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  Established by Edward L. Youmans

              APPLETONS'
           POPULAR SCIENCE
               MONTHLY

              EDITED BY
         WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS

               VOL. LV

        MAY TO OCTOBER, 1899

              NEW YORK
       D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
                1899




          COPYRIGHT, 1899,
     BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.




[Illustration: WILLIAM PENGELLY.]




APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

MAY, 1899.




ALASKA AND THE KLONDIKE.

A JOURNEY TO THE NEW ELDORADO.

BY ANGELO HEILPRIN,

PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY AT THE ACADEMY OF NATURAL SCIENCES OF
PHILADELPHIA, FELLOW OF THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON.


I.--IN BY THE WHITE PASS AND OUT BY THE CHILKOOT.

Hardly two years ago the names Dawson and Klondike were entirely
unknown to the outside world, and geographers were as ignorant of
their existence as was at that time the less learned laity. To-day it
may be questioned if any two localities of foreign and uncivilized
lands are as well known, by name at least, as these that mark the
approach to the arctic realm in the northwest of the American
continent. One of those periodic movements in the history of peoples
which mark epochs in the progress of the world, and have their source
in a sudden or unlooked-for discovery, directed attention to this new
quarter of the globe, and to it stream and will continue to stream
thousands of the world's inhabitants. Probably not less than from
thirty-five thousand to forty thousand people, possibly even
considerably more, have in the short period following the discovery of
gold in the Klondike region already passed to or beyond the portals of
what has not inaptly been designated the New Eldorado. To some of
these a fortune has been born; to many more a hope has been shattered
in disappointment; and to still more the arbiter of fate, whether for
good or for bad, has for a while withheld the issue.

In its simplest geographical setting Dawson, this Mecca of the north,
is a settlement of the Northwest Territory of Canada, situated at a
point thirteen hundred miles as the crow flies northwest of Seattle.
It is close to, if not quite on, the Arctic Circle, and it lies the
better part of three hundred miles nearer to the pole than does St.
Petersburg in Russia. By its side one of the mighty rivers of the
globe hurries its course to the ocean, but not too swiftly to permit
of sixteen hundred miles of its lower waters being navigated by craft
of the size of nearly the largest of the Mississippi steamers, and
five hundred miles above by craft of about half this size. In its own
particular world, the longest day of the year drawls itself out to
twenty-two hours of sunlight, while the shortest contracts to the same
length of sun absence.

During the warmer days of summer the heat feels almost tropical; the
winter cold is, on the other hand, of almost the extreme Siberian
rigor. Yet a beautiful vegetation smiles not only over the valleys,
but on the hilltops, the birds gambol in the thickets, and the tiny
mosquito, either here or near by, pipes out its daily sustenance to
the wrath of man. The hungry forest stretches out its gnarled and
ragged arms for still another hundred or even three hundred miles
farther to the north.

Up to within a few years the white man was a stranger in the land, and
the Indian roamed the woods and pastures as still do the moose and
caribou. To-day this has largely changed. The banks of the once silent
river now give out the hum of the sawmill, the click of the hammer,
and the blast of the time-whistle, commanding either to rest or to
work. A busy front of humanity has settled where formerly the grizzly
bear lapped the stranded salmon from the shore, and where at a still
earlier period--although perhaps not easily associated with the
history of man--the mammoth, the musk ox, and the bison were masters
of the land. The red man is still there in lingering numbers, but his
spirit is no longer that which dominates, and his courage not that of
the untutored savage.

The modern history of Dawson begins with about the middle of 1896,
shortly after the "public" discovery of gold in the Klondike tract.
Three or four months previous there was hardly a habitation, whether
tent or of logs, to deface the landscape, and the voice of animate
Nature was hushed only in the sound of many waters. At the close of
the past year, as nearly as estimate can make it, there were probably
not less than from fourteen thousand to fifteen thousand men, women,
and children, settled on the strip of land that borders the Yukon,
both as lowland and highland, for about two miles of its course near
the confluence of the Klondike. Many of these have located for a
permanence, others only to give way to successors more fortunate than
themselves. Some of the richest claims of the Bonanza, now a famed
gold creek of the world, are located hardly twelve miles distant, and
the wealth of the Eldorado is discharged within a radius of less than
twenty miles. Over the mountains that closely limit the head springs
of Bonanza and Eldorado, Hunker, Dominion, and Sulphur Creeks
thread their own valleys of gold in deep hollows of beautiful
woodland--fascinating even to-day, but already badly scarred by the
work that man has so assiduously pressed in the region. This is the
Klondike, a land full of promise and of equal disappointment, brought
to public notice in the early part of 1897, when intelligence was
received by the outside world regarding the first important gold
location on Bonanza Creek in August of the year previous.

[Illustration: LOOKING DOWN THE LYNN CANAL--SKAGUAY RIVER, WITH
SKAGUAY ON THE LEFT.]

On the 24th of July of the past year I found myself on the principal
thoroughfare of Skaguay, the ubiquitous Broadway, contemplating a
journey to the new north. The route of travel had been determined for
me in part by the non-arrival at Seattle of the expected steamers from
the mouth of the Yukon River, and by that woeful lack of knowledge
regarding "conditions" which so frequently distinguishes steamship
companies. It was to be, therefore, the overland route, and from
Skaguay it was merely the alternative between the White Pass and the
Chilkoot Pass or Dyea trails. The two start from points barely four
miles apart, cross their summits at very nearly the same distance from
one another, and virtually terminate at the same body of inland water,
Lake Lindeman, the navigable head of the great Yukon River. A more
than generous supply of summer heat gave little warning of that bleak
and severe interior with which the world had been made so well
familiar during the last twelvemonth, and from which we were barely
six hundred miles distant; nor did the character of the surroundings
betray much of an approach to the Arctic Circle. Mountains of aspiring
elevations, six thousand to seven thousand feet, most symmetrically
separated off into pinnacles and knobs, and supporting here and there
enough of snow to form goodly glaciers, look down upon the narrow
trough which to-day is the valley of the Skaguay River. At the foot of
this ancient fiord lies the boom town of Skaguay. Charming forests,
except where the hand of man has leveled the work of Nature to suit
the requirements of a constructing railway, yet clothe the mountain
slopes and fill in the gap that lies between them, shadowing the dense
herbage and moss which almost everywhere form an exquisite carpeting
to the underlying rock. The ear may catch the strains of a few
mosquitoes, or the mellow notes of the robin or thrush, but rising far
above these in the majesty of tone and accent is the swish of the
tumbling cataracts which bring the landscape of Norway to America.
Man, it is claimed, is much the same the world over; but there is a
limitation. The second habitation of white man in Skaguay was
established less than a year before my visit; yet at that time,
presumably to meet the demands of a resident population of nearly five
thousand, and of the wandering hordes pressing to the interior, the
destructive hand of the advertiser had already inscribed on the walls
of rock, in characters twenty feet or more in height, and sufficiently
elevated to make them nearly the most conspicuous elements of the
landscape, the glories of cigars, the value of mental and physical
specifics, and of other abominations which were contrived to fatten
the Yankee pocket.

[Illustration: A SUMMER DAY ON THE SKAGUAY.]

Had it not been for the kindly advice of one who had just returned
from the Klondike, and who claimed to have crossed both passes fifty
times, I should almost unhesitatingly have taken the White Pass trail;
but the representation that beyond the summit the mud would be
neck-deep and virtually impenetrable for a distance of twenty miles or
more, cast the decision in favor of the Chilkoot. The fortunate or
unfortunate circumstance that a billowy sea made a landing of
passengers at Dyea impossible on that day threw me back upon my first
resource, and about two hours before midday of the 30th I was mounted
on a horse following out the Skaguay trail. By seven o'clock in the
evening of the following day I had reached Lake Lindeman, and about a
half hour later Lake Bennett, the starting point of the lines of Upper
Yukon steamers which had just recently been established. We had made
the forty miles of the dreaded White Pass trail without serious
hindrance or delay, up over the summit of 2,860 feet elevation, and
down over a course which was depicted in colors of hardship that would
have done more truthful service in describing a pass in the Himalayas.
There was no mud, not a trace of snow or ice except on the mountain
declivities, and had it not been for a horse that was both stiff and
lame, and required my attention as pedestrian to an extent that had
not been bargained for, the journey would have been an exceptionally
delightful one.

It is true that an unfortunate fall at one time almost deprived me of
my animal, but the service of tackle soon put him to rights and to his
feet, and but few blood marks were left on the rocks to tell of the
struggle. The most disagreeable incident of the journey was a dense
and shifting fog, which so blocked out the landscape of early evening
as to necessitate "feeling" the brokenness of a glaciated country in
order to ascertain wherein lay the trail. But beyond this there was a
perpetual delight in the landscape--in the narrow rocky defile, the
bursting torrent, the open meadows, with their carpet of green and
variegated with fireweed, gentian, rose, and forget-me-not, which more
than compensated for the little vexations that allied themselves with
the journey.

[Illustration: COMING DOWN THE WHITE PASS--WINTER.]

It is not often that the selection of a route of travel is determined
by the odorous or malodorous qualities which appertain thereto. Such a
case was, however, presented here. It was not the depth of mud alone
which was to deter one from essaying the White Pass route; sturdy
pioneers who had toiled long and hard in opening up one or more new
regions, laid emphasis upon the stench of decaying horse-flesh as a
factor of first consideration in the choice of route. So far as stench
and decaying horse-flesh were concerned, they were in strong evidence.
The Desert of Sahara, with its lines of skeletons, can boast of no
such exhibition of carcasses. Long before Bennett was reached I had
taken count of more than a thousand unfortunates whose bodies now made
part of the trail; frequently we were obliged to pass directly over
these ghastly figures of hide, and sometimes, indeed, broke into them.
Men whose veracity need not be questioned assured me that what I saw
was in no way the full picture of the "life" of the trail; the
carcasses of that time were less than one third of the full number
which in April and May gave grim character to the route to the new
Eldorado. Equally spread out, this number would mean one dead animal
for every sixty feet of distance! The poor beasts succumbed not so
much to the hardships of the trail as to the inhuman treatment, or
lack of care and assistance, which they received on the part of their
owners. Once out of the line of the mad rush, perhaps unable to
extricate themselves from the holding meshes of soft snow and of
quagmires, they were allowed to remain where they were, a food
offering to the army of carrion eaters which were hovering about,
only too certain of the meal which was being prepared for them.
Oftentimes pack saddles, and sometimes even the packs, were allowed to
remain with the struggling or sunken animal--such was the mad race
which the greed of gold inspired.

On October 9th I was again at Bennett, this time returning from my
journey into the interior, and full of experience of what steam
navigation on the upper six hundred miles of Yukon waters might mean.
There was now a change in the sentiment regarding the quality of the
two passes. The Pacific and Arctic Railway, the pioneer of Alaska
steam railways, was operating twelve miles of track, and had thus
materially reduced the "hardships" of the Skaguay trail; the Chilkoot,
on the other hand, was represented to be in the worst of mood, and
prepared to put the passing traveler into the same condition. It was
more than late in the season, but the winter's blasts had been stayed
off by a full month, and there were still no signs of their coming. A
little ice had begun to form along the river's margin and over
sheltered pools, and an occasional cool night made demands for
moderately warm clothing proper; but, on the whole, the temperature
was mild and balmy, and to its influence responded a vegetation which
in its full glory might easily have called to mind the region of the
Juniata.

[Illustration: CUTTING GRADE FOR THE PACIFIC AND ARCTIC
RAILWAY--TUNNEL MOUNTAIN, WHITE PASS ROUTE.]

Although strongly warned against taking the Chilkoot Pass so late in
the season, many of the outgoers, whose recollections of events in the
early part of the year were still vividly fresh, and who could not be
persuaded that the period of a few months had so effaced the
conditions of the past as to permit a steam railway to enter for
twelve miles into the region, chose it in preference to the White
Pass. My own mind had been cast in the same direction; not, however,
from a point of judicious preference, but merely because I was anxious
to see for myself that which had become historic in the movement of
1898, and of instituting a direct comparison of the physical features
and general characteristics of the two routes. With no serious
hindrance, the journey from Bennett out was that of a full day only,
and there was no particular reason to suspect that there would be
delay. Snow had fallen on the summit and whitened all the higher
points, but seemingly it hung in only a measurably thin crust, and
with not enough to necessitate breaking a trail.

A crude steam ferry across Lake Lindeman cuts off about six miles from
the first part of the trail, after which a rapidly rising path,
sufficiently distinct to permit it to be easily followed, winds over
the rocks and among rock _débris_ to Long Lake, situated at an
elevation of some twenty-six hundred feet, where night shelter is
found in a fairly comfortable tent. Up to this point we had
encountered but little snow, and the condition of the trail was such
as to allow of rapid travel. A wise caution detained us here for the
night, and the incoming of a solitary traveler warned us that a
blizzard had struck the summit of the pass, and buried it beneath a
heavy mantle of snow. Had we been a day earlier we might have crossed
dry shod, a very exceptional condition at this time of the year, but
now the possibilities of a struggle gravely presented themselves. A
light frost of the night had fairly congealed the soil, but the lake
did not carry enough surface ice to interfere with the progress of a
scow, and we reached the farther end without difficulty. The two-mile
portage to Crater Lake was largely a snow traverse, but an easy one;
at this time, however, it began to snow heavily, and the immediate
prospect was anything but cheerful. A low fog hung over the waters,
but not so low or so dense as to prevent us from occasionally catching
glimpses of the rocks which projected with disagreeable frequency from
an assumed bottomless pit or "crater." The ascent from Crater Lake to
the summit, somewhat less than three hundred and fifty feet, was made
in about half an hour, and then began the steep and sudden plunge
which marks the southern declivity of this famous mountain pass. Some
little caution was here required to keep a foothold, and a too sudden
break might have led to an exhilarating, even if not anxiously sought
after, glissade; but in truth, to any one only moderately practiced in
mountaineering, even this steep face, which descends for a thousand
feet or more from a summit elevation of thirty-four hundred feet,
presents little difficulty and hardly more danger. What there is of a
trail zigzags in wild and rapid courses over an almost illimitable
mass of rock _débris_, at times within sheltered or confined hollows,
but more generally on the open face of the declivity. This it is more
particularly that carries to many a certain amount of fear in the
making of the passage, but, with proper caution and the right kind of
boots, nothing of danger need be apprehended.

Unfortunately for the enjoyment of the scenery of the pass, I could
see but a modest part of it. Although snow was no longer falling, and
the atmosphere had settled down to a condition of almost passive
inactivity--much to the surprise, if not disappointment, of a few who
had prophesied a stiff and biting wind the moment we passed the
divide--heavy cloud banks hovered about the summits, and only at
intervals did they afford glimpses of the majestic mountain peaks by
which we were surrounded. Enough, however, could be seen to justify
for the pass the claims of most imposing scenery, and its superiority
in this respect over the White Pass. The temperature at the time of
our crossing was a few degrees below freezing, perhaps 25° or 27° F.,
but our rapid walk brought on profuse perspiration, and it would have
been a pleasure, if a sense of proper caution had permitted, to divest
ourselves of mackinaws and travel in summer fashion. We made Sheep
Camp, with its surroundings of beautiful woodland, shortly after noon,
and Cañon City, which, as the terminus of a good coach road to Dyea,
virtually marks the end or beginning of the Chilkoot trail, at two
o'clock.

[Illustration: THE FINAL ASCENT TO CHILKOOT SUMMIT--WINTER.]

To a mountaineer or traveler of ordinary resource neither the White
Pass nor the Chilkoot Pass will appear other than it actually
is--i. e., a mountain pass, sufficiently rough and precipitous in
places, and presenting no serious obstacle to the passage of man,
woman, or child. True, I did not see them at their worst, but they
were both represented to be frightfully bad even at the time of my
crossing. The seasonal effects, doubtless, do much to modify the
character of the trails, and even local conditions must mold them to a
very considerable extent. It is not difficult to conceive of miry
spots along the White Pass trail, or of snow-swept areas on the
Chilkoot, and there certainly must be times when both trails are in a
measure or way impassable. All trails are, however, subject to
modifications in character, and even the best is at times sufficiently
bad. Trains of pack animals cross the White Pass both winter and
summer, and, even with the great loss to their "forefathers," their
testimony of steady work is a recommendation of the class of service
in which they are engaged. A limited number of cattle and horses have
also found their way over the summit of the Chilkoot Pass--some
crossing immediately after us--but the trail is too steep on the ocean
side to fit it for animal service, although I strongly suspect that
were the location in Mexico instead of in Alaska, there would be a
goodly number of _caballeros_ and _arrieros_ to smile at the
proposition of presented difficulties. Indian women seem to consider
it no hardship to pack a fifty-pound sack of flour and more over the
summit, and there are many men who do not hesitate to take double this
load, and make several journeys during the same day. It is the load
that kills, and it was, doubtless, this influence, united to a cruel
method, which so strongly impressed the pioneers with the notion of
extreme hardship. The most level and perfect road, to one carrying for
miles a pack of from sixty to eighty pounds, soon begins to loom up a
steep incline.

Both the northern and southern slopes of the Chilkoot Pass are largely
surfaced with shattered rocks, over which, with occasional deflections
across more pleasant snow banks, a fairly well-defined trail mounts on
either side to the summit. In its grim landscape effects, more
particularly on the inner face, where a number of rock-bound
tarns--Crater Lake, Long Lake, Deep Lake--afford a certain relief to
the degree of desolation which the scene carries, it reminded me much
of the famous Grimsel Pass, and here as well as there the modeling of
the surface through glacial action was strongly in evidence. The
vastly towering Alpine peaks were, however, wanting, and the glaciers
that still appeared showed that they had long since passed their
better days. The actual summit is trenched by a narrow rocky gap,
roughly worn through walls of granite, and by it have passed the
thousands who have pressed to the interior. There is no timber growth
at or near this summit, nor is there soil sufficient to give support
to an arboreal vegetation. Nearest to the top line a prostrate form of
scrubby hemlock (_Tsuga Pattoniana_) alone makes pretense to being a
tree, but below it of itself grows to majestic proportions, and about
"Sheep Camp," with Menzie's spruce, a birch, and cottonwood (_Populus
balsamifera_), forms part of the beautiful woodland, which with
ever-increasing freshness descends to the lower levels.

Lest I be accused of too freely seeing the beauties of the northern
landscape, I venture in my defense the following graphic description
of the Dyea Valley from the pen of another traveler and geologist,
Prof. Israel Russell: "In the valley of the Taiya the timber line is
sharply drawn along the bordering cliffs at an elevation of about
twenty-five hundred feet. Above that height the mountain sides are
stern and rugged; below is a dense forest of gigantic hemlocks,
festooned with long streamers of moss, which grows even more
luxuriantly than on the oaks of Florida. The ground beneath the trees
and the fallen monarchs of the forest are densely covered with a soft,
feathery carpet of mosses, lichens, and ferns of all possible tints of
brown and green. The day I traversed this enchanted valley was bright
and sunny in the upper regions, but the valley was filled with
drifting vapors. At one minute nothing would be visible but the somber
forest through which the white mist was hurrying; and the next the
veil would be swept aside, revealing with startling distinctness the
towering mountain spires, snowy pinnacles, and turquoise cliffs of ice
towering heavenward. These views through the cloud rifts seemed
glimpses of another world. Below was a sea of surging branches that
filled all the valley bottom and dashed high on the bordering cliffs.
Much space could be occupied with descriptions of the magnificent
scenery about Lynn Canal, and of the wonderful atmospheric effects to
be seen there, but the poetry of travel is foreign to these pages, and
must be left for more facile pens."

[Illustration: THE CHILKOOT TRAIL--POWER HOUSE OF THE AËRIAL TRAMWAY.]

In its present condition the Chilkoot trail has the advantage over the
Skaguay in its shorter length, the distance from Dyea to the head of
Lake Lindeman, the virtual head of river navigation, being about
twenty-four miles; from Skaguay to Bennett, along the usual White Pass
trail, the distance is fully ten or twelve miles longer, although a
cut-off by way of the summit lakes reduces the traverse considerably.
At intervals along both routes fairly good accommodation can now be
had. One condition of the Chilkoot Pass, and that a not altogether
light one, places it during certain months at a disadvantage as
compared with the White Pass. I refer to the dangers from avalanches.
These are of the true Alpine type, having their source in the heavy
beds of snow which cling with bare support to the steeply pitching
mountain walls, in places along some of the narrowest parts of the
pass. The appalling catastrophe of April, 1898, which caused the loss
of sixty-three lives, and followed closely upon an earlier event of
like nature, had its seat in the steep, rocky ledges of the east wall
between Sheep Camp and the Scales. It is claimed that the Indians
along the trail clearly foresaw the impending event, and announced it
in unmistakable language, but their warnings were allowed to go
unheeded. They themselves did not make the traverse on that day. The
minor disaster of the following December (9th), when but six lives
were sacrificed, took place on the steep declivity which faces Crater
Lake, not far from the service house of the Chilkoot Pass Aërial
Tramway Company. Here the mountain face is very precipitous and gives
but insecure lodgment to the snow. The Indians carefully watch all
natural signals and urge a rapid journey. However useful these trails
may have been in the past, how well or how indifferently they may have
met the wants of the pioneers of 1897 and 1898, they are destined
before long to be thrown into that same obscurity which they held when
the Indians and a few adventurous trappers and traders alone made use
of them as avenues of communication between the inner and outer
worlds. The advance of the iron horse is now an assured fact, and the
Pacific and Arctic Railway, whose construction is engineered by some
of the most experienced mechanical talent of Great Britain and
America, will minister before many months not alone to the
professional interlopers in the new land, but to hosts of tourists as
well. The road, which in reaching White Pass summit will have a
maximum gradient of a little more than five per cent, is of
narrow-gauge construction, solidly supported on dressed ties brought
from the forests of Oregon. No terminal appears to have been as yet
definitely determined upon, although the charter act recites Fort
Selkirk on the Yukon, about one hundred and sixty miles above Dawson,
as such. Operating as it now does sixteen miles or more of road, it is
already an extensive freight carrier; but until its completion to
Bennett or to some point close to a navigable part of the Yukon River,
the Chilkoot Pass tramway, a remarkable construction which crosses
over the summit and deposits at Crater Lake, must continue to handle a
large part of the business intended for the interior.

[Illustration: SUMMIT OF THE CHILKOOT PASS, WITH IMPEDIMENTA OF
PROSPECTORS, APRIL, 1898.]

It is safe to say that the stirring scenes which were enacted on the
passes during the winter of 1897-'98, when the impedimenta of travel
and occupation were packed together in the manner of an army camp,
will not be repeated again. The past history was a short one, and it
gives way to one of greater promise.


     NOTE.--For most of the photographic illustrations the author is
     indebted to the work of Curtis, Barley, and E. A. Hegg;
     especially to the last-named gentleman, of Skaguay and Dawson, is
     he under obligations for permission to use several of the
     copyrighted views.




THE ORIGIN OF EUROPEAN CULTURE.[A]

BY WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY, PH. D.,

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF
TECHNOLOGY, BOSTON, LECTURER IN ANTHROPOLOGY AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY,
NEW YORK.


Prehistoric archæology is possessed of a distinct advantage over
linguistics in the investigation of racial problems; for human remains
are often discovered in connection with the implements, utensils, or
trinkets by which the civilization of an extinct people is
archæologically determined. To attempt even an outline of the cultural
history of Europe would be obviously impossible in this place. It
would fill a complete volume by itself alone. Furthermore, the short
span of forty years since the inception of archæological science has
not sufficed to produce complete unanimity of opinion among the
leading authorities. Many important questions, especially concerning
eastern Europe, are still awaiting settlement. All that we can hope to
do is to describe what may be termed a few fixed points in European
cultural history. This, as in our discussion of physical origins,[B]
we shall attempt to do by means of definite propositions, concerning
which there is now substantial agreement.

I. _In western and southern Europe an entirely indigenous culture
gradually evolved during the later stone age. This was characterized
by great technical advance in fashioning implements, carvings, and
designs in stone, bone, ivory, and copper; by the construction of
dolmens and habitations of stone; by pottery-making; and possibly even
by a primitive system of writing._

A marked reaction has taken place during the last ten years among
archæologists respecting the course of cultural development in France.
It was long believed that after the first crude attempts of the
palæolithic epoch an extended _hiatus_ ensued, followed by the sudden
appearance of a more highly developed civilization, brought by an
immigrant broad-headed race from the East. Two waves of invasion were
described: the first bringing polished stone, a later one introducing
bronze, cereals, agriculture, and the domestication of animals. Not
even credit for the construction of the great stone dolmen tombs was
granted to the natives in Gaul, for these were all ascribed to an
invasion from the North. The undoubted submergence of the primitive
long-headed population of France by a brachycephalic type from the
East, to which we have already adverted, was held accountable for a
radical advance in civilization. Even the existence of a bronze age
was denied to this country, it being maintained that the introduction
of bronze was retarded until both metals came in together from the
Orient in the hands of the cultural deliverers of the land. The
absence of a distinct bronze age was speedily disproved; but the view
that France and western Europe were saved from barbarism only by a new
race from the East still held sway. It is represented by the classical
school of G. de Mortillet, Bertrand, Topinard, and a host of minor
disciples. The new school, holding that a steady and uninterrupted
development of culture _in situ_ was taking place, is represented
notably by Reinach[C] in France and by Sergi[D] in Italy. Their proof
of this seems to be unanswerable. Granting that it is easier to borrow
culture than to evolve it, a proposition underlying the older view, it
seems nevertheless that the West has too long been denied its rightful
share in the history of European civilization.

[Illustration: NEOLITHIC IVORY CARVING. Mas d'Azil.

(By special permission. Further reproduction prohibited.)]

A notable advance in the line of culture entirely indigenous to
southwestern Europe has been lately revealed through the interesting
discoveries by Piette at the station of Brassempuoy and in the grotto
of Mas d'Azil. Carvings in ivory, designs upon bone, evidence of a
numerical system, of settled habitations, and, most important of all,
of a domestication of the reindeer, of the horse, and the ox in the
pure stone age have been found; and that, too, in the uttermost
southwestern corner of Europe. In the lake dwellings of Switzerland,
as also in Scandinavia, a knowledge of agriculture, pottery, and the
domestication of animals is evinced, likewise as a native discovery.
From other quarters of the continent in the stone age comes similar
testimony to a marked advance of man culturally. The justly celebrated
carving of a reindeer from Thayngen, almost worthy of a modern
craftsman, betrays no mean artistic ability. The man who drew it was
far from being a savage, even if he knew no metals, and buried his
dead instead of cremating them. The evidence as to early domestication
of animals is perhaps the most startling. Carved horses' heads, with
halters and rude bridles, have been surely identified by Piette and
others.

[Illustration: BONE CARVING. Thayngen. (After Bertrand, 1891.)]

A system of writing seems also to have been invented in western Europe
as far back as the stone age.[E] Letourneau and Bordier have advanced
good evidence to this effect, although it is not yet incontestably
proved. The Phoenicians were perhaps antedated in their noted
invention by the dolmen builders, by the lake dwellers of the earliest
times, and, according to Sergi, also by the people of the Villanova
pre-Etruscan culture in Italy. In an earlier time still in the Po
Valley, as far back as the stone-age _Terramare_ period, pottery was
made, and that, too, of a very decent sort. And all this time there is
not the slightest evidence of contact with or knowledge of the East.
As Reinach says, in no dolmen, no lake station, no excavation of the
stone age is there any trace of an Assyrian or Babylonian cylinder, or
even an Egyptian amulet. Even the jade and nephrite found in western
Europe from Switzerland to Norway, which has so long been regarded as
evidence of early commerce with the East, he denies as proof of such
contact. The case thus put may perhaps be over-strenuously stated, yet
one can not but realize from it that western Europe has too long been
libeled in respect of its native aptitude for civilization. This is
not constituted of bronze alone, nor is its trade-mark cremation.
Thus, while an intensive outbreak of culture of a high order may not
have arisen west of the Alps, it can no longer be denied that the
general standard of intelligence was surely rising of its own native
volition.

II. _Throughout the eastern Alpine highlands, a culture far more
highly evolved than the neolithic one in the West, and betraying
certain Oriental affinities, appears at a very early time, a thousand
years or more before the Christian era. This prehistoric civilization
represents a transitional stage between bronze and iron._

In a secluded valley in upper Austria, close to the border line of
Salzburg, by the little Alpine hamlet of Hallstatt, a remarkable
necropolis was discovered more than a half century ago, which marked
an epoch in archæological research. Excavations at this place alone,
far from any present considerable seat of population, have already
revealed more than three thousand graves. The primitive culture here
unearthed, represented by all kinds of weapons, implements, and
ornaments, bore no resemblance to any of the then known classical ones
of the Mediterranean basin. Its graves contained no Roman coins or
relics. There was nothing Greek about it. It contained no trace either
of writing or chronology. It was obviously prehistoric; there was no
suggestion of a likeness to the early civilizations in Scandinavia. It
was even more primitive than the Etruscan, and entirely different from
it, especially in its lack of the beautiful pottery known to these
predecessors of the Romans. Little wonder that von Sacken, who first
adequately described it in 1868, and Hochstetter, who worthily carried
on his researches, believed that Hallstatt represented an entirely
indigenous and extinct Alpine civilization. On the other hand, so
exceedingly rich and varied were the finds in this out-of-the-way
corner of Europe, that another and quite different view seemed
justifiable. Might this not be an entirely exotic culture? products
gained by trade from all parts of the world, being here deposited with
their dead by a people who controlled the great and very ancient salt
mines hereabouts? Neither of these interpretations of this find at
Hallstatt have been exactly verified by later researches, and yet its
importance has not lessened in the least. By later discoveries all
over eastern Europe south of the Danube, from the Tyrol over to the
Balkan peninsula, as well as throughout northern Italy, Würtemberg,
and even over into northeastern France, the wide extension of this
civilization[F] proves that it must in a large measure have developed
upon the spot, and not come as an importation from abroad. On the
other hand, its affinity in many details with the cultures both of
Italy and Greece proved that it had made heavy drafts upon each of
these, profiting greatly thereby. The best opinion to-day is, that it
constitutes a link in the chain of culture between eastern and western
Europe. As such it is of primary importance in any study of European
origins.

[Illustration: BRONZE SITULA.

Watsch, Austrian Tyrol.]

The primitive stage of European civilization, to which the term
Hallstatt is specifically applied by archæologists, is characterized
by a knowledge both of bronze and iron, although the latter is
relatively insignificant. Its rarity indicates that we have to do with
the very beginnings of its use. In this early combination of bronze
and iron the Hallstatt culture is in strong contrast with the rest of
Europe. Almost everywhere else, as in Hungary for example, a pure
bronze age--sometimes one even of copper also--intervenes between the
use of stone and iron. Here, however, the two metals, bronze and iron,
appear simultaneously. There is no evidence of a use of bronze alone.
Bearing in mind, what we shall subsequently emphasize in the case of
Scandinavia, that in that remote part of Europe man had to put up with
the inferior metal for close upon a thousand years before the
acquisition of a better substitute, it will be seen that at Hallstatt
a remarkable foreshortening of cultural evolution had ensued. Iron, as
we have said, was still comparatively rare. Only in the case of small
objects, less often in the blades of bronze-handled swords, does this
more precious metal appear. But it is far more common than in the
earliest Greek civilizations made known to us by Schliemann and
others.

Pages of description would not give so clear an idea of this early
civilization as the pictures of their lives, which the Hallstatt
people have fortunately left to us. These are found in _repoussé_ upon
their bronzes, and particularly upon their little _situlæ_, or
metallic pails. These _situlæ_ are, in fact, the most distinctive
feature among all the objects which they have left to us. By means of
them their civilization has been most accurately traced and identified
geographically. On the opposite page we have reproduced the design
upon the most celebrated of these _situlæ_, discovered by Deschmann in
1882, at Watsch in the Tyrol. Another from Bologna, typical of the
pre-Etruscan Italian time, will be found upon a later page. Upon each
of these, the skill manifested in the representation of men and
animals is no less remarkable than the civilization which it depicts.
The upper zone of this _situla_ from Watsch apparently shows a festal
procession, possibly a wedding, for a lady rides in the second
chariot. The grooms and outriders betoken a party of distinction. As
for the second zone, doubt as to its exact interpretation prevails.
Hochstetter declares it to be a banquet, food and entertainment being
offered to the personages seated upon chairs at the left. Bertrand is
disposed to give it more of a religious interpretation. As for the
contest between gladiators armed with the cestus, all is plain. The
spectators, judges, even the ram and the helmet for reward of the
victor, are all shown in detail. It is not necessary for us to cite
more evidence. A civilization already far from primitive is surely
depicted. As for its date, all are agreed that it is at least as early
as ten centuries before Christ;[G] not far, that is to say, from the
supposed Homeric epoch in Greece.

[Illustration: BRONZE BREASTPLATE FROM OLYMPIA. (After Furtwaengler's
Olympia, 1892.)]

The Hallstatt civilizations betray unmistakable affinities with three
other prehistoric European cultures, widely separated from one
another. It contains many early Greek elements; it is very similar to
a notable prehistoric culture in the Caucasus Mountains; and it
resembles most nearly of all perhaps the pre-Etruscan civilization in
Italy. With the third of these--the Italian--it seems to have been
most nearly upon terms of equality, each borrowing from the other,
after a fashion of which we shall have occasion to speak shortly. On
the other hand, the relation of the Hallstatt culture to that of
Greece and Caucasia seems to be somewhat more filial rather than
fraternal. In describing the area of this civilization, we have seen
how firmly it is intrenched all through the southern part of
Austria-Hungary and well over into the north of the Balkan peninsula.
A comparison of Furtwaengler's magnificent collection of objects from
Olympia with those of Hallstatt instantly reveals their similarities.
To make this clear, we have reproduced one of the Olympian
breastplates, ornamented with figures, which at once suggest those
upon the _situla_ from Watsch above described. This design is doubly
interesting. It shows us a slightly higher stage of the art of figural
representation, as well as of conventional design. Not only the men
and horses, but the borders, are far better drawn. More than this, we
begin to detect a distinctly Oriental motive in other details. The
bulls and the lions--lions are not indigenous to Europe nowadays--at
once remind us of their Babylonian and Assyrian prototypes. We have
entered the sphere of Asiatic artistic influence, albeit very
indistinctly. This design here represented, it should be said, is
rather above the average of the Olympian finds of the earlier epoch.
Many of the other objects, especially the little votive figures of
beasts and men, are much more crude, although always characteristic
and rudely artistic in many ways. Through this Olympian stage of
culture we pass transitionally on to the Mycenæan, which brings us
into the full bloom of the classic Greek.

The Oriental affinities of the Hallstatt culture have been especially
emphasized by recent archæological discoveries at Koban, in the
Caucasus Mountains. A stage of culture transitional between bronze and
iron, almost exactly equivalent to that of the eastern Alps, is
revealed. Similarities in little objects, like fibulæ, might easily be
accounted for as having passed in trade, but the relationship is too
intimate to be thus explained. Hungary forms the connecting link
between the two. In many respects its bronze age is different from
that of Hallstatt, notably in that the latter seems to have acquired
the knowledge of iron and of bronze at about the same time. In Hungary
the pure bronze age lasted a long time, and attained a full maturity.
A characteristic piece is represented herewith. In respect of the
representation of figures of animals such as these, Hallstatt,
Hungary, and Koban are quite alike.

[Illustration: HUNGARIAN BRONZE VESSEL. (After Hampel, 1876.)]

Have we proved that bronze culture came from Asia by reason of these
recent finds in the Caucasus? Great stress has been laid upon them in
the discussion of European origins. Are we justified in agreeing with
Chantre that two currents of culture have swept from Asia into
Europe--one by the Caucasus north of the Black Sea and up the Danube;
the other across Asia Minor and into the Balkan peninsula, thence
joining the first in the main center of Hallstatt civilization, east
of the Alps? The point seems by no means established. Relationship
does not prove parentage. Far more likely does it appear that the
Koban culture is a relic or an offshoot rather than a cradle of bronze
civilization. And even Chantre, ardent advocate as he is of Oriental
derivations, seems to feel the force of this in his later writings,
for he confesses that Koban is rather from Mediterranean European
sources than that Europe is from Koban. Most probable of all is it,
that both Hallstatt and Koban are alike derived from a common root in
the neighborhood of Chaldea.

III. _The Hallstatt (or Celtic?) civilization of bronze and iron
roughly overlies the present area occupied by the broad-headed Alpine
race; yet this type is not always identified with the Oriental
culture. It seems to have appeared in Europe in a far lower stage of
civilization, and to have subsequently made progress culturally upon
the spot._

To trace any definite connection between race and civilization in
Europe is rendered extremely hazardous scientifically by reason of the
appearance along with bronze of the custom of burning instead of
burying the dead, their ashes being disposed in cinerary urns, jars,
or other receptacles. By this procedure all possible clew to the
physical type of the people is, of course, annihilated at once. It has
become almost an axiom among archæologists that bronze culture and
incineration are constant companions. Wherever one appears, the other
may confidently be looked for. Together they have long been supposed
to be the special and peculiar attributes of a new broad-headed
immigrant race from the East. To prove this conclusively is, of
course, absolutely impossible for the above-mentioned reason. Of the
two, it seems as if incineration would be a more reliable test of race
than a knowledge of bronze; for burial customs, involving as they do
the most sacred instincts and traditions of a people, would be most
persistently maintained, even throughout long-continued migrations.
The use of bronze, on the other hand, being a matter of obvious
utility, and capable of widespread dissemination commercially, is
seemingly of far less ethnic significance.

To indicate the uncertainty of proof in these matters, let us suppose
that the Hallstatt civilization, for example, is the result of an
immigration of a brachycephalic Oriental civilized race overlying a
primitive native long-headed one. That seems best to conform to the
data, which northern Italy at least affords. Suppose the new
people--call them Celts with the best authorities, if you
please--brought not only bronze and iron, but the custom of
incineration. Prior to their appearance inhumation was the rule. What
would be the result if one attempted to determine the physical
character of that people from a study of the remains in their
necropoli? All the crania to be found in the graves with the precious
objects of bronze would in no wise represent the people who brought
that bronze. They burned their bridges behind them at death, and
disappeared for good and all. And the remains left to the archæologist
would represent precisely that class in the population which had
nothing to do with the main characteristics of its civilization. And
then, again, we must bear in mind that the interments in these
necropoli as a whole, both with burned or buried dead, constitute a
selected type. Neither Hallstatt, Watsch, nor any of the burial places
of their type were open to the great mass of the common people. They
were sacred spots, far removed among the mountains from any centers of
population. Only the rich or powerful presumably had access to them.
They are no more typical of the Hallstatt people, therefore, than
interments in Westminster Abbey are representative of the English
masses. All our data are necessarily drawn from a class within a
class. Inductions from them must be very gingerly handled.

The situation above described seems to prevail almost everywhere in
the Hallstatt cultural area. Two distinct burial customs denote
possibly two separate peoples, the inhumers being certainly the older.
In the Hallstatt necropolis, for example, about one third of the
graves once contained human remains, all the others containing mere
ashes. So ancient are these graves that only eight crania from the
hundreds of interments of the first class are available for study.
These are of a pronounced long-headed type.[H] The modern populations
of this part of Europe are, as we have seen, among the broadest-headed
people in the world, as are also all the modern Illyrians. Yet from
the great necropolis at Glasinac in Bosnia, with its twenty thousand
tumuli, the meager Hallstatt returns are amply corroborated.[I] The
ancient inhabitants were as long-headed as they are pronouncedly of
the opposite type to-day. Up in Bohemia and Moravia also, according to
Niederle, the first bronze-age people, such as we know them, were
still dolichocephalic quite like their predecessors in the pure stone
age. And here also is incineration just about frequent enough to make
it uncertain whether the human remains are typical or not.

Under these circumstances, three suppositions are open to us. We may
hold that these long-headed crania of the Hallstatt people are
worthless for any anthropological purposes whatever. This one would
certainly be tempted to do were the testimony, such as it is, not so
unanimous. Or, secondly, we may assume that these long-headed
Hallstatt people belonged to a period subsequent to the appearance of
the brachycephalic type in western Europe. If we do so, we place them
in the same class with the Teutonic race which so certainly appears
to overlie this one in the later iron age in Switzerland and
throughout southern Germany; for the Helvetians and the _Reihengräber_
conquerors from the north surely imposed a novel culture, albeit a
militant one, upon the long-settled Alpine people, racially speaking.
The Hallstatt civilization is immeasurably too early to permit of this
hypothesis. At this time the long-headed Teutonic peoples about
Scandinavia were certainly vastly inferior in culture, as we shall
attempt to prove shortly. Thus we are forced to the third conclusion
if we admit the competency of our cranial evidence--namely, that the
Hallstatt people in this early bloom of civilization in Europe were
allied to the Mediterranean type of the south. No other source for
such a dolichocephalic population is possible. Our stock of types of
this kind is exhausted.

It does not require a great credulity to admit of this hypothesis,
that the Hallstatt people were of Mediterranean type. Were not the
Greeks, the Phoenicians, and the Egyptians all members of this same
race? One single difficulty presents itself. Over in Italy, throughout
the valley of the Po, an entirely analogous civilization to that of
the eastern Alps occurs. Hallstatt and Villanova, Watsch and Bologna,
are almost identical culturally. And yet over here in Italy the new
culture of bronze and of incineration seems to be borne by a
broad-headed people of the same type as the modern one. Thus, for
example, at Novilara so long as the bodies were all inhumed, the
people were of the long-headed Mediterranean type once indigenous to
the whole of Italy, now surviving, as we have seen, only in the
southern half. On the other hand, when incineration begins to appear
in this place, the human remains still left to us are of a mixed and
far more broad-headed type. It would seem admissible to assume that
when the modern brachycephalic Alpine race submerged the native one it
brought new elements of civilization with it. Many Italian
authorities, at all events, agree in ascribing the new culture--call
it Umbrian with Sergi, or proto-Etruscan with Helbig--to a new race of
Veneto-Illyrian or Alpine physical proclivities. What they have not
definitely proved, however, is that any necessary connection between
race and culture exists. There is much to show that the broad-headed
race came in some time before the introduction of the new arts. Even
in the later _Terramare_ period, preceding the Italian Hallstatt
culture, when stone and copper only are in evidence, a change of
physical type in the people apparently begins, just as also in France
in the neolithic period.

The most indubitable testimony that the Alpine race did not appear in
western Europe, armed _cap-à-pie_ with bronze and other attributes of
culture, is afforded by the lake dwellings of Switzerland. Here in the
pile-built villages of the Swiss lakes we can trace an uninterrupted
development of civilization from the pure stone age through bronze and
into iron. Beginning at a stage of civilization about equal to that of
the ancient Aryan-speaking peoples, judged by the root words known to
us; not only knowledge of the metals, but of agriculture, of the
domestication of animals, and of the finer arts of domestic life, have
little by little been acquired. Equally certain is it that no change
of physical type has occurred among these primitive Swiss, at least
until the irruptions of the Teutonic Helvetians and others at the
opening of the historic period. From the very earliest times in the
stone age a broad-headedness no less pronounced than that of the
modern Swiss prevailed among these people.[J] Here would seem to be
pretty conclusive proof that the Alpine race entered Europe long
before the culture with which its name has been all too intimately
associated.

In the outlying parts of Europe, perhaps even in Gaul, it is extremely
doubtful whether any closer connection between race and culture exists
than in the Alps. It has long been maintained that the brachycephalic
people of the Round Barrows introduced bronze into Britain. Surely, as
we have already shown, things point to that conclusion.[K] Beddoe,
Dawkins, and other authorities maintain it at all events. Yet Canon
Taylor makes it pretty evident that the new race arrived in Britain,
as it certainly did in Gaul, considerably in advance of any knowledge
of the metals. As for Scandinavia, much the same relation holds true.
Both race and culture, as we shall see, came from the south, but it is
by no means clear that they arrived at the same time or that one
brought the other. In Spain, Siret has asserted that bronze came in
the hands of a new immigrant broad-headed race, but the authoritative
opinion of Cartailhac discovers no direct evidence to this effect.

The final conclusions which would seem to follow from our tedious
summary is this: That the nearly contemporaneous appearance of a
brachycephalic race and the first knowledge of metals indicative of
Oriental cultural influences in western Europe, is more or less a
coincidence. The first civilized peoples of the Hallstatt period seem
to have been closely allied, both in physical type and culture, with
the Greeks and other peoples of the classic East. Among them, perhaps
over them, swept the representatives of our broad-headed Alpine type
who came from the direction of Asia. These invaders may have been the
Scythians, although the matter is incapable of proof. Pressure from
this direction set both culture and population in motion toward the
west, in much the same way that the fall of Constantinople in the
fifteenth century induced the Renaissance in Italy.

IV. _The remarkable prehistoric civilization of Italy is due to the
union of two cultures: one from the Hallstatt region having entered
Europe by way of the Danube, the other coming from the southeast by
sea being distinctly Mediterranean. From these evolved the Umbrian and
the Etruscan civilizations, followed in the historic period by the
early Latin._

The earliest culture in Italy worthy the name is found in the
_palafitte_ or pile dwellings, in the northern lakes, and in the
so-called _terramare_ settlements in the valley of the Po. The former
are not distinguishable from similar structures in the Swiss lake
dwellings, but the _terramare_ are entirely peculiar to Italy. Their
like is not found anywhere else in Europe. Briefly described, they are
villages built upon raised platforms of earth, encircled by a moat,
and generally having a ditch or small pond in the middle, in which an
altar is erected. These complicated structures are built upon the low,
marshy, alluvial plains along the Po, but show many points of
similarity with the true pile dwellings. The people of this early
period were in the pure stone age, with few arts save that of making
the coarser kinds of pottery. From their osseous remains, they seem to
have been of a long-headed type, quite like their predecessors, who
were cave dwellers. After a time, without any modification of the
modes of construction of their settlements, new elements appear among
these _terramare_ people, bringing bronze and introducing cremation.
At about the same period, as we have said, the Alpine broad-headed
race began its submergence of the primitive Ligurian type, leading to
the formation of the north Italian population as we see it to-day.
This type surely invaded Italy from the north and northeast.

From the foregoing considerations it will appear that there were two
constituent streams of culture and also of men here uniting in the
valley of the Po and on the northern slopes of the Apennines.
Possibly, as Chantre affirms, these two streams were from a common
Oriental source, here being reunited after long and independent
migrations. At all events, a remarkable advance in culture speedily
ensued, superior to either of those from which its elements were
derived. For the civilization unearthed at Villanova, in the Certosa
at Bologna, at Este, and elsewhere, while in much of its bronze work
similar to the Hallstatt types, contained a number of added features,
obviously either indigenous or brought directly from the south. The
Hallstatt affinities are especially revealed in the _situlæ_ to which
we have already called attention. That of Arnoaldi, discovered at
Bologna, betrays much the same grade of skill in manufacture as the
one from Watsch. Its flat development is shown by the accompanying
cut. The scenes represented are not dissimilar. The boxers armed with
the cestus, the chariots, and horses closely resemble one another. No
doubt of a close intercourse between the two regions of Bologna and
Austria can possibly exist.

[Illustration: ARNOALDI SITULA, BOLOGNA.

(From Revue Archéologique, 1885, vol. ii, Plate XXV.)]

The influence of the second or native element in prehistoric Italian
civilization appears most clearly in the Etruscan period. Etruria,
lying south of the Apennines, was more essentially Italian, as we
might expect, than the region about Bologna, where the Umbro-Hallstatt
or continental culture flourished. It is easy to note the superiority
in the former case. It is most clearly indicated in the pottery. Here
we find an art which is truly indigenous to the climate and soil of
the Mediterranean.

Popularly, the word "Etruscan" at once suggests the ceramic art; the
progress effected in a short time was certainly startling. To give an
idea of the sudden change, we have reproduced upon page 30
illustrations of typical bits of Italian pottery.[L] The first vase,
prior to the full Etruscan culture, shows its crudity at once, both in
its defects of form and the plainness and simplicity of its
ornamentation. Such a vessel might have been made in Mexico or even by
our own Pueblo Indians. In a century or two some teacher made it
possible to produce the sample depicted in the next cut. Perfect in
form, superb in grace of outline, its decoration is most effective;
yet it betrays greater skill in geometrical design than in the
representation of animate life. The dog drawn on the girdle is still
far from lifelike. Then come--probably after inspiration from Greek
art--the possibilities in complex ornamentation represented by our
third specimen. Not more pleasing in form, perhaps less truly artistic
because of its ornateness, it manifests much skill in the delineation
of human and animal forms. The culture culminates at this point. From
profusion of ornament and overloaded decoration, degeneracy begins. It
is the old story of the life and decay of schools of art, time in and
time out, the world over.

[Illustration: EARLY ETRUSCAN.

LATER ETRUSCAN.

GREEK ETRUSCAN.]

The advance in culture typified by our vases was equaled in all the
details of life. The people built strongly walled cities; they
constructed roads and bridges; their architecture, true predecessor of
the Roman, was unique and highly evolved. All the plain and good
things of life were known to these people, and their civilization was
rich in its luxury, its culture and art as well. In costumes, jewelry,
the paraphernalia of war, in painting and statuary they were alike
distinguished. Their mythology was very complex, much of the Roman
being derived from it. Most of our knowledge of them is derived from
the rich discoveries in their chambered tombs, scattered all over
Italy from Rome to Bologna. There can be no doubt of a very high type
of civilization attained long before the Christian era. Roman history
is merged in the obscurity of time, five or six hundred years later
than this. The high antiquity of the Etruscan is therefore beyond
question. But its highly evolved art and culture show that we have no
longer to do with European origins; to discuss it further would lead
us to trench upon the field of classical rather than prehistoric
archæology.

V. _The northwestern corner of Europe, including Scandinavia, Denmark,
and the Baltic plain of Germany, throughout the prehistoric period has
been characterized by backwardness of culture as compared with the
rest of Europe. It was populated from the south, deriving a large part
of such primitive civilization as it possessed from the south and the
southeast as well._

That this region was necessarily uninhabited during the Glacial epoch,
long after the advent of man in southern Europe, is indubitable. It is
proved by the extent of the glaciated area, which extends on the
mainland as far south as Hamburg, Berlin, and Posen, and over the
entire British Isles at the same time.[M] It was by the melting of
this vast sheet of ice that those high level river terraces in France
and Belgium were formed, in which the most ancient and primitive
implements of human manufacture occur. In the area beneath this ice
sheet no trace of human occupation until long after this time occurs.
This fact of itself, is not absolutely conclusive, for glaciation
would have obliterated all traces of anterior habitation or activity.
As to the possibility of a tertiary population before the Glacial
epoch, it presents too remote a contingency for us to consider,
although we do not deny its possibility. It too far antedates
prehistory, so to speak.

At the notable International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric
Archæology at Stockholm in 1874 a landmark in these sciences was
established by substantial agreement among the leading authorities
from all over Europe upon the proposition now before us.[N] First of
all, every one subscribed to the view that the palæolithic or oldest
stone age was entirely unrepresented in Sweden. The earliest and
simplest stone implements discovered in the southern part of that
country betray a degree of skill and culture far above that so long
prevalent in France and Germany. Stone is not only rubbed and polished
into shape, but the complicated art of boring holes in it has been
learned. Norway also seems to be lacking in similar evidence of a
human population in the very lowest stage of civilization. Stone
implements anterior to the discovery of the art of rubbing or
polishing are almost unknown. Only about Christiania have any finds at
all been made. In Denmark some few very rude implements have been
found. They are so scarce as to suggest that they are mere rejects or
half-finished ones of a later type. The kitchen middens, or shell
heaps, of Jutland, for which the region is most notable, as described
by Steenstrup, abound in stone implements. They all represent man in
the neolithic age. Polished stones are as abundant as the rudely
hammered ones are rare. From the absence of all the very early stone
implements, and from the sudden appearance of others of a far more
finished type, the possibility of a gradual evolution of culture about
Scandinavia _in situ_ is denied on all hands. The art of working stone
has surely been introduced from some more favored region. The only
place to look for the source of this culture is to the south.

[Illustration: FLINT DAGGER.

(From Montelius, 1895 b.)]

[Illustration: STONE AXE.

(From Montelius, 1895 b.)]

[Illustration: BRONZE AXE.

(From Montelius, 1895 b.)]

Tardy in its human occupation and its stone culture, Scandinavia was
still more backward, as compared with the rest of Europe, in its
transition to the age of bronze. This is all the more remarkable in
view of the rich store of raw materials on every hand. Nowhere else in
Europe does the pure stone age seem to have been so unduly protracted.
A necessary consequence of this was that stone-working reached a
higher stage of evolution here than anywhere else in the world save in
America. In other parts of Europe the discovery of metal-working, of
course, immediately put an end to all progress in this direction. The
ultimate degree of skill to which they attained is represented in the
accompanying cuts. The first, a flint poniard, shows the
possibilities, both in the line of form and finish, of manufacture by
the chipping process. To equal this example one must look to the most
skillful of the American Indians, as in Tennessee, where they were
too remote from mines of native copper to make use of a ready
substitute for stone. Our second implement is an axe hammer, made of
diorite. To shape, sharpen, bore, and polish a piece of stone like
this certainly required a long apprenticeship in the art.

[Illustration: BRONZE BRACELET: 650-500 B. C. (From Montelius, 1895
b.)]

Bronze culture, when it did at last appear in this remote part of
Europe, came upon the scene suddenly and in full maturity. Whether
this was as early as the eighth to the tenth century, as Montelius
avers, is disputed by many. All are nevertheless agreed that evidence
is absolutely lacking that the art was of indigenous origin. From what
part of the world this knowledge of bronze ultimately came we leave an
open question, as also whether it came with Phoenician traders or
direct from Greece, as Worsaae affirms. It was certainly introduced
into Sweden, making its way into Norway about the same time directly
from the peninsula of Jutland. Its first appearance is in a highly
evolved state. Such crude attempts at manufacture as Chantre finds so
long prevalent along the Rhone Valley, for example, are entirely
absent. Both in form and ornamentation the hand of the master is
apparent. This bronze age, like that of stone, lasted a very long
time--far longer than anywhere else on the continent. Central Europe
passed through three stages of metallic progress while Scandinavia was
evolving two. Not until the second or third century of our era--not
until the time of the Romans, it would appear--did iron begin to
supplant bronze. History repeats itself. The excessive duration of the
bronze age, as in the case of stone antecedently, led to the
attainment of a remarkable skill. The two accompanying cuts are
typical of the best work of this time. In the one case, merely
superficial ornament, especially the skillful use of the spiral; in
the other, real beauty of form in the bracelet, are clearly apparent.
Possessed of such skill in the working of bronze, it is small wonder
that the need of a better metal was not felt. Only when fashioned into
weapons of war does iron reveal its supremacy over bronze. This, of
course, with the campaigns of historical times, brings us to the end
of our chronicle.

The prehistoric experience of metal-working in Scandinavia is typical
of the other details of its cultural evolution. In its earliest epoch
no trace of domestic animals is present. It is rather a remarkable
fact that even the reindeer seems to have been unknown.[O] What can
Penka say to this in his positive affirmation that the original Aryans
got up into Scandinavia, having followed the reindeer from central
Europe north after the retreat of the ice sheet? The fact is,
archæologically speaking, from the evidence furnished by the kitchen
middens, that if they ever did this "they left a fine country, where
deer were plenty, to subsist upon shellfish on the foggy coasts of
Denmark."[P] The entire absence of economic motive for such a
migration is at once apparent. Men seldom travel far under such
conditions. Quite early, however, even in the stone age, do evidences
of domestic animals occur, to the dog being added the ox, horse,
swine, and sheep. Pottery in a rude form also follows. Finally, and in
apparent coincidence with the bronze culture, comes a new custom of
incineration. The dead are no longer buried, but burned. A profound
modification of religious ideas is hereby implied. It seems to have
been at about this time also that our Alpine racial type entered
Scandinavia from Denmark, although, as we have already observed, it is
yet far from certain that the new race was the active agent in
introducing the new elements of culture. All that we know is that they
both came from the south, and reached this remote region at about the
same time.

       *       *       *       *       *

That the origins of culture in Europe are certainly mixed would seem
to be about the main conclusion to be drawn from our extended
discussion. It has an iconoclastic tone. Yet we would not leave the
matter entirely in the air, nor would we agree with Mantegazza (1884)
in his conclusion that "Ignoramus" sums up our entire knowledge of the
subject. There is some comfort to be drawn even from this mass of
conflicting opinions. Our final destructive aim has been achieved if
we have emphasized the danger of correlating data drawn from several
distinct sciences, whose only bond of unity is that they are all
concerned with the same object--man. The positive contribution which
we would seek to make is that the whole matter of European origins is
by no means so simple as it has too often been made to appear. It is
not imperative that conclusions from all the contributory sciences of
physical anthropology, philology, and cultural history should be
susceptible of interweaving into a simple scheme of common origins for
all. The order of races, for example, need mean nothing as respects
priority of culture. Nor do the two sciences, philology and
archæology, involve one another's conclusions so far as civilization
is concerned. Language and industrial culture may have had very
different sources; their migrations need stand in no relation to one
another in the least. Each science is fully justified in its own
deductions, but must be content to leave the results of others in
peace. Such is the ultimate conclusion to which all the latest
authority is tending. Only by a careful comparison of data from each
sphere of investigation may we finally hope to combine them all in a
composite whole, as many-sided and complex as the life and nature of
man itself.


FOOTNOTES:

[A] Advance sheets from The Races of Europe, now in the press of D.
Appleton and Company, to appear in May. Footnotes and references are
herein largely omitted.

[B] Popular Science Monthly, January, 1898, pp. 304-322.

[C] Le Mirage Orientale, 1893 a; and in his admirable outline of
sculptural origins in Europe (1894-'96).

[D] Arii e Italici, Torino, 1898, especially pp. 199-220.

[E] Reinach, 1893 a, pp. 543-548. G. de Mortillet, 1897, denies the
claim.

[F] Chantre, 1884; Hoernes, 1892; Bertrand and Reinach, 1894 a; Sergi,
1898 a; and Orsi (Bull. Paletnologia Italiana, xi, 1885, p. 1 _et
seq._) are best authorities. See also Hallstatt in the subject index
of our Bibliography, soon to be published as a Special Bulletin of the
Boston Public Library.

[G] Hoernes, 1892, p. 529; Bertrand, 1876 a, second edition, pp.
207-216, fixes about 800 B. C.; but 1894 a, p. 80, carries it back to
1200-1300 B. C.

[H] Zuckerkandl, 1883, p. 96.

[I] Weisbach, 1897 b.

[J] This fact has been established beyond doubt by the recent great
work of Studer and Bannwarth, Crania Helvetica Antiqua, 1894. _Vide_
p. 13. Sergi's attempt to interpret the data otherwise (1898 a, p. 67)
is entirely erroneous. Gross's data apparently refer entirely to the
later period of Teutonic invasions in the iron age (1883, p. 106).
_Cf._ Munro, pp. 537 and 541.

[K] Popular Science Monthly, December, 1897, p. 151.

[L] From Montelius, 1897.

[M] _Cf._ maps and data in J. Geikie, 1894; Penck, 1884; and Niederle,
1893, p. 25.

[N] Bertrand, 1876 a and 1876 b, gives a full account of it. The best
recent authorities upon Scandinavian culture are Sophus Mueller, 1897,
and Montelius, 1895 b. Other works of reference are those of Worsaae,
Nilsson, Hildebrand, Madsen and Rygh, full titles being given in our
supplementary Bibliography of the Anthropology and Ethnology of
Europe. Comprising nearly two thousand titles, it will be provided
with a detailed subject index.

[O] Bertrand, 1876 b, p. 40.

[P] Reinach, 1892, pp. 72-78, for severe criticism of Penka's
hypotheses.




LIQUID AIR.

BY IRA REMSEN,

PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY IN THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.


Water, the substance most familiar to us, is known in the liquid, in
the solid, and in the gaseous state. Everybody knows that by heating
the solid it passes into the liquid state, and that by heating the
liquid it passes into the form of gas or vapor. So also everybody
knows that when the vapor of water is cooled it is liquefied, and that
by cooling liquid water sufficiently it becomes solid or turns to ice.
In the same way many of the substances that are known to us as
liquids, such as alcohol and ether, can be converted into the form of
gas or vapor by heat. In fact, this is true of most liquids. The
temperature at which a solid passes into the liquid state is called
its melting point, and the temperature at which a liquid passes into
the gaseous state is called its boiling point. The boiling point of
water, for example, is 100° C. (212° F.) in the open air. But the
boiling point varies with the pressure exerted upon the surface. The
pressure that we ordinarily have to deal with is that of the
atmosphere. If the pressure is increased the boiling point is raised,
and if the pressure is decreased the boiling point is lowered. In
dealing, then, with the conversion of a gas into a liquid, or that of
a liquid into a gas, both the temperature and the pressure have to be
considered.

Just as water is most familiar to us in the liquid form, so there are
substances that are most familiar to us in the gaseous form. In fact,
the only gaseous substances that can be said to be familiar to
everybody are the gases contained in the air. The principal
constituents of the air are nitrogen and oxygen, which form
respectively about four fifths and one fifth of its bulk. Besides
these gases, however, the air contains water vapor, carbonic-acid gas,
ammonia, argon in small quantities, and many other substances in still
smaller quantities. For the purposes of this article it is only
necessary to have in mind the nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, and
carbonic acid. Of these, the water vapor is easily converted into
liquid, as, for example, in the formation of rain, while the other
constituents are liquefied with difficulty. The name "liquid air" is
applied to the substance that is obtained by converting the air as a
whole into a liquid; but in this process the water and the carbonic
acid become solid and can be filtered from the liquid so that the
latter consists almost wholly of oxygen and nitrogen. A few years ago
this liquid was obtainable in only very small quantities. To-day,
thanks especially to the efforts of Mr. Charles E. Tripler, of New
York, it can be produced in any desired quantity, and at moderate
cost. In consequence of this, it has come to be talked about in a
familiar way, and many persons have had the privilege of seeing and
feeling it, and of learning something about its wonderful properties.
The object of this article is to explain the method employed in the
production of liquid air, to give an account of some of its
properties, and to indicate some of the uses to which it may possibly
be put.

In the older text-books of physics and of chemistry certain gases were
classed as "permanent," under the impression that these could not be
liquefied, and this impression was based upon the fact that all
efforts to liquefy them had failed. A brief account of these efforts
will be helpful.

Among the so-called permanent gases was chlorine. An English chemist,
Northmore, first succeeded, early in this century, in liquefying
chlorine. His work was, however, lost sight of, and in 1823 Faraday at
the Royal Institution showed independently that this transformation of
gaseous chlorine into the liquid can be effected comparatively easily.
The method used by him is this: When chlorine gas is passed into cold
water it forms with the water a solid product known as chlorine
hydrate. If kept well cooled this hydrate can be dried. If then its
temperature is raised even to the ordinary temperature of the room,
the solid hydrate is decomposed into liquid water and gaseous
chlorine. Faraday put some of the solid hydrate into a stout glass
tube sealed at one end and bent at the middle. The other end of the
tube was then closed. The tube was then suspended so that the two ends
were turned downward. On gently warming the end in which was the solid
hydrate, this was decomposed into chlorine and water. But the gas
given off would under ordinary conditions have occupied a much larger
space than the solid hydrate. Being prevented from expanding by the
tube in which it was inclosed, it was under very considerable
pressure. The end of the tube that was not warmed was cooled, and in
this end, in consequence of the pressure and the comparatively low
temperature, chlorine, which is gaseous under the ordinary pressure of
the air, appeared as a liquid. The general method made use of by
Faraday in this classical experiment is that which is always made use
of for the purpose of liquefying gases, but for some gases pressures
very much higher and temperatures very much lower are required.
Faraday himself succeeded in liquefying all the gases then known
except oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, nitric oxide, and marsh gas. He
subjected oxygen to a pressure of about one thousand pounds to the
square inch, or nearly seventy atmospheres, but it showed no signs of
liquefaction. Later experimenters increased the pressure to four
thousand pounds to the square inch, with no better results, so that it
is not surprising that it came to be held that some gases are
permanent.

Within comparatively recent years several gases have been liquefied on
the large scale by means of pressure. These are ammonia, carbonic
acid, nitrous oxide, and chlorine. Ammonia is used for producing low
temperatures, as in breweries and in cold-storage plants and in the
manufacture of ice; carbonic acid, for fire extinguishers and for
charging beer with the gas; nitrous oxide, for producing anæsthesia;
and chlorine in connection with several branches of chemical
manufacture. The production of low temperatures by means of liquid
ammonia and of liquid carbonic acid will be more fully dealt with
further on, when the principles involved will be briefly presented. It
is to be borne in mind that these substances are liquefied by means of
pressure alone, at temperatures that are easily reached, so that it
appears that by mechanical pressure it is possible to produce low
temperatures. In 1869 an important fact was discovered by Andrews. It
was that for every gas there is a temperature above which it is
impossible to liquefy it by pressure. Thus, if chlorine is at any
temperature above 146° C. (294° F.) it can not be liquefied. This
temperature is called the "critical temperature" of chlorine. The
pressure to which the gas must be subjected at the "critical
temperature" in order that the gas may be liquefied is called the
"critical pressure." In the case of chlorine this is 93.5 atmospheres.
Now, the critical temperature of the gases that were called permanent
gases are very low--lower than could be reached by the means at the
command of earlier experimenters. The critical temperature of oxygen,
for example, is -118.8° C. (-182° F.), while that of nitrogen is -146°
C. (-230° F.). The critical pressures are 50.8 and 35 atmospheres
respectively. As there is no difficulty in obtaining these pressures,
the problem of liquefying oxygen and nitrogen and air resolves itself
into finding a method of producing temperatures below the critical
temperatures of these gases.

It is well known that a temperature somewhat below the freezing point
of water can be produced artificially by mixing ice and salt. The
ordinary ice-cream freezer is a familiar application of this method of
producing cold. Other freezing mixtures that are sometimes used
consist of calcium chloride and snow, that gives the temperature -48°
C. (-54.4° F.), and solid carbonic acid and ether, that is capable of
lowering the temperature to -100° C. (-148° F.). But even with the
latter mixture it is not possible to reach the critical temperature of
oxygen or that of nitrogen. How, then, is it possible to reach these
extremely low temperatures?

In order to answer this question it will be necessary to take into
consideration certain temperature changes that are observed when
solids are melted and liquids are boiled, as well as when gases are
liquefied and liquids are frozen. When heat is applied to a mass of
ice at its melting point it melts and forms a mass of water having the
same temperature. Heat disappears in the operation. It is stored up in
the water. This disappearance of heat that accompanies the melting of
ice can be shown in a very striking way by mixing a certain weight of
ice with the same weight of water that has been heated to 80° C. (176°
F.). The ice will melt and all the water obtained will be found to
have the temperature of the melting ice--that is, 0° C. (32° F.). The
water of 80° C. is thus cooled down to 0° by the melting of the ice.
Again, when heat is applied to water its temperature rises until the
boiling point is reached. Then it is converted into vapor, but this
vapor has the temperature of the boiling water. During the process of
boiling there is no rise in the temperature of the water or of the
vapor. Heat disappears, therefore, or is used up in the process of
vaporization. Similar phenomena are observed whenever a solid is
melted or a liquid is boiled. When, however, a gas is liquefied it
gives up again the heat that is absorbed by it when it is formed from
a liquid; and so also when a liquid solidifies it gives up the heat it
absorbs when it is formed from a solid.

But it is not necessary that a gas should be converted into a liquid
in order that it should give up heat. Whenever it is compressed it
becomes warmer. Some of the heat stored up in it is, as it were,
squeezed out of it. Conversely, whenever a gas expands, it takes up
heat and, of course, surrounding objects from which the heat is taken
become colder. Now, it is a comparatively simple matter to compress
air. Every wheelman knows that, and he also knows that the process
causes a rise in temperature; at least he knows it if he uses a small
hand pump. With large pumps run by steam any desired pressure can be
reached. This is simply a question of securing the proper engines, and
vessels sufficiently strong to stand the pressure. It has already been
pointed out that several gases are now liquefied on the large scale by
means of pressure. It is to be noted that low temperatures can be
produced by converting certain gases, such as ammonia and carbonic
acid, into liquids, and by compressing certain gases, as, for example,
air. When liquefied gases are used it is only necessary to allow them
to pass rapidly into the gaseous state, when more or less heat is
absorbed. This is the basis for the use of liquid ammonia in the
manufacture of ice. A vessel containing the liquid ammonia is placed
in another containing water. The inner vessel being opened, the liquid
ammonia is rapidly converted into the gas; heat is absorbed from the
water; it freezes. When a vessel containing liquid carbonic acid is
opened so that the gas that is formed escapes through a small valve,
so much heat is absorbed that a part of the liquid carbonic acid is
itself frozen. In this case the substance is present in all three
states of aggregation--the solid, the liquid, and the gaseous. The use
of a mixture of ether and solid carbonic acid as a freezing mixture
has already been referred to. Its value depends, of course,
principally upon the fact that solid carbonic acid is liquefied, and
the liquid then converted into gas, both of which operations involve
absorption of heat.

We are now prepared to understand the important experiments of
Cailletet and of Pictet, the results of which were published in 1877.
It should be said that they worked independently of each
other--Cailletet in Paris and Pictet in Geneva. Pictet liquefied
carbonic acid and sulphur dioxide by pressure. The liquid carbonic
acid was passed through a tube that was surrounded by liquid sulphur
dioxide boiling in a partial vacuum. The liquid carbonic acid thus
cooled was then boiled under diminished pressure in a jacket
surrounding a tube in which the gas to be liquefied was contained
under high pressure. When this gas was allowed to escape from a small
opening its temperature was so reduced by the expansion that a part of
it was liquefied in the tube and passed off as a liquid. Cailletet
worked in essentially the same way, but on a smaller scale. Neither of
these experimenters liquefied oxygen or nitrogen on the large scale,
but they pointed out the way that must be followed in order that
success may be attained. They destroyed the belief in "permanent"
gases.

Later experimenters in this field are Wroblewski, Olszewski, and
Dewar, who have been interested mainly in the purely scientific side
of the problem, while Linde in Germany, Hampson in England, and
Tripler in the United States have their minds on the practical side.
Notwithstanding the low temperatures involved in the experiments, a
number of heated discussions have been carried on in the scientific
journals touching the question of priority. To the unprejudiced
observer it appears that all of those named above are entitled to
credit. They have all helped the cause along, but just how to
apportion the credit no one knows. In a general way, however, some of
the results obtained by each in turn should be given. Wroblewski and
Olszewski have carried on the work begun by Cailletet and Pictet, and
have produced lower temperatures. In the latest form of apparatus used
by Olszewski, liquid ethylene is used as the cooling agent. Its
boiling point is -102° C. (-151.6° F.). By causing it to boil rapidly
under diminished pressure a temperature below the critical temperature
of oxygen can be reached. As early as 1891 Olszewski obtained as much
as two hundred cubic centimetres of liquid air by this method. Dewar
has also made use of liquid ethylene. This was passed through a spiral
copper tube surrounded by solid carbonic acid and ether. It was then
passed into a cylinder surrounded by another cylinder containing solid
carbonic acid and ether. A spiral copper tube, which runs through the
outer cylinder and also through the inner cylinder in which the
ethylene was boiling under diminished pressure, carried the air. This
was liquefied and then collected in a vacuum vessel below. Later he
found that air can be liquefied by using liquid carbonic acid alone as
the cooling agent. A sectional drawing of his apparatus described in
1896 is given herewith. As he remarks: "With this simple machine, one
hundred cubic centimetres of liquid oxygen can readily be obtained,
the cooling agent being carbon dioxide, at the temperature of -79°. If
liquid air has to be made by this apparatus, then the carbonic acid
must be kept under exhaustion of about one inch of mercury pressure,
so as to begin with a temperature of -115°."

[Illustration:

FIG. 1.--LABORATORY LIQUEFACTION APPARATUS OF DEWAR FOR THE PRODUCTION
OF LIQUID OXYGEN, ETC.

A, air or oxygen inlet; B, carbon-dioxide inlet; C, carbon-dioxide
valve; D, regenerator coils; F, air or oxygen expansion valve; G,
vacuum vessel with liquid oxygen; H, carbon-dioxide and air outlet;
o, air coil; ø, carbon-dioxide coil.]

The introduction of the vacuum vessel by Dewar has been of great
service in all the work on liquefied gases. A vacuum vessel is a
double-walled glass vessel, as shown in Fig. 1, G. The space between
the inner and outer walls of the vessel is exhausted by means of an
air pump before it is closed. The vessel is therefore surrounded by a
vacuum. As heat is not conducted by a vacuum, it is possible to keep
specimens of liquefied gases in such vessels for a surprisingly long
time. Heat enough can not pass through the vacuum to vaporize the
liquid rapidly. The most common form of these vessels is that of a
globe. Such a vessel is known as a Dewar globe or bulb.

It has been found that liquid air can be kept very well by putting it
in a tin or galvanized iron vessel, which in turn is placed in a
larger one, and then filling the space between the two with felt.
Under these conditions vaporization takes place quite slowly, and it
is possible to transport the liquid comparatively long distances. It
has, for example, been transported from New York to Baltimore and
Washington. In one case with which the writer is familiar two cans
were taken from Mr. Tripler's laboratory in the morning, delivered at
the Johns Hopkins University in the afternoon, and used to illustrate
a lecture in the evening. After the lecture there was enough left for
certain experiments that were carried on during the rest of the night.

[Illustration: FIG. 2.--DIAGRAM SHOWING WORKING OF COMPRESSION
APPARATUS FOR MAKING LIQUID AIR.]

Tripler, Linde, and Hampson have all succeeded in devising forms of
apparatus by means of which air can be liquefied without the aid of
other cooling agents than the expanding air. In principle the methods
employed by these three workers are essentially the same. It appears
from the published statements that at the present time Tripler's plant
is the most efficient. While a few years ago a half pint or so of
liquid air is said to have cost five hundred dollars, now five gallons
can be made for about twenty dollars, and probably much less. The
general working of Tripler's apparatus can be made clear by the aid of
the accompanying drawing, Fig. 2. A^1, A^2, A^3 represent steam
compression pumps. Air is taken through I from above the roof of the
laboratory. In the first pump it is compressed to sixty-five pounds to
the square inch. It, of course, becomes heated as it is compressed. In
order to cool it down again it is passed through a coil, B^1, which is
surrounded by water of the ordinary temperature. This compressed and
cooled air is then further compressed in the second pump, A^2, to four
hundred pounds to the square inch. Again it is cooled in the same way
as before by means of water which circulates around the coil B^2. Once
more the air is compressed, this time in the cylinder A^3, in which it
is subjected to a pressure of two thousand to twenty-five hundred
pounds to the square inch; and then this compressed air is brought
down to the ordinary temperature in the cooler B^3. The air under this
great pressure is now passed through the purifier C, where it is freed
from particles of dust and to a great extent from moisture. From C the
air passes into the inner bent tube, about thirty feet in length,
until it reaches D. This may be called the critical point of the
apparatus. Here is situated a needle valve from which the air is
allowed to escape. It, of course, expands enormously, and is
correspondingly cooled. This very cold air passes into the space
between the inner and outer tubes, and finally escapes at F. The
result of this is that the compressed air in the inner tube is soon
cooled down so far that a considerable part of the air that escapes at
D appears in the liquid form. This collects in the lower part of the
jacket, and on opening the stopcock at E the liquid escapes in a
stream the size of one's finger.

In Mr. Tripler's laboratory the liquid is collected in the cans
already referred to. Although for the reasons mentioned the
evaporation of the liquid is comparatively slow, it is constantly
going on, and as the gas formed occupies a very much larger volume
under the pressure of the atmosphere than the liquid from which it is
formed, it is necessary to leave the cans loosely covered. Otherwise
the pressure would increase to such an extent as to burst any but the
strongest vessels. One cubic foot of liquid air gives at atmospheric
pressure eight hundred cubic feet of gaseous air.

Liquid air obtained as described is a turbid, colorless liquid. The
turbidity is due to the presence of solid water and solid carbonic
acid. By passing the liquid through a paper filter the solids are
removed, and a transparent liquid is thus obtained. This, as already
stated, consists mostly of nitrogen and oxygen in the proportion of
about four fifths of the former to one fifth of the latter. Though it
should not be forgotten that this liquid contains argon in small
quantity, besides three or four other substances in still smaller
quantities, as has recently been shown by Professor Ramsay, we may
disregard everything except the nitrogen and oxygen. Liquid air is a
_mixture_ of these two substances. They are not chemically combined as
hydrogen and oxygen are, for example, in water. This mixture boils at
-191° C. (-312° F.), which is the temperature of the liquid as it is
in the cans. As the nitrogen boils at a lower temperature (-194° C. or
318° F.) than oxygen (-183° C. or 297° F.), more nitrogen is converted
into gas in a given time than oxygen, and after a time the liquid
that is left is much richer in oxygen than ordinary air. When liquid
air is poured upon water it, being a little lighter than the water,
floats, not quietly, to be sure, but in a very troubled way. Soon,
however, the liquid sinks to the bottom because the nitrogen, which is
the lighter constituent, passes into the gaseous state, and the liquid
oxygen which is left is a little heavier than water. The experiment is
a very beautiful one. A scientific poet could alone do justice to it.
The beauty is enhanced by the fact that while liquid air is colorless,
or practically so, liquid oxygen is distinctly blue.

Although liquid air has the temperature -191° C. (-312° F.), one can
without danger pass the hand through it rapidly. The sensation is a
new one, but it is evanescent. Very serious results would follow if
the hand were allowed to remain in the liquid even for a short time.
The tissues would be killed. So also, it is possible to pass the hand
rapidly through molten lead without injury. In the latter case the
moisture on the hand is converted into vapor which forms a protecting
cushion between the hand and the hot liquid; while, in the former
case, the heat of the hand converts the liquid air immediately
surrounding it into gas which prevents the liquid from coming in
contact with the hand.

When the liquid is poured out of a vessel in the air it is rapidly
converted into gas. The great lowering in the temperature causes a
condensation of the moisture of the air in the form of a cloud. The
same thing is seen when the cover is removed from a can containing the
liquid. Of course, this liquid does not wet things as water does.
When, however, as happened in New York, the lecturer deliberately
pours a dipperful of the liquid upon a priceless Worth gown, he may
expect to hear expressions of horror from the owner. This experiment
passed off most successfully. Every trace of the liquid air was
converted into invisible gases before the fleeting agony of the
sympathetic audience had passed away.

The effects of very low temperature upon a number of substances have
been studied, and some of them can easily be shown. Paraffin, resin,
and rubber immersed in liquid air soon become very brittle, and the
color of the resin is completely changed. A beefsteak or an onion also
becomes brittle, and can be broken into small fragments by the blow of
a hammer. A similar effect is produced in the case of some metals. Tin
and iron, for example, become brittle, and the tenacity of the iron is
greatly increased. A copper wire, however, retains its flexibility. At
low temperatures the electric conductivity of all metals is increased.
In general, the lower the temperature the greater the conductivity. If
a copper wire could by any means be kept cold enough, electrical
energy could be transmitted by it with but little loss--perhaps none.
Mercury is easily frozen by surrounding it with liquid air, and the
solid thus formed is very hard, though if it is cooled down
sufficiently it becomes brittle.

Alcohol can be frozen without difficulty by means of liquid air. By
the aid of the lowest temperatures hitherto attainable it has only
been possible to convert alcohol into a pasty mass. The frozen alcohol
is as hard as ice. When alcohol is dropped into liquid air the drops
retain the globular form. When taken out on a platinum loop the flame
of a Bunsen burner does not set fire to it.

Phosphorescence is greatly increased by cooling substances down to the
temperature of liquid air. This has been shown by means of water,
milk, paper, eggs, and feathers. An egg and a feather could be
distinctly seen in a dark room.

Scarlet iodide of mercury is converted into the yellow variety when it
is subjected to the temperature of liquid air. Some other colors are
changed under the same circumstances, but not enough is known of this
subject to warrant a general statement.

Attention has already been called to the fact that liquid air loses
its nitrogen more rapidly than it does its oxygen, and that, after a
time, the residue contains a large proportion of oxygen. As combustion
is combination with oxygen, combustion or burning takes place more
readily in contact with this liquid oxygen than it does in the air. If
a lighted match is attached to the end of a steel watch spring, and
this then plunged beneath the surface of liquid air, the spring will
soon take fire and burn brilliantly, the sparks flying off for some
distance in beautiful coruscations. Hair felt, which does not burn in
the air, burns in a flash when soaked with liquid air. Finally, when
liquid air is confined in any vessel not capable of sustaining an
enormous pressure, say about ten thousand pounds to the square inch,
the vaporization goes on until the vessel bursts or the stopper is
forced out. It might therefore be used as an explosive without any
addition, but its manipulation is not altogether simple.

Now for the inevitable question: Of what use is liquid air likely to
be? This is a perfectly proper question, and yet, if scientific
workers always stopped to ask it, and would not work unless they could
find a favorable answer, progress would, to say the least, be much
slower than it is. Most great practical discoveries have necessarily
passed through the plaything stage. Some of the most important
discoveries have not even furnished playthings, and have found no
practical applications as this expression is commonly understood. But
the production of liquid air, while furnishing mankind with a
beautiful and instructive plaything, seems likely to find practical
applications. We may look for these in four directions, to each of
which a short paragraph may be devoted:

First, as a cooling agent. Low temperature is marketable. To be sure,
the demand for the extremely low temperature that can be produced by
liquid air does not exist to-day, but this concentrated low
temperature can be diluted to suit conditions. The only question to be
answered in this connection is, then, What is the cost of cold
produced by liquid air? It is impossible for any one to answer this
question at all satisfactorily at present. It can only be said that
this is what experimenters are trying to find out. It appears,
however, that they are on the way to cheap liquid air, and that as the
processes are improved the price will become lower and lower.

Second, for the construction of motors. There is no doubt that liquid
air with its enormous power of expansion can be used as a source of
motive power just as compressed air is. In the case of steam it is
necessary to heat the water in order to convert it into steam, and to
heat the steam to give it the power of expansion. The cost is, in the
first instance, that of the fuel. Given a certain amount of heat, and
a certain amount of work is obtained. If liquid air is used, the
problem is much the same. Engines must be run in order to compress the
air which is to be liquefied. Every gallon of liquid air has been
produced at the expense of work of some kind. Now, the question arises
at once, What proportion of the work that was put in that gallon of
liquid air in the course of its production can be got out of it again?
It is certain that all of it can not be got out unless all that we
have ever learned about such matters goes for nothing. In dealing with
the problem of the application of liquid air as a source of motive
power we are therefore doubly handicapped. In the first place, we do
not know the cost of the liquid when produced on the large scale; and,
in the second place, _we_ do not know the probable efficiency of a
liquid-air motor. I say "we do not know." Perhaps Mr. Tripler and the
others engaged in the experiments on this subject do know
approximately. We certainly can not blame them for not telling us all
they know at this stage of the work. It is unfortunate, however, that
such a statement as was recently published in a popular magazine
should be allowed to gain currency--apparently with the sanction of
Mr. Tripler. The statement referred to is to the effect that ten
gallons of liquid air have been made by the use of three gallons of
liquid air in the engine. If that means that the ten gallons of liquid
air are made from air at the ordinary pressure, the statement is in
direct conflict with well-established principles. If it means that the
ten gallons of liquid air are made from air that has already been
partly compressed, we must know how much work has been done before the
liquid-air engine began. Leaving out of consideration the question of
cost, it may be pointed out that liquid-air engines would have the
advantage of compactness, though they would necessarily be heavy, as
they would have to be strong enough to stand the great pressure to
which they would be subjected.

The third application of liquid air that has been suggested is in the
preparation of an explosive. In fact, an explosive has been made and
used for some time in which liquid air is one of the constituents.
When the liquid from which a part of the nitrogen has boiled off is
mixed with powdered charcoal, the mixture burns with great rapidity
and great explosive force. "To make this explosive, Dr. Linde pours
the liquid containing about forty or fifty per cent of oxygen on
fragments of wood charcoal, two or four cubic millimetres in size.
These are kept from scattering under the ebullition of the liquid by
mixing them into a sort of sponge with about one third of their weight
of cotton wool." Of course, this explosive must be made at or near the
place where it is used. It has been in use in the way of a practical
test in a coal mine at Pensberg, near Munich. It is claimed that the
results were satisfactory. The chief advantage of the explosive is its
cheapness, and the fact that it soon loses its power of exploding.

Finally, the fourth application of liquid air is for the purpose of
getting oxygen from the air. This can be accomplished by chemical
means, but the chemical method is somewhat expensive. Oxygen has
commercial value, and cheap oxygen would be a decided advantage in a
number of branches of industry. It will be observed that it is the
liquid oxygen that makes possible the preparation of the explosive
described in the last paragraph. Oxygen as such in the form of gas is
of value in Deacon's process for the manufacture of chlorine. In this
process air and hydrochloric acid are caused to act upon each other so
as to form water and chlorine. The nitrogen takes no part in the act,
and it would be an advantage if it could be left out. It is only the
oxygen that is wanted. There are many other possible uses for oxygen
either in the liquid or in the gaseous form, but these need no mention
here.

In conclusion it may safely be said that it is highly probable that
liquid air will be found to be a useful substance, but it is
impossible at present to speak with any confidence of the particular
uses that will be made of it. As work with it is being carried on
energetically in at least three countries, we may confidently expect
important developments in the near future.




THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE WEST INDIES.

BY F. L. OSWALD.


II.--BIRDS.

The abundance of birds on the four largest islands of the West Indian
archipelago, where indigenous mammals are almost limited to rodents
and bats, has often suggested the conjecture that the ancestors of
those islanders must have been immigrants from the east coasts of the
American mainland; and that theory seems to be confirmed by two facts:
the identity, or similarity, of numerous Mexican and West Indian
species, and the circumstance that those analogies include so many
swift-winged birds.

There are no woodpeckers in the forests of the Antilles, and only two
species of large gallinaceous birds, but a prodigious variety of
pigeons, swallows, finches, and crows. The _alcedos_ (kingfishers) are
scarce, but the blackbirds so numerous that some of the countless
species seem to claim a South American and even transatlantic
ancestry. The restless _estornino_ of the Cuban highland forests, for
instance, might be mistaken for a varnished starling, resembling the
_Sturnus vulgaris_ of western Europe in everything but the more
brilliant luster of its plumage. The curious _codornilla_, or dove
quail, too, has its nearest relatives on the other side of the
Atlantic, in Syria, Arabia, and the foothills of the Atlas. It builds
its nest on the ground and, judging from its appearance, would seem to
form a connecting link between the doves and small _gallinæ_; but its
wings are those of a pigeon, and with the assistance of a northeast
gale may possibly have carried it across the ocean.

[Illustration: CROWN PIGEON.]

In studying the geographical distribution of animals, we may estimate
the prevalence of special genera by the number of their varieties, or
by the aggregate sum of individuals, and in the latter sense the
migratory pigeons of our forest States once nearly outnumbered all the
other birds of North America, though the family is limited to five or
six species. But in the West Indies the _Columbidæ_ predominate in
both respects. Cuba is a country of wild pigeons as pre-eminently as
South Africa is a land of pachyderms and Madagascar of night monkeys.
The _Columba leucocephala_ (a congener of our ringdove) inhabits the
mountain forests in countless swarms, and at the end of the rainy
season visits grainfields in such numbers that hundreds are sometimes
captured in nets, by means of corn scattered along the furrows.

A closely allied variety is found in San Domingo, where in many upland
regions a darkey, equipped with a shotgun and a supply of gunpowder,
can dispense with agriculture and raise a family of anthropoids on
pigeon pies and _tortillas_, compounded from the grain found in the
crops of his victims.

But the _tittyblang_ (_tête-blanc_) has scores of smaller and larger
cousins, culminating in the Cuban primate of the family, the splendid
_paloma real_, with its coronet of pearl-gray plumes and dark-blue
wings.

[Illustration: CRESTED CURASSOW.]

[Illustration: PORTO RICO PARRAKEET.]

Ducks, too, must number some twenty West Indian species, and one kind
of wild geese often obliged the rice planters to employ mounted
sharpshooters, who galloped up and down the long dikes, yelling
blasphemies, and every now and then enforcing their quotations with a
handful of buckshot. But, for all that, the planter could think
himself lucky to gather a sixty-per-cent harvest of the total produce,
for experience soon enabled the long-necked depredators to estimate
the target range of the _cazador_ within a dozen yards and take wing
in the nick of time, only to resume their feast at the other end of
the plantation.

[Illustration: VERVAIN HUMMING BIRD AND NEST.]

A long-continued process of natural selection has also modified the
habits of numerous species of West Indian parrots. Four hundred years
ago, when Fernan Oviedo superintended the placer mines of Hayti,
_loris_ were so abundant and tame that his assistants often amused
themselves prowling about a thicket of berry bushes and capturing the
chattering visitors by means of a common ring net. Nestlings could be
taken from every hollow tree, and often from the thatchwork of
deserted Indian cabins; but the overconfident specimens came to grief,
and the survivors have learned to give the Caucasian varieties of the
_Simia destructor_ a wide berth. They raise their young in the
cavities of the tallest forest trees, and approach human habitations
only at dawn of day and sometimes during the noonday heat, when
creoles can be relied upon to indulge in a _siesta_ nap. In reliance
on their protective colors, gray parrakeets frequent the dead timber
of the coffee plantations, while the leaf-green Amazon parrot sticks
to leaf trees.

"When they alight on a dry branch," says Captain Gosse, in his Jamaica
chronicle, "their emerald hue is conspicuous and affords a fair mark
for the gunner, but in a tree of full foliage their color proves an
excellent concealment. They seem aware of this, and their sagacity
prompts them to rely on it for protection. Often we hear their voices
proceeding from a certain tree, or have marked the descent of a flock,
but on proceeding to the spot, though the eye has not wandered from
it, we can not discover an individual; we go close to the tree, but
all is silent; we institute a careful survey of every part with the
eye, to detect the slightest motion, or the form of a bird among the
leaves, but in vain, and we begin to think that they have stolen off
unperceived, but on throwing a stone into the tree a dozen voices
burst forth into cry, and as many green birds dart forth upon the
wing."

The gorgeous macaws, on the other hand, seem to owe their color
contrasts to sexual selection. "Ya son vencidos los pavos de
India"--"That does beat a Hindostan peacock"--exclaimed King
Ferdinand, when Columbus introduced those most splendid products of
the American tropics.

Nor can the exigencies of protection have evolved the glaring colors
of the West Indian hornbill. The _toco_ (toucan), as the Cubans call
the yellow-billed species, can be descried from a distance of two
hundred yards, and is, indeed, not anxious to be admired at close
range. Old specimens get as wary as mountain ravens, but, like crows,
become ridiculously tame in captivity, and will follow their
proprietors with loud croaks, every now and then opening their
lunch-trap to indicate their desire for refreshment. They are, on the
whole, the hardiest of all tropical birds, and can weather the winters
of our coast towns as far north as Wilmington, in open-air cages,
owing perhaps to their habit of extending their excursions to the high
mountain ranges of their native land.

[Illustration: THE SMALLEST BIRD.]

Economical Nature rarely wastes the gift of song on a bird of bright
plumage, but it is less easy to understand why so many feathered
beauties should have been afflicted with harsh and positively
repulsive voices. The horrid screams of the peacocks, guinea hens, and
macaws can hardly be supposed to charm their mates, and are too easily
recognized to deter their natural enemies. But the roars (there is no
more adequate word) of some species of hornbills would almost seem
intended to serve the latter purpose.

"The voice of the _Buceros bicornis_," says Wallace, "can be plainly
heard at a distance of a mile, so that the amazement of travelers
visiting its haunts seems explicable enough. Its screams may be
described as something between the bray of a jackass and the shriek of
a locomotive, and are not surpassed in power by any sound that an
animal is capable of making. They re-echo through the hills to such a
degree that it is difficult to assign the noise to a bird, and are
sometimes kept up so continuously as to become absolutely unbearable."

The condor and the harpy eagle have not found their way across the
Caribbean Sea, but the West Indies boast three varieties of fish
eagles, several species of mountain falcons, and a curious singing
owl, the _oriya_, that chants its serenades in the plaintive strain of
the whip-poor-will, and is dreaded by the Porto Rico darkeys as a bird
of ill-omen:

      "Grita l'oriya: Venga amigo,
      Venga conmigo a mi patria,
      Venga te-digo!"

Small hooting owls abound, and there are four species of sparrow
hawks, one of them not much larger than a finch.

It is probably the smallest bird of prey, and there is no doubt that
one species of West Indian humming bird is the smallest bird on earth,
the _Vervain colibri_, of Jamaica, that hides its nest under an orange
leaf, and, though an insect-eater, could be easily overpowered by an
able-bodied bumblebee. In beauty some of the south Cuban species rival
those of the Amazon Valley, and frequent every flowering shrub from
the jungles of the coast lands to the highland meadows of the Sierra
Maestra. In Hayti there are parklike plateaus where they often appear
in swarms at a time of the year when the forests of the foothills are
drenched by the afternoon cloudbursts of the rainy season, and on some
of the smaller Antilles they are seen only during the flowering period
of special plants.

In the solitudes of the Morne Range (San Domingo) mountain ravens rear
their brood in the crevices of steep rocks, and fiercely attack birds
of prey, not excepting the black-crested eagle, that now and then
visits the sierras in quest of conies. But the winged constables of
the highlands rarely leave their mountain reservation. Of
Abd-el-Wahab, the Arabian heretic, it used to be said that "Mohammedan
zealots shrank in affright from his superior fanaticism," and on the
midway terraces of the Dominican sierras the persecution mania of the
giant crow yields to that of the great shrike, the _Lanius rufus_,
that operates pairwise and assails all winged comers with absolutely
reckless courage.

The raven of the Mornes seems to be identical with the cosmopolitan
forager that is found in the uplands of the eastern continent from
the bleak summit regions of the Hindu-Kush to the sierras of Portugal,
and from the Atlas to the Norwegian Alps; but there are several
exclusively West Indian species of the genus _Corvus_, including a
steel-blue rook that flits about the Cuban coffee plantations and has
a curious habit of perching on a stump and talking to itself in a sort
of croaking chuckle for half hours together.

The _gallinæ_, as might be expected from their limited wing-power, are
well represented in the number of individuals, rather than of species.
Turkeys, though abundant in the coast forests of Central America, are
not found wild in any part of the West Indies, where the perennial
presence of berries would be as inviting as the absence of foxes.

[Illustration: THE CARIBBEAN ALBATROSS.]

In the mountains some species of curassow have, however, developed
into a stately game bird, the _Oreophasis niger_, or highland
"pheasant," that lays a dozen large eggs, and in its courtship season
becomes so infatuated that it can be approached and killed with a
common walking-stick. The consequent persecution has made it rather
scarce in famine-stricken Cuba, but in Hayti it can still be seen in
troops of a dozen or more, scratching up the dry leaves of the sierra
forests, or pecking at insect-haunted shrubs, exactly like a flock of
Tennessee turkeys.

There are also several varieties of true pheasants, and two species of
quail (besides the above-mentioned _codornilla_), and in eastern Cuba
numerous barnyard chickens have taken to the woods and become so shy
that it seems a puzzle how their ancestors in the coast range of
Burmah could ever be captured and domesticated. They still practice
polygamy, combined with a system of co-operative housekeeping, to
judge from the number of eggs that are often found in one nest. At
the approach of an unfeathered biped the hen bird takes wing with a
screech, and is apt to vanish for the rest of that day. The roosters
are rarely seen, their glaring colors having faded into more
protective shades of olive and brown, but at dawn of day their shrill
reveille can be heard from afar in the heart of the pathless jungle
woods.

[_To be continued._]




INSANE CHARACTERS IN FICTION AND THE DRAMA.

BY PROF. CESARE LOMBROSO.


One of the things that most strikes one who compares the ancient
theater, and even the theater of a few years ago, with the modern
theater, is the enormous difference in the character of the
personages, and particularly the curious frequency of insane as
principal personages in the modern theater. We have come to such a
point that one may be almost sure that in reading over a new play, by
Ibsen, for example, he will find three or four insane personages in
it, if, the characters are not all so. These madmen have
characteristics so particularized as to seem as if they might have
been depicted by an alienist. If the protagonists are not mad, they
are agitated by such violent and strange passions as the ordinary
world never meets in life; which it therefore refuses to accept when
they are described in a scientific book, but nevertheless receives
them when it sees them in the scenes or meets them in the romances of
the great modern novelists.

Ibsen, for example, has made a most exact picture of the progressive
general paralysis which arises, precisely as he depicts it, in men of
genius, of great mental activity, who have wasted their hereditary
power in pleasures or excessive work; and there is in them both
impulsiveness and want of will power, complete perversion of all the
instincts, and mental confusion, alternating here and there with
genial flashes; but he is wrong in accumulating in a single subject
the maladies of a large number of diseased, and therefore exaggerating
their eccentricities--as he exaggerates atavism and heredity of
disease when he makes the morbid son repeat the same incoherent
phrases as the father from whom he inherits his disorder used.

Just and true, however, is that other form of heredity under which
from a father corrupted by licentious indulgence and by alcohol, and
criminally vicious, is born, besides a paresic son, a lascivious and
criminal daughter, who throws herself into prostitution at the first
opportunity without any special cause.

So, too, that love of art existing now as only a dream, and that
egotistic good nature which enjoys the advantages of a mother's care
without gratitude, those short accesses of genial eloquence followed
by fury which burst out from the midst of apathy, and which are
drowned in the intoxication of alcohol with a complete, immediate
forgetfulness of everything, are specific traits of paralytic
dementia.

Ibsen, in Hedda Gabler, describes to us a neurotic woman who, being
pregnant, and therefore suffering more acute attacks, avenges herself,
though married, upon her former lover, who had left her, by burning
the manuscripts which he expected to make him famous. Virile, like all
criminals, she nursed her resentment from youth.

In the Pillars of Society the great political characters are rogues
and neurotics.

In Berkmann the true criminal banker comes into play. He does not kill
or ravish, but appropriates the money belonging to his bank under the
illusion that he will be able to make great gains with it through the
accomplishment of wonderful things that will secure to him his single
joy--power; and that he can then restore the sum with redoubled
interest.

This case is of a kind of very frequent occurrence, and shows a
complete absence in the banker of affection and of moral sense. He
sacrifices the woman who loves him to further the desires of an
accomplice. He has a faithful friend who, robbed by him, continues to
visit him every day and give him the solace of admiration even when
all despise him; and he repels him when he fails to absolve him and to
believe in the possibility of his return to power. Later the defaulter
pretends that he has studied his own case, and has probed it in every
way, with the result of a complete acquittal of himself. And why all
this? Because he has used the money of others for great purposes: to
connect seas, to excavate the millions that are shut up in the bosom
of the earth and are crying out to be brought into the light. Thus it
is that with the combined genius and delirium of megalomaniacs he
hears the call of the minerals and the groaning of the ships longing
to be set free. Conscience, duty, and probity do not exist for him. He
believes that his quality as a man of genius permits him everything;
therefore he sacrifices to his chimeras the beings who love him most.
"I am," he says, "like a Napoleon disabled by a shot in his first
battle"; and he does not perceive that he has grown old, that he has a
mortal heart disease; and he dreams of returning to power and of
hearing men ask the benefit of his advice, and no longer talks with
anybody, because there is nobody but his old lover who does not
believe him guilty.

Finally, repulsed by all, he plunges into the whirl of life and the
torment of the mountain, and dies at last of syncope; while his
equally egotistical son deserts the mother who adores him to go to
the south with the wealthy Amasia, daughter of his father's enemy.

In Dostoievski, madmen, especially epileptics, constitute the absolute
majority of the characters; or else they are born criminals, such as
my school has attempted to identify by the figures on the hand.

"This strange family," he writes in The House of the Dead, "had an air
which attracted notice at the first glance." All the prisoners were
melancholy, envious, terribly vain, presumptuous, susceptible, and
formal in the highest degree. Vanity ruled always, without the least
sign of shame or repentance or the least sorrow over the commission of
an offense. Nearly all the convicts dreamed aloud or raved during
sleep. Most usually they spoke words of abuse and slang, talked of
knife and axe. "We are a ruined people," they said; "we have no
bowels; therefore we cry out in the night."

This impossibility of feeling remorse or penitence, along with vanity
and exaggerated love of pomp, are characteristics well known to all
observers. But other traits were manifested perhaps more conspicuous,
and such as are common to children. On feast days the more elegant
ones dressed gorgeously, and could be seen parading themselves through
the barracks. Pleasure in being well dressed amounted to childishness
in them.

Reasoning has no power upon men like Petroff, because they have not
any decisive will. If they have, there are no longer obstacles to it.
Such persons are born with an idea that moves them unconsciously all
their lives hither and thither. They are quiet till they have found
some object that strongly arouses their desire; then they no longer
spare even their heads. "More than once have I wondered to see how
Petroff robbed me in spite of the affection he had for me. This
happened to him at intervals, when he had a strong desire to drink. A
person like him is capable of assassinating a man for twenty-five
soldi, only to drink a litre; on other occasions he would scorn
thousands of rubles. He often confessed his thefts to me, lamenting
that I no longer had the objects, but showed no penitence for having
stolen them; bore reproofs because he thought they were inevitable, or
because he deserved to receive them; because I ought to punish him to
compensate myself for the things I had lost, but thought within
himself that they were trifles that one ought to be above speaking
of."

Further on the novelist speaks of the smuggler by profession, a
pleasant fellow, condemned for life for his offenses, who could not
lose the instinct for smuggling brandy into the prison. He received
only a ridiculous profit, was greatly afraid of the rod, although he
had rarely passed under it, wept, swore that he would not offend any
more, and then fell down.

Zola also reproduces my epileptic moral madman in _La Bête Humaine_,
in the alcoholic in _L'Assommoir_, the paranoiac in Work, and himself
confesses to having taken the brief of his immortal chain of romances,
Rougon, from a study made by Aubry in a provincial family celebrated
for its richness in degenerates, criminals, and insane, all derived
from a dull, neurotic Keratry.

Daudet depicts in Jack a series of _mattoidi_, that particular species
of insane which I first discovered, that occupies a position between
paranoiacs, geniuses, and imbeciles.

ANCIENT ROMANCE AND THEATER.--We turn now to the ancient theater and
romance. All the Roman novels of Petronius and Apuleius are rich in
obscene, mythological, and magical adventures, most improbable and
satirical, without ever defining a character or including a real
madman.

In the ancient Greek theater, while the idea of heredity is
discernible under the form of fate, while violent passion is every now
and then depicted under marvelous forms, while anomalies strike us,
and furies of Ajax and Dejanira, of Orestes and Oedipus, and the
melancholy of Philoctetes, they all still have a common type, which is
not perceived in ordinary life. They are madmen who do not exist in
any asylum, who seem symbolical, and have little correspondence with
the men of the mythological and heroic epoch to which they all
belonged; they never, except in Euripides, present a specific
personage, nor ever, unless with rare exceptions--as in the Persians
of Æschylus and a few other lost works, like the Siege of
Miletus--deal with contemporary historical facts.

These poets were concerned with the symbol, the moral, the tradition,
and, if I may be permitted the term, the blasphemy, the declamation,
rather than with depicting the person. This is further seen in the
comedy of the Greek decadence, and still further in that of the
Romans, in which, except in the political squibs, the same personages
nearly always appear, as well as showing out of the masks intended for
the common people--and these figures have come down to us. There are
nearly always the old miser or rake, the go-between slave, the
braggart soldier. The plots were likewise the same: changed children,
reconciled lovers, except in the Greek political satires, in which the
demerits of the adversary were exaggerated into the most atrocious
caricature, and which became like real humorous journals of the
political trifles of the day.

Yet these highly cultivated peoples, agitated by grand public
passions, had absorbing, moving controversies--the struggles of the
Gracchi, the banishment of Themistocles and Aristides, and the varying
fortunes of Marius, of which no trace is found. Nor, for the rest, did
the Latins, who were our masters, and were, as we are after them,
copyists, followers in the footsteps of their Greek predecessors,
readapt contemporary events to their dramatic lines. We in our turn,
down to Goldoni and Molière, and even to this very century, have
copied those ancient comic and tragic writers, warming them up afresh
from Orestes and Clytemnestra, and from events which had not the least
echo among us. Trissin, Maffei, and Alfieri delineated more or less,
on one side tyrants, on the other tyrannicides, which have little to
distinguish them from one another. So in Schiller and Goethe, all the
passions are of the scene rather than of personages. Thus Faust, for
example, and Margaret, are not persons who have a special character.
They are, in fact, personages who cover a symbol, who would tell the
story of literature, the story of the beautiful, the skepticism of
knowledge, but they tell it with a number of interesting, moving
facts, without delineating an individuality. Faust is neither very
good nor very bad, since he with his easy way of speaking commits
rogueries of every kind till finally he is redeemed. He is a
scientific student with a passion for investigation, but in his
enthusiasm, instigated by the devil or by doubt, he too often deserts
the search for the truth for that of pleasure, too often forsakes the
studies that had ennobled his life from youth, and as a man to enjoy
the nights of the Brocken, and worse, the favors of Margaret, of
Helen, till the moment when he redeems himself by saving a people; but
he does this at the last instant, when he is about to die, and has
nothing more to enjoy. Margaret, too, is a child like other children,
who, like so many others, suffers herself to be beguiled by manly
beauty, and has no good qualities except that of being able to die
with fortitude, hoping with the penalty to expiate the sin, which is,
in fact, more the devil's than hers.

The elder Dumas invented an immense diverting confusion of facts, but
his personages are always the same, and are the occasion, the
instrument, the setting of the adventures.

THE REASONS FOR THIS ABSENCE.--The inquiry into the reasons of this
absence of insane persons in the older romances and dramas is a
curious one. The first cause lies evidently in the law of proceeding
in every organism as in every work from the simple to the complex. As
in penal law, not the criminal but the crime was studied at first,
while now both are studied together; as in primordial medicine only
the disease was studied, while now the patient is studied first of
all; so in the drama and in comedy, in the measure that the thought
has become discriminating, it has substituted or rather associated
with observation of the fact _per se_, that of the author of the fact.
The study, of course, exacts more acumen, but it also better satisfies
our reinvigorated culture and opens broader horizons to us.

We have thus done more than abandon the pedantesque scale of the old
time and the mere study of the fact; we have introduced characters
into the personages, which, while they correspond to living and real
characters that we have under our eyes, attempt to resolve a problem
and teach us a moral, and go so far as to represent to us a symbolical
idea which is a pure abstraction of the author's, reaching thence the
maximum of complication.

Naturally, such salient characters as madmen, eccentrics, and
criminals would not be likely to escape the notice of the dramatist,
who finds in them motives for great effects without departing from
truth and probability.

But there is another more material reason for the recent introduction
of insane characters into the theater, and for their greater frequency
and participation in real life. It has been remarked that insane
persons have multiplied a hundredfold with civilization, to such an
extent that where a few years ago one madhouse was enough, now five
hundred and six are needed. Taking, for example, the statistics of the
most progressive country in the world, those of the United States,
furnished by its invaluable census report,[A] we see that the number
of insane persons, which was 15,610 in 1850, 24,042 in 1860, and
37,432 in 1870, rose in 1880 to 91,994; while the population, from
23,191,876 in 1850, increased to 38,558,371 in 1870, to 50,155,783 in
1880--that is, while the population doubled in a little more than
thirty years, the insane increased sixfold; so, in the last decade the
increase in population was thirty per cent, and that of insane one
hundred and fifty-five per cent.

In France[B] there were 131.1 insane per 100,000 inhabitants in 1883,
133 in 1884, 136 in 1888. These figures indicate that the number of
insane is larger in the most civilized countries, and is increasing
every year. It may indeed be said that many of these insane are not
produced but are only revealed by civilization, and that the opening
of the large asylums has caused a considerable number to be brought
into the light who were not known of before. It is true that the
greater care we give now to the insane, as well as to consumptives,
makes them longer-lived. And it is true that as the mind grows
enlightened criminals come to be regarded as insane and thus increase
the apparent number of such. But all this is not sufficient to explain
a doubling in a decade, a tenfold increase in twenty years.

We know, too, that civilization has brought on the development of new
forms of disease, which hardly existed before. For example, general
progressive paralysis was formerly so rare that no special name was
given to it till our time, while now it forms the larger quota of the
maladies of the wealthy, of thinkers, and of military men. Epilepsy
has greatly increased in its psychical form, so that what are called
psychical and obscure epilepsy are a revelation of our times, and that
its close association with crime (which I believe to be one of the
sure facts of modern psychiatry) is still accepted by only a very few
alienists, not to say that it is rejected with indignation, and, I
will remark, with profound ignorance, by most modern jurists.

Alcoholism, too, has taken on enormous proportions. Not that the
ancients did not drink, but rather that pure alcohol had not yet been
introduced; while in the middle ages it passed for one of the most
efficacious remedies--_aqua vita_, living water. Dr. Beard has made a
most judicious observation in America which I have been able to verify
in Sicily--that there must be a very advanced degree of civilization,
or rather of degeneracy produced by civilization, for inebriety to be
transformed into that aggregation of disasters, especially of the
nervous system, which is called alcoholism. Now we have not alcoholism
only, but morphinism, cocainism, all stimuli of the nervous system,
which are used by barbarians as potent excitants, but not to the point
of producing stable alterations except in rare cases, like the _amuck_
of the Malays.

And now, we all of us, at least in the capitals and the great centers,
find ourselves consumed by a feverish activity which makes the mind
labor much more than Nature intended it should, under which is
produced all this mass of neurasthenics, hystericals, besides the
multitudes of moral insane, profoundly egotistical persons, without
affection and wholly directed by a powerful passion for gold, for
which they sacrifice everything, even salvation!

And, finally, we have that group of semi-insane, which I call
_mattoidi_, and who are known as _détraqués_ in France and _cranks_ in
North America--that is, those who have the livery of genius with a
substratum of weakness and the practical cunning of the average man,
who betray their errors only when they write, who hardly exist save
among males (with a few exceptions, like Michel) and in the great
centers. I have never seen them in the country. Civilization is now
depopulating the country and building up the cities, as it is also
augmenting physical excitants with alcoholism, morphinism, etc.
Civilization emblazons the baton of the marshal, and not only of the
marshal but of the president of the republic, in the eyes of everybody
who can read and write. Why, then, should we not suppose that
civilization can further derange the equilibrium of mental labor and,
indirectly, therefore cause an increase of insanity?

Not only has the number of insane increased, but their importance in
society has multiplied fourfold; for which reason we can not fail to
give them attention. The morally insane in politics and the
megalomaniac insane in the bank who inspired Ibsen are to be found
walking around in every country. The blood-criminal, transmuted into
the forger and the bankrupt, penetrates into our houses, and we suffer
from him every day; while the insane man at first was not regarded, or
was adored under the form of a saint or hated as a wizard, possessed
of the devil always, or seemed a phenomenon strange to society, a
species of extraplanetary meteor. If we add that the degeneration
provoked by the abuses of civilization has begotten a multitude of
forms akin to madness which afford a field for combinations now
tragic, now strangely comic--like the phobia by which one is afraid to
cross a room, or avoids a certain group of words, or refuses to know
how many doors and windows there are on the street, or can not be at
ease without saying sexual pacifying formulas; a class who with their
perverted tastes form a real new world apart; and they all may inspire
new dramatic settings forth.

As a third cause we add that in our age psychology has penetrated into
all departments. There are psychologies of the senses, of the
sentiments, of the will, the psychology of the crowd, of the insane,
of criminals, and finally the psychology of the cell, or at least of
the infusoria (Binet). Therefore, as statistics is applied to history,
to politics, to religion, in the same way psychology has at last
entered into romance and the drama, and has taken the lion's share.
And, far from being repelled by the public, the authors who use it or
abuse it, like Euripides and to a certain point Shakespeare, win the
admiration of the public; and we are proud to see Zola taking from
_L'Uomo delinquente_ the Jacques of his _Bête humaine_ to make an
immortal figure of him, and Dostoiewski depicting innate criminals in
his House of the Dead, and the criminaloid in his Crime and
Punishment; and we do not despise Bourget when, making more a
caricature of psychology than a psychology, he assumes to apply it to
the toilets of women and the Parisian _cocottes_ under the form of a
psychology of love.

It may at first sight seem a contradiction that we have shown that
there were also found in antiquity at great intervals dramatic poets
and romancers like Shakespeare, Dante, and Euripides who, led by the
observing and creative instinct, did not confine themselves to events,
but studied characters too, and, keenly perceiving the dramatic
potencies in the character of insanity, treasured it up in their
works. Thus Euripides depicts Helena, vain even into her old age,
saving a part of the hair she was offering at the tomb of her sister
so as not to lose what remained of her former beauty; and Orestes has
not the simple bestial fury depicted by Æschylus, but has choreic
movements, genial intervals, and a tendency to suicide, which show
that the author had attained a true conception of the maniac.

In the Mahabharata the maiden Damaianti is described as made insane by
love (Book II, st. iii) and Nalo, who, possessed by the demon Kali,
stakes his kingdom on the dice, and, denying his wife, abandons her in
the wood:

"And with soul slave to the thought, discolored face, and all absorbed
in sighs, now lifting up the head, now musing, bereft of sense, you
would say; a sudden pallor came on. With mind occupied with one
desire, nor sleep, nor the table, nor the sight of familiar friends
afforded pleasure, nor day nor night gave repose. Ah! poor miserable
one! thus exclaiming and bursting into tears, by that lament, by those
soul-sick acts, she was recognized by her friends."

Niceforus has shown how Dante in his Inferno has delineated in the
damned the characteristics which my school gives to the born criminal.
Shakespeare has done better, and has divined many criminal
characteristics through the greater intensity of the crime in the
criminal woman. Virile even when compared with the criminal man, Lady
Macbeth is crueler than her husband, and, more than that, has many of
the characteristics of men:

      "Bring forth men-children only,
      For thy undaunted mettle should compose
      Nothing but males."

And Macbeth, as cool in the crime as the artful contriver of it, is
hysterical and hypnotic, and in the accesses reproduces the acts and
words of the tragedy, showing that the author knew that hysterics and
somnambulists often repeat the acts and the emotions which mark the
climax of their malady.

Hamlet has the folly of doubts and hallucinations, simulates the
ravings of a madman, but in his suspicious cunning discovers and
anticipates what is contemplated to his harm, is homicidal through
fear, and is yet often discreet, and a good lover, save that his love
vanishes before the fixed idea.

In Ophelia, disappointed love, the contact with a madman or a
pretended one, the death of her father almost under her very eyes,
provoke a species of madness which would now be called mental
confusion, with vague ideas of persecution, dim recollections of love
betrayed and of her father, incoherent and confused expressions ending
in automatic suicide. This confirms our conclusions.

Genius has also anticipated an epoch in the use and abuse of lunatics,
just because time is canceled for genius, because genius anticipates
the future work of centuries. But on this subject the inquiry is
pertinent why, while in the complaisant literary world such creations
as the Argenson of Daudet, the Jack of Zola, and the Eliza of Goncourt
find, if not an immediate, a kindly and ready acceptance--while all
the great artists, even the most ancient ones, have given the type
which I assign to the born delinquents to executioners and
criminals--the world has refused to accept the existence of the
criminal type of insanity in genius, and the relations in criminals
between epilepsy and crime which are nevertheless received in romance
and the drama. It is because when we are in the presence of true
figures, made to move before us under a strong light by the great
artists, the consciousness of the truth which lies dormant in all of
us, smothered and broken under distortion by the schools, reawakens,
and rebels against the conventional forms which they have imposed; all
the more so because the charm of art has vastly magnified the lines of
the truth, has rendered them more evident, and has thus much
diminished the effort required to master them. If, on the other hand,
we base our conclusion upon cold statistics and what I should call a
skeleton study of the facts, we find the old views rising in confusion
with those of sentiment and the artistic sense, and we arrive at
nothing.


FOOTNOTES:

[A] Compendium of the Tenth Census of the United States, Part II, p.
1659. See documents in the new statistical laboratory, the only one in
Italy, of Professor Cognetti, recently published at Turin.

[B] Bodio. Bulletin de l'Institut international de Statistique, 1889,
pp. 112 and 128. See some Sanitary Statistics in Italy and other
European States, by Dr. Rasori.




COLONIAL EXPANSION AND FOREIGN TRADE.

BY JACOB SCHOENHOF.


Fifty years have elapsed since the adoption of free trade by England.
It was hoped that the free entrance of commodities extended to all the
world would pave the way to an era of mutual peace and good will. But,
judging by the political situation, and taking the armaments as an
outward sign of good intentions, the era of peace and good will among
nations is certainly far off. To get a trading advantage here and a
concession from a semibarbarous country there is still the ambitious
striving of the cabinets and the diplomacy of Europe. To give the
striving emphasis, industry is taxed to the breaking point and labor
to the starving point. Russia exhausts her resources in a railroad
through the Siberian waste in her endeavor to obtain an outlet to the
sea, which is jealously closed to her at the southwestern end of her
dominions by England. The trader of Manchester, fearing for his
markets, grows frantic at the prospect of Russian cotton goods being
brought to China or to India. The mere acquisition of a port in
Manchuria by Russia threatens to seal his doom. But he might look on
with complacency. Russia's labor is very dear, capital is dear, wages
are on the Asiatic level, famine still stalks through the land,
intercommunication is made difficult by the lack of roads, and her
wonderful natural resources lie unimproved because the eyes of greed,
like those of the dog crossing the stream, are turned on the coveted
piece of meat he sees reflected in the water, and to grasp which he
drops the one he holds in his mouth. France bristles with bayonets,
and is constantly at pains to increase her naval armaments, about
whose seaworthiness her own minister of marine expresses suspicions,
in obedience to a nervous restlessness for foreign acquisition.
England, after her feat in civilizing savages and barbarians in the
customary fashion, shown again at Omdurman, is ready to turn her war
dogs on France, because the latter has the temerity to demand a slice
of Soudanese territory. Well might she have given as hush-money, or
for the mere grace of the action, a few thousand square miles of a
country closed to access except by the permission of Great Britain,
which has successfully pre-empted every desirable bit of land in
sight.

Germany, instead of using her newly liberated energies at home in an
endeavor to elevate the miserable condition of her working classes,
taxes their bread and meat, never too freely supplied, to increase the
size of her armies and the number of her battle ships. The defense and
expansion of her colonial empire is her leading thought. A strange
paradox: The workingman and the peasant are overburdened with taxes on
the necessaries of life, so as to procure markets for a limited
quantity of factory products outside of the field secured in open
competition.

While professing friendship and brotherly love, they all have their
eyes on their neighbor's throat, fearful only lest the other might
clutch first.

As we are in danger of being drawn into this vortex, it is well to
examine the range of possibilities and see what the trade amounts to,
to obtain which the scientific intellect of Europe and America has
been strained to its limits to discover new means of destruction for
attack and defense unknown to the other brothers in the common bond of
civilization.

It is a matter of course that trade among European nations does not
come within this circle, nor of European nations with the United
States. It does not depend on battle ships. In the annexed tables I
have classified the countries in three classes: (1) Independent
states; (2) colonies of European countries, populated by people of
European stock; and (3) colonies and dependencies of European
countries, but of non-European stock.

I have reduced the values of imports and exports of the different
countries, published in their own currencies, to American dollars. As
the values are paper currencies, silver currencies, or conventional
values, and of fluctuating rates, I have in such instances taken a
yearly average, which will be found in the footnotes of the tables.


_I. Trade of Independent Countries other than of Europe and North
America._

  Key:
  (A) Number of inhabitants.
  (B) Importations. Thousands of dollars.
  (C) Exportations. Thousands of dollars.
  (D) Imports per capita. Dollars.
  (E) Exports per capita. Dollars.

  ---------------------------+---------+---------+---------+-------+------
       NAMES OF COUNTRIES.   |   (A)   |   (B)   |   (C)   |  (D)  |  (E)
  ---------------------------+---------+---------+---------+-------+------
          _Asia_ (1895).     |         |         |         |       |
                             |         |         |         |       |
  China[A]                   | 383,253 | 128,772 | 107,499 |   .34 |   .28
  Japan[B]                   |  42,270 |  90,681 |  62,443 |  2.14 |  1.47
  All other states           |  27,000 |  30,000 |  82,000 |  1.10 |  1.18
                             |         |         |         |       |
            _America._       |         |         |         |       |
                             |         |         |         |       |
  Argentina[C]               |   4,000 | 103,058 | 108,671 | 26.50 | 27.17
  Brazil[D]                  |  16,000 |  96,000 |  97,000 |  6.00 |  6.06
  Chile[E]                   |   2,700 |  69,200 |  72,900 | 25.62 | 27.00
  Peru[F]                    |   2,600 |   7,560 |   9,000 |  2.90 |  3.30
  Mexico[G]                  |  12,600 |  42,000 |  22,000 |  3.32 |  1.76
  Uruguay[H]                 |     800 |  25,000 |  30,000 | 31.25 | 37.50
  Venezuela[I]               |   2,300 |  17,000 |  22,000 |  7.40 |  9.56
  All other states           |  11,300 |  34,000 |  46,800 |  3.00 |  4.14
                             |         |         |         |       |
        _South Africa_       |         |         |         |       |
                             |         |         |         |       |
  Independent states         |   1,000 |  75,000 |  12,000 | 75.00 | 12.00
                             +---------+---------+---------+       |
    Total independent states | 505,800 | 718,271 | 622,313 |       |
                             +=========+=========+=========+       |
  Asiatic states             | 452,500 | 249,453 | 201,942 |       |
  American and South African |  53,300 | 468,818 | 420,371 |       |
  ---------------------------+---------+---------+---------+-------+------

  FOOTNOTES:

  [A] Haikwan tael, 74.9 cents.

  [B] Yen, 52.9 cents.

  [C] Peso, gold, 96.5 cents.

  [D] Milreis, paper (1896), 20-1/2 cents.

  [E] Peso, gold.

  [F] Soler, 43 cents.

  [G] Dollar (47 cents) for exports, gold dollar for imports.

  [H] Peso, $1.

  [I] Bolivar, 19.3 cents.


The year is 1896, and where a different one is taken it is so marked
against the country in the table. The figures only represent the
direct merchandise trade. All specie and bullion shipments are
eliminated from the account.


_II. Trade of India and Dependencies and of Colonies and other
Possessions of the United Kingdom (Year ending March, 1897)._

  Key:
  (A) Number of inhabitants.
  (B) Importations. Thousands of dollars.
  (C) Exportations. Thousands of dollars.
  (D) Imports per capita. Dollars.
  (E) Exports per capita. Dollars.

  ---------------------------+---------+---------+---------+-------+------
     NAMES OF COLONIES AND   |         |         |         |       |
       OTHER POSSESSIONS.    |   (A)   |   (B)   |   (C)   |  (D)  |  (E)
  ---------------------------+---------+---------+---------+-------+------
  India and its              |         |         |         |       |
      dependencies[A]        | 290,690 | 284,026 | 378,732 |   .97 |  1.30
                             |         |         |         |       |
            _Colonies._      |         |         |         |       |
                             |         |         |         |       |
  Cape Colony                |   1,820 |  91,800 |  39,000 | 50.04 | 20.15
  Natal                      |     778 |  18,000 |   6,500 | 23.15 |  8.20
  Gold Coast and other       |         |         |         |       |
      Central African        |         |         |         |       |
      possessions            |  36,700 |  19,000 |  17,000 |   .52 |   .46
  Canada                     |   5,125 | 118,000 | 121,000 | 23.05 | 24.04
  West Indies                |   3,614 |  30,000 |  25,000 |  8.33 |  6.94
  Australasia and Oceanica   |   4,793 | 204,500 | 210,000 | 42.65 | 43.75
                             +---------+---------+---------+       |
    Trade of all countries   |         |         |         |       |
        under British flag   | 343,520 | 765,326 | 797,232 |       |
                             +=========+=========+=========+       |
  Trade of colonies with     |         |         |         |       |
      white population       |  16,130 | 461,320 | 411,584 |       |
  Trade of Asiatic           |         |         |         |       |
      dependencies           | 290,690 | 284,026 | 378,732 |       |
  ---------------------------+---------+---------+---------+-------+------

  FOOTNOTE:

  [A] Rupee, 32 cents. For Straits Settlement and Ceylon, Mexican
  dollars @ 47 cents.


_III. Trade of Foreign Possessions of all other Countries than the
United Kingdom._

  Key:
  (A) Number of inhabitants in thousands.
  (B) Importations in thousands of dollars.
  (C) Exportations in thousands of dollars.
  (D) Imports per capita. Dollars.
  (E) Exports per capita. Dollars.
  ------------------------+--------+--------+--------+-------+-------
    COUNTRIES AND THEIR   |  (A)   |  (B)   |  (C)   |  (D)  |  (E)
   COLONIAL POSSESSIONS.  |        |        |        |       |
  ------------------------+--------+--------+--------+-------+-------
  _A. France_ (1894).     |        |        |        |       |
                          |        |        |        |       |
  Asia                    | 21,821 | 16,000 | 25,000 |   .73 |  1.14
  Africa, outside of      |        |        |        |       |
    Algeria and Tunis     | 24,500 | 13,000 | 22,000 |   .53 |   .50
  America and Oceanica    |    460 | 14,500 | 12,600 | 31.50 | 27.40
                          |        |        |        |       |
  _B. Germany_ (1897).    |        |        |        |       |
                          |        |        |        |       |
  Africa                  | 10,200 |  2,189 |  1,078 |   .21 |   .10
  New Guinea              |    400 |     72 |     50 |   .18 |   .12
                          |        |        |        |       |
  _C. Italy._             |        |        |        |       |
                          |        |        |        |       |
  Africa                  |    400 |  5,600 |  3,000 |       |
                          |        |        |        |       |
  _D. Netherlands_ (1895).|        |        |        |       |
                          |        |        |        |       |
  East India              | 34,000 | 61,000 | 89,600 |  1.80 |  2.63
                          |        |        |        |       |
  _E._                    |        |        |        |       |
                          |        |        |        |       |
  Philippines             |  7,600 | 11,000 | 20,000 |  1.50 |  2.63
  ------------------------+--------+--------+--------+-------+-------


_Summary of Statistical Tables of the Trade of Colonies and
Dependencies of European States and of Independent States other than
of Europe and the United States._

  Key:
  (A) Number of inhabitants in thousands.
  (B) Importations. Thousands of dollars.
  (C) Exportations. Thousands of dollars.
  (D) Inhabitants. Per cent to total.
  (E) Imports. Per cent to total.
  (F) Exports. Per cent to total.
  ----------------------+----------+---------+---------+-----+-----+-----
  NAMES OF DIVISIONS BY |          |         |         |     |     |
   COUNTRIES, COLONIES, |   (A)    |   (B)   |   (C)   | (D) | (E) | (F)
        AND RACES.      |          |         |         |     |     |
  ----------------------+----------+---------+---------+-----+-----+-----
  Totals of tabulations |          |         |         |     |     |
    I, II, and III      |1,584,099 |1,587,758|1,540,858|100  |100  |100.0
                        |          |         |         |     |     |
  Under British flag    |  343,520 |  765,320|  797,232| 36  | 48.3| 50.0
                        |          |         |         |     |     |
  Under all other flags |  605,180 |  818,779|  790,527| 64  | 51.7| 49.8
                        |          |         |         |     |     |
  Peoples of European   |          |         |         |     |     |
    descent             |   69,430 |  909,020|  831,984|  7.3| 57.4| 52.4
                        |          |         |         |     |     |
  Peoples of other races|  879,271 |  675,079|  755,774| 92.7| 42.6| 47.6
                        |          |         |         |     |     |
  Anglo-Saxon           |   17,130 |  519,300|  407,584|  1.8| 32.8| 25.7
                        |          |         |         |     |     |
  Latin-American        |   52,300 |  389,700|  424,400|  5.5| 24.6| 26.7
                        |          |         |         |     |     |
  Asiatic races         |  806,611 |  618,079|  706,274| 85.0| 39.0| 44.0
                        |          |         |         |     |     |
  African races         |   72,500 |   57,000|   49,500|  7.7|  3.6|  3.6
                        |          |         |         |     |     |
  States and colonies,  |          |         |         |     |     |
    wool chief export   |   11,100 |  441,300|  394,500|  1.2| 27.8| 24.9
  ----------------------+----------+---------+---------+-----+-----+-----


In examining these tables carefully the reader can form an idea as to
how the world's trade is divided, and see what the world is arming to
its teeth about.

The only Asiatic country about whose trade the possibilities of war
may be entertained is China. Japan has shown her teeth and claws. The
history of Poland, Port Arthur, or Kiao-tchow is not likely to find
repetition on her territory. Only the defenseless tempt the avidity of
the civilizing nations. The import trade of China, an empire with one
fourth the population of the entire world, is but half as much again
as that of Japan, with but one ninth of the population of the
Celestial Empire. Japan's trade has trebled within the last dozen
years. Her imports of merchandise are over two dollars _per capita_.
Those of China are thirty-four cents. It will be said that China
parceled out to modern nations will vastly extend in trading
opportunities. So it may. We have, however, national disposition to
take into consideration. England has devoted her best efforts to
India. After a century spent in bringing the various races to
submission, the process of "benevolent assimilation" is helped along
by a never-ending flow of capital from England. She has become the
teacher and administrator of the people of Hither and Farther India.
It is doubtful whether under existing conditions any better government
for their three hundred millions could be devised by any outer force.
Though England does her utmost, as she understands it, to make the
people under her dominion happy and prosperous, although the rule of
law and a degree of local independence are established, yet she finds
small thanks from her wards. They have their own notions of happiness,
and seem to prefer misery of their selection to the advantages of the
white man's ordering. The fact is, the brown man and the yellow man
have different notions and desires from the white man. No amount of
jostling, pushing, and urging will make them take up our views, our
tastes, our working methods, except in the due development of time.
Our ideas as to necessaries of life and theirs are widely different.
Their simple needs are easily supplied from native hands, who
understand far better than our potters do the clay they have to deal
with. The progress in trade will not be rapid, and will certainly be
disappointing to those who expect to see it extend into general lines
of merchandise. The import trade of India and its dependencies (1897)
is $284,000,000, inclusive of Ceylon and the net trade of the Straits
Settlements. This amount, directly catering to the wants of fully
three hundred millions of people, is but about one third more than the
net import trade of Australasia, with a population of less than five
millions of people. The _per-capita_ consumption of imported
merchandise of the Asiatic possessions of England is ninety-seven
cents; of Australasia, $41.66. I must say here in explanation that the
values of importations of merchandise, as published in the English
returns and lately reproduced by the Bureau of Statistics of the
Treasury Department, Colonial Systems of the World, is $305,000,000,
which would make a showing of $63.33 _per capita_. But in the English
returns the intercolonial trade figures are included. The Treasury
Bureau did not mention this in its publication, and gave thereby a
basis for erroneous deductions. I have deducted all the intercolonial
trade figures of imports and exports from the returns of each of the
Australian colonies, so as to bring the figures to a basis of parity
with the accounts of Canada, and other colonies and dependencies where
no duplications of this kind are possible. The figures of importations
remaining over are reduced by this process to £40,500,000, or about
$200,000,000--$41.66 _per capita_. The inhabitants of the Anglo-Saxon
colonies of the world number but seventeen million. Their net imports
of merchandise are $460,000,000. The seven hundred and thirty millions
of Hindu and Mongolian populations import $530,000,000. These are the
lands of fabled wealth. Antiquity and the middle ages dreamed of
riches inexhaustible in connection with their names. To-day still the
popular belief is that the wealth of nations is dependent on the
conduct of direct trade with the far East. The country can not be rich
whose millions find happiness in a sufficient supply of millet or
rice, whatever the wealth of a small favored class may be. But these
nations were the teachers of the barbarians whose descendants now
populate America and Europe. The disciples have improved on the
masters. We have improved the tools which they invented and applied
new forces of production. We have cheapened the processes of
production. We have quintupled, we have decupled time. But whatever
our improvements in the tools, they are still our masters in the work.
Any one who would endeavor to substitute the product of our mills in
cotton, in silk, in wool, in wood, iron, clay, in lacquer, cloisonné,
or enamel, for theirs, and not see at a glance the hopelessness, would
indeed prove his incapacity for grasping the situation. Our best
producers study with profit the work of China and, chiefly, of Japan,
and are grateful for the inspiration they derive from it. But they do
not attempt to copy. Neither in color effect nor design could they
stand the test of comparison. Five thousand years have been recovered
from the sepulcher under which they had been sleeping. But the oldest
traces unearthed in the valley of the Euphrates still take us back to
the farthest East as the originator of what we cover by the term
"civilization." The Mongolian shares the lot of all who have benefited
the race.

If we can not expect great openings for our mill products in Asia,
Africa is a new field for the civilizing efforts of Europe, and will
repay cultivating, perhaps. The negro has neither factories nor
workshops. There at least is an unlimited field for trade expansion.
Germany, the latest comer, with the zeal of all fresh missionaries, is
eagerly taking up her colonizing mission. The result is not very
encouraging. There is a fine set of buildings with garden spots and
harbor improvements in the settlement at Cameroon, and a well-stocked
graveyard of what were once good German boys, victims of the deadly
climate and of the expansion fever. So far this is the only net
showing to the credit side of the ledger. The territory in Africa
covers nearly one million square miles. The possession of such an
empire is worth a sacrifice, apparently, and Germany is not
parsimonious in this direction. The contribution of the German
Government to the administration fund of the African colonies was
$2,194,000 in 1896-'97. This does not include the expense of
maintaining the military and naval forces stationed in the African
settlements. The annual importations of all the colonies amounted (in
1897) to $2,261,000, inclusive of New Guinea. So it costs the
Government more than one dollar to enable its citizens to do a
dollar's worth of trade. The population is estimated at 10,200,000.
What possibilities stretch out before us, if they could be made to
wear shirts or uniforms like the native police force, which has been
organized at Cameroon! The extent of the territory, however, precludes
the possibility of successfully conducting the missionary effort to
induce them to wear clothes. The question also remains open what
return could be made, even if the recipients could be brought to
appreciate the advantage of a fuller covering of their nakedness than
the traditional one.

France is in possession of territories in Africa, the population of
which is on a more advanced status. The territories of the Senegal
have been under French dominion for a period of two hundred years and
more, and trade relations with the Senegal and Soudan have been
assiduously cultivated. In Asia, Tonquin and Annam were to open the
road to a very active trade with China. She has held undisputed
lodgment since 1814 in Pondicherry and other towns in India that
remained over to her from her East Indian empire conquered by Dupleix
and abandoned by Louis XV's weak policy. Still, with all the tender
care and an expenditure for the colonial service, as per budget of
1898, of about 80,000,000 francs, and not counting the colonial
expense _êtat_ of the ministry of war and of the navy, the entire
export trade of France to her Asiatic possessions is 35,000,000
francs; to her African dominions, outside of Algiers, 22,000,000
francs; and to her American possessions, with barely five hundred
thousand inhabitants, 35,000,000 francs. The territories to which this
trade caters have a population of about twenty-two million in Asia and
twenty-five million in Africa. If we include the French islands in
America and French Guiana, the exports of French merchandise to all
her colonies amount to about 95,000,000 francs. If we include the
allowance for colonial service from the naval and military budget,
France has an expense that exceeds the amount of her colonial export
trade. How much better off France would be if she would drop this
burden! She could do the same trading and save her money, annually
wasted, and her men annually slaughtered to the mania of colonial
expansion.

The forty-five millions peopling the French possessions in Asia and
tropical Africa consume altogether about $30,000,000 worth of foreign
imports. The French share of this is about $11,000,000, or a little
over one third--eleven millions of trade against fourteen millions of
direct expense. The contributions to the American colonies are but
$2,000,000, inclusive of about $1,000,000 to the penal establishment
at Cayenne.

Italy's demonstration of the extent to which this madness can carry
otherwise sane statesmen is fresh in everybody's memory. Outside of
Russia, the poor--meaning the working classes--are in no country of
Europe as poor as in Italy. If we take the production per acre in all
the cereals as a gauge of interior development, then no European
country west of Russia, not excepting Spain, is in a more backward
state. Wise statesmanship would have found here a field for
cultivation sufficiently large to tax all its energies. The peaceful
acquisitions of industry did not satisfy the ambition of the
Government. Conquests in equatorial Africa were deemed more essential
to the kingdom's material welfare, but lately freed from the deadening
grasp of clericalism and absolutism, than the improvement of
opportunities lavishly present at home. What she has cultivated at an
enormous expense of blood and treasure has borne the ordinary harvest
of failure and disaster. The entire import trade of Massowah, to which
the whole world contributed, and which is largely a transit trade,
amounts to about $5,000,000. The expenditure on account of her Red Sea
possessions for the year 1895-'96 is given in the Statesman's Year
Book as 123,738,064 lires ($24,000,000). The contribution to the
maintenance of this her "white man's burden," from 1882 to 1895, was
303,905,926 lires. At present (1897-'98), after the sobering lesson
received in 1896, the net expense is about $3,500,000 (17,000,000
lires).

The three powers--France, Italy, and Germany--point a lesson of
unmistakable significance. The figures speak for themselves. No amount
of expense can make the African and the Asiatic consume an appreciable
amount of European merchandise. No amount of cultivation can make the
tropics endurable to the northern man. Labor and exertion on his part
under the rays of a deadly sun and a miasma-breeding soil are entirely
out of the question. Those who would make the endeavor in the manner
of the temperate zone would only succeed the sooner in reaching the
end of white man's settlement in the tropics, disease and death.

Many point to the Dutch East India settlements as a successful
commercial enterprise. But, taking the best construction given to the
story from the trader's point of view, the present satisfactory
conditions have been reached after a great deal of disappointment,
loss, and bloodshed. A large revenue is acquired from Government sales
of colonial produce; still, with all this added to the other revenues
from land tax, excise, and other duties, the Government has a
deficiency of over 10,000,000 florins a year in her East India
possessions. The budget for 1898 shows an expense _état_ of
146,150,164 florins, which is met by a revenue from all sources of but
135,204,203 florins.

This is the richest part of the Malay world, and for centuries has
been in the possession of Europe's most enlightened people. The
results, if the _per-capita_ unit of imports and exports is taken as a
criterion, are not different from those shown in the account of the
Philippines, governed for centuries by Spain. The loss of their
colonies is ascribed to the oppressive rule which the Spaniards
exercised. The Netherlands, devoting all their efforts to the
development of the resources of the islands, at least during the
greater part of this century, do not show much better results. The
imports _per capita_ of the Dutch possessions are $1.80, and the
exports $2.63. The imports of the Philippines are $1.50 and the
exports $2.63 _per capita_.

From this we may be permitted to deduce that the Malay Islands are not
likely to prove a more thankful field for cultivation by our traders
than to the extent indicated in the trade reports set forth above.

Under the conditions here delineated, it would be inviting all the
risks and dangers connected with expansion and colonization, while
nothing is to be gained in a commercial sense that can not be realized
by the means now in our hands.

All the ends of trade can be attained without territorial expansion.
The trade in the hands of peoples under English sovereignty is open to
all commerce on equal terms. Not even the sovereign country, except in
the recent concessions by Canada, receives a preference. The
protection of the British flag is tendered gratis to the colonies and
dependencies. The imports of these countries cover about one half of
the trade of all the world, outside of Europe and the United States.
Though they have but 4.67 per cent of the population, the Anglo-Saxon
colonies do sixty-nine per cent of the trade of all the colonies and
dependencies of the British Empire.

South and Central America absorb about one fourth--24.6 per cent of
imports and 26.7 per cent of exports--of the world's trade here
summarized. The colonies peopled by Anglo-Saxon population and the
Latin-American states together, though but 7.3 per cent of the
inhabitants, do an importing trade of 57.4 per cent of the trade of
the world here reviewed. The countries trading under the protection of
the British flag and the Latin-American states combined have about
seventy-three per cent of that trade among them. All this trade, as
well as by far the greatest part of the rest, is incontestably
accessible to-day on an equal basis to all the world. The key to it
lies in the best terms, the best value. The trader and not the admiral
governs the field. Prince Heinrich will not succeed better than
Admiral von Diederichs in convincing China of the advantages Germany
can offer if Mr. Carnegie's rails are cheaper than Mr. Krupp's. A
whole fleet of American battle ships will not convince the Asiatics
that our cotton goods are as desirable as the English so long as the
latter make goods suitable to their markets, and the Americans offer
only products calculated to cover the home demands.

The golden rule is a more effective trade opener than the cannon's
mouth. Fair and square dealing among nations does not entail expense,
but brings in good returns. Our national policy, however, has been one
studiously calculated to array the world against us. Like every policy
in behalf of a selfish interest, it injures the foreign people against
which it is directed far less than the nation which devises it.

The trade of Australasia, Argentina, and Uruguay, and the Cape is
based chiefly on wool and hides. The imports of these countries,
numbering but eleven million inhabitants, amount to $440,000,000,
equaling in amount the trade of China, Japan, Persia, and India, with
their seven hundred and fifty million inhabitants. Though but 1.2 per
cent of the population of the world (outside of Europe and the United
States), their imports are 27.8 per cent of the totals of the figures
in the tables. In exports they do about $400,000,000, or 24.9 per cent
of the total sum of exports here given. It would be worth cultivating
friendly relations with them. They are inhabited by people of European
stock, and come nearer to the standard of life of Americans than any
of the other nations of the globe. Our latest effort to draw them
closer to us was the Dingley tariff, with its duty of eleven cents a
pound on greasy wool and of fifteen per cent on raw hides. The action
can not be construed as a very friendly one. But neither is the effect
as calculated by the wise heads who insisted on the provisions of the
wool tariff, the woolen and worsted manufacturers of the East, and the
wool raisers of the West. The wool and woolen trade of America has
suffered many vicissitudes during the thirty-five years of high
tariffs. It has gone through many periods of depression. But it is
doubtful whether at any time more disastrous conditions existed than
have marked the twelve months ending at this writing (March, 1899).

The situation can be appreciated from the fact that wool, imported
prior to the passing of the Dingley tariff, is being reshipped to
England, where it is bringing better prices than can be obtained here
under the ægis of the protective duty of eleven cents a pound. Three
and a half million pounds were shipped in the seven months ending
January 31st.

We should profit by this experience, try to cultivate friendly
relations in parts of the world where advantageous trade connections
can be established, instead of following the _ignis fatuus_ of Asiatic
expansion.




THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE.

BY EDMUND NOBLE.


It is an interesting and suggestive fact in Nature study that at the
outset man was thrown utterly upon himself for the very vocabulary of
the world-puzzle which presented itself to him for solution. He had
not only to unriddle his "inscription in an unknown tongue," but to
evolve even the possibility of an explanation out of his inner
consciousness. His first theories of the universe were based, not on
anything which the cosmos was, independently of him, but upon his own
nature and activities as a living animal. This resort to himself as
his chief means of interpretation resulted from the very nature of the
knowing process; for knowledge of things is never in any absolute
sense what things are, but is rather what they are like. When we
cognize an object we do it by referring that object to the class of
objects which in one or more respects it resembles. And as in this
process we draw from the objects most familiar to us the principle of
explanation which we need for the less familiar things that have not
yet become part of our mental possessions, much depends upon priority
in the setting up of mental classes, as well as on the strength of the
impression which they make upon the mind. The earliest and deepest
class impressions are necessarily those which arise out of man's
knowledge of himself--of his body and the parts thereof, of his
corporeal activities, and of his feelings and thoughts; next, of the
bodies of other men and of their movements; finally, in the order of
vividness, of the animate and inanimate objects most nearly related to
his life. It is these classes which, by virtue of their priority and
strength, naturally acquire dominating influence over all later
acquirements, and it is to them that the mind refers the impressions
gained from the more remote inorganic world.

Among the simpler illustrations of the effort man makes to assimilate
the external system to himself are those with which we are more or
less familiar in the domain of language. We find them first in the
forms for gender by which, in all inflectional tongues, inanimate
objects are to this extent likened to living animals. A similar
tendency is at work in the widespread lingual habit of naming things
after parts of the body, as in the case of "door," called the "eye of
the house" by the native of Banks' Island; of "son-tree," the term
applied by the Siamese to "fruit"; of the Malay's use of the noun
"child" for "lock"; of "house-belly," the African Mandingo's
equivalent for "in the house"; and of "hair," often used for "leaf" or
"feather" in many Melanesian languages.[A] In more modern forms of
speech the process is suggested by such expressions as the _head_ of a
bridge, the _eye_ of a needle, the _mouth_ of a river, the _neck_ of
an estuary, the _trunk_ and _arms_ of a tree, the _lungs_ of a
bellows, the _bones_ of an umbrella, the _nose_ of a promontory, the
_ears_ of a book, the _fingers_ of a clock, the _legs_ of a table, the
_veins_ of marble, the _foot_ of a mountain. Then there are analogies
based on the activities of the human body, for when we describe things
as standing, sitting, or lying; as rising, falling, running, or
climbing--when we use expressions like "striking clock," "dancing
light," "sleeping lake," "yawning precipice," "laughing skies,"
"babbling brooks," "raging billows," we are applying to the objects
named terms originally used to describe our own acts. The sense of
hearing, again, is utilized in such expressions as _taube Nuss_ ("with
nothing in the shell") and _taube Kohlen_ ("those which have burned
out"). So the defect of blindness is objectified in the _cæcum vallum_
of Roman speech, in _ciego_, said in Spanish of cheese that "has no
eyes," and in the _blinder Schuss_ of the Germans, whose more familiar
_Augenblick_ everybody recalls. Not less suggestive are the numerous
expressions which project conceptions of life and death into the
environment, such as the _caput mortuum_ (_tête morte_) of chemistry,
_eau vive_ (_Quellwasser_), "dead water" (turn of the tide), _todte
Farbe_ and _lebhafte Farbe_, _vivus lapis_ (firestone), "quicksand"
and "quicksilver," the "dead of night," "dead weight," a "dead level,"
and _todtes Kapital_. Nor must we forget that the reading of vitality
into inorganic objects, common enough among savages, has by no means
disappeared from civilized races. Dr. Stanley Hall's inquiries have
shown that out of forty-eight children just attaining school age,
twenty believed the moon and stars to be alive, fifteen thought a doll
and sixteen thought flowers would suffer pain if burned. One pupil
described the crescent moon as "half stuck" or "half buttoned" into
the sky; the spluttering of coals in a fire was called "barking" by a
girl four years and a half old. Miss Ingelow says that when over two
years old, and for about a year after, she had the habit of
attributing intelligence not only to all living creatures, but even to
stones and manufactured articles.

This projection of words originally descriptive of the human body or
of its activities into the objective world of Nature finds its richest
illustrations in poetry,[B] where it may be held to represent less the
elaborate artifice of a cultured mind than one of the most primitive
tendencies of that mind powerfully swayed by emotion. Yet the process
belongs equally to the more prosaic efforts which man puts forth to
utilize the objects of his environment in the interests of
self-maintenance. One of the earliest of these is seen in the use of
words describing parts of the body to facilitate the description of
the external world in its numerical aspects. Thus the Chinese use for
"two" certain syllables (_ny_ and _ceul_) which originally mean
"ears," the Hottentots employing the word for "hand" in the same
sense. In middle high German the word for "sheaf" (_Schock_) signifies
sixty, and is applied in that sense to all kinds of objects. The
Letts, owing to their habit of throwing fish three at a time, employ
the word _mettens_, "a throw," in the sense of "three." Among the same
people flounders are tied in lots of thirty, whence has arisen the
practice of designating thirty by the word _kahlis_, meaning "cord."
The Quichuas attach the significance of ten to the word _chuncu_,
"heap." The Gallas word for "half" has been traced to the verb
_chaba_, "to break," and is the equivalent of our own word "fraction."
So in a large number of languages the term for hand signifies "five,"
"two hands" meaning ten, and "man" ("two hands and two feet") twenty.

A like origin must be claimed for the measures of space and weight
needed by man in his industrial and commercial activities. The finger,
the thumb, the hand, the palm, the forearm, the foot--the extended
arms, as in the ancient _orgya_, and the extended legs, as in the
modern yard--have all played a fundamental part in determining the
standard measures of the civilized world. To the same class belong the
[Greek: gyê], the extent of field that could be worked by a laborer in
one day; the _stade_, the distance which a good runner could traverse
without stopping to take rest; also measures of time, such as the old
division of the day based on the length of a man's shadow.

The human body was thus of primary importance as a means of
comprehending and coming into relations with the external world. But
men also sought to make the environment intelligible to them by
projecting into it the images gained from the more general aspects of
their life. Such phrases as "pig of iron," "monkey wrench," "battering
ram," "lifting crane," remind us of a period in which objects were
actually shaped so as to enable the mind to accommodate itself more
completely to the thought of their vitality. The Greek sailing vessel,
for example, was so constructed--with the body of a bird, with cheeks,
eyes, and projecting ears--as to make it seem to the navigators of
the time as almost alive. And the dolphins, eagles, ravens, and
dragons which threatened England from the prows of the invading Danish
fleet have had their prototypes in almost every nation that has
betaken itself to the sea.

Not less suggestive are the more general aspects of the process. Our
ancestor called the earth's satellite the "moon," or "measurer,"
because it served him as a divider of time. The familiar grains of
wheat and barley which he harvested became the units of his measures.
So the names of his seasons were based on the fall of the leaves, the
reappearance of particular stars, or the periodical inundations upon
which he depended for his food. The most primitive method in
chronology is that which enables man to orient himself in the world of
time by associating particular lunations with vicissitudes of weather,
with seasonal aspects of vegetation, and with the constantly changing
sights and sounds of the animal world. In the calendar of the
Crees,[C] for example, we find such designations as "duck-month,"
"frog-moon," "leaf-moon," "berries-ripe-month," "buffalo-rutting
moon," "leaves-entirely-changed," "leaves-in-the-trees,"
"fish-catching-moon," "moon-that-strikes-the-earth cold,"
"coldest-moon," "ice-thawing-moon," "eagles-seen-moon." So in the
calendars of Central America and Mexico,[D] the months are named
variously after the arrival of birds, the blossoming of flowers, the
blowing of winds, the return of mosquitoes, and the appearance of
fishes. The Greeks constantly used the movements of birds to mark the
seasons; the arrival of the swallow and kite were thus noted. Hesiod
tells us how the cry of the crane signaled the departure of winter,
while the setting of the Pleiades gave notice to the plowman when to
begin his work. The Incas[E] called Venus "the hairy," on account of
the brightness of her rays, just as the Peruvians named her the
"eight-hour torch," or "the twilight lamp," from the time of her
shining. One at least of the three portions into which the Greeks
divided their night received its name--[Greek: peri lychnôn
haphas]--from the social custom of lighting the lamps at dusk. For
whole races the departure of the sun made night a time of danger, and
man did his best to lessen the mystery of the heavens by filling their
obscure depths with the figures of animals and heroes, or by likening
their shining lines of cosmic cloud to a road or highway for the march
of beings celestial and terrestrial. Thus, for the speakers of
Sanskrit the Milky Way was "The Path of the Gods"; the Lithuanians
dubbed it "The Bird Road"; in Low German it is known as "The Way of
Cows"; the Cymris associated it with the course of the wind; for
Scandinavians it was "The Road of Winter"; the Persians viewed it as
the route along which the straw carrier drew his burden; to this day
the Winnebagoes call it "The Way of the Chiefs."[F]

Science itself is indebted to terms and phrases in which outer
realities are assimilated to the circumstances of the life lived by
man and by the societies which he forms. Such words as "attraction,"
"repulsion," "resistance," "nature," "body," "atom," "current,"
contain obviously anthropomorphic elements. The human origin of the
idea conveyed by the term "inertia" may be more or less veiled by
unfamiliar Latin elements, yet it is recovered for us again in
_Trägheit_, "idleness," the German form of the word. The phrase
"natural selection" contains a teleological element which has more
than once been used to throw discredit on the process which it
describes. And when one observes how persistently such an
anthropopathic expression as "affinity" is still applied to chemical
reaction, or with what _naïveté_ the term "law" is transferred from
the realm of human jurisprudence into the domain of natural processes,
one ceases to wonder at the constant confusions of outer with inner in
which so much of the psychomorphism of the time has had its origin.

It would be strange, then, if, seen in so many of man's efforts to
interpret the inanimate things around him, this process of
self-projection should not also be valid for the larger relations of
his mental activity to the universe. It is but a step, in fact, from
the application of anthropomorphic words to the objects and processes
of Nature, to the employment regarding such processes of
anthropomorphic thought. As the child finds the satisfaction of its
fancy in the discovery of some strange face as suggested to him in the
decorations of the wall paper which surrounds his sick-bed, or in
tracing out from the contours of clothes hung up within range of his
vision the preposterous outline or figure of some human likeness or
caricature, so the savage, with a deeper purpose born of necessity,
traces out from the larger patterns of the moving world about him the
organic shapes, embodying will and personality, that are to serve him
as explanations of the external power which touches his existence for
good or for evil, and which, thus serving him, enable him to come into
relations with that power. It is the deepest interests of human life
which make this process necessary, and it is of the very nature of the
process that the characters thus projected into the environment must
always--throughout the history of human ascent, and at every
particular stage of it--be closely and definitely correlated with the
degree and kind of the self-knowledge which is its source.

The earliest of the animal characters displaying this correlation,
and used as a means of understanding the environment, could not well
have been other than that of motion. That by the higher mammals, at
any rate, moving things, even when inorganic, are generally regarded
as alive, is a view rendered probable by a large body of evidence.[G]
But when man finally appeared on the scene, a new element came in to
complicate the merely animal attitude in which vitality was attributed
to inanimate objects in motion. By contemplating the phenomena of his
subjective life, and observing analogous phenomena in his
fellow-beings--through the consideration of dreams, swoons, even death
itself--our ancestor discovered in himself a character deeper than
that of vitality; came to recognize that the living creature, animal
and human, possesses an inner principle or essence underlying its
activities; is not only "alive," but also "animated." At first the
conception of vitality was one with the conception of bodily activity;
at last man learned to differentiate the movements of the body from an
inner essence to which he believed them to be due--learned, in a word,
to distinguish between the corporeal existence and the soul. And
having effected this first rude division of the characters of soul
from the merely physical attributes of life, our ancestor soon
projected the new view which he had reached of himself into the
objects of his environment. The beneficent influences of Nature, so
necessary to his life, he now invested with the good purposes of the
better nature within him; in the maleficent forces of the cosmos he
read the malignant will of his own angry passions.

But it is not as mere phenomena that these powers, thus finally
ensouled and regarded as personal, can be thought about. In the
beginning the human mind carries on its mental processes largely with
the aid of images--recovered images of something seen, heard, felt, or
tasted--and is yet far off from the stage of scientific thought in
which abstract concepts take the place of the recovered mental
pictures which have been yielded through the senses. Man thus needed
concrete images with which to think about the personal powers of the
external world, and he naturally found them in the animal and human
shapes already familiar to him. Discovering some likeness between a
Nature force and some animal, he henceforth associated the two, and
recalled the image of the animal as the more concrete means of mental
recovery when he wished to think of the abstract Nature power. Or,
associating some departed ancestor, relative, hero, or king with the
Nature force--an association which would be greatly strengthened by
belief in the survival of the soul after death--he gradually
confounded the disembodied human power with the soul of the Nature
power, and through the law of least effort, used the concrete image of
the departed human being to stand in his mental processes for the much
more difficult thought of the Nature force. But, whatever the process,
animal shapes were obviously needed to reduce the Nature powers to
such a degree of concreteness as would make it possible for primitive
man to deal with them as objects of thought. And it is not less
certain that while, for some races, the earliest shapes thus utilized
were those of the lower animals, the final form for all races was that
of man himself.

In the anthropomorphic stage, then, there is the same effort to
understand the external system by assimilating it to something with
which man is already familiar. The worshiped deities may be many or
few, numberless as the Nature forces, polytheistic as among the Greeks
and Romans, or one as in the monotheism of the Semite. Man likens them
to himself, attributes to them not only his outward shape, but also
his failings and virtues, making his Pantheon resemble not only the
social order, but also the political system under which he happens to
live. It is the completeness of this assimilation which made
anthropomorphism the most persistent aspect of man's intellectual
growth the world has known. Yet the view could linger only as the
possession of the intellectually slothful and immature. The
inadequacy, the crudeness, of the conception in which Deity was imaged
as a gigantic man gradually forced itself upon the attention of the
more thoughtful. Increased mental activity, a better acquaintance with
natural processes, brought the idea of a power above Nature rather
than merely superior to man; and as the human mind passed from the
conception of the superhuman to that of the supernatural--as,
moreover, the thought of merely local gods gave way to the idea of
gods not limited in their functions to particular areas--the
anthropomorphic shapes naturally fell away from the powers they could
no longer adequately represent.

Then other changes, strictly correlated with man's advancing knowledge
of himself, ushered in the latest stage of his attitude toward the
external system. For in the same mind which had been compelled to
reject crude anthropomorphism, there had been growing the
consciousness of man as something more than a mere compound of
vitality, consciousness, and will--something more than a set of bodily
and mental capacities essential to the work of self-maintenance--the
thought that man was the sum of his higher, not of his lower
qualities, that henceforth he must be measured by the activities which
he carried on in the domain of pure thought. And this recognition of
mental attributes as the most worthy, the most exalted characters of
human personality, could not fail to impress itself upon the
conception of deity already undergoing deanthropomorphization. More
and more, therefore, in the higher mind of the race, the Divine Being,
not only losing his former bodily form, but yielding even the grosser
attributes of personality with which he has been invested, becomes for
the thought of man a psychical being in the deepest sense of that
term. Anthropomorphism, or man-likening, passes away, and in its place
comes psychomorphism, or mind-likening.

Two aspects are thus recognizable in the mental interpretation of the
environment: on the one hand an aspect which may be called causal,
since it seeks the source of the power exerted by Nature forces and
objects; on the other, an aspect which is obviously formal, its main
significance being that it condenses, so to speak, groups of qualities
into a single mental sign. The causal aspect yields, in howsoever
simple or complex a form, a theory of the cosmos or of its parts; the
formal aspect is no more than a means, ready at hand, in the visible
bodies of animals and men for facilitating the use of that theory in
processes of thought. Hence we may regard vitalism, animism,
psychomorphism as so many stages of man's attitude toward the external
system, corresponding with the degree of his power to apprehend the
more abstract as distinguished from the more particular and
superficial characters of things that come within the range of his
knowledge. In the first, he explicitly recognizes vitality, the most
obvious character of Nature force; in the second, subsuming vitalism,
he raises the soul life to the place of honor; in the third, subsuming
both vitalism and animism, he emphasizes in psychomorphism the highest
human qualities which his mind enables him to recognize.

The passage from the idea of multiplicity to that of unity is itself
an inseparable part of the total process. As at the beginning man
reads vitality into the separate objects and forces of Nature, without
any thought of their underlying unity, so he regards as discrete,
unconnected, objectively unrelated, the multifarious souls with which,
in his thought, these various powers of the environment have come to
be animated. But in course of time, by an inner necessity of
intellectual growth, relations come to be perceived between the forces
of Nature, likenesses are recognized between the functions of spirits
and deities--between the powers put forth and the results achieved.
The result is a process of coalescence which, to describe it in the
briefest way, first merges a large number of spirit-evolved gods into
a smaller number of relatively independent divinities, forms these
into pantheons of gods each subordinated to a superior, and finally
unites all beings regarded as divine in the single, all-comprehending,
omniscient and omnipotent Deity of monotheism.

In all this advance, moreover, we find that the process illustrated
by the changing phases of man's mental attitude toward Nature also
holds good of the multifarious acts by which, in what is known as
religion, man has sought to realize that attitude in conduct. For, in
seeking to adjust himself to the system of Power, man has been forced
to conceive of his Pantheon in terms as well of his social
arrangements as of the political system under which he happened to be
living. The spirit world of a horde of savages could only reflect the
indefiniteness and disunion of the nomads whose imagination it
satisfied. But as the household made its appearance, as a definite
social structure arose, and the straggling tribes began to be united
into nations, the gods themselves took on the characters of an
analogous transformation. The divine selfishness--the "_remota ab
nostris rebus_"--long ago satirized by the poet Lucretius, obviously
correlated with the attitude of man toward man, just as naturally gave
way, with the growth of the social sympathies, to the thought of that
more active concern in human affairs which is one of the salient
characters of the later phases of monotheism. The original
indifference of Deity toward ethical issues--a widespread feature of
the earlier religious conceptions--could not but pass away with the
moral stagnation of the ancient communities out of which it had
arisen. So the comparatively new thought of a God definitely
identified in his aims and activities with the cause of moral reform
is no less obviously a result of the new attitude of man himself
toward problems of social improvement; while the persistence with
which, in human thought, morals remain associated with religion
sufficiently illustrates the extent to which man's view of each has
been determined by the self-knowledge which underlies his attitude
toward both. Note also, finally, the manifest relation in which our
human thought regarding mind and body has always stood toward
conceptions of a world-soul, and then the dependence of man's view of
the relation of God to the world upon the knowledge of his own planet
and of its place in the universe. For as long as our ancestor held the
old geocentric theory of the cosmos--regarded the heavens as a set of
spheres revolving around a flat earth--the thought of a deity outside
the world related to it as a mechanician might be to a cunningly
devised piece of clockwork which he had brought into existence, was
inevitable. But when the geographical discoveries of the fifteenth
century co-operated with the revelations of Galilei to secure the
final triumph of the Copernican over the Ptolemaic theory of the
world-order, the ancient view of Deity as external to his creation
gave place to the essentially modern conception of his immanence.

If now we attentively examine the progress above described, we shall
find that the earliest attitude of the human mind toward the external
system tends in the latest to repeat itself on a higher plane and
with a richer content. Thus vitalism, by the process of unification
and intensification, culminates in anthropomorphic monotheism, while
animism, through the coalescence of objects and forces at first
believed to be separately animated, finally develops into pantheism.
These two lines of thought, moreover, tend themselves to converge, or,
at any rate, to become interchangeable, since monotheism, by
deanthropomorphizing itself, approximates to pantheism, as is well
seen in the Christian theologies and ethical religions of the world;
while pantheism, by emphasizing the characters of intelligence and
will, is sometimes hardly to be distinguished from those modern forms
of monotheism which teach the doctrine of immanence. The intellectual
outcome of the whole movement, embodying the modern attitude in Nature
philosophy, is thus no longer anthropomorphism, but psychomorphism,
since it reads into the universe, not the characters which distinguish
human beings from the lower animals, but the highest manifestation of
the characters recognized to be common to both, namely, psychic
characters--the characters, in a word, of mind. For the deepest
reaches of human thought, the process of man-likening has thus given
way to the process of mind-likening. On the subjective side of mental
inquiry we get psychomorphic monotheism, or what may be called
theological pantheism; while on the objective side we reach scientific
pantheism, or monism. It is true that the psychomorphism of scientific
monism is reached by a process different from that which has
culminated in the mind-likening of theological pantheism. Yet in both
cases there is the same projection of intelligence into the external
system as a means of comprehending it. And as the intelligence of
atoms implies their vitality, we really return in scientific monism to
the vitalistic attitude of the primitive observer of Nature. The
salient difference between the two views is this: that while early man
subsumed under his concept of vitality only the rudest characters
thereof, the terms in the mind of the monist connotes in all their
richness the ideas associated with mind.

Enough has now been said to show the basis on which rests the whole
superstructure, of man's mental attitude toward the cosmos. Despite
all uncertainties regarding the details of the process, we may be
assured of its fundamental nature, and are thus compelled to recognize
the dependence of the forms of man's mental attitude toward the
universe upon his knowledge of himself. It is because his own actions
have their source in a personal will that he refers external movements
to will. He is conscious of his own acts, and the world around him can
not be devoid of a like illumination. Does he himself plan? Nature
must also be intelligent. And the highest qualities which he can
discover in himself he reads unhesitatingly into the cosmos.

At first sight, then, knowledge may seem inextricably involved in the
process here described. If man can not know the external system to
which he must adapt himself save by assimilating it to himself--save
by interpreting it on the basis of analogies which he discovers
between his own body and its activities, and the world with its
activities--are we not committed by our very nature as organisms to
all the errors which that nature imposes upon us? If, in other words,
every effort to view the universe as it is, independently of us, be
rendered impossible by the very nature of the knowing process, with
what chance of success shall we seek to eliminate those vitalistic and
psychomorphic characters which seem to belong to that process as its
very warp and woof? In reality our knowledge inflicts upon us no such
dilemma. Man is the helpless "measure of the universe" only to the
extent that his reasoning processes are undeveloped. That knowledge
must always have a subjective element is undoubted, but that man must
always mistake the subjective vesture with which things are clothed by
the senses for the things themselves is an inference which the whole
history of thought negatives. While his life remained simple,
primitive man could regard appearances as realities without
prejudicing the overplus of utility brought to him by his knowledge.
Yet as his relation to the natural surroundings grew in complexity,
the importance of the reasoning process, with its veto power over the
deliverances of the senses, began to assert itself. At first accepted
with little or no demur, these deliverances came more and more to be
challenged in the interest of self-maintenance; and finally, by
expansion of a germ possessed by the mind in the beginning, there was
developed that way of dealing with the testimony of appearances which
we call the objective method. The evidence previously accepted had
been, though on the whole useful, in large measure misleading. For in
appearances men saw and felt mainly what Nature was for them, and only
to a minor degree what the external world was for and in itself. The
great need of the investigator of Nature is to know what things are
independently of man, in order to know how they act on one another, as
a means of knowing how they will act on the human organism, and how
that organism may react on them in the interest of its own life. The
prejudice done by implicit reliance on sense testimony arose out of
the fact that it presented objects as largely unrelated to each
other--as so much being, rather than as so much doing, acting and
interacting, determining and interdetermining. It became the function
of reason to develop, out of the material furnished by the senses, a
knowledge of the true nature of the system external to man and
involving him in its scope which we call universe. In the carrying out
of this function the analogical process has remained, but the
analogies utilized, from being likenesses between what things seem to
be to the senses, have more and more become analogies between
propositions made regarding what things do, regarding how things act
upon, are related to and determine each other.

Our knowledge of Nature, therefore, illustrates progress from a stage
in which external objects are viewed as so much doing--from a stage in
which they seem more or less isolated, more or less independent of
each other--to a stage in which we know them as acting and
interacting, and therefore, by virtue of this action and interaction,
as interrelated and interdependent. It was because man had to begin
with the thought of the world around him as a series of unconnected
aspects that he fell into the error of regarding every object as
containing within itself the powers which it put forth; it was by
gradually progressing to the knowledge of the external system as a
process that he discovered how inextricably the smallest "flower in
the crannied wall" is linked to its vastest environment, and how
dependent must be the mechanism of the molecule, as well as of the
solar system, upon the whole universe Power which we call cosmos.

Thus also is it with man's method of interpreting the external world
system. At first unable to fully perceive his own relation to that
system, as part of his inability to perceive general cosmic relations,
and therefore viewing himself as more or less independent of
Nature--as something imposed upon it rather than as something arising
out of it--he naturally sought to force it for purposes of explanation
into the narrow limits of his knowledge of himself, of his feelings,
his thoughts, his institutions. But as he grew in the power to
comprehend his place in the system of things--to understand the way in
which the objects and forces of the world were related to each other,
together with the way in which he, as knowing organism, was related to
the universe--he gradually ceased from his vain striving to subject
the cosmos to himself, and at last learned not only to subordinate
himself to the cosmos, but to trace to it unreservedly the whole
method and meaning of his origin as a living, thinking organism. Man
in the beginning could be no more than the measure of the universe.
That he has come at last, wielding the objective method, to be its
measurer, is the culmination of a struggle between false and true ways
of interpreting Nature which has had the whole history of human
thought for its arena, and for its final triumph the establishment of
the objective or scientific method of investigation upon impregnable
foundations.


FOOTNOTES:

[A] Codrington. The Melanesian Languages.

[B] See Henle. Poetische Personification.

[C] Contributions to the Ethnology and Philology of the Indian Tribes
of the Missouri Valley. Dr. F. V. Hayden, 1862.

[D] The Native Calendars of Central America and Mexico. Daniel G.
Brinton.

[E] Popular Science Monthly, vol. xlv, article Astronomy of the Incas.

[F] Les Origines Indo-Européennes. Pictet, p. 568.

[G] See a paper by G. K. Schneider in vol. ii of Vierteljahrsschrift
für wissenschaftliche Philosophie.




FROM SERFDOM TO FREEDOM.

BY EDWARD BICKNELL.


However keen our interest in the problems arising out of the recent
Spanish war, and however earnest our study of the policy to be pursued
toward our new dependencies, we should not forget that the problems
pressing for a solution before the war are still with us. The labor
question, which then commanded so much of our thought, is still
unsettled, and is by no means dwarfed by the subjects now upon every
lip. Rather, as has been shown in an article in a recent number of
this magazine, this question really forms one of the most important
elements of the present situation, and should not be lost sight of in
shaping public policy. We are entering upon an untilled field as far
as our institutions are concerned, and we have the opportunity to
start on a higher level in treating the relations of capital and labor
in our new possessions, if we have the wisdom to know how, and the
courage to do as well as we know.

It will help us in a consideration of the present status of the
laborer and of his future if we study his past, beginning, if not with
Adam, at least with the laborer's entrance into English history as a
distinct class. Any one at all familiar with Green's Short History of
the English People will see how much use I have made of that
instructive and fascinating work. And if I tell only an old story, it
may still be of value to many of us in recalling facts almost
forgotten, and a help to others whose vision into the past is limited.
Brushing away the cobwebs in the old attic of our father's house
usually brings to light treasures the recollection of which had
slipped from our minds.

The free laborer, the man who works for wages, for whom and where he
chooses, did not exist as a class until within about six hundred
years. In the early days the laborer was tied to the soil where he was
born. Such a thing as a laborer going about to seek work where he
would, or having much to say about his master or his wages, was
usually out of the question.

At a very early day the towns or boroughs of England had preserved old
rights, or regained them, which the rural part of England had lost,
and in general serfage could not exist there as it did in the country
round them. Trade and manufacture, such as they were in that day, did
not make the demand for labor which was made by the agricultural
pursuits of the country or in the castles of the nobility. So we do
not find in the towns of the eleventh or twelfth century the large
labor class we do to-day. In general we may fairly say that the labor
class began in the country.

The manorial system had divided the rural part of England for
cultivation and general order into large estates. The lord of the
manor occupied a part of the estate for his own demesne and divided
the rest among his villeins or serfs, who in return were obliged to
render services to him. It is not necessary for my purpose to enter
into any long description or discussion of the different relations
existing between different tenants and their overlord, or the
differences existing under Saxon or Norman rule. The general relation
of lord of the manor and his tenants or villeins or serfs is the main
point to be observed. The villeins or serfs of the manor cultivated
the lord's home farm or demesne, filled his barn, cut his wood, and
did all his work. "These services were the labor rent by which they
held their lands." Some of these tenants, the villeins, were obliged
to work on the lord's demesne at harvest only and to help plow and
sow, while the others, the serfs, to speak in general terms, were
obliged to help on the home farm or in the castle the year round.

In course of time the use of a certain parcel of land by the tenant
and a right to pasturage and so forth on the one hand, and the amount
and kind of service required on the other, became definitely regulated
by custom; and instead of the use of the land being a mere indulgence
given to the tenant to be taken away from him on any whim of his lord,
it became a definite right in the land which must be respected and
could be pleaded at law.

"The number of teams," and so forth, "the services that a lord could
claim, at first mere matter of oral tradition, came to be entered on
the court roll of the manor, a copy of which became the title deed of
the villein." So after a while instead of "villein" he became a
"copyholder."

As time went on it grew to be customary, instead of rendering services
for the use of the land held by copyhold, to pay a money rent. In
other words, the system of leasing the little farms came into use, and
from that came the tenant farmer. This left the other laborers about
the lord's demesne or his castle as before. While the class of
villeins, who did only occasional services, although definite as to
amount and time, gradually commuted these services into money
payments, and became farmers, the other serfs still remained on the
manor, liable to do their work when and where it was customary. This
rise of the wealthier tenants made a new class between the large
proprietors, the lords of the manor, and the tenants or serfs still
bound by custom to work for their lords. But the same process which
freed the farmer from personal service in time became the chief way of
freeing the serf also. Until this came about the serf or laborer,
whatever other rights he might have, and he was not a slave, was born
to his holding and his lord. He could choose neither master nor place
of work. "He paid head money for license to remove from the estate in
search of trade or hire, and a refusal to return on recall by his
owner would have ended in his pursuit as a fugitive outlaw." But the
advance of society silently worked to free the laborer from this local
bondage. The runaway serf gained freedom by residence in a chartered
town for a year and a day. The influence of the church was directed
toward his emancipation, at least on all estates outside of its own,
but the main cause was the growing tendency to commute labor services
for money payments. As Mr. Green says: "The luxury of the castle hall,
the splendor and pomp of chivalry, the cost of campaigns, drained the
purses of knight and baron, and the sale of freedom to a serf or
exemption from services to a villein afforded an easy and tempting
mode of refilling them. In this process even kings took part. Edward
III sent commissioners to royal estates for the especial purpose of
selling manumissions to the king's serfs, and we still possess the
names of those who were enfranchised with their families by a payment
of hard cash in aid of the exhausted exchequer." The Crusades,
whatever else they may have accomplished, aided in this freedom for
the serf. Those costly expeditions dissipated the estates of the
barons, and, to use Hume's somewhat strained expression, "Their
poverty extorted from their pride those charters of freedom which
unlocked the fetters of the slave." And so, following the rise of the
farmer, came this new class--the free laborer. By the latter part of
the fourteenth century labor was no longer, as a rule, "bound to one
spot or one master; it was free to hire itself to what employer and to
choose what field of employment it would."

This is the beginning of the labor class as we know it. In those times
labor was abundant and therefore cheap. The landowners in the country
and the craftsmen in the town found plenty of help, and the new class
then coming upon the stage could go where it was needed. From a serf
the common laborer had become his own master as far as choosing his
own employer and the place of his employment. But just at this time a
condition of affairs arose which put an end to this state of things.
In 1348 came the Great Plague. That swept away more than half of the
three or four millions who then made up the population of England. The
plague and the sudden rise of wages which followed, although coupled
with an increase in the cost of living, quite naturally brought on an
outburst of lawless self-indulgence which told especially upon the
laborer looking for work. He easily became the "sturdy beggar" or
"bandit of the woods." While harvests rotted to the ground from lack
of hands, in the towns labor was just as scarce and equally as
independent. The landowners and wealthier craftsmen were startled and
terrified by "what seemed in their age the extravagant demands of the
new labor classes." Here we have the labor problem at once and at the
beginning. And from that time to this that problem has been with us.
With the capitalist one person and the laborer another there has been
always more or less discord. As Richard T. Ely has somewhere said,
although in theory capital and labor should be allies and not enemies,
the interests of those furnishing capital or labor are not precisely
identical. But five hundred years ago the labor class of to-day had
just come into existence. It had no organization then, and its members
few political rights. The landowners and craftsmen could appeal
effectively to the crown and Parliament through their wealth, their
political power, and the craftsmen, especially, through their
organizations. The laborer had only himself and brute force. As a
result, the legislation of that day reflects the demands of the upper
and middle classes only. The laboring class was considered only as it
affected the landowners and craftsmen. So the labor troubles of that
day were met with the Statute of Laborers. "Every man or woman," runs
this famous provision, "of whatsoever condition, free or bond, able in
body, and within the age of threescore years, ... and not having of
his own about the tillage of which he may occupy himself, and not
serving any other, shall be bound to serve the employer who shall
require him to do so, and shall take only the wages which were
accustomed to be taken in the neighborhood where he is bound to serve"
two years before the plague began. A refusal to obey was punished by
imprisonment. Here was an attempt to fix the rate of wages by statute,
and to fix them very much lower than a fair market rate; and, further,
to force the unemployed laborer to serve any man who first demanded
it. The statute failed in its object, naturally, and so sterner
measures were adopted. "Not only was the price of labor fixed by
Parliament in the next statute of 1351, but the labor class was once
more tied to the soil." It was made the servant not of one master but
of a class--the employers. "The laborer was forbidden to quit the
parish where he lived in search of better-paid employment; if he
disobeyed, he became a 'fugitive,' and subject to imprisonment at the
hands of the justices of the peace." Provisions had risen so that a
day's work at the legal wages would not purchase enough for a man's
support, and therefore no such law could be enforced literally. Still,
the landowners persisted in trying, and at last the runaway laborer,
the man looking for better wages, was branded on the forehead with a
hot iron, while the harboring of serfs in towns was rigorously put
down. As the landowners wanted all the labor they could get, the
commutation of labor service for money payments ceased, and every
effort was made and every quibble taken advantage of to annul
manumissions previously made. In the towns, under the pressure of the
craftsmen, the system of forced labor was applied with even more
rigor than in the country, and strikes and combinations became
frequent.

That is the state of things in free England at a time when labor was
not strong enough to protect itself--called upon by the law of the
land to work for less than living wages or be branded as cattle! The
irrepressible conflict between capital and labor began with the very
beginning of the existence of the labor class.

In such a condition of things as here indicated, is it any wonder that
there were labor disturbances in those days--that there was a peasant
revolt? Already the doctrine of the equality of man and social
inequality was being preached to the lower classes. In 1360 John
Ball--"a mad priest in Kent," as Froissart calls him--preached such a
communistic sermon as this to the sturdy yeomen of that day: "Good
people, things will never go well in England so long as goods be not
in common, and so long as there be villeins and gentlemen. By what
right are they whom we call lords greater folk than we? On what
grounds have they deserved it? Why do they hold us in serfage? If we
all came of the same father and mother, of Adam and Eve, how can they
say or prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they make
us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride? They are
clothed in velvet, and warm in their furs and their ermines, while we
are covered with rags. They have wine and spices and fair bread; and
we oatcake and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine
houses; we have pain and labor, the rain and wind in the fields. And
yet it is of us and of our toil that these men hold their state." That
is the same cry against the inequality of property and social
condition which we hear to-day. And we may thank him, and men like him
and with his inspiration, that the conditions of five hundred years
ago have changed, and that the dawn of a better and higher humanity
has broken upon us. Filled with socialism and communism as the words
are, they still have a truth which appeals to every sympathetic and
thoughtful man.

And it was in those early days that the old rhyme was heard all over
the land:

      "When Adam delved and Eve span.
      Who was then the gentleman?"

The sermon was preached against the tyranny of property, the rhyme was
full of the democracy of the coming years.

I do not imagine that the instigators of such laws as the Statute of
Laborers were hard men as men go. They could see only their side of
the case. The laborer had become a necessity for them, and they rather
believed that the Almighty had put him on earth for their advantage. I
am afraid that something of that spirit still is left among us. The
feeling still exists that the employer and capitalist can take care
of and provide for the employees better than they can themselves; that
they should be very thankful when out of his abundance the employer
builds them a library or permits them to live in some finely ordered
village as he directs. But somehow the feeling is growing now that if
the wage-earner had a larger and fairer share in the profits he could
take care of himself better in the end and grow faster, because he
would be more his own master; and that the good things now and then
given him with more or less ostentation as gifts are bought with the
money he really ought to have and in the future hopes to have himself.

Well, the result of such laws and the general social discontent and
the levy of new taxes upon even the lower classes brought about the
Peasant Revolt in 1381. Of course, the power of the upper classes,
aided by the courage of Richard II, then only a boy, put down the
revolt, but not until the king had promised amnesty and emancipation
to the serfs. Death on the scaffold and in the field soon showed the
participants how little such promises were worth. The serfs were
subdued, but strife between the laborers and employers was not ended.
The legislation still reflects the terror and greed of the landowners,
for, in spite of all, labor was in demand and had the market at its
feet. Legislation forbade "the child of any tiller of the soil to be
apprenticed in a town," and the landowners "prayed Richard to ordain
'that no bondman or bondwoman shall place their children at school, as
has been done, so as to advance their children in the world by their
going into the church.'" But villeinage continued to disappear, and
within the next hundred and fifty years it had become "an antiquated
thing." The failure of the landowners to again fasten labor to the
soil and to fix low wages drove their energies in a new direction.
"Sheep farming required fewer hands than tillage, and the scarcity and
high price of labor tended to throw more and more land into sheep
farms." As personal service died away it became the interest of the
lord to unite the small holdings on his estate into larger ones. The
evictions consequent upon this course threw many laborers upon the
market, and the sheep farms diminished the number required, while the
smaller amount of holdings devoted to agriculture increased the price
of food. And so it is not surprising that within the course of a
comparatively few years, instead of a scarcity there was a glut of
labor; that pauperism increased, and social discontent continued; that
vagabondage with its dangers to society at large became a difficult
problem. Indeed, the poor have always been with us, but those of us
who find so much to depress us in these modern days can get new
courage by looking back to those old days and can see the real
progress which has been made. The whole lower class in England down to
the time of Elizabeth stood looking into the face of want. Henry VIII
confiscated the monasteries, but put nothing in their place, and in a
measure by so doing deprived the poor of some relief from the wealth
of the church. But Elizabeth inaugurated a system of poor-laws which,
although crude and somewhat hard, still served to ward off some of the
social danger. The course of events, however, and the rise of new
industries did more to make life for the laborer, the landless man,
less bitter. With the discovery of America and the opening of
fisheries in these western waters, and the adventurous and
buccaneering voyages of Drake and his compeers, came the gradual
development of manufacture, and a "more careful and constant
cultivation of the land." All these were new and larger avenues for
the employment of labor. By this time the laborer had grown entirely
away from serfage, had been freed from the terrible grasp of a
hopeless future, and the possibility of a degree of comfort and
independence had come into existence. We need not linger longer over
his early days. The laborer still had his peculiar trials and
hardships, but he had a future. From a subject class, the terror as
well as necessity of its employers, he has grown to be their equal
before the law, and this by his own efforts, aided, of course, by the
advance of society and the broader humanity of mankind.

The increase of manufacture brought with it a new danger to the
working class as we reach our times, and brought about a state of
things which gave rise to trades unions. Manufacture naturally in the
beginning was carried on in a small way, but in modern times,
especially as we get into this century, the small concerns grew into
large ones. Instead of one man or partnership with a comparatively
small amount of capital, the corporation or joint-stock company with
its large aggregation of capital carries on the business of
manufacture and trade. This aggregation of capital has made an entire
change in the relation between employer and employee. The corporation
came in the line of progress. Consolidation of capital has come to
stay, and properly so, but it brought with it dangers, just as every
step in advance has done. It was to meet the new dangers to the
wage-earners that trades unions came into being, for trades unions and
labor unions are really only organizations of labor as corporations
are aggregations of capital.

When industrial establishments were small, the owner, whether in trade
or manufacture, had practically absolute direction of his business. In
the industrial world what corresponds to an unlimited monarchy in the
political world has been the system. As establishments grew larger,
the autocratic power of the owner passed to the manager acting for the
owners. As one writer puts it: "Huge industrial establishments are
under the unrestrained control of a single man. At his will they are
set in motion; at his will they stand still; at his will capital and
labor unite and are fruitful; at his will they are parted and remain
barren. Men come and go at his bidding. He knows no superior and
recognizes no limitations. He calls an attempt at control 'dictation'
and resents it with anger." That is the extreme case, and is
industrial despotism. While the results doubtless are good in many
cases, and the laborer receives fair and decent treatment in most
cases, that is owing to the temperament or prudence and good judgment
of the master and not to the system. Such a condition of things is
becoming more and more modified. We have reached in many cases a
condition which may be said to correspond to a monarchy with
constitutional limitations--the master is restrained in the exercise
of his power by public opinion, the strength of the workingmen, and in
some cases by legal limitations. The organization of boards of
arbitration, and the recognition of the right of the employee to a
share in the profits, are daily extending. The tendency toward giving
the wage-earners a share in the business, some modified form of
co-operation, is daily extending. The trend is toward what may be
called industrial democracy, just as in the political world real
democracy is fast becoming the universal principle, whatever the style
of the government may be.

This advance in the industrial world has come about through the
agitation and power of labor organizations, of which, as they exist
now, trades unions were the early manifestation. The employer, as a
rule, looked after his own interests mainly, and the employee alone by
himself had to take what he could get and do as he was told. Just as
the people, after they sunk into subjection in the earlier days, had
little political power as against the nobility until they were strong
enough to take it, so the laborer still would be of little account
except as a more or less intelligent machine unless he had proved
himself a man, with a man's aspirations and a man's energy.

Labor organizations or trades unions came into existence in England.
The democratic spirit, the spirit of liberty, the Saxon spirit of
independence, which wrested from kings and the nobility all the rights
which the common people enjoy, has been doing in the industrial world
only what it did in the political world years before.

We may say that trades unions find their prototype in the _frith
guilds_ or _peace guilds_ of the Anglo-Saxon. A few words in general
about them and their successors and the spirit pervading them, the
causes of their existence and decay, will have a bearing on labor
organizations, which are like them in "being founded on similar mental
faculties and desires and as contemplating similar purposes."

These _frith guilds_ seem to have been associations of neighbors for
mutual help and protection. They replaced the older brotherhood of
kinsfolk, which had existed among the German races, "by a voluntary
association of neighbors for the same purposes of order and
self-defense." An isolated existence for a man, even a freeman, was
one of danger, especially when the feudal temper of the nobles
increased and the Danish incursions broke over England. The ties of
kindred had become weakened, and the frith guild took the place of the
family. A mutual oath bound the members together, and the monthly
guild feast became the substitute for the old gathering round the
family hearth. A member could call upon the guild in case of violence
or wrong; when charged with crime, the guild answered for him, and
when guilty, punished him; when poor, it supported him; and when dead,
buried him. When these guilds were located in towns rather than in the
country, they inevitably tended in time to combine, and eventually the
town passed from a collection of guilds into one large guild, and we
have the _town guild_. The word "town" is used in contradistinction
from the word "country," just as we say "town and country," "going to
town," and so on. The spirit of independence and freedom, kept alive
in our town meetings here, and in our local self-government, has come
down to us through those old town guilds and the boroughs of England.
It is to the towns of England and not to the country that we owe much
of our liberty to-day.

So these guilds in towns, by joining together and making a town guild,
became quite strong communities. They made demands upon the crown
itself, and took upon themselves the government of the towns where
they were located. Their members were the landowners of the town, and
the other people who came there to settle, no matter how numerous, had
no part in the government. From being democratic in the beginning, as
the frith guilds were, the towns became oligarchies.

In the course of time the differences between town and country became
more marked. The town guilds began to have less and less to do with
agriculture, although at first they were interested in it. The wealth
in the town is turned to trade and manufacture, such as there was in
those days. So, by the time of the Norman conquest, in 1066, we hear
little of town guilds, but in almost every case _merchant guilds_. The
_town guild_ has become a _merchant guild_, although composed of the
same constituency. The commercial spirit has become the ruling spirit
of the town.

As time went on and life and property became safer and trade
increased, the consequent accumulation of wealth in towns produced
important results in the character of these municipal institutions.
"In becoming a merchant guild the body of citizens who formed" the
government of "the town enlarged their powers of civic legislation by
applying them to the control of their internal trade." No longer
confining themselves to providing for public order or protection from
unjust oppression or dangers from without, they began to legislate for
their own immediate advancement and for their own pockets. "It became
their especial business to obtain from the crown or from their lords
wider commercial privileges, rights of coinage, grants of fairs, and
exemptions from tolls; while within the town itself they framed
regulations as to the sale and quality of goods, the control of
markets, and the recovery of debts." And further, the members of the
guild withdrew from the humbler trades to confine themselves to the
larger business of commerce or trades requiring large capital, leaving
the trades and traffic given up to their poorer neighbors. This ruling
class comprised only a part of the inhabitants, only the members of
the merchant guild. The great mass of the people, the artisans and the
poor, the men without land, the serfs escaped from the country and
gaining their freedom in the town, all had no voice in the government
whatever. They lived and worked and earned their daily bread
practically by permission or at least under the direct control of the
merchant guild. From a simple association, the guilds in towns had
become the governing body, and a government in the hands of a few at
that. From the need of protection on account of individual weakness,
the members of the guilds had grown to be in need of repression; and
with the demand for repression came the instrument of repression--the
_craft guild_. Against the autocratic power of the merchant guild
arose the craft guilds, or associations of workers in the various
trades, those trades abandoned by the merchants, and these guilds
"soon rose into dangerous rivalry with the original merchant guild of
the town."

These craft guilds in the old English towns, in order to attain their
objects, considered it necessary to compel the whole body of craftsmen
belonging to the trade to join the guild of that craft or trade; and
further, that the guild should have legal control over the trade
itself--who should be admitted to it, and so forth. "A royal charter
was indispensable for these purposes, and over the grant of these
charters took place the first struggle with the merchant guild, which
had till then solely exercised jurisdiction over trade within the
borough." The struggle was a fierce one and long continued, but the
spread of the craft guilds went steadily on, and the control of trade
passed into their hands. Then the next step--a share in the government
of the borough itself--was taken, and the government of the towns
passed from an oligarchy into the hands of the middle classes.

The craft guild came into being just as its predecessor had, from the
necessity of association for protection, and like it was democratic at
first; and, again like it, became in time an oligarchy as narrow as
that which it had deposed. The craft guild arose because the artisans
and tradesmen had grown to a position where they could recognize the
injustice and oppression of the merchant guild, and were strong enough
and persistent enough to assert themselves, and as long as the craft
guilds were democratic in spirit and were true to the needs for which
they were organized they flourished. But with age and success came
narrowness and bigotry and opposition to progress. They became
monopolies of employment and societies of greedy capitalists, and in
England withered away before the growth of the modern vast industrial
establishment.

I have ventured to give this general sketch of these guilds because
the same spirit and necessities which inspired them brought the trades
union into being. The trades union or labor organization was created
to protect the laborer and gain for him a better position in life, to
raise his standard of living. It is like the old guilds in being
subject to the same dangers as they were, and when it proves false to
its true objects it will pass away as did the old guilds. It will last
only so long as there is a necessity for its existence, as long as it
does the work it is born to do. And when it has come to deny freedom,
to refuse another's rights, and to repress industry, the seeds of
dissolution are already sown.

Trades unions or labor unions arose from the necessity of organization
among the laborers or wage-earners if they were to hold their own
against the aggregation of capital. The craft guild arose at a time
when trading and manufacturing concerns were small, when the interest
of both master and workman in a business were alike joined in
opposition to the exactions of a superior class--the merchant guild;
while the trades union came upon the field to protect the laborer
against his employer. Whatever other objects and aims it may have had
do not enter into my purposes in this paper. The personal relation
which had existed between the master and servant, the employer and his
few employees, the manufacturer and his half dozen workmen or
apprentices, no longer existed when the workers became scores and
hundreds, and the owner of the business was replaced by the manager or
superintendent. That personal relation was in some measure a
protection for both, but when that disappeared the temptation to
gratify owners and stockholders with big dividends became too strong
to be overcome. Against organized capital there was absolute need of
organized labor, and trades unions and labor unions and such
organizations came into existence.

There was no possibility of their existence until the laborer had
become intellectually and socially capable of organization, and until
the divine spirit of discontent drove him to association with his
brother worker. During all the years from the time of his serfdom up
to the time these organizations began he had been slowly growing in
development and gaining something in political position, but it was
not until political power came nearer and nearer to him that he gained
the strength to raise his standard of living, to make a stand for
himself. He knew the struggle would be a hard one, for everything he
gained seemed to be something taken away from those who held
themselves above him and better than he.

As a rule, we are very well content to let things alone if we
ourselves are fairly comfortable, and especially are we blind to
another's ills if the remedy for them is found in a renunciation of
part of that which we have always considered our own. There is nothing
particularly new in this. We easily can imagine some worthy burgher in
the olden time expostulating at the demand of the craft guild even to
be allowed to exist, and I do not imagine his language varied much in
spirit from the indignant disgust shown by some large employer of
labor to-day when he talks of labor unions. Doubtless these unions
to-day seem to him to have the same dangerous tendencies which the
craft guilds were talked of as having eight hundred years ago.

If there were no wrongs to right, if selfishness did not exist, if
there were a real belief in the brotherhood of man, and life were in
accordance with that belief, such organizations might not be
necessary, or if they existed have other aims; but until all men have
an equal chance for self-development, and a chance for something more
than a mere existence, labor unions or something to take their place
must exist.

And so we stand to-day with labor unions and the labor problem, so
called, with us. The laboring class is discontented. Men claim as
rights what their fathers would have been glad to get as favors. There
are violence and bad blood and waste, and so there have been from the
beginning. But there have been also injustice and oppression and greed
from the beginning. While we may condemn strongly much of the violence
and wrongdoing of labor organizations, we can find many extenuating
circumstances. The same spirit of independence, the same desire for
equal justice which animated the old guilds of England, and which have
made the Englishman and those who have sprung from him the freest as
well as most law-abiding people on the earth, are found within the
organizations of labor. We in this country hardly can find only danger
in the spirit which impels the workingman to resist every encroachment
upon his rights, to strive for that better future to which he believes
he is entitled. There were many things done in the youth of our
history which in our manhood we regret, and I hardly think, as a
nation, our own robe is so unspotted that we must draw it round us
lest it be soiled by the violence of a perhaps uneducated and
inadvisable but still earnest effort after higher and better
conditions of life. Let us read and ponder over our histories anew,
and with humble hearts try to find a better way both for the laborer
and ourselves.

I have said that it was through his organization that the laborer has
made the industrial and social advance he certainly has made in the
last century. The trades unions, like the guilds before them, had to
struggle for a legal existence, and their early days were full of
violence. Dr. Brentano, in his work on Trades Unions, says: "They have
fought contests quite as fierce as those of the old craftsmen against
the patricians, if not fiercer. The history of their sufferings since
the end of the eighteenth century, and of the privations endured for
their independence, is a real record of heroism." May not we hope with
him that now they may cease using the arms of violence which belong to
former times and use the legal means which belong to our days?

We can not approve of their violence, but let us not be unduly alarmed
by it. If society becomes so ossified in its usages and habits and
thinking that a newer and better thought can not get in, a nobler way
of living for all be entered upon, it sometimes seems as if in the
very nature of things violence must come to rend away the
obstructions. I believe that labor organizations are as much the
instruments of progress as the town guilds and craft guilds of old.
They will do their work, and the world will be the better for it. They
tend to make society more democratic industrially as well as
politically, as their predecessors did, and therefore better. For what
is democracy but a practical recognition of the brotherhood of man? If
Christianity amounts to anything, what higher aim should we have than
that?

Many students of the problems involved state that in the long run
labor still does not receive its full share of the profits; that in
order to keep up the standard of living which the wage-earner already
has reached he must have a larger reserve fund. In other words, he
must be able to save more. To do that and still live as he claims he
ought, his share in the profits, his wages, must be larger than now.
We can not claim that the standard is too high because admittedly it
is higher than ever before. Hon. Carroll D. Wright, in a recent
address, says: "Under the iron law of wages as announced by Ricardo,
it [the labor question] is a struggle simply to secure barely enough
of food and raiment and shelter to preserve the working physical
machine, the rule being that wages ought not to be paid over the bare
necessities. To-day the standard of living of the ordinary wage
receiver involves margins above the iron law of from ten to fifteen
per cent, out of which margin is to be found what are now called
spiritual necessities, means of leisure, reading, music, recreation,
etc., so that the demand of the worker in all civilized countries is
for the expansion of this margin. He feels entitled to this because
society has insisted upon educating him, giving him a taste for higher
things, making him a social and political factor; in fact, fitting
him for membership in a democratic community."

Labor organizations, in spite of much extravagant language and many
ill-advised acts, certainly aim at a better condition for the
wage-earner. We fail to see the intelligence underlying industrial
controversies because progress has been so rapid. Some of the methods
of labor organizations are violent and the weapons used are in a great
measure strikes and boycotts. That is industrial warfare and is as
costly and wasteful and cruel in many ways as any warfare is, but very
often these organizations seem to have no other method of making their
power felt; no other way of bringing about a needed reform. And we can
not say that all strikes have been or are necessarily wrong, except in
the same way that all warfare is an evil. The very readiness to strike
will effect a reform which a known weakness or lack of courage on the
part of the organization would have prevented. Such an authority as
John Stuart Mill says that "strikes, therefore, and the trade
societies which render strikes possible, are for these various reasons
not a mischievous, but, on the contrary, a valuable part of the
existing machinery of society." Whether in a particular case a strike
or boycott is right or wrong depends upon the facts of that case, and
whether we have reached a point where strikes are no longer right, no
matter what may have been the case in the past, is another question.
Let us hope we are nearer that time, at any rate. It will depend upon
the attitude of employers as well as employees.

Out of strikes themselves comes a remedy. Daniel J. Ryan, in his
article on Arbitration, records that "for sixteen years the disputes
of labor and capital in the rolling mills of England have been settled
by arbitration, and it has been an era remarkably free from strikes.
The Board of Arbitration for the north of England iron business was,
as all efforts of this kind usually are, the outgrowth of a strike."
Now, in this part of England before the formation of this board,
strikes were chronic. The works in that section recently had 1,913
puddling furnaces--more than in all Pennsylvania, and half as many as
in the entire United States.

The limits of this article will not allow a discussion of voluntary or
involuntary arbitration, but let me say that in the above case we see
that a simple arrangement between the parties changed all the strife
to peace. Will society long tolerate a continuance of industrial
warfare when it has in its own hands a preventive? For its own
protection will it not tell employer and laborer, "You must settle
your differences quietly by mutual agreement, or, if you can not, I
will settle them for you"? It says this now to the individual. Men and
women are not allowed in these days to settle their rights and wrongs
by brute force. That method passed away long years ago in civilized
communities. And society must continue to suffer from the violence and
waste of strikes until it teaches employers and workingmen and itself
a higher and better way.

May not it be possible that the outcome will be that associations of
wage-earners are to be treated as the equals of the employer? Will not
the democratic spirit of the age to come so permeate the industrial as
well as the political world that the laborer and the employer will
each have a share in the business they together carry on?

I have tried to make a very broad sketch of the change which has taken
place in the condition of the laborer, with a consideration of some of
the means by which that has come about. No longer is he a serf--no
longer even the servant of a ruling class. He at length has risen to a
share in the government of his town and country. No longer are laws
passed against him specially, but in his favor. The laborer has become
free--free to follow along the path of his predecessors, to gain full
justice, but not to oppress others. Before the law at least he is the
equal of his employer. I have implied at least that he has but
followed the spirit which led his older brother of the middle class up
from practical subjection to power. The craft guilds of the one, the
labor unions of the other, are in the same line as the old town
guilds. They all are manifestations of that democratic independence
which seems necessary for political freedom. They all imply the
capacity for organization as they all have shown its power. Let us
believe that, like the old guilds, these labor organizations are
helpful parts of the machinery of human progress. They force upon us
the fact that there have been and are injustices which must be
righted. We are beginning to learn that we can not depend upon one
side alone for our political economy or our facts; that we need an
organization strong enough to compel respect in order to protect those
who without it would be, as they have been, helpless.

All the smoke and clash of industrial warfare seem terrifying; the
innocent victims shock our sense of justice, but it is leading to the
perfect peace. The true democracy--the brotherhood of man--is forcing
itself upon mankind. If we in our prejudice, our selfishness, our
ignorance, defy the signs of its coming, try to prevent its growth, or
find only license in liberty, we shall continue to suffer all the ills
which an obstruction of progress or a violation of its laws always
brings with it. Is it not true that never in the history of the world
has there been an agrarian rising, a peasant revolt, a labor war, that
back of it we do not find as a main cause the injustice, the
oppression, the selfishness of a more powerful class? And will there
be perfect peace, perfect prosperity, until the divine harmony--the
real brotherhood of man--is the rule of life? Wrong always breeds
violence. But out of that violence, when the wrong is made right,
comes peace. Massachusetts in her motto declares that "by the sword
she seeks peace," and, to use Richard T. Ely's words, "the Prince of
Peace proclaimed, 'Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I
came not to send peace, but a sword'; and yet truly was he called the
Prince of Peace." Often is war the price of peace. And no one, no
class of men, deserve their freedom unless, when all other means fail,
they have the courage and energy to pay the price.

Therefore, we will not be alarmed at struggles which in the end will
bring about a better condition of life for all. Rather let us try to
end those struggles by pushing bravely on toward the end mankind is
striving for. We, with such a past as ours, must not be false to the
ideal which is our birthright; we should not be incapable of finding
the true way. If we will forget our merely partisan strife, our petty
jealousies, our class distinctions, and have only one aim, justice for
all, an equal chance for self-development for all, whether he be born
rich or poor, the ruling spirit of the next century will keep America
still true to her high calling, and mankind still will find in her the
inspiration to raise the disheartened and lowly of other lands. The
truest patriotism is broad enough to help the unfortunate everywhere,
and with courage, intelligence, and a faith in true democracy we shall
not fail.




THE BERING SEA CONTROVERSY ONCE MORE.

BY PROF. T. C. MENDENHALL.


Mr. Clark's interesting and, on the whole, fair review of my article
on Expert Testimony in the Bering Sea Controversy, printed in this
journal in 1897, might be allowed to stand, without comment, as the
best possible vindication of the work of the Bering Sea Commission of
1891-'92, and as strong corroborative evidence of the soundness of the
position taken in the article referred to. One or two quotations which
he makes, however, are placed in such relation to other parts of the
paper as to imply meanings which a reading of the article as a whole
will show were never intended. This is notably true of the description
of the frame of mind in which a scientific man should approach or
conduct any investigation, which Mr. Clark quotes, and the further
statement that, unfortunately, he often fails to come up to the
standard set, and especially when his own interests are involved.

It might easily be inferred that these remarks were meant to have
special application to the members of one or both Bering Sea
commissions, while as a matter of fact they were a part of the general
introduction, occurring some time before any reference is made to the
commissions. I should greatly regret having any one understand that
there was the slightest intimation of the existence of a "handsome
retainer," or anything of the sort, in connection with any or all of
the Bering Sea investigations.

As far as the American representatives on the first commission are
concerned, it is no harm to say that the pecuniary residual was
unfortunately affected by the wrong sign, and this was doubtless the
case as well with Dr. Jordan and his colleagues.

As to the truth of the statement regarding the "scientific expert," no
evidence need be offered here, for it is furnished by every court in
the land, and not a day passes that does not witness a struggle
between "experts" who have nearly always started from the same
premises, but whose conclusions are diametrically opposed to each
other. What I do want to say is that this is quite consistent with the
perfect honesty and good intent of the experts themselves. It is the
result of the limitations to which the operations of the human
intellect are still subjected, and it is a fact always to be reckoned
with in matters of this kind. There should be no skepticism as to the
honesty and frankness of Sir George Baden-Powell and Dr. George M.
Dawson in assuming an attitude so opposed to that of the American
commissioners in 1892.

Mr. Clark regards my article of 1897 as a "prediction of failure for
the new commission," an assumption quite unjustified and unsustained
by the article itself, in which the fullest recognition is shown of
the great value of the work of Dr. Jordan and his colleagues. Indeed,
the article was purposely prepared and published before the meeting of
the second commission, that it might not seem to be in any way a
criticism upon its work. Now that both commissions have made public
their findings, the whole matter is easily accessible, but Mr. Clark
is hardly just to the first commissioners on either side, by the
slight reference he makes to their separate reports to their
respective governments. A more careful study of both might have led to
some modification of his views, even concerning the partition of
authorship which he has ventured to make. It is no mean compliment,
however, to find him admitting, in regard to the report of the
American commissioners, that "not a single statement of fact in it has
proved fallacious, and the more exhaustive investigations of 1896 and
1897 corroborate its conclusions in every particular." And this
admission lies adjacent to his assertion that "the investigations
conducted by the two commissions [of 1891] were, from a scientific
point of view, of the nature of a farce." The fact is, Mr. Clark seems
to have strangely misunderstood the character of the investigations
which were contemplated and desired. The natural history of the fur
seal was not the question submitted to the joint commission, except
in so far as it specially affected seal life in Bering Sea and the
measures necessary for its proper protection and preservation.

"Facts, causes, and remedies" were the subjects to be considered.
There is an old saying that the flavor of the pudding may often be
revealed by chewing the string, and no long and exhaustive
investigation was necessary to enable the American commissioners to
arrive at what Mr. Clark admits to be the "facts, causes, and
remedies" for the Bering Sea problem. Not many weeks were occupied in
the field, it is true, for the commission was delayed in its
appointment and notification, and the season was nearly over when it
reached the islands. But, as Mr. Clark justly remarks, one member of
the commission, Dr. Merriam, was already exceptionally well informed
concerning the habits of the fur seal, and some things may be so in
evidence that even a physicist can see them.

It is true that the _joint_ report of the commission of 1891-'92 was
meager, and the explanation lies close at hand in the unwillingness of
the American commissioners to swerve from what they were convinced was
absolutely true. Mr. Clark will look in vain for the "handwriting of
diplomacy mingled with that of science," for the appearance of which
in the report of the commission of 1897 he offers apologies, except,
indeed, it be the diplomacy of going straight at the facts without
concealment or evasion, on which Americans have sometimes prided
themselves.

The joint report was limited to that, and only that, on which the
commissioners were actually agreed, and the American commissioners
have explained in their separate report that had they been willing to
concede certain points the joint report would have been greatly
augmented in volume. Mr. Clark has reviewed the conclusions of the
commission of 1897, which he justly considers a most important and
valuable document. It has not escaped his attention that in a number
of the paragraphs of this report the American commissioners have
committed themselves to the approval of several doubtful statements,
such as that "the pelagic industry is conducted in an orderly manner,
and in a spirit of acquiescence in the limitations imposed by law";
that a certain number of females may be killed without involving the
actual diminution of the herd; the "tendency toward equilibrium
theory"; that the herd is still far from a stage that threatens
extermination, and others. These statements he excuses as "balm for
the wounded feelings of the pelagic sealer"; "a concession to
diplomacy"; "a diplomatic concession to take the sting out of the real
admission"; "another concession to diplomacy," etc. I do not wish to
be understood as questioning the necessity or wisdom of inserting
these paragraphs in the joint report, but is it not a little strange
that with them in, and apologizing for them as he does, Mr. Clark
should have selected this as a model of what the report of a
scientific commission ought to be and sufficient of itself to forever
fix the value of the scientific expert in the settlement of government
disputes? As I have already intimated, no one appreciates more highly
than I the great work done by Dr. Jordan and his associates in the
study of the natural history of the seal. May not the work of the two
commissions, as _bearing on the problem of the fur-seal industry_, be
summed up about as follows?--The report of the American members of the
first commission related facts, declared causes, and proposed
remedies. The American case at the Paris arbitration rested on these.
As almost universally happens, arbitration resulted in compromise,
unsatisfactory to both parties, and, as has since turned out,
decidedly unfavorable to one. The commission of 1897 has made a joint
report of considerable length and much importance, in which the
"facts, causes, and remedies" of the report of 1892 are in a sense
confirmed, but with a number of concessions that do not strengthen the
American contention regarding pelagic sealing, the justice of which
seems to be admitted by Mr. Clark. But the practical question is, What
has been the effect of either or both of these commissions upon the
fur-seal industry? It would be unkind to press this question upon one
who characterizes the work of the first commission as above quoted,
and who speaks of the second as having, after being in joint session
one week, "concluded its labors, reaching a full and satisfactory
agreement." If he really wishes to know what progress is being made
under such an agreeable state of affairs, let him inquire of the
International Joint Commission, which is endeavoring to arrange all
outstanding differences between this country and Canada.




CAUSES AND PREVENTION OF INSANITY.

BY SMITH BAKER, M. D.


It is being found out that cases of insanity may of themselves fall
naturally into two classes: the first comprising those who get well,
and the second those who do not. To the first class belong the
deliriums of fevers and other like diseases, and also certain acute
manias and melancholias and the so-called generalized insanities. In
the second class are included the insanities which last indefinitely,
or, if seemingly cured, which, in the proportion of from twelve to
fourteen per cent, come back again one or more times, and finally do
not recover. Says Regis: "Out of all forms of mental alienation or
insanity only the generalized types--i. e., mania and melancholia--are
curable. The systematized insanities are essentially chronic and
recover only exceptionally" (Practical Manual of Mental Medicine, page
54). The latter are known by such specific names as paranoia, chronic
mania, chronic melancholia, insanity of doubt, circular insanity,
hereditary insanity, and the like. What makes such a division of
insanities into these two classes significant is not only that those
of the first class get well and the others do not, but that, generally
speaking, these latter are so founded in the constitution of the
individual that they can not recover, let everything as yet possible
be done for them as it may. Probably there are exceptions to this;
but, if so, they are not very often met with. All these cases seem to
be doomed from the very first either to follow a slowly downward grade
to the very end, or else to manifest a series of alternate better and
worse stages, which, while giving rise to bright hopes of ultimate
recovery, nevertheless just as surely tend more or less rapidly
downward, in pretty strict accordance with the rule. In passing, it
may be noted that not only the tragedy of such alternations of
emphatic despair and delusive hope constitutes not the least of the
wretchedness involved in the history of these cases, but that it is by
no means the easiest thing about them to manage; for, in the earlier
stages, it is almost impossible to make associates or relatives
understand the full meaning of the disease, or to take a correct view
of its probable outcome. Even much later on they cling to the
possibility of recovery, which is as delusive as it is painful, for
the disease goes on, nevertheless, with varying stride and
manifestation, until it finally becomes evident that hope is almost
absolutely without any real foundation.

Now, when a case of persistent or recurrent but really irrecoverable
insanity is studied, with respect not only to the life of the
individual affected but to the lives of his ancestors, both remote and
near, and in sufficient detail, it is seen that the causes of the
present breakdown have been long and surely operative in those from
whom he has inherited certain unfavorable characteristics, and at
whose hands he has had his bringing up and education; and this even
much more weightily than in himself or the life which he has lived. So
far as the patient's own responsible life is concerned, the common
causes, such as accident, infection, overwork, mental and moral
strain--in fact, all the usual forms of stress--have, of course, been
just as variously to blame, and in just the same way as they have been
in the production of insanities in other individuals who finally
recover. But even in respect to these latter, it probably may be most
frequently discovered that the harmful effects of certain so-called
exciting causes have been experienced, not because of the common
emergencies and exigencies of life so much as because of some peculiar
but unrevealed characteristics which have produced and maintained a
sort of vicious maelstrom into which have been attracted all the
detrimental influences that have accidentally or intentionally come
within reach. For instance, such persons are almost always
predetermined to grow up into harmful bodily and mental habits. Says
Peterson: "Among all degenerates there is a taste or appetite for
certain foods or drugs which tend to favor their dissolution (alcohol,
morphine, cocaine, and the like)" (State Hospitals Bulletin, vol. i,
p. 372). So also are they apt to be wrongly educated, or to draw
around them harmful associates; to develop the most wearying and
exhausting enthusiasms, or to choose a business and place of residence
to which they are not adapted; to marry some one who will chiefly wear
and burden them; to assume responsibilities and positions out of
keeping with their native strength and endurance; in fact, to get
entangled in all the affairs of life in just the very way calculated
to bring about the one thing which should have been, by every known
means, sought to be avoided. It is in this way that "physiological
fate" unconsciously spins the web which ultimately fastens its own
doom. That such a pernicious course should eventually result in
disaster is no wonder at all; for when investigated deeply and
comprehensively enough, it is seen that of all possible persons, such
are, by birth, the very least calculated to endure the wear and tear
thus engendered and maintained; while, as scarcely a word is ever
heard and scarcely an effort is ever made as to the necessity for so
training and educating and inspiring these people that the defects of
heredity will be remedied, it follows that the most ordinary ventures
of commonplace life are by far more dangerous to them than to their
better-endowed fellows.[A] When properly endowed by heredity, and
adequately bred and educated, it is almost beyond wonder, the amount
and character of persistent stress which human nature can triumphantly
endure. When otherwise, however, it is no wonder at all that sooner or
later serious breakdown comes to pass.

The importance of saying this is obvious when we consider that as a
rule active life is allowed to be entered upon without adequate
preparation and intelligent adaptation of either bodily or mental
strength to the stress that is likely to be encountered. Always it is
asked, if anything is asked at all, "Has he the skill to make his
way?" instead of, "Has he the prospective endurance required by what
he purposes undertaking?" while, if the latter chances to be
considered at all, the conclusion is most usually based upon present
appearances rather than upon past tendencies or actual developments.
Elsewhere I have said: "In almost every instance (of breakdown) I
have come across the result of some big educational blunder, owing
either to the system in vogue or else to those who execute it." (See
Steps toward Insanity, New York Medical Journal, August 14, 1897.)

There is one fact about heredity which seems not to be commonly
considered--namely, that each individual is really the descendant of
not only his immediate parents, but of the two lines of ancestry
indefinitely far back and widespread. Thus, in many instances, the
dominating characteristics are not those of father and mother, but of
grandparents, or of some other antecedent or collateral relatives
instead. In fact, each individual in its development from the germ to
adulthood passes through not only many animal forms, but through many
ancestral phases of character as well. And, as in the first case, the
size and strength of adult physical features depend on the stage at
which growth becomes abnormally extended, perverted, or arrested, so,
with regard to mental and moral qualities and their persistence under
stress, the outcome mostly if not entirely depends upon the extent to
which they are allowed or constrained to develop, or the reverse. Here
we often see the absolutely limiting influence of "atavism," or what
is characterized as "reversion," to generations further removed than
the parental, but which really is the result of an exaggeration or a
stoppage, or a perversion of development before the stage of parental
dominance is finally reached. In this way the featural and mental
characteristics of relatives as far removed as great-grandparents or
great-granduncles, as well as grandparents and uncles, are seen to
appear in children even when young, to be finally either accentuated
and made prominent, or else possibly outgrown or otherwise overcome as
the years go by, and as the later parental determining powers and the
corresponding environment come to manifest their influence.

With this view of heredity in mind, it is easy to see how the real
basis of every mental breakdown may be and probably is simply an
overdoing or perversion or other irregularity at some premature or
"atavistic" stage of development; and that anything and everything
which may have had to do in causing this should be considered as a
primary step toward the insanity itself. But easy as it is to see this
theoretically, it does not necessarily follow that it is easy to get
hold of the real facts or to help the matter in any given case. Many
times families are loath to reveal things which might indicate such a
basis of the dreaded disease. Many times they do not recognize the
necessity of telling what they would otherwise be willing enough to
reveal. Many things are absolutely forgotten or have been at best only
vaguely comprehended. Sometimes conscious deception is practiced; at
others, the party who really has known the facts is dead or is
otherwise inaccessible. But more often, and more interfering still, is
the unconscious perversion of facts, either from the false meanings
which, owing to specific views and predilections and fears, are read
into them, not only by the laity, but often by the profession, or else
from the wrong deductions derived from actual facts clearly
understood. Try as one may, it is often most difficult to get a
sufficient number of clearly defined facts to enable even the most
expert to form a true and comprehensive idea of the case in hand.[B]
This leads to the remark that what is now absolutely needed is some
form of record-keeping which shall become a general practice on the
part of heads of families and their physicians, and which may be
handed down from generation to generation; and not only this, but that
these shall be so accurately and fully kept that they may be worthy of
consideration as the best and in fact the only basis of a scientific
generalization in case of mental or moral emergency. That people as a
rule would probably resent this, as constituting an undue interference
with the sanctity of personal and family rights, while undoubtedly
rendering it practically nugatory for the time being, does not in any
good sense militate against either the scientific need or the great
good which would accrue from the use of such family records faithfully
and intelligently kept. It is encouraging to note that already the way
for such records is being opened in the demands made by the various
_questionnaires_ sent out by Dr. G. Stanley Hall and others who are
interested in the scientific study of children. (See various issues of
the American Journal of Psychology, and of the Pedagogical Seminary,
for pertinent suggestions and results. Also an article by Dr. William
H. Thomson, in the Yale Medical Journal for April, 1898.) Much more
useful and in general satisfactory would this be than the blind
staggering after elusory causation now so universally and yet so
futilely pursued.

And the same may be said with reference to statistics as commonly
tabulated. These having reference but to the surface showings, the
after-the-mischief-is-done results, and so often obtained under
misleading constraint or other unfavorable influences, are scarcely
capable of even hinting the significance of real conditions, and
especially of tendencies that have existed antecedent to the
individual breakdown. For instance, such statistics as those compiled
by Dr. Wise (see State Hospitals Bulletin, vol. i, page 157), when
subjected to the requirements of an accurate causative consideration,
easily lend themselves to the criticism made by the author himself,
who says, "The careful inquirer can receive no reliable information
from the study of insane hospital statistics except the bare fact of
the number of insane persons under care and treatment." Yet a glance
at his tables shows that forty-two per cent of the cases admitted to
the New York State hospitals for the year ending September 30, 1895,
are to be noted as suffering from constitutional degeneracies, and so
presumably to be incurable. The more than twenty per cent of cases of
insanity reported to have had hereditary antecedents, although
undoubtedly as accurate as possible under the circumstances, merely
chronicle the more obvious matters, and must necessarily have left out
of account all the less obvious but in many respects even more
important ones. And so with all the other series thus far published.
They are good as indicating where we are to look for some of the steps
toward insanity, but for the most part they are quite inadequate for a
basis of comprehensive discussion or anything like accurate
conclusion.

The pressing need, then, is that there shall be obtained a series of
statistics which shall be founded upon the most definite, penetrating,
and far-reaching studies of cases that it is possible for the trained
scientist, with the help of an intelligent, willing laity, to make. In
this respect it may be said that the assistance of the latter is just
as essential as the painstaking devotion of the former; for it is upon
the facts which an intelligent laity can observe and report that the
scientist can bring his training to bear in such a way as to arrive
eventually at accurate and therefore most useful generalizations. But
such concurrent observation and study will never be until the public
shall have come to look upon insanity as merely an unfortunate disease
instead of a stigmatized disgrace, which, with certain exceptions, it
should not be considered to be. Nor will this be the case until
professional examiners in lunacy shall regularly ask for such family
records, and thus create a need for their being made. When both the
public as well as the profession lay aside entirely the common notions
of a transcendental origin of insanity, and set to work to study the
perfectly natural steps through which degeneration and breakdown
eventually come to be, all will see the desirability of such health
records being accurately and fully kept, not only as a help toward
determining the nature and prospects of any given case, but also
toward preventing the development of those constitutional tendencies
which lead to trouble, as well as in helping on those that provide
against it.

When we come to study the causes of insanity with a view to
successfully preventing it, we are led to the supposition that the
nearer to very first steps we can push our investigations the greater
will be our service. Remembering that the well-born, well-bred
personality generally bears almost every sort of stress with
comparative impunity, it becomes us to ask just how does the
opposite--the ill-born, ill-bred--constitution come so to be, and
hence to break down so easily. Certainly, the weak, easily breaking
strains must have their origin and growth just as definitely as the
more enduring ones, and if we can get an accurate notion of such
origin and the conditions of subsequent growth, it seems probable that
useful knowledge will thus be attained.

With this object in view an investigation was undertaken which should
cover the life histories of a series of families with sufficient
detail and extension to warrant at least tentative conclusions as well
as also to indicate probable lines for future work. So far as
possible, inquiries were pushed along collateral as well as direct
lines of ancestry; and not only ill health but common habits and
experiences were, so far as possible, given the consideration strictly
their due. In every way the attempt was made to properly estimate the
factors appertaining to the more intimate personal life as well as
those that were more obvious and impersonal. Often, however, the
completed record proved to be more or less broken; more often still,
important items--the most important of all, in fact--could only be
obtained under promise of absolute secrecy as to future use. So, as
matters of absolute science, the following conclusions must stand
chiefly as challenges for future confirmation or change. But, so far
as they can be allowed to go, they may be accepted as pretty
thoroughly based in ascertained fact and legitimate generalization.

The very first conclusion, so far as the natural history of the steps
toward insanity is concerned, is that the weak constitutional strands
and tendencies have their beginnings in those ancestral marriages
which, chiefly for educational reasons, I have chosen to call
"unphysiological."[C] By an unphysiological marriage one need not mean
a marriage between people obviously deformed or imbecile or insane, or
otherwise permanently unfitted, but rather between people who are
found to be not well adapted to each other in some important sense.
Thus, too great physical disproportion; too great disparity of age, or
of temperament, or of family or of natural tendencies; or, on the
other hand, too near a sameness, either through consanguinity or other
sources; or too fixed constitutional characteristics; or even too
great differences of education, religion, taste, or ambition. In fact,
it seems probable that anything and everything which difficultly
amalgamates in marriage, and as surely fails to blend in progeny, may
be considered as unphysiological in this connection. As I have said
elsewhere: "The parties entering into such an unphysiological marriage
may both be normal individually, but yet not physiologically
marriageable, because they are either too distantly or too nearly, or
in fact too unphysiologically, related, either physically or
psychically. In such cases the ultimate outcome is almost absolutely
certain, and is noted chiefly by a definite class of tensions and
reactions of both mind and body which invariably impress themselves
upon progeny, and which for the most part are made obvious in this
particular way. No matter how unphysiological such marriages may be,
however, they do not necessarily or very often result in the evolution
of insanity in the parties contracting them, but rather they do lay
the foundation of degenerative tendencies which almost invariably
predetermine the development of this affection in more or less remote
succeeding generations. Nor do the children of such marriages
necessarily or generally become insane, although they sometimes do;
but, impressed as these are by the degenerative malnutritions and
tensions and reactions of their parents, they tend to exhibit arrests
and eccentricities of development, which in turn become intensified in
the next, and again, in turn, in all the generations following, until
the instability becomes so marked that explosion occurs. In passing,
it may be said that the most frequent source of the initiatory
tensions and reactions resulting from unphysiological marriage is
undoubtedly found in abnormal cohabitation, and the unrest and
unsatisfaction and exhaustion resulting therefrom. Such a condition of
things begets in perfectly normal people an irritating, nagging,
exhausting, persistent erethism, which in time involves the whole
organism and deflects it from its norm. Two people enmeshed in such a
bond always go to excesses and irregularities, either in abstinence or
indulgence; or, if not this, then the whole matter becomes aversional,
with straining antipathy, perverting practices, and ideational
distrusts and loathings more and more predominating. No wonder that
such people predetermine succeeding generations to abnormal
sensitiveness, irregular growth, and erratic manifestations in both
mental and physical spheres." (See New York Medical Journal for August
14, 1897; also Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, vol. xvii, page
669.)

Now, the outcome of such marriages seems to be a vitiated stream of
tendency, which carries with it in its progress from generation to
generation certain elements which predetermine to still fuller
vitiation, even with incurable insanity, as noted above. Thus, people
endowed with such natural characteristics, being altogether too prone
to gravitate toward each other, eventually marry, and thus emphasize
in progeny the vitiation already doubly initiated. Nature's course
demands that such people marry, if at all, into the healthiest, most
corrective stock possible. But here immediately there arises not only
a scientific prohibition, but an ethical question which should be
heeded: Should such people really marry even the best of stock, with
the probability of thus vitiating a stream which until this time has
evidently been becoming clearer and stronger? Again, people who are
constitutionally tending to mental breakdown are very apt to load
themselves down with duties and get themselves into situations which
must necessarily prove to be too onerous and too perplexing for their
poorly developed strength and skill. Of course, circumstances often
require this. Many times, however, there is a kind of impulsive
restlessness coupled with a short-sighted optimism, both
constitutional, which, altogether more than ordinary circumstances,
are to blame for undue assumption of work or care, and whose effect
is, perhaps, best seen in the persistent tendency of such people to
originate and perpetuate exhausting habits, both of mind and body.
Thus, the habit of self-poisoning from poorly digested and poorly
assimilated food is easily acquired by such people, and always becomes
a source of progressive brain starvation and often of consequent
mental breakdown. Says Dr. A. S. Thayer (Journal of Medicine and
Science, vol. iii, page 173), "There is ground for belief that
exhaustion--fatigue--is dependent upon poisoning of the cells of the
brain, muscles, and other tissues by the waste products of functional
activity."[D] Again, as already noted, perversions of the natural
instincts--of appetite for food, of desire for gain, of social or
other ambitions, and especially of the sexual impulse and its habitual
indulgence--fasten themselves upon such individuals with a permanence
and destructiveness that must almost of necessity lead to disaster.[E]
And so we may see that as a most natural, although often a
far-removed, result of unphysiological marriages, proceeding through
generations which have been thus predestinated to weakening choices
and practices, insanity finally appears to mark the ultimate extent
both of the mental disorganization and bodily inefficiency, which
extent is owing not only to the original initiating steps, but also to
subsequent stages of causation, progressively developed from
generation to generation.

Another great source of vitiation of the stream of tendency is found
in two people who marry in a truly enough physiological sense, but who
find or force themselves in lives of wear and tear which progressively
unfit them for childbearing and child nurture. Poorly calculated
ambitions, unexpected difficulties to be surmounted, depressing
oppositions, with perhaps more or less actual disease or accident,
largely account for this in a general way. Obviously, during the
child-rearing age, the effect of what parents are obliged to endure
and execute upon the fortunes of progeny becomes a matter of
far-reaching importance. That anything which persistently exhausts or
overstrains the parents must tell in the later dynamic tendency and
development is premised at least by certain recent studies, especially
those of Hodge on the influence of fatigue, and of Van Gieson on the
effects of exhaustion and intoxication upon the nervous elements. (See
also Peterson, _op. cit._) In no sense can parents be said to live for
themselves chiefly. Always the influence of their own health,
happiness, and prosperity upon their children should be remembered,
and should be made as constructive as possible. That this can be
consciously attempted with commensurate results is more or less
evidenced not only by common observation but by investigation. Not,
however, in the sense that parents are always able to endow children
with some particular, much-wished-for characteristic, as so many
suppose--for it must be remembered that perhaps pretty fixed
tendencies for several generations may have to be overcome and
reversed before such special results can be obtained, but in the much
better sense of giving such an impetus healthward and strengthward and
lifeward as may later on be the beginning of a constitutional
foundation that shall support many generations of full health and
longevity.

If, then, the first steps--and, generally speaking, the most important
steps--are discovered in the unphysiological marriage and its
influence upon the bearing and rearing of progeny, then it is obvious
enough that prevention of incurable insanity should begin with giving
adequate attention to this phase of the subject, and this first and
emphatically. Already the law says that certain peculiarly afflicted
individuals can not marry; and probably this is about as far as the
law can helpfully go until, at least, public intelligence as well as
private sentiment will sustain it in going further. So we must look to
these latter--a widespread intelligence and a corresponding earnest
sentiment founded upon such intelligence--for the means of making
progress toward the prevention of insanity. But how can this needed
knowledge and helpful sentiment come to be? Certainly not by
perpetuating the present notions of so-called "modesty" and "purity,"
which, as now held, must always interfere with the study and practice
necessary for ascertaining the truth, and for applying it to the needs
of race-building. The time ought to come soon, very soon, when matters
of such serious content shall not be so absolutely subject to the
dominance of conventionality and guesswork and recklessness as now,
but shall instead be subject to the sway of accurate science and its
careful adaptation to human conditions. Every marriage now is at best
but an experiment--blind and chance-taking often, in a most wasteful
and dangerous sense. Let it remain, if it must, an experiment still,
but one which shall be henceforth conducted with such foresight and
skill, and withal with such intelligent purpose, as shall certainly
point to improved results from generation to generation. Experience
shows that it is comparatively easy to ascertain what marriages,
generally speaking, are prone to result in obviously vitiated progeny;
or if not in these, then, to some extent at least, in the progeny
which, being unnaturally constituted, are prone to develop their
weaker strands of personality, and so to break down in the end. But to
this course neither prudery nor superstition nor selfishness will ever
assent; it must be pursued in spite of these, and by the only method
which science now recognizes--namely, accurate observation, careful
record, and the most comprehensive, skillful comparison, all in order
that truthful inductions may be finally secured. That parents should
train up their children to look forward to marriage not as the acme of
personal indulgence and satisfaction, but as a most responsible
partnership for the developmental keeping of unborn fortunes, and the
proper nurturing of the children that may come to them, is no longer
speculation, but a science-founded fact. Undoubtedly the highest state
of adult satisfaction will always be closely associated with what may
be characterized as child completion. Moreover, that an educational
system which so thoroughly ignores this most important of all
educational subjects must, in time, be subjected to the criticism
which science may justly develop, is amply borne out by the cases
studied. Often, indeed, has it appeared that had a modicum of real
knowledge been at hand, most disastrous results would naturally have
been obviated. Educators lead the day; why not they lead in directions
which shall most truly correct the results of physiological ignorance
and daring? That no man or woman should go forth from college with
such vital knowledge unlearned is probably the first and most
important means of preventing incurable insanity conceivable; and that
these in turn should never hesitate to diffuse popularly that which
they have been so favored in the learning, implies a duty which the
intelligence itself makes clear.

So, too, if persistent overstrain and exhaustion of parents, either
prospective or actual, leads directly to starvation of their own
structural elements, how probable that the initiating and bearing and
nurturing of children is to a like extent detrimentally interfered
with in any given case through the development of an "erratic cell
growth." Certain it is that completeness of development depends on two
things--namely, nutrition and exercise. In a biological sense both
these are dependent upon a right adjustment of supply to demand. Hence
starvation or engorgement, inactivity or overwork, each may lead to
the same dynamic result--that is to say, to an interference with the
proper growth of the organism. That due heed, then, should always be
given to the necessary health preservation of those who essay to
become parents, not only in preparation for but during the whole
so-called childbearing period, is so scientifically deducible that it
may be for all practical purposes considered as axiomatic. The way to
have healthy, long-lived, and happy children is for parents to be
healthful and intelligently careful themselves; while the whole
science of health must eventually consist in the science of such
symmetrical and high development as will enable individuals to endure
necessary strain, resist disease, and rapidly and fully recover from
accident and infection.


FOOTNOTES:

[A] "It is perfectly certain that two in every three children are
irretrievably damaged or hindered in their mental and moral
development in the schools; but I am not sure that they would fare
better if they stayed at home."--Baldwin, in _Mental Development_, p.
38.

[B] See an instance clearly elucidative of this in an account of the
Kelly murder trial, given by Dr. Walter Channing in the American
Journal of Insanity for January, 1898, page 385.

[C] See New York Medical Journal for August 14, 1897.

[D] See also Dr. Edward Cowles. Shattuck Lecture on Neurasthenia.

[E] See Peterson. The Stigmata of Degeneration. State Hospitals
Bulletin, vol. i, p. 327.




SKETCH OF WILLIAM PENGELLY.


The name of William Pengelly is most closely associated with the
explorations of caves in England containing relics of men together
with the remains of extinct animals, the results of which, confirming
similar conclusions that had been reached in France, convinced English
geologists of man's extreme antiquity. Speaking of him at the time of
his death as one of the last survivors of the heroes who laid the
foundation of geological science, Prof. T. G. Bonney said, "He has
left behind an example of what one man can do in advancing knowledge
by energy and perseverance."

WILLIAM PENGELLY was born at East Looe, a fishing village in Cornwall,
England, January 12, 1812, and died in Torquay, March 16, 1894. The
name of Pengelly is not uncommon in Cornwall, and has figured in
English history--among others, in the person of Sir Thomas Pengelly,
who was chief baron of the exchequer, and left certain sums for the
discharge of debtors from the jails of Bodmin and Launceston. His
father was captain of a small coasting vessel, and he acquired a
strong attachment to the sea. He was sent to the Dame's School in his
native village when very young, and before he was five years old had
made so rapid progress that his mother applied to the master of a
school for larger boys to receive him as a pupil. The master declined
to take him, but, hearing him reading as he passed the door of the
house not long afterward, concluded to grant the mother's request. At
school he soon gained such a reputation for scholarship that the boys
made him spend all his play hours helping them in their lessons. His
school days ended when he was twelve years old, and he accompanied his
father to sea, making, however, voyages that were seldom more than
three days long, most of the work of which consisted in taking in and
taking out cargo. The sailors soon discovered his clerkly gifts and
employed him to write their letters, but did not so well appreciate
his excellent conversational powers. On "tailoring days" it was
understood that his clothes should be repaired for him, while he read
aloud for the general benefit, and the sailors would amuse themselves
by finding solutions to questions in Walkingham's Arithmetic. His
seafaring life closed in his sixteenth year, when the death of a
brother made it desirable that he should remain at home.

Though working hard all the day for a mere support, young Pengelly
managed to spend several hours every night in study, seeking to master
mathematics. He had no tutor and no really good text-books, but made
such progress in his studies that in a comparatively short time he
became "a mathematical tutor of no mean order." He bought his first
Euclid of a peddler who occasionally visited the place; then, having
saved up a little money for the purpose, it was a happy day for him
when he walked thirty miles to Devonport and back, bearing, on his
return, twenty volumes in a bundle over his shoulder; among them were
the works of some of the standard authors, for he cultivated a
literary as well as a mathematical taste.

He received his first lesson in geology while he was still a sailor
boy, at Lyme Regis--a spot exceedingly rich in fossils. A laborer whom
he was observing broke a stone, the opening of which disclosed a fine
ammonite. To his question as to what the fossil was, the laborer
replied that if he had read his Bible he would have known; that there
was once a flood that covered all the world; the things that were
drowned were buried in the mud, and this was a snake which had
suffered that fate. "A snake! but where's his head?" He was again
referred to the Bible, which would tell him why the snakes in the
rocks had no heads. "We're told there that the seed of the woman shall
bruise the serpent's head. That's how 'tis." The second lesson came a
few years later, in a reading club of which Pengelly was a member.
They were reading Dick's Christian Philosopher, and came to a
geological section, when the reader remarked that "as geology was very
likely to be extremely dry, and as many good people thought it
dangerous if not decidedly infidel in its teachings, he would propose
that the selection should not be read. This was passed by acclamation,
and the reader passed on to astronomy."

While still young, Pengelly removed to Torquay, where he spent the
remainder of his life. Shortly after arriving there, he opened a small
day school on the Pestalozzian system, into which he introduced the
novelty of the use of chalk and the blackboard in giving instruction.
Beginning with six pupils, the school grew rapidly. He had private
pupils, too, and in 1846 these had become so numerous that he gave up
his school, and as a special tutor in mathematics and the natural
sciences found his life occupation. Some of his pupils became
distinguished in after life; while others, like the two Russian
princes, nephews of the Czar Alexander II, and Princess Mary, of the
Netherlands, all of whom became much attached to him, were famous by
reason of their position. His attention was brought for a third time
to geology while looking over some books which he thought might be
useful to his pupils, when he found one published by the brothers
Chambers, which contained a chapter on that science. This was not
much, but it was enough to inform him how much had already been done
in geology, and, perhaps, to give him a hint of some of the
possibilities that lay in it. From this time on, he was ardently
interested in geology. The journal of his first visit to London and
the British Museum, in 1843, attests how he was becoming absorbed in
it. He spent his holidays in geological explorations and in excursions
which gradually grew larger, until his position as a geologist was
recognized, and he became an authority respecting all points and
phenomena which had come under his personal knowledge. A hint dropped
to him by Professor Jameson as he was about to visit the Isle of Arran
taught him to make his notes of observations on the spot, and greatly
helped, his daughter Hester observes in the biography on which we have
drawn very largely, "to form those habits of extreme accuracy which
characterized all his scientific work."

In 1837 Mr. Pengelly assisted in the reorganization of the Torquay
Mechanics' Institute, with which he maintained a connection for more
than twenty years, and before which he delivered many lectures. In
1844 he participated in the organization of the Torquay Natural
History Society, of which he became, in 1851, honorary secretary, and
remained so for more than thirty-nine years. "Under his guidance it
became a scientific power in the country. Year after year he lectured
there, tincturing the locality with his own enthusiasm; and from the
society there ultimately sprang the museum in Babbacombe Road, with
its admirable collections."

His lectures, delivered gratuitously at Torquay, were very popular,
and were attended by large audiences. The fame of them spread, and he
was called to other places--Exeter, Exmouth, and larger towns and
farther off, and to the great learned societies--where he lectured,
always with success, and to the satisfaction and delight of his
audiences. "Those persons living, and they are many," says Mr. F. S.
Ellis in the preface to Hester Pengelly's biography of her father,
"who had the good fortune to hear Pengelly lecture will bear ready
witness to the complete mastery he always had of his subject, and of
the faculty of imparting his knowledge. Even when speaking upon
abstruse subjects to a mixed audience, he would make the matter
perfectly clear without in any degree appearing to talk down to the
capacity of those he was addressing.... His manner was no less
pleasing and attractive than the language in which he clothed his
ideas was grateful to the ear." Geology and astronomy furnished the
subjects of the lectures.

It would be impracticable in a brief sketch to follow the detail of
Pengelly's geological investigations previous to his engaging in
systematic cave exploration. They embraced fields chiefly in
Devonshire and Cornwall, and afforded subjects for correspondence and
discussion with many of the most eminent British geologists, and some
of other countries than England. A study of some fossil fish, first
observed by Mr. Charles W. Peach in Cornwall, furnished the occasion
for one of his first recorded papers, On the Ichthyolites of East
Cornwall, in the Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of East
Cornwall, 1849-'50; and a single volume--the seventh--of these
Transactions contains nine of his papers. Another subject of interest
was the beekites, curious formations of chalcedonic silica on the
limestone fragments in the New Red Sandstone of Devonshire, first
observed by Dr. Beek, of Bristol, concerning which he read a paper at
the Cheltenham meeting of the British Association, the first which he
attended, in 1856. In 1860 he completed the formation of a collection
of Devonian fossils from Devon and Cornwall, which was presented by
the Baroness Burdett-Coutts to the new museum of the University of
Oxford, in connection with the foundation of a geological scholarship,
and was named "the Pengelly Collection."

The first of the more important geological researches with which
Pengelly's name is intimately associated was the exploration of the
peculiar formation at Bovey Tracey, for the identification of its
fossils and the determination of its age. The plain in which the
formation lay had an aspect suggesting the basin of an ancient lake,
and its deposits, "very different from the solid rocks of the
surrounding hills," confirmed the suggestion. They consisted of
gravels, sands, and clays, distinctly stratified, with seams of
lignite, for which they had been worked. The pits had already
attracted some notice, and the deposits had been mentioned in
scientific literature, but very little had been learned concerning
their age. In 1860 the subject was mentioned by the late Dr. Falconer,
an eminent paleontologist, to Miss Burdett-Coutts as one the
investigation of which would be a boon to science. Miss Coutts
supplied the money that was needed, and the direction of the
systematic investigation was intrusted to Pengelly; on learning which,
Sir Charles Lyell wrote to him: "I am very glad of the prospect of our
knowing something of the Bovey coal plants. It is almost a reproach to
English geology that they have been so little explored, as they are
perhaps the only fossils of the Tertiary period to which they belong."
In order to determine accurately the nature, thickness, and order of
the successive beds, and to make a satisfactory collection of fossils,
a new section of the deposit was made, measuring one hundred and
twenty-five feet, down to the bottom of a seam of lignite four feet in
thickness, the "last bed" of the workmen, but not at the actual base
of the deposit. Thirteen of the thirty-one beds of lignite which were
cut through, and two of the beds of clay, yielded distinguishable
plant remains. These were sent to Dr. Oswald Heer, of Switzerland, for
examination; and he determined from the collection fifty species,
including ferns, conifers, figs, cinnamon trees, an oak, a laurel,
vines, andromedas, a bilberry, a gardenia, a water lily, and some
leguminous plants. Heer referred the group to the Lower Miocene
period, but some modification was afterward made in this determination
in the light of a fuller knowledge of the Tertiary flora. The deposits
and work at Bovey Tracey were the subject of a memoir to the Royal
Society by Sir Charles Lyell; and Dr. Heer's account of his work--The
Fossil Flora of Bovey Tracey--was published in 1863.

While this investigation was going on, Lyell was preparing the fifth
edition of his Manual of Geology. He invited Pengelly to suggest
corrections to the text, saying that, besides positive mistakes, he
would "be glad of any hints and suggestions made freely, which your
knowledge of the manner in which beginners are struck may enable you
to send us." The criticisms supplied by Mr. Pengelly were adopted by
Lyell except where they had already been made unnecessary.

On the accidental discovery by workmen, in 1858, of a cavern in
Windmill Hill, overhanging the town of Brixham, Pengelly at once
thought of finding what was in it, and what story it might have to
tell. He visited the place and applied to the owner for permission to
explore it in behalf of the Torquay Natural History Society. But on
consultation with Dr. Hugh Falconer it was decided that as that
society probably had not means sufficient to bear the expense of the
exploration, the Royal and Geographical Societies should be applied to
for a grant. This was obtained, and the work was carried on under the
superintendence of Professor Prestwich and Mr. Pengelly, on whom, as a
resident of the place, the burden substantially fell. The decision to
explore the cave was brought about largely by the fact that it was a
virgin cave which had been inaccessibly closed during an incalculably
long period, the last previous event in its history having been the
introduction of a reindeer antler, which was found attached to the
upper surface of the stalagmitic floor. It was therefore free from the
objection urged against Kent's Cavern that, having been long known and
open, it had probably been ransacked again and again. A thorough
method of exploration was determined upon, beginning with the
examination and removal of the stalagmitic floor; after which the
upper bed should be dealt with in a similar manner horizontally
throughout the entire length of the cavern, or so far as practicable;
then the next lower bed, and so on, till all the deposits had been
removed. By this method the general stratigraphical order of the
deposits and their characteristics could be learned, all their fossils
secured, and the highest possible exactness attained. The excavations
were continued through twelve months, at the end of which the cave had
been practically emptied. Besides furnishing interesting indications
relative to its physical history, the cave yielded sixteen hundred and
twenty-one bones and thirty-six flints. While most of the flints were
flakes, some of which possibly might not be artificial, three were
fairly well made implements of paleolithic type; and it was therefore
concluded that man either frequented or at any rate sometimes entered
the Brixham Cave while Devonshire was inhabited by various mammals
which are now extinct. Previous to the execution of this work, all
geological evidence as to the antiquity of man had been received, even
by English geologists of the first rank, with what Pengelly called
apathy and skepticism. After the work it soon became evident, Pengelly
said in an address to the Section of Anthropology of the British
Association, in 1883, that this geological apathy had been more
apparent than real. "In fact, geologists were found to have been not
so much disinclined to entertain the question of human antiquity, as
to doubt the trustworthiness of the evidence which had previously been
offered to them on the subject." The discoveries are thought to have
had a considerable share in disposing Mr. Prestwich to undertake the
investigation of the remains at Amiens and Abbeville in France and
Hoxne in England, "which added to his own great reputation and rescued
M. Boucher de Perthes from undeserved neglect." Prof. Boyd Dawkins
says that they established beyond all doubt the existence of
paleolithic man in the Pleistocene age, and caused the whole of the
scientific world to awake to the fact of the vast antiquity of the
human race. Of course, they aroused a theological controversy which
was long and bitter, and has only recently died out. Pengelly had no
trouble through it all. "Geologists," he said, "see no mode of
reconciling the Mosaic account of creation with geological science....
For myself, I am satisfied that science can do nothing for the
salvation of the soul, and that the Bible is able, through God's
grace, to make us wise unto salvation." No doubts or difficulties
could ever undermine his faith as a Christian.

The evidence accumulated at Brixham suggested the propriety of a
re-examination of other evidences of man's antiquity, and
particularly, in England, of those from Kent's Hole, or Cavern, at
Torquay. The existence of this cave had been known from time
immemorial, but the first recorded exploration of it was made in 1824
by Mr. Northmore, of Cleve, looking for organic remains and an ancient
temple of Mithras. Mr. W. C. Trevelyan followed him, and first
obtained results of value to science. The Rev. J. MacEnery, a Roman
Catholic priest, began a four years' exploration of the cave in 1825,
and prepared a narrative of his work, which was not published for
several years after his death, having been lost, and found by Pengelly
after a long search. He showed that the cave had been inhabited,
practically at the same time, by man and various extinct animals; but
the antiquity of man not being yet a live subject, little regard was
paid to his evidences. With a grant of a hundred pounds from the
British Association, the work was begun under the direction of a
committee of which Pengelly was the leading spirit and the working
member. It opened a new chapter in his life, his daughter says, "for
he not only superintended the exploration of the cavern, but undertook
its entire management, throwing himself, heart and soul, into the
numerous duties which it entailed. The labor was arduous, and severely
taxed his energies for fifteen years; but it was a congenial
employment, and most faithfully performed.... After undertaking the
exploration, Pengelly became such an enthusiast in the progress made
that, when in Torquay, he never (unless prevented by illness) failed
on a single week day to visit the cavern, while he devoted many hours
at home in the examination of the specimens exhumed. He even abridged
his short holidays, and all idea of living in London was abandoned on
this account." In the investigation, the surface accumulations having
been removed and preserved for examination, the floor of granular
stalagmite was stripped off, so as to lay bare the cave earth, and
this was dug out ultimately to a depth of four feet in a series of
prismatic blocks, a yard long and a foot square in section, layer by
layer. This material was examined in the cave by candlelight, then at
the door by daylight. A box was appropriated to each "yard," in which
all the objects of interest found in that particular earth were put.
The boxes, with the record of what they contained, were sent daily to
Pengelly, who cleaned the articles and repacked them, and kept regular
records of his day's works. Other materials were dealt with with
similar thoroughness in ways according to their nature. "Whatever was
discovered beneath the stalagmite flooring must have been sealed up by
it for, at the very least, two thousand years, probably for a much
longer time." The exploration was completed June 19, 1880. The more
than seventy-three hundred prisms of material which proved productive
yielded, besides fifty thousand bones examined by Prof. Boyd Dawkins,
numerous implements, including those of bone, the work of man. Two
deposits were evident, one of "cave earth," and one of breccia beneath
it. A glance at the implements from them showed that they were very
dissimilar. Those from the breccia were more massive and ruder in
every way than the others, and none of them were of bone. "In short,
the stone tools, though both sets were unpolished and coeval with
extinct mammals, represent two distinct civilizations. It is equally
clear that the ruder men were the more ancient, for their tools were
lodged in a deposit which, whenever the two occurred in the same
vertical section, was invariably the undermost." Various conditions in
the deposits united in indicating that the interval between them must
have been very considerable. Other caves were examined by Pengelly,
but his most important discoveries were made in those of Brixham and
Kent.

A third section of Pengelly's scientific work reviewed by Prof. T. G.
Bonney in the summary he has added to Miss Pengelly's biography, from
which we have quoted freely, includes miscellaneous papers on geology
and kindred subjects, relating almost exclusively to the southwest of
England. As a rule, the papers are comparatively short, being the
fruits of researches which either did not demand a long time, or could
be carried on at intervals as circumstances allowed, and appeared
mostly in the transactions of local societies.

Pengelly was one of the prime movers and a leading spirit in the
organization, in 1862, of the Devonshire Association for the
Advancement of Science, Literature, and Art, at Plymouth, and was its
president in 1867-'68. The objects of the association were "to give a
stronger impulse and a more systematic direction to scientific inquiry
in Devonshire, and to promote the intercourse of those who cultivate
science, literature, or art in different parts of the country." It
worked according to the methods of the British Association, with
literature and art added to its objects, besides giving some attention
to history and archæology. The first meeting was held under the
presidency of Sir John Bowring. In 1872 the president was the bishop
of the diocese, Dr. Temple, now Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1863
Pengelly was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

From 1856, when he read a paper at the Cheltenham meeting, Mr.
Pengelly was almost a constant attendant upon the meetings of the
British Association, and gained, as the years advanced, a prominent
position among its leading members. He was president of the Geological
Section at the Plymouth meeting, 1877. At the jubilee meeting of the
association, held at York in 1880, he made the acquaintance of Prof.
Asa Gray, which ripened into a friendship and resulted in a visit of
Professor Gray and Mrs. Gray to Torquay. He met another distinguished
American man of science, Prof. O. C. Marsh, recently deceased, at the
International Geological Congress in London, in 1888. In 1801 he
received a visit from Prof. G. F. Wright. He opposed the transference
of the meeting of the British Association to Montreal in 1884, on
account of the expense and the sacrifice of time which he thought many
who would like to attend could not afford, and did not go himself. In
March, 1874, he was visited at Torquay by Professor Phillips and
others in behalf of a number of members of the British Association,
and presented with an illuminated parchment containing the signatures
of the contributors and a check, as a testimonial "in recognition of
his long and valued services to science in general, and more
especially for the exploration of Kent's Cavern. Replying to the
addresses, he said he had done the work in connection with Kent's
Cavern simply because he liked it.... He had experienced intense
pleasure in it, and he could assure them that, on his finding a
_Machairodus latidus_, after seven years and a half exploration, the
discovery of that one tooth, in his opinion, was worth all the money
that had been spent in the exploration of the cavern."

Besides geology, Mr. Pengelly had a living concern with astronomy, on
subjects of which he lectured and read papers, and in folklore, and
was "extremely interested" in the religious history of Cornwall. He
became a member of the Society of Friends about 1853, and married his
second wife, Lydia Spriggs, in that body. She assisted him in his
scientific work, preparing diagrams.

Of Pengelly's character as a man, Professor Bonney speaks of the great
charm in his personality, and the union in him of "such strong mental
powers, and no less strong sense of what was just, true, and right, to
such genuine humor and hearty enjoyment of wit." Sir Archibald Geikie
speaks of his "genial, kindly, and helpful nature, and his invariably
bright, cheery, and witty talk." Prof. Rupert Jones characterizes him
as "a good example of a religious man--earnest, persevering, and exact
in scientific research." The Rev. Robert Hardy says, "He did not
obtrude his theological opinions, but it was easy to perceive that he
was a man of true religious character." Sir Joseph Lister, looking
back to the times of his acquaintance with him, recalled "vividly the
impression of his great intellectual powers, his genial benevolence,
and his sparkling humor."

As a lecturer his style is described as having been "most attractive.
It is incisive, clear, and at times there are touches of humor. His
perfect knowledge of the subject, combined with intense earnestness,
clothed his lecture with genuine eloquence."

Miss Pengelly's biography abounds with illustrations of her father's
rare faculty of attracting and interesting workingmen. A letter from
one such man expresses gratitude, mingled with great pleasure, for the
lasting happiness he was "so anxious and constant to impart to us
young men during the Young Men's Society and afterward at the
Mechanics' Institute, ... and I have often felt and said I owe more
gratitude for the small amount of knowledge I possess, to Mr.
Pengelly, of Torquay, than to any living man, and I think there are a
few now in Torquay who might truly say so too."




Editor's Table.


_KINDERGARTENIZED CHILDREN._

We do not know whether the verb "to kindergartenize" has yet crept
into the language, but, after reading the article of Miss Marion
Hamilton Carter in the March Atlantic on The Kindergarten Child--after
the kindergarten, one is disposed to think that such a verb is a
present necessity. The question as to whether the kindergarten on the
whole is a good institution is too wide for discussion within the
restricted limits of the Table; but no one can read Miss Carter's
article without being forced to the conclusion that, in some of its
aspects, kindergarten work is of very doubtful utility. That lady
found by actual experience with two or three successive levies of
kindergarten children that they seemed to have an impaired rather than
an improved faculty of acquiring knowledge, that their infancy seemed
to have been artificially prolonged, that they had become accustomed
to a nauseating amount of endearment in the language addressed to them
by their instructors, that they seemed to expect to be continually
amused, and that a certain drill through which they had been put for
the alleged purpose of developing their powers of imagination had gone
a long way toward making them incapable of speaking of things simply
as they found them. All this is set forth in Miss Carter's article in
a manner which leaves little doubt that she has described things
substantially as they fell under her observation.

There is one important principle in education which it seems to us the
kindergarten system too much ignores, if it does not completely set it
at defiance, and that is that very young children require a great deal
of letting alone. The spontaneous activity of the little ones--and
they are sure to be active if they get the chance--is worth more for
their education than any amount of directed activity. Their
imaginations, too, will take care of themselves much better than we
can take care of them. Nothing is less favorable to the development of
imagination in a child than constant intercourse with grown people who
have passed the imaginative stage, and whose daily duty it is to lay
out ordered knowledge for assimilation by these babes. It is no wonder
that part of the system should consist of special exercises for the
cultivation of the very faculty which the system as a whole is so
adapted to dull and to weaken. Anything much more silly, however, than
the method described by Miss Carter it would be difficult to imagine.

The great popularity of the kindergarten is due in large measure to
the fact that it relieves mothers during part of the day of the care
of their small children. That it does this in very many cases at the
expense of weakening the tie between mother and child there is too
much reason to fear. The State has been stepping in more and more
between parents and children, until now it lays its hand almost upon
the cradle. The mothers of the republic are giving way, so far as
influence over the rising generation is concerned, to the schoolmarms;
but it is idle to expect that the latter can take the place of the
mothers we used to know. The kindergarten constitutes a vast extension
of the educational machinery previously in operation, and machinery is
always impressive, especially to those who do not understand it. What
people see is that the system works very smoothly and uniformly and
rhythmically, and that it saves, or seems to save, them a great deal
of trouble; and that it is enough to make them think it something very
fine. Whether it is really saving trouble in the end is a question
which we consider quite open to discussion. There is room, in our
opinion, to inquire whether the stimulus of society is not too early
and too systematically brought to bear on the infants who throng the
educational nursery--whether it is well for children of three and four
to be brought every day under the eye of, and more or less into
competition with, a large number of companions of their own age. We
doubt much whether it tends to simplicity of character, and we can not
but regard it as distinctly unfavorable to the development of
individuality. The rule of fashion begins at once to operate with
great intensity, and the child loses the power of conceiving life
except in the herd. As to whether trouble on the whole is being saved
to parents by the new system, the question could best be answered by
ascertaining whether, in the long run, parents have more or less
trouble with their children now than formerly. We should be surprised
to hear any one maintaining that they had less.

We are aware that parents, for the most part, enthusiastically testify
that their children enjoy the kindergarten very much; but may it not
be possible for children, as well as their elders, to like what is not
altogether for their good? We do not consider that we can safely
follow all a child's likes and dislikes in the matter of diet, or
companionship, or hours for going to bed and rising. Sensible people
do not think that everything children crave should be given to them,
or that more than a limited number of excitements should be thrown in
their way. It is one of the drawbacks to wealth that the possessors of
it can hardly refrain from half burying their children beneath a
profusion of toys, and crowding upon them such a multitude of
distractions, in the way of travel, shows of all kinds, and society,
that all chance of development from within is well-nigh destroyed. It
has been remarked by many that the children of to-day who rarely read
a story that is not illustrated, have much less imagination than the
children of former days, who in reading had to make and did make their
own mental pictures. Yet what pampered child ever said he or she was
pampered too much? What overflattered child ever asked for a surcease
of flattery? What child suffering from an excessive amount of social
excitement ever requested that it might have less of such unhealthy
stimulation? The inference we draw is that it does not settle the
question finally in favor of the kindergarten to say that children
enjoy it. If Miss Carter's experience is to be depended on, the result
at least of some kindergarten training is to stimulate the vanity of
the little ones and give them a quite undue sense of their
self-importance. They would enjoy that while it lasted, poor little
things! but it would be a bad preparation for the subsequent work of
education. One broad fact stares the educational world in the face,
and that is that the average child has to-day, at a given age, a less
capacity for learning than the average child of twenty-five or thirty
years ago. What share the kindergarten may have had in this retardment
of intellectual development is a question which deserves
investigation. Messrs. McLellan and Dewey, in their work on The
Psychology of Number (International Education Series), say (page 154):
"We have known the seven-year-old 'head boy' of a kindergarten,
conducted by a noted kindergarten teacher, who could not recognize a
quantity of three things without counting them by ones.... There is
surely something lacking either in the kindergarten as a preparation
for the primary school, or in the primary school as a continuation of
the kindergarten, when a child, after full training in the
kindergarten, together with two years' work in the primary school, is
considered able to undertake nothing (in arithmetic) beyond the number
twenty." These authors enter into a very elaborate analysis of the
number concept, and lay down with extreme care what they conceive to
be the best lines of approach to the youthful mind in the teaching of
arithmetic. It seems to us, however, that the number concept will dawn
upon the youthful mind without much effort on the part of teachers
when the time arrives for it to be of use. In most childish games the
element of number is involved. The smallest girl with a skipping rope
will get into the way of counting her skips with a more or less
distinct conception of the difference between one number and another.
So in the matter of "turns" in any game in which two or more are
engaged: if one child wants to have more "turns" than it is entitled
to, the others have to be very young indeed not to protest. In a
tug-of-war with, say, four on each side, the addition of a fifth to
one side without permission would make trouble in the camp. When
candies are being distributed the arithmetical sense is generally
keenly alive.

We conclude by commending Miss Carter's article to the careful
consideration of all who are interested in educational problems. She
writes with a certain tinge of vexation, and, without meaning it, may
have somewhat forced the case against her kindergarten children. The
Atlantic Monthly deserves credit, we must add, for the many able and
timely articles which it has lately been publishing on educational
topics--articles stamped by the breadth of thought and high culture
which are characteristic of our contemporary, and eminently adapted to
assist in delivering our educational methods from bondage to a
mechanical routine, and bringing them nearer to the simplicity and
freedom of Nature.


_IS FREEDOM LIMITED BY CLIMATE?_

Since the United States turned its ambition toward the tropics, the
question as to whether its political institutions can be extended to
the inhabitants there has been widely discussed. As might be expected,
the philanthropic advocates of expansion have insisted that "the
blessings of freedom and civilization" are not limited by latitude or
longitude. Any other position would, of course, have involved them in
the charge of inconsistency and hypocrisy. But certain philosophic
expansionists, as they may be politely called, have taken the opposite
view. "It is a cardinal fact," they say, quoting the language of a
recent essay of Mr. Benjamin Kidd, "that in the tropics the white man
lives and works only as a diver lives and works under water....
Neither physically, morally, nor politically can he be acclimatized in
the tropics." Still quoting his language, they say again that "a
clearer insight into the laws that have shaped the course of human
evolution must bring us to see that the process which has gradually
developed the energy, enterprise, and social efficiency of the race
northward, and which has left less richly endowed in this respect the
people inhabiting the regions where the conditions of life are
easiest, is no passing accident, nor the result of circumstances
changeable at will, but part of the cosmic order of things which we
have no power to alter."

Whether Mr. Kidd recognizes the odious significance of his captivating
speculation or not, it is certainly a plea and an apology for slavery
and political despotism in the tropics. Most welcome will it be to all
those nations and people of easy conscience and measureless greed that
now hold in bondage of greater or less intensity millions of the
inhabitants of that rich and splendid region. But there is reason to
believe that it must be relegated to the limbo of a kindred and
popular superstition. Within the past year much has been said about
the genius of the Anglo-Saxon for freedom and the ethnic incapacity of
the Latins for that boon of civilization. Even so great a scholar as
Guizot encourages this extraordinary theory. Again and again does he
point out in his History of Civilization how the spirit of freedom may
be traced to the Teutonic hordes that swarmed the forests of Germany.
He does so despite the overwhelming evidence against him to be found
in his own pages even. In apology for his misinterpretation of social
phenomena there can be urged his ignorance of the law of evolution and
of the hardly less important law of the militant origin of despotism
and the pacific origin of freedom. No such apology can, however, be
made in behalf of Mr. Kidd, or of any other apostle of imperialism.
Not only have they at command all the generalizations of social
science, but all the facts upon which those generalizations are based,
to prove that neither climate nor race is a limitation upon freedom.

If climate determined the character of the political institutions of a
people, many questions would be suggested at once that would be beyond
solution. Why, for instance, should a certain freedom have existed in
Athens, and the most intolerable despotism in Sparta? Again, why
should there be despotism in Russia and Germany as well as in Morocco
and Egypt? Another series of questions equally perplexing can be
raised. Why should there be more freedom in England to-day than six
hundred or even one hundred years ago? The climate has not changed in
the interval. Why should the institutions of Spain in the thirteenth
century have been more liberal than in the seventeenth? Why was it
that the freedom that existed in Germany before the Thirty Years' War
had virtually ceased to exist at the Peace of Westphalia? Here also
the climate had not changed. Why, finally, was there a reaction toward
despotism in France after the French Revolution, in Germany after the
disturbances of 1848, in England after the Crimean War, and in the
United States after the rebellion? The only satisfactory answer to
these questions is to be found in the fact that militant activities
always lead to despotism, and pacific activities always to freedom.
When people get into war, the central power must exercise all the
authority over life and property essential to success in battle. The
impulse thus given to despotism spreads to every part of the social
fabric. When people are devoted to the pursuits of peace, the forces
that make for freedom transform their ideas, feelings, morals, and
institutions, political, industrial, and social.

Whether despotism exists, as Mr. Kidd and his followers assume, among
all the indigenous populations of the tropics, only a careful
investigation of the subject would permit one to say. But that it
must, as they contend, always exist there, none of the laws of social
evolution gives the slightest warrant. Wherever it does exist, it had
the same origin that it had in England, and in obedience to the same
forces of peace and industry that operated against it in that country,
it must pass away. The struggles between clans and tribes for the
possession of desirable territory, or for the capture of food or
slaves, or for the gratification of predatory and belligerent
instincts, gave rise to the permanent chief, to the ruling hierarchy,
and to all the other characteristics of a militant society. The degree
of heat or humidity or the luxuriant vegetation of the tropics had no
more to do with this political organization than the degree of cold,
or the dryness of the atmosphere, or the comparative poverty of the
soil of some of the Western States with the similar political
organization of the Indians that roamed over them. None of these
physical characteristics can prevent the play of those forces that
drive people eventually to the adoption of that form of social
organization that will best promote their happiness. As the social
philosophy of evolution shows, the social organization best fitted for
this purpose is the one where the largest individual freedom prevails.
Since the abolition of slavery and serfdom and many other forms of
despotism has been found necessary for the best interests of society
in Europe, we have a right to believe that the abolition of the same
forms of despotism will be found necessary for the best interests of
society in the tropics.

It is true that in the tropics the white man has found it
uncomfortable to work, and has often reduced the indigenes to a kind
of slavery. But that either is inevitable and unavoidable because of
the laws of social evolution, or any more than a temporary reversion,
there is no reason for holding. Alfred Russel Wallace, who spent
twelve years in the tropics, says in a recent article that the white
man can and does work in every part of them. If he does not work, it
is simply for the same reason that he does not work in Europe or the
United States--namely, because he does not have to. When, however,
necessity lays its heavy hands on him, driving him to earn his living
by the sweat of his brow, he does it in the tropical region quite as
well as he does in the temperate. That is shown particularly in
Queensland. But when natives can be reduced to slavery the crime is
committed with slight compunction, and defended on the same ground
that it was defended in the South and elsewhere. The time must come,
however, as it came in Brazil and in other countries where slave labor
was found too wasteful and demoralizing, when it will be displaced
with free labor. The time must come, too, when free institutions will
be found as essential under the equator as farther north. Without them
social evolution can not reach its highest point, nor man attain to
his greatest happiness, a state that he is always seeking, no matter
where he lives.




Scientific Literature.


SPECIAL BOOKS.

The famous discovery in Java, by Dubois, of the skullcap, femur, and
two teeth in the upper Tertiary rocks has led to many interesting
discussions, among which was a paper read by Ernst Haeckel before the
International Congress of Zoölogists, held in Cambridge, England, last
year. In this paper Haeckel contended that in these remains we had at
last the long-sought-for missing link.[A] This paper excited much
interest, which led to a request for its publication. The intelligent
public, without knowing much about the value of the osteological
points under discussion, were ready to grant that here indeed was the
missing link, since the highest authorities in science were divided in
opinion as to whether the remains belonged to a very low member of the
human race or a very high member of the manlike apes. The conclusion
would naturally follow that it made but little difference whether the
remains proved to be those of man or monkey, as here was a creature so
intermediate in structure that it stood on the dividing line, so to
speak. In this little book Haeckel presents the old evidences as to
the structural similarities between man and the higher apes, and
places the Java remains (_Pithicanthropus erectus_) as the last link
in the chain of descent. He also traces the ancestors of the apes
through the mammalian series down, step by step, to the lowest
vertebrates, and on through the invertebrates to the lowest forms of
life. The suggestions are in many cases hypothetical yet instructive,
as showing the possible lines of descent.

The unaccountable attitude of the distinguished Virchow in the
presence of these remains is in harmony with his uncompromising and,
one might say, unreasoning attitude in regard to the derivative
theory. Haeckel shows this up very clearly in the following, which we
quote: "Virchow went to the Leyden Congress with the set purpose of
disproving that the bones found by Dubois belonged to a creature which
linked together apes and man. First, he maintained that the skull was
that of an ape, while the thigh belonged to man. This insinuation was
at once refuted by the expert paleontologists, who declared that
without the slightest doubt the bones belonged to one and the same
individual. Next, Virchow explained that certain exostoses or growths
observable on the thigh proved its human nature, since only under
careful treatment the patient could have healed the original injury.
Thereupon Professor Marsh, the celebrated paleontologist, exhibited a
number of thigh bones of wild monkeys which showed similar exostoses,
and had healed without hospital treatment. As a last argument the
Berlin pathologist declared that the deep constriction behind the
upper margin of the orbits proved that the skull was that of an ape,
as such never occurred in man. It so happened that a few weeks later
Professor Nehring, of Berlin, demonstrated exactly the same formation
on a human prehistoric skull received by him from Santos, in Brazil."

       *       *       *       *       *

Mr. _Russell_ expresses a hope that the review of some of the
characteristics of rivers given in one of the chapters of his _Rivers
of North America_[B] may stimulate a desire in American students "to
know more of the many and varied charms of their native land." The
study of rivers is an alluring one, whether pursued upon the little
local stream of one's neighborhood or upon the grand rivers that form
systems and determine geographical districts; whether made with the
assistance of a fishing-rod or of a steamboat. It can not fail to be
promoted by Mr. Russell's instructive book, which the local student or
the excursionist may consult with profit, while the geographer and
geologist will find it a convenient manual. A river, when we come to
think of it, means a great deal. Economically, it is the most valuable
topographical feature a country can possess; geologically and
geographically, it is a result of prominent features of the earth's
structure, and is the cause of modifications in its surface which in
time may revolutionize the topographical conditions and produce
climatic and physical changes. All these characteristics of rivers are
systematically and comprehensively set forth in Mr. Russell's book,
where the life-history of the stream is presented, from its beginning
in a little mountain torrent or hillside rill, through its course as
it descends to the plain, wearing and tearing and deepening its
channel. In the plain its character and action are modified under the
new conditions in which it finds itself, and gradually, as it
approaches its mouth, it deposits, whereas it had torn away at its
beginning, and shows contrasts quite as marked as those between youth
and old age. Rivers have their growth in time, too, and a stream that
has been carrying on its work for long ages presents different
characteristics throughout its course from one that comes fresh to its
task, and these differences are pointed out. We are told, too, how
rivers grow, drawing new affluents to themselves and extending their
sources backward, and how when the sources of streams on different
sides of a watershed approach on the summit, there is a struggle for
the mastery. These are only a few of the new suggestions which the
book offers us. Coming to the more matter-of-fact details, the laws
governing streams and their course; the influence of inequalities and
the hardness of rocks, especially on riverside scenery; and the office
of rivers as carriers of material in suspension and in solution, are
considered; then their deposits, under various heads and aspects, and
the effects of changes in the elevation of the land, of variations in
the load of material and of changes of climate upon them; the origin
and characteristics of stream terraces and stream development, the
topics concerning which are too many and varied to bear more than a
passing reference. The more salient characteristics of American rivers
are discussed as to the nine drainage slopes--the Atlantic, St.
Lawrence, Hudson Bay, Arctic, Bering, Pacific, Great Basin, Gulf, and
Caribbean--each slope presenting its own general characteristics, with
varieties in detail almost as numerous as the rivers. The whole is
briefly summarized in the last chapter, The Life History of a River.
We have given merely the tamest inventory of only a part of the topics
of Mr. Russell's book. As the subject is treated by the author with
careful attention to specific features, as the magnitude of our river
systems is indicated, and as rivers with different or contrasting
characteristics--the St. Lawrence and the Colorado, for example--are
compared with one another, the subject takes on an aspect that is
really grand.


FOOTNOTES:

[A] The Last Link. Our Present Knowledge of the Descent of Kan. By
Ernst Haeckel. Adam and Charles Black. 1898.

[B] Rivers of North America. A Reading Lesson for Students of
Geography and Geology. By Israel C. Russell. New York: G. P. Putnam's
Sons. Pp. 327. Price, $2.


GENERAL NOTICES.

An unfulfilled intention entertained by two successive prosectors of
the London Zoölogical Society--the late Professor Garrod and the late
W. A. Forbes--of writing a treatise on bird anatomy, is carried out in
the present work[A] by their successor, _Frank E. Beddard_. Professor
Garrod had nearly completed an account of the Anatomy of the Fowl,
which was to be followed by a presentation of the anatomical
characters of the different groups. Professor Forbes died before he
was able to add anything to the manuscripts left by Professor Garrod.
In the instance of the present work the detailed account of _Gallus_,
with which Professor Garrod intended to preface his book, has been
rendered unnecessary by Dr. Shufeldt's monograph on the Raven, dealing
with one particular bird type. Accepting this as a sufficient
presentation of that feature of the subject, Mr. Beddard begins with a
general sketch of bird structure, purposely avoiding histological
detail and the elaborate description of anatomical facts, which
in the present state of our knowledge are not of great use in
classification. The main part of the book is the account of the
structure of the different groups of birds, which is treated of to a
considerable extent; and a large number of facts, some of which are
recorded for the first time, are incorporated in the systematic part
of the book. While all the principal facts pertaining to the subject
are believed to have been given, and nothing of importance to have
been left out, references are made in each section to most of the
memoirs already published. The majority of the facts of bird structure
have been verified by the author, especially those relating to
osteology and anatomy, and he has drawn liberally on the notebooks of
his two predecessors. The book gives first an account of the general
structure of birds; next of the reproductive and renal organs, the
circulatory, respiratory, and muscular systems, osteology, brain and
nervous system, and affinities of birds, and, finally, the
classification.

_Bush Fruits_[B] is the first of a proposed series of monographs on
the various types of American fruits, to be published under the
editorial direction of Prof. L. H. Bailey. Its purpose is to present
both the practical and the technical phases of all the important
questions concerned in the cultivation and domestication of the fruits
that grow on bushes; and the attempt is made to present these two
sides separate from the details of history, botany, and entomology, so
that the practical reader may be introduced at once to the information
he is seeking. The aim is made to treat general truths and principles
rather than mere details of practice, leaving the reader to think out
and solve the local problems for himself. The author, Mr. _F. W.
Card_, who presented the work originally as a Cornell University
thesis, was first a bush-grower, and then a student and teacher,
acquiring first the practice and then the theory. The fruits treated
of are raspberries, blackberries, dewberries, currants, gooseberries,
buffalo berry, gounie, huckleberries, Juneberries, the cranberry,
barberry, and sand cherry--all, as to their important types, except
the currants, evolutions from the species of our own woods. A useful
list of American books on bush fruits is given in the appendix.

_The History of the World, from the Earliest Historical Time to the
Year 1898_,[C] is the latest addition to the Concise Knowledge
Library, "a series of volumes on great subjects, containing in an
abridged form a wealth of exact information which can be thoroughly
relied upon by the student, and yet of such a popular character as to
meet the needs of the general reader." This compact volume of 790
pages presents a complete survey of the world's history. After a brief
introduction describing the various races that have furthered
civilization, ancient history proper begins with the Egyptians, the
people of whom we possess the earliest records, and who were the first
to emerge out of the darkness of prehistoric times. Closely connected
with them, both by racial affinities and political ties, were the
other great empires in the southwestern part of Asia that one after
the other rose, flourished, and fell into decay. The interesting part
of the book here is the constant reference to the familiar facts of
the Bible, the connection of the known with the unknown. The rise and
development of Greece and Rome, following in due course, bring us down
to the middle ages. Mediæval history has for its stage Europe, and for
its argument the upbuilding of the states on which our modern
political institutions rest. Modern history, dating from the discovery
of America, then turns the eyes of the nations westward, to found
empires beyond the sea. Nor is the East forgotten. Asia, the cradle of
man, and Africa, where he first rose into consciousness of himself and
recorded his deeds, again claim the historian's attention. But now it
is China and Japan on the one continent, and the conquests and
colonies of the Europeans on the other. Neither is the country
youngest in civilization, Australasia, passed by. And the history of
all these countries, whether east or west, is brought down to date.
Even our recent war with Spain is briefly told. Indeed, the value of
the book as a work of reference lies in the fact that it encompasses
_all_ the world's history, giving in compact, handy form the chief
data in the progress of the human race, that otherwise must be sought
for in a dozen different places. Another valuable feature of the book,
attainable only on the plan of rigid selection of salient points, is
the connection between the different peoples. Their interdependence,
the sequence of their appearance on the stage of action, and their
decline, are most vividly realized in such a bird's-eye view. The book
has maps and a full index.

The essays comprised in Mr. _William M. Bryant's_ volume entitled
_Life, Death, and Immortality, and Kindred Essays_[D] have developed,
as he expresses it, one by one during a number of years past. The term
developed is a happy one, for the papers were certainly not made to
order, but read like results of systematic, continuous thinking. They
concern the religious aspect of human nature. The author thinks that
negative criticism has for the time being exhausted its resources, and
the time has come for further positive interpretation of the
fundamental conceptions of the Christian doctrine as to man's nature
and destiny. A reference to a few of the points in the first essay,
which gives the title to the book, will afford a view of the author's
method. Men of science are constantly insisting that the total
quantity of energy is changeless, and nothing can be added to it and
nothing taken away. What are the "total quantity of energy" and the
"great first cause" but the same, to the activity of which is due
every phase of reality? This being changeless, it could not at some
period "have created a world and afterward left it to spin on of its
own accord 'without interference.'" Mind is a form of energy,
consequently indestructible and undying, and the question of
immortality is reduced to the form "whether in respect of man's
essential nature as a thinking unit, death can ever be more than
transition from one to another grade of life." Other essays are on
Oriental Religions, Church Organization, The Heresy of Non-Progressive
Orthodoxy, Christian Ethics and those of other religions, and
Eternity.

Professor _Merriman's_ _Elements of Sanitary Engineering_[E] is a
thoroughly practical treatise setting forth the principal rules and
laws relating to sanitation, both individual and municipal, as it is
practiced to-day. A brief historical introduction is followed by a
classification of diseases, and a general consideration of such
questions as filth and disease, impure air and disease, drinking water
and disease, etc. The second chapter takes up the question of the
purification of water. Chapter III discusses the practical aspects,
for a municipality, of water-supply systems. Consumption of water,
capacity of storage reservoirs, pipe lines, pumping engines, tanks and
stand pipes and street mains are among the special headings. Sewerage
systems are next dealt with. A discussion of questions connected with
the disposal of garbage and sewage forms the fifth and last chapter of
the book. An item which adds value to the volume is the series of
exercises and problems, practically applying the laws set forth, which
follows each chapter.

_An Epitome of Human Histology_[F] has been written by Mr. _Weysse_ to
meet the difficulty in which the conscientious student of microscopic
anatomy is placed who finds himself in possession of a great many
isolated facts about the minute structure of the body, but with rather
an indefinite conception of the relation of those facts to one another
and of the subject as a whole. In the writing the author has sought to
present all the facts that are of real importance to the student; to
express them in the briefest and clearest language, omitting whatever
is not strictly required; and to arrange them in such a way that the
reader, in considering any organ, may, if he will, actually sketch
each part as he proceeds, and thus make a diagrammatic plan or picture
of the entire structure. The book is not for idle students, but for
serious ones, and it is not a text-book or intended to take the place
of one; and it can serve its true purpose only when used by students
who have had laboratory practice as well as lectures in histology, and
have thus examined the actual structures.

In his work on _Elementary Botany_,[G] Professor _Atkinson_ introduces
the method which he has found successful in teaching beginners. Many
of the newer botanical text-books, in reacting against the plan of
presenting first the higher types of plant life, overwhelm the student
not only with a multitude of unfamiliar forms, but demand from him
powers of comparison and analysis that are generally the result of
much scientific discipline. In this book the pupil receives some
preliminary guidance in habits of correct induction. By studying the
processes of transpiration, nutrition, growth, and irritability in
plants belonging to higher as well as lower groups, he learns the
universality of these life principles, and is led to see the
foundations for sound generalization. This the author considers vastly
more important than the knowledge of individual plants. The student,
however, in this investigation becomes acquainted with special forms
among the lower plants, and is thus prepared to take up morphology
systematically. This topic begins with the study of Spirogyra, and
ends with an outline of twenty lessons in the angiosperms. The final
third of the book is devoted to ecology, the study of plants in their
natural surroundings and of their modifying factors--climate, soil,
topography, etc. The illustrations, which are above the average
throughout the work, are in this division exceedingly good. The
descriptive text of the same section is entertaining enough to be used
as a class reader, and would interest those unfamiliar with botany.
There are several slight errors to be corrected in a future edition.
In the table of measures a kilometre is made to equal one hundred
instead of one thousand metres, and the references to plates are
occasionally wrong. On page 345 the reference should be 449, and on
page 349 should be 458 in place of 457. In describing pollination of
the skunk cabbage, the words "rub off" are ambiguous. The uninitiated
might suppose that the insect obtained pollen from the stigmas instead
of depositing it there. The book is not intended for recitation, but
for reference and as a guide in study. It is supplied with an appendix
upon the collection and preservation of material, and an index.

A notice of a book[H] of this nature is justified in this column,
since it contains much that will be of interest to the student of
ethnology, folklore, and cognate subjects. It is interesting to get a
glimpse of matters pertaining to social customs, ways of thinking, and
the occurrences which animated these ways among the Japanese a
thousand and more years ago. The author says, "It is a remarkable and,
I believe, an unexampled fact that a very large and important part of
the best literature which Japan has produced was written by women."

The preparation of his _Elementary Text-Book of Botany_[I] was
undertaken by Mr. _Vines_ to meet a demand which appeared to exist for
a less bulky and expensive volume than his Students' Text-Book. A more
important feature than the diminution of the bulk is claimed in the
simplification which the contents have undergone from the omission of
certain difficult and still debatable topics. The usual divisions into
morphology, anatomy, physiology, and systematic botany are followed;
but the caution is appended that it must not be forgotten that these
are all parts of one subject, different methods of studying one
object--the plant. Hence they must be pursued together. "For instance,
the morphology of the leaf can not be profitably studied without a
knowledge of its structure and functions; and it is also important to
know what is the systematic position of each of the various plants
whose leaves afford the material for study. In a word, the student
should not attempt to read the book straight through from the
beginning as if it were a novel. On the contrary, he may begin with
any one of the four parts as his main subject; but that part must be
studied in close relation with the other three parts"; and this method
of proceeding is facilitated by the insertion of a large number of
cross-references in the text.

A satisfactory account is given by _C. Francis Jenkins_ in
_Animated Pictures_[J] of the development and present state of
chronophotography, or the art of "conveying by persistence of vision a
counterfeit impression of objects in motion through the display in
rapid succession of a series of related pictures." The story shows
very clearly that this, like most other inventions of consequence, is
no sudden discovery, but is the culmination of a very long series of
experiments. The principle of it is embodied in the toy, the zoetrope,
the origin of which is not known, though a citation from Lucretius
indicates that something of the kind existed in his time. With the
discovery of instantaneous photography, a new application of the
principle of the zoetrope was found. Muybridge and Marey were pioneers
in this development with their photographs of the motions of animals
valuable in sciences. Since their work was begun the photographic
processes and apparatus have been greatly improved. Mr. Jenkins
forecasts a brilliant and useful future for the art, which he hopes
will be prosecuted along the line of other than its present most
popular uses. The book is practical as well as historical and
prophetic, and contains an account of Mr. Jenkins's phantoscope as the
first successful "moving picture projecting apparatus," for which he
received the Elliott Cresson medal from the Franklin Institute.

_The Metric System of Weights and Measures_, prepared by Mr. _A. D.
Risteen_, and published by the Hartford Steam-Boiler Inspection
Company, Hartford, Connecticut (price, $1.25), gives what has long
been wanted--a neat volume, convenient for the pocket and durably
bound, furnishing tables for instantly converting all the metrical
units up to one hundred of each into those of the English weights and
measures, and _vice versa_. Calculation, being needed only for the
numbers above one hundred, for which there are already short devices,
is reduced to the lowest possible limit.

_Terrestrial Magnetism_, an international quarterly journal, edited by
_L. A. Bauer_ and _Thomas French, Jr._, and published at the
University of Cincinnati, is the recognized organ of the International
Conference on Terrestrial Magnetism and Atmospheric Electricity. The
September number, 1898, contains the proceedings of the conference,
which met in connection with the last Bristol meeting of the British
Association. It contains in full the welcoming address of Prof. W. E.
Ayrton, the opening address of A. W. Rücker, president of the
conference, and ten of the papers read at the meeting.

The name of Prof. _John Trowbridge_ as author of such a book as
_Philip's Experiments; or, Physical Science at Home_ (D. Appleton and
Company, $1) is a sure guarantee of its scientific value. The author
has given a chapter substantially out of his own experience, for he
says his taste for science and for drawing were stimulated by his
father in the manner here described. His object in publishing it is
"to show that a few moments devoted each day at home to simple
investigations can result in habits of self-reliance in the
acquirement of a modern language and in the study of the art of
drawing." He endeavors also to show how to cultivate a taste for
mathematics by studying practical problems in surveying and in sailing
a boat; and how much a parent can accomplish in the formation of a
son's tastes without special knowledge, and without the expenditure of
much time and money. The account is in the form of letters from the
father to a friend, describing his experiments with his son Philip in
this method of teaching. He has always cultivated fellowship with the
boy; and, finding him inclined to improve and add to the designs on
the wall-paper, puts objects to be drawn and copied in his way, and
induces him to go out and draw from Nature. So the boy learns to study
forms and observe. To teach language he gives him regularly the daily
German newspaper, to pick out what he can from it, and joins him in
the sport. In a similar way he introduces Philip to surveying and
physics, and other branches of science. The plan is a success; Philip
attracts attention by the ingenuity which his training has enabled him
to develop, and going to college is graduated with credit and in
possession of a live as well as a book knowledge of what he has
studied.

In _The Story of the English_ (American Book Company) the more
prominent facts of English history from the beginning to the present
time are related by _H. A. Guerber_ in simple, brief narratives. A
commendable feature of the book is the insistence in the preface of
the essential oneness of the English and American people--an idea that
can hardly be too sedulously cultivated. The author's principal object
has been to render pupils so familiar with the prominent characters of
English history that they shall henceforth seem like old
acquaintances, and, in addition, to make the story attractive; but it
is a fact to be regretted that he has regarded the growth of English
law and liberty and the changes in religion as too unintelligible and
uninteresting to be more than touched upon "very briefly and in the
most simple way." The growth of law and liberty are the very things
that it is most important to fix the attention of children upon, and
it is only because they have suffered comparative neglect in the
education of teachers in favor of stories of war and intrigue that
they are not the most intelligible and interesting branch of the
subject.

Prof. _Francis E. Nipher_, of Washington University, having been
called upon to present a paper to an educational convention on the
Greater Efficiency of Science Instruction, undertook to show how such
changes as were adapted to promote that end might be accomplished
without radical departures from present methods; and the _Introduction
to Graphical Algebra_ (Henry Holt & Co., New York, 60 cents) is the
result of that effort. The author believes that the study of algebra
and geometry as distinct subjects having no relation to each other
gives the pupil a false idea of the intellectual situation of to-day;
that by injecting here and there into the ordinary instruction in
algebra such material as is found in his book, new meaning will be
given to the operations involved in the solution of equations, and new
interest in the subject may be aroused; and that as scientific
investigators are making much use of other methods than Euclid's,
while the study of his geometry should not be banished from our
schools, some of the time given to it might be usefully spent in
elementary analytical geometry or graphical algebra. The treatise is
brief and convenient in size and composed in clear language.

_The New Man, a Chronicle of the Modern Time_ (Philadelphia: The
Levytype Company), is a story written by _Ellis Paxson Oberholzer_
with reference to that expansion of women's education and sphere of
action which is suggested by the phrase "the new woman." In it "the
new woman is developed to her logical conclusion, and the new man as
he must needs become under the reaction of her influence," and it
deals with "men and women imbued with the modern university spirit,
whose emotional natures are developed under the scientific impulse of
our time, and whose thoughts and actions reflect that impulse in the
midst of all the varied realities of our modern life."

_Armageddon_ (Rand, McNally & Co.), to the plot of which the author's
name of _Stanley Waterloo_ seems curiously appropriate, is possibly a
specimen of a class of literature to which we are likely to be treated
in abundance for a few years to come. The spoliation of the Spanish
Egyptians by the Americans having come to a halt with the gain of
Puerto Rico and the Philippines, the great Anglo-American alliance
enters upon the view and is made a fact, though informally. The two
nations together build the Nicaragua Canal, and are about to celebrate
its completion, when they are anticipated by the precipitation of the
war of the nations through the simultaneous occurrence of a number of
slight international quarrels in different parts of the world.
Germany, Russia, the Scandinavians, and the Latins are pitted on one
side, and the British and Americans, assisted by the British colonies
and the Japanese, on the other; and the battle of the combined fleets
occurs near the Canaries. The hero of the story has invented an air
ship which carries terrible explosives to be dropped from a great
height into the midst of the enemy. This engine does its work at the
decisive moment, and then follows the grab game of negotiations, in
which might rules, and Germany joins the Anglo-Saxon alliance against
the rest of the world. Finally, the air-ship engine of destruction has
rendered war henceforth forever impossible.

Mr. _James Reid Cole_, president of a classical and military school at
Dallas, Texas, has published under the title of _Miscellany_ what is
substantially a picture or transcript of his own life. It contains a
variety of articles--literary essays, school addresses, and even
schoolboy compositions--the chief interest of which is to the author
and his close friends. Other papers, such as A Bird's-eye View of
Johnston's Surrender, the sketches of the Life of Lieutenant C. C.
Cole, the Looking Backward over the course of the author's own life,
and political and legislative speeches may have a more general value
as partial reflections of the times to which they relate, more
intimate than are usually to be derived from ordinary sketches and
histories.

The publications of the _New York Academy of Sciences_ now consist of
two series--the _Annals_ (8vo) and the _Memoirs_ (4to). The
Transactions, in which the shorter papers and business reports have
hitherto appeared, are abolished, and the matter appears in the
Annals. This publication, which was begun in 1824, contains the
scientific contributions and reports of researches, together with the
reports of meetings. The complete volumes will hereafter coincide with
the calendar year. Vol. X, Nos. 1 to 12, contains three papers by H.
S. Davis and one by Frank Schesinger based on the Rutherfurd
photographs of the stars; The Nature and Origin of Stipules, by A. A.
Tyler, and an examination of the Ascidian Half-Embryo, by H. E.
Crampton, Jr. Vol. XI, Part II, contains the annual address of
retiring President J. J. Stevenson, February 28, 1898, on the Debt of
the World to Pure Science, and six articles on special subjects in
biology.

The Commissioner of Labor was authorized by Congress in 1895 to make
an investigation, so far as it could be done within the limits of the
regular appropriations to his department, relative to the economic
aspects of the liquor traffic. He interpreted such an investigation to
include the consideration of monetary conditions; of the agricultural
and other products used in the production of liquors; of the
manufacture of liquors as a distinct industry; of transportation,
consumption, and the traffic in them; of the revenue derived from them
and the laws regulating its collection; and of the experience and
practice of employers in relation to the use of intoxicants. In some
of these phases of the subject the facts were not separable from those
relating to other matters; in others, they were to be found in the
reports of other departments; and original inquiry was necessary only
with reference to the last three items of the category. The results of
this inquiry are given in the _Twelfth Annual Report of the
Commissioner of Labor, 1897_, under the heading of _Economic Aspects
of the Liquor Problem_.

_A New Story of the Stars_ is an essay in which _A. W. Bickerton_,
professor of chemistry and physics in Christ Church College, New
Zealand, sets forth a theory of the origin of universes or of parts of
universes by impact. Nebulæ already existing--but how existing we are
not informed--careering through space, are supposed to collide,
whereby heat and light are developed. They may meet in face, and would
then probably coalesce, but more likely the impact would be a grazing
one, when three bodies would be produced; a portion, or slice, as the
author calls it, of each of the colliding bodies would be sheared off,
forming an intensely hot and bright new star, while the original
masses would go on their course, having the parts that had been in
contact heated and made brilliant, so as to present in their
revolutions the aspect of variable stars. The author's attention was
drawn to this subject by the appearance of a new star in Cygnus in
1877. A little while afterward Nova Aurigæ appeared, presenting
exactly the phenomena he had predicted. Professor Bickerton writes as
one who understands his subject; there is nothing in his speculations,
so far as we have observed, that grates harshly with known facts, and
it can be read, as he reads it, to account plausibly for some of the
facts--just as can several other theories of the formation of the
universe which are still only speculations. The problem is yet far
from comprehension, and is one of the legacies which the nineteenth
century is destined to bequeath to the twentieth. (Published at Christ
Church, New Zealand.)


FOOTNOTES:

[A] The Structure and Classification of Birds. By Frank E. Beddard.
London and New York: Longmans, Green & Co. Pp. 548.

[B] Bush Fruits. A Horticultural Monograph of Raspberries,
Blackberries, Dewberries, Currants, Gooseberries, and other Shrublike
Fruits. By Fred W. Card. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 537.
Price, $1.50.

[C] The History of the World, from the Earliest Historical Time to the
Year 1898. By Edgar Sanderson. With Maps. New York: D. Appleton and
Company. 1898.

[D] Life, Death, and Immortality, and Kindred Essays. By William M.
Bryant. New York: The Baker & Taylor Company.

[E] Elements of Sanitary Engineering. By Mansfield Merriman. New York:
John Wiley & Sons. London: Chapman & Hall, Limited. Pp. 216. $2.

[F] An Epitome of Human Histology. By Arthur W. Weysse. New York:
Longmans, Green & Co. Pp. 90. Price, $1.50.

[G] Elementary Botany. By George Francis Atkinson, Ph. D. New York:
Henry Holt & Co. Pp. 444. Price, $1.25.

[H]: A History of Japanese Literature. By W. G. Aston, Late Japanese
Secretary to H. M. Legation, Tokyo. D. Appleton and Company.

[I] An Elementary Text-Book of Botany. By Sydney H. Vines. London:
Swan, Sonnenschein & Co. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 611.
Price, $2.25.

[J] Animated Pictures. An Exposition of the Historical Development of
Chronophotography, its Present Scientific Application and Future
Possibilities, and of the Methods and Apparatus employed in the
Entertainment of Large Audiences by Means of Projecting Lanterns to
give the Appearance of Objects in Motion. Washington, D. C.: C.
Francis Jenkins. Pp. 118, with plates.


PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.

Agricultural Experiment Stations. Bulletins and Reports. Connecticut:
Twenty-second Annual Report, for 1898, Part I, Fertilizers. Pp.
101.--Cornell University: No. 163. Three Important Fungous Diseases of
the Sugar Beet. By B. M. Duggar. Pp. 30; No. 164. Peach-Leaf Cure,
etc. By B. M. Duggar. Pp. 20.--Massachusetts Agricultural College
(Hatch Station): No. 58. Manurial Requirements of Crops. Pp 16.--New
Jersey: No. 135. Poisonous Plants. By Byron D. Halsted. Pp. 28.--North
Dakota Weather and Crop Service, Fifth Annual Report. B. H. Bronson,
section director. Pp. 78; Monthly Reports for October and November,
1898. Pp. 8 each.--Ohio: No. 96. The Army Worm and Other Insects. By
P. M. Webster and C. W. Mally. Pp. 26; No. 97. Some Diseases of Wheat
and Oats. By A. D. Selby. Pp. 32; No. 98. Small Fruits. By W. J.
Green. Pp. 146.--West Virginia: No. 53. Commercial Fertilizers. By J.
H. Stewart and B. H. Hite. Pp. 36.

American Asiatic Association, Journal of the. Vol. I, No. 5. John
Foord, editor. Pp. 16.

Ayer, N. W., and Son. American Newspaper Annual, 1899. Philadelphia.
Pp. 1400.

Berea Quarterly, February, 1899. Berea College, Kentucky. Pp. 28. 30
cents. $1 a year.

Berry, Arthur. A Short History of Astronomy. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons (University Series). Pp. 440. $1.50.

Bradford, Gamaliel. The Lesson of Popular Government. New York: The
Macmillan Company. 2 vols. Pp. 520 and 590. $4.

Brown, William Harvey. On the South African Frontier. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 430, with map. $3.

Buckley, Arabella B. The Fairy-Land of Science. New York: D. Appleton
and Company.

Clayton, C. Helm. Studies of Cyclonic and Anti-Cyclonic Phenomena with
Kites. Blue Hill (Massachusetts) Meteorological Observatory. Pp. 15,
with plates.

Force, General Manning F. General Sherman. New York: D. Appleton and
Company (Great Commanders Series). Pp. 353.

Guignet, E., and Gamier, Edouard. La Céramique, Ancienne et Modern
(Ceramics, Ancient and Modern). Paris: Félix Alcan. (Bibliothèque
Scientifique Internationale.) Pp. 311. 6 francs.

Gellé, Le Dr. M. E. L'Audition et ses Organes (Hearing and Its
Organs). Paris: Félix Alcan. (Bibliothèque Scientifique
Internationale.) Pp. 326. 6 francs.

Hancock, James Denton. The Louisiana Purchase treated in its Relations
to the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of
Independence. Pp. 8.

Herzberg, Henry. True _versus_ False Education. Pp. 20.

Hinsdale, Guy, M. D. Acromegaly. Detroit: William M. Warren. Pp. 88.
$1.50.

International Correspondence School, Scranton, Pennsylvania. Short
Courses in English Branches, Bookkeeping, Stenography, and Mechanical
and Ornamental Drawing. Pp. 16.

Jacobs, Joseph. The Story of Geographical Discovery. New York: D.
Appleton and Company. (Library of Useful Stories.) Pp. 200. 40 cents.

Kingsley, Mary H. West African Studies. New York: The Macmillan
Company. Pp. 633, with maps. $5.

Library Notes, Vol. IV, No. 16. Edited by Melvil Dewey. Simplified
Library School Rules. Pp. 72. Quarterly. 50 cents. $1 a year.

Lille, Société Photographique de. Le Nord Photographie. January, 1899.
(Sixth year.) Lille, France. Pp. 20.

Mason, William P. Examination of Water (Chemical and Bacteriological).
New York: John Wiley & Sons. Pp. 135. $1.25.

Macalaster, The. Monthly. February, 1899. St. Paul, Minnesota,
Macalaster College. Pp. 32. 15 cents. $1 a year.

Parsons, Frances Theodora. How to Know the Ferns. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons. Pp. 215. $1.50.

Rafinesque, C. S. Ichthyologia Ohioensis; or, Natural History of the
Fishes inhabiting the River Ohio and its Tributary Streams. A reprint
of the original, with life, etc. By R. Ellsworth Call. Cleveland,
Ohio: The Burrows Brothers Company. Pp. 175. $4.

Reprints. Ashmead, Albert S., M. D. No Evidence in America of
Pre-Columbian Leprosy. Pp. 10.--Grant, Sir James. The Alimentary Canal
and Human Decay In Relation to the Neurons. Pp. 8.--Hopkins, Thomas C.
Clays and Clay Industries of Pennsylvania; I, Clays of Western
Pennsylvania (in part). Pp. 183.--Howard, L. O. The Economic Status of
Insects as a Class. Pp. 33.--Jackman, Wilbur S. Constructive Work in
the Common Schools. Pp. 18.

Russell, Frank. Explorations in the Far North. University of Iowa. Pp.
290.

Schiavone, Mario. Il Principio della dirigibilita orizzontalie degli
aerostate ed Binaerostato (The Principle of the Horizontal
Dirigibility of Aërostats and the Binaërostat). Potenza, Italy. Pp.
48.

Schubert, Hermann. Mathematical Essays and Recreations. Translated by
T. J. McCormack. Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company. Pp. 149.
75 cents.

Scrutten, Percy E. Electricity in Town and Country Houses. Second
edition. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 148. $1.

Sloyd Bulletin No. 2, March, 1899. Boston: Sloyd Training School. Pp.
21.

Smithsonian Institution publications: Annual Report of the Board of
Regents to July, 1896. Pp. 727; do. to July, 1897. Pp. 686.--Bolton,
H. C. A Select Bibliography of Chemistry, 1492 to 1897. First
Supplement. Pp. 489.--Cook, O. F. African Diplopoda of the Genus
Pachybolus. Pp. 10, with plates.

Society of American Authors. Monthly Bulletin. March, 1899. Pp. 16.

United States Commissioner of Education (W. T. Harris). Report for
1896-'97, Vol. II. Pp. 1245.

Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: The
Macmillan Company. Pp. 400. $2.

Waddell, John. The Arithmetic of Chemistry. New York: The Macmillan
Company. Pp. 137. 90 cents.

Wickersham, James. Major Powell's Inquiry, "Whence came the American
Indians?" An Answer. Tacoma, Washington: Allen and Lamborn Printing
Company. Pp. 28.

Writt, Henry. Some Observations on the Fundamental Principles of
Nature. Chicago: P. O., Station N. Pp. 32. 25 cents.




Fragments of Science.


=Death of Professor Marsh.=--Othniel C. Marsh, professor of
paleontology in Yale University, and curator of the geological
collection of that institution, died of pneumonia at his home in New
Haven, Connecticut, March 18th. He had not been in good health for
several years, and succumbed to the effects of a cold which he had
caught before wholly recovering from a previous cold. A sketch of his
life up to that time, embracing the most active parts of his career as
a geological explorer, in which he gained great renown, was given,
with a portrait, in the Popular Science Monthly for September, 1878.
During the period that has intervened he made studies of the results
of his explorations and other geological work, and published papers of
very high scientific value. About a year ago he transferred his
extensive and famous collections at the Peabody Museum to the
university. These collections were among the finest of their kind in
the world, and were especially remarkable for their fossils of immense
animals exhumed from the Western plains. They were greatly admired by
Professor Gaudry, the eminent French geologist, who spoke of them in
terms of high praise in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ of October 15,
1898. It was through his efforts that the funds were obtained from
George Peabody, his uncle, for the construction of the Peabody Museum,
a part of which has been built. His health having apparently improved
for a few months previous to his death, he had been working with
renewed activity at the museum, and had recently written articles on
paleontological subjects. Having considerable means of his own, he
served the university without salary, and carried on his explorations
mostly at his own cost, paying large sums to assistants and for other
items in the work. He left ten thousand dollars to the National
Academy of Sciences, of which he was one of the founders and was for
several years president, and all of the rest of his estate, estimated
to be worth nearly one hundred thousand dollars, to Yale University.

=Popular Co-operation in Health Work.=--In a review of A Quarter
Century of Public Health Work in Michigan, Mr. Theodore R. MacClure,
chief clerk of the State Board of Health office, says that experience
in the State has indicated that it is necessary to have the
co-operation of the people if the dangerous communicable diseases are
to be restricted and prevented. In order to accomplish this result,
the State Board of Health has published leaflets relating to the modes
of spreading and the best methods for the restriction and prevention
of such diseases. These leaflets have been printed by tens of
thousands, and whenever a dangerous disease is reported to the central
office several copies of the leaflet relating to the disease in
question are usually sent to the local health officer. He is requested
to place one of these instructive publications with the family where
the disease exists, and a copy with each neighbor of the infected
premises. The instruction comes at a time when people are interested
to know about the disease in question, and in this way their general
co-operation is sought and secured. Citizens are thus educated and
become familiar with their duties in the premises, are taught wherein
the dangers lie and how to avoid them, and are prompted by the
strongest considerations to do their part in the matter.

=Death of Prof. Oliver Marcy.=--Dr. Oliver Marcy, professor of natural
science in Northwestern University, who died February 19th, in the
eightieth year of his age, was a native of Coleraine, Massachusetts;
was graduated from Wesleyan University in 1846, became teacher of
mathematics in Wilbraham Academy, Massachusetts, and later professor
of geology, etc., in that institution. In 1862 he was appointed
professor of geology in Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois,
but taught in addition, at times, other branches of science and even
some branches in other lines. He was twice acting president of the
university. In conjunction with Prof. Alexander Winchell, he prepared
a monograph on Fossils from the Niagara Limestone of Chicago, which
was read to the Boston Society of Natural History. In 1866 he was
naturalist to a Government expedition to the Bitter Root Mountains in
Idaho and Montana, in which he collected scientific material, and of
which he published an account in 1867. He wrote papers concerning the
geology of the shore of Lake Michigan and of the region about Chicago;
brought two fossil trees found in the university grounds to scientific
notice; and contributed considerably to geological publications. He
was curator to the natural history collection of his university for
nearly thirty years. Two fossil species and a mountain in Montana have
been named after him.

=Which is the Fittest to Survive?=--Prof. A. W. Rücker spoke in his
opening address at the recent meeting of the International Magnetic
Conference in Bristol, England, of what seems to be a law of Nature,
that the products of an organism are fatal to itself; in accordance
with which, he said, pure science is threatened by the very success of
its practical applications. The smoke of our cities blots the stars
from the vision of the astronomer, and now the science of terrestrial
magnetism is threatened by the artificial earth currents of the
electric railway. Prof. W. E. Ayrton, in his welcoming address, took
another view of the subject and answered the reference the electrical
engineers make to the principle of the survival of the fittest when
they are told of the ruin their wires are bringing upon magnetic
observatories--"So much the worse for the observatories"--"Can the
system of electric traction that has already destroyed the two most
important magnetic observatories in the United States and British
North America be the best and fittest to survive? Again, do we take
such care and spend such vast sums in tending the weak and nursing the
sick because we are convinced that they are the fittest to survive?
May it not be perhaps because we have an inherent doubt about the
justice of the survival of the strongest, or perhaps because even the
strongest of us feels compelled modestly to confess his inability to
pick out the fittest, that modern civilization encourages, _not_ the
destruction but the preservation of what has obvious weakness, on the
chance that it may have unseen strength? When the electrical engineer
feels himself full of pride at the greatness, the importance, and the
power of his industry, and when he is inclined to think slightingly of
the deflection of a little magnet compared with the whirl of his
one-thousand-horse-power dynamo, let him go and visit a certain dark
storeroom near the entrance hall of the Royal Institution, and while
he looks at some little coils there, ponder on the blaze of light
that has been shed over the whole world from the dimly lighted
cupboard in which these coils now lie. Then he may realize that while
the earth as a magnet has endured for all time, the earth as a tramway
conductor may at no distant date be relegated to the class of
temporary makeshifts, and that the raids of the feudal baron into the
agricultural fields of his neighbors were not more barbarous than the
alarms and excursions of the tramway engineer into the magnetic fields
of his friends."

=Teaching the Teachers.=--The following suggestive paragraph is taken
from the inaugural address of William Henry Preece, president of the
British Institution of Civil Engineers: "Our educational methods have
begun at the wrong end. We ought to teach the masters first and then
the men. Moreover, we have to teach the teachers and those who have
control of the purse-strings. The County Councils of England are
scarcely qualified as yet to discharge the very serious duty of
properly dealing with a question so few of them understand--though
many of them have tackled the matter manfully, especially the London
County Council, through its Technical Education Board, on which a
large proportion of co-opted experts have seats, who, by supporting
existing institutions, have contributed toward the supply of teachers.
But how are we to approach the masters? A fault once discovered is
halfway to repair. It is difficult to remove the scales from the eyes
of the man who has been successful in business and knows not of his
blindness; but the coming generation will be more enlightened, and the
future masters better educated. We are suffering from a lack of
competent teachers. A teacher who has had no training in the practical
world is worse than useless, for he imparts ideas derived from his
inner consciousness or from the false teaching of his own abstract
professor, which lead to mischief. In my own experience I have met
with very serious inconveniences from this cause. The ideal professor
of pure abstract science is a very charming personage, but he is a
very arrogant and dogmatic individual, and, being a sort of little
monarch in his own laboratory and lecture room, surrounded by devoted
subjects, his word is law, and he regards the world at large,
especially the practical world, as outside his domain and beneath his
notice. He is generally behind the age. These are not the men for
technical institutes. Such teachers should possess the diploma of this
institution."

=The People of India and the Missionaries.=--In the light of three
months' special observation, J. T. Sunderland has reviewed in the New
World Magazine the prospects of the success of Christian missions in
India. There are several causes that hinder their progress, among
which the author mentions as more important the number of Christian
sects and denominations; the character of the doctrines preached, in
that in many aspects they do not appeal to Hindu or Mohammedan faith
or modes of thought, and in some contradict them, and as to those
points are a serious hindrance to the progress of Christianity; and
the vices of many Europeans, creating a prejudice against their
professed religion that is not wholly contradicted by the testimonies
and examples of the missionaries and men of nobler stamp. To the last
objection the answer is easy, though it may not always be convincing,
that these wicked men sin not because they are natural products of
Christianity, but because they disobey it. A strong factor in
disarming prejudice against Christianity and winning favor for it is
the fact that through it, directly or indirectly, certain very
important kinds of good are coming to India--education, schools,
books, science, invention. The contact of India with Christian lands,
civilization, thought, and life, is steadily telling upon Indian
thought. Further, "it is to be said to the honor of all the Protestant
missions of India, at least, of whatever name, that they are helping,
instructing, and lifting up the lower classes, and offering them hopes
and prospects such as they could not have had under their old faiths.
This is much, very much." The very presence of the missionary in a
community is likely to be an enlightening influence. He is a man of
more than common education, and "has brought with him to India
something of the thought, the culture, the ideals of life, the habits
and customs of the Western world. He introduces higher standards of
living. He gives his influence in favor of better public sanitation,
better homes for the people, better streets and public buildings,
better public improvements generally. His home and family life, in
which the wife receives the same consideration as her husband, and the
daughters are educated with the same care as the sons, becomes a
valuable object lesson in the community where he dwells." The missions
as a whole are regarded by the author as an important factor in a
great religious evolution. The precise form and direction which this
evolution will take seem to be a matter yet to be determined.

=Weeds under Cultivation.=--For several years past the botanical
department of Michigan Agricultural College has maintained a "weed
garden," and has grown a hundred or more species of the most
troublesome weeds in plots. Some curious results from the experiments
are recorded by Prof. W. J. Beal in a paper read at the meeting, 1897,
of the Society for the Promotion of Agricultural Science. The most
vigorous and aggressive weeds seem to take on under cultivation the
weakness and capriciousness of delicate cultivated plants. "It is very
instructive," Professor Beal says, "to note how much better many of
these plants thrive when they get away from the spot where they have
been confined for from two to several years. Seedlings of Jamestown
weed were larger in the plantain bed than in their own. After three
years the plantain nearly ran out and _Amaranthus albus_ entirely
disappeared. One species of pigweed grew finely for two years, but
afterward made a small display; and another variety did not seem very
persistent for a plant that ranked among the weeds, but shied off from
its home ground 'as if searching for fresh fields.' Barnyard grass
(_Panicum crusgalli_) behaved like pigweed, and 'needed considerable
attention.' The little round-leaved mallow, which roots deeply about
rubbish piles in mellow soil, was grown of respectable proportions in
the garden with considerable difficulty, and with no more ease in the
bottom lands of other parts of the botanic garden. Considerable pains
is required every year to keep on hand even fairly well-grown
specimens of mullein. Knotgrass, which thrives with abuse and seems to
enjoy trampling by feet, was grown with difficulty in the plots.
'Insects prey upon it; rust causes it to dwindle and disappear.'
'Motherwort grows rank four feet high near the barnyard fence, and the
flowers are covered with bees, but when kept several years in the same
bed it goes off into the sulks as though neglected.' Shepherd's purse
is often disturbed by a parasitic fungus, and it is difficult to grow
nice plants long in the same place. Cocklebur, if found long in the
same spot, is troubled sadly with a mildew, and more recently also
with a rust."

=Operations against Woodchucks.=--Prof. F. H. Storer records in the
Bulletin of the Bussey Institution, Harvard University, the results of
his experiments in the destruction of woodchucks, which, besides being
very injurious to lands he had under cultivation, appeared to be
increasing. Smothering by a volatile liquid driven into the burrow has
been suggested by Professor Hilgard, who recommends bisulphide of
carbon. Professor Bussey finds that liquid not wholly satisfactory and
liable to objections, and prefers a preparation of naphtha or other
volatile liquid. In any event, some device seems to be needed for
forcing a considerable quantity of the vapor into the very end of the
burrow. Poisons are dangerous because of the probability that the
animal would bring the food on which they are placed to the mouth of
the burrow for eating, where children or useful animals might get it.
While experimenting with burning Cayenne pepper or sulphur on touch
paper, in order to smoke out the burrows, the author became acquainted
with the "woodchuck torches" of Mr. B. M. Wedger, of Roslindale,
Massachusetts. These consist of nitrate of soda, sulphur, mealed
gunpowder, and sulphide of antimony, so packed into a tube like a
Roman candle that on burning the fuse the vapors would be forced by
great pressure to the farthest recesses of the burrow. They proved
effectual, and it was indeed rare that any woodchuck to which they
were applied ever reported himself again. Professor Storer also
describes some experiments he made in burning sulphur in the burrows,
with special expedients for insuring more rapid and perfect combustion
of the sulphur; these promised fairly well. Mr. Henry Stewart has
described in the Country Gentleman an effectual method of destroying
woodchucks with blasting powder or dynamite.

=Evolution in Lamps.=--The story of lamps from Herodotus down to 1830,
Mr. Henry C. Mercer says, in an instructive study on Light and Light
Making in the contributions of the Bucks County (Pa.) Historical
Society, is not one of development. In principle and form they remain
the same, whether as the tin cylindrical or boat-shaped cups on
candlestick pedestals and the round tin cups with hemispherical lids,
or the lidless cups resting on wooden stands such as were recently
rescued by the author from the garret rubbish of old Bucks County. And
before Herodotus, as we follow the lamp back into the tombs of the Old
World, we find the boat-shaped form of earthenware preceding the
boat-shaped form of iron and possibly even that of bronze. The
chalk-cup lamp found by Canon Greenwell in the neolithic flint mines
at Grimes Graves, England, perhaps the oldest wick-floating lamp in
the world, is not essentially different from the oyster shell filled
with lard and provided with wicks that may be found among Virginia
negroes to-day. The Egyptian, Grecian, Phoenician, and Roman lamps, as
they have been found in the tombs and as we see them in the museums,
are not unlike the lard lamps that were most in use early in the
nineteenth century. Then crude grease gave way to sperm oil and lard
oil, with especial adaptations of the lamps that made them more
convenient and improved the light; and burning fluids that were
convenient and clean and gave a brilliant light, but were dangerous;
and kerosene, with other improvements in the lamps and refinements in
the oil that enabled it to give the most perfect artificial light yet
found and to keep up the fight for quality with gas and
electricity--all these having come in within the life-time of men
still among us. Besides the old lamps, our ancestors had candles,
molded when the price of tin, the material for the molds, did not
forbid the luxury, and before them tallow dips; a suspended wick was
dipped into a pot of hot tallow, on a cold day, and the operation was
repeated till layer after layer of grease hardened, and the candle was
thick enough. These candles were, however, troublesome in hot weather,
on account of their propensity to yield to the temperature and fall
over. "Who shall say, however, that candle-dipping is older than
molding, when we know ... that they molded candles in County Galway,
Ireland, in late years by punching holes in peat and pouring in tallow
on the down-hung wick of twisted flax fiber?" The Irish had, too, as
had the negroes, the rush light, a greased rush set in a hole in a
wooden block serving as a candlestick; or rushes joined in a triple
twist which flies apart when lighted, increasing the blaze. From this
Mr. Mercer passes to forms of candlesticks and torches and cressets
and methods of producing fire, whither we can not follow him, for the
multitude of details he notices, which will not bear abstracting.

=Inconsistent Philozoists.=--In his address at the opening of the
physiological and pathological laboratories at Belfast, Ireland, Lord
Lister took occasion to give some illustrations, drawn from practice,
of the value of pathological research. "There are people," he said,
"who do not object to eating a mutton chop--people who do not even
object to shooting a pheasant with a considerable chance that it may
be only wounded and may have to die after lingering in pain, unable to
obtain its proper nutriment--and yet who consider it something
monstrous to introduce under the skin of a guinea-pig a little
inoculation of some microbe to ascertain its action. These seem to me
to be most inconsistent views. If these experiments upon the lower
animals were made for the mere sport of the thing, they would be
indeed to be deprecated and decried; but if they are made with the
wholly noble object of not only increasing human knowledge, but also
of diminishing human suffering, then I hold that such investigations
are deserving of all praise. Those little know who lightly speak on
these matters how much self-denial is required in the prosecution of
such researches when they are conducted, as indeed they always are, as
far as I am aware, with the object of establishing new truth."

=The Ruins of Xkichmook, Yucatan.=--The group of ruins in Yucatan
called Xkichmook was discovered by Mr. Edward H. Thompson in 1888,
when he read a paper before the American Antiquarian Society embodying
his first impressions of it. He has since made studies of it extending
over a period of seven years. The group is about one hundred and forty
miles south of Merida and forty or fifty miles east of Campeche,
situated in a narrow valley between a series of rocky hills, and has
to be approached by precipitous paths over the hillsides, and thence
down the beds of dry _arroyos_ whose yearly freshets wash away all
vegetation. Ten buildings, including one called the Palace, and two
mounds were explored, and some miscellaneous excavations were
made--all of which are described in the author's paper (Field
Columbian Museum), with figures of the buildings and objects. Pottery
and flaked stone implements were plentiful, but polished implements
and specimens of sculpture were exceedingly rare. The flat under
surfaces of the ceiling stones of the vaulted chambers seem to have
contained very elaborate designs; in another chamber portions of a
painting were still partly preserved; in another, curious drawings or
glyphs in strong black lines once existed; in another was a painted
human figure, of which only the flowing headdress, a portion of the
face, and certain devices issuing from the mouth and probably
indicating speech, now remain. The mysterious red hand was found
painted in various places, and in one a human hand in blue pigment was
found, the impression of which was so fresh and perfect in places that
even the minute lines of the skin were visible. In ten years of
investigation among the ruins of Yucatan and Campeche not as many
specimens of worked obsidian were found as could be picked up in half
an hour among certain Mexican ruins; but traces of ancient fabrication
of flint implements were more plentiful than anywhere else.

=The Seventeen-Year and the Thirteen-Year Locusts.=--The periodical
cicada, or seventeen-year locust, as it is called, is distinctly
American, and has the longest life period of any known insect. It is
especially remarkable, Mr. C. L. Marlatt observes in his memoir upon
it, in its adolescent period, the features of particular divergence
from other insects being its long subterranean life of thirteen or
seventeen years, and the perfect regularity with which at the end of
these periods every generation, though numbering millions of
individuals, attains maturity almost at the same moment. At this
moment the brood issue from the ground, leaving innumerable exit
holes, and swarm over trees and shrubs, filling the air with their
strident calls, and laying their eggs in slits which they cut in the
trees. The larvæ, when hatched, fall to the ground, and quickly burrow
out of sight, each "forming for itself a little subterranean chamber
over some rootlet, where it remains through winter and summer, buried
from sun, light, and air, and protected in a manner from cold and
frost.... It lives thus alone in its moist earthen chamber," rarely
changing its position unless some accident to the nourishing rootlet
may necessitate its seeking another, passing the thirteen or seventeen
years of its hypogeal existence in slow growth and preparation for a
few weeks only of winged life in the air and light. Other cicadas
appear every year, usually in comparatively small numbers. They are
probably equally long in maturing, but the periods of their lives have
from some cause or another been cast in "off" years. The thirteen-year
broods are southern, and the shortening of their periods of
development may possibly be accounted for by the longer season of
warmth in the southern year giving them the number of hours or of
aggregate degrees of warmth in thirteen years that the more northern
broods can not receive in less than seventeen years. This, however, is
only speculation, and there are difficulties in applying the
supposition to make it fit all the facts; and many believe that the
two races are specifically different. The late Prof. Charles V. Riley
distinguished twenty-two different broods of cicadas in the United
States, seven of which appertain to the thirteen-year period (_Cicada
tredecem_).


MINOR PARAGRAPHS.

The Bureau of Nature Study of Cornell University is making a
praiseworthy effort to interest children in caring for birds, or, as
its circular has it, treating them as "summer boarders." It publishes
a leaflet entitled The Birds and I, which it sends free to teachers
who ask for it and who will give it to their pupils. It has pictures
of various styles of bird houses, which may serve as patterns for the
construction of homes for the summer guests. "The kind of birds," the
interesting circular of the bureau says, "that will set up
housekeeping in the homes that you provide will harm no one. They are
never cross, never throw stones or rob us, but are always happy and
have cheerful songs. We are always kind to people having such
dispositions, and why should we not be so to birds as well?" The
bureau invites correspondence from boys and girls disposed to
entertain birds.

The National Geographic Society offers prizes of one hundred and fifty
dollars and seventy-five dollars severally for the first and second
best essays relating to pre-Columbian discoveries and settlements of
the Norsemen on the mainland of North America, and the location of the
lands mentioned in the Icelandic Sagas, the competition to close
December 31, 1899. The essays sent in should be typewritten in the
English language, not exceeding six thousand words in length, and may
be accompanied by maps and illustrations for explanation of the text,
but not for embellishment. The committee of awards consists of Mr.
Henry Gannett, Prof. Albert Bushnell Hart, Mrs. Anita Newcomb McGee,
Prof. John Bach McMaster, and Coast Survey Superintendent Henry S.
Pritchet.

Experiments by a German naturalist, Herr Albrecht Bethe, summarized in
the _Revue Scientifique_, upon recognition of one another by ants,
confirm the opinions of Lubbock, McCook, Forel, and others that they
are guided by the sense of smell. Herr Bethe found that an ant
"whitewashed" with liquid of ants of its own nest was well received by
its fellows when it went among them; but when the liquid of ants of a
different nest was applied it was attacked at once. An ant washed with
alcohol, next with water, and then with the liquid of a strange
species was well received in a nest of that species, although it was
much smaller than any of the individuals composing it. Another ant
washed with alcohol and water, dried, and immediately returned to its
fellows of its own nest, was attacked by them; but when kept for
twenty-four hours after drying, or long enough to recruit itself, was
received by them.

The following tables are taken from a paper by Dr. J. Richardson
Armstrong in a recent Lancet, describing his experience with
diphtheria antitoxine in private practice in treating one hundred and
twenty-two cases of diphtheria:

  ------------------------+------+----------+--------
                          |      |Recovered.|  Died.
  ------------------------+------+----------+--------
            1.            |      |          |
  Total number of cases   |      |          |
    treated from June     |      |          |
    21 to Dec. 17, 1897   |  42  |    36    |    6
  Severe cases; antitoxine|      |          |
    injected              |  22  |    20    |    2
  Mild cases; antitoxine  |      |          |
    not injected          |  20  |    16    |    4
                          +======+==========+========
            2.            |      |          |
  Total number of cases   |      |          |
    treated, January 1    |      |          |
    to December 31,       |      |          |
    1898                  |  80  |    77    |    3
  Severe cases, injected  |  55  |    54    |    1
  Mild cases, non-injected|  25  |    23    |    2
  ------------------------+------+----------+--------

In answer to the question, Should every case of diphtheria be treated
with antitoxine, Dr. Armstrong says: "Some of the cases are
sufficiently mild not to need it, so I will not go so far as to say
that it is absolutely essential to inject in every case, although I
would call it an excellent practice to do so, and the patients would
make much more rapid recoveries. I think that injection ought to be
insisted upon as early as possible in every case that is at all severe
or likely to prove so, and I think that the medical man who does not
employ antitoxine and who loses a large proportion of his cases is
incurring a responsibility which is almost criminal. The earlier a
patient is injected the greater is the chance of recovery, and the
more rapid is the recovery."

Among the leading principles of forestry, as defined by the chief fire
warden of Minnesota, are that the best agricultural land should not be
devoted to forest while wood and timber can be profitably grown on
soil that is unfit for farming purposes; that the management should be
continuous, and no more timber should be taken out of the forest in
one year, or in a series of ten or twenty years, than grows in the
entire forest in the same period; that the cutting of timber should be
in blocks or strips, so as to facilitate reproduction on the clear
areas by seeds falling from the trees left standing; and that the
forest, when young, must have in numbers vastly more trees than when
it is mature. To make good timber, the forest, when young, must be
crowded so as to secure height growth. Mixed wood, managed on forestry
principles in the Black Forest of Germany, has per acre, at the age of
twenty years, 3,960 trees; at the age of one hundred years, 262 trees.

A new process for the production of a textile material is thus
described in Industries and Iron: "It consists of 'squirting,' in a
fashion similar to that of making electric incandescent carbons, pure
gelatin in threads of about one thousandth part of an inch in
diameter, the thread being taken away on revolving tapes. The threads
are wound upon reels and exposed to formalin vapor, which exercises a
most remarkable effect on the gelatin, rendering it insoluble in any
medium yet applied to it. The tensile qualities of the thread are also
increased, while, in opposition to that produced under the Lehner
process (which is simply forming nitrated cellulose into threads for
weaving), it is capable of taking up any dye desired; and it is, of
course, impervious to any hygroscopic influence."


NOTES.

Prof. E. C. Pickering, of the Harvard College Observatory, announces
the discovery by Mrs. Fleming of a new variable star in Sagittarius.
It was found on eight of the photographs in her large collection. On
March 8, 1898, it was of the fifth magnitude, and on April 29, 1898,
of the eighth magnitude. A plate taken on March 9, 1899, shows it
still visible and of the tenth magnitude. Its spectrum resembles that
of other new stars. The entire number of new stars discovered since
1885 is six, of which five have been found by Mrs. Fleming.

Because of the great loss by fire which occurs every year in the
Russian villages, the government is making efforts to induce the
peasantry, says the _Saturday Review_, to employ some less dangerous
material than straw thatch for the roofing of their _izbas_. There has
already been a large increase in the use of shingle, and this has led
to a considerable importation from Belgium and Germany, and also from
the United States, of simple and inexpensive shingle making machines,
for use in rural districts. German manufacturers, whose "commercial
intelligence department" is remarkably well informed, are now making
redoubled efforts to meet the immense demand anticipated. An improved
and inexpensive hand fire engine is also being provided. Roofing felt
or paper is very generally used under the shingle, and the demand for
this is also increasing.

A fourth specimen of the _Notornis Mantelli_, a bird of New Zealand
supposed to have become extinct, was captured in August last, and has
been prepared for the museum by Mr. W. B. Benham. The first specimen
was obtained, recently slain, by Mr. W. Mantell, in 1849, and is
preserved in the British Museum; the second was killed by Maoris in
1851, and is in the Colonial Collection; and the third, now in the
Dresden Museum, was taken in 1879. All these birds were found in a
single denuded region of the country. The present specimen was caught
by a dog in the bushes near Lake Te Anan, still in the same region,
and is a very fine young female.

A plant growing in the dense jungles of Langsuam, Siam, was described
by H. Warington Smyth, in an address to the Royal Geographical
Society, as having the property of setting up a great irritation in
the skin of any person coming in contact with it. "It has a large,
broad leaf, and the Siamese declare that, after being badly stung by
it, the only remedy is the heat of a fire; to bathe in a stream, which
is the natural impulse, is considered absolutely fatal. A spot on the
Kra-Champawn trail is known as _Burmatai_, from the fact that a party
of Burmese, coming across to harry their neighbors in the old fighting
days, are said to have got into a thick growth of this plant, and to
have bathed in the stream to allay the agony, with the result that
they all died there." The Siamese call the plant _kalang-ton chang_.

In the western part of Belgium the dog has been employed as a beast of
burden from time immemorial. The Belgian dog (known only by this name)
is a large, compactly built animal, measuring from twenty to thirty
inches in height; the hair is smooth and short, generally tan or dark
brown in color. It is the custom to crop both ears and tail. The dogs
are usually driven before carts weighing from one hundred to one
hundred and twenty pounds, in teams of from two to six abreast. A
harness very similar in arrangement to that of the horse is used. Six
of these animals will draw from six to eight hundred pounds. They are
put to work when about a year old. They vary in price from twenty-five
to sixty shillings. There are over two thousand dogs in Ghent licensed
as draught animals.

A plant described by M. Henri Chantrey as most probably answering to
the manna found by the Hebrews in the desert is the thallophyte
_Canona esculenta_, or edible lichen, which grows in the deserts of
Persia, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Sahara. It is a grayish cryptogam of
about the size of a pea, bearing short bracteate appendages on its
top; when cut, it resembles a mass of dull white flour paste. It is an
ephemeral substance, and must be collected the morning it appears, as
it will soon dry up; but when properly prepared it can be kept in a
close vessel. It is highly appreciated by the wandering Arabs, who
have often been saved by it from starvation, and they lay up stores of
it when opportunity offers. It is easily collected, for it never
adheres to any foreign body, and, so far as appearance goes, seems as
if it might have been thrown on the ground. There is but little
suggestion of the mushroom in its taste, which is rather starchy, with
a slight flavor of sugar. Cattle are very fond of it. The Arabs boil
it into a gelatinous paste, which they serve in various ways. They
preserve it by drying it in the shade and pack it in bladders or
skins. It is not a complete first-class food, but is very good for a
few days till something better can be got.

The Jernkontoret of Sweden is an ironmasters' exchange at Stockholm,
which was founded in 1747 for the financial convenience of the
subscribers, and now possesses a reserve fund of about $1,500,000. The
functions of the society have been considerably enlarged since its
institution. It has organized a corps of mining engineers and
metallurgists, who receive salaries from it, and further from
manufacturers whom they may serve. They are often commissioned to go
abroad and obtain information and practical hints bearing upon their
profession. The institution is supported by a light assessment on the
production of its constituency. It has a fine building, and publishes
an annual volume in _Jernkontorets Annalen_, containing original
memoirs and reports from technical agents, which is sent gratuitously
to all the masters of forges in Sweden, and is sold abroad.

In a number of glass mirrors of the third and fourth centuries,
examined by M. Berthelot, the glass was coated with a metallic
substance and with a layer of whitish material. The metal proved to be
lead, with no trace of gold, silver, copper, tin, antimony, or
mercury, and no sign of organic substance was present. It was thus
shown that no extraneous material was used to cement the lead to the
glass. The mirrors appeared to have been cut from hollow blown glass
globes, and it is possible that before the globe was cut the molten
lead had been poured into the interior, and had adhered to the
previously warmed glass. The whitish layer consisted of lead carbonate
and lead oxide formed by the oxidation of the lead coating and calcium
carbonate, which had been deposited from the water of the district in
which the mirrors were found.

The list of recent deaths among men known in connection with science
and its applications includes the names of Prof. Karl Müller,
botanist, one of the founders of the German scientific weekly, _Die
Natur_, February 9th, aged eighty-one years; Sir John Struthers,
emeritus professor of anatomy in the University of Aberdeen, in his
sixty-seventh year; John Kreusi, mechanical engineer and inventor, at
Schenectady, N. Y., January 22d, aged fifty-six years; Thomas Cook,
teacher of anatomy and author of works on the subject, in London,
February 8th; Dr. A. Veitmeyer, civil engineer, in Berlin; Dr. Carl
Schoenlein, of the Zoölogical Station at Naples, aged forty years;
Major-General Joseph J. Reynolds, of the United States Army, formerly
professor of mechanics and engineering at Washington University, St.
Louis, February 26th, aged seventy-seven years; Dr. Alexandre
Laboulbène, professor of the history of medicine in the University of
Paris, and author of a treatise on pathological anatomy and a book on
French entomological fauna, aged seventy-three years; Dr. Philipp J.
J. Valentini, Americanist and student of ancient Mexican and Central
American monuments and codices, in New York, March 16th, in his
seventy-first year; Gustave Wiedmann, professor of physics and
chemistry in the University of Leipsic, and writer on electricity and
magnetism; and Major J. Evans, professor of pathology in the Calcutta
Medical College, March 13th.




Transcriber's Notes:


Words surrounded by _ are italicized.

Words surrounded by = are bold.

Obvious printer's errors have been repaired, other inconsistent
spellings have been kept, including inconsistent use of hyphen (e.g.
"air ship" and "air-ship"), diacritical marks (e.g. "êtat" and
"état"), and proper names (e.g. "Dostoievski" and "Dostoiewski").

Captions added to captionless illustrations.

Some illustrations were relocated to correspond to their references in
the text.