of circumstances,
among which are food, climate, occupation, and the incidents of birth
itself, as well as the various forms of infantile disease. I will
undertake to find enough physical peculiarities, in any locality, or
among the members of any profession, to establish any physical theory
which may be propounded.
[Illustration: Group 2, No. 1 (forger).]
[Illustration: Group 2, No. 2.]
[Illustration: Group 2, No. 3.]
It occurred to me to try an experiment in a manner entirely different
from the usual criminal researches. Having been very familiar with a
certain prison for many years, I requested the warden, who is a very
able man in his profession, to send me the photographs of ten or a
dozen men whom he regarded as the most representative criminals in his
population of some five hundred persons. The warden was not informed of
the use I intended to make of the material, and supposed it was for
illustration in university class work. Later, he gave me the Bertillon
measurements of the men, with an epitome of their history. A number of
these men I have known for years. So far from this selection supporting
the modern theory of a criminal type, it confutes it in a conspicuous
manner. The abnormalities are slight, and there is as great a diversity
among the men as could be asked. It must be remembered that these cases
were selected by a shrewd and competent official, solely upon their
criminal record, and not in the interests of any theory whatever.
Of course, the men do not look well, but neither would any ordinary
company of citizens if their heads were shaved and they were put in
prison dress. I am always shocked by the changed appearance of the men
after the prison transformation. Young embezzlers of elegant figure,
who have moved in good society without a question, easily look the
rascal behind prison walls.
The first group are murderers. No. 1 murdered his daughter because she
insisted upon going to a party against his wishes. He has the head of
a philosopher. It was his first crime. It may be noted that tattooing
is supposed to be common among criminals. This man is tattooed, but
committed no crime until fifty years of age, and was a deputy sheriff
for some years. No. 2 did not kill his victim, but the assault was
murderous, and the escape from death was accidental. It is difficult
to discuss the negro in crime without entering into racial and social
questions beyond the present limits. No. 3 has a very good head, an
excellent ear, and, barring the expression, a pleasing face. He has a
life sentence for murder. He is the worst man in the prison. I have
for years believed him to be insane. His family is criminal. His
father murdered his mother in a brutal manner before the child's eyes,
when No. 3 was only eight years old. He himself has committed several
desperate assaults, growing out of his persistent mania of persecution.
No. 3 is not morally responsible, and there are usually two or three
such prisoners out of a thousand subjects.
The second group are very diverse in structure and temperament, but
have committed the same kind of crime. No. 1 is a confidence man and a
forger. He is a crafty and an habitual criminal, has served terms in
various prisons, is keen of intellect, well educated, has traveled in
many countries, and is a citizen of the world.
No. 2 is a confirmed forger, and has served several terms in prison
for the same offense. He is a skillful bookkeeper, has an attractive
manner, and as soon as he is out in the world secures employment and
plans his next crime.
No. 3 is a counterfeiter. His head is small, but of excellent shape,
and he has rather a refined physical organization. His criminal record
is bad, and he has served at least one term before for the same
offense. His imagination, temperament, and vices would select him as a
person who would be guilty of a very different and more fleshly kind
of crime. The group is formed by the correlation of crime; they have
nothing in common in physical organization.
[Illustration: Group 3, No. 1.]
[Illustration: Group 3, No. 2.]
[Illustration: Group 3, No. 3.]
The third group are thieves. No. 1 is a confirmed criminal, and has
served several terms in prison. He is the tallest man in the list.
His head is "long" and well formed, and his features are regular. His
expression indicates power of sustained thought, and his peculiar
appearance is not due to his kind of crime, but to his habit of
mind. He is a pessimist of the first rank, and hates the world, his
fellow-men, and perhaps himself most of all. He will not work when at
liberty, thinks that society is totally depraved, and that war upon it
is the only proper mission in life. He is pre-eminently the antisocial
man.
No. 2 is really a pleasing fellow. He is tender, sympathetic, and
pious. Under proper circumstances he might have made an admirable
Sunday-school superintendent. He is plausible, insinuating, and
winning. In temperament, feeling, and social habit he is the complete
antithesis to No. 1. He is a most dangerous criminal, and has a black
and varied record.
No. 3 is a man of lower grade of organization and habit, but he is a
criminal by profession. He is an idle and worthless vagabond, but he
is an accomplished thief. He makes an excellent prisoner, obedient to
the rules, industrious, and seemingly anxious to improve. In fact, the
prison furnishes his best environment, for it is only there that he is
at peace with himself and his world.
[Illustration: Contrasts, No. 1.]
[Illustration: Contrasts, No. 2.]
The last two men presented are contrasts. No. 1 is an accidental
criminal. His previous history and character give strong grounds for
the belief that, under pressure of want for the necessaries of life,
he was led astray by a man older and stronger than himself. It is not
likely that he would repeat his fault. No. 2, on the other hand, is a
sexual pervert of the worst kind, whose case seems so hopeless that
perpetual imprisonment is indicated as the only relief for him, and the
only safety for society. Apart from the expression of his eyes, caused
by an irregular focus, there is nothing marked about the face. The head
is of a pronounced "broad" type, but, on the other hand, he comes from
a province of Germany where that type is dominant.
To complete the experiment, I submitted these portraits to a number
of gentlemen, and to no two of them at the same time, for their
opinions of the cases. The informal committee represented the different
professions which might be expected to fit men for observation, for
there was a lawyer, a physician, a railway president, a criminal judge,
and a college professor. Each of them is eminent in his special field.
The committee was manifestly handicapped by the shorn head, the prison
dress, and the lack of the accessories of masculine ornamentation, such
as collars and cravats. The committee was asked to name the crimes,
and to group the men according to their criminal record. Each opinion
differed from the other, and all were wide of the mark. The shrewd
lawyer thought the accidental criminal "might be guilty of anything."
It was only the college professor, the last man of the company from
whom anything might properly be expected, who was able to select the
worst two cases with the remark, "These men are degenerates." But while
the committee was at work on the photographs the writer was at work on
the committee, and actually discovered more anomalies of organization
in these distinguished citizens than are apparent in the criminals.
After this remark it is necessary to withhold their names, though some
of them are men of national reputation.
It is time to reassert with increasing emphasis the personal
responsibility of the individual, and to insist upon the enthronement
and guidance of conscience. There are certainly social and economic
reasons for crime, some of which the writer has pointed out elsewhere,
but the chief fact in human life is the power of self-determination.
The chief causes of crime, outside of personal and moral degradation,
are psychical and not physical. The reader of history can not fail
to have noted that relation of prevalent ideas to conduct which is
so conspicuous in human affairs. The scenes of blood and desolation
characteristic of the French Revolution are directly traceable to the
doctrines which prepared the way for anarchy, but not for rational
freedom.
We have had our attention directed to the contagion of suicide which
has marked the last half decade. But Lecky tells us that suicide was
made practically unknown in the civilized world by the spread of
Christianity and its beliefs in the dignity and sanctity of man. The
present contagion will disappear not as the result of food, or raiment,
or houses, or any other material good, but by a revival of practical
faith in the human soul and its capacity, in human righteousness and
its obligation.
A CENTURY OF GEOLOGY.
BY PROF. JOSEPH LE CONTE.
[_Concluded._]
THE AGE OF THE EARTH.
Until almost the beginning of the present century the general belief in
all Christian countries was that not only the earth and man, but the
whole cosmos, began to exist about six thousand to seven thousand years
ago; furthermore, that all was made at once without natural process,
and have remained substantially unchanged ever since. This is the old
doctrine of the supernatural origin and substantial permanency of the
earth and its features. Among intelligent and especially scientific men
this doctrine, even in the eighteenth century, began to be questioned,
although not publicly; for in 1751 Buffon was compelled by the Sorbonne
to retract certain views concerning the age of the earth, published in
his Natural History in 1749.[1] Remnants of the old belief lingered
even into the early part of the present century, and may even yet be
found hiding away in some of the remote corners of civilized countries.
But with the birth of geology, and especially through the work of
Hutton in Scotland, Cuvier in France, and William Smith in England,
the much greater--the inconceivably great--antiquity of the earth and
the origin of its present forms, by gradual changes which are still
going on, was generally acknowledged. Indeed, as already said, this is
the fundamental idea of geology, without which it could not exist as a
science.
Geology has its own measures of time--in eras, periods, epochs,
ages, etc.--but it is natural and right that we should desire more
accurate estimates by familiar standards. How old, then, is the
earth, especially the inhabited earth, in years? Geologists have
attempted to answer this question by estimates based on the rates of
sedimentation and erosion, or else on the rate of changes of organic
forms by struggle for life and survival of the fittest. Physicists have
attempted to answer the same question by calculations based on known
laws of dissipation of energy in a cooling body, such as the sun or the
earth. The results of the two methods differ widely. The estimates of
the geologists are enormous, and growing ever greater as the conditions
of the problem are better understood. Nothing less than several hundred
million years will serve his purpose. The estimates of the physicists
are much more moderate, and apparently growing less with each revision.
The latest results of King and Kelvin give only twenty to thirty
millions.[2] This the geologist declares is absurdly inadequate. He can
not work freely in so narrow a space--he has not elbow room.
The subject is still discussed very earnestly, but with little hope of
definite conclusion. One thing, however, must be remarked. Both parties
assume--the geologist tacitly, the physicist avowedly--the nebular
hypothesis of the origin of the solar system, and therefore the early
incandescent _fluid_ condition of the earth as the basis of all his
reasonings. Now, while this is probably the most reasonable view, it is
not so certain that it can be made the basis of complex mathematical
calculation. There is a possible alternative theory--viz., the meteoric
theory--which is coming more and more into favor. According to this
view, the planets may have been formed by aggregation of meteoric
swarms, and the heat of the earth produced by the collision of the
meteors in the act of aggregation. According to the one view (the
nebular), the heat is all primal, and the earth has been only losing
heat all the time. According to the other, the aggregation and the
heating are both gradual, and may have continued even since the earth
was inhabited. According to the one, the spendthrift earth wasted
nearly all its energy before it became habitable or even a crust was
formed, and therefore the habitable period must be comparatively short.
According to the other, the cooling and the heating, the expenditure
and the income, were going on at the same time, and therefore the
process may have lasted much longer.
The subject is much too complex to be discussed here. Suffice it to
say that on this latter view not only the age of the earth, but many
other fundamental problems of dynamical geology, would have to be
recalculated. The solution of these great questions must also be left
to the next century. In the meantime we simply draw attention to two
very recent papers on the subject--viz., that of Lord Kelvin,[3] and
criticism of the same by Chamberlin.[4]
ANTIQUITY AND ORIGIN OF MAN.
Even after the great antiquity of the earth and its origin and
development by a natural process were generally accepted, still man
was believed, even by the most competent geologists, to have appeared
only a few thousand years ago. The change from this old view took
place in the last half of the present century--viz., about 1859--and,
coming almost simultaneously with the publication of Darwin's Origin of
Species, prepared the scientific mind for entertaining, at least, the
idea of man's origin by a natural process of evolution.
Evidences of the work of man--flint implements, associated with the
bones of extinct animals and therefore showing much greater age than
usually accepted--had been reported from time to time, notably those
found in the river Somme by Boucher de Perthes. But the prejudice
against such antiquity was so strong that geologists with one accord,
and without examination, pooh-poohed all such evidence as incredible.
It was Sir Joseph Prestwich who, in 1859, first examined them
carefully, and published the proofs that convinced the geological world
that early man was indeed contemporaneous with the extinct animals of
the Quaternary period, and that the time must have been many times
greater than usually allowed.[5]
Since that time confirmatory evidence has accumulated, and the earliest
appearance of man has been pushed back first to the late glacial, then
to the middle glacial, and finally, in Mr. Prestwich's Plateau Gravels,
to the early glacial or possibly preglacial times.
Still, however, in every case earliest man was unmistakably man. No
links connecting him with other anthropoids had been found. Very
recently, however, have been found, by Du Bois, in Java, the skull,
teeth, and thigh bone of what seems to be a veritable _missing_ link,
named by the discoverer _Pithecanthropus erectus_. The only question
that seems to remain is whether it should be regarded as an ape
more manlike than any known ape, or a man more apelike than any yet
discovered. The age of this creature was either latest Pliocene or
earliest Quaternary.
BREAKS IN THE GEOLOGICAL RECORD AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE.
From the earliest times of geologic study there have been observed
unconformities of the strata and corresponding changes in the fossil
contents. Some of these unconformities are local and the changes of
organic forms inconsiderable, but sometimes they are of wider extent
and the changes of life system greater. In some cases the unconformity
is universal or nearly so, and in such cases we find a complete
and apparently sudden change in the fossil contents. It was these
universal breaks that gave rise to the belief in the occurrence of
violent catastrophes and corresponding wholesale exterminations and
re-creations of faunas and floras.
It is evident, however, on a little reflection, that every such
unconformity indicates a land period at the place observed, and
therefore a time unrecorded in strata and fossils at that place--i.
e., a lost interval--certain leaves missing from the book of time. And
if the unconformity be widespread, the lost interval is correspondingly
great. It is therefore probable that change of species went on slowly
and uniformly all the time, although not recorded at that place.
Intermediate strata may be and often are found elsewhere, and the
supposed lost interval filled. The record was continuous and the
changes uniform, but the record is not all found in one place. The
leaves of the book of Time are scattered here and there, and it is the
duty of the geologist to gather and arrange them in proper order, so
that the record may read continuously.
This is the uniformitarian view, and is undoubtedly far truer than
the catastrophic. But the objection to it is that in the case of very
widespread unconformities, such as occurred several times in the
history of the earth, the changes of organisms are so great that if the
rate of change was uniform the lost interval must have been equal to
all the rest of the history put together. Therefore we are compelled
to admit that in the history of the earth there have been periods of
comparative quiet (not fixedness) during which evolutionary changes
were slow and regular, and periods of revolution during which the
changes were much more rapid, but not catastrophic. This is exactly
what we ought to expect on the idea of gradual evolution of earth
forms by secular cooling, for in the gradual contraction of the earth
there must come times of general readjustment of the crust to the
shrinking nucleus. These readjustments would cause great changes in
physical geography and climate, and corresponding rapid changes in
organic forms. In addition to this, the changes in physical geography
and climate would cause extensive migrations of species, and therefore
minglings of faunas and floras, severer struggles of competing forms,
and more rapid advance in the steps of evolution. Among these changes
of organic forms there would arise and have arisen _new dominant
types_, and these, in their turn, would compel new adjustment of
relations and still further hasten the steps of evolution. Such
changes, whether geographic, or climatic, or organic, would _not_
be simultaneous all over the earth, but propagated from place to
place, until quiet was re-established and a new period of comparative
stability and prosperity commenced.
This view is a complete reconciliation of catastrophism and
uniformitarianism, and is far more rational than either extreme.
_Critical Periods in the History of the Earth._--Such periods of rapid
change may well be called _critical periods or revolutions_. They are
marked by several characteristics: (1) By widespread oscillations of
the earth's crust, and therefore by almost universal unconformities.
(2) By widespread changes of physical geography, and therefore by
great changes in climate. (3) By great and widespread changes in
organic forms, produced partly by the physical changes and partly by
the extensive migrations. (4) By the evolution of new dominant types,
which are also the cause of extensive changes in species. (5) Among the
physical changes occurring at these times is the formation of great
mountain ranges. The names of these critical periods or revolutions are
often taken from the mountain range which form their most conspicuous
features.
There have been at least four of these critical periods, or periods of
greatest change: (1) The pre-Cambrian or Laurentide revolution; (2)
the post-Paleozoic or Appalachian; (3) the post-Cretaceous or Rocky
Mountain; (4) the post-Tertiary or glacial revolution.
Now, as these critical periods separate the primary divisions of
time--the eras--it follows that the _Present_--the Age of Man--is an
era. It may be called the _Psychozoic Era_. These views have been
mainly advocated by the writer of this sketch, but I believe that, with
perhaps some modification in statement, they would be accepted by most
geologists as a permanent acquisition of science.[6]
GEOLOGICAL CLIMATES.
Attention was first drawn to this subject by the apparently unique
phenomena of the Glacial epoch.
For nearly a century past Alpine glaciers, their structure, their
mysterious motion, and their characteristic erosive effects, have
excited the keenest interest of scientific men. But until about 1840
the interest was purely physical. It was Louis Agassiz who first
recognized ice as a great _geological agent_. He had long been familiar
with the characteristic marks of glacial action, and with the fact
that Alpine glaciers were far more extensive formerly than now, and
had, moreover, conceived the idea of a Glacial epoch--an ice age in
the history of the earth. With this idea in his mind, in 1840 he
visited England, and found the marks of glaciers all over the higher
regions of England and Scotland. He boldly announced that the whole
of northern Europe was once covered with a universal ice sheet. A few
years later he came to the United States, and found the tracks of
glaciers everywhere, and again astonished the world by asserting that
the whole northern part of the North American continent was modeled
by a moving ice sheet. This idea has been confirmed by all subsequent
investigation, especially here in America.
But it would be strange, indeed, if the cold of the Glacial epoch
should be absolutely unique. Attention was soon called to similar marks
in rocks of other geological periods, especially in the Permian of the
southern hemisphere. This opened up the general question of _geological
climates and their causes_.
Perhaps no subject connected with the physics of the earth is more
obscure and difficult than this. The facts, as far as we know them,
are briefly as follows: (1) All the evidence we have point to a
high, even an ultra-tropical, climate in early geological times;
(2) all the evidence points to a uniform distribution of this early
high temperature, so that the zonal arrangement of temperatures,
such as characterizes present climates, did not then exist; (3)
temperature zones were apparently first introduced in the late Mesozoic
(Cretaceous) or early Tertiary times, and during the Tertiary the
colder zones were successively added, until at the end there was formed
a polar ice-cap as now.
Thus far all might be explained by progressive cooling of the earth
and progressive clearing of the atmosphere of its excess CO_[2] and
aqueous vapor. But (4) from time to time (i. e., at critical periods)
there occurred great oscillations of temperature, the last and probably
the greatest of these being the Glacial period. The cause of these
great oscillations of temperature, and especially the cause of the
glacial climate, is one of the most interesting and yet one of the
obscurest and therefore one of most hotly disputed points in geology.
Indeed, the subject has entered into the region of almost profitless
discussion. We must wait for further light and for another century.
Only one remark seems called for here. It is in accordance with a true
scientific method that we should exhaust terrestrial causes before we
resort to cosmical. The most usual terrestrial cause invoked is the
oscillation of the earth's crust. But recently Chamberlin, in a most
suggestive paper,[7] has invoked oscillations in the composition of the
atmosphere, especially in its proportion of CO_[2], as the _immediate_
cause, although this in turn is due to oscillations of the earth's
crust.
THE NEW GEOLOGY.
Heretofore the geological history of the earth has been studied only
in the record of stratified rocks and their contained fossils. But in
every place there have been land-periods in which, of course, erosion
took the place of sedimentation. This kind of record is very imperfect,
because there are no fossils. Until recently no account was taken of
these erosion-periods except as breaks of indefinite length in the
record--as lost intervals. But now, and mainly through the work of
American geologists, interpretation of these erosion-periods has fairly
commenced, and so important has this new departure in the study of
geology seemed to some that it has been hailed as a new era in geology,
connecting it more closely with geography. Heretofore _former_ land
periods were recognized by unconformities and the amount of time by
the degree of change in the fossils, but now the amount of time is
estimated in _existing_ land surfaces by topographic _forms_ alone.
This idea was introduced into geology by Major J. W. Powell, and has
been applied with success by William Morris Davis, W. J. McGee, and
others.
The principle is this: Land surface subject to erosion and standing
still is finally cut down to gently sweeping curves, with low, rounded
divides and broad, shallow troughs. Such a surface is called by Davis
a Peneplain. Such a peneplain is characteristic of old topography.
If such a surface be again lifted to higher level, the rivers again
dissect it by ravines, which are deep and narrow in proportion to the
amount and rate of the uplift. If the land again remains steady, the
sharply dissected surface is again slowly smoothed out to the gentle
curves of a peneplain. If, on the contrary, the surface be depressed,
the rivers fill up the channels with sediment which, on re-elevation,
is again dissected. Thus the whole _ontogeny_ of land surfaces have
been studied out, so that their age may be recognized at sight.
Thus, while heretofore the more recent movements of the crust were
supposed to be readable only on coast lines and by means of the old
sea strands, now we read with equal ease the movements of the interior
by means of the physiognomy of the topography, and especially the
structure of the river channels. Moreover, while heretofore the history
of the earth was supposed to be recorded only in stratified rock and
their contained fossils, now we find that recent history is recorded
and may be read also in the general topography of the land surfaces.
Geography is studied no longer as mere description of earth forms, but
also as to the causes of these forms, no longer as to present forms,
but also as to the history of their becoming. Thus geography, by its
alliance with geology, has become a truly scientific study, and as
such is now introduced into the colleges and universities. It is this
alliance with geology which has caused the dry bones of geographic
facts to live. It is this which has created a soul under the dry "_ribs
of this death_." This mode of study of the history of the earth has
just commenced. How much will come of it is yet to be shown in the next
century.
In this connection it is interesting to trace the effect of environment
on geological reasonings in different countries. Heretofore, especially
in England, what we have called peneplains were usually attributed to
marine denudation--i. e., to cutting back of a coast line by constant
action of the waves, leaving behind a level submarine plateau, which
is afterward raised above sea level and dissected by rivers. American
geologists, on the contrary, are apt to regard such level surfaces as
the final result of aërial degradation or a base level of rain and
river erosion. The same difference is seen in the interpretation of
glacial phenomena. Until recently, English geologists were inclined
to attribute more to iceberg, Americans more to land ice. Again, in
England coast scenery is apt to be attributed mainly to the ravages
of the sea, while in America we attribute more to land erosion
combined with subsidence of the coast line. In a word, in the tight
little sea-girt island of Great Britain, where the ravages of the
sea are yearly making such serious inroads upon the area of the
land, it is natural that the power of the sea should strongly affect
the imagination and impress itself on geological theories, and tend
perhaps to exaggeration of sea agencies, while the broad features
of the American continent and the evidences of prodigious erosion
in comparatively recent geological time tend to the exaggeration of
erosive agency of rain and rivers. These two must be duly weighed and
each given its right proportion in the work of earth sculpture.
PALEONTOLOGY.
Paleontology at first attracted attention mainly by the new and strange
life forms which it revealed. It is the interest of a zoölogical
garden. This interest is of course perennial, but can hardly be called
scientific. Geology at first was a kind of wonder book.
Next fossils, especially marine shells, were studied as characteristic
forms denoting strata of a particular age. They were coins by which we
identify certain periods of history. They were "medals of creation."
It was in this way chiefly that William Smith, the founder of English
stratigraphic geology, used them. It was in this way that Lyell and
all the older geologists, until the advent of evolution, were chiefly
interested in them.
It was Cuvier, the great zoölogist and comparative anatomist, who, in
the beginning of the present century, first studied fossils, especially
mammalian fossils, from the _zoölogical_ point of view--i. e., as
to their affinities with existing animals. Cuvier's studies of the
vertebrates of the Paris basin may be said to have laid the foundation
of scientific paleontology from this point of view.
Thenceforward two views of paleontology and two modes of study
gradually differentiated from one another, the one zoölogical, the
other geological. In the one case we study fossils in _taxonomic_
groups--i. e., as species, genera, families, orders, etc.--and trace
the gradual evolution of each of these from generalized forms to their
specialized outcomes, completing as far as possible the genetic chain
through all time. In the other we study fossils in _faunal groups_,
as successive geological faunas, and the geographic diversity in
each geological period--i. e., the evolution of geologic faunas and
the causes of geographic diversity in each. In a word, we study the
laws of distribution of faunas in time geologically and in space
geographically, and the causes of these laws in each case. The first
is strictly a branch of zoölogy and botany, and we leave it to these
specialists. The second alone belongs properly to geology. In this
purely geologic paleontology, as seen from its scope given above, there
are many questions of widest philosophical interest which are only now
attracting the attention they deserve. I only touch lightly two which
have been brought forward in these very last years of the century.
I. GENERAL LAWS OF FAUNAL EVOLUTION.--The evolution of the organic
kingdom from this strictly geological point of view may be briefly
formulated as follows:
1. Throughout all geological time there has been a general movement
upward and onward, as it were abreast, everywhere. If this were all,
there would be only geological progress, but no geographical diversity.
Geological history would be the same everywhere. A time horizon would
be easily determined by identity of fossil species. This we know is not
true. Therefore there are other elements besides this.
2. In different countries, isolated from one another and under
different conditions, evolution takes different _directions_ and
different _rates_, producing geographical diversity in each geological
period. This diversity increases with time as long as the isolation
continues. If this were all, the geographical diversity by continued
divergence would have become so great that it would be impossible even
approximately to determine any geological horizon. The history of each
country must be studied for itself. A general history of the earth
would be impossible. But this also is not true. There is therefore
still another element.
3. From time to time, at long intervals--i. e., _critical
periods_--there are widespread readjustments of the crust to internal
strain, determining changes of physical geography and of climate,
and therefore wide migrations of species with mingling and conflict
of faunas. This would produce more rapid movement of evolution, but
at the same time more or less complete obliteration of geographical
diversity.
4. After these periods of migrations and minglings there would be
re-isolations in new localities, and the process of diversification
would recommence and increase as long as the isolation continues.
The last of these critical periods of migrations and minglings and
struggles for life among competing species was the _Glacial epoch_ or
ice age. Therefore the present geographical distribution of species was
largely determined by the extensive migrations of that time.
II. COSMOPOLITAN AND PROVINCIAL FAUNAS.--There are apparently in the
history of the earth periods of widespread or cosmopolitan faunas,
alternating with localized or provincial faunas. The cosmopolitan
periods are usually times of prevalence of limestones or organic
sediments, and the fossils are very abundant. The provincial periods
are usually characterized by sandstones and shales or mechanical
sediments, and are comparatively poor in fossils. Moreover, it
is believed that the cosmopolitan limestone periods are oceanic
periods--i. e., periods of wide oceans and lower and smaller continents
and little erosive activity, while the sandstone periods, characterized
by provincial faunas, are periods of higher and larger continents, and
therefore of great erosion and abundant mechanical sedimentation.
Now, according to Chamberlin, these remarkable alternations are due
to oscillations of the crust, in which the continents are alternately
lifted and depressed. It must be remembered that abyssal faunas
are almost unknown among fossils. This is the necessary result of
substantial permanency of oceanic basins. The whole geological record
is in shallow-water faunas. These shallow waters are along continental
shore lines and in interior continental seas. According to Chamberlin
again, during a period of continental depression all the flat
continental margins are submerged, forming broad submarine platforms,
and the lower interior portions of the continents are also submerged,
forming wide and shallow interior seas. Under these conditions
continental waste, and therefore sand and clay sediments, are reduced
to a minimum. Life, animal and vegetal, abounds, and therefore much
limestone is formed. The oceans are widely connected with one another,
and therefore the faunas are widespread or cosmopolitan. During the
period of elevation, on the contrary, the continents are extended to
the margin of the deep oceanic basins, the broad, shallow submarine
platforms are abolished, the interior seas are also abolished, the
shallow-water areas are reduced to isolated bays, and their faunas are
peculiar or provincial. Also, elevated and enlarged continents give
rise to maximum erosion, and therefore abundant sediments of sandstone
and clay, and comparative poverty of life and therefore of limestone.
Chamberlin also gives reasons why the oceanic periods should be warm,
humid, equable in temperature, and the atmosphere highly charged
with CO_[2], and therefore highly favorable to abundant life, both
vegetal and animal, while land periods would be drier and cooler, the
atmosphere deficient in CO_[2], and therefore cold from that cause and
in many ways unfavorable to abundant life.
These extremely interesting views, however, must be regarded as still
on trial, as a provisional hypothesis to be sifted, confirmed, or
rejected, or in any case modified, in the next century.
Lastly, it is interesting to note the ever-increasing part taken by
American geologists in the advance of this science. There has been
through the century a gradual movement of what might be called the
center of gravity of geological research westward, until now, at its
end, the most productive activity is here in America. This is not due
to any superiority of American geologists, but to the superiority of
their opportunities. Dana has well said that _America is the type
continent of the world_. All geological problems are expressed here
with a clearness and a simplicity not found elsewhere. We must add to
this the comparative recency of geological study in this rich field. In
Europe the simpler and broader problems are already worked out, and all
that remain are difficult problems requiring much time. In America, on
the contrary, not only are all problems expressed in simpler terms, but
many great and broad problems are still awaiting solution. For these
reasons the greatest activity in research, and the most rapid advance
during the next century, will probably be here in America.
"SALAMANDERS" AND "SALAMANDER" CATS.
BY NORMAN ROBINSON.
In many places in the extreme Southern States, especially in what is
locally known as the "piney woods," one of the most notable features
is the constantly recurring mounds of yellow sand which everywhere dot
and, it must be confessed, disfigure the monotonous landscape. These
piles of earth are usually nearly circular in form, fairly symmetrical
in contour, from six inches to two feet in diameter, and, save where
they have been beaten down by rain or winds or the trampling of cattle,
about half as high as they are broad. Often these sand heaps are
pretty evenly distributed, sometimes so thickly as to cover at least
one fourth of the soil surface. If you ask a native the cause of
this singular phenomenon, which you will perhaps at first be disposed
to consider a kind of arenaceous eruption which has somehow broken
out on the face of Nature, your informant will sententiously reply,
"Salamanders!"
All this disfigurement is indeed the work of a curious little rodent
popularly so named and about the size and color of an ordinary rat.
He is never seen above ground if he can possibly help it. He digs
innumerable branching underground tunnels at depths varying from one to
six feet, and these mounds of sand are simply the "dump heaps" which,
in his engineering operations, he finds it necessary to make.
[Illustration: "SNAP-SHOT" VIEW OF A LIVE "SALAMANDER."]
After carrying the excavated earth to the surface this cautious little
miner takes the greatest pains to cover up his tracks. No opening into
his burrow is left. How he manages to so carefully smooth over his
little sand mound and then literally "pull the hole in after him" is
as yet unexplained. The work is mostly done at night, when observation
is especially difficult. Sometimes, when he is a little belated and
the early morning twilight admonishes him that it is "quitting time,"
he gets in a hurry and slights his work. Then a little depression at
the top of the mound tells where he has made a hasty exit. Ordinarily
the rounding out of the sand pile is as deftly done as though it had
all been managed from above. Indeed, the feat actually accomplished by
this little underground builder appears more puzzling the more it is
considered. The most skilled human engineer would confess his inability
to thus pile up a mound of loose sand, go down through it, leave
the top perfectly smoothed over, and, with no supports save the sand
itself, to so fill up the passageway above him as he went down that not
the slightest mark should be left to indicate his pathway of retreat.
Even if you dig into and under one of these sand mounds you will find
very little to betray the builder's whereabouts. It is seemingly all
solid earth, and unless you know exactly when and where and how to
dig you will probably give up the search in disgust, with your labor
and your backache but no "salamander" hole for your pains. Indeed,
the cunning of this little rodent in hiding his burrow is quite as
conspicuous as his skill in digging it. "Strategy" is his strong
point. If by any chance you come upon his burrow it is probably an old
abandoned one that is closed up and leads nowhere. The chances are ten
to one that his real burrow is rods if not furlongs away.
Provided you can find the last mound he has built and not more than
four or five hours have elapsed since its completion, by digging
diagonally to the right or left, at the distance of a foot or so, you
will have a fair chance of encountering his burrow. He is probably near
by, resting from the severe labors of the previous night. If you give
him time to get his nap out and finish his job, your wiser plan will be
to stop hunting and digging a little before you begin.
Why this little underground dweller should be called "salamander" is
one of those mysteries of popular nomenclature which is seemingly
inexplicable. There is certainly nothing in the habits or appearance of
the animal to suggest the fabled fireproof batrachian. Like some other
lovers of darkness, he has quite a number of _aliases_ by which in
various portions of the South and West he is known. "Gopher," "pouched
rat," "hamster," and "muelos" are some of the titles by which he is
locally known. "Salamander" appears to be the most generally accepted
one.
This enterprising little rodent belongs to an ancient if not honorable
family. By naturalists he is generally known as "pocket gopher," and
is classed among the _Geomyidæ_. Some fifteen known species have
been recognized, with possibly more to hear from, and with a habitat
extending quite across the continent. The Florida species is probably
_Geomys tuza_ (Ord.), and though not as large as one or two others, is
quite the peer of any of his cousins in enterprise and ability to look
out for himself.
The illustration given is from what is probably the only photograph of
a living "salamander" ever taken. Mr. Geomys is not a model "sitter."
No unwilling candidate for the "rogues' gallery" has more decided
views on the subject of having his picture taken. In a general way,
it may be said that he doesn't pose for anybody. Precisely how this
prejudice was finally overcome it is needless to state. Perseverance
and "snap shots" were too much for our recalcitrant rodent. In the
matter of "looking pleasant" it must be conceded that Mr. Geomys was a
little intractable.
[Illustration: "DUMP HEAPS" OF THE "SALAMANDER."]
The fore legs and feet of the "salamander" are worth studying. They
remind one somewhat of those of the mole, but are more stoutly built,
with much longer claws, and are evidently designed for harder tasks.
They are controlled by powerful brachial and pectoral muscles, and,
as we shall see, are not only special tools adapted to special and
difficult work, but work which requires an enormous expenditure of
physical force.
The engineering problems which this little troglodyte has to solve are
far and away ahead of any that the New York Rapid-Transit Commission
has to deal with. It is very much as though a single miner were placed
over in Hoboken, a hundred feet below the surface, with instructions to
tunnel under the Hudson River with no tools except his hands, without
a chance of seeing daylight until he reached it on the New York side,
and with the added conditions that all the excavated earth should be
carried out at the eastern opening of the tunnel, and finally that he
should obliterate all marks of his work and, as he retreated into his
tunnel, pack the exit shaft above him so tightly and so deftly that it
is impossible to trace its course!
How our little fur-coated engineer solves all these problems is as
yet a mystery. We only know that he does it. He has a steam engine in
his shoulders and shovels for hands, but his exact methods of using
them is as yet largely a matter of conjecture. Only two plans of
operation would seem to be possible. One would be for the "salamander"
to first carry the excavated earth all to the rear into some portion
of his already finished tunnel, and finally, when the outward exit is
completed, to carry it back again and deposit it on the surface. This,
of course, involves a double transfer of all the earth removed. It is
more likely that the "salamander" first forces a narrow passageway
along the line of his future tunnel in a way similar to that pursued
by the mole. The latter animal has the advantage of working near
the surface, and the earth always yields along the line of least
resistance, which of course is upward. Four or five feet down there
is no such line, and the amount of force required to push the ground
aside must be something enormous. When the "salamander" comes to the
upper air the work of excavation and enlargement begins. He then piles
upon the surface all the earth that he can not use in obliterating his
upward passageway. As the writer has frequently observed fresh sand
mounds hundreds of feet from any others, he is inclined to believe that
this is the real method pursued.
The exceeding care which the "salamander" takes to leave no opening
into his subterranean home arises, no doubt, from his horror of snakes.
In this respect no woman can surpass him. His antipathies to reptiles
are probably the accumulated embodiment of hundreds of centuries of
ancestral experience. He is aware that these hereditary enemies of his
race are of a very investigating turn of mind, and put in a good deal
of spare time when awake in crawling into and exploring any tempting
hole they may discover. And so Mr. Geomys, like the sensible fellow
that he is, not only takes good care to shut and lock his front gate
every time he is compelled to go through it, but he blocks up the whole
passageway and does his best to convince trespassers that it is all a
mistake to suppose that there ever has been any roadway leading to his
underground home.
Indeed, it is by taking advantage of this morbid antipathy to intruders
and daylight that our little underground dweller is usually caught. If
by skillful digging a recently formed burrow is reached, one may be
reasonably certain that in from five to ten minutes Mr. "Salamander"
will be on hand to see what has happened and to repair damages. A
shotgun kept steadily aimed at the opening, and with a quick pull on
the trigger the instant the slightest movement in the sand is seen,
"fetches" him every time. Another very successful method is to place
a strong trap right at the opening into his burrow. In making repairs
our "salamander" is in too big a hurry to look very carefully where he
steps, and so is quite likely to blunder into the trap. He is always
caught, however, by one of his legs, and if left any length of time
is quite apt to gnaw off the captive limb and thus make his escape.
Spartan bravery or love of freedom surpassing this would be hard to
find.
The food of _Geomys bursarius_ appears to be exclusively vegetable.
Native roots and root stocks, cones and bulbs, together with the root
bark of various trees, are eaten by him, and sometimes in a very
annoying way. Orange trees are peculiarly liable to his attacks. He
gnaws through and around the tap root as near to the surface as he can
without disturbing it or in any way calling attention to his work, and
not infrequently he continues his depredations until every root of any
size is eaten off. This, of course, means the death of the tree.
From the "salamander" point of view, however, the greatest food
"bonanza" of all is a sweet-potato patch. "A 'possum up a 'simmon
tree" or a "pig in clover" is not more alive to the delights and
advantages of the situation. He not only eats all he can stuff, but
invites his relatives and friends. Nor is this all. He has learned
that in autumn sweet potatoes are liable to suddenly disappear, so he
"takes time"--and the potatoes--"by the forelock," and packs them away
in liberal measure in his burrow for winter use. So well understood
are the ways and weaknesses of this underground marauder that any
suspicious mound of earth in a sweet-potato field is the signal for an
active campaign of extermination, which ends only in the intruder's
flight or death.
The "side pockets" of the "salamander" have already been referred to.
They are undoubtedly a great convenience to their owner in carrying
food and possibly other things. The capacity of these cheek pouches is
about sufficient to give room for a pigeon's egg. They are, however,
quite extensile, and can readily be made to hold three or four times
this amount. Indeed, the skin and underlying connective tissue are so
elastic that these pockets can readily be turned inside out. It is
claimed that the "salamander" employs his handlike fore feet to fill
and empty these receptacles, using the right foot for the left pouch,
and _vice versa_. A gentleman in Florida recently assured me that by a
lucky thrust of a spade he once killed one of these mischievous rodents
as he was in the very act of cutting off the roots of an orange tree.
The cheek pouches of the culprit were filled with fragments of bark
which he had gnawed off, doubtless to be stowed away in his burrow.
Why, in a climate where there is almost no winter, where there is
very little interruption to vegetable growth and the food supply
is practically unlimited, provisions should thus be stored away is
somewhat difficult to explain. It is not impossible that it is simply
the survival of an ancestral habit acquired during the Glacial period.
Or it may be that, like the dog, the "salamander" finds the flavor
of old and well-seasoned food more to his taste. All that can be
positively affirmed is that this wise little rodent does, occasionally
at least, thus _caché_ his food supplies.
One of the most curious results of the existence and habits of this
elusive little burrowing rodent is the development of a new and
peculiar breed of _Felis domestica_, called "salamander" cats. Ordinary
tabbys do not understand or admire the ways of _Geomys bursarius_,
or, for some other good and sufficient feline reason, do not include
him in their game list. The variety of cats in question, which, so
far as the author knows, is confined to Florida, appears to have been
developed spontaneously and with very little if any human agency, and
is noted for its special skill in catching "salamanders," as well as a
decided liking for the sport. Any Mrs. Tabby of this breed, especially
if she has a family to provide for, is up betimes in the morning. The
particular object of her pursuit is a remarkably early riser, and
finishes his day's work before most people have begun theirs. So if
there is a convenient fence around the grounds she proposes to hunt
she mounts it with the first peep of day, and, with a sharp eye to
landward, starts on her tour of observation. Any fresh pile of sand
is closely scrutinized. The slightest movement there brings her to
the mound with a spring, and she is at once crouching behind it; so
when Mr. Geomys comes up in a big hurry with his next load of sand he
finds somebody to meet him that is in a bigger hurry still, and so the
unsuspecting victim is borne off in triumph.
An estimable lady of the writer's acquaintance who owned one of these
"salamander" cats, with a single juvenile pussy to provide for, kept
an accurate account of the number of these rodents which she saw this
industrious mother cat bring to her offspring in a single month. The
number was thirty, and as the month happened to be February this gave,
of course, two more than a "salamander" a day.
One other curious observed feature of this new variety of cats is their
want of fecundity. The mother tabby seldom has more than one kitten
at a birth. The writer once owned a fine female of this breed that
scrupulously adhered to the traditional habits of her race.
This particular pussy, like the rest of us, had her family troubles.
Her one kitten--probably from its mixed parentage--was always inclined
to rebel at the "salamander" diet. There was something amusing to a
degree and suggestively human in the old cat's methods of discipline.
When she had succeeded in catching a salamander she would always first
bring it and lay it down before her mistress, to make sure of the
praise and the petting. Then, with a motherly "_meow_," she would call
her kitten. That frisky little youngster was always quite ready for his
breakfast, but showed a decided preference for the "maternal font."
Then the old cat would give him a "cuff" that would send him spinning.
Then she would take up the "salamander" and put it down before her
hopeful offspring with an air that said as plainly as words could do:
"There, now! Eat that or go hungry!" Then her mother love would get the
better of her and she would go to licking and petting her disobedient
baby, and it would usually end in the kitten's having its own way
and satisfying its hunger with milk from the "original package." By
persistence and the force of example the old cat finally succeeded in
accustoming her offspring to what she evidently thought the orthodox
diet of her race.
The writer is quite well aware of the intrinsic difficulties involved
in the spontaneous development of any new variety of cats. Still, such
branching of types has occurred in the past, and of course is possible
now. When his attention was first called to the matter he was inclined
to consider it merely an instance of animal education. A fact that came
under his personal observation seems, however, hard to reconcile with
this or any theory that does not concede the hereditary transmission of
acquired habits and tastes.
A kitten of the breed of cats in question was taken when very young and
reared nearly a mile away from its mother. When grown it developed the
same skill in hunting "salamanders," and the same love for the sport as
that for which its mother was celebrated.
Dogs, of course, have long been noted for the readiness with which
acquired knowledge, habits, and tastes manifest and perpetuate
themselves in hereditary forms. The setter, pointer, collie, St.
Bernard, and other well-known breeds will occur to everyone as
illustrating this psychic plasticity. Doubtless the cat brain is
somewhat less impressible, but there would seem to be good reasons for
including it among the educably variable types.
WHAT MAKES THE TROLLEY CAR GO.
BY WILLIAM BAXTER, JR., C. E.
III.
NOTE.--Figs. 28 and 32 are reproductions of photographs kindly
furnished by the General Electric Company, while for the view of car,
Fig. 30, we are indebted to Colonel N. H. Heft, chief electrical
engineer of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad.
Although the electric railway has been introduced throughout the
civilized world with the most remarkable rapidity, replacing cable as
well as horse roads, there has always been a strong opposition to the
use of the overhead trolley, and in some places, as, for instance, the
city of New York, this opposition has been so strong as to prevent the
introduction of the system until some other means of conveying the
current to the moving cars was devised. Many attempts have been made
to solve this problem, and the patents taken out on such devices can
be numbered by the hundred and possibly by the thousand. Inventors
in this field, however, have not met with all the encouragement they
could desire, owing to the fact that, notwithstanding opposition, the
overhead trolley has been permitted in all but about three or four of
the larger cities of this country, and the greater portion of those
of other countries. The principal well-founded objection that can be
raised against the trolley is that it is unsightly and destroys the
appearance of the street, but those who are opposed to it also claim
that it is dangerous, and that underground or surface systems would not
be. As a matter of fact it is not dangerous, and there is nothing on
record to show that it is. Many persons have been run over by trolley
cars, but this is no fault of the overhead trolley; it is due to the
fact that street railroads are permitted to run cars through crowded
streets at a speed that is too great for safety. Underground conduit
cars running at the same speed would run over just as many people. In
accusing the trolley of being dangerous it is sought to prove that
the current flowing in the wire can do harm; but the history of the
numerous roads in existence shows that, so far as human beings are
concerned, the trolley current is not fatal, although it can give a
decidedly unpleasant shock, such as one would not care to experience
the second time. There is just as great, if not greater, liability
of obtaining shocks from underground systems as from the trolley,
therefore the only real gain that can be made by their use is in the
artistic sense. From a financial point of view no underground system
so far devised can compare with the overhead trolley; but if any one
should devise anything hereafter that can be constructed at the same
expense and will not cost more for maintenance it will undoubtedly find
an extensive application. Until such a perfect solution of the problem
makes its appearance the field for these devices will be confined to
cities like New York and Washington, where the overhead trolley is not
permitted.
Every system of conductors that dispenses with the overhead wire is
called by the layman an underground trolley, but, properly speaking,
these systems may be divided into surface and subsurface conductors.
Both of these may again be divided into exposed and inclosed
conductors, and also into continuous and sectional conductors. Finally,
we may designate the various modifications as mechanical, electrical,
and magnetic, the mechanical being those that accomplish the result
by purely mechanical means, the electrical being those that employ
electrical devices, and the magnetic those that depend for their
action upon the attraction of magnets. The principal difficulties
that the inventors in this field have to contend with are the cost
of construction and the effective insulation of conductors. With the
overhead trolley the current flows out from the power house to the
cars through wires carried on poles, and the poles are themselves good
insulators; but to make the work doubly sure the conductors are secured
to glass insulators, which are practically perfect. The current returns
to the power house through the ground and the track rails. As it is
easier for the current to circulate in a short path than in a long
one, there is a continual tendency for it to jump from the overhead
wire through the insulation to the ground, but this is effectually
prevented by the very perfect character of the insulation. When the
outgoing and incoming wires are both placed upon or underground the
strain upon the insulation is very much increased, for then instead of
the two lines being separated by fifteen or twenty feet of pole, which
is a very fair insulator, they are separated by only a few inches of
earth or perhaps metal, the first of which is a fairly good conductor,
while the last is a nearly perfect one. It is evident, therefore, that
the insulation proper in an underground or surface system must be of
the highest order. If the conduits in which the wires are located
could be kept perfectly dry, there would be no difficulty in obtaining
insulation that would withstand the strain it is subjected to; but rain
in summer and snow in winter will at times cover the tracks and fill
the conduits, hence the securing of perfect insulation presents great
difficulties. The manner in which inventors have sought to surmount
the obstacles can be made clear by the aid of a few illustrations of
typical designs.
[Illustration: FIG. 25.--UNDERGROUND CONDUIT WITH PROTECTING SHIELD FOR
THE CONDUCTOR.]
Fig. 25 shows one of the forms of a class of underground conduits
belonging to the inclosed conductor type. The track rails are supported
upon the outer ends of large castings, _F F_, commonly called yokes.
These are made of such size that the portion below the opening which
incloses the conduit may be of sufficient depth to afford the requisite
strength to properly support the track. The conductor that carries the
current is located at _f_ and is insulated from the casing _j_, which
forms the lower half of the conduit, by the stands _g_. From the car a
bar, _P_, which is called a plow, projects downward through the slot
between the rails, _k k_, and on its end is spread out into a fork,
_d_, which carries a pulley, _e_. When this pulley is in contact with
the conductor _f_ the current passes through the plow _P_ to the motors
upon the car, and thence to the track rails and back to the power house.
As the yokes _F F_ and the conduit casing _j_ are made of iron and
are in metallic connection with the track rails, it is evident that
if the conduits should fill with water to the depth of the wire _f_
the current would pass directly to the rails, and thus would avoid the
longer path through the motors. To prevent this occurrence, the sides
of the conduit are inclosed with the sheet-iron covers _c c_, which
nominally are in the position shown by the dotted lines _i i_. The
plow is also provided with the arms _b b_, upon the ends of which are
mounted small wheels _a a_, and these run upon tracks attached to the
covers _c c_. As is shown in the figure, the wheels _a a_, running upon
the tracks attached to the covers _c c_, cause the latter to spread
out to the position in which they are shown. This spreading, as can be
readily understood, only takes place for a short distance ahead and
behind the plow, but at all other parts of the conduit the sides assume
the position _i i_, and thus close the conduit and exclude the water.
It can be easily seen that some difficulty would be encountered in
making a tight joint at _h h_, and also that the opening and closing of
the sides might not operate as perfectly in practice as upon paper, but
it does not follow from these facts that the design is not practical;
it simply illustrates that there are many minor difficulties to be
overcome in order that complete success may be attained. Many designs
operating upon this principle have been patented, and in some of them a
great amount of ingenuity is displayed.
[Illustration: FIG. 26.--UNDERGROUND CONDUIT WITH INCLOSED CONDUCTOR.]
Fig. 26 illustrates another type of inclosed conductor which at a first
glance appears to be far superior to that just described, but upon
closer investigation it is found to be not wholly free from objections
that are difficult to overcome. The yoke _F F_, as in the design just
described, is made wide enough to support upon its outer ends the track
rails _R R_, and is cut away in the middle to an outline conforming
with the shape of the conduit. The conductor that carries the current
is located at _d_, being supported by the stands _e_. An elastic tube
_f_ is provided, which is water-tight and thus excludes moisture from
its interior, within which the conductor _d_ is located. On the top of
tube _f_ a flexible rail _b_ is secured, and this connects with studs
_c_, which are within the tube, as clearly shown in the drawing, and so
situated that they may be forced down into contact with _d_. Normally
these studs are separated from _d_, but when the car comes along, the
wheel _a_, mounted upon the end of plow _P_, flattens the tube _f_ and
thus forces one or more of the studs _c_ into contact with _d_. The
distance between the studs _c_ is such that at least two will always be
in contact with _d_, thus insuring a continuous electrical connection
with the motors so long as the plow is depressed.
The first impression upon looking at this design would be that it is
entirely free from objections; for if we assume that the tube _f_ is
made of rubber, we can see it in our mind's eye springing up after
the plow passes by and thus separating the contacts _c_ from _d_, and
at the same time yielding freely to the pressure of the wheel _a_.
All of this is true, but rubber is not very durable when under such
exposed conditions, and to maintain a length of several miles of it in
a perfect state for even two or three years could not reasonably be
expected; and if it became necessary to renew the tube oftener than
this the cost of maintenance would be entirely too great. There is
another objection, however, which is more serious, and that is that the
conduit will gradually fill up with dirt, and this pressing against the
rubber tube would force it out of shape, and thus cause the contacts
_c_ to bear permanently upon _d_, or else to become so far displaced
that they would not touch it when depressed by the plow.
As the rubber tube can not be depended upon, inventors have sought
to improve the construction by using sheet steel and making the
tube flatter and much wider, so that a section of it would present
an outline much resembling an elliptic carriage spring. Such a
construction will meet the requirements as to strength and the
retention of the contacts _c_ in their proper position; but steel
expands when warm and contracts when cooled, therefore a long tube
would be stretched so much in winter that it might pull apart, while in
summer it would be compressed and tend to buckle up and thus be forced
out of place. These difficulties can be overcome by providing expansion
joints at suitable intervals, so that they are not necessarily proof
of the impracticability of devices based upon the principles involved
in this design; they simply serve to forcibly bring to mind the fact
that the path of the inventor of underground systems is not strewn with
roses, no matter in what direction he may turn to find a solution of
the problem.
[Illustration: FIG. 27.--UNDERGROUND CONDUIT WITH EXPOSED CONDUCTORS.]
The object in the designs Figs. 25 and 26 is to shield the conductor
so that it will remain dry should the conduit be filled or partially
filled with water. If water could be excluded from the conduit, the
casing _j c c_, in the first figure, and the tube _f_, in the second
one, would not be required, for there is no difficulty in providing an
insulating support that will hold the conductor firmly in place and
at the same time prevent the escape of the current; but as soon as
moisture collects upon the surfaces of the insulating supports it acts
as a conductor, and thus renders the insulation of little value. If
water runs into the conduit in such quantities as to come in contact
with the conductor, then the effect of the insulation is entirely
destroyed; the aim of the inventors, therefore, is to provide means for
preventing the accumulation of water or moisture around the conducting
wire. It can be readily seen that the shorter the conductor the easier
it is to protect it, and this fact has given rise to the development of
a great number of designs classified as sectional conductors. In these,
two conductors are used, one of which is continuous and so situated
and insulated that it can not under any conditions be reached by either
moisture or water. The other conductor is made in lengths that vary
all the way from fifteen to two or three hundred feet. Normally, these
short sections are not connected with the circuit--they are dead, as
it is called--but when the car comes along, the plow, by acting upon
suitable mechanism, establishes a connection between the continuous
conductor and the portion of the sectional conductor that is directly
under it, and in this way the current passes to the car. As soon
as the car passes beyond a section of the sectional conductor, the
connection between it and the continuous wire is broken automatically.
Some of these arrangements depend upon mechanical devices, such as
levers that are struck by the plow and thereby move a switch that
closes a connection between the section and the continuous conductor,
but in most instances the switch is operated by a magnet, which may
be carried by the car or may be arranged so as to be energized as the
car approaches it. Designs of this last type come under the head of
electrically operated sectional conductor systems. There are other
arrangements in which a magnet carried by the car attracts iron levers
suitably disposed along the conduit, and these levers close switches
that connect the section of conductor under the car with the continuous
one. As the levers are actuated by the magnet, they only hold the
switch closed while the latter passes over them; thus the electrical
connection is made and broken as the car moves along.
[Illustration: FIG. 28.--VIEW OF STREET RAILWAY LINES IN WASHINGTON
OPERATED BY UNDERGROUND CONDUCTOR OF TYPE SHOWN IN FIG. 27.]
Most of the designs in which sectional conductors are used can be
placed much nearer to the surface of the street than the types
illustrated in Figs. 25 and 26, and this is a decided advantage, as it
greatly reduces the cost of construction. Any system that requires an
underground conduit, with the yokes _F F_ to support the track, can
only be used by roads upon which the traffic is very great, for the
cost of construction would be such as to prohibit its use under any
other conditions, no matter how successful its operation might be. For
small roads with moderate traffic the question of first cost is of
paramount importance, and the only system that can offer a satisfactory
solution of the problem for these is one that does not require an
underground conduit.
[Illustration: FIG. 29.--CROSS-SECTION OF RAILWAY TRACK PROVIDED WITH
THIRD-RAIL CONDUCTOR.]
Although many patents have been taken out for systems similar to
those described in the foregoing, nothing has been done practically
with any of them except in an experimental way. Some are in operation
on small roads in out-of-the-way places, being intended principally
to illustrate the practicability of the system and thus assist in
promoting its introduction elsewhere, but the system that has been
adopted in a commercial way is one in which no attempt is made to
shield the conductor from moisture and water, and for its successful
operation dependence is placed entirely upon the proper drainage of
the conduit. This system is well illustrated in Fig. 27. The plow _P_
carries upon its end two brushes, _b b_, which are insulated from each
other. These brushes rub against the conductors _a a_, which are made
of bars of channel iron and are well insulated from the yokes _F F_ and
the conduit casing to which they are attached by means of the supports
_c c_. In the construction shown in the figure the current comes
from the generator through one of the _a_ bars and returns through
the other, but both bars can be used to conduct the current from the
generator, in which case the return can be effected through the track
rails, just as in the designs already considered. If both the bars _a
a_ are used to convey the current from the power house the insulation
between the brushes _b b_ is not required. To avoid the accumulation
of water in the conduit the drain _G_ is provided with outlets _d_,
located at suitable points.
Although this system is the simplest that can be devised for use in
streets or public highways its construction is very costly, so much so
that it can only be used in cities where the traffic is so great as to
require the running of cars on short headway; and, furthermore, it can
not be operated with any degree of success except in municipalities
where there is a good sewage system. During the summer months it is
liable to be more or less impaired by heavy showers, but the trouble in
such cases is only temporary. In winter time snowstorms are liable to
affect it in the same way, especially if, after a heavy fall, a warm
wave comes along and produces a rapid thaw.
From the fact that no attempt whatever is made to protect the
conductors, one would naturally suppose that every time there is a rain
the road would be compelled to shut down; for, as the slot through
which the plow travels is open, water can enter the conduit with the
greatest freedom, and, in trickling down the sides, would be caught
to some extent upon the brackets _c c_, and thus make its way over to
the channel bars _a a_, and thereby destroy the insulation. Practice,
however, shows that this action does not take place, at least not so
often as to produce any serious trouble. The roads that are operated
by electricity in New York, and also the lines of the Capital Traction
Company, of Washington, D. C., employ this system, and they have been
in operation a sufficient length of time to fully demonstrate that
the difficulties actually developed by the action of the elements are
not of a formidable character. On one occasion the Sixth Avenue road,
in New York, was compelled to stop its cars for a short time just
after a severe snowstorm, but the failure was not due to impairment of
the insulation, according to the statements of the officials of the
company, but to the fact that the melted snow froze upon the track and
caused the wheels to slip around without sending the car ahead. The
fact that other roads in New York, belonging to the same company, are
being equipped with the system, is proof that, upon the whole, its
practical operation is regarded as satisfactory; but it is very evident
that it is not the final solution of the problem. A system to be a
decided success must cost very little more than the ordinary overhead
trolley, and its construction must be such that it will not easily get
out of order. If it is not inexpensive it will not come into use except
in places where the authorities will not permit the overhead wires.
A surface or underground system ought to be more durable than the
overhead, as the wires are not liable to be injured by high winds or
the accumulation of ice and snow; and, furthermore, as the conductors
are below the ground the danger of burning out motors and generators
by lightning would be eliminated, and this is a serious matter with
all trolley roads, especially in cities. Country roads do not suffer
so much from lightning, because when there is a heavy thunderstorm
the generators are stopped and the trolley poles are pulled away from
the wire, the cars remaining stalled on the track until the storm
passes over. This course can not be pursued by city roads, for the
passengers feel that, lightning or no lightning, they must reach their
destination, therefore the cars must continue to run and take their
chances. Lightning, however, does not strike trolley lines as often in
cities as in the open country, owing to the fact that there are so many
iron buildings and roofs to attract it in other directions.
[Illustration: FIG. 30.--VIEW OF A SECTION OF THE NEW YORK, NEW HAVEN
AND HARTFORD RAILROAD, EQUIPPED WITH THE THIRD-RAIL SYSTEM.]
Fig. 28 shows the appearance of the street surface when an underground
system such as is illustrated in Fig. 27 is used. This figure is a
photograph of the Capital Traction Company's lines in Washington.
After looking at this picture one can not deny that the appearance
of the streets of a city is greatly improved when the overhead wires
are removed, but underground systems which require a plow to run in a
groove are not without objection, for the groove forms a dangerous trap
into which the narrow-tired wheels of light wagons can readily drop,
and the toes and heels of horseshoes can be caught. Thus, unless the
slot can be dispensed with the greater beauty overhead is obtained at
the expense of increased danger on the street surface. There are quite
a number of underground conductor systems in which the slot is not
used, the current being conveyed to the car by contact made with plates
set at suitable intervals between or along the sides of the tracks, and
on a level with the street surface. Many of these arrangements appear
to be quite practical, but none of them can attract the attention of
railroad managers unless it can be constructed at a reasonable cost.
[Illustration: FIG. 31.--CROSS-SECTION OF RAILWAY TRACK, SHOWING A
MODIFICATION OF THE THIRD-RAIL SYSTEM.]
About two years ago the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad
published a report of the performance of a branch line that was
equipped with electric motors, the current being conveyed to them by
means of a third rail. Some of the sensational dailies at once took
the matter up and heralded the third rail to the public as something
entirely new and sure to supersede the trolley. Now, as a matter of
fact, the third rail is one of the oldest arrangements that have been
used, and was in daily operation in Baltimore in 1886. It is a very
cheap system and well adapted to roads owning the right of way or
running upon elevated tracks, but could not be used on public highways
or streets. The third-rail system in its simplest form is shown in
Fig. 29, which represents a section through the roadbed. The log _A_
represents a tie or sleeper, and _c c_ are the track rails, while _b_
is the third rail through which the current passes to the motors.
Between the rail _b_ and the tie _A_ is placed a piece of insulating
material, _a_, of such dimensions as may be necessary. If the track is
high above the surrounding ground, so as to not be submerged when there
is a heavy fall of rain, _a_ may be thin, but otherwise it must be of
sufficient thickness to raise the rail above the high-water mark. The
car is provided with a wheel or brush to bear upon the rail _b_.
This is the construction used upon the New York, New Haven, and
Hartford Railroad, as can be seen from Fig. 30, which is a photograph
of a section of the road. The third rail, it will be seen, is raised
but slightly from the ties, just about as shown in Fig. 29. One
objection to this construction is that persons and animals can receive
shocks by touching the center rail and one of the side ones at the same
time, as, for example, by standing with one foot on each. Such shocks
would not prove fatal to men, as the currents used for railway work
are not of a sufficiently high electro-motive force to produce death,
but the shock is nevertheless very severe. Horses and cattle would be
killed outright, as these animals are not able to withstand as strong
a shock as human beings. To render the third-rail system safer, and
also to improve the insulation of the conducting rail, the construction
illustrated in Fig. 31 has been devised. The only difference between
it and Fig. 29 is that the rail _b_, instead of resting upon the ties
between the tracks, is carried upon a side support _c c_ and is housed
in with boards _a a_. To take the current from it a wheel is mounted
upon a shaft projecting from the side of the car truck.
[Illustration: FIG. 32--ELECTRIC LOCOMOTIVE ON THE BUFFALO AND LOCKPORT
RAILWAY.]
From the foregoing brief description of the essential features of the
several systems devised for conveying current to the moving car by
means of conductors placed underground or upon the surface, it can
be seen that while the result can be accomplished in many ways, and
is actually accomplished in a number of instances, nothing has been
brought forward so far that is as free from objection as the simple
trolley, if we disregard the unsightliness of the latter. It is this
unsightliness that has created a demand for something else, but the
substitutes, while capable of doing the work, are far more costly and
can not be said to be as reliable under all conditions of weather.
The sphere of action of the electric-railway motor is not confined to
street railways or suburban transit, but extends to the legitimate
domain of the steam locomotive. In many places electric locomotives are
used to move freight trains made up of cars of the largest capacity,
this same work having been done formerly by steam locomotives. In
the city of Baltimore, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad uses electric
locomotives, of greater capacity than any steam locomotives so far
made, to draw trains through the tunnel that passes under the city. The
general appearance of an electric locomotive can be judged from Fig.
32, which shows an engine of average size at the head of a long freight
train.
MM. Bertaux and G. Yver are quoted, in _La Nature_, as relating in
their travels in Italy that between Benevento and Foggia, where the
railway passes through a tract of wheat fields, a falcon was observed
closely accompanying the train. He would graze the windows, fly over
the roofs of the cars and turn, and keep constantly dashing down to
the ground by the side of the track. A habitual traveler on the road
remarked that he had observed this habit of the bird several times a
week. The crafty hawk had observed that the eddy made by the train as
it rushed through the air overcame the small birds and made them an
easy prey, and it had learned to take advantage of the fact. It was
also remarked that this particular train, which was the "fast train,"
was the only one the bird thus pursued.
A SURVIVAL OF MEDIÆVAL CREDULITY.
BY PROFESSOR E. P. EVANS.
One of the crassest and most impudent and yet most successful frauds of
modern times is that recently practiced by Leo Taxil and his associates
on the papal hierarchy in their pretended exposures of the Freemasons
and the Satanic rites performed by this secret fraternity. On April
20, 1884, Leo XIII issued an encyclical letter in which he divides the
human race "into two diverse and adverse classes" (_in partes duas
diversas adversasque_): "the kingdom of God on earth--namely, the
true Church of Jesus Christ"--and "the realm of Satan." All who are
not members of the former belong to the latter, so that there is no
alternative between being a good Catholic or a worshiper of the devil.
His Holiness then proceeds to show that the headquarters of Satanism
are the lodges of the Freemasons, a fact, he adds, fully recognized
by his predecessors, who have never ceased to expose and denounce the
diabolical character and flagitious aims of these archenemies of the
Christian faith. The detailed description of the organization of this
order, its devilish purposes, and the horrible crimes committed in
order to accomplish them are very queer reading in an official document
emanating from an infallible ecclesiastical authority at the close of
the nineteenth century. On August 20, 1894, Leo XIII published a decree
of the Inquisition putting under ban "Odd Fellows, Sons of Temperance,
and Knights of Pythias" as "synagogues of Satan," and excluding them
from the sacraments of the Church.
It is no wonder that such an exhibition of credulity, which excited
the astonishment of many a Romanist and made all intelligent and
unprejudiced persons smile and shrug their shoulders, should have
suggested to an arrant wag and incorrigible player of practical jokes
like Leo Taxil (pseudonym of Gabriel Jogand) the idea of appealing to
this peculiar passion on a grand scale and seeing to what extent the
"mother Church" could be led into fraud, as Milton says, like "Eve,
our credulous mother." In tracing the development of this audacious
plot through all its stages and perceiving by what silly tales and
transparent deceptions the Holy Father permitted himself to be duped,
one can hardly refrain from exclaiming, in the words of Ben Jonson:
"Had you no quirk
To avoid gullage, sir, by such a creature?"
Leo Taxil was born at Marseilles on March 21, 1854, and was therefore
thirty years of age when he entered upon this career of intrigue and
mystification. From his childhood he had been educated in strictly
Roman Catholic schools, and everything was done by his pious parents
and teachers to render him sound in the faith. Long before arriving at
man's estate he had thrown off these influences and cast in his lot
with unbelievers, although he continued to go to mass, confession,
and communion. While a pupil in the Catholic College of St. Louis,
at Marseilles, he was strongly attracted to the political views of
the radical party as set forth in Rochefort's _Lanterne_, and soon
began to write for the press; in 1871 he joined the editorial staff
of _Egalité_, and published for two years a humoristic journal--_La
Marotte_ (Fool's Bauble). It is not necessary to give a detailed
sketch of this man's life. Suffice it to say that he was violently
anticlerical, and was repeatedly fined and imprisoned for articles
insulting to the Church and to ecclesiastical dignitaries. On December
29, 1881, at Montpellier, he was condemned to pay a fine of sixty-five
thousand francs for publishing a book entitled The Secret Amours of
Pius IX. He appealed from this decision, and, after repeated efforts,
succeeded in having the indictment quashed. A new edition appeared in
1885, and was announced by large placards, in the center of which was
a medallion of the Pope's head, encircled with the heads of a bevy of
beautiful women, forming, according to the author, a fitting halo for
his Holiness. We may add that the sensational revelations contained
in this book, as well as in the Scandalous History of the Orléans and
similar works, are for the most part mere figments of the imagination
recorded as facts, for the purpose of mystifying a credulous public. In
1880 he founded a "Society of Freethinkers," which, with its numerous
branches, numbered in a few years about seventeen thousand members. The
remarkable success of this movement was due in a great measure to the
energy with which he advocated it in the columns of the _République
Anti-Clericale_, of which he was the editor.
Perhaps the most comical episode in his strange career is his pretended
repentance, resulting in the return of this black sheep to the fold of
the Catholic Church. In his Confessions the arrant renegade relates
how, on April 3, 1885 (April 1st would have been a more appropriate
date), while engaged in writing a book on Joan of Arc designed to
excite animosity against the clergy, his fell purpose was suddenly
shaken by strong compunctions, and soon a fearful agitation convulsed
his whole being. His description of his contrition and self-reproaches
is quite sensational and thrilling, and shows rare talent as an
actor, if we only bear in mind that the whole thing was a farce. "I
burst into sobs. 'Pardon me, O God!' I cried out in a voice choked
with tears. 'Pardon my many blasphemies! Pardon all the evil I have
wrought!' I passed the night in prayer, and resolved on the next day
to seek absolution for my sins." He retired from the editorship of
the _République Anti-Clericale_, and handed in his resignation at a
meeting of the "Anti-Clerical League," of which he was the founder
and hitherto the most active member, when he had the satisfaction of
being denounced by the presiding officer as a comedian and scoundrel.
No one of his former colleagues believed in his sincerity, and yet
every one was puzzled to understand the strategic purpose of this
retrograde movement. The general impression was that he had been
bribed. "You can't fool us by your abjuration!" they exclaimed. "The
fact is, you have received a large sum of money from the Vatican." He
does not seem to have attempted to refute these charges, nor did he
permit them to divert him from the execution of his deep-laid plot.
With hypocritical humility, he made full confession to the papal
nuncio in Paris, Monsignore Di Rende, who, after subjecting him to
several days' penance, embraced him with joy and released him from all
excommunications and ecclesiastical censures.
Taxil now began to issue his Complete Revelations concerning
Freemasonry, in four volumes, the ostensible object of which was to
expose the secret and sacrilegious rites of this order as an organized
system of devil-worship, thus confirming by the testimony of an
eyewitness the assertions of the Popes, and proving that their decrees
and decisions on this point had been bulls in the ecclesiastical and
not in the Irish sense of the term. This work, although a mere tissue
of fabrications, was greeted by the Catholic press and priesthood
with exultation, as an authentic narration containing positive and
irrefutable proofs of the diabolic character of the Masonic mysteries.
The members of this fraternity, says Taxil, regard the God of the
Catholics as an evil principle--a crafty, jealous, and cruel genius,
a supernal tyrant, and archenemy of human happiness. Opposed to him
is Lucifer, the good genius, the perennial source of virtue and
wisdom, the spirit of freedom, and the friend of mankind. For this
reason, in the high-grade lodges Lucifer, the reputed father of Cain,
Canaan, and Hiram, is adored, under different names indicative of the
Supreme Being, as the God of Nature, and the great architect of the
universe. In short, while modern freethinking is atheistic and begets
a skepticism which, even when not denying God, does not care for him,
Freemasonry is essentially a Satanic cult. These words give the sum
and substance of the supposititious disclosures which excited such
intense joy in the clerical camp. In 1887, when Taxil was received
in solemn audience by Leo XIII, "My son," asked the Pope, "what dost
thou desire?" "Holy Father, to die this moment at thy feet were for
me the highest bliss," replied the kneeling penitent. "Not so," was
the benignant response of the successor of St. Peter; "thy life is
still very useful in combats for the faith." His Holiness then pointed
to Taxil's writings on the shelves of his library, declaring that he
had read them all through with extreme satisfaction, and encouraged
him to continue his exposures of these satellites of Satan and their
abominations. Taxil left the Vatican with the papal benediction and
with the firm conviction that he could devise no better means of
currying favor with the Apostolic See than by inventing tales about the
homage paid by the Freemasons to the devil, and determined to work this
rich vein to its utmost capacity. He also came to the conclusion that
he could imagine nothing so absurd that it would not be received in
Catholic circles as authentic and indorsed by infallible authority.
His work had an immense pecuniary success, and thus attained the
chief object which he had in view. More than one hundred thousand
copies of the original French edition were sold, and it was translated
into English, German, Italian, and Spanish. This result is not so
surprising, if we remember that nearly all the bishops and other clergy
of the Catholic Church acted as voluntary and extremely zealous agents
for the diffusion of these Revelations, which they seemed to regard
as a new apocalypse designed to unveil the mysteries of Babylon and
disclose the present doings of Satan and dominion of antichrist. Of the
utterly apocryphal character of the Revelations they do not appear to
have entertained the slightest suspicion, although the hoax was clearly
perceptible to every unprejudiced mind. The German translation by the
Jesuit Father Gruber, which appeared at Freiburg, in Switzerland, and
at Paderborn, in Westphalia, omitted the volume entitled The Masonic
Sisters, on account of the indecency of its contents, although accepted
as true and deemed especially damaging to the Masonic fraternity.
However desirable it might be to tear away the mask of philanthropy
from the face of Freemasonry and let the world see its devilish
features, it was thought best not to outrage the moral sense of the
community by uncovering "the filthiness of the hellish crew."
In 1892 Taxil's coadjutor, Dr. Bataille (a pseudonym of Dr. Karl Hacks,
a German from the Rhineland), began to issue a serial publication,
entitled The Devil in the Nineteenth Century, purporting to embody
the results of his observations as ship's surgeon during his travels
in various countries, and especially in the Orient, where he had
opportunities of studying Satanism in its diverse manifestations. He
begins by referring to the encyclical letter _Humanum genus_, already
cited, in which Leo XIII divides the human race into worshipers of God
and worshipers of Satan, and then proceeds to adduce facts proving the
correctness of this classification. It is, in reality, a bold burlesque
of the papal circular, as, indeed, it was intended to be, and would
doubtless have been laughed at for a time as a clever persiflage, if
the dignitaries of the Church had not taken it seriously, as they were
expected to do. Dr. Hacks confessed to an "interviewer," in 1897, that
no sooner had he read the pontifical circular in question than he saw
in it "a rare opportunity to coin money out of the crass credulity and
boundless stupidity of the Catholics. It needed only a Jules Verne to
clothe these extravagant fancies in an attractive garb. I resolved to
play the part of this Jules Verne. Strangely enough, the same idea
occurred to others. I therefore joined forces with Leo Taxil and a few
friends, and began to publish The Devil in the Nineteenth Century, the
success of which is well known.... I had traversed many lands and got
up marvelous stories, the scenes of which were laid in remote regions,
which I was sure no one would visit in order to test the truth of my
assertions." Besides, he counted on the silliness of the persons with
whom he had to deal, and felt certain that if he should tell them he
had been fooling them they would not believe him, but would remain
convinced that all his inventions were strictly true. He could not
conceive of a body of ecclesiastics as ready to discard a belief which
served their turn, however evident its absurdity might be to other
minds. "Sometimes I fabricated the most incredible stories, as, for
example, that of the serpent inditing prophecies with its tail on the
back of Sophia Walder, or that of the demon, who, in order to marry a
Freemason, transformed himself into a young lady, and played the piano
evenings in the form of a crocodile. My colleagues were aghast, and
exclaimed, 'You'll spoil the whole joke with your nonsense.' 'Bah!' I
replied. 'Let me be, and you will see!'" And they did see how eagerly
such gross falsehoods were accepted as positive facts. Protestants
without exception are denounced as godless apostates. Every Lutheran
is a Luciferian in disguise. Singapore, he says, like every British
colony, is settled by knaves, footpads, and all sorts of criminals. The
Protestant Englishman is, at the bottom, an embodiment of scoundrelism
coupled with Satanism. There is a strangely infernal element in the
social life at Singapore. "The British matrons and even the maidens are
incarnations of vice and godlessness. The young English woman dedicates
all her charms and intelligence to the service of Satan, whose apostle
and agent she is; cursed by God, she is the dearly beloved paramour of
Lucifer; a woman only in name, she is in fact absolutely infernal--an
actual deviless." Hacks asserts that in a Presbyterian church at
Singapore he discovered a secret tabernacle for the worship of Satan.
The pastor opened the door, and there was a Baphomet, with all the
Palladistic (Satanic) apparatus--goblet, host, and dagger--standing
before his eyes.
Albert Pike, Grand Master of the Freemasons in Charleston, S. C., is
called the "Satanic Pope," and is said to have a telephone invented and
operated by devils, whereby instantaneous communication is possible
between the seven principal directorates at Charleston, Rome, Berlin,
Washington, Montevideo, Naples, and Calcutta. He has also a magic
bracelet, by means of which he can summon Lucifer at any moment. "One
day Satan took Pike gently in his arms and made a trip with him to
Sirius, traversing the whole distance in a few minutes. After exploring
the fixed star, he was brought back safe and sound to his room in
Washington." Whether he found the star as hot and scorching as its name
implies is not stated. Hacks discovered, under the cliffs of Gibraltar,
mysterious caverns with laboratories in which devils prepared microbes
for generating and diffusing epidemics. He was politely received by
Tubal-Cain, the director of the establishment, who addressed him in
pure Parisian French, from which we may infer that this is the language
of the lower regions. On his departure Hacks was presented with a small
vial, the contents of which would suffice to produce a fearful epidemic
of cholera. No less an authority than Professor Bautz, of the Prussian
Academy at Münster, tells us that the volcanoes are the flues of hell,
and it was probably this contribution to the topography of Tartarus
that led Hacks to look for the devil's workshop in the cavities of
mountains, which, however, being used for infernal purposes, would
hardly be what Milton calls "umbrageous grots and caves of cool
recess."[8]
The following may be cited as a specimen of the manner in which
historical events were perverted by Hacks to subserve his purpose:
Before the capture of Rome by the Italian troops in 1870, a secret
meeting of Freemasons was held in Milan, at which Riboli, Cucchi, and
General Cadorna were present, and the revolutionary deliberations
were rendered piquant by dreadful blasphemies. Thus General Cadorna, a
renegade priest, parodied the consecration of the host with a piece of
bread, which he finally threw into the fire with the words, "In honor
of Lucifer!" Thereupon Lucifer rose up in person through the floor,
gazed benignantly for a moment on his faithful followers, and said,
"The moment is come for firing the third salvo of cannon." A month
later General Cadorna entered Rome through the breach of the Porta
Via. In Luciferian lingo, the first salvo was the Reformation and the
second the French Revolution, while the third victory of Satan was the
overthrow of the Pope's temporal power.
Hacks relates that in Freiburg, Switzerland, there was a Masonic
temple of Satan hewn in a rock and provided with altars and all the
paraphernalia of this cult. There men and women assembled in the
costume worn by our first parents before the fall. Attached to the
lodge was a brothel, the scene of the most disgusting debaucheries. One
altar, in the form of a triangle with an image of the demon Baphomet,
was used for stabbing the body of Christ, in the form of consecrated
wafers, with a dagger. At this altar, too, was said the so-called
"black mass," an invention of the Grand Master Holebrook and Albert
Pike, of Charleston. During this service hymns were sung to Satan. The
consecrated wafers were procured by Miss Lucia Claraz, of Freiburg,
who stole them while pretending to partake of the communion, and
passed the night before committing the theft in the wildest orgies.
This incredibly foolish story was published in the _Moniteur de Rome_,
against which Miss Claraz, a lady "piously inclined and morally
irreproachable," according to the testimony of the Bishop of Freiburg,
brought suit for defamation. The court sentenced the editor, Monsignore
Vöglin, to a fine of twenty-five thousand lire and four years'
imprisonment.
These examples suffice to show the wretched stuff which Hacks hashed
up for the edification of the clerical and the entertainment of the
carnal-minded public. Even the silly statement that he saw a gigantic
tree bow down before Sophia Walder, the predestined great-grandmother
of antichrist, and present her with a bouquet, did not shake the faith
of the true believers. The editor of the _Revue Mensuelle_ declared, in
1894, that Dr. Bataille had really made all these discoveries on his
travels, and that his honesty and sincerity were beyond question. This
was the attitude of the whole clerical press almost without exception,
as well as of abbots, bishops, cardinals, and the highest dignitaries
of the Church. Even as late as July, 1897, when the imposture had been
exposed and confessed, a Parisian Catholic journal continued to regard
"the mystification as more apparent than actual, and the documents
adduced as chiefly authentic"; so difficult is it for minds thus
constituted, with the rational faculties dwarfed and stunted by being
constantly kept in the leading strings of credulity, to recognize the
falsity of what they wish or are told to believe.
Another of Taxil's confederates was Domenico Margiotta, according to
his own account a native of Palmi, in southern Italy, and professor of
literature and philosophy. His principal work, Adriano Lemmi, Supreme
Head of the Freemasons, published in French in 1894, gives a long
list of his titles, designed to impress the public by indicating his
high position in the Masonic order. Hacks calls him a "Member of the
Sovereign Sanctuary of the Oriental Rite of Memphis and Mizraim," a
purely fictitious designation. This cunning device was also crowned
with complete success, and caused the fabricated disclosures to be
hailed with enthusiasm. Here, exclaimed the clerical journals, we
have "not an apprentice or novice like Taxil, but one of the highest
dignitaries of universal Freemasonry and Luciferianism, who is
initiated and instructed in all its mysteries and occult observances,"
being apparently ignorant of the fact that Taxil was in the main the
real author of the book.
One of the most common accusations brought against the Freemasons is
that of desecrating the host by stabbing it with a dagger. A German
Catholic journal, The Pelican,[9] affirms that not only Masonic devil
worshipers, but also Jews, infidels, and heretics in general commit
this sacrilege in order to show their deadly hatred of Christianity.
In proof of this charge, the following "historical fact" is published
in the number for July, 1897: Several consecrated wafers were once
stolen by Jews from a church at Langenses, in Silesia, and, after being
pierced through with knives, were hidden in the forest. They were
discovered by a Polish nobleman, whose four horses, as he was driving
by, suddenly kneeled down and refused to go on, although he beat them
with his whip. He then descended from the carriage, and soon found the
wafers covered with blood. They were carried back with solemn ceremony
to the church, which became a place of pilgrimage with a wonder-working
pyx. What a hardened and hopeless skeptic a man must be, who is not
convinced by conclusive evidence of this kind, when even horses bear
witness to the truth by their genuflections!
Still more sensational was the part played in this spicy comedy
by Miss Diana Vaughan, whom Taxil introduced to the public as a
descendant of the Rosicrucian alchemist and Oxford professor Thomas
Vaughan, and who was said to have in her possession a copy of the
written pact with Satan, signed by her ancestor on March 25, 1645.
The young lady claimed to have been born in Paris on February 29,
1874. The fact that there was no February 29th in the year 1874 would
make this date an impossible natal day for ordinary mortals, but a
person with Luciferian blood in her veins would naturally take no
note of the divisions of time as recorded in human calendars; for,
according to Taxil, her forbear was the goddess Astarte, who appeared
to Thomas Vaughan on a summer night in 1646, while he was sojourning
among the American Indians, in all her marvelous beauty, bringing
with her a bed surrounded with flames and attended by little demons
bearing flowers. She approached Vaughan and put a wedding ring on his
finger, and eleven days later gave birth to a daughter named Diana,
from whom the Miss Diana Vaughan in question traced her descent.
Several instances of similar commerce with incarnate demons are said
to have occurred in the history of her family, so that she inherited
a strong Satanic taint; even her own mother was guilty of the same
criminal conduct. Her inherited qualities were carefully fostered by
education, inasmuch as she was brought up by her father and uncle on
strictly Luciferian principles. One day, when her instructors were
praising Cain and Judas as ideals of excellence, she expressed some
doubt of the superior worthiness of the fratricide and venal traitor.
This dangerous unbelief was attributed to angelical possession, and
it was soon ascertained that the archangel Raphael was the cause of
the lapse from Luciferianism. Recourse was had to exorcism, the whole
process of which, as described by Taxil, is a clever travesty of the
ceremonial prescribed by the Romish Church for the expulsion of evil
spirits. The dance performed by the father and uncle on this occasion
consisted of the same saltatory movements that are executed by the
"procession of jumpers" every year at the grave of St. Willibord, in
Echternach, Luxemburg.[10] Devil's ointment took the place of holy oil,
and the exorcism ended with the sacrifice of a black hen; thereupon
"Raphael" went out of her, and simultaneously with his exit all the
panes of glass in the house were broken into fragments and fell to the
ground with a tremendous crash. The marvel is that bishops and priests
accepted this ridiculous story as an authentic and edifying narration,
instead of rejecting it with horror and disgust as a palpable burlesque
of their own approved methods of casting out demons, and particularly
of the _Exorcismus in Satanam et Angelos Apostatas_, composed by Leo
XIII and issued by him November 19, 1890. It is evident that Taxil had
this document in his eye, and intended to hold it up to derision; to
calm the fears of the simple-minded, who were puzzled and perplexed by
the striking resemblance of diabolic orgies to divine ordinances, he
explained it on the general principle that "Satan is the ape of God."
After being freed from the influence of Raphael, Diana was placed under
the tutelage of Asmodeus, who, as her guardian devil, watched over her,
shielding her from bodily harm and helping her to resist the wiles of
angels. One day when she was wandering in the woods she was attacked
by negroes, but Asmodeus came to her rescue, and bore her safely
to her home through the air. Another time he caught her mettlesome
courser by the bridle as he was running away, and when the chief of
Garibaldi's staff, Bordone, insulted her, Asmodeus twisted his neck so
that his face looked backward. For three weeks he was obliged to take a
retrospective view of life and of his own conduct, when Diana, in the
kindness of her heart, set his head right again. On these occasions the
tutelar demon usually appeared in the form of a fine young gentleman,
and emitted an aroma of balsam, which seems to have been as inseparable
from him as is the scent of musk from a modern dude or modish dame.
He spoke of her as his bride, and often took her on pleasure trips
to paradise, purgatory, and other remote regions; once when she was
greatly depressed, because her Luciferian rival, Sophia Walder, had got
the better of her, he consoled her by making an excursion with her to
Mars, where they rode on Schiaparelli's canals, sailed on the Sea of
the Sirens, and strolled like pygmies among the gigantic inhabitants of
that planet.
[_To be concluded._]
Contrary to the common supposition that the astronomy of the ancients
was based exclusively on the geocentric hypothesis, Mr. G. H. Bryan
says in Nature: "Schiaparelli has shown that Heraclitus Ponticus,
a disciple of Plato, had already accepted the theory that the sun
is the center of the orbit of the planets, while the earth is the
center of the universe and of the lunar and solar rotations--a theory
substantially that of Tycho."
"RIBBON LIGHTNING."
BY ORANGE COOK.
In the summer of 1898, W. H. Osborne, of Chardon, Ohio, an amateur
photographer of some experience, secured the accompanying photograph
of a lightning flash which seemed to us to show certain peculiarities
that entitle it to a public notice and a permanent record. The picture
shows three flashes, of which the distant and faint one at the right
and the bright one at the left were simultaneous, while the center one
occurred a few seconds earlier. Nothing about the thunder that followed
the last and bright flash suggested that it was specially near, but
an examination of the picture when developed and a comparison with
the features of the landscape showed that it had come to earth about
fifteen rods from the place where Mr. Osborne stood with his camera.
Mr. Osborne and myself carefully searched the locality indicated, but
failed to find even the slightest mark caused by the discharge upon any
object or in the earth.
[Illustration]
Measurements at this place give the width of the ribbon of light, if
it stood at right angles with the line of sight, about eight feet.
This ribbon of light is seen to consist of six lines, approximately
parallel, of unequal brightness, a pair being at each edge and a pair
near the center. The space between these pairs is crossed by many
nearly horizontal lines and a few oblique ones, while that between
the right-hand pair is crossed by oblique lines only. The horizontal
lines at the right of the center become curved downward, which, with
the increased brightness of the whole toward that side, suggests to
us that the ribbon of light did not lie in a plane, but was concave
toward a point at the observer's left. That the ribbon did not stand
at right angles with the line of sight, but was nearer the observer
at the right-hand edge, is also shown by the inequality of the lower
termination of the six vertical lines referred to above. The ones at
the left either rest upon or are hidden behind a rise of ground, whose
crest can be traced for a little distance each side of the flash, while
those at the right come lower, falling between the observer and the
ground at that point. Probably, when measured upon this diagonal and
curved line, the width of the flash was fifteen or twenty feet.
Mention has already been made of the fact that the accompanying thunder
was comparatively light, and not at all like that ordinarily heard when
lightning occurs within so short a distance. Possibly this, as well as
the absence of marks at the point where it reached the earth, might
have been because the discharge was of very low tension.
* * * * *
[A very similar lightning flash was described and pictured in the
issue of the Electrical World and Engineer for October 28, 1899, by
A. E. Kennelly, who suggested the following explanation: A lightning
flash passed through the air on the left-hand side of the ribbon of
lightning (the wind was blowing from right to left) and broke a hole
in the air along that line. This discharge may have been oscillatory,
and may have lasted in all any time up to about 1/100 of a second. The
discharge then ceased for lack of electricity, but a fresh charge from
the cloud being gathered immediately afterward, or in about 1/30 of
a second from the first rupture, a new discharge passed through the
same hole in the air, which had not had time to seal up. There might
thus be fourteen successive flashes (this was the number of distinct
flashes making up the ribbon in the photograph), each averaging about
1/25 of a second apart, through the same hole, owing to the imperfect
conducting qualities of the clouds overhead, meanwhile the hole having
been carried from left to right in the picture, across the line of
sight (by the wind), and thus producing the appearance of a broad
ribbonlike flash. Professor Trowbridge, of Cambridge, has suggested the
possibility that many of these apparently curious electrical phenomena
may be of purely optical or physiological origin--that is, may arise
through the abnormal behavior of the eye or the camera lens toward
intense lines of light, such as lightning flashes.--ED.]
CROSS-EDUCATION.
BY E. W. SCRIPTURE,
DIRECTOR OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL LABORATORY, YALE UNIVERSITY.
Some years ago I made the following simple experiment: I arranged a
rubber bulb, like that used for releasing a photographer's shutter, to
connect with a bottle, from which rose a long, vertical glass tube.
The bottle contained mercury, and the long tube reached nearly to the
bottom. Every part was air-tight, so that when anybody squeezed the
bulb the mercury was forced up the vertical tube. It was what is known
as a mercury-dynamometer.
During experiments with this dynamometer, what was more natural than to
think of trying what would happen if one hand were practiced daily in
squeezing the bulb? So one of our graduate students, Miss E. M. Brown,
was set to work in the following manner: On the first day she squeezed
the bulb as hard as possible with the left hand, while an assistant
noted the height of the mercury; this was repeated ten times, and the
results were averaged. Immediately thereafter she took ten records with
the right hand. Then, on the following days, with some intermissions,
she practiced the right hand by squeezing ten times on each occasion.
On the last day she again tested the left hand, which had not been
practiced in the meantime. The records ran as follows:
----------+---------------------------------------------------------------
| DAY.
+------+------+------+------+------+------+-------+------+------
|First |Second|Third |Fourth|Fifth |Sixth |Seventh|Eighth|Ninth
----------+------+------+------+------+------+------+-------+------+------
|Inches|Inches|Inches|Inches|Inches|Inches|Inches |Inches|Inches
Right hand| 28.8 | 33.7 | 35.6 | 36.6 | 40.9 | 44.7 | 47.0 | 48.8 | 48.6
Left hand | 29.6 | .... | .... | .... | .... | .... | .... | .... | 42.3
----------+------+------+------+------+------+------+-------+------+------
Thus the left hand had gained about fifty per cent in strength through
practice of the right hand. This peculiar phenomenon of transference of
the effects of practice from one side to the other I have ventured to
call "cross-education."
The phenomenon was curious enough to suggest other experiments. Another
student, Miss T. L. Smith, was set to trying to insert the point of a
needle at the end of a rod into a small hole in a drill-gauge without
touching the sides. The first experiment consisted of twenty trials
with the left hand, with a success of fifty per cent. Immediately
thereafter twenty trials were made with the right hand, with a success
of sixty per cent. On the following day and on each succeeding day two
hundred experiments were made with the right hand, with successes of
61, 64, 65, 75, 74, 75, 82, 79, 78, and 88 per cent. On the last day
the left hand, which had not been practiced in the meantime, was again
tried, with a success of seventy-six per cent.
These last experiments remind us of certain familiar phenomena. It has
frequently been noticed that persons taught to write with the right
hand become able to write backward, but not forward, with the left
hand. This is the so-called "mirror writing," which appears correct if
seen in a mirror. The first published observation of this fact exists
in a letter from H. F. Weber to Fechner, the founder of experimental
psychology. Fechner, moreover, noticed that with the left hand he could
make the figure 9 backward better than in the regular way.
Curiously enough, the principle of cross-education has been put to
practical use. A letter (with permission to publish) has been received
from Oscar Raif, Professor of Music in the Berlin Hochschule:
"In the spring of 1898 I made an experiment with twenty of my pupils. I
began by taking the average speed of each hand with the metronome. The
average of the right hand was [quarter note symbol] = 116 (= four times
116 in the minute) [464 beats], and for the left hand 112 [448 beats].
I gave them exercises for the right hand only (finger exercises,
scales, and broken accords) to develop rapidity. After one week the
average of the right hand was 120 [480]; after two weeks, 126 [504];
three weeks, 132 [528], etc. After two months the right hand yielded
176 [604]. Then I had them try the left hand, which averaged 152 [608],
whereas in November the average was only 112 [448]. In two months'
time, absolutely without practice, the left hand had risen from 112
[448] to 152 [608]. A few of my pupils had some difficulty in playing
the scales in parallel motion, but were able to play them in contrary
motion.
"The tenor of my work is that in piano playing the chief requirement
is _not_ that each single finger should move rapidly, but that each
movement should come at exactly the right time, and we do not work only
to get limber fingers, but, more than that, to get perfect control over
each finger. The source of what in German is called _Fingerfertigkeit_
is the center of our nervous system--the brain."
These facts, however, require further investigation, for it is evident
that we must begin with the fact of cross-education and proceed to
more complicated cases. Indeed, cross-education has shown itself to
be one step of a ladder up which we must climb even if there were
no other motive except that of curiosity as to what we could find
at the top. If practice of one hand educates the other hand, will
it not also educate the foot? Again, if practice of one hand in
squeezing a dynamometer develops the strength of the other members of
the body, will it not also develop their dexterity or their advance?
Again, if the development of voluntary power--let us say, frankly,
"will power"--in one direction brings about a development in other
directions, why should we limit the transference to muscular activity?
Why can we not expect, that the development should be extended to the
higher forms of will power that go to make up character? The outlook
begins to be stirring on account of its vastness. If the last principle
be admitted, there seems no argument against the claim that some forms
of manual training, such as lathe work and forge work, are just the
things to develop moral character. By the same reasoning we would be
obliged to admit the often-made argument that training in Latin, Greek,
and mathematics furnishes a means of general mental development. If we
admit the principle, we find ourselves at once involved in important
educational controversies. However we may think in respect to these
questions, it is plain that it is worth while to climb a ladder which
has such an outlook at the top. Let us begin.
In the first place, the fact of cross-education is established. Let
us ask in what this education consists. On this point some curious
observations have been made by Prof. W. W. Davis,[11] now of Iowa
College. The subject of the experiment began by raising a five-pound
dumb-bell by flexing the arm at the elbow; this called into play
chiefly the biceps muscle for lifting and the forearm muscles for
grasping. This was done as many times as possible with the right arm,
and then, after a rest, with the left arm. The subject then entered
upon a practice extending from two to four weeks; this consisted in
lifting the weight with the right arm only. At the end both arms were
tested as at the start.
The results were strange enough. The unpracticed left arm gained in
power as we expected, but it also gained in size. Careful measurements
were made by Dr. J. W. Seaver, of the Yale Gymnasium, on the girths of
both upper arm and forearm. Let us compare the gains in girth with the
gains in power:
----------+------------------------------+------------------------------
| GAINS IN GIRTH. | GAINS IN POWER.
SUBJECT. +------+--------------+--------------+---------------
| Right biceps. | Left biceps. | Right arm. | Left arm.
----------+---------------+--------------+--------------+---------------
G | 5 mm. | -5 mm. | 820 flexions.| 200 flexions.
J | 2 " | 0 " | 400 " | 225 "
K | 4 " | 2 " | 724 " | 514 "
H | 13 " | 6 " | 950 " | 30 "
B | 6 " | 11 " | 900 " | 75 "
I | 8 " | 3 " | 750 " | 75 "
----------+---------------+--------------+--------------+---------------
All subjects had gained power in the unpracticed left arm, three
of them largely and three slightly. All but one had gained in the
size of the unpracticed left biceps. Strangely enough, those who had
gained most in power had gained least in size. The case was quite
similar in regard to the girth of the forearm. The gains in power were
unquestionably mostly central--that is, in the nerve centers--and not
in the muscles. Yet there was also a strange but unquestionable gain in
the size of the muscles at the same time.
[Illustration: FIG. 1.]
We have arrived at the second step of the ladder, which is: The gain
by practice which shows itself in cross-education consists in a
development of higher nerve centers connected with the two sides of
the body. We must next ask: Is this effect of practice confined to the
symmetrical organ, or does it extend to other organs? This question was
answered by a peculiar experiment.
The experiment consisted in testing the effect of educating one of the
feet to tap as rapidly as possible on a telegraph key. The apparatus
is shown in Fig. 1. The clocklike instrument is really a piece of
clockwork actuated by a magnet, so that it counts up one point every
time the electric circuit is closed. The electric circuit is comprised
of a battery and two keys. Any form of battery will do; the one in
the figure is a "lamp battery"--that is, an arrangement of lamps in
series and in shunt, such that the ordinary high-voltage city current
is conveniently transformed into a low-voltage current. The key to the
left is the experimenter's key, and that to the right the subject's
key. When the subject is set to tapping on the latter key the counter
will register whenever the experimenter keeps his key closed.
For the actual experiments by Professor Davis the subject's key was
removed to a distant room. Here there were three keys of this kind, any
one of which would register. One key each was arranged for tapping with
the big toes; the third key could be tapped by either right or left
index finger.
On the first day all four digits--right and left index fingers and
right and left large toes--were carefully tested in tapping as rapidly
as possible. Thereafter the right large toe was practiced daily in
tapping for several weeks, the other digits being left unpracticed.
At the end all four digits were again tested. Four of the six persons
experimented upon showed a gain for the right large toe--that is,
for the digit practiced; the other two showed a slight loss, due
unquestionably to "over-practice," or "over-training." All of those
who gained for the right large toe gained for the other digits also.
Their average gains were: Right foot, thirty-three per cent; left
foot, thirty-one per cent; right hand, twenty-one per cent; left hand,
thirty-one per cent. Even both of the "over-trained" men gained for
the left foot and one of them gained for the left hand. Thus we have
reached the third step--the effects of practice are extended to various
parts of the body.
Beyond the third step the experimental investigations have not yet
advanced, but I believe that sooner or later we shall be able to
establish the fact that development of those forms of the will involved
in simple muscular activities does also develop the more complicated
forms that express themselves in acts of a mental nature.
It has long been claimed that sports, games, and manual occupations are
among the best developers of character. Football develops solidarity
of feeling and action; running rapids or cross-country hunting
develop coolness in danger and promptness and firmness of judgment;
wood-turning requires boldness and foresight; forge work requires
regulation and reserve of power, and so on. This is no place for an
account of the psychology of sports and occupations, but if the reader
has ever tried any of these things and failed he will easily recognize
the lacking mental quality.
Yet there has never been but one attempt, as far as I can learn, to
organize a system of manual occupations on the basis of this principle.
The success of the attempt furnishes, I believe, the still-lacking
laboratory proof of the principle itself. I refer to the remarkable
experiment of Mr. Z. R. Brockway, Superintendent of the Elmira
Reformatory.
Most of the young felons sent to the Elmira Reformatory are set to
learning trades, by which they can support themselves on leaving.
Those, however, who are too stupid to even learn the simplest trade
are put into a manual-training school, in the hope that their brains
can be sufficiently developed to enable them to keep out of the prison
or the asylum. Those who are so stupid that they have difficulty in
learning the alphabet or in counting their fingers are put into a
kindergarten, where they practice on letter blocks and sticks and
straws.
Those who are too stupid to learn a trade are the ones of interest
here. Three main lines of defect are recognized in Superintendent
Brockway's classification of them. Those who are intellectually weak,
but of fair power of self-control, are classed as Group I; those who
are reasonably bright, but are unable to get along because they can not
control their impulses, are classed as Group II; those who fail on both
sides are classed as Group III.
Group II is composed of those who are for the most part devoid of moral
sense--those who fight, swear, assault officers, are licentious, and
generally unresponsive to the usual reformatory measures. To this class
belong some of the most intellectual inmates of the reformatory, but
this intellectuality runs riot on account of weakness of character.
How are their characters to be built up? They are required to devote
most of their waking hours to athletics and calisthenics, wood-turning,
making wooden patterns for castings, mechanical drawing, sloyd, clay
modeling, and chipping and filing metal. These exercises have been
selected on account of their character-building qualities.
The work is a great success. Nearly all inmates subjected to this
building-up process finally graduate with sufficient self-control from
the manual-training department into the trades school. A concrete
example will give an idea of the change produced in the pupil. The
record of No. 6,361 is instructive. The account is taken from a report
by the manual-training instructor, R. C. Bates:
"The pupil, previous to his assignment to manual training, had earned
for himself the sobriquet of 'dangerous man' among the officers and
inmates. His offenses have been mostly threatening language, lying,
contraband articles, talking, fooling, assaulting officers, and
institutional crimes of that nature.
"We begin his record in September, 1895, when he was reduced to the
second grade for fighting. October and November he lost three marks
each for lying and threatening language, and, by the influence of
September markings, caused his reduction to the third grade, or
incorrigibles, a closely defined group. He was in the third grade two
months and three days, when he was placed in the foundry, where, amid
blinding smoke, stifling air, and the task system, it was thought he
would tone down, upon the theory that the muscular demands of such a
place on a 124-pound body would vitiate sufficiently to weaken the
will and curb the disposition to riotous acts.
"From January 15th to February 15th he was on modified treatment. On
February 18th he was unconditionally restored to the second grade.
February and March he did fairly well, losing one mark each month,
but in April his period of passably well-doing was checked by his
committing an assault, along with assumption of authority, and on the
27th of April he was returned to the third grade for the second time,
remaining in the same two months and three days, when he was again
placed on modified treatment, and did well for three months, when he
fell again, this time for fighting, losing six marks in October. In
November he made a perfect month, securing promotion to second grade.
"On December 15, 1896, he was assigned to manual training, Group
II; object, development of self-control, with subjects as follows:
Athletics, drawing, sloyd, woodwork, chipping and filing, molding. Each
subject one hour and a half per day, five days per week. The influence
of the new environment sustained the effort made in November to
improve, and, by securing a perfect month in December, all his past was
blotted out and he was restored to the lower first grade again, through
'amnesty,' on December 25, 1896.
"Thus, on December 25, 1896, he was where he was institutionally
classed at the time of his admittance two years and three months
ago--viz., lower first grade, from which all who are committed begin
the reformatory course of treatment, additionally thereto in the
manual-training department. His development now begins. In January,
1897, he lost two marks as a result of school failures, but in February
he secured a perfect demeanor record; in March he lost two marks; April
and May were perfect months in all respects, and he was graduated
from manual training in May, returned to institutional life, and
assigned to the exercise squad in the morning and stone masonry in the
afternoon. Later his daily assignment was changed, placing him in the
molding class of the technological department to complete trade. His
development was complete and permanent. He was returned to the manual
training as _assistant instructor_ in the molding class, and is now
doing well in all departments, having been promoted to the upper first
grade in August and ranking as sergeant in 'I' company."
This record is only one example of many.
When manual-training schools organize their courses on the principle
of adapting the exercise to the ability to be developed, we shall have
abundance of similar proof. When these facts have been incontestably
established, there will be a means of satisfying the complaints of
those who are constantly attacking our schools because they develop
intellect and ruin character. "What is the use," say they, "of teaching
children to read and think if you do not make them honest and truthful?
How is it better for the community to educate liars and thieves merely
that they may lie and steal successfully in business and politics,
where they can not be caught, rather than to leave them in the slums,
where the police can get them?" The accusation is bitterly unjust
in many ways, but its force can be met by introducing a system of
character building based on a careful study of the means of developing
truthfulness, honesty, carefulness, persistence, bravery, courage under
defeat, and the other qualities that go to make up a true man. The
foundation of this system is to be found, I believe, in the _principle
of character-building by motor activity_.
The ladder of cross-education will be slowly climbed by psychological
investigators; if they find at the top a principle of such value and
wide application, surely the climb will have been worth the time and
trouble.
THE MORBID "SENSE OF INJURY."
BY W. F. BECKER, M. D.
As a fog about a ship removes it from exact relations to surroundings,
so, from the standpoint of morbid psychology, we may fancy the mind
peering through a more or less misty envelope to the true adjustment to
things--the "glass" through which we see "darkly." Were all action and
reaction of the mind to surroundings perfectly adapted, there could be
such a thing as _absolute_ sanity. So long, however, as evolution with
continuous readaptation and the processes of dissolution with attempted
adaptations continue, so long can there be but groping, imperfect
relations to surroundings, so long must there be defective or morbid
mental action, and sanity and insanity therefore but relative terms.
Thus many symptoms of the insane appear to be but varying degrees
of the morbid mental manifestations of health, and we may assume _a
priori_ that they have a common genesis and can be identified for
study. If we take, for example, one of the commonest of these--viz.,
the idea of persecution among the insane--we may safely identify it
with the "sense of injury" equally common among the sane.
By this "sense of injury" is meant that vague sense which afflicts many
of us at times of being the object of hostile feelings on the part
of others. No doubt we often _are_, for, in the stress of necessary
rivalry and conflict upon which progress depends, we give and take
injuries. But there remains a large excess of this "injured" feeling
which can not be so explained, or which is disproportionate to its
cause or entirely gratuitous, and is thus shifted into the field of
morbid psychology. This only is here treated--the _morbid_ sense of
injury.
It seems to find an easy entrance to the mind from a mere feeling of
being ill used or stinted in sympathy to the entertainment of serious
grievances or persecutory ideas. In certain temperaments it is marked.
On so-called "blue" days we are constantly moved to a "sense of injury"
from fancied aloofness of our friends. Madam Lofty slights us, and our
jaundiced imagination has it that she has heard something detrimental
and dislikes us. But lo! to-day, when the liver is released, madam
smiles sweetly, and never heard a thing.
So in suspicious people. They entertain a chronic state of mind, by
which the acts of others are given an invidious construction. They
anticipate ill will, carrying the _chip_ on the shoulder. Of two
constructions of a given situation, they leap to the more offending.
Some take on the vindictive attitude as a result, approaching that
type of insanity known as _paranoia_, of which Guiteau and Prendergast
were conspicuous examples; others are humiliated, as a consequence
approaching the _melancholia_ type of insanity, each illustrating
again how the sane and insane states are paralleled. Many come to bear
the outward marks--the stigmata of this mental attitude, approaching
sometimes the "asylum" face, like that of the insanely suspicious
Rousseau. We all know such faces, with their hard, set expressions, as
if forever sealed against any tender of good will.
By a curious fact, those who invite ill will seem often to get it.
Society, based on a reciprocity of faith, seems to have no smiles to
bestow upon the misanthrope. It bids him, "Laugh, and the world laughs
with you." It so comes to pass that many of them acquire some real
ground for their "sense of injury," and in the long run that real
quarrels are precipitated from this atmosphere of suspiciousness.
Indeed, this is the psychology of most quarrels. The _effect_ of
imaginary grievances comes in turn to be the _cause_ of real ones. Thus
into an incident between two persons, one of them mistakenly reads an
affront to himself. He retaliates, and the other person, unconscious
of having done anything to evoke any hostility, finds _himself_
affronted, and in _his_ turn retaliates. By this time real grievances
have come, and the quarrel is on. Balzac, that master analyst, in
alluding to friendship, in one of his stories, says: "It died" (the
friendship) "like other great passions--by a misunderstanding. Both
sides imagine treachery, pride prevents an understanding, and the
rupture comes." Just as the malevolent feelings may arise _de novo_,
so it is with the benevolent ones. Nordau shows how the nondescript
state of being "in love" often arises. Some incident between John and
Mary leads one of them--we will say John--to think mistakenly that Mary
has been attracted to him. Pleased with the fact, he reciprocates.
Mary, altogether unconscious of the reciprocal nature of John's
attention, finds pleasure in it, and in _her_ turn reciprocates. Mutual
reciprocity then follows.
In irritable persons we find the morbid sense of injury coupled with
resentment. Quickly interpreting anything disagreeable to them as an
affront by another, their first impulse is to resent it, which they
do more or less violently, according to circumstances, their second
thought often recognizing the irrational nature of the outbreak. This
suggests the feral instinct. Examples are common in the lower animals,
while in pain attacking those about them as if they were the cause of
it. No doubt this resentment is a survival from evolutionary ancestry.
It has probably served a necessary purpose in the conservation of
animal life by causing the animal to attack what may, in the jealousy
of self-preservation and its feeble discrimination, even be suspected
of being inimical to its welfare. Blind and unjust, perhaps, but
Nature hesitates at no apparent injustice to accomplish this. When
we go higher, to the tribal relation of man, we find the same blind
resentment. The Australian aborigines have no conception of death,
except as vaguely associated with homicidal causes, and when a member
of a tribe dies a most natural death a member of a hostile tribe
is killed to avenge the supposed murder. The Africans, too, read
homicidal forces into natural deaths. In civilized social relations it
appears again in the very popular and usually irrational demand for a
scapegoat when matters go wrong. The idea of religious sacrifice, too,
is a practice by which the anthropomorphic God is credited with being
aggrieved by human conduct and of wishing to be appeased therefor.
Though the exercise of this indiscriminate resentment was probably
greater and more necessary in the pre-social stage of human evolution,
there is still ground for its activity to-day in the struggle for
existence which has but changed its arena. Under a veneer of amity,
laudable enough, there are till the suspicion and resentment of the
tribal relation, as we may often see unveiled in a posse of boys, and
that this resentment is yet of the blind kind, we still have proof if
we have seen an enlightened man deliberately kick a harmless chair
because he stumbled on it in the dark.
Phylogenetically, then, we see this morbid "sense of injury" to be
reversional. This is in harmony with the atavic theory of insanity. In
the individual it is a delusion, and, like other delusions, an attempt
by the reason to explain a disordered feeling; in this case a _painful_
feeling, having its origin broadly in some imperfect adaptation of the
organism. This attempt to explain a feeling or sensation seems a human
necessity. However wide of the truth such explanations usually are, we
seem forced to attempt them. In the case of this _painful_ feeling,
with which we are here concerned, we are either unwilling or unable to
explain it in its true way, and are prone to attribute it to malevolent
agencies, often personal--perhaps the "bogy-man" remnant of the
child and race. Such explanation is often an easy escape from truths
unwelcome to our ego--truths which, if recognized, would wound pride
or conscience beyond easy endurance. It requires a man of rare courage
and mental clarity to recognize his particular pain from failure in
adaptation as autogenetic, and to lay it to natural and unflattering
causes. We prefer, of the two, to accuse the environment rather than
the organism, especially when the organism happens to be our own. We
take refuge in a grievance rather than impugn the supremacy of our ego.
Indeed, it seems to be necessary for healthy subjective activity, so to
speak, that a sort of _imperialism_ of the ego, however circumscribed,
be maintained. It is the condition _sine qua non_ of the necessary
measure of well-being of the individual. It is most reluctantly
relinquished, and we constantly see the plainest truths immolated that
it be retained. Only in the great self-effacement of melancholia and
in those rare characters who recognize and bear complacently naked
truths--the _Weltschmerz_ of Goethe--is this well-being renounced.
Even those who are willing to father their own wounded ego still
seek the necessary approbation by reducing its future pretensions
or claims so that they may not be again pained by their failure to
achieve them. They _unhitch_ their wagon from the star. Professor
James has illustrated this by a fraction showing that our approbation
is determined by our _success_ divided by our _pretensions_. Thus,
success/pretensions = approbation (self-esteem). The quotient may
be increased by diminishing the _pretensions_ or by increasing the
_success_. James's fraction is as applicable to the moral conduct as to
the intellectual side.
When we look for the physical equivalent of the mental state which
evokes the "sense of injury" we find it in dynamic and toxic states
of the nervous system and their correlation. Certain conditions of
the individual or environment bring these into special relief. Old
age is one. The querulousness, the sense of abuse or persecution
which afflict the aged and often lead them to take refuge in the
martyr-spirit, are sad examples. The state of fatigue or exhaustion is
another, and "neurasthenic" insanity is only an expression in greater
degree of the morbid mental action found in fatigue and exhausted
states.
The primary and secondary effects of alcohol or other narcotic
indulgence is another soil in which the "sense of injury" easily grows.
The _habitué_ is notoriously suspicious and irritable, and full of
fictitious grievances and unwarranted persecutory ideas. His attitude
toward them is that of the paranoiac, vindictive, rather than that
of the melancholiac, humiliated. They swell the army of so-called
"borderland" cases of insanity, fretting their friends and puzzling the
doctor with conduct alternately interpreted as "cussed" or "crazy."
Where there is bodily disease, acute or chronic, the morbid "sense
of injury" is much in play. An intelligent patient, on recovery from
a stomach disorder, admitted that whenever her stomach had ached she
was taken with a violent hatred of her companion with whom she was in
affectionate relation. An ignorant Southern colored woman, who had
rheumatism in her ankle, believed that she had been "hoodooed," and
explained the pain in her ankle by the presence of a snake, which she
believed had been put there by a "hoodoo." She was not insane, the
idea being consistent with her degree of intelligence, training, and
early environment. Another patient, a sensible, cultivated woman,
while suffering from a non-nervous illness, in which she had received
all the consideration that love and money could furnish, believed
herself to have been constantly and deliberately abused. After her
recovery, now some years, she still maintains the belief. Instances
could be multiplied, for doctors continually meet this atmosphere in
the sick-room, from ugly little grievances to delusions of persecution.
They are not surprised when a patient tells them in mingled confidence
and complaint that he is hungry and neglected, that "they" will
give him nothing to eat, etc., to find that his wife has been most
attentive, has been pressing him to eat, and has stocked the pantry in
anticipation. Dr. Johnson had plenty of ground for saying that a sick
man is a rascal, though the modern doctor has reversed the formula.
Persons who suffer from actual trouble or ill treatment easily develop
a morbid sense of injury, just as under similar conditions they may
become insane. Unable to estimate the precise amount of their real
grievance, there is an easy mental overflow into the fictitious
ones. It is for this reason that the narrative of a real trouble or
quarrel is so fraught with calumnious arraignment of others that it
is unreliable until we have heard the "other side of the story," and
that when disputants meet and explanations follow they often find
that they have no _casus belli_. In the examination of the alleged
insane for commitment we have constantly to separate the real from the
imaginary troubles. Mr. F---- was the subject of such examination. He
was suffering from heart disease, and thereby compelled to remain at
home idle. His wife was supporting the family by keeping boarders,
and he began to develop a morbid jealousy of her. He annoyed her by a
constant surveillance and suspicion of her every act, which amounted
at times to the delusion that she was unfaithful to him, and which
culminated one night in an outbreak in which the police figured. It
was difficult to separate his real from his imaginary grievances, for
his wife had ceased to have any affection for him, though his delusion
in regard to her unfaithfulness was unfounded and had been grafted
upon his real trouble. Sent to a general hospital, he improved, and
was reported "not insane." Circumstances requiring a hard struggle
for existence, disappointment without apparent cause, coupled with a
certain sentimental cast of mind, often prevent the correct estimation
of the wrongs suffered and the proper relation of undoubted misfortunes.
In the insane the sense of injury or its analogue--delusions of
persecution--appears in numerous shapes. Thus patients are defrauded,
or conspired against, or acted upon by witchcraft, magnetism,
electricity, or poisoned, or preached against, or subjected to
disagreeable odors. Sometimes the delusions are but ill-defined
and vague. Often it is possible to trace them to their underlying
disordered sense impression or the particular environment or to
vestiges of outgrown beliefs. They appear in depressed states of
melancholia as well as in the exalted states of mania and paranoia.
In melancholia they accompany a feeling of worthlessness which is the
patient's explanation of his persecution--i. e., he is unworthy of
better treatment. In paranoia the patient believes the persecution to
be prompted by fear or envy of him, and there is consequently a feeling
of self-importance--a morbid egotism which is in direct proportion to
the magnitude or complexity of the ideas of persecution. Indeed, it
is probable that these ideas of persecution, acting on a potentially
melancholic or a potentially paranoiac mind, whatever these may be,
determine the type that these mental diseases take.
The difference between the "injured" sense in the sane and insane
states we must from our view point, without essaying to bridge all
the _terra incognita_ which lies between sanity and insanity, regard
as largely but one of degree. And so with the underlying mental and
physical states. We find the morbid ideas more fixed in the sane than
in the insane, frequent repetitions of the morbid impression tending
to its final organization, so to speak. We also find that the morbid
idea is usually more elaborated in the insane than in the sane state,
although instances of the greatest elaboration are sometimes met with,
especially where the element of some external foundation is large. It
is probable, however, that the elements of fixity and elaboration of
the persecutory idea are after all dependent upon and in proportion to
the intensity of the underlying brain and mind states. In other words,
that to increase a given intensity of these states is to increase the
fixity and elaborateness of the "sense of injury," is to prevent the
correction of the morbid idea, until finally exploited in conduct,
which is the _début_ of the insanity.
Thus the relativity of insanity which has all along been maintained is
clear on the line here pursued. It would be equally so in following
other lines of morbid psychology. It has, though, received but little
general recognition, and writers still treat insanity as an entity
apart from its bearings on the average mind and its evolutionary
history. The word "insanity," or "lunatic," is no doubt largely
responsible for this, suggesting popularly, as it does, a distinct
class of persons--a type of being as unlike ourselves as a Martian
might be fancied to be. Nature or science, however, has set no line
between the morbid mental manifestations which constitute sanity and
those which constitute insanity, that being an arbitrary, however
practical, distinction which science has had rather to descend to
meet. Nothing so stands in the way of the best welfare of the insane
than this abysmal ignorance which still prevails in regard to them--an
ignorance which still clings to the mediæval idea of insanity, the
classical portraiture, as in the pictures of Hogarth, or on the stage,
or in fiction; an ignorance which is ever hearkening for the maniac's
shriek or the clanking of his fetters, which recognizes nothing short
of "furious madness" as sufficient ground for committing a brain-sick
man to the tender therapy of the hospital ward.
But those who know best tell us that the insane are very much like
other people, that there is wonderfully little difference between them
and ourselves; and sometimes but a slight circumstance, a mere accident
of environment, determines which side of the hospital wall we shall be
on.
EARLY EXPERIMENTS IN AIR FLIGHT.
BY M. BANET RIVET.
Man has sought in all times and at all places to find means of leaving
the earth's surface, in imitation of the birds, and rising into the
air. Ancient legendary lore furnishes many stories, like those of
Dædalus and his son Icarus, of attempts of this sort. In the fourth
century B. C., Archytas of Tarentum, a learned Pythagorean, who has
been credited with the invention of the screw, the pulley, and the
kite, according to Aulus Gellius, constructed a wooden dove which could
rise and sustain itself in the air by some mechanism the arrangement of
which is not known. Credible accounts exist of an English Benedictine
monk, Oliver of Malmesbury, in the eleventh century, having tried to
fly by precipitating himself from the height of a tower, with the
assistance of wings attached to his arms and his feet. It is said that,
after having gone along a little way, he fell and broke his legs. He
attributed his accident to failure to provide his apparatus with a
tail, which would have helped preserve his equilibrium and made the
descent a gentler one.
In the sixteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci first demonstrated that a
bird, which is heavier than the air, sustains itself, advances in the
air, "by rendering the fluid denser where it passes than where it does
not pass." In order to fly it has to fix its point of support on the
air; its wing in the descending stroke exerts a pressure from above
down, the reaction of which from below up forces the center of gravity
of its body to ascend at each instant to the height at which the bird
wishes to maintain it. Some sketches that have come down to us prove
that Leonardo occupied himself, like Oliver of Malmesbury, with giving
man power to fly by the aid of wings suitably fixed to his body. We owe
to Leonardo also the invention of the parachute, which he described in
the following terms: "If a man had a pavilion, each side of which was
fifteen braces wide and twelve braces high, he might cast himself from
any height whatever, without fear of danger." It may be said, too, of
Leonardo da Vinci, that he was the first to suggest the idea of the
screw propeller. "If," he said, "this instrument in the form of a screw
is properly made--that is, made of linen cloth, the interstices of
which have been filled with starch--and if we turn it rapidly, such a
screw will make a bearing nut for itself through the air and rise. This
can be proved by moving a broad, thin rule rapidly through the air,
when it will be found that the arm is forced to follow in the direction
of the edge of the board. The frame for the cloth of which I have been
speaking should be made of long, stout reeds. A model of it might be
made in paper, with, for its axis, a thin strip of iron which we twist
forcibly. When the strip is left free it will turn the screw."
In 1680 Borelli published some studies of a remarkably correct
character on the flight of birds. According to his view, the wing
acts upon the air in the phase of beating down, in the manner of an
inclined plane, so as, by virtue of the resistance opposed by the
air, to push the body of the animal upward at first and then onward.
The action of the ascending wing was compared to that of a kite, and
it would consequently continue to sustain the body of the bird while
waiting the following stroke. But Borelli never thought of turning
his observations to advantage, so as to supply man with the means
of flying. Attention was much engaged in 1742 with the attempt of
the Marquis de Bacqueville, substantially repeating that of Oliver
of Malmesbury, which was terminated by a similar accident. Mention
should also be made of Paucton, who in 1768 drafted a plan for a screw
machine. In 1784 Launoy and Bienvenu exhibited and operated, before
the Academy of Sciences in Paris, a screw which was moved by a strong
spring. Before this, however, Joseph and Stephen Montgolfier had filled
the world with the noise of their discovery of the air balloon, and the
ingenious machine of these aëronauts failed to receive the attention it
deserved.
It has been known since the days of Archimedes that every body partly
or wholly submerged in a liquid in equilibrium suffers a vertical push
upward from the fluid equal to the weight of liquid it displaces.
Let us consider the case of a body entirely plunged in a liquid--water,
for example. If its weight exceeds the thrust it suffers it will fall
to the bottom of the water under the action of a descensional force
equal, at each instant, to the difference between the weight of the
body, which is invariable, and the thrust, which is invariable also,
and thus constant in direction and also in amount. If the weight of the
body is less than the thrust, the latter overcomes it, and, contrary
to the usual laws of weight, the body will rise under the action of
an ascensional force, which will evidently be likewise constant in
amount as well as in direction. A cork held down at the bottom of a
vessel of water and then left to itself will supply an example of this
ascensional movement.
A third case may be presented--that in which the weight of the body
is equal to the thrust of the water. Weight and thrust are then in
mutual equilibrium. No force invites the body either to descend or to
rise, and it remains balanced in the midst of the liquid, wherever it
happens to have been placed. This state of indifferent equilibrium is,
however, possible only if the weight of the body remains rigorously
constant. The slightest augmentation of the weight immediately causes
the body to descend, while the slightest diminution sends it up. From
this source arise the difficulties that are met in the construction
of submarine boats, when their ascent or descent is obtained by
means of air chambers, which are filled with water or emptied of it
according to the requirements. The equilibrium of these engines is
always precarious, and this explains why none of them, from that of Van
Drebbel in 1620 to the experiments of Goubet in 1895, have given really
practical results in the matter of stability of immersion.
When Galileo, following Aristotle, had demonstrated the ponderability
of the air, and Torricelli had proved that atmospheric pressure was a
result of that property, it was immediately thought that the principle
discovered by Archimedes might be extended to the air, and Otto von
Guericke gave an experimental demonstration of it by the invention of
the baroscope.
From this period it seems, then, that the discovery of aëronautics was
possible. If the weight of the volume of air displaced is greater than
that of the body, the latter should take an ascensional movement in the
atmosphere, as a cork does when plunged into water; and it is evident
that for a body to satisfy such conditions we have only to fill a very
light envelope with a gas less dense than the ambient air. But the
study of gases was still in its infancy in the seventeenth century, and
it required the labors of Mortrel d'Élement and Hales, at the beginning
of the following century, to teach physicists how to collect and retain
them.
The history of the progress of the human mind shows, further, that the
pure and simple acceptance of a scientific discovery is not enough to
make it produce all the consequences we have a right to expect from it.
It must, further, impregnating the mind with itself, pass, we might
say, into the condition of an innate idea. Chemistry, in this very
matter of the discovery of the weight of the air and of the gases,
presents a striking example of the accuracy of our proposition. The
ponderability of the air had been accepted by physicists for a long
time, while chemists continued to take no account of it, although, as
Mendeleef has remarked, no exact idea could be conceived, under such
conditions, concerning most chemical phenomena. It is to the glory of
Lavoisier that he first took account of this ponderability and of that
of all the gases as well. When we reflect that it was not till about
1775, or a hundred and fifty years after Galileo, that this illustrious
Frenchman began to set forth those ideas, it is not any wonder that
the discovery of aërostats was not made till toward the end of the
eighteenth century. Lalande was therefore much in the wrong when he
said "it was so simple! why was it not done before?"
It would not be just, however, to refer the discovery of aërostats
solely to the efforts of the Montgolfiers. Like all inventors, like
Lavoisier himself, these brothers, as Figuier has remarked, had the
benefit of a long series of isolated labors, carried on often without
special purpose, by which the elements of their invention had been
gathered up.
Père Lana, of Brescia, conceived a plan in 1670 for constructing a ship
which should sustain itself in the air and move by the aid of sails.
Four copper globes, in which a vacuum had been produced in order to
render them lighter than the volume of air displaced, were to support
the ship while the sails propelled it. The scientific conception of the
empty globes was correct, but Père Lana did not think of the enormous
collapsing force which the atmospheric pressure would exercise upon
them. The idea of a sail which would give his aërial boat a resemblance
to a vessel driven by the winds was wholly erroneous.
Sixty-five years later, in 1735, Père Galien, of Avignon, gave a
fairly clear expression to the theory of aërostats. Resting on the
principle of Archimedes, he maintained that if he could fill a globe
made of light cloth with a sufficiently rarefied air the globe would
necessarily possess an ascensional force, which would permit it to lift
itself up in the air with a ship and all its cargo. He proposed to draw
this rarefied air from out of the upper regions of the atmosphere,
down from the summits of high mountains, forgetting that the air, when
brought down to the level of the ground, would contract in volume and
assume the density of the ambient atmosphere.
In the condition of ignorance of the properties of gases that existed
in that age, it did not occur, and could not have occurred, to Père
Galien to use other gases than air; no more could he have thought
of employing heat to rarefy the air, for the first not very precise
notions on the decrease in densities of gases by heat only date from
Priestley. But when Cavendish, in 1765, had fully studied hydrogen
gas, and shown that as it was prepared then it was seven times lighter
than air, Black was enabled to suggest that by filling a light bag
with hydrogen the bag would be able to raise a certain weight in the
air. The labors of Cavendish, Black, and the discoveries of oxygen,
nitrogen, and other gases by Priestley, were described by Priestley
a few years afterward in the celebrated book on The Different Kinds
of Air--a book which Stephen and Joseph Montgolfier had in their
possession. The two brothers evidently found the germ of their
invention in it.
It is fair to say that the Montgolfiers, who were already known in the
learned world by their discoveries in the mechanical sciences, had
thought, before they knew of Priestley's book, of a way of imitating
Nature by inclosing vapor of water, a gas lighter than air, in a paper
bag, which would be lifted up, the vapor contained in the bag being
sustained in the air like a cloud. But the vapor condensed, and the
weighted balloon shortly fell to the ground. The smoke produced by
burning wood inclosed in a bag gave no better results. After seeing
Priestley's book, they substituted hydrogen for vapor and for smoke,
but the gas passed through the paper bag, and they gave up this attempt.
They then fancied that electricity was one of the causes of the rise
of clouds, and sought for a gas that had electrical properties. They
thought they could obtain it by burning wet straw and wool together.
A box made of silk was filled with this gas, and they had the great
satisfaction of seeing it rise to the ceiling of their room, and, in a
second experiment, into the air. This was in November, 1782.
Five months previously, Tiberius Cavallo, in England, had repeated
Black's experiment of filling a paper sack with hydrogen; but, as
the Montgolfiers had found, the hydrogen leaked through the paper.
Cavallo had better success with soap bubbles, which held the gas. His
experiments stopped here, while the Montgolfiers carried theirs on to
practical success.--_Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from
the Revue Scientifique._
SKETCH OF EDWARD ORTON,
LATE STATE GEOLOGIST OF OHIO; LATE PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN
ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE.
All persons interested in American science were surprised and shocked
at learning of the death, from heart trouble, on October 16, 1899, of
Prof. Edward Orton, of the Ohio State University. The event occurred
only little less than two months after Professor Orton had presided,
with a simplicity of manner that did not hide but rather heightened
the traits of vigor in his character, over the meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science at his home in Columbus,
Ohio. The services he rendered to geology, his long and honorable
career as an educator, and his continual and consistent insistence
upon the faithful use of the scientific method well entitle him to
be remembered as one of the most meritorious of American scientific
workers.
EDWARD ORTON was born in Deposit, Delaware County, N. Y., March 9,
1829. He was descended from Thomas Orton, who, born in England in
1613, was one of the fifty-three original settlers and owners of
Farmington, Conn., was of the stock from which most of the Ortons in
the United States are derived, and represented his town in the General
Court in 1784. Another ancestor, a grandson of Thomas Orton, was one
of the original purchasers and settlers of Litchfield, Conn., where
he owned a square mile of land known as Orton Hill, on the south side
of Bantam Lake. Two of the maternal ancestors of the subject of this
sketch fought in the colonial wars, and ten Ortons were soldiers in the
Revolution.
Young Edward Orton was taught by his father, the Rev. Samuel G. Orton,
D. D., and received further training preparatory for college in the
academies of Westfield and Fredonia, N. Y. He entered Hamilton College,
whence his father had been graduated in 1822, in 1845 as a sophomore,
and was graduated in 1848 in a class among the other members of which
were the Rev. Dr. Thomas S. Hastings, President of Union Theological
Seminary, New York, and the Hon. F. J. Van Alstyne, afterward Mayor of
Albany, N. Y., and member of Congress. After his graduation he taught
for a number of years in academies at Erie, Pa., Franklin, N. Y., and
Chester, N. Y., and became, in 1856, Professor of Natural Science in
the State Normal School at Albany, N. Y. He pursued post-graduate
studies in chemistry, botany, and other subjects at the Lawrence
Scientific School, with Professors Horsford, Cooke, and Gray as his
teachers, and studied theology for a time under Dr. Lyman Beecher, at
Lane, and Dr. Edwards A. Park, at Andover Seminaries. While teaching at
Chester, N. Y., he was called to Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio,
where he took charge of the preparatory department in 1865; was made
Professor of Natural History shortly afterward, and was made president
of the college in 1872, but retained the office for only one year, at
the end of which he went to occupy a similar position in the State
University at Columbus.
When the second Geological Survey of Ohio was undertaken in 1869 under
the charge of Prof. J. S. Newberry, Professor Orton was appointed
an assistant by Governor Rutherford B. Hayes, and was continued by
reappointment by Governor E. F. Noyes. When Professor Newberry withdrew
from the survey in 1881, Professor Orton was appointed State Geologist
by Governor Charles Foster, and he was afterward reappointed to the
position successively by Governors Hoadley, Foraker, Campbell, and
Bushnell. He retained the title of State Geologist till his death,
although he had not been engaged in any active public work on the
survey for a considerable time.
The Ohio State University having been established on the basis of
the grants of land made to the States for colleges under the Morrill
Land-Grant Act, Professor Orton was appointed its president and
Professor of Geology. He discharged the duties of this office for
eight years, or till 1881. But the executive work of the president's
office was irksome to him, since it grew constantly heavier as the
young college expanded, and therefore left him less and less time
for teaching and research in geology. Being in a measure compelled
to make a choice between the two fields of activity, he chose the
less ambitious position, resigning the presidency, and assuming the
position of Professor of Geology, which he retained for the remainder
of his life. The geological building of the university is named after
him--Orton Hall. Besides his work on the Geological Survey of Ohio and
his participation in the composition of its reports, Professor Orton
prepared, for the Eighth Annual Report of the United States Geological
Survey, a paper on the New Oil and Gas Fields of Ohio and Indiana,
and another, only recently published in the Nineteenth Annual Report
of the United States Survey, on the Rock Waters of Ohio; a volume for
the Geological Survey of Kentucky on the Petroliferous Production of
the Western Part of the State, published in 1891; and a report on
petroliferous productions which is in process of publication by the
Geological Survey of New York.
In the paper on the Oil and Gas Fields of Ohio and Indiana the
discovery of the supply of those materials, the great value of which
was only realized in 1884 and afterward, is spoken of as being more
surprising and anomalous than any similar discovery that had preceded
it, and as a development which experts were hardly more prepared for
than others. The oil and gas derived from the Trenton limestone in
certain parts of these States were found to differ from the oil and
gas in the Pennsylvania wells in chemical composition and physical
properties, in the horizons from which they were obtained, in the
structural features of the rocks associated with their production,
and, most of all, in the kind of rock that produced them. "No facts
more unexpected have ever been brought to light in connection with
the geology of this country than those with which we are now becoming
acquainted." Professor Orton's paper, which fills one hundred and
eighty of the large pages of the report of the Geological Survey,
includes a sketch of the history of the discovery to July, 1887,
when it was prepared; a designation of what was known in regard to
the geological scale and geological structure of the regions within
which the new fields are embraced, and the tracing of the chief
factors that influence or control the productiveness of the oil rock,
with the description of the special features and boundaries of the
several fields and the setting forth of the leading facts and present
development of these lately found sources of power. Two principal
conditions under which the new oil rock had proved petroliferous on a
large scale were found to be porosity, connected with and apparently
dependent on the chemical transformation of the upper portion of the
limestone, for a number of feet in thickness, into a highly crystalline
dolomite; and a relief resulting from slight warping of the strata,
whereby the common contents of the porous portions of the Trenton
limestone had been differentiated by gravity, the gas and oil seeking
the highest levels, and the salt water maintaining a lower but definite
elevation in every field. Professor Orton found nothing in the new
experience to make it safe to count the Trenton limestone an oil
rock or a gas rock in any locality, unless it could be shown to have
undergone the dolomitic replacement by which its porosity was assured;
and even in case it had suffered this transformation it would not be
found a reservoir of gas or oil in an important sense unless some parts
of it had acquired the relief essential to the due separation of its
liquid and gaseous contents.
The report on the Rock Waters of Ohio concerns, first, those waters,
chiefly in the northwestern and western part of the State, that are
obtained from a considerable depth as compared with ordinary wells, the
knowledge of which was almost wholly derived from wells drilled in the
search for oil and gas, and was necessarily fragmentary and incomplete;
because water was not included among the objects of search, but was
considered a hindrance and obstruction to be got out of the way as well
as possible; and, second, flowing wells, including only those having
considerable head of pressure and those occurring in considerable
areas, all of which belong entirely to the drift. Further, a brief
review is given of some facts of unusual interest that were developed
in the deep drillings concerning the preglacial drainage system of the
part of the State in question. Indications of old river channels, one
of which seems to have been extensive, were found at several points.
Among the curious results of these studies was the conclusion, "seeming
to be already established," "that the Ohio River, as we now know the
stream, is of recent origin, and that the main volume of water gathered
in it at the present time originally flowed across the State to the
northward at least as far as Auglaize and Mercer Counties, where it
turned to the westward toward the present lines of Wabash drainage in
Indiana." Professor Orton seems to have placed considerable emphasis
on the value of a study of the rocky floor of the State, concerning
which all we know at present is derived from the revelations of deep
drillings at haphazard; and he thought it would be a good work for
the State to make use of all accessible data of this kind at once in
constructing a model of the rocky floor of the region under review. The
care and fidelity with which he studied the underground geology are
exemplified in a map attached to the paper on the oil and gas fields,
in which the horizons of the Trenton limestone are indicated and
approximately bounded as they occur by gradations ranging from fifty
to two hundred and fifty feet, from elevations above the ocean level
to one thousand and more feet below. Another contribution of Professor
Orton's which may appropriately be given special notice is his part
of the article on Ohio in the Encyclopædia Britannica, in which a
succinct, clear, and comprehensive account of the geology of the whole
State is given, with its salient features delineated so sharply that
one may almost conceive from it a definite geological picture of the
region.
Of all his scientific work, however, Professor Orton regarded
the fixing of the order of the coal measures of Ohio as the most
important; and he considered the determination of the order of the
subcarboniferous strata, and particularly of the Berea Grit, as
constituting a large permanent service to the study of the geology of
the State.
At the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science Professor Orton contributed a special paper on the local
geology of Columbus, the place of the meeting, in which he dwelt
largely on the origin of the drift that marks the superficial geology
of the vicinity.
Of the work he has done for the increase and advancement of knowledge,
the extent of a part of which we have only faintly indicated by the
mention of a few particular researches, Professor Orton put the highest
value on his labors as a teacher, a calling to which he was devoted for
more than half a century. He found peculiar pleasure in instructing
the children of the old pupils whom he had taught in his younger days.
He was actively concerned in the promotion and extension of sanitary
science, his addresses in that field having been one of the factors
that led to the establishment of the Ohio State Board of Health. He was
also greatly interested in the advancement of agriculture.
A theme on which Professor Orton was fond of dwelling in his public
addresses was the amount and value of what has been accomplished
within a comparatively short time in the world's history by the use
of the methods of science. In an address delivered before the alumni
of Hamilton College in 1888 he maintained that we were living in a
revolutionary period, which is marked by a great advance in knowledge
and a vastly larger control of the forces of Nature; by a large
increase in freedom of thought and action; by a sudden and remarkable
addition to the mobility of man, accompanied by an unexampled growth
of great cities; and by an incalculable addition to the wealth of
the world. Accompanying these great changes in the material and
intellectual world were certain moral transformations appearing to grow
out of them. All these advances were ascribed to a movement--a new
method of investigating Nature--that began, so far as its particular
and continuous development is concerned, about three hundred years
ago, but to which no date or founder's name could be attached. This
new philosophy thoroughly respected Nature, was humble, patient in the
accumulation of facts and the trial of its theories, comprehensive,
progressive, and hopeful. It has given us the marvelous increase
of knowledge which especially marks the nineteenth century; it has
impressed its influence upon all branches of study, and has wrought
great improvements in methods and results; and has rendered an immense
and inestimable service to Christian theology, and done much to broaden
and rationalize it and thus to perpetuate and strengthen its hold on
the world. Finally, the method of science was pronounced "the best gift
that God has given to the mind of man." A similar train of thought as
to the material aspects is apparent, though in a somewhat different
form, in an address on The Stored (or Fossil) Power of the World,
delivered in 1894.
A considerable part of Professor Orton's presidential address at the
last meeting of the American Association was devoted to a summary
of the conclusions derived from Alfred Russell Wallace's book, The
Wonderful Century, that the progress accomplished in the present
century far outweighs the entire progress of the human race from the
beginning up to 1800. In this address, also, the author felicitously
spoke of the scope of the American Association as possibly including
the whole continent, and its object as the advancement of science, the
discovery of new truth. "It is possible that we could make ourselves
more interesting to the general public if we occasionally forswore
our loyalty to our name and spent a portion of our time in restating
established truths." But the discoveries recorded, though often
fragmentary and devoid of special interest to the outside world, all
had a place in the great temple of knowledge; and the speaker hoped
that although no great discoveries should be reported this time, the
meeting might still be a memorable one through the inspiration it would
give to the multitude of workers in the several fields of science.
Professor Orton was a member of several learned societies; was
President of the Sanitary Association of Ohio in 1884 and 1885;
received the degree of Ph. D. from Hamilton College in 1876, and that
of LL. D. from the Ohio State University in 1881; was elected President
of the Geological Society of America in 1896; and was designated at the
Boston meeting of the American Association, 1898, as president for the
Columbus meeting, 1899.
In addition to his interests in science and theology, Professor Orton
was keenly alive to everything that bore on the history of man on
this planet. He was long a member of the Ohio State Archæological and
Historical Society, and had recently been made a member of its board of
trustees. He was a prominent member of the Old Northwest Genealogical
Society, and was the author of a volume, published in 1896, on the
Genealogy of the Orton Family in America. The absolute freedom of his
character from any desire for display or self-aggrandizement is well
shown by the fact that in this volume, compiled, with enormous labor,
in the spare minutes of a busy life, he cuts himself off with one
paragraph of a hundred words, while devoting pages to contemporaneous
members of the family of whom the world has never elsewhere heard.
He was stricken with hemiplegia in December, 1891, but was able to do
a considerable amount of work in his profession afterward. A few days
before his death he said, in a note, that he felt that he had lived out
his allotted time, and that his work was done. He never met his classes
again, though he continued able to be up and about his home till the
hour of his death. He seemed to feel that the solemn event was drawing
close, during the last two days of his life, and his mind was always
busy with the great question, "If a man die, shall he live again?" He
had formed an affirmative answer apparently, as he read Browning's
Prospice repeatedly in his last hours, and seemed to find in it the
greatest pleasure and solace. His death was a quiet and painless one--a
fitting end to a beautiful life.
Statistics of cremation, presented by M. Bourneville at the recent
annual meeting of the society in Paris, show that the number of
incinerations at the Père Lachaise crematory has almost steadily
increased since 1889, and that the whole number last year was 4,513,
making 37,068 from the beginning. A fair proportion of the number
were women. There are now in Europe and America seventy crematories,
twenty-seven of which are in Italy and twenty in the United States.
Cremation is making good progress in England, where four crematories
are reported from, and two are in course of erection. Germany has six,
where 423 incinerations took place in 1898; Switzerland and Sweden
have two each, Denmark one, and one has been authorized in Norway.
Editor's Table.
_A COMMISSION IN DIFFICULTIES._
The synopsis which has been given to the press of the Thirteenth
Annual Report of the Interstate Commerce Commission is not encouraging
reading for those who like to believe in legislation as an infallible
panacea for all public and social ills. The tone of the document indeed
is very far from being one of triumph. The note struck in the very
first paragraph is the need for more legislation to save the copious
legislation already passed from proving ineffectual and abortive.
Whether it is that Congress does not wish to make the work of the
commission successful, or whether it has begun to have a wise distrust
of its own powers, we can not say; but the commissioners complain
bitterly of its inaction. We can not do better than quote their own
words: "The reasons for the failure of the law to accomplish the
purposes for which it was enacted have been so frequently and fully set
forth that repetition can not add to their force or make them better
understood. It is sufficient to say that the existing situation and the
developments of the past year render more imperative than ever before
the necessity for speedy and suitable legislation. We therefore renew
the recommendations heretofore made, and earnestly urge their early
consideration and adoption."
As the document proceeds, we see the good commissioners at war with the
wicked railways, and it is impossible to resist the conclusion that, on
the whole, the wicked railways have the best of it. The commissioners
admit that certain cases which have come before the courts have been
decided against them, and in favor of the railways; but they are far
from disclosing the full extent of the discouragement, not to say
mortification, they receive. The business of the commission is to
interfere between the railways and their customers--the public--in
the interest of the latter. The railways naturally consider this a
rather one-sided function, and are not extremely zealous to aid in its
performance. They have their own troubles with the public, and have
no commission to come to their assistance. Everybody is after cheap
railway rates, just as everybody is after cheap goods; and the means
sometimes resorted to to get reductions would at least hold their own
for astuteness with any that could be concocted in a traffic office for
the raising of rates. We give the commissioners full credit for doing
their best to protect the interests of the public, but we can not help
doubting whether, on the whole, the public has derived much benefit
from their efforts. In fact, we are strongly inclined to the opinion
that the whole idea of the commission is simply a legislative blunder.
The railways undoubtedly possess great powers which theoretically
there is nothing to prevent their abusing to almost any extent. But
what is theoretically possible is not always practically possible.
The President of the United States possesses great powers, which
theoretically he might abuse to any extent; so does the Queen of
England; so do many other potentates. But of all the evil that is
theoretically possible, how much is carried out in practice? All kinds
of things _might_ happen if people were fools enough to do all the harm
that it is in their power to do. The great saving fact is that it is
not possible to go very far in doing harm to others without doing it
to yourself. It is this fact which the insatiable legislation-monger
ignores. He has an infinite faith in the mischief that will happen
if things are left alone. He can not bear to think that somebody is
not looking after everybody. He has no faith whatever in natural
law or natural actions and reactions, and would hoot the idea of
what the poet Wordsworth calls a "wise passiveness." Such people
have little conception of the mischief they do, and of the good that
fails of realization through their pestilent activity. The readers of
Dickens will perhaps remember Mrs. Pardiggle and the admirable system
of education she applied to her numerous family of children. The
unhappy youngsters were under orders every hour of the day; they were
marched round the country with their mother when she went on visits
of charity, and compelled to contribute out of their own (nominal)
pocket money to all kinds of religious and benevolent schemes. How
they kicked and rebelled, and what distressing passions were roused in
their youthful breasts, the great novelist has told us; and we think
we may take his word for it. The fussy legislator is a Pardiggle. If
he would leave things alone, opposing interests would find a _modus
vivendi_, and practical justice would more and more assert itself.
The more interference there is between parties who in the last resort
are dependent on one another's good will, the less likely they are to
recognize their substantial identity of interest. If the interference
is wholly in the interest of one of the parties, the other is sure to
be forced into an undesirable attitude; while the one whose protection
is the object in view will not unnaturally take all the protection he
can get, and look for something more.
What is wanted to put the relations between the railways and the public
upon the most satisfactory footing possible is, in the first place,
less legislative interference; and, in the second, a higher tone of
business morality throughout the community. We place this second not
as underrating its importance, but because we believe it would to some
extent flow from the first. It is when the public transfers its right
of eminent domain to a railway corporation that it should take adequate
measures to protect its own interests; but how can this be done when
legislation is sold--when charters are given or withheld, according
to the amount of money available for purposes of persuasion? With
honest legislators and honest courts there would be very little trouble
between the railways and the public, and such as arose could be easily
remedied. Commerce commissions are a testimony to the existence of low
standards of business morality; and, unfortunately, they tend to keep
them low, if not to make them lower.
The sooner we make up our minds to trust more to moral influences
freely acting in the intercourse of man with man and of interest with
interest, and less to legal compulsion, the better it will be for us
in every department of our national life. The Thirteenth Annual Report
of the Interstate Commerce Commission is a virtual confession of the
failure of legislation to accomplish a purpose which was supposed to
be easily within its field of action. The confession is coupled with
a demand for more legislation, but, were the demand conceded, who can
guarantee that more still would not be wanted? The railways are not at
the end of their resources, and new laws would, we fear, be only too
likely to suggest new means of evasion. No; the remedy lies elsewhere,
and if Congress is wise it will give that remedy a trial by allowing
the railways and the public a chance to arrange terms between them,
with public opinion as the principal court of appeal.
_THE FUNCTION OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY._
A paper that was read by Mr. Lindsay Swift, of the Boston Public
Library, at a meeting of the Massachusetts Library Club, on the subject
of Paternalism in Public Libraries, and which we find in the Library
Journal for November last, is one which, in our opinion, deserves to be
separately printed and widely circulated. It abounds in good sense, and
preaches a doctrine of self-help and self-reliance which is much needed
in these days.
A question which the author of the paper does not discuss, but which,
it seems to us, lies at the threshold of the whole subject, is whether
the very existence of a public library--if we understand by the term a
library supported by public taxes--is not in itself an exemplification
of paternalism. Mr. Swift strikes us as a benevolent bureaucrat who
wants to give the people at large a wider liberty in the matter of
reading than the ruling influences of time and place are disposed
to allow. He sees that liberty is good, that leading strings belong
to infancy, and he raises his protest against a paternalism in the
management of public libraries which, under the plea of providing only
the most approved reading for all classes, would tend to the repression
of individuality in the reader and the establishment of the supremacy
of commonplace. But what if commonplace insists on being supreme and
shutting out whatever is not of one complexion with itself? How are
we to resist its demand in the administration of a State-supported,
and therefore majority-ruled, institution? "You offer us," say its
representatives, "a liberty we do not want for ourselves, and are not
prepared to concede to others, as we are sure it can not be for their
good. We are not going to consult the tastes of cranks, criminals,
intellectual aristocrats, or social mugwumps of any kind. For all
practical purposes we are the public, and we mean to run this public
library." To the objection that a portion, at least, of the taxes is
paid by those whose views and tastes are not going to be consulted, the
answer would be ready: "It is for the majority to say how taxes shall
be applied." We recognize the excellence of Mr. Swift's intentions and
sympathize with his way of looking at things, but we feel that his
objections to "paternalism" in connection with public libraries are
delivered from a somewhat shaky platform. We observe that a periodical
quoted in the Library Journal--the Overland Monthly--makes the remark
that "there is nothing to be said for free books that could not be
urged in favor of free beefsteaks and free overcoats."
Some of the points, however, that are made by Mr. Swift are deserving
of attention. The several professions--law, medicine, theology,
etc.--would more or less like to have only such books placed upon the
shelves of a public library as represent what may be called their
respective orthodoxies. But, as Mr. Swift observes, "libraries are as
much the depositories of the folly as of the wisdom of the ages." A
library, therefore, should tell us what men have thought and attempted
in the past, and what they are thinking and attempting now. It is for
schools and colleges, for newspapers and reviews, to afford guidance
in the wilderness of opinions, not for the library to make a point of
putting out of people's reach everything that is not in line with the
scientific, literary, or other orthodoxy of the hour.
"A subtle form of paternalism is the deliberate inculcation of the
patriotic spirit, especially in children." Mr. Swift is a brave man
to attempt to stem this particular torrent. He thinks there are times
when one who loves his country would feel shame for it rather than
pride, and that the motto "My country right or wrong" is not the most
wholesome sentiment that can be impressed on the mind of youth. "To
fill a child with the consummate virtues of Washington, Jefferson, and
other of our immortals, and to leave him ignorant of the greatness of
Cromwell and of William the Silent, is a serious injustice to the child
and to the cause of education." Not only is this done, but, in the
domain of literature as well, it seems as if the only names with which
public-school pupils obtain any acquaintance are those of national
authors. So far as poetry is concerned, Mr. Swift says that almost the
only name he hears from the lips of children frequenting the Public
Library is "Longfellow." He can not remember ever having had a call
from a child for Tennyson, while Wordsworth in the school region is
equally unknown.
Apart from the studied inculcation of a narrow patriotism, the author
of the paper we are considering thinks that there is altogether too
much paternalism shown in the choice of children's reading. He has only
a limited and feeble faith in "children's rooms" in public libraries.
They are very much, he thinks, like Sunday schools--convenient places
for parents to unload their offspring. The aim of the censorship is
to eliminate everything that is not in accord with the most approved
canons of juvenile life and thought, leaving only what is ready for
immediate acceptance and assimilation. Such a policy, Mr. Swift holds,
is not favorable either to individuality or to intellectual growth.
"We must," he says, "take books, like life, as we find them, and learn
to distinguish good and bad; learn, as we ought, that the good is not
so good as we have been told it is, and that the bad contains a strong
infusion of good. No wrecks are so fearful as those which come to the
young who have up to a point led 'sheltered lives.'"
It is not, however, children only who get the benefit of a benevolent
protective policy. Selecting committees are quite prepared to look
after grown-up people as well, and keep out of their way books which
might prove too exciting, which might reveal depths of passion such
as persons leading decorous lives are not supposed to know anything
about, or otherwise agitate the tranquil mill pond of their existence.
It does not occur to them that thus the salt and savor of human life
are expelled, and that, instead of the free play of vital forces,
there supervenes a dreary mechanic round of semi-automatic activities
unvisited by enthusiasm, untouched by strong desire, without dream or
vision or any quickening of the heart or the imagination. Some good
people are excessively particular not only as to what may threaten
moral disturbance, but as to anything that may encourage departures
from conventional modes of speech and deportment. They do not like
to admit books that they regard as vulgar, and a great mark of
vulgarity in their opinion is the use of slang. Yet so accomplished
a _littérateur_ as Mr. William Archer told us lately that he pleads
guilty to "an unholy relish" for the talk of "Chimmie Fadden" and his
Chicago contemporary "Artie." To him, as to Mr. Swift, the books in
which these worthies disport themselves _mean something_, and something
deserving of attention. That being the case, the vulgarity, which is
part of the picture, becomes in proportion to its truth an element of
value. Mr. Swift, very bold and like the ancient prophet, says plainly:
"Harmless books in general are mediocre books; if a new note in morals
or society is struck, the suggestion of a possible injuriousness at
once arises."
Taken as a whole, Mr. Swift's paper is a strong plea for individualism
and liberty. As such we have felt it a duty to call attention to it,
and we trust that it will in some way obtain a more general circulation
than can be afforded by the useful, but somewhat technical, columns of
the Library Journal.
Fragments of Science.
=Longevity of Whales.=--Some light was thrown, a few years ago,
upon the subject of the vitality of whales by finding one of these
animals in Bering Sea, in 1890, with a "toggle" harpoon head in its
body bearing the mark of the American whaler Montezuma. That vessel
was engaged in whaling in Bering Sea about ten years, but not later
than 1854. She was afterward sold to the Government, and was sunk in
Charleston Harbor during the civil war to serve as an obstruction.
Hence, it is estimated, the whale must have carried the harpoon not
less than thirty-six years. In connection with this fact, Mr. William
H. Dall gives an account, in the National Geographic Magazine, of a
discussion with Captain E. P. Herendeen, of the United States National
Museum, of cases of whales that have been supposed to have made their
way from Greenland waters to Bering Strait, and to have been identified
by the harpoons they carried. While it is very likely that the whale
really makes the passage, an uncertainty must always be allowed, for
ships were often changing ownership and their tools were sold and put
on board of other vessels, and harpoon irons were sometimes given or
traded to Eskimos. It therefore becomes possible that the animal was
struck with a second-hand iron.
=Solidification of Hydrogen.=--As soon as he was able to obtain liquid
hydrogen in manageable quantities, in the fall of 1898, Mr. James Dewar
began experiments for its solidification. The apparatus he used was
like that employed in other solidification experiments, consisting
of a small vacuum test-tube, containing the hydrogen, placed in a
larger vessel of the same kind, with excess of the hydrogen partly
filling the circular space between the two tubes. No solidification was
produced, and the effort was suspended for a time, while the author
attacked other problems. The experiments were renewed in 1899, with
the advantage of more knowledge concerning reductions of temperature
brought about by reduction of pressure. A slight leak of air in the
apparatus was observed, which was frozen into an air snow when it met
the cold vapor of hydrogen coming off, and this leak at a particular
point of pressure caused a sudden solidification of the liquid hydrogen
into a mass like frozen foam. An apparatus was then arranged that could
be overturned, so that if any of the hydrogen was still liquid it would
run out. None ran out, but by the aid of a strong light on the side
of the apparatus opposite the eye the hydrogen was seen as a solid
ice in the lower part, while the surface looked frothy. The melting
point of hydrogen ice was determined at about 16° or 17° absolute
(-257° or -256° C.). The solid seemed to possess the properties of the
non-metallic elements rather than of the metals, among which it has
been usual to class hydrogen.
=The Gegenschein.=--Much interest prevails among astronomers at present
concerning the question of the nature of the _Gegenschein_. This German
word, which means "opposite shine," is applied to designate a small,
somewhat oblong, bright spot which is sometimes seen in the sky at
night, nearly opposite the point which is at the time occupied by the
sun on the opposite side of the globe. It is near the ecliptic, but
appears two or three degrees away from exact opposition to the sun.
It seems agreed that the _Gegenschein_ is not atmospheric, but rather
meteoric, being a reflection from some collection of meteors. The
problem set before astronomers is to identify the meteors. A theory
that they are connected with the asteroidal zone, or mass of meteors
of which the known and numbered asteroids are conspicuous examples,
has, according to Professor Barnard, "much in its favor, but there
are objections to the theory which can not easily be reconciled with
the observed facts." Mr. J. Evershed, of Kenley, England, assumes the
_Gegenschein_ to be a tail to the earth, produced by the escape of
molecules of hydrogen and helium away from the globe in a direction
opposite to the sun--much as a comet's tail is formed. Other observers
suppose it to be connected with the zodiacal light or band, which is
regarded as a body of meteors connected with the earth and accompanying
it, and is plainly visible in the western sky after sunset in the
spring, rising from the place of the sun toward the zenith; and Mr.
William Anderson, of Madeira, publishes a figure with a demonstration,
in The Observatory, to show how its place and appearance may be
accounted for on this supposition. The _Gegenschein_ has been compared
in a homely way to the radiance which may be seen around the shadows of
our heads cast by the sun upon the dewy grass early on a bright summer
morning.
=Literature for Children.=--Mr. Richard le Gallienne, in an article
published in the Boston Transcript, laments the flood of rubbish that
is poured out under the guise of children's books. The subject of
literature for children is discussed in the Studies of the Colorado
Scientific Society by Prof. E. S. Parsons, who remarks that three
of the greatest classics of childhood were not written for children
at all. "Pilgrim's Progress was a new type of sermon written by the
tinker preacher in his prison cell at Bedford; Robinson Crusoe was a
pseudo-history from the pen of one of the first great English realists;
Gulliver's Travels was a political satire by the greatest of English
satirists. The same thing is true of the stories of the Bible, of the
Arabian Nights, of the folklore which strikes a sympathetic chord at
once in the child's nature.... Child study, then, reveals the fact that
the child nature is the counterpart of what is best in books--that
children can appreciate literature." A friend of Professor Parsons
wrote him of her daughter, nine years old, being very fond of her
father's library, and "simply devoted" to the Bible and the plays
of Shakespeare. Harriet Martineau, when a child, "devoured all of
Shakespeare," sitting on a footstool and reading by firelight, and
making shirts, with Goldsmith or Thomson or Milton where she could
glance at them occasionally. Another of Professor Parsons's friends
read "all of Goethe's Faust with his little thirteen-year-old girl,
to her great enjoyment," and the little girl afterward read alone
all of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. "Many teachers have found young
children delighted with Dante." These incidents and others point to the
inference that it is not necessary to go outside of the world's great
literature for fit material for a child's imaginative and emotional
nature. One of Mr. Le Gallienne's main conclusions is that it is very
hard to guess beforehand what the child will like.
=Geography and Exploration in 1899.=--No great geographical discoveries
were recorded during 1899, but much good work was done in exploration.
Considerable interest has been taken in preparing expeditions of
antarctic research, of which a Belgian expedition has returned
with some important results, and Mr. Borchgrevink has begun work
at Cape Adar, on the antarctic mainland. The search for Andrée has
helped increase our knowledge of parts of the arctic coast. In Asia,
Captain Deasy has laid down the whole of the before unknown course
of the Yarkand River, and has furnished other information concerning
little-known regions; and other surveys and explorations have been
diligently prosecuted. About as much may be said of Africa, where "the
want of adequate exploration of the mountainous regions on the borders
of Cape Colony and Natal has been only too forcibly brought home" to
the English. Expeditions sent out by Canadian surveys are constantly
opening up new countries and producing maps of great geographical and
industrial value. Mr. A. P. Low finds Labrador not quite so bleak
and hopeless a country as had been generally believed. Sir Martin
Conway has done some very creditable exploration in the Andes and in
Tierra del Fuego, the scientific results of which are of considerable
value. In Chile, Dr. Staffer and his colleagues have been exploring
the wonderful fiords of the coast and the rivers that come down to
them from the Andean range. Dr. Moreno has described the results of
twenty-five years' exploration of the great Patagonian plains, and of
the lakes and glaciers and mountains on the eastern face of the Andes.
One of the most important scientific enterprises during the year, the
London Times says, was the German oceanographical expedition in the
Valdivia, under Professor Chum, which went south through the Atlantic
to the edge of the antarctic ice, and north through the Indian Ocean to
Sumatra, and home through the Red Sea.
=Royal Society Medalists.=--The Copley medal was conferred, at the
recent anniversary meeting of the Royal Society, upon Lord Rayleigh
for his splendid service to physics, his investigations, the president
said in presenting the award, having increased our knowledge in almost
every department of physical science, covering the experimental as well
as the mathematical parts of the subject. "His researches, from the
range of subjects they cover, their abundance, and their importance,
have rarely been paralleled in the history of physical science." A
summary account of the principal ones was given in the sketch of him
published in the twenty-fifth volume of the Popular Science Monthly
(October, 1884). At the same meeting of the Royal Society the Royal
medals were conferred upon Prof. G. F. Fitzgerald, for his brilliant
contributions to physics, and Prof. William C. McIntosh, for his very
important labors as a zoölogist. Professor Fitzgerald's investigations
have been in the field of radiation and electrical theory, and in a
manner complementary to those of J. Clerke Maxwell. Among his works is
a memoir presenting a dynamic formulation of the electric theory of
light on the basis of the principle of least action, which concludes
with a remark upon the advantage of "emancipating our minds from the
thraldom of a material ether." Professor McIntosh was spoken of as "one
of a distinguished succession of monographers of the British fauna,
who, beginning with Edward Forbes, have, during the last fifty years,
done work highly creditable to British zoölogy." He is author of a
great monograph of the British Annelids, which is still in progress
of publication by the Royal Society, and of an important contribution
to the Challenger reports, and was the founder of the first marine
biological station in Great Britain--the Gatty Marine Laboratory at St.
Andrews. The Davy medal was bestowed upon Edward Schunck for researches
of very high importance in organic chemistry. These works include a
remarkable series of contributions to the chemistry of the organic
coloring matters, particularly those relating to the indigo plant and
to the madder plant. Of late years he has studied, with distinguished
success, the chemistry of chlorophyll.
=Anglo-Saxon Superiority.=--The question of the superiority of the
Anglo-Saxon race is at present interesting economists of other stocks,
especially of the supposed Latin races. The fact of superiority
seems to be conceded. The problem is to account for it. A French
writer, M. Dumoulins, attributes it to the superiority of Anglo-Saxon
educational institutions. Signor G. Sergi, the distinguished Italian
anthropologist, thinks it is a result of the mixture of ethnic elements
of which the English people are made up, and he goes over the history
of the colonizations which have overtaken Britain, to show how upon
the first neolithic settlers of the Mediterranean stocks came a small
emigration of the Asiatic Aryan or Indo-European peoples. Cæsar's
conquest brought in a Roman infusion with some African elements, which
did not last long, but left their mark. Next the Anglo-Saxon tribes of
northern Germany made the principal contribution to the formation of
the English people. A portion of Scandinavian blood was added to the
composition, and on top of all came the Normans. These elements, none
of which were extremely discordant with the others, became thoroughly
mixed in the course of time, and matured into the English people as it
is. The English resemble the Romans in their methods of colonization,
political tact, practical sense, persistence, religious tolerance,
the magnitude of their works and the boldness of their undertakings,
and in their egotism working together with the principle of social
solidarity. Both readily established themselves in new colonies,
carrying there the civilization of the mother country and their systems
of administration. The great roads and wonderful bridges constructed by
the Romans are paralleled by the great Anglo-Saxon railway systems. As
the Latin language became almost universal, so the English language is
diffusing itself everywhere. But Signor Sergi fails to show why, if the
English have taken so much from the Romans, the Italians, their direct
descendants, have lost so much of what they once had. He reserves that
question, after raising it, for future consideration.
=Carbonic Acid and Climate.=--The great importance of the carbonic
acid in the atmosphere as a factor in determining the climate of the
earth has been confirmed by the researches of a considerable number
of investigators. Its work appears to be that of an absorbent of the
sun's radiant heat, retaining it and preventing its passing by us and
leaving us in the cold temperature of space. Tyndall computes that it
has in this capacity a power eighty times that of oxygen or nitrogen,
while it is excelled by water vapor with ninety-two times that of those
gases. Lecher and Pretner, on the other hand, believe that carbonic
acid is the only agent concerned in the service. Mr. Cyrus F. Talman,
Jr., in view of the fact that carbonic acid is an important factor
among geological agencies, has published, in the Journal of Geology,
a study of the conditions of the content of that gas in the ocean, a
study that leads to the consideration of the chemistry of the ocean.
It seems to be clear that with falling temperature the ocean will
dissolve carbonic acid from the air. Dr. T. C. Chamberlin has shown
that the amount of carbonic acid in the atmosphere at any one time, and
therefore the climate of the earth at that time, depends upon the value
of the ratio of the supply of the gas to its depletion. Besides the
continuous supply that the atmosphere receives from the interior of the
earth and from planetary space and the continuous depletion due to the
formation of carbonates in place of the igneous alkali earth silicates,
there are variations in the ratio of supply to depletion dependent
upon the attitude of the land and the water. A large exposure of land
surface is correlated with a rapid solution of calcium and magnesium
carbonates, which, becoming bicarbonates, represent a loss of carbonic
acid to the atmosphere. On the other hand, the formation of the normal
carbonate by lime-secreting animals causes a direct liberation of the
second equivalent of the bicarbonate. Therefore extensive oceans and
abundant marine life are correlated with warm climate. After a somewhat
more minute discussion of the action, Mr. Talman concludes that the
ocean very greatly intensifies the secular variation of the earth's
temperature, although acting as a moderating agent in the minor cycles.
=Pearl Mussels.=--In his report to the United States Fish Commission
on the Pearly Fresh-Water Mussels of the United States, Mr. Charles
T. Simpson speaks of the great variety of conditions under which they
live. They show great capacity for adaptation. Most of them are found
in shallow water, but certain forms live at considerable depths. Some
bury themselves among the fibrous roots of trees, some in the muddy,
sandy banks just below the surface of the water, and some, as in Lake
Tiberias (Palestine) and Lake Tanganyika (Africa), under six hundred
or more feet of water. Ordinarily they die in a very short time if
taken out of the water--in from twenty-four to forty-eight hours, as a
rule--and they generally die in a few hours when exposed to the sun.
But many species, thus tender in the open air, will lie buried in dried
mud for a long time. In June, 1850, a living pond mussel was sent to
London, from Australia, which had been out of water for more than a
year. Along a small stream near Braidentown, Fla., which runs only
during about three months in summer and is dry the rest of the year,
thousands of a large colony of _Unio obesus_ may be found just buried
in the sandy banks or among the flags and rushes of the bottom, where
there is very little moisture, all in healthy condition. Mr. Simpson
has laid these mussels in the sun for months without killing them. The
specimens which live in perennial water seem to die soon if removed
from it, while those which inhabit streams or ponds that often dry up
will live a long time out of water. Some species in rocky streams live
in the crevices of the rocks. In the Big Vermilion River, in La Salle
County, Illinois, a swift, rocky stream, the author has found living
mussels that had been so washed about that nearly all the epidermis was
destroyed. The shells in such streams are usually heavier than those in
more quiet water.
MINOR PARAGRAPHS.
Prof. Frederick Starr, of the University of Chicago, has made two
excursions to Mexico for the purpose of establishing the physical types
of the aborigines by means of measurements, photographs, and casts. He
studied twelve tribes, half of which were almost unknown to science,
and made measurements of more than eleven hundred and fifty men and
three hundred women. On his last trip he rode one thousand miles among
the mountains on horseback. In a recent paper in the Open Court he
takes notice of frequent and curious survivals of pagan belief to be
remarked among these peoples, although they are all supposed to be
devout Christians. In one instance, which is specially described, an
idol bearing some resemblance to those found among the ruins of the
ancient cities occupied a station in the church by the side of the
crucifix, sharing the honors with the statue of the Virgin on the other
side. Grief and consternation prevailed among the Indians when the idol
was taken away by the ecclesiastical authorities.
* * * * *
The question of the increase of insanity in England during the last few
years is regarded as assuming a serious aspect, and the report of the
Commissioners of Lunacy for 1898, showing the largest annual increase
yet recorded, the Lancet says, reveals the gravity of the situation.
Other collateral facts given in the report "add to the seriousness of
the outlook." The increase in the number of inmates in institutions for
lunatics is attended with a falling off in the recovery rate, which
is lower for 1898 than that of the previous year, and even than the
average of the last ten years. A steady diminution in the recovery rate
has appeared also during each period of five years since 1873. The
attempt to account for the increase of lunatics in public and private
asylums by supposing that it is made up by removals thither from
workhouses or from the care of relatives fails, for it is shown that
this class of insane is increasing too, though slowly. The subject is
regarded as of so much importance that it was considered and discussed
in the Psychological Section of the British Association at its Bristol
meeting in 1899.
* * * * *
A process by which calcium carbide can be continuously produced
more cheaply than by the process at present in use is reported, in
Industries and Iron, to have been discovered by Professor Freeman, of
Chicago. In the new process a huge arc lamp inclosed in brickwork in
the interior of a furnace is employed. The upper electrode of the lamp
is hollow, and through it is fed a powder composed of common lime and
coke. This powder, being carried through the upper carbon directly into
the electric flame, is melted by the intense heat, and molten calcium
carbide runs away from the furnace. It is estimated that the carbide is
produced at a cost of half a cent per pound.
NOTES.
A new method of securing more perfect combustion, described by Mr.
Paul J. Schlicht before the Franklin Institute, is based on the fact,
described by the inventor, that if a current of air is properly
introduced into a chimney flue through which hot products of combustion
are escaping, it will flow in a direction contrary to theirs, and,
becoming heated in contact with them, will reach the center of the
fire in a condition highly favorable to the most complete union of
oxygen with the combustible elements of the fuel. Suggestions are
made in Mr. Schlicht's paper for the construction and regulation of
furnaces, so as to secure the condition described.
* * * * *
Mr. Edward Orton, Jr., has been appointed State Geologist of Ohio, to
succeed his father, the late Dr. Edward Orton. He has been connected,
as an assistant, with the survey, in which he studied the distribution
of the coal measures, and has also prepared reports on the clay and
clay industries of the State.
* * * * *
"From a moral if not from a scientific and industrial point of view,
incontestably superior to that of the European peoples," is the
characterization a book reviewer in the _Revue Scientifique_ gives to
Chinese civilization.
* * * * *
Sir William Turner is the president-elect for the Bradford meeting
of the British Association, 1900. He is head of the great medical
school at Edinburgh, and President of the General Medical Council, and
was pronounced by Lord Lister, in nominating him, the foremost human
anatomist in the British Islands, and also a great anthropologist.
* * * * *
A gold medal is offered by the Society of Agricultural Industry and
Commerce of Milan to the inventor of the best apparatus or the person
who will make known the best method for protecting working electricians
against the accidents of their profession. The competition is open to
all nations.
* * * * *
The statue of Lavoisier, called by the French "the founder of
chemistry," is to be erected, during the Universal Exposition in
Paris, on the square of the Madeleine, at the intersection of the Rue
Tronchet. The work is in charge of the sculptor Barrias. The sum of
ninety-eight thousand francs, or nineteen thousand six hundred dollars,
has been subscribed to pay for it.
* * * * *
The death list of the last few weeks of men known in science includes
a considerable proportion of important names. Among the number are
John B. Stallo, formerly of Cincinnati, author of General Principles
of the Philosophy of Nature, The Concepts and Theories of Modern
Science, and numerous contributions to scientific publications,
recently United States minister to Italy, in Florence, December
30th, in his seventy-fifth year; Sir James Paget, for many years the
leading surgeon in England, and author of books relating to surgery,
in London, December 30th, in his eighty-sixth year; Dr. Thomas C.
Egleston, Emeritus Professor of Mineralogy and Metallurgy in Columbia
University, in New York, January 15th; Prof. Henry Allen Hazen, one of
the chief forecasters of the United States Weather Bureau, and author
of improvements in the methods employed there, in Washington, from the
results of a bicycle collision, January 22d, in his fifty-first year;
Dr. Wilhelm Zenker, a distinguished physicist, at Berlin, October
21st, aged seventy years; Augustus Doerflinger, an engineer who was
engaged in the work of the removal of Hell Gate in New York Harbor,
at Brooklyn, November 24th, in his fifty-eighth year; Johann Carl
Wilhelm Ferdinand Tiemann, Professor of Chemistry in the University
of Berlin and late editor of the Reports of the German Chemical
Society, at Meran, Tyrol, November 17th, in his fifty-second year;
he was distinguished for his researches upon the constitution of
odoriferous principles, including works on vanillin, the aroma of the
violet, terpenes, and camphor, and the synthesis of amido-acids; Dr.
Birch-Hirschfeld, Professor of Pathology in the University of Berlin,
aged fifty-seven years; Sir Richard Thorne Thorne, principal medical
officer to the Local Government Board, in London, December 18th, aged
fifty-eight years; author of many official reports relating to the
public health, of works on the progress of preventive medicine during
the Victorian era, and of lectures on diphtheria and the administrative
control of tuberculosis; Dr. John Frederick Hodges, Professor of
Agriculture and lecturer on medical jurisprudence in Queen's College,
Belfast, Ireland, and author of two elementary books on chemistry, The
Structure and Physiology of the Animals of the Farm, and of several
papers published in the Proceedings of Scientific Societies; E. C. C.
Stanford, a practical chemist, distinguished for the introduction of
several original methods of manufacture, and for the preparation of
several new substances, such as algin and thyroglandin; he was the
author of the monograph on the iodine industry in Thorpe's Dictionary
of Chemistry; and John Ruskin, who, though not a man of science in the
strict sense of the term, did his full share for the advancement of
knowledge and comfort among men, at Coniston Lake, England, January
20th, in his eighty-first year.
PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.
Agricultural Experiment Stations. Bulletins and Reports. Summary of
Feeding-Stuffs Law in Force in New York after December 1, 1899. P.
1. Bulletin No. 159. A Pest of Woodland and Grove. (The Forest Tent
Caterpillar). By F. H. Hall and V. H. Lowe. Pp. 5; No. 160. Report of
Analyses of Commercial Fertilizers for the Fall of 1899. By L. S. Van
Slyke. Pp. 102; No. 161. Popular Edition. Gooseberry Mildew held in
Check. By F. H. Hall and C. P. Close. Pp. 4; Newspaper Summaries of
these Three Bulletins. P. 1.
Carter, Oscar C. S. Coastal Topography of the United States. Pp. 30.
Connecticut, State of. Fifteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor
Statistics for the Year ending September 30, 1899. Pp. 266.
Densmore, Emmet, M. D. Consumption and Kindred Diseases. (Open-air
Treatment.) Brooklyn, N. Y.: The Stillmann Publishing Company. Pp. 138.
Douglas, James, New York City. American Transcontinental Lines. Pp. 56.
Fry, the Right Hon. Sir Edward, and Agnes. The Mycetozoa and some
Questions which they Suggest. London: "Knowledge" Office. Pp. 82. 1
shilling.
Gay, Albert, and Yeaman, C. H. An Introduction to the Study of Central
Station Electricity Supply. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 167.
$3.
Johnston, Charles. The Memory of Past Births. New York: The
Metaphysical Publishing Company. Pp. 50. 25 cents.
King, F. H. Irrigation and Drainage. Principles and Practice of their
Cultural Phases. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 502. $1.50.
Kunz, George F. The Production of Precious Stones in 1898. United
States Geological Survey. Pp. 48, with plate.
Marine Biological Laboratory, at Woods Holl, Mass. Announcement for the
Thirteenth Season. July 5 to August 16, 1900. Pp. 12.
McKay, A. H., Halifax, Nova Scotia. Phenological Observations, Canada,
1898. Pp. 20.
McKim, W. Duncan. Heredity and Human Progress. New York: G. P. Putnam's
Sons. Pp. 283. $1.50.
Michigan. Thirty-seventh Annual Report of the Secretary of the State
Board of Agriculture, and Eleventh Annual Report of the Agricultural
College Experiment Station. July 1, 1897, to June 30, 1898. Pp. 740.
New York State Library Bulletin. (Legislation No. 11, January, 1900.)
Albany. Pp. 395. 25 cents.
Parker, T. Jaffrey, and Haswell, William A. A Manual of Zoölogy.
Revised and adapted for the use of American Schools and Colleges. New
York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 163. $1.60.
Peet, Stephen Denison. The Cliff-Dwellers and the Pueblos. Chicago:
Office of the American Antiquarian. Pp. 398.
Smithsonian Institution. List of Publications available for
Distribution. December, 1899. Pp. 35.
Sound Currency. October, 1899. Deposit Currency; the Effective Currency
of Commercial Communities. Pp. 12. November, 1899. The Farmer's
Interest in the Banking Question. Pp. 8. Both by L. Carroll Root.
Spencer, Frank Clarence. Education of the Pueblo Child. A Study in
Arrested Development. (Columbia University Contributions to Philosophy,
Psychology, and Education. Vol. VII, No. 1.) New York: The Macmillan
Company. Pp. 97. 75 cents.
United States Commissioner of Education. Report for the Year 1897-'98.
Vol. II. Containing Parts II and III. Pp. 2640.
United States Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries. The Preservation of
Fishery Products for Food. By Charles H. Stevenson. Pp. 570.
United States Department of Labor. Bulletin No. 25. November, 1899.
Foreign Labor Laws. Pp. 80.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Lyell's Principles of Geology, eighth edition, p. 41.
[2] Clarence King, American Journal of Science, pp. 45-51, 1893;
Kelvin, Science, vol. ix, p. 665, 1899.
[3] Science, vol. ix, p. 665, 1899.
[4] Ibid., p. 889, and vols. x and xi, 1899.
[5] Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Prestwich, pp. 124 _et seq._
[6] Critical Periods, etc., American Journal of Science, vol. xiv, p.
99, 1877; Bulletin of the Geological Department of the University of
California, vol. i, No. 11, 1895.
[7] Journal of Geology, vol. vi, p. 597, 1898, and vol. vii, p. 545,
1899.
[8] Views similar to those of Professor Bautz have been advocated by
a French Jesuit, Père F. H. Schouppe, in a work entitled The Doctrine
of Purgatory elucidated by Facts and Private Revelations. The "facts"
consist of the visions of saints, and the "private revelations" prove
to be apparitions of souls in purgatory to hysterical women and other
persons "blasted with ecstasy." The book has been translated into
German by a Tyrolese priest, G. Pletl, and just published at Brixen,
"with the approbation of the Prince Bishop." An Austrian journal,
the Ostdeutsche Rundschau, printed extracts from the volume with
appropriate comments, and was confiscated by the Government in Vienna
for "offense to religion."
[9] The manner in which The Pelican makes piety profitable is most
extraordinary and should win the admiration and excite the envy of the
"yellow press." The editor informs the public that he entered into a
compact with St. Joseph, promising to distribute fifty books in which
this holy person is glorified, provided the journal receives two
thousand subscribers. In less than a year the number of subscribers
was twenty-five hundred. A promise to distribute one hundred books of
this kind, if St. Joseph would procure eight thousand subscribers,
raised the list of subscribers to twelve thousand; and this barter
went on until The Pelican could boast of ninety thousand subscribers.
The editor also announces that he has engaged two hundred and eighty
priests to say masses for the readers of his paper and to pray for and
bless their children, and concludes this astounding piece of puffery as
follows: "Experience teaches us that the benediction of a single priest
is effective. What, then, can not be obtained if two hundred and eighty
priests unite in blessing us!"
[10] _Cf._ Popular Science Monthly, November, 1895, p. 83.
[11] Studies from the Yale Psychological Laboratory, vol. vi.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
-Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.
-A Table of Contents was not in the original work; one has been
produced and added by Transcriber.
-Subscripted numbers are rendered with an underscore (e.g. CO_[2] means
that "2" is subscripted).
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Vol. 56, March 1900, by Various
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