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CONTENTS


  Advance of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century      289
  The Applications of Explosives                          300
  A Paradoxical Anarchist                                 312
  What Makes the Trolley Car Go                           316
  Woman’s Struggle For Liberty in Germany                 328
  Scenes on the Planets                                   337
  Professor Ward on “Naturalism and Agnosticism”          349
  Destructive Effects of Vagrant Electricity              357
  Winter Birds in a City Park                             366
  Old Rattler and the King Snake                          371
  Remarkable Volcanic Eruptions in the Philippines        374
  The Scavengers of the Body                              379
  Editor’s Table                                          385
  Fragments of Science                                    388
  Minor Paragraphs                                        395
  Publications Received                                   399




  Established by Edward L. Youmans


  APPLETONS’
  POPULAR SCIENCE
  MONTHLY

  EDITED BY
  WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS

  VOL. LVI
  NOVEMBER, 1899, TO APRIL, 1900

  NEW YORK
  D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
  1900




  COPYRIGHT, 1900,
  BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.




  APPLETONS’
  POPULAR SCIENCE
  MONTHLY.

JANUARY, 1900.




ADVANCE OF ASTRONOMY DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

BY SIR ROBERT BALL, LOWNDEAN PROFESSOR OF ASTRONOMY AT THE UNIVERSITY
OF CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND.


One of the most remarkable chapters in the astronomy of the past
century was commenced on the very first night with which that century
began. It was, indeed, on the 1st of January, 1801, that the discovery
of a new planet was announced. The five great orbs--Jupiter, Saturn,
Mercury, Mars, and Venus--had been known from the earliest times of
which we have records, and the planet Uranus had been discovered nearly
twenty years before the previous century closed. The solar system
was thus thought to consist of these six planets and, of course, the
earth. On the memorable night to which I have referred, Piazzi, the
astronomer, made a remarkable advance. He discovered yet another
planet--the seventh, or eighth, if the earth be included. The new body
was a small object in comparison with those which were previously
known. It was invisible to the unaided eye, and seemed no more than a
starlike point even when viewed through a telescope. It revolved around
the sun in the wide region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
This discovery was speedily followed by others of the same kind,
and, as the century has advanced to its close, the numbers of these
planets--asteroids, as they are generally called--has been gradually
increasing, so much so that now, of these little bodies known to
astronomers, the number amounts to about four hundred and fifty.

But just as the beginning of the century was heralded by the discovery
of the first of these asteroids, so the close of the century will be
signalized in the history of astronomy by the detection among these
little objects of one which has entirely cast into the shade all other
discoveries of the same nature. On the night of the 13th of August,
1898, a German astronomer, Herr Witt, exposed a photographic plate to
the heavens in his telescope in the Observatory of Urania, at Berlin.
On that plate a picture of the heavens was obtained, and in that
picture a new planet was revealed. At first the discovery of one more
asteroid does not imply very much. Hundreds of such planets might be
found, and indeed have been found, and yet no particular comment has
been called forth. But this planet found by Witt is a unique object; it
is more interesting than the whole of the four hundred and thirty-two
other minor planets which have preceded it--not, indeed, on account
of its size, for Witt’s planet is a wholly insignificant object from
this point of view. The special interest which this new planet has
for us dwellers on the earth lies in the fact that it seems to be the
nearest to the earth of all the other worlds in space--the moon, of
course, excepted. This is the reason why the attention of all who are
interested in the science of astronomy has been concentrated on Witt’s
discovery. It is certainly the most interesting telescopic revelation
which has been made for many years.

It may illustrate a characteristic feature in the progress of modern
astronomy if I describe how Witt succeeded in obtaining this picture.
He had selected one of the most rapid plates that the skilled
manufacturer can supply to the photographer. He put this plate into
his telescope, and he directed it to the heavens. If that plate had
been used in broad daylight for the more ordinary purpose of obtaining
a photographic portrait, an exposure of half a second would have been
quite long enough. But the very faint stars can not work their charm on
the plate with equal rapidity; a second is not long enough, nor is ten
seconds, nor even ten minutes. If we desire to secure an imprint of the
faintest stars we must expose the plate for an hour, and sometimes for
even much longer than an hour. Of course, an exposure of such duration
would utterly ruin the picture if a gleam of any other light obtained
access. But in the darkness of night the plate is secure from this
danger. Each star is thus given time enough to impress its little image
at leisure.

The photographer has often occasion to deplore the poorness of his
light. It is, of course, in the endeavor to counteract the poorness
of the light that so long an exposure is frequently given. But it
will not be any longer supposed that, from the astronomer’s point of
view, a tedious exposure must necessarily be a disadvantage. Let it
be henceforth recollected that it was the very requirement of a long
exposure which led to the present important discovery. If the stars had
been bright enough to be photographed by an exposure not longer than
a few seconds or even than a few minutes, then this new and wonderful
planet Eros would not have been revealed.

Many points of light which were undoubtedly stars, and merely stars,
were shown on this picture taken by the German astronomer at Urania.
Among these points of light was, however, one object which, though in
appearance hardly distinguishable from a faint star, was in truth a
body of a very different character. No telescope, however powerful,
would show by mere inspection any appreciable difference between the
dot of light indicating a star and the dot of light indicating the
asteroid Eros. The fundamental difference between the star and Eros
was, however, revealed by the long exposure. The stars in such a
picture are, of course, at rest. They have occupied for years and for
centuries the places where we now find them. If they are moving at
all, their movements are so slow that they need not now be considered.
But this starlike point, or, as we may at once call it, this asteroid,
Eros, is moving. Not that its movements seem very rapid from the
distance at which alone we are compelled to view it. No casual glance
would indicate that Eros was flying along. The ordinary observer would
see no change in its place in a second--no change in its place even in
a minute. But when the exposure has lasted for an hour this asteroid,
in the course of the hour, has moved quite appreciably. Hence arose a
great difference between the representation which the photograph has
given of the stars, properly so called, and of the asteroid. Each star
is depicted as a sharp, well-defined point. This little body which
is not a star, this unsteady sitter in the picture, could not be so
represented; it merely appeared as a streak. The completed photograph
accordingly shows a large number of well-marked dots for the stars, and
among them one faint line for the asteroid.

Such a feature on a picture, though very unusual, does sometimes
present itself. To detect such a streak on a photograph of the stars
is a moment of transcendent joy to the astronomer. It is often for
him the exciting occasion on which a discovery is made. This little
moving point is in actual fact as different from a star as a pebble
is different from a brilliant electric light. The resemblance of the
asteroid to a star is merely casual; the resemblance would wholly
disappear if we were able to make a closer inspection. The star is a
brilliant blazing orb like a sun, but so far away that its luster is
diminished to that of a point; the planet is comparatively near us;
it is a dark body like our earth, and is like our earth also in this
further respect that all the light it enjoys has been derived from the
sun.

Though there is this immense difference between a star and a planet,
yet the observer must not expect to notice any such difference by
merely taking a peep through the telescope. It was only the long
exposure in the photograph that revealed the little body.

Such is the manner in which an asteroid is generally discovered in
these latter days. A discovery like this comes as the well-earned
reward of the skill and patience of the astronomical photographer.
There are, indeed, a large number of known asteroids; our catalogues
contained four hundred and thirty-two of them up to the time when Witt
exposed his now famous plate. Had the asteroid Witt then found been
merely as other asteroids, it would never have received the prominent
position that has now to be assigned to it in any account of the
astronomy of the century. That object found by Witt on this night which
is to be henceforth memorable in astronomy is of a wholly exceptional
kind. Had Eros been merely an ordinary asteroid, Witt might no doubt
have received the credit to which his labors and success would have
entitled him. Another asteroid would have been added to the long list
of such objects already known, but the newspapers would never have
troubled their readers about the matter, and the only persons who
would have been affected would have been the astronomers, and perhaps
even among them no particular sympathy would have been felt in certain
quarters. Those particular astronomers to whom has been intrusted the
special work of looking after the asteroids and of calculating the
tables of their movements might even have received with no very great
enthusiasm the announcement of this further addition to the burden on
their heavily laden shoulders.

I have said that Eros is quite a small globe; it may be well for us
fully to realize how small that asteroid actually is. If the moon were
to be crushed into two million equal fragments, each of those parts
would be as big as Eros. If the whole of Eros were to be covered with
houses, the city thus formed would not be so large as greater London.
So far as mere size is concerned, Eros is quite unimportant. We can
further illustrate this if we compare Eros with some of the other
planets. The well-known evening star, Venus, the goddess of love, is a
hundred million times as big as that tiny orb we now call Eros, the god
of love. After all this it may seem strange to have to maintain what
is, however, undoubtedly the fact, that the discovery of Eros is one of
the most remarkable discoveries of this century.

Until Eros was discovered, our nearest neighbors among the planets
were considered to be Venus on one side and Mars on the other. The
other great planets are much more distant, while, of course, the stars
properly so called are millions of times as far.

Great, then, was the astonishment of the astronomers when, by the
discovery of Eros, Mars and Venus were suddenly dethroned from their
position of being the earth’s nearest neighbors among the planetary
host. This little Eros will, under favorable circumstances, approach
the earth to within about one third the distance of Mars when nearest,
or about one half the distance of Venus when nearest. We thus
concentrate on Eros all the interest which arises from the fact that,
the moon of course excepted, Eros is the nearest globe to the earth in
the wide expanse of heaven. To the astronomer this statement is of the
utmost significance; when Eros comes so close it will be possible to
determine its distance with a precision hitherto unattainable in such
measurements. Once the distance of Eros is known, the distance of the
sun and of all the other planets can be determined. The importance of
the new discovery arises, then, from the fact that by the help of Eros
all our measurements in the celestial spaces will gain that for which
every astronomer strives--namely, increased accuracy.

Seeing that the existence of intelligence is a characteristic feature
of this earth, we feel naturally very much interested in the question
as to whether there can be intelligent beings dwelling on other
worlds around us. It is only regrettable that our means of solving
this problem are so inadequate. Indeed, until quite lately it would
have been almost futile to discuss this question at all. All that
could then have been said on the subject amounted to little more
than the statement that it would be intolerable presumption for man
to suppose that he alone, of all beings in the universe, was endowed
with intelligence, and that his insignificant little earth, alone
amid the myriad globes of space, enjoyed the distinction of being the
abode of life. Recent discovery has, however, given a new aspect to
this question. At the end of this century certain observations have
been made disclosing features in the neighboring planet, Mars, which
have riveted the attention of the world. On this question, above most
others, extreme caution is necessary. It is especially the duty of the
man of science to weigh carefully the evidence offered to him on a
subject so important. He will test that evidence by every means in his
power, and if he finds the evidence establishes certain conclusions,
then he is bound to accept such conclusions irrespective of all other
circumstances.

Mr. Percival Lowell has an observatory in an eminently favorable
position at Flagstaff, in Arizona. He has a superb telescope,
and enjoys a perfect climate for astronomical work. Aided by
skillful assistants, he has observed Mars under the most favorable
circumstances with great care for some years. I must be permitted to
say that, having carefully studied what Mr. Lowell has set forth, and
having tested his facts and figures in every way in my power, most
astronomers have come to the conclusion that, however astonishing his
observations may seem to be, we can not refuse to accept them.

No one has ever seen inhabitants on Mars, but Mr. Percival Lowell
and one or two other equally favored observers have seen features on
that planet which, so far as our experience goes, can be explained in
no other way than by supposing that they were made by an intelligent
designer for an intelligent purpose. Mr. Lowell has discovered that
there are certain operations in progress on the surface of Mars which,
if we met with on this earth, we should certainly conclude, without the
slightest hesitation, were the result of operations conducted under
what we consider rational guidance.

A river, as Nature has made it, wends its way to and fro; it never
takes the shortest route from one point to another; the width of the
river is incessantly changing; sometimes it expands into a lake,
sometimes it divides so as to inclose an island. If we could discern
through our telescopes a winding line such as I have described on Mars
it might perhaps represent a river.

But suppose, instead of a winding line, there was a perfectly straight
line, or rather a great circle on the globe drawn as straight as a
surveyor could lay it out--if we beheld an object like that on Mars I
think we should certainly infer that it was not a river made in the
ordinary course of natural operations; no natural river ever runs in
that regular fashion. If such a straight line were indeed a river, then
it must have been designedly straightened by human agency or by some
other intelligent agency for some particular purpose. In its larger
features Nature does not work by straight lines. A long and perfectly
straight object, if found on our earth, might be a canal or it might be
a road; it might be a railway or a terrace of some kind; but assuredly
no one would expect it to be a natural object.

We have the testimony of Schiaparelli, now strengthened by that of Mr.
Lowell and his assistants, that there are many straight lines of this
kind on Mars. They appear to be just as straight as a railway would
have to be if laid across the flat and boundless prairie, where the
engineer encountered no obstacle whatever to make him swerve from the
direct path. These lines on Mars run for hundreds of miles, sometimes,
indeed, I should say for thousands of miles. They are far wider than
any terrestrial river, except perhaps the Amazon for a short part of
its course. The lines on Mars are about forty miles wide. Indeed, the
planet is so distant that if these lines were much narrower than
forty miles they would be invisible. Each of them is marvelous in its
uniformity throughout its entire length.

The existence of these straight lines on the planet contains perhaps
the first suggestion of the presence of some intelligent beings on
Mars. The mere occurrence of a number of perfectly straight, uniform
lines on such a globe would in itself be a sufficiently remarkable
circumstance. But there are other features exhibited by these objects
which also suggest the astonishing surmise that they have been
constructed by some intelligent beings for some intelligent purposes.

Sometimes two of these lines will start from a certain junction,
sometimes there will be a third or a fourth from the same junction; in
one case there are as many as seven radiating from the same point. Such
an arrangement of these straight lines is certainly unlike anything
that we find in Nature. We are led to seek for some other explanation
of the phenomenon, and here is the explanation which Mr. Lowell offers:

It has recently been found that there are no oceans of water on the
planet Mars. In earlier days it used no doubt to be believed that the
dark marks easily seen in the telescope could represent nothing but
oceans, but I think we must now give up the notion that these are
watery expanses. Indeed, there is not much water on that globe anywhere
in comparison with the abundance of water on our earth. It is the
scarcity of water which seems to give a clew to some of the mysteries
discovered on Mars by Schiaparelli and Lowell.

As our earth moves round the sun we have, of course, the changing
seasons of the year. In a somewhat similar manner Mars revolves around
the sun, and accordingly this planet has also its due succession of
seasons. There is a summer on Mars, and there is a winter; during the
winter on that globe the poles of the planet are much colder than at
other seasons, and the water there accumulates in the form of ice or
snow to make those ice-caps that telescopic observers have so long
noticed. In this respect Mars, of course, is like our earth. The
ice-cap at each pole of our globe is so vast that even the hottest
summer does not suffice to melt the accumulation; much of the ice and
snow there remains to form the eternal snow which every arctic explorer
so well knows. It would seem, however, that the contrast between winter
and summer on Mars must be much more deeply marked than the contrast
between winter and summer on our earth. During the summer of Mars ice
and snow vanish altogether from the poles of that planet.

Mr. Lowell supposes that water is so scarce on Mars that the
inhabitants have found it necessary to economize to the utmost whatever
stock there may be of this most necessary element. The observations at
Flagstaff tend to show that the dark lines on Mars mark the course of
the canals by which the water melted in summer in the arctic regions
is conducted over the globe to the tracts where the water is wanted.
Not that the line as we see it represents actually the water itself;
the straight line so characteristic of Mars’s globe seems rather to
correspond to the zones of vegetation which are brought into culture
by means of water that flows along a canal in its center. In much the
same way would the course of the Nile be exhibited to an inhabitant
on Mars who was directing a telescope toward this earth: the river
itself would not be visible, but the cultivated tracts which owe their
fertility to the irrigation from the river would be broad enough to be
distinguishable. The appearance of these irrigated zones would vary, of
course, with the seasons; and we observe, as might have been expected,
changes in the lines on Mars corresponding to the changes in the
seasons of the planet.

A noteworthy development of astronomy in the last century has been the
erection of mighty telescopes for the study of the heavens. It must
here suffice to mention, as the latest and most remarkable of these,
the famous instrument at the Yerkes Observatory, which belongs to the
University of Chicago. Just as the century is drawing to its close, the
Yerkes telescope has begun to enter on its sublime task of exhibiting
the heavens under greater advantages than have ever been previously
afforded to any astronomers since the world began.

The University of Chicago having been recently founded, it was desired
to associate with the university an astronomical observatory which
should be worthy of the astonishing place that this wonderful city has
assumed in the world’s history. Mr. Yerkes, an American millionaire,
generously undertook to provide the cost of this observatory. Two noble
disks of glass, forty inches in diameter, were produced at the furnaces
of Messrs. Mantois, in Paris; these disks were worked by Mr. Alvan
Clark, of Boston, into the famous object glass which, weighing nearly
half a ton, has now been mounted in what we may describe as a temple or
a palace such as had never been dreamed of before in the whole annals
of astronomy.

Perhaps if we could now place the science of the nineteenth century in
its proper perspective the most remarkable discovery which it contains
would be that of the planet Neptune. Indeed, the whole annals of
science present no incident of a more dramatic character.

It will be remembered that at the latter part of the eighteenth century
William Herschel had immortalized himself by the discovery of a great
planet, to which was presently assigned the name of Uranus. After the
movements of Uranus had been carefully studied, it was found that
on many previous occasions Uranus had been unwittingly observed by
astronomers, who regarded it as a star. When these observations were
all brought together, and when the track which Uranus followed through
the heavens was thus opened to investigation, it was found that the
movements of the planet presented considerable anomalies. The planet
did not move precisely as it would have moved had it been subjected
solely to the supreme attractive power of the sun. Astronomers are,
of course, accustomed to irregularities of this description in the
movements of the planets. These irregularities have as their origin
the attractions of the various other members of the solar system.
It is possible to submit these attractions to calculation and thus
to estimate their amount. The effect, for instance, of Saturn in
disturbing Jupiter can be allowed for, and the nature of Jupiter’s
motion as thus modified can be precisely estimated. In like manner,
the influence of the earth on Venus can be determined, and so for the
other planets; and thus, generally speaking, it was found that when
the proper allowances had been made for the action of known causes
of disturbance, then the calculated movement of each planet could be
reconciled with observation.

The circumstances of Uranus were, however, in this respect wholly
exceptional. Due allowance was first made for the attraction of Uranus
by Saturn, and for the attraction of Uranus by Jupiter, as well as by
the other planets. It was thus found that the irregularities of Uranus
could be to some extent explained, but that it was not possible in this
manner to account for those irregularities completely. It was therefore
evident that some influence must be at work affecting the movement
of Uranus, in addition to those arising from any planet of which
astronomers hitherto had cognizance. The only available supposition
would be that some other planet, at present unrecognized, must be in
our system, and that the attraction of this unknown body must give rise
to those irregularities of Uranus which remained still outstanding.

A great problem was thus proposed for mathematicians. It was nothing
less than to affect the determination of the orbit and the position
of this unknown planet, the sole guide to the solution of the problem
being afforded by the discrepancies between the places of Uranus
as actually observed and the places which were indicated by the
calculations, when every allowance had been made for known causes.
The problem was indeed a difficult one, but, fortunately, two
mathematicians proved to be equal to the task of solving it--Adams,
in England, and Le Verrier, in France. Each of these astronomers, in
independence of the other, succeeded in determining the place of the
planet in the sky. The dramatic incident of this discovery was afforded
when the mathematicians had done their work. When the place of the
planet had been ascertained, then the telescopic search was undertaken
to verify if it were indeed the case that a planet hitherto unknown
did actually lurk in the spot to which the calculations pointed. Every
one who has ever read a book on astronomy is well acquainted with the
wonderful manner in which this verification was made. Just where the
mathematicians indicated, there was the great planet discovered! To
this object the name of “Neptune” has been assigned, and its discovery
may be said to mark an epoch in the history of gravitation. It provided
a most striking illustration of the truth of those great laws which
Newton had discovered.

The latter half of the century will be also remarkable in the history
of science from the fact that within that period mankind has been
enabled to make some acquaintance with the chemistry of the celestial
bodies. It was in 1859 that Kirchhoff and Bunsen first expounded to the
world the true meaning of the dark lines in the solar spectrum. In this
they were following out a line of reasoning that had been previously
suggested by Prof. Sir G. Stokes, of Cambridge, England. Those who
are at all conversant with that wonderful branch of knowledge known
as spectrum analysis are aware how these discoveries have rendered it
possible for us to determine in many cases the actual material elements
found in the most distant bodies.

One of the striking results to which this investigation has led is the
demonstration of the substantial unity of the materials from which the
earth and the various heavenly bodies have been constructed. Those
elements which enter most abundantly into the composition of the earth
are also the elements which appear to enter most abundantly into the
composition of the sun and of the stars. The iron and the hydrogen, the
sodium and the many other materials of which our globe is so largely
formed, are also the selfsame materials which, in widely different
proportions and in very different associations, go to form the heavenly
bodies. This conclusion is as interesting as it was unexpected. It
might naturally have been thought that, seeing the sun is separated
from us by nearly a hundred million miles, and seeing that the stars
are separated from us by millions of millions of miles, all these
celestial bodies must be constructed in quite a different manner and
of substances quite distinct from the substances which we know on
this earth. But this is not the case. Indeed, at the present moment
it seems doubtful if there be any element which spectrum analysis
has hitherto disclosed in the celestial bodies which is not also a
recognized terrestrial body. The well-known case of helium gives a
striking illustration. In the year 1868 Sir Norman Lockyer detected
the presence of rays in the solar spectrum which were unknown at that
time in terrestrial chemistry. These rays appeared to emanate from
some substance which, though present in the sun, did not then appear
to belong to the earth. This element was accordingly named “helium,”
to indicate its solar origin. Twenty-five years later Professor
Ramsay discovered a substance on the earth which had been hitherto
unrecognized, and which, on examination, yielded in the spectrum
precisely those same rays which had been found in the so-called
helium from the sun. In consequence of this discovery this element
is now recognized as a terrestrial body. It is indeed a remarkable
illustration of the extraordinary character of modern methods of
research that a substance should have first been discovered at a
distance of nearly one hundred million miles, that same substance being
all the time, though no doubt in very small quantities, a constituent
of our earth as well as of the sun.

Much has been done within the past century in many other branches of
astronomy. I must especially mention the important subject of meteoric
showers. For the development of our knowledge of this attractive part
of astronomy we are largely indebted to the labors of the late Prof.
H. Newton, of Yale. By his investigations, in conjunction with those
of the late Professor Adams, it was demonstrated that the shower of
shooting stars which usually appears in the middle of November is
derived from a shoal of small bodies which revolve around the sun in an
elliptic track, and accomplish that circuit in about thirty-three years
and a quarter. The earth crosses the track of these meteors in the
middle of November. If it should happen that the great shoal is passing
through the junction at the time the earth also arrives there, then the
earth rushes through the shoal of little bodies. These plunge into our
atmosphere, they are ignited by the friction, and a great shower is
observed. It is thus that we account for the recurrence of specially
superb displays at intervals of about thirty-three years.

But one more great astronomical discovery of this century must be
mentioned, and here again, as in so many other instances, we are
indebted to American astronomers. It was in 1877 that Prof. Asaph Hall
discovered that the planet Mars was attended by two satellites. This
was indeed a great achievement, and excited the liveliest interest and
attention. Since the days when telescopes were first invented all
the astronomers have been looking at Mars, and yet they never noticed
(their telescopes were not good enough) those interesting satellites
which the acute observation of Professor Hall detected with the help
of the great telescope of the Naval Observatory at Washington. This
discovery was followed by another of a still more delicate nature,
when that consummate observer, Professor Barnard, using the great Lick
telescope, detected the fifth satellite of Jupiter. This is indeed a
most difficult object to observe, requiring, as it does, the highest
optical power, the most perfect atmospheric conditions, and the most
skillful of astronomical observers. We may take this observation to
represent the high-water mark of telescopic astronomy in the nineteenth
century. This being so, it may fitly conclude this brief account of
some of the most remarkable astronomical discoveries which that century
has produced.




THE APPLICATIONS OF EXPLOSIVES.

BY CHARLES E. MUNROE,

PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY, COLUMBIAN UNIVERSITY.


[Illustration: GUN-COTTON FACTORY. Dipping cotton in nitrating troughs.]

There is something about fire which fascinates every one, yet the
action of explosives arouses even a livelier interest, since the
accompanying fiery phenomena are more intense and are attended with a
shocking report and a violent destruction of the surrounding material,
while this train of events, with all its marked effects, is set in
operation by what appears to be a very slight initial cause. It is
evident on brief consideration that these bodies, like a coiled spring,
a bent bow, or a head of water, are enormous reservoirs of energy which
can be released at a touch, and which, if the explosive be properly
placed in well-proportioned amounts and discharged at the right
time, can be made to do useful and important work that can not be as
conveniently and quickly accomplished in most cases, and in some cases
can not be accomplished at all by any other means.

[Illustration: GUN-COTTON FACTORY. Digestion troughs.]

The marked characteristic of all explosive substances, and especially
of the so-called high explosives, is that the energy, as developed, is
at high potential, and the uses to which energy in this condition can
be economically put are so manifold that the production of explosives
has become one of the most important of our chemical industries, this
country alone producing, in 1890, 108,735,980 pounds, having a value of
nearly $11,000,000.

The number of possible substances possessing explosive properties
is exceedingly large; the number actually known is so great that it
has taxed the ingenuity of inventors to provide them with suitable
names; but these various explosive substances vary to so great an
extent in the energy they will develop in practice and in their safety
in storage, transportation, and use that but a comparatively small
number have met with wide acceptance. All may be classified under the
heads of physical mixtures like gunpowder, or chemical compounds like
nitroglycerin, and they owe their development of energy to the fact
that, like gunpowder, they are mixtures in which combustible substances
such as charcoal are mixed with supporters of combustion such as niter;
or that, like chloride of nitrogen, they are chemical compounds, the
formation of whose molecules is attended with the absorption of heat;
or that, like gun cotton, they are chemical compounds whose molecules
contain both the combustible and the supporter of combustion, and
whose formation from their elements is attended with the absorption
of heat; while occupying a middle place between the gunpowder and the
gun cotton class, and possessing also to some degree the properties of
the nitrogen-chloride class, are the nitro-substitution explosives, of
which melinite, emmensite, lyddite, and joveite furnish conspicuous
examples.

[Illustration: GUN-COTTON FACTORY. Final press.]

It may lead to a clearer understanding of what is said regarding
the applications of explosives to dwell briefly on the methods by
which some of them are produced, since, although the raw material in
each case is different and the details of the operations vary, the
underlying principles of the methods are the same, and a good example
is found in the military gun cotton as made by the Abel process at the
United States Naval Torpedo Station.

[Illustration: GUNPOWDER GRAINS. The large ones are over five pounds
weight, each.]

The material employed is cotton, but whether fresh from the field or in
the form of waste, it must first be freed from dirt by hand picking and
sorting, and from grease and incrusting substances by boiling in a weak
soda solution. The cotton is now dried by wringing in a centrifugal
wringer and exposing to a current of hot air in a metal closet; but as
the compacted mass of cotton holds moisture with great persistency,
after partial drying the cotton is passed through a cotton picker to
open the fiber, so that it not only yields its contained water more
readily and completely, but it also absorbs the acids more speedily in
the dipping process to which it is subsequently exposed.

[Illustration: BURNING DISK OF GUN COTTON.]

[Illustration: EXTINGUISHING BURNING GUN COTTON.]

When the moisture, by the final drying, is reduced to one half of
one per cent the cotton is, while hot, placed in copper tanks which
close hermetically, where it cools to the atmospheric temperature
and in which it is transported to the dipping room, where a battery
of large iron troughs, filled with a mixture of one part of the most
concentrated nitric acid and three parts of the most concentrated
sulphuric acid, set in a large iron water bath to keep the mixture at
a uniform temperature, is placed under a hood against the wall. The
fluffy cotton, in one-pound lots, is dipped handful by handful under
the acid, by means of an iron fork, where it is allowed to remain
for ten minutes, when it is raised to the grating at the rear of the
trough and squeezed with the lever press to remove the excess of
acid. It still retains about ten pounds of the acid mixture, and in
this condition is placed in an acid-proof stoneware crock, where it
is squeezed by another iron press to cause the contained acid to rise
above the surface of the partly converted cotton. The covered crock
is now placed with others in wooden troughs containing running water
so as to keep the temperature uniform, where the cotton is allowed to
digest for about twenty-four hours. The acid is then wrung out in a
steel centrifugal, and the wrung gun cotton is thrown in small lots
into an immersion tank containing a large volume of flowing water, in
which a paddle wheel is revolving so as to rapidly dilute and wash away
the residual acid in the gun cotton without permitting any considerable
rise of temperature from the reaction of the water with the acid.

[Illustration: MAKING MERCURY FULMINATE.]

Even these severe means are not enough, for, as the cotton fiber is
in the form of hairlike tubes, traces of the acid sufficient to bring
about the subsequent decomposition of the gun cotton are retained
by capillarity. Therefore, after boiling with a dilute solution of
sodium carbonate, the gun cotton is pulped and washed in a beater or
rag engine until the fiber is reduced to the fineness of corn meal,
and a sample of it will pass the “heat test.” This is a test of the
resistance of gun cotton to decomposition, and requires that when the
air-dried sample of gun cotton is heated to 65.5° C. in a closed tube
in which a moistened strip of potassium iodide and starch paper is
suspended, the paper should not become discolored in less than fifteen
minutes’ exposure.

[Illustration: DETONATOR USED IN THE UNITED STATES NAVY. Contains
thirty-five grains of fulminate of mercury.]

This pulping of the gun cotton not only enables one to more completely
purify it, but it also renders it possible to mold it into convenient
forms and to compress it so as to greatly increase its efficiency in
use. For this purpose the pulp is suspended in water and pumped to a
molding press, where, under a hydraulic pressure of one hundred pounds
to the square inch, it is molded into cylinders or prisms about three
inches in diameter and five inches and a half high, and these are
compressed to two inches in height by a final press exerting a pressure
of about sixty-eight hundred pounds to the square inch. As this is
regarded as a somewhat hazardous operation, the press is surrounded
by a mantlet woven from stout rope to protect the workmen from flying
pieces of metal in case of an accident. The operation is analogous to
that employed in powder-making, where the gunpowder has been pressed in
a great variety of forms and into single grains weighing several pounds
apiece.

[Illustration: TORPEDO CASES AND BLOCKS OF WOOD DESTROYED BY A NAVAL
DETONATOR.]

[Illustration: TESTING DETONATORS ON IRON PLATES.]

[Illustration: IRON CYLINDER FILLED WITH WATER AND CONTAINING A NAVAL
DETONATOR. Before and after firing, shows the work accomplished by
thirty-five grains of mercury fulminate.]

Even under the enormous pressure of the final press the compressed gun
cotton still retains from twelve to sixteen per cent of water, and in
this form it is quite safe to store and handle. When dry it is very
combustible and burns readily when ignited, but it can be quenched by
pouring water upon it. When confined in the chamber of a gun or the
bore-hole of a rock, gun cotton will burn like gunpowder when ignited,
if dry, and produce an explosion, but, in common with nitroglycerin and
other high explosives, gun cotton is best exploded and develops its
maximum effect when detonated, a result which is secured by exploding a
small quantity of mercury fulminate in contact with the dry material.

[Illustration: SMOKELESS POWDERS. In the bottle is indurite in flake
grains. The larger grains are cylindrical and hexagonal multiperforated
United States army grains. The bent grain in the foreground, looking
like a piece of rubber tubing, is a grain of Maxim powder with a single
canal. The flat strips in the foreground on the left are grains of the
French B. N. powder. The flat strips in the foreground on the right are
grains of the United States navy “pyrocellulose” powder.]

Mercury fulminate is made by dissolving mercury in nitric acid and
pouring the solution thus produced into alcohol, when a violent
reaction takes place and the fulminate is deposited as a crystalline
gray powder. This powder is loaded in copper cases and, after drying,
it is primed with dry-mealed gun cotton, the mouth of the case being
closed with a sulphur-glass plug, through which pass two copper leading
wires joined by a bridge of platinum-iridium wire, two one-thousandths
of an inch in diameter, which becomes heated to incandescence when an
electric current is sent through it. This device is what is known as
the naval detonator. Mercury fulminate is so employed because it is the
most violent of all explosives in common use, and exerts a pressure of
forty-eight thousand atmospheres when fired in contact. Although the
naval detonator contains but thirty-five grains of mercury fulminate,
yet it will rupture stout iron and heavy tin torpedo cases when fired
suspended in them, it will rend thick blocks of wood when placed in
a hole and fired within them, and it will even pierce holes through
plates of the finest wrought iron one-sixteenth inch in thickness if
only the base of the detonator is in contact with the plate, and this
has been used as a test of their efficiency. Its force is markedly
shown by firing one in a stout iron cylinder filled with water and
closed tightly, when the cylinder is blown into a shredded sphere. When
used to detonate gun cotton, either when confined or in the open, the
detonator is placed in the hole which has been molded in the center of
the gun cotton disk or block, so that it shall be in close contact with
the gun cotton. I have found that perfectly dry compressed gun cotton
is detonated by 2.83 grains of mercury fulminate; but as a torpedo
attack is necessarily in the nature of a forlorn hope and should be
provided with every possible provision against failure, and since if
the detonator fails the attack fails, the naval detonator is supplied
with thirty-five grains, so as to give a large coefficient of assurance.

[Illustration: BLENDING MACHINE FOR CORDITE.]

[Illustration: CARTRIDGE OF CORDITE SMOKELESS POWDER. Charge for 6-inch
2 F gun, 13 pounds, 4 ounces. Cords, 22¾ inches long, 3 inches in
diameter.]

A characteristic feature of gun cotton is that it may be detonated even
when completely saturated with and immersed in water, if only some dry
gun cotton be detonated in contact with it. Thus in one experiment a
disk of dry gun cotton was covered with a water-proof coating and the
detonator inserted in the detonator hole of this disk. This dry disk
was laid upon four uncoated disks, the five lashed tightly together,
and sunk in Newport Harbor, where the column remained until the
uncoated disks were saturated with salt water, when the mine was fired
and the saturated disks were found by measurement of the work done to
have been completely exploded. I have found that three ounces of dry
compressed gun cotton will cause the detonation of wet compressed gun
cotton in contact with it, but forty ounces of dry gun cotton are used
as the primer in our naval mines and torpedoes, so as to give a large
coefficient of assurance.

[Illustration: GUN-COTTON SPAR TORPEDO.]

[Illustration: BLOWING UP THE SCHOONER JOSEPH HENRY.]

In the mining and other industries the fulminate is used in smaller
quantities and it is generally mixed with potassium chlorate, the
mixture being compressed in small copper cases and sold as blasting
caps. They are fired by means of a piece of Bickford or running
fuse, consisting of a woven cotton or hemp tube containing a core
of gunpowder, which is inserted in the mouth of the copper cap and
made fast within it by crimping. The capped fuse is then inserted in
a dynamite cartridge so that the cap is firmly in contact with the
dynamite, the mouth of the cartridge is fastened securely, and the
charge inserted in the bore-hole in the rock and tamped. The protruding
end of the fuse is lighted, and the fire travels at the rate of three
feet per minute down the train of gunpowder to the fulminate, which
then detonates and causes the detonation of the dynamite.

Although gun cotton, nitroglycerin, and their congeners can be and
usually are fired by detonation, there has within recent years been
a great number of compositions invented which, while formed from gun
cotton alone or mixtures of it with nitroglycerin, burn progressively
when ignited and are therefore available for use as propellants; and
since the products of their burning are almost wholly gaseous, they
produce but little or no smoke and are therefore called smokeless
powders. As upward of fifty-seven per cent of the products of the
burning of ordinary gunpowder are solids or easily compressed vapors,
this comparative smokelessness of the modern powders is a very
important characteristic, and when used in battle they seriously modify
our former accepted methods of handling troops. While this is the
feature of these powders which has attracted popular attention, a far
more important quality which they possess is the power to impart to
a projectile a much higher velocity than black powder does, without
exerting an undue pressure on the gun. A velocity of over twenty-four
hundred feet per second has been imparted to a one-hundred-pound
projectile with the powder that I have invented for our navy, while the
pressure on the gun was less than fifteen tons to the square inch.

[Illustration: TORPEDO PRACTICE. Bow discharge.]

Prior to my work in this field all the so-called smokeless powders were
mixtures of several ingredients, resembling gunpowder in this respect.
But, considering the precise and difficult work that was expected of
these high-powered powders and the difficulty which had always been
found in securing uniformity in mixtures, and that this difficulty had
become the more apparent as the gun became more highly developed, I
sought to produce a powder which should consist of a single chemical
substance in a state of chemical purity, and which could be formed into
grains of such form and size as were most suitable for the piece in
which the powder was to be used.

I succeeded in so treating cellulose nitrate of the highest degree of
nitration as to convert it into a mass like ivory and yet leave it
pure. In this indurated condition the gun cotton will burn freely, but
it has not been possible to detonate it even when closely confined and
exposed to the initial detonation of large masses of mercury fulminate.

[Illustration: TORPEDO PRACTICE ON THE CUSHING. Broadside discharge.]

I am happy to say that this principle has now been adopted by the
Russian Government, and by our navy in its specifications for smokeless
powder; but they have, I think unwisely, selected a cellulose nitrate
containing 12.5 per cent or less of nitrogen instead of that of the
highest nitration.

This work was completed, a factory established, and the processes well
marked out when I left the torpedo station in 1892. Besides this,
there were then already commercial works established elsewhere in this
country for the manufacture of the nitroglycerin-nitrocellulose powders
of the ballistite class, while large quantities of many varieties
could be easily procured abroad. Considering these facts, and that
France and Germany had already adopted smokeless powders in 1887, that
Italy adopted one in 1888, and England about the same time, it is
unpardonable that our services should not yet have adopted any of the
smokeless powders available when we were drawn into the conflict with
Spain.

Besides their use as ballistic agents, gun cotton, dynamite, and
explosive gelatin in their ordinary condition have found employment
and been adopted as service explosives in military and naval mining,
as their great energy and the violence with which they explode, even
when unconfined, especially adapt them for use in the various kinds of
torpedoes and mines which are in vogue in the service.

[Illustration: LAUNCHING PATRICK TORPEDO FROM THE WAYS.]

One form of these torpedoes was attached to the end of a spar or pole
which was rigged out from the bow of a launch or vessel so that it
could be thrust under the enemy’s vessel, and the detonators of such
spar torpedoes were not only connected with electric generators, so
that they could be fired at will, but they, in common with mines,
were frequently provided with a system of levers so arranged that the
enemy’s vessel fired the torpedoes and mines automatically as it came
in contact with the levers. It was with such a contact-spar torpedo,
containing thirty-three pounds of gun cotton, that the schooner Joseph
Henry was blown up in Newport Harbor in 1884.

[Illustration: PATRICK TORPEDO UNDER WAY. Moving at the rate of
twenty-three knots per hour.]

There are many types of the automobile torpedo. Among them the Hall,
Patrick, Whitehead, and Howell may be cited. The first three are
propelled by the energy resident in compressed gases; the Howell by
the energy stored in a heavy fly wheel, which also, by acting on the
gyroscopic principle, serves to maintain the direction imparted to
the torpedo as it is launched. The Hall, Whitehead, and Howell are
launched from tubes or guns by means of light powder charges, and
are independent of exterior control after launching. The Patrick is
launched from ways, and is controlled from the shore or boat by a
wire through which an electric current may be sent to its steering
mechanism. The charges are quite variable, but the war heads of the
larger torpedoes contain as much as five hundred pounds of gun cotton.

[_To be concluded._]




A PARADOXICAL ANARCHIST.

BY PROF. CESARE LOMBROSO.


While I have had the privilege of making several indirect studies of
anarchists by means of the data furnished by legal processes, the
journals, and the handwriting of the subjects, I have only rarely
been able to examine one directly and make those measurements and
craniological determinations upon him without which any study can be
only approximate, or, we might even say, hypothetical. I had, however,
an opportunity a short time ago to observe a real anarchist in person,
and study him according to the methods of my criminological clinic.
The results have been singular, and it seems to me that they should
cast some light upon the dark world of these agitators, and especially
upon the phenomena of the strange contradictions presented in their
life; manifestations which jurists and police officers, intent only
on achieving the judicial triumph of a conviction, consider and call
simulations and falsehoods.

[Illustration: (Unclear handwritten inscription)]

He was a fellow who had caused a great excitement, during the crowded
days of the exposition at Turin, by saying that he wanted to kill
the king. In fact, he gave himself up to the police, saying that the
anarchists of Alexandria were seeking the assassination of the king,
and had written him a letter directing him to arm himself, but that he,
wishing anything else than to commit regicide, had surrendered in order
to denounce the scheme. There was no real basis of criminal intent, but
our police put him in prison, and there I found him.

His physiognomy presented all the characteristics of the born criminal
and of the foolhardy and sanguinary anarchist. He had flaring ears,
premature and deep wrinkles, small, sinister eyes sunk back in their
orbits, a hollowed flat nose, and small beard--in short, he presented
an extraordinary resemblance to Ravachol, as may be seen from their
portraits.

The cranium was a little smaller than the normal, and the upper part
of the skull was much rounded and deformed, with a cephalic index of
91--considerably more rounded than the head of Luccheni. The horizontal
fold of the hand was of a type much like that of Ravachol.

I add that the biological study, which was made directly, and therefore
more satisfactorily than was practicable with Caserio and Luccheni,
revealed a series of very singular anomalies; a touch six times more
obtuse than the normal--six millimetres on the right, five on the
left; a remarkably blunt sensitiveness to pain and dull perception of
location; an extraordinarily reduced visual field, particularly in
the left eye; a somewhat tremulous handwriting, and slight defects of
articulation in speech; and thin hair. There was nothing very striking
in his affective nature. He spoke kindly of his parents, whom he would
be glad to see. But he had a blunt moral sense, and had committed
frequent thefts, especially against his family, so that he had been
put into a house of correction. And it was just while he was still in
this establishment, at sixteen years of age, that he pretended to have
been invited to attend a meeting of about thirty anarchists at Brescia,
where he was made to swear, kissing a dagger, to kill the king. He
described the room, and spoke of the individual persons present, and
then said that he thought no more of the matter after he returned to
the house; but a few days ago it had come into his mind to go to the
post office, and there he had found a letter from the anarchists of
Alexandria, urging him to arm himself to kill the king.

He repeated this story minutely and with great persistence,
notwithstanding the postal authorities denied having given him the
letter, in the face of the asseverations of the prefects that there
were not thirty anarchists in Brescia, where he was in correction, and
although all the facts were against him. Observe that he was in prison,
that he had been there three months, and that he was told he would be
likely to stay there as long as he adhered to his story.

[Illustration: RAVACHOL.]

Efforts to account for the phenomenon were unsuccessful, because his
friends and relatives made no mention of any traces of insanity. Light
began to break upon the case when it was learned that he had attempted
suicide, a few years before, in grief at the death of his mother, and
also that on the day before he gave himself up he had stolen a small
sum from his drunken brother. These, however, were only distant hints.
The matter was fully explained when, after he had drunk a litre of wine
in the prison, he began to exclaim, “_Viva l’anarchio!_” (Hurrah for
anarchy!), “_Morte al Re!_” (Death to the king!), to kiss a dagger,
to break various things against imaginary guards, and, after a short
period of quiet, to swear and forswear himself that his companions had
done what he had done, that they had shouted for anarchy, had broken
the vases, and had desired to kill the king.

[Illustration: VISUAL FIELD (LEFT EYE) OF CHIE ... GIAC ...

    The thin line indicates the normal visual field (left eye).

    The thick line indicates the visual field (left eye) under
    alcoholic excitement.
]

This cleared up the matter at once for me, but I wished to complete the
elucidation with an experiment. I began by giving him ten, then twenty,
then thirty, then forty grammes of alcohol, up to eighty. I observed
that his personality began to change after forty grammes. He became
somewhat insolent and suspicious, and had vague delirious imaginings
of persecutions. When invited to sing anarchistic songs he refused,
evidently fearing to compromise himself, but sang them voluntarily in
an undertone. When the dose of alcohol was increased to ninety grammes
his personality seemed immediately to undergo a full change; his
touch became twice as fine (three millimetres), and his visual field
increased threefold; he declared that there was a spy around. When
put into his cell he sang anarchistic hymns, threatened death to the
king, handled a box as if brandishing a dagger, climbed to a window and
insulted the sentinel, resisted five men who tried to disarm him, and
continued in this condition for eight hours.

The next day he denied having done any of these things, avowed that
he was a good monarchist and a good citizen, and declared distinctly
that he had not done what he had done, in the face of the concurrent
testimony of several witnesses. On renewing the experiment a few
days afterward with eighty grammes of alcohol, the same series of
phenomena recurred--a real anarchistic raving, a genuine mania for
regicide, which would certainly have ended in some act if he had not
been restrained by force; and this person, who had at first presented
an evident obtusity of touch and an extraordinary contraction of the
visual field, now exhibited an almost normal touch of three millimetres
and a visual field enlarged to triple its extent when he was sober.

On the day after this he recollected none of all the things that
had happened the day before. This double personality was determined
in him by alcohol, as it is in others by misery or by fanaticism,
while it rests with all upon a congenital basis. The fact helps us
to explain how some inoffensive man may have a type of physiognomy
quite similar to that of Ravachol, showing how often there are true
criminals in potency, whose physiognomy, or rather the anomalies of it,
bears a prophetic relation to the crime which breaks out on the first
determining circumstance. And we have here another explanation of such
contradictory characters as those of Ravachol, Caserio, and Luccheni,
who, having been once well-behaved, end by becoming criminals.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Applied science was defined by Sir W. Roberts Austen, in his
    presidential address to the Iron and Steel Institute, 1899, as
    “nothing but the application of pure science to particular classes
    of problems.”




WHAT MAKES THE TROLLEY CAR GO.

BY WILLIAM BAXTER, JR., C. E.


I.

Of all the wonderful operations accomplished by the aid of electricity
at the present time, none so completely mystifies the beholder
as the action of the trolley car. The electric light, although
incomprehensible to the average layman, does not excite his curiosity
to the same extent. The glowing filament of an incandescent lamp or
the dazzling carbon points of an arc light stimulate the inquisitive
proclivities to some extent, but as the popular notion with respect
to the nature of electricity is that it is some kind of fluid that
can flow through wires and other things like water through a pipe,
the conclusion arrived at is that the current, in its passage through
the filament or the carbon points, generates a sufficient amount of
heat to raise the temperature of the material to the luminous point.
The fact that energy is required to raise the temperature of the mass
to the incandescent point is not taken into consideration by those
not versed in technical matters, owing to the fact that, as nothing
moves, it is not supposed that power can be expended. When a trolley
car is seen coming down the street at a high rate of speed the effect
upon the mind is very different. Here we see a vast amount of weight
propelled at a high velocity, and yet the only source through which
the power to accomplish this result is supplied is a small wire. The
mystifying cause does not stop here, for if we look further into the
matter we see that the energy has to pass from the trolley wire to the
car through the very small contact between it and the trolley wheel.
After contemplating these facts, it appears remarkable that the energy
that can creep through this diminutive passage can by any means be made
to develop the force necessary to propel a car with a heavy load up a
steep grade. An electrical engineer, if asked to explain the action,
would say that the force of magnetic attraction was made use of to
accomplish the result, but this explanation would fail to throw any
light upon the subject. In what follows, it is proposed to explain the
matter in a simple manner, and then it will be seen that what appears
to be an incomprehensible mystery, when not understood, is, in fact, no
mystery at all.

    NOTE.--The illustrations of railway motor, generator, and
    switchboard (Figs. 15, 16, 17) were made from photographs kindly
    furnished by the manufacturers, the Westinghouse Electric and
    Manufacturing Company.

Electricity and magnetism are two forces that are intimately associated
with each other, and, although radically different, it is difficult,
if not impossible, to obtain one without the other, although it is a
simple matter to make one inactive under certain conditions. It is very
generally understood that a magnet possesses the power of attraction,
and that it will draw toward it pieces of iron, steel, and other
magnets. The laws governing the attractive properties of magnets,
however, are not so well understood, and many are not aware of the fact
that under certain conditions one magnet will repel another, but such
is nevertheless the case.

[Illustration: FIGS. 1, 2, 3.--DIAGRAMS ILLUSTRATING THE ATTRACTION AND
REPULSION OF MAGNETS.]

In Fig. 1 the lower outline, _M_, represents a magnet fixed in
position, and the upper bar represents another magnet arranged to
swing freely around the pivot _a_. A magnet, as is generally known,
will arrange itself in a north-to-south position if suspended from its
center, like a scale beam, and allowed to swing freely, and the same
end will always point toward the north. On this account the ends of a
magnet are called its poles, and the one that will point toward the
north is designated the north pole, while the other one is the south
pole. The terms north and south poles were applied to magnets centuries
ago, but at the present time the ends are more commonly designated as
positive and negative. In Fig. 1 it will be noticed that the stationary
magnet has its positive end upward, and this attracts the negative end
of the swinging magnet. If the order of the poles is reversed, so that
the positive of the swinging magnet will come opposite the positive of
the stationary one, then there will be a repulsive action instead of an
attraction, as is shown in Fig. 2. If the two negative ends were placed
opposite, the effect would be the same. From this we see that to obtain
an attraction we must place the magnets so that opposite poles come
together, and that by reversing the order we obtain a repulsive action.

If the swinging magnet is replaced by a bar of iron, as is shown in
Fig. 3, there will be an attraction, no matter what end of the magnet
may be uppermost, thus showing that either end of a magnet will attract
a bar of iron. The explanation of these different actions is that when
two magnets are brought into proximity to each other each one exerts
its force without any regard to the other, and if the two are set
to act together they will attract one another, but if set to act in
opposition they will repel. When one of the bars is not a magnet, but
simply a piece of iron or steel, this bar, having no attractive or
repulsive force of its own, can only obey the attractive action of the
other, which is the only one that exerts a force.

[Illustration: FIGS 4, 5.--DIAGRAMS ILLUSTRATING THE METHOD OF
OBTAINING ROTARY MOTION WITH MAGNETS.]

In Fig. 4 _M_ is a magnet bent into the form of a U, commonly called
a horseshoe magnet. The short bar set between the upper ends is also
a magnet, and is arranged so as to revolve around the shaft _s_. From
what has just been explained in connection with Figs. 1 and 2 it
will be understood that, with the poles as indicated by the letters,
there will be an attractive force set up between the top end of the
straight bar and the _P_ end of the horseshoe, and thus rotation will
be produced in the direction of the arrow. The rotation, however, will
necessarily stop when the bar reaches the position shown in Fig. 5, for
then the attraction between the poles will resist further movement.
If the straight bar were not a magnet, but simply a piece of iron or
steel, it is evident that when in the position of Fig. 4 the attraction
would be just as much toward the right as toward the left, and if
the bar were placed accurately in the central position it would not
swing in either direction. It would be in the condition called, in
mechanics, unstable equilibrium. In practice this condition could not
be very well realized, as it would be difficult to set and retain the
bar in a position where the attraction from both sides would be the
same, therefore the rotation would be in one direction or the other;
but whichever way the bar might move, it would only swing through one
quarter of a revolution, into the horizontal position of Fig. 5.

If we reflect upon these actions we can see that if we could destroy
the magnetism of both parts before the straight bar reaches the
position of Fig. 5 it would be possible to obtain rotation through
a greater distance than one quarter of a turn, for then the headway
acquired by the rotating part would cause it to continue its motion.
If, after the completion of one half of a revolution, we could
remagnetize both parts, we would then set up an attraction between the
lower end of the straight bar and the left side of the horseshoe, for
then the polarity of the former would be the reverse of that shown in
Fig. 4--that is, the lower end would be negative. By means of this
second attraction we would cause the bar to rotate through the third
quarter of the revolution, and if, just before completing this last
quarter, we were to remove all the magnetism again, the headway would
keep up the motion through the final quarter of the revolution, thus
completing one full turn. From this it will be realized that if we
could magnetize and demagnetize the two parts twice in each revolution
a continuous rotation could be obtained.

If the magnetizing and demagnetizing action were only applied to the
rotating part we would fail to keep up a continuous rotation, for,
as was shown in connection with Fig. 3, the action when the straight
bar reached the position of Fig. 5 would be the same as if it were
magnetized, owing to the fact that a magnet always exerts an attraction
upon a mass of iron. Suppose, however, that we were to reverse the
polarity of the rotating part just as it reaches the position of Fig.
5, then there would be two poles of the same polarity opposite each
other, and, as shown in Fig. 2, the force acting between them would be
repulsive, and would push the bar around in the direction of rotation.
Not only would the right-side pole of the horseshoe force the end
of the bar away from it, but the negative pole, on the left side,
would attract this same end, and thus a force would be exerted by the
two poles of _M_ to keep up the rotation through the next half of a
circle. On reaching this last position the rotation would stop if the
polarity of the revolving bar were left unchanged, for then the poles
facing each other would be of opposite polarity. If, however, we again
reversed the polarity, a repulsion would be set up between the poles
facing each other, and thus a force would be exerted to continue the
rotation. Thus we see that if the polarity of the horseshoe magnet is
not disturbed it is necessary to reverse that of the rotating part to
obtain a continuous motion, but if we change the magnetic conditions of
both parts, then it is only necessary to magnetize and demagnetize them
alternately.

From the foregoing it is seen that there are two ways in which the
force of magnetism could be utilized to keep up a continuous rotation,
and the question now is, Can either of them be made available in
practice? To this we answer that, by the aid of the relations existing
between electricity and magnetism, both can be and are made available,
as will be shown in the following paragraphs:

[Illustration: FIGS. 6, 7, 8.--DIAGRAMS ILLUSTRATING THE PRINCIPLES OF
ELECTRO-MAGNETS.]

In Fig. 6 _W_ represents a coil of wire provided with a cotton
covering, so that there may be no actual contact between the adjoining
convolutions. If the ends _p n_ of this coil are connected with a
source of electric energy, an electric current will flow through it,
and if a bar, as indicated by _N P_, of iron or steel is placed within
the coil it will become magnetized. If the bar is made of steel and
is hardened it will retain the magnetism, and become what is called a
permanent magnet; such a magnet, in fact, as we have considered in all
the previous figures. If the bar is made of iron it will not retain the
magnetism, but will only be a magnet as long as the electric current
flows through the coil _W_. A magnet of the latter type is called
an electro-magnet. If the iron is of poor quality--that is, from an
electrical standpoint--it will require an appreciable time to lose its
magnetism, but if it is soft and high grade, electrically considered,
it will lose its magnetism instantly, or nearly so. If we take two bars
of soft iron and arrange them side by side, as in Fig. 7, and wind
coils around them as indicated each one will become magnetized when the
ends _p n_ of the coils are connected with an electric circuit. If the
lower ends of the two bars are joined by a piece, as shown at _M_, we
will have a horseshoe electro-magnet. If we take a round disk of iron,
as in Fig. 8, and wind a coil around it, it will also become a magnet
when an electric current traverses the coil. Thus it will be seen that
it makes little difference what the shape of the iron may be, providing
it is surrounded by a coil of wire and an electric current is passed
through the latter. This being the case, it is evident that either of
the processes explained in connection with Figs. 4 and 5 can be made
available for the production of a continuous rotation by the aid of
electro-magnets. Suppose we make a drum, as shown in Fig. 9, and wind
a wire coil around it in the direction indicated, then when a current
passes through the wire the drum will be magnetized, with poles at top
and bottom. If the electric current passes through the wire from end
_p_ to end _n_ the drum will be magnetized positively at the top and
negatively at the bottom, and if the direction of the current through
the wire is reversed the polarity of the drum will be reversed. If we
construct a horseshoe magnet of the shape shown in Fig. 10, and place
within the circular opening between its ends the drum of Fig. 9, we
will have a device that is capable of developing a continuous rotation,
providing we have suitable means for reversing the direction of the
electric current through the wire coil; and this machine constitutes an
electric motor in its simplest form.

[Illustration: FIGS. 9, 10.--DIAGRAMS ILLUSTRATING THE PRINCIPLES OF
THE ELECTRIC MOTOR.]

In an electric motor the horseshoe magnet is called the field magnet,
and the rotating part is called the armature, while the device by
means of which the direction of the current through the armature coil
is reversed is called the commutator. In this last figure it will be
noticed that the coils wound upon the field magnet are represented
as of wire much finer than that wound upon the armature. In actual
practice machines are sometimes wound in this way, and sometimes the
field wire is twice as large as that on the armature. When the field
wire is very much finer than that of the armature the machine is what
is known as shunt wound, which means that only a small portion of the
current that passed through the armature passes through the field
coils. Although with this type of winding the current that passes
through the field coils is very weak, the magnetism developed thereby
can be made greater than that of the armature if desired. This result
is accomplished by increasing the number of turns of wire in the field
coils. Thus if the current through the armature is one hundred times
as strong as that through the field coils, the latter can be made to
equal the effect of the former by increasing the number of turns in the
proportion of one hundred to one, and if the increase is still greater
the field coils will develop the strongest magnetism. The reason why a
small current passing around a magnet a great many times will develop
as strong a magnetization as a large current, can be readily understood
when we say that the magnetism is in proportion to the total strength
of the electric current that circulates around the magnet. Suppose we
have two currents, one of which is one thousand times as strong as the
other, then if the weak one is passed through a coil consisting of
one thousand turns it will develop just as strong a magnetization as
the large current passing through a coil of only one turn. This last
explanation enables us to see how it is that the comparatively small
current that can pass through the contact between the trolley wire and
the trolley wheel can develop in the motor force sufficient to propel
a heavy car up a steep grade. When that small current reaches the car
motors it passes through a thousand or more turns of wire, and thus its
effect is increased a corresponding number of times.

A motor having a single coil of wire upon the armature, as in Fig. 10,
would not give very satisfactory results, owing to the fact that the
rotative force developed by it would not be uniform. Such motors are
made in very small sizes, but never when a machine of any capacity is
required. For large machines it is necessary to wind the armature with
a number of coils, so that the rotating force may be uniform, and also
so that the current may be reversed by the commutator without producing
sparks so large as to destroy the device. When an armature is wound
with a number of coils the direction of the current is reversed, by the
commutator, in each coil as it reaches the point where its usefulness
ends, and where, if it continued to flow in the same direction, it
would act to hold the armature back. The effect of this reversal of
the current in one coil after another is to maintain the polarity of
the armature practically at the same point, so that the strongest pull
is exerted between it and the field magnet poles at all times. To
explain clearly the way in which the commutator reverses the current
in one coil at a time it will be necessary to make use of a diagram
illustrating what is called a ring armature. Such a diagram is shown
in Fig. 11. The ring _A_ is the armature core, and is made of iron;
the wire coils are represented as consisting of one turn to each coil,
and are marked _w w w_. The current enters the wire through the spring
_B_, and passes out through _C_. As can be seen, the current from _B_
can flow through the coils _w w_ in both directions, thus dividing
into two currents, each one of which will traverse one half of the
wire wound upon the armature. The two half currents will meet at _C_.
If the armature is rotated the springs _B_ and _C_ (which are called
commutator brushes) will pass from one turn of the wire coil to another
just back of it as the rotation progresses, and each time that contact
is made with a new turn the direction of the current in the turn just
ahead will be reversed. The current in the wire as a whole, however,
will always be in the same direction--that is, in all the turns to the
right of the two brushes; the current will flow toward the center of
the shaft on the front side of the armature, and away from the shaft
in all the turns on the left side. As the direction of the current on
opposite sides of the brushes is always the same, the poles of the
armature will remain under _B_ and _C_, therefore the relation between
the position of the poles of the armature and the field magnet will
be the same substantially as that illustrated in Fig. 10, and, as a
result, the force tending to produce rotation will at all times be the
greatest possible for the strength of the current used and the size of
the magnets.

Armatures are wound with a number of turns of wire in each coil, unless
the machine is very large, and present an appearance more like Fig.
12. In this figure the brushes are arranged to make contact with the
outer surface of the ring _C_, which is the commutator. The segments
_s s_ are connected with the ends of the armature coils _c c c_, but
are separated from each other by some kind of material that will not
conduct electricity--that is, they are electrically insulated. As will
be noticed from this, the armature in Fig. 11 acts as a commutator as
well as an armature, its outer surface performing the former office.
In the winding the difference between Figs. 11 and 12 is simply in
the number of turns in each coil, there being one turn in Fig. 11 and
several in Fig. 12.

[Illustration: FIGS. 11, 12.--DIAGRAMS ILLUSTRATING THE METHOD OF
WINDING ARMATURES OF ELECTRIC MOTORS AND GENERATORS.]

The armature shown in Fig. 10 is of the type called drum armature,
but it can be wound so as to produce the same result as the ring,
although it is not so easy to explain this style of winding. It will
be sufficient for the present explanation to say that whatever type of
armature may be used, the winding is always such that the direction of
the current through the wire coils is reversed progressively, so that
the magnetic polarity is maintained practically at the same point;
therefore there is a continuous pull between this point of the armature
core and the poles of the field magnet. The commutator is secured to
the armature shaft, and the brushes through which the current enters
and leaves are held stationary; keeping this fact in mind, it can be
seen at once that in Fig. 12 the current will flow from the brush _a_
through the two sides of the armature wire to brush _b_, hence all
the coils on the right of the vertical line will be traversed by the
current in the same direction--that is, either to or from the center of
the shaft--and in the coils on the left the direction will be opposite,
which is just the same order as was explained in connection with Fig.
11.

[Illustration: FIGS. 13, 14.--DIAGRAMS ILLUSTRATING THE DIFFERENCE
BETWEEN AN ELECTRIC MOTOR AND A GENERATOR.]

An electric motor can be turned into an electric generator by simply
reversing the direction in which the armature rotates--that is, any
electric machine is either a generator or a motor. This fact can
be illustrated by means of Figs. 13 and 14, both of which show the
armature and the poles of the field magnet. The first figure represents
an electric motor, and, as can be seen, the pull between the _N_ pole
of the armature and the _P_ pole of the field is in the direction of
arrow _b_, hence the armature will rotate in the same direction, as
indicated by arrow _a_. To obtain the polarity of the armature and
field it is necessary to pass an electric current through both--that
is to say, we must expend electrical energy to obtain power from the
machine. As soon as the current ceases to flow, the polarity of the
armature and field dies out, and the rotation of the former comes to an
end. The magnetism, however, does not die out entirely; a small residue
is always left, although it is never sufficient to produce rotation,
and even if it were it could only cause the armature to revolve through
one quarter of a turn. If, after the current has been shut off, the
armature shaft is rotated in the reverse direction, as indicated by
arrow _a_ in Fig. 14, the motion will be against the pull of the
magnetism; therefore, although the poles may be very weak, an amount of
power sufficient to overcome their attraction must be applied to the
pulley, otherwise rotation can not be accomplished. In consequence of
the backward rotation a current is generated in the armature coils, and
this current, as it traverses the field coils as well as those of the
armature, causes the polarity of both parts to increase. As a result
of the increased polarity the resistance to rotation is increased,
and more power has to be applied to the pulley. The increase in the
strength of the poles results in increasing the current generated, and
this in turn further increases the pole strength, so that one effect
helps the other, the result being that the current, which starts with
an infinitesimal strength, soon rises to the maximum capacity of the
machine.

The motor shown in Fig. 10 does not in any way resemble an electric
railway motor, nevertheless the principle of action is precisely the
same in both. The design of a machine of any kind has to conform to
the practical requirements, and this is true of railway motors, just
as it is true of printing presses, sawmills, or any other mechanism.
A railway motor must be designed to run at a comparatively slow speed
and to develop a strong rotative force, or torque, as it is technically
called. It must also be so constructed that it will not be injured if
covered with mud and water. It must be compact, strong, and light, and
capable of withstanding a severe strain without giving out. To render
the machine water- and mud-proof it is formed with an outer iron shell,
which entirely incases the internal parts. The first railway motors
were not inclosed, and the result was that they frequently came to
grief from the effects of a shower of mud. When the modern inclosed
type of motor, which is called the iron-clad type, first made its
appearance it was frequently spoken of as the clam-shell type, and
the name is not altogether inappropriate, for while the outside may
be covered with mud to such an extent as to entirely obliterate the
design, the interior will remain perfectly clean and dry, and therefore
its effectiveness will not be impaired.

[Illustration: FIG. 15.--EXTERNAL VIEW OF ELECTRIC RAILWAY MOTOR
MOUNTED UPON CAR-WHEEL AXLE.]

To enable the motor to give a strong torque and run at a slow speed
the number of poles in the field and armature is increased. The design
of Fig. 10 has two poles in the field and two in the armature, and
is what is known as the bipolar type. Machines having more than two
poles in each part are called multipolar machines. The number of poles
can be increased by pairs, but not by a single pole--that is, we can
have four, six, eight, or any other even number of poles, but not
five, seven, or any odd number. This is owing to the fact that there
must always be as many positive as negative poles, no more and no
less. Railway motors at the present time are made with four poles. The
external appearance can be understood from Fig. 15, while Fig. 16 and
Fig. 17 will serve to elucidate the internal construction. In Fig.
15 the motor casing is marked _M_, and, as will be seen, it forms a
complete shell. The motion of the armature shaft is transmitted to the
car-wheel axle _F_ through a pinion, which engages with a spur gear
secured to the latter. In Fig. 16 the pinion and gear are marked _N_
and _L_ respectively. As it is necessary that the armature shaft and
the axle be kept in perfect alignment, the motor casing _M_ is provided
with suitable bearings for both, those for the armature shaft being
marked _P P_ in Fig. 16, and one of those for the axle being marked _T_
in Fig. 15. It will be understood from the foregoing that the motor
is mounted so as to swing around the car-wheel axle as a center, but,
as it is not desirable to have all this dead weight resting upon the
wheels without any elasticity, the motor is carried by the crossbars
_B B_, Fig. 15, which rest upon springs _s s_ at each end. The beam
_A_ and a similar one at the farther end of the _B B_ bars extend out
to the sides of the car truck and are suitably secured to the latter.
The coils _w w_ are the ends of the field coils and the armature
connections, and to these the wires conveying the current from the
trolley are connected. The cover _C_ on top of the motor at one end
closes an opening through which access to the commutator brushes is
obtained. The armature is shown at _H_ in Fig. 16 and the commutator at
_K_ in the same figure. Directly under the armature may be seen one of
the field magnet coils, it being marked _R_.

[Illustration: FIG. 16.--RAILWAY MOTOR WITH CASING OPEN, SHOWING
ARMATURE IN LOWER HALF.]

As will be noticed in Fig. 16, the motor casing is made so as to open
along the central line, and the lower half is secured to the top by
means of hinges, _g g_, Fig. 15, and also by a number of bolts, which
are not so clearly shown. The gear wheels are also located within a
casing, which (Fig. 16) is made so as to be readily opened whenever
it becomes necessary. All the vital parts of the machine are entirely
covered, and are not easily injured by mud or water.

The construction of the armature and commutator is well illustrated in
Fig. 17, which shows this part of the machine by itself. The armature
is marked _A_, the shaft _B_, and the commutator _C_. In the diagrams,
Figs. 9, 10, 11, and 12, the wire coils are represented as wound upon
the surface of the armature core, but, from Fig. 17, it will be noticed
that they are located in grooves. A railway motor armature core, when
seen without the wire coils, looks very much like a wide-faced cog
wheel with extra long teeth, not very well shaped for gear teeth. In
Fig. 17 the ends of the teeth are marked _D_, and the grooves within
which the wire is wound are marked _E_. The coils are not wound so that
their sides are on diametrically opposite sides of the armature core,
but so that they may be one quarter of the circumference apart, and, as
will be noticed, the wires are arranged so as to fit neatly into each
other at the ends of the armature core. The bands marked _F F F F_ are
provided for the purpose of holding the wire coils within the grooves.
The flanges _H_ and _I_ are simply shields to prevent oil, grease, or
even water, if it should pass through the bearings, from being thrown
upon the commutator or armature. The pinion through which the armature
imparts motion to the car-wheel axle is not shown in Fig. 17, but it is
mounted upon the taper end of the shaft.

[Illustration: FIG. 17.--ARMATURE OF ELECTRIC RAILWAY MOTOR.]

An electric railway motor is a machine that is characterized by extreme
simplicity (there being only one moving part), compactness, and great
strength. In addition, as none of the working parts is exposed it
can not be injured, no matter how much mud may accumulate upon it.
One of the reasons why the electric railway motor has met with such
unparalleled success is that it is a machine that can withstand the
roughest kind of usage without being damaged thereby. Another reason
is that an electric motor can, if called upon, develop an amount
of power two or three times greater than its full-rated capacity
without injury, providing the strain is not maintained too long.
A steam engine or any other type of motor that has ever been used
for railway propulsion if loaded beyond its capacity will come to a
standstill--that is, it will be stalled--but an electric motor can not
be stalled with any strain that is likely to be placed upon it. If the
load is increased the motor will run slower and the current will become
greater, thus increasing the pull, but the armature will continue
to rotate until the current becomes so great as to burn out the
insulation. A railway motor calculated to work up to twenty-five-horse
power will have to develop on an average about six-or seven-horse
power, but if the car runs off the track on a steep grade, and has such
a heavy load that the motor is called upon to develop one-hundred-horse
power for a few seconds, the machine will be equal to the occasion.
This result a steam, gas, or any other type of engine can not
accomplish, and it is this fact as much as anything else that has given
the electric motor the control of the street-railway field.

[_To be continued_.]




WOMAN’S STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY IN GERMANY.

BY MARY MILLS PATRICK, PH. D.,

PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN COLLEGE FOR GIRLS AT CONSTANTINOPLE.


It is during the latter part of the present century that a general
movement has arisen to give women their rights in business life and
in political and social affairs. It is the intention of this article
to treat of this movement, especially in its relation to education,
in Germany, where, of all civilized lands, it has had apparently
the smallest results. Progress in the direction indicated has been,
however, far greater than appears on the surface, and the movement is
slowly taking shape in a form that will gain official recognition and
support, and the way is being prepared for scholarly attainments among
the women of Germany, superior, possibly, to those of the women of
other nations.

There is, moreover, an ideal side to this movement in Germany not
altogether found in other lands. The motive for advanced study is more
largely joy in the study itself, and desire to supply the spiritual
needs of an idle life. In order to understand this ideal tendency it is
necessary to cast a glance backward over nearly three hundred years.

Let us begin with the contest which was waged so successfully for the
development and protection of the German language, first against the
Latin and later against the French. In this struggle women took a
prominent part, especially through membership in the society called
the “Order of the Palms,” which, before the beginning of the Thirty
Years’ War, united the strongest spirits of Germany for this purpose.
The first woman to join this society was Sophie Elizabeth, Princess of
Mecklenburg, married in 1636 to the Herzog of Braunschweig. She was
followed by many others, both of the nobility and the common people,
and was named by virtue of this leadership “The Deliverer.”

In the eighteenth century we have the founder of the German theater,
Caroline Neuber. In the artistic sense she was the first director of
the German stage, the first to turn the attention of the greatest
actors of her day to the ideal side of dramatic presentation. Early
in the eighteenth century women began to take up university studies.
A certain Frau von Zingler received a prize from the University of
Wittenberg for literary work, and the wife of Professor Gottscheds
entered upon a contest for a prize in poetry with her husband.

We find some old verses published in Leipsic, in a book of students’
songs, in 1736, recognizing the fact that women attended lectures in
the university there, although the reference is rather sarcastic,
speaking of “beauty coming to listen in the halls of learning.”

In 1754 the first woman received her degree of Doctor of Medicine
in Halle--Dorothea Christine Erxleben, _née_ Leborin, a daughter of
a physician, who attained to this result only after many years of
painstaking effort. With her father’s help she studied the classics
and medicine, and gradually, in spite of the objections of his
brother physicians, began to practice as a doctor under her father’s
protection. She is said to have cured her patients _cito tuto_,
_jucunde_, and in 1742 she published a book on the right of women to
study, the title of which, according to the custom of the day, included
the full table of contents. This book passed through two editions, and
enabled her to gain the attention of Frederick II, who was persuaded to
order the University of Halle to grant her the privilege of taking her
examination there. The day arrived, and the hall was crowded for the
occasion; the candidate passed the ordeal in a brilliant manner, and
took the oath for the doctor’s degree amid a storm of applause from the
listeners present.

In the present century the germ of the movement for educational rights
for women came into consciousness in Germany in the stormy year
1848, and first found expression and life through the work of two
women--Louise Otto Peters and Auguste Schmidt. The former founded the
Universal Association for Women in Germany, and through this society
both these women worked for thirty years and did much toward preparing
the way for the broader efforts of the present time.

It is a fact granted by all the educational world that scholarship
attains a depth and thoroughness in Germany not found in other lands,
and this very perfection has been in part the cause of the backwardness
of the educational movement among the women, for a high degree of
scholarship has often been acquired by the men at the expense of the
devoted service of the women connected with them. Yet when the women of
Germany demand their educational rights it will be to share also in the
rich intellectual inheritance of their land.

The majority of the men thus far regard the movement with distrust
and suspicion, but are powerless to crush it out. An amusing instance
occurred last year in the family of an official in one of the large
university towns. He was a conservative man who had his immediate
family in a proper state of subjection, but his mother-in-law, alas!
he could not control, and to his dismay she enrolled herself at the
university as a _Hospitant_, and, in spite of the protestations of her
son-in-law, she was a regular attendant upon the courses of lectures
that she had elected.

The regular schools for girls in Germany, above the common schools
attended by girls and boys together, are of two grades--the middle
schools and the high schools. The avowed object of these schools is to
fit girls for society and for the position of housewife, as Herr Dr.
Bosse, the Minister of Public Instruction for the German Empire, states
in his report on the condition of girls’ schools in Germany, and as
he publicly declared before the German Parliament in the discussion
regarding the establishment of a girls’ gymnasium in Breslau, referred
to later on in this paper.

The girls’ schools established by the Government provide well for the
study of the modern languages, and it is the exception to find women
in the upper classes who do not speak French and English. Literature,
religion, gymnastics, and needlework are also well taught. The course
of study in the high school includes a little mathematics, offered
under the name of reckoning, and sufficient to enable a woman to keep
the accounts of a household, and also a little science of the kind
that can be learned without a knowledge of mathematics. Let me quote
a paragraph from the report of the Minister of Public Instruction
for the year 1898 in regard to the aim of the mathematical course in
the girls’ high schools: “Accuracy in reckoning with numbers and the
ability to use numbers in the common relations of life, especially in
housekeeping. Great weight is laid upon quick mental computations, but
in all grades the choice of problems should be such as especially apply
to the keeping of a house.” This is the opportunity which is offered to
girls by the Government in the department of mathematics! In addition
to the two grades of schools mentioned there are seminaries in many
of the large cities for the purpose of educating women teachers. The
instructors in these seminaries are well prepared for their positions,
are mostly men, and the instruction given is very superior to that
given in the girls’ high schools. Latin and Greek are, however,
not studied in these seminaries, and mathematics and science are
expurgated, we might say, of points that might prove difficult for the
feminine intellect.

The ability to learn Latin and Greek seems in the German mind to
especially mark the dividing line between the masculine and feminine
brain. The writer was at one time studying a subject in Greek
philosophy, in the City Library of Munich, requiring the use of a
number of Greek and Latin books, and it was amusing to notice the
astonishment of the men present that a woman should know the classic
languages!

The women who hold certificates from the seminaries are allowed,
according to a new law passed in 1894, to continue their studies and
to take the higher teachers’ examinations. This is considered a great
step in advance, for a woman who has successfully passed this latter
examination can hold any position in the girls’ schools, and can even
be director of such a school.

That German women have long been discontented with the education
provided for them by the Government is proved by the fact that the
number of higher institutions offering private opportunities to girls
is constantly increasing. As far back as 1868 the Victoria Lyceum was
founded by a Scotch woman--Miss Georgina Archer--at her own expense and
on her own responsibility, and this institution was well sustained from
the beginning. It is now under the patronage of the Empress Frederick,
and offers courses to women that run parallel to a certain extent
with those given on the same subjects in the university. Professors
from the university lecture in the Victoria Lyceum, but a young woman
who had listened to the same professor in both places informed me
that he (perhaps unconsciously) simplified his lectures very much
for the Victoria Lyceum. Fraulein Anna von Cotta is the director of
the institution. Among the women who teach there we note the name of
the well-known Fraulein Lange, who lectures on psychology and German
literature.

There are several girls’ gymnasia in Germany which testify to the
demand for higher education. These institutions are all but one
private, and three of them--one in Leipsic, one in Berlin, and a third,
opened in October, 1898, in Königsberg--are called “gymnasial courses,”
and are for girls who have finished the girls’ high school, and who
must pass entrance examinations in order to be received into them.

There has been for some time a girls’ gymnasium which corresponds
exactly to those for boys in Carlsruhe, under the auspices of the
“Society for Reform in the Education of Women,” which receives girls
of twelve who must have finished the six lower classes of a girls’
school. This society, to which the girls of Germany owe much, is
planning to open another gymnasium in Hannover, to which girls will be
received from the junior class of the girls’ high school; the course
of study will occupy five years, and will fit girls for the same
official examinations as the boys’ gymnasia. The language courses in
the highest class will be elective, providing either for Greek or the
modern languages, but Latin is obligatory in all the classes. The girls
from all these gymnasia are debarred from taking any of the official
examinations for which their studies have prepared them.

The next step in the matter of gymnasial education for girls was
what might have been expected. The people of the wide-awake city of
Breslau voted, by an overwhelming majority, to establish a girls’
gymnasium under the same laws and furnishing the same advantages as
the boys’ gymnasia. The completed plan was sent to the Minister of
Public Instruction in Berlin in January, 1898, for approval, with the
intention of opening the gymnasium at Easter, for which twenty-six
girls were already enrolled. Herr Dr. Bosse, however, foreseeing
the results such an undertaking would involve, consulted the other
departments of the ministry, and two months later a decided refusal
came like a thunderbolt upon the people of Breslau. On the 30th of
April, 1898, Herr Dr. Bosse was called to account in the Reichstag
for his action in the matter, which he justified on the ground that
Government approval of girls’ gymnasia would mean the acceptance of
the diploma for matriculation in the universities and the opening
to women of all Government professional examinations, and that to
have granted it would have been to take a step in the direction of
the modern movement for women which could never have been recalled,
and would open the lecture rooms of Germany in general to women. He
contended, further, that the founding of official gymnasia for girls
would delegate the existing girls’ high school to a secondary place,
an institution which had been planned thoughtfully by the Government
for the purpose of educating women in the best manner, not to become
rivals of men, but help-meets and able housekeepers.

The demand of the people of Breslau, Dr. Bosse said, was an unnatural
one, and his refusal was founded on the fear that such a movement would
increase and threaten the social foundations of all Germany, as the
idea that women can compete with men in all careers is a false one.

The petition of the magistrate of Breslau was supported in the
discussion by some of the national-liberal, free-conservative, and
Polish representatives. These took the broad ground that girls have
a right to equal education with boys, and that the educational
institutions of Germany which have so long stood at the head of those
of the world should not, in the matter of education of women, leave the
question to be decided according to the whims of private individuals.

Some of the arguments of those who spoke in favor of the enterprise
were amusing. One said that the girls of Germany would be grateful if
the Minister of Public Instruction would furnish them with husbands,
but, as there were not enough to go around, the others should have some
career provided for them. Another, that about forty per cent of the
girls of the higher classes no longer marry, and they should not be
allowed to suffer the consequences of the fact that young men of the
present day do not care to marry, but they have a right that the way be
shown them to such careers as are suited to their feminine nature.

An objector said that he could not understand how any man of
pedagogical culture could approve of a girls’ gymnasium, for it is
evident that any such progress for women as that would imply must be at
the expense of the men, who would gain less on account of the increased
number of candidates for work of all kinds and would more seldom be
able to offer the best of all existences to a woman--that of wifehood.
The city of Breslau was obliged, therefore, to give up the undertaking
for the present, but the agitation of the question has probably
prepared the way for more extended plans in the future in the same
direction in Prussia.

A similar undertaking in Carlsruhe, in Baden, has met with better
success, and resulted in the opening of the first official gymnasium
for girls in Germany, in September, 1898. This gymnasium was planned
about the same time as that of Breslau, and as the permission of
the Minister of Public Instruction in Baden was obtained without
difficulty, the institution came into existence according to the
will of the people of Carlsruhe. Seventy-nine of the members of the
Bürgerauschuss voted in favor of the undertaking in the meeting in
which the final action was taken early in the summer of 1898. The
Christian-conservative party only decidedly opposed it. The leader of
this party was very much excited over the matter, and called out, when
the action was taken, “I ask you, gentlemen, on your honor, if any of
you would marry a girl from a gymnasium?”

The opening of the Government gymnasium will remove the necessity for
continuing the private one in Carlsruhe, under the society in charge of
it, and leave that society free to direct its efforts elsewhere.

There had already been several references to the general subject of
the education of women in the Reichstag before the question of the
gymnasium in Breslau came up. In January, 1898, Prince Carolath spoke
in favor of founding several girls’ gymnasia, and admitting women
legally to the universities and to pedagogical and to medical state
professional examinations, remarking that in all other civilized lands
the universities are more open to women than in Germany.

Coming now to the present attitude of the universities to the higher
education of women, we find that a great change has taken place during
the last few years. While it is still the fact that no German woman can
matriculate in any university in Germany, yet the problem of the stand
which the universities should take is working out its own solution in
the right direction.

The University of Berlin, the largest and in many respects the leading
one, has made progress in the matter, although women still work there
under great limitations. The cause was injured at the outset in Berlin
by the fact that women, often foreigners, who had not the required
preparation, rushed into lecture rooms which were open to them from
motives of curiosity. This caused such strong feeling among the
professors that in one instance a professor, on entering his classroom,
saw a lady sitting in the rear, walked up to her, offered her his arm,
and led her out of the room.

The first step in the right direction has been to demand either a
diploma from some well-known institution, or, as that could not be
complied with by German women, the certificate of the teachers’
examinations. The possessors of such credentials may attend lectures
in any course, where the professor is willing, as _Hospitants_. The
conditions under which women may attend the University of Berlin are
the following:

1. A written permission must be obtained from the curator of the
university on presentation of a satisfactory diploma, a passport, and,
by Russian applicants, a written permission from the police authorities
to study in Germany.

2. Written permission from the rector.

3. Written permission from the professors or docents whose lectures the
applicant wishes to attend.

4. The permission from the rector must be obtained each semester, but
from the curator only when a new subject is chosen.

5. The same fee is demanded from women as from men, and women are
requested to always carry with them, in attending lectures, the written
permission from the rector.

At the public installation of Rector Waldeyer, in October, 1898,
both in his address and in that of the resigning rector, Geheimrath
Professor Schmoller, the subject of education of women received
attention.

Geheimrath Schmoller said that the first condition of further
concessions in the matter must be better preparation on the part of the
women, and when this deficiency should be provided for the faculty of
the university could make the conditions of their attending lectures
lighter, perhaps even the same as those for men. Geheimrath Waldeyer
made the subject one of three to which he gave equal space, and which
he said called for immediate attention in the educational affairs of
Germany. The other two subjects were the relation of technical schools
to the universities, and university extension. Geheimrath Waldeyer said
that he had formerly been opposed to the higher education of women,
but had been led to change his mind from seeing that the movement is
not an artificial one, but rather the natural result of the present
social condition of society, and on the simple ground of right should
be forwarded in a legitimate manner. He spoke strongly, however, in
favor of the establishment of separate universities for men and women,
on account of the natural differences in the working of their minds and
the necessity of adapting methods in both instances to their needs.

The number of women in the University of Berlin has increased very
rapidly, being in the autumn of 1896 thirty-nine, in the winter of the
same year ninety-five. The next year the largest number was nearly
two hundred, and in 1897-’98 three hundred and fifty-two were in all
inscribed. Nearly half of these were German women. Most of the women
in the University of Berlin are in the department of philosophy, but
several are pursuing courses in theology and law. These women are of
all ages. One from Charlottenburg was sixty-two years old, and, besides
this honored lady, there were five others whose white hair testified
to an age of from fifty to fifty-five, while the youngest of all was a
Bulgarian girl of seventeen.

The first woman to take her degree in the University of Berlin was
Dr. Else Neumann, in December, 1898, in physics and mathematics, who
succeeded, notwithstanding the difficulties to be contended with in the
absence of preparatory study and the necessity for private preparation.

It is not, however, only in Berlin that the desire for university
study has taken a strong hold on the German women, but it is shown
in other places, not simply by the fact that many of them attend the
universities of Switzerland, which are everywhere open to them, but by
their also obtaining the advantages in their own land which have so
long been denied them.

Heidelberg was the first university in Germany to grant the doctor
examination to women, and this was done several years before lectures
were open to them. The writer called upon Prof. Kuno Fischer one day
in the summer of 1890 to ask permission to attend a lecture which he
was to give that afternoon on Helmholtz. He said that he was very sorry
indeed, but he was obliged to refuse women the privilege of listening
to him, as they were not admitted to the university. I asked when
they would probably be admitted, and he replied, speaking in French,
“_Jamais, mademoiselle, jamais!_” Four years later, however, a friend
of mine took her degree there in the department of philosophy, thus
proving that the wisest of men sometimes make mistakes.

Women have for years studied as _Hospitants_ in the Universities of
Leipsic and Göttingen, but since November, 1897, the conditions of
their admission in Göttingen have been made more difficult.

In Kiel the professors who are not willing to allow women to attend
their lectures put a star opposite their names in the university
programme of the lecture courses, and this star is unfortunately seen
opposite the names of all the professors of theology and many of those
of medicine. Women began to attend the University of Tübingen in the
autumn of 1898, Dr. Maria Gräfin von Linden being the first, who was
soon followed by many others.

The degree of Doctor of Philosophy _honoris causa_ has been conferred
on two women by the University of Munich--in December, 1897, on the
Princess Theresa, and in October, 1898, on Lady Blennerhassett, an
author, for her researches in modern languages. The Dean of the
Philosophical Faculty, accompanied by three professors, visited her
in her home in Munich to communicate to her the honor which she had
received.

The University of Breslau offers better conditions to women than are
provided elsewhere, as might naturally be expected, especially in the
department of medicine.

Germany was represented in the International Council of Women, held in
London in June of this present year, by Frau Anna Simson, Frau Bieber
Boehm, and Fran Marie Stritt, of Dresden.

It was also decided at this congress that the next Quinquennial
International Council of Women should be held in Berlin, and it will
without doubt be an occasion that will mark an era in the history of
the progress of liberty for the women of Germany.




SCENES ON THE PLANETS.

BY GARRETT P. SERVISS.


Although amateurs have played a conspicuous part in telescopic
discovery among the heavenly bodies, yet every owner of a small
telescope should not expect to attach his name to a star. But he
certainly can do something perhaps more useful to himself and his
friends. He can follow the discoveries that others, with better
appliances and opportunities, have made, and can thus impart to those
discoveries that sense of reality which only comes from seeing things
with one’s own eyes. There are hundreds of things continually referred
to in books and writings on astronomy which have but a misty and
uncertain significance for the mere reader, but which he can easily
verify for himself with the aid of a telescope of four or five inches’
aperture, and which, when actually confronted by the senses, assume a
meaning, a beauty, and an importance that would otherwise entirely have
escaped him. Henceforth every allusion to the objects he has seen is
eloquent with intelligence and suggestion.

Take, for instance, the planets that have been the subject of so many
observations and speculations of late years--Mars, Jupiter, Saturn,
Venus. For the ordinary reader much that is said about them makes very
little impression upon his mind, and is almost unintelligible. He reads
of the “snow patches” on Mars, but unless he has actually seen the
whitened poles of that planet he can form no clear image in his mind of
what is meant. So the “belts of Jupiter” is a confusing and misleading
phrase for almost everybody except the astronomer, and the rings of
Saturn are beyond comprehension unless they have actually been seen.

It is true that pictures and photographs partially supply the place
of observation, but by no means so successfully as many imagine. The
most realistic drawings and the sharpest photographs in astronomy are
those of the moon, yet I think nobody would maintain that any picture
in existence is capable of imparting a really satisfactory visual
impression of the appearance of the lunar globe. Nobody who has not
seen the moon with a telescope--it need not be a large one--can form a
correct and definite idea of what the moon is like.

The satisfaction of viewing with one’s own eyes some of the things the
astronomers write and talk about is very great, and the illumination
that comes from such viewing is equally great. Just as in foreign
travel the actual seeing of a famous city, a great gallery filled with
masterpieces, or a battlefield where decisive issues have been fought
out illuminates, for the traveler’s mind, the events of history, the
criticisms of artists, and the occurrences of contemporary life in
foreign lands, so an acquaintance with the sights of the heavens gives
a grasp on astronomical problems that can not be acquired in any other
way. The person who has been in Rome, though he may be no archæologist,
gets a far more vivid conception of a new discovery in the Forum than
does the reader who has never seen the city of the Seven Hills; and
the amateur who has looked at Jupiter with a telescope, though he may
be no astronomer, finds that the announcement of some change among the
wonderful belts of that cloudy planet has for him a meaning and an
interest in which the ordinary reader can not share.

[Illustration: JUPITER SEEN WITH A FIVE-INCH TELESCOPE. Shadow of a
satellite visible.]

Jupiter is perhaps the easiest of all the planets for the amateur
observer. A three-inch telescope gives beautiful views of the great
planet, although a four-inch or a five-inch is of course better. But
there is no necessity for going beyond six inches’ aperture in any
case. For myself, I think I should care for nothing better than my
five-inch of fifty-two inches’ focal distance. With such a glass more
details are visible in the dark belts and along the bright equatorial
girdle than can be correctly represented in a sketch before the
rotation of the planet has altered their aspect, while the shadows
of the satellites thrown upon the broad disk, and the satellites
themselves when in transit, can be seen sometimes with exquisite
clearness. The contrasting colors of various parts of the disk are also
easily studied with a glass of four or five inches’ aperture.

There is a charm about the great planet when he rides high in a
clear evening sky, lording it over the fixed stars with his serene,
unflickering luminousness, which no possessor of a telescope can
resist. You turn the glass upon him and he floats into the field of
view, with his _cortége_ of satellites, like a yellow-and-red moon,
attended by four miniatures of itself. You instantly comprehend
Jupiter’s mastery over his satellites--their allegiance is evident. No
one would for an instant mistake them for stars accidentally seen in
the same field of view. Although it requires a very large telescope
to magnify their disks to measurable dimensions, yet the smallest
glass differentiates them at once from the fixed stars. There is
something almost startling in their appearance of companionship with
the huge planet--this sudden verification to your eyes of the laws of
gravitation and of central forces. It is easy, while looking at Jupiter
amid his family, to understand the consternation of the churchmen when
Galileo’s telescope revealed that miniature of the solar system, and
it is gratifying to gaze upon one of the first battle grounds whereon
science gained a decisive victory for truth.

The swift changing of place among the satellites, as well as the
rapidity of Jupiter’s axial rotation, give the attraction of visible
movement to the Jovian spectacle. The planet rotates in four or five
minutes less than ten hours--in other words, it makes two turns and
four tenths of a third turn while the earth is turning once upon its
axis. A point on Jupiter’s equator moves about twenty-seven thousand
miles, or considerably more than the entire circumference of the earth,
in a single hour. The effect of this motion is clearly perceptible to
the observer with a telescope on account of the diversified markings
and colors of the moving disk, and to watch it is one of the greatest
pleasures that the telescope affords.

It would be possible, when the planet is favorably situated, to witness
an entire rotation of Jupiter in the course of one night, but the
beginning and end of the observation would be more or less interfered
with by the effects of low altitude, to say nothing of the tedium
of so long a vigil. But by looking at the planet for an hour at a
time in the course of a few nights every side of it will have been
presented to view. Suppose the first observation is made between nine
and ten o’clock on any night which may have been selected. Then on the
following night between ten and eleven o’clock Jupiter will have made
two and a half turns upon his axis, and the side diametrically opposite
to that seen on the first night will be visible. On the third night
between eleven and twelve o’clock Jupiter will have performed five
complete rotations, and the side originally viewed will be visible
again.

[Illustration: ECLIPSES AND TRANSITS OF JUPITER’S SATELLITES. Satellite
I and the shadow of III are seen in transit. IV is about to be
eclipsed.]

Owing to the rotundity of the planet, only the central part of the
disk is sharply defined, and markings which can be easily seen when
centrally located become indistinct or disappear altogether when near
the limb. Approach to the edge of the disk also causes a foreshortening
which sometimes entirely alters the aspect of a marking. It is
advisable, therefore, to confine the attention mainly to the middle of
the disk. As time passes, clearly defined markings on or between the
cloudy belts will be seen to approach the western edge of the disk,
gradually losing their distinctness and altering their appearance,
while from the region of indistinct definition near the eastern edge
other markings slowly emerge and advance toward the center, becoming
sharper in outline and more clearly defined in color as they swing into
view.

Watching these changes, the observer is carried away by the reflection
that he actually sees the turning of another distant world upon its
axis of rotation, just as he might view the revolving earth from a
standpoint on the moon. Belts of reddish clouds, many thousands of
miles across, are stretched along on each side of the equator of the
great planet he is watching; the equatorial belt itself, brilliantly
lemon-hued, or sometimes ruddy, is diversified with white globular and
balloon-shaped masses, which almost recall the appearance of summer
cloud domes hanging over a terrestrial landscape, while toward the
poles shadowy expanses of gradually deepening blue or blue-gray suggest
the comparative coolness of those regions which lie always under a low
sun.

After a few nights’ observation even the veriest amateur finds himself
recognizing certain shapes or appearances--a narrow dark belt running
slopingly across the equator from one of the main cloud zones to the
other, or a rift in one of the colored bands, or a rotund white mass
apparently floating above the equator, or a broad scallop in the
edge of a belt like that near the site of the celebrated “red spot,”
whose changes of color and aspect since its first appearance in 1878,
together with the light it has thrown on the constitution of Jupiter’s
disk, have all but created a new Jovian literature, so thoroughly and
so frequently have they been discussed.

And, having noticed these recurring features, the observer will
begin to note their relations to one another, and will thus be led
to observe that some of them gradually drift apart, while others
drift nearer; and after a time, without any aid from books or hints
from observatories, he will discover for himself that there is a law
governing the movements on Jupiter’s disk. Upon the whole he will find
that the swiftest motions are near the equator, and the slowest near
the poles, although, if he is persistent and has a good eye and a good
instrument, he will note exceptions to this rule, probably arising, as
Professor Hough suggests, from differences of altitude in Jupiter’s
atmosphere. Finally, he will conclude that the colossal globe before
him is, exteriorly at least, a vast ball of clouds and vapors, subject
to tremendous vicissitudes, possibly intensely heated, and altogether
different in its physical constitution, although made up of similar
elements, from the earth. Then, if he chooses, he can sail off into the
delightful cloud-land of astronomical speculation, and make of the
striped and spotted sphere of Jove just such a world as may please his
fancy--for a world of some kind it certainly is.

For many observers the satellites of Jupiter possess even greater
attractions than the gigantic ball itself. As I have already remarked,
their movements are very noticeable and lend a wonderful animation
to the scene. Although they bear classical names, they are almost
universally referred to by their Roman numbers, beginning with the
innermost, whose symbol is I, and running outward in regular order II,
III, and IV. The minute satellite much nearer to the planet than any
of the others, which Mr. Barnard discovered with the Lick telescope in
1892, is called the fifth, although in the order of distance it would
be the first. In size and importance, however, it can not rank with its
comparatively gigantic brothers. Of course, no amateur’s telescope can
show the faintest glimpse of it.

Satellite I, situated at a mean distance of 261,000 miles from
Jupiter’s center--about 22,000 miles farther than the moon is from the
earth--is urged by its master’s overpowering attraction to a speed of
320 miles per minute, so that it performs a complete revolution in
about forty-two hours and a half. The others, of course, move more
slowly, but even the most distant performs its revolution in several
hours less than sixteen days. The plane of their orbits is presented
edgewise toward the earth, from which it follows that they appear
to move back and forth nearly in straight lines, some apparently
approaching the planet, while others are receding from it. The changes
in their relative positions, which can be detected from hour to hour,
are very striking night after night, and lead to a great variety of
arrangements always pleasing to the eye.

The most interesting phenomena that they present are their transits
and those of their round, black shadows across the face of the planet;
their eclipses by the planet’s shadow, when they disappear and
afterward reappear with astonishing suddenness; and their occultations
by the globe of Jupiter. Upon the whole, the most interesting thing
for the amateur to watch is the passage of the shadows across Jupiter.
The distinctness with which they can be seen when the air is steady is
likely to surprise, as it is certain to delight, the observer. When it
falls upon a light part of the disk the shadow of a satellite is as
black and sharply outlined as a drop of ink; on a dark-colored belt it
can not so easily be seen.

It is more difficult to see the satellites themselves in transit. There
appears to be some difference among them as to visibility in such
circumstances. Owing to their luminosity they are best seen when they
have a dark belt for a background, and are least easily visible when
they appear against a bright portion of the planet. Every observer
should provide himself with a copy of the American Ephemeris for the
current year, wherein he will find all the information needed to enable
him to identify the various satellites and to predict, by turning
Washington mean time into his own local time, the various phenomena of
the transits and eclipses.

While a faithful study of the phenomena of Jupiter is likely to lead
the student to the conclusion that the greatest planet in our system is
not a suitable abode for life, yet the problem of its future, always
fascinating to the imagination, is open; and whosoever may be disposed
to record his observations in a systematic manner may at least hope to
render aid in the solution of that problem.

[Illustration: SATURN SEEN WITH A FIVE-INCH TELESCOPE.]

Saturn ranks next to Jupiter in attractiveness for the observer with
a telescope. The rings are almost as mystifying to-day as they were
in the time of Herschel. There is probably no single telescopic view
that can compare in the power to excite wonder with that of Saturn
when the ring system is not so widely opened but that both poles of
the planet project beyond it. One returns to it again and again with
unflagging interest, and the beauty of the spectacle quite matches its
singularity. When Saturn is in view the owner of a telescope may become
a recruiting officer for astronomy by simply inviting his friends to
gaze at the wonderful planet. The silvery color of the ball, delicately
chased with half-visible shadings, merging one into another from the
bright equatorial band to the bluish polar caps; the grand arch of the
rings, sweeping across the planet with a perceptible edging of shadow;
their sudden disappearance close to the margin of the ball, where they
go behind it and fall straightway into night; the manifest contrast
of brightness, if not of color, between the two principal rings; the
fine curve of the black line marking the 1,600-mile gap between their
edges--these are some of the elements of a picture that can never fade
from the memory of any one who has once beheld it in its full glory.

Saturn’s moons are by no means so interesting to watch as are those of
Jupiter. Even the effect of their surprising number (raised to nine
by Professor Pickering’s discovery last spring of a new one which is
almost at the limit of visibility, and was found only with the aid of
photography) is lost, because most of them are too faint to be seen
with ordinary telescopes, or, if seen, to make any notable impression
upon the eye. The two largest--Titan and Japetus--are easily found, and
Titan is conspicuous, but they give none of that sense of companionship
and obedience to a central authority which strikes even the careless
observer of Jupiter’s system. This is owing partly to their more
deliberate movements and partly to the inclination of the plane of
their orbits, which seldom lies edgewise toward the earth.

[Illustration: POLAR VIEW OF SATURN’S SYSTEM. The orbits of the five
nearest satellites are shown. The dotted line outside the rings shows
Roche’s limit.]

But the charm of the peerless rings is abiding, and the interest of
the spectator is heightened by recalling what science has recently
established as to their composition. It is marvelous to think, while
looking upon their broad, level surfaces--as smooth, apparently,
as polished steel, though thirty thousand miles across--that they
are in reality vast circling currents of meteoritic particles or
dust, through which run immense waves, condensation and rarefaction
succeeding one another as in the undulations of sound. Yet, with
all their inferential tumult, they may actually be as soundless as
the depths of interstellar space, for Struve has shown that those
spectacular rings possess no appreciable mass, and, viewed from Saturn
itself, their (to us) gorgeous seeming bow may appear only as a wreath
of shimmering vapor spanning the sky and paled by the rivalry of the
brighter stars.

In view of the theory of tidal action disrupting a satellite within
a critical distance from the center of its primary, the thoughtful
observer of Saturn will find himself wondering what may have been the
origin of the rings. The critical distance referred to, and which
is known as Roche’s limit, lies, according to the most trustworthy
estimates, just outside the outermost edge of the rings. It follows
that if the matter composing the rings were collected into a single
body that body would inevitably be torn to pieces and scattered into
rings; and so, too, if instead of one there were several or many bodies
of considerable size occupying the place of the rings, all of these
bodies would be disrupted and scattered. If one of the present moons of
Saturn--for instance, Mimas, the innermost hitherto discovered--should
wander within the magic circle of Roche’s limit it would suffer a
similar fate, and its particles would be disseminated among the rings.
One can hardly help wondering whether the rings have originated from
the demolition of satellites--Saturn devouring his children, as the
ancient myths represent, and encircling himself, amid the fury of
destruction, with the dust of his disintegrated victims. At any rate,
the amateur student of Saturn will find in the revelations of his
telescope the inspirations of poetry as well as those of science, and
the bent of his mind will determine which he shall follow.

Professor Pickering’s discovery of a ninth satellite of Saturn,
situated at the great distance of nearly eight million miles from
the planet, serves to call attention to the vastness of the “sphere
of activity” over which the ringed planet reigns. Surprising as the
distance of the new satellite appears when compared with that of our
moon, it is yet far from the limit where Saturn’s control ceases and
that of the sun becomes predominant. That limit, according to Prof.
Asaph Hall’s calculation, is nearly 30,000,000 miles from Saturn’s
center, while if our moon were removed to a distance a little exceeding
500,000 miles the earth would be in danger of losing its satellite
through the elopement of Artemis with Apollo.

Although, as already remarked, the satellites of Saturn are not
especially interesting to the amateur telescopist, yet it may be well
to mention that, in addition to Titan and Japetus, the satellite
named Rhea, the fifth in order of distance from the planet, is not a
difficult object for a three-or four-inch telescope, and two others
considerably fainter than Rhea--Dione (the fourth) and Tethys (the
third)--may be seen in favorable circumstances. The others--Mimas (the
first), Enceladus (the second), and Hyperion (the seventh)--are beyond
the reach of all but large telescopes. The ninth satellite, which has
received the name of Phœbe, is much fainter than any of the others, its
stellar magnitude being reckoned by its discoverer at about 15.5.

Mars, the best advertised of all the planets, is nearly the least
satisfactory to look at except during a favorable opposition, like
those of 1877 and 1892, when its comparative nearness to the earth
renders some of its characteristic features visible in a small
telescope. The next favorable opposition will occur in 1907.

[Illustration: MARS SEEN WITH A FIVE-INCH TELESCOPE.]

When well seen with an ordinary telescope, say a four-or five-inch
glass, Mars shows three peculiarities that may be called fairly
conspicuous--viz., its white polar cap, its general reddish, or
orange-yellow, hue, and its dark markings, one of the clearest of which
is the so-called Syrtis Major, or, as it was once named on account
of its shape, “Hourglass Sea.” Other dark expanses in the southern
hemisphere are not difficult to be seen, although their outlines are
more or less misty and indistinct. The gradual diminution of the polar
cap, which certainly behaves in this respect as a mass of snow and ice
would do, is a most interesting spectacle. As summer advances in the
southern hemisphere of Mars, the white circular patch surrounding the
pole becomes smaller, night after night, until it sometimes disappears
entirely even from the ken of the largest telescopes. At the same time
the dark expanses become more distinct, as if the melting of the polar
snows had supplied them with a greater depth of water, or the advance
of the season had darkened them with a heavier growth of vegetation.

The phenomena mentioned above are about all that a small telescope
will reveal. Occasionally a dark streak, which large instruments show
is connected with the mysterious system of “canals,” can be detected,
but the “canals” themselves are far beyond the reach of any telescope
except a few of the giants handled by experienced observers. The
conviction which seems to have forced its way into the minds even of
some conservative astronomers, that on Mars the conditions, to use
the expression of Professor Young, “are more nearly earthlike than on
any other of the heavenly bodies which we can see with our present
telescopes,” is sufficient to make the planet a center of undying
interest notwithstanding the difficulties with which the amateur is
confronted in his endeavors to see the details of its markings.

[Illustration: THE ILLUMINATION OF VENUS’S ATMOSPHERE AT THE BEGINNING
OF HER TRANSIT ACROSS THE SUN.]

In Venus “the fatal gift of beauty” may be said, as far as our
observations are concerned, to be matched by the equally fatal gift of
brilliance. Whether it be due to atmospheric reflection alone or to the
prevalence of clouds, Venus is so bright that considerable doubt exists
as to the actual visibility of any permanent markings on her surface.
The detailed representations of the disk of Venus by Mr. Percival
Lowell, showing in some respects a resemblance to the stripings of
Mars, can not yet be accepted as decisive. More experienced astronomers
than Mr. Lowell have been unable to see at all things which he draws
with a fearless and unhesitating pencil. That there are some shadowy
features of the planet’s surface to be seen in favorable circumstances
is probable, but the time for drawing a “map of Venus” has not yet come.

The previous work of Schiaparelli lends a certain degree of probability
to Mr. Lowell’s observations on the rotation of Venus. This rotation,
according to the original announcement of Schiaparelli, is probably
performed in the same period as the revolution around the sun. In other
words, Venus, if Schiaparelli and Lowell are right, always presents the
same side to the sun, possessing, in consequence, a day hemisphere and
a night hemisphere which never interchange places. This condition is
so antagonistic to all our ideas of what constitutes habitability for
a planet that one hesitates to accept it as proved, and almost hopes
that it may turn out to have no real existence. Venus, as the twin of
the earth in size, is a planet which the imagination, warmed by its
sunny aspect, would fain people with intelligent beings a little fairer
than ourselves; but how can such ideas be reconciled with the picture
of a world one half of which is subjected to the merciless rays of a
never-setting sun, while the other half is buried in the fearful gloom
and icy chill of unending night?

Any amateur observer who wishes to test his eyesight and his telescope
in the search of shades or markings on the disk of Venus by the aid of
which the question of its rotation may finally be settled should do his
work while the sun is still above the horizon. Schiaparelli adopted
that plan years ago, and others have followed him with advantage. The
diffused light of day serves to take off the glare which is so serious
an obstacle to the successful observation of Venus when seen against
a dark sky. Knowing the location of Venus in the sky, which can be
ascertained from the Ephemeris, the observer can find it by day. If
his telescope is not permanently mounted and provided with “circles”
this may not prove an easy thing to do, yet a little perseverance and
ingenuity will effect it. One way is to find, with a star chart, some
star whose declination is the same, or very nearly the same, as that of
Venus, and which crosses the meridian say twelve hours ahead of her.
Then set the telescope upon that star, when it is on the meridian at
night, and leave it there, and the next day, twelve hours after the
star crossed the meridian, look into your telescope and you will see
Venus, or, if not, a slight motion of the tube one way or another will
bring her into view.

For many amateurs the phases of Venus will alone supply sufficient
interest for telescopic observation. The changes in her form, from
that of a round full moon when she is near superior conjunction to
the gibbous, and finally the half-moon phase as she approaches her
eastern elongation, followed by the gradually narrowing and lengthening
crescent, until she becomes a mere silver sickle as she swings in
between the sun and the earth, form a succession of delightful pictures
for the eye.

Not very much can be said for Mercury as a telescopic object. The
little planet presents phases like those of Venus, and, according to
Schiaparelli and Lowell, it resembles Venus in its rotation, keeping
always the same side to the sun. In fact, Schiaparelli’s discovery of
this peculiarity in the case of Mercury preceded the similar discovery
in the case of Venus. There are perceptible markings on Mercury which
have reminded some astronomers of the appearance of the moon, and
there are various reasons for thinking that the planet can not be
a suitable abode for living beings, at least for beings resembling
the inhabitants of the earth. Uranus and Neptune are too far away to
present any attraction for amateur observation.




PROFESSOR WARD ON “NATURALISM AND AGNOSTICISM.”

BY HERBERT SPENCER.


In a recent advertisement, Professor Ward’s work entitled as above was
characterized as “one of the most important contributions to philosophy
made in our time in England,” and this was joined with the prophecy
that it “may even do something to restore to philosophy the prominent
place it once occupied in English thought.” Along with laudatory
expressions, I have observed in some notices reprobation of the manner
adopted by Professor Ward in his attack upon my views--I might almost
say upon me; and one of the reviewers gives examples of the words he
uses--“ridiculous,” “absurd,” “blunder,” “nonsense,” “amazing fallacy,”
“our oracle.”

When, some time ago, I glanced at one of the volumes, I came upon a
passage which at once stamped the book by displaying the attitude
of the writer; but, being then otherwise occupied, I decided not to
disturb myself by reading more. Now, however, partly by the reviews I
have seen, and partly by the comments of a friend, I have been shown
that I can not let the book pass without remark. The assumption that a
critic states rightly the doctrine he criticises is so generally made,
that in the absence of proof to the contrary his criticisms are almost
certain to be regarded as valid. And when the critic is a Cambridge
Professor and an Honorary LL. D., the assumption will be thought fully
warranted.

       *       *       *       *       *

Let me set out by quoting some passages disclosing the kind of feeling
by which Professor Ward’s criticisms are influenced, if not prompted.
In his preface he says:--

    “When at length Naturalism is forced to take account of the facts
    of life and mind, we find the strain on the mechanical theory is
    more than it will bear. Mr. Spencer has blandly to confess that
    ‘two volumes’ of his _Synthetic Philosophy_ are missing, the
    volumes that should connect inorganic with biological, evolution.”

Respecting the first of these sentences, I have only to remark that I
have said (as in _First Principles_, § 62) and repeatedly implied,
that force or energy in the sense which a “mechanical theory” connotes,
can not be that Ultimate Cause whence all things proceed, and that
there is as much warrant for calling it spiritual as for calling it
material. As was asserted at the close of that work (p. 558), the
“implications are no more materialistic than they are spiritualistic;
and no more spiritualistic than they are materialistic”; and as
was contended in the _Principles of Sociology_, § 659, “the Power
manifested throughout the Universe distinguished as material, is the
same Power which in ourselves wells up under the form of consciousness.”

But it is to the second sentence I here chiefly draw attention. Whether
or not there be a sarcasm behind the words “blandly to confess,” it
is clear that the sentence is meant to imply some dereliction on my
part. Now in the programme of the Synthetic Philosophy, the division
dealing with inorganic nature was avowedly omitted, “because even
without it the scheme is too extensive”; and this undue extensiveness
was so conspicuous that I was thought absurd or almost insane. Yet I
am now tacitly reproached because I did not make it more extensive
still--because an undertaking deemed scarcely possible was not made
quite impossible. When blamed for attempting too much, it never entered
my thoughts that I might in after years be blamed for not attempting
more.

Repeated reference to _First Principles_ as “the stereotyped
philosophy” are manifestly intended by Professor Ward to reflect on
me, either for having left that work during many years unchanged, or
for implying that no change is needed. Much as I dislike personal
explanations, I am here compelled to make them. If, in 1896, when the
ten volumes constituting the Synthetic Philosophy were completed, I
had done nothing toward revision of them, the omission would not have
been considered by most men a reason for complaint. The facts, however,
are, that in 1867 I issued a recast and revised edition of _First
Principles_; in 1870 an edition of the _Principles of Psychology_, of
which half was revised, and ten years later an enlarged edition of
the same work; in 1885 a revised edition of the first volume of the
_Principles of Sociology_; and now I have fortunately been able to
finish a revised and enlarged edition of the _Principles of Biology_.
Any one not willfully blind might have seen that when persisting, under
great difficulties, in trying to execute the entire work as originally
outlined, it was not practicable at the same time to bring all earlier
parts of it up to date. Professor Ward, however, thinks that I should
have sacrificed the end to improve the beginning, or else that I
should have found energy enough to re-revise an earlier volume while
writing the later ones; and my failure to do both prompts sarcastic
allusions.[A]

    [A] Candor often brings penalties, as witness the
        announcement “stereotyped edition.” When another thousand
        of a work has been ordered, the printers do not always
        refer to the author for correction of the title-page,
        but, as a matter of course, put “second edition,” or
        “third edition,” as the case may be. When my attention
        has been drawn to such matters, however, I have directed
        that the words “stereotyped edition” shall be put on the
        title-page if the printing is from plates, and if the work
        is unaltered: objecting to a usage which betrays readers
        into the false belief that new matter is forthcoming. I
        did not perceive that an antagonist might transform the
        words “stereotyped edition” into an assertion that the work
        needed no changes. Experience should have warned me that
        adverse interpretations are inevitable wherever they are
        possible. To the question--“Why did you stereotype?” the
        obvious reply is--“From motives of economy.”

In further illustration of the feeling Professor Ward brings to his
task, I may quote the following passage, in which he interposes
comments on my mode of writing:--

    “By the persistence of Force [capital F], we really mean the
    persistence of some Power [capital P] which transcends our
    knowledge and conception. The manifestations, as recurring
    either in ourselves or outside of us, do not persist; but that
    which persists is the Unknown Cause [capitals again] of these
    manifestations.”

The matter itself is trivial enough. It is worth noticing only as
indicating a state of mind. Supposing even that capitals were in such
cases inappropriate--supposing even that small initial letters would
have been more appropriate; it is clear that only one having a strong
_animus_ would have gone out of his way to notice it.

After thus enabling the reader to judge in what temper the criticisms
of Professor Ward are made, I may pass on.

       *       *       *       *       *

As implied at the outset, my intention is not to discuss Professor
Ward’s own philosophy--the less so because I discussed a like
philosophy nearly a generation ago. His position is that “Once
materialism is abandoned and dualism found untenable, a spiritualistic
monism remains the one stable position. It is only in terms of mind
that we can understand the unity, activity, and regularity that
nature presents. In so understanding we see that Nature is Spirit.”
(_Preface._) This was the position of Dr. Martineau in 1872 (and
probably is now). He argued, that to account for this infinitude of
physical changes everywhere going on, “Mind must be conceived as
there,” “under the guise of simple Dynamics.” My criticisms on this
view, given in an essay entitled “Mr. Martineau on Evolution,” can not
here be repeated. But I held then, as I hold now, that “the Ultimate
Power is no more representable in terms of human consciousness than
human consciousness is representable in terms of a plant’s functions.”
Briefly the result is, that in saying “Nature is Spirit” (capital N and
capital S!), Professor Ward implies that he knows all about it; while
I, on the other hand, am sure that I know nothing about it.

       *       *       *       *       *

And now, passing to my essential purpose, let me exemplify Professor
Ward’s controversial method. Specifying an hypothesis of the late Dr.
Croll (who, he thinks, had “incomparably more right to an opinion on
the question” than I have), he says, that it “at least recognizes a
problem with which Mr. Spencer scarcely attempts to deal--I mean the
evolution of the chemical elements. It thus suffices to convict Mr.
Spencer’s work of a certain incompleteness” (i., 190). Apparently
the words “scarcely attempts” refer to a passage in the above-named
essay, “Mr. Martineau on Evolution,” where several reasons are given
for thinking that the “so-called elements arise by compounding and
recompounding.” More than this has been done, however. The evolution
of the elements, if not systematically dealt with within the limits of
the Synthetic Philosophy, has not been ignored. In an essay on “The
Nebular Hypothesis” (_Essays_, i., pp. 156-9), it is argued, that
“the general law of evolution, if it does not actually involve the
conclusion that the so-called elements are compounds, yet affords _a
priori_ ground for suspecting that they are such”; and five groups of
traits are enumerated which support the belief that they originated by
a process of evolution like that everywhere going on. But the point I
here chiefly emphasize is that, having reflected upon me for omitting
two volumes, Professor Ward again reflects upon me for having omitted
something which one of these volumes would have contained. “Sir, you
have neglected to build that house which was wanted! Moreover, you have
not supplied the stairs!”

       *       *       *       *       *

From a sin of omission let us pass to a sin of commission. Professor
Ward quotes from me the sentence--“The absolutely homogeneous must
lose its equilibrium; and the relatively homogeneous must lapse into
the relatively less homogeneous.”--_First Principles_, p. 429. Then
presently he writes:--

    “In truth, however, homogeneity is not necessarily instability.
    Quite otherwise. If the homogeneity be absolute--that of Lord
    Kelvin’s primordial medium, say--the stability will be absolute
    too. In other words, if ‘the indefinite, incoherent homogeneity,’
    in which, according to Mr. Spencer, some rearrangement _must
    result_, be a state devoid of all qualitative diversity and without
    assignable bounds, then, as we saw in discussing mechanical ideals,
    any ‘rearrangement’ can result only from external interference; it
    can not begin from within” (i., 223).

And then he goes on to argue that “Thus, the very first step in Mr.
Spencer’s evolution seems to necessitate a breach of continuity. This
fatal defect, &c.” (_ibid._).

Observe the words “without assignable bounds”--without knowable limits,
infinite. So that the law of the instability of the homogeneous is
disposed of because it does not apply to an infinite homogeneous
medium. But since infinity is inconceivable by us, this alleged
case of stable homogeneity is inconceivable too. Hence the proposal
is to shelve the law displayed in all things we know, because it
is inapplicable to a hypothetical thing we can not know, and can
not even conceive! Now let me turn to the essential point. This
nominally-exceptional case was fully recognized by me in the chapter
he is criticising. In § 155 of _First Principles_ (p. 429), it is
written:--

    “One stable homogeneity only, is hypothetically possible. If
    centers of force, absolutely uniform in their powers, were diffused
    with absolute uniformity through unlimited space, they would remain
    in equilibrium. This, however, though a verbally intelligible
    supposition, is one that can not be represented in thought; since
    unlimited space is inconceivable.”

So that this nominal exception which Professor Ward urges against me as
a “fatal defect,” was set forth by me thirty-seven years ago!

A somewhat more involved case may next be dealt with. Professor Ward
writes:--

    “Moreover, on the physical assumption from which Mr. Spencer sets
    out, viz., that the mass of the universe and the energy of the
    universe are fixed in quantity--which ought to mean are finite
    in quantity--there can be no such alternations [of evolution and
    dissolution] as he supposes” (i., 192).

After some two pages of argument, he goes on:--

    “And so while all transformations of energy lead directly or
    indirectly to transformation into heat, from that transformation
    there is no complete return, and, therefore finally no return at
    all. This then is the conclusion to which Mr. Spencer’s premises
    lead. Two eminent physicists who accept those premises may be cited
    at this point: ‘It is absolutely certain,’ they say, ‘that life,
    so far as it is physical, depends essentially upon transformations
    of energy; it is also absolutely certain that age after age the
    possibility of such transformations is becoming less and less; and,
    so far as we yet know, the final state of the present universe must
    be an aggregation (into one mass) of all the matter it contains,
    _i. e._ the potential energy gone, and a practically useless state
    of kinetic energy, _i. e._ uniform temperature throughout that
    mass.... The present visible universe began in time and will in
    time come to an end’” (p. 194).

Mark now, however, that this opinion of “two eminent physicists,”
quoted to disprove my position, and tacitly assumed to have validity
in so far as it serves that end, is forthwith dismissed as having, for
other purposes, no validity. His next paragraph runs:--

    “To this conclusion we are surely led from such premises. But
    again I ask what warrant is there for the premises? Our experience
    certainly does not embrace the totality of things, is, in fact,
    ridiculously far from it. We have no evidence of definite space
    or time limits; quite the contrary. Every advance of knowledge
    only opens up new vistas into a remoter past and discloses further
    depths of immensity teeming with worlds.”

Thus the truth urged against me is that we can not know anything
about these ultimate physical principles in their application to the
ultra-visible universe. But, unhappily for Professor Ward’s criticism,
I entered this same caveat long ago. Demurring to that doctrine of the
dissipation of energy to which he now demurs, I wrote:--

    “Here, indeed, we arrive at a barrier to our reasonings; since we
    can not know whether this condition is or is not fulfilled. If the
    ether which fills the interspaces of our Sidereal system has a
    limit somewhere beyond the outermost stars, then it is inferable
    that motion is not lost by radiation beyond this limit; and if
    so, the original degree of diffusion may be resumed. Or supposing
    the ethereal medium to have no such limit, yet, on the hypothesis
    of an unlimited space, containing, at certain intervals, Sidereal
    Systems like our own, it may be that the quantity of molecular
    motion radiated into the region occupied by our Sidereal System,
    is equal to that which our Sidereal System radiates; in which case
    the quantity of motion possessed by it, remaining undiminished, it
    may continue during unlimited time its alternate concentrations and
    diffusions. But if, on the other hand, throughout boundless space
    filled with ether, there exist no other Sidereal Systems subject
    to like changes, or if such other Sidereal Systems exist at more
    than a certain average distance from one another; then it seems an
    unavoidable conclusion that the quantity of motion possessed, must
    diminish by radiation; and that so, on each successive resumption
    of the nebulous form, the matter of our Sidereal System will
    occupy a less space; until it reaches either a state in which its
    concentrations and diffusions are relatively small, or a state
    of complete aggregation and rest. Since, however, we have no
    evidence showing the existence or non-existence of Sidereal Systems
    throughout remote space; and since, even had we such evidence, a
    legitimate conclusion could not be drawn from premises of which
    one element (unlimited space) is inconceivable; we must be forever
    without answer to this transcendent question.” (_First Principles_,
    § 182, pp. 535-6.)

See, then, how the case stands. After urging against me the argument
of “two eminent physicists” as fatal to my conclusions, he thereupon
expresses dissent from the premises of that argument; and the reasons
he gives for dissenting are like those given by me before he was out of
his teens!

       *       *       *       *       *

It is not always easy to disentangle misrepresentations; especially
when they are woven into a fabric. For elucidation of this matter
there needs another section. It may fitly begin with an analogy.
An astronomer who “saw reason to think” that the swarm of November
meteors this year would be greater than usual, would be surprised if
the occurrence of a smaller number were cited in disproof of his
astronomical beliefs at large. It would be held that so undecided a
phrase as “saw reason to think,” not implying a definite deduction, did
not implicate his general conceptions nor appreciably discredit them.
Professor Ward, however, thinks a tentative opinion is equivalent to a
positive assertion. In the course of the foregoing argument (p. 191)
he represents me as saying that “there is an alternation of evolution
and dissolution in the totality of things.” He does not quote the whole
clause, which runs thus:--“For _if_, as we saw _reason to think_,
there is an alternation of evolution and dissolution in the totality
of things, &c.” Here, then, are two qualifying expressions which he
suppresses; and not only does he here suppress them, but elsewhere he
refers to this passage as not speculative, but quite positive. On p.
197 he says:--

    “But of a single supreme evolution embracing them all we have no
    title to speak: not even to assume that it is, much less to say
    what it is; least of all to _affirm confidently_ that it can be
    embraced in such a meaningless formula as the integration of matter
    and the dissipation of motion.” [The italics are mine.]

So that a hypothetical inference (implied by “if”), drawn from avowedly
uncertain data (implied by “reason to think”), he transforms into an
unhesitating assertion. He does this in presence of my statement that
respecting transformations of the Universe as a whole, no “legitimate
conclusions” can be drawn, and that we must be forever “without answer
to this transcendent question.” Nay, he does it in presence of a still
more specific repudiation of certainty. Section 182 begins:--

    “Here we come to the question raised at the close of the last
    chapter--does Evolution as a whole, like Evolution in detail,
    advance toward complete quiescence? Is that motionless state called
    death, which ends Evolution in organic bodies, typical of the
    universal death in which Evolution at large must end?...

    “To so speculative an inquiry, none but a speculative answer is to
    be expected. Such answer as may be ventured, must be taken less as
    a positive answer than as a demurrer to the conclusion that the
    proximate result must be the ultimate result” (p. 529). Instead of
    being a positive answer, it is intended to _exclude_ a positive
    answer.

One more instance may be given to illustrate Professor Ward’s mode of
discrediting views which he dislikes. On p. 198 of his first volume
occurs the sentence--

    “At any rate such a conception is less conjectural and more
    adequate than Mr. Spencer’s ridiculous comparison of the universe
    to a spinning top that begins by ‘wabbling,’ passes into a state of
    steady motion or _equilibrium mobile_, and finally comes to rest.”

The reader who seeks a warrant for this representation will seek in
vain. If, in the chapter of _First Principles_ on “Equilibration,”
he turns to section 171, where the celestial applications of the
general law are considered, he will find the Solar System alone
instanced as having progressed toward a moving equilibrium; and the
moving equilibrium even of this not compared as alleged. Neither in
that section nor in any subsequent section of the chapter, is any
larger celestial aggregate mentioned as progressing toward a moving
equilibrium. Contrariwise, in the succeeding chapter on “Dissolution,”
it is said that “the irregular distribution of our Sidereal System”
is “such as to render even a temporary moving equilibrium impossible”
(p. 531). On pp. 533-4 it is contended that even local aggregations
of stars, still more the whole Sidereal System, must eventually reach
a diffused state without passing through any such stage. And had not
conclusions respecting the changes of the Universe been excluded
as exceeding the bounds even of speculation (p. 536), it is clear
that still more of the Universe would no moving equilibrium have
been alleged; but, had anything been alleged, it would have been the
reverse. How, then, has it been possible, the reader will ask, for
Professor Ward to write the sentence above quoted? If instead of
vainly seeking through the sections devoted to “Equilibration” and
“Dissolution” in relation to celestial phenomena, he turns back to
some introductory pages he will find a clew. I have pointed out that
in an aggregate having compounded motions, one of the constituent
motions may be dissipated while the rest continue; and that in some
such cases there is established a moving equilibrium. In illustration
I have taken “the most familiar example”--“that of the spinning top”;
and to remind the reader of one of the movements thus dissipated while
the rest continue, I have used the word “wabbling”; there being no
other descriptive word. What then has Professor Ward done? That mode
of establishing an equilibrium which the spinning top exemplifies,
he represents as extended by me to celestial phenomena, though no
such comparison is made nor any such word used. Nay, he has done so
notwithstanding my assertion that a moving equilibrium of our sidereal
system is negatived, and regardless of the implied assertion that
still more would be negatived a moving equilibrium of the Universe,
could we with any rationality speculate about it. Actually in defiance
of all this, he says I compare the motion of the Universe to that of
a “wabbling” top. Having constructed a grotesque fancy, he labels it
“ridiculous” and then debits me with it.

I can not pursue further this examination of Professor Ward’s
criticisms: other things have to be done. Whether what has been said
will lead readers to discount the laudatory expressions I quoted at the
outset, it is not for me to say. But I think I have said enough to
warn them that before accepting Professor Ward’s versions of my views,
it will be prudent to verify them.

       *       *       *       *       *

POSTSCRIPT.--I said that I did not propose to discuss Professor Ward’s
own philosophy, and I contented myself with quoting his summary of
it--“Nature is Spirit.” It occurs to me, however, that as showing the
point of view from which his criticisms are made, it may not be amiss
to give readers a rather more specific conception of his philosophy, by
reproducing a laudatory quotation he makes. Here it is:--

    “If ‘rational synthesis’ of things is what we seek, it is surely
    more reasonable to say with Lotze: ‘What lies beneath all is not a
    quantity which is bound eternally to the same limits and compelled
    through many diverse arrangements, continuously varied, to
    manifest always the very same total. On the contrary, should _the
    self-realization of the Idea_ [!] require it, there is nothing to
    hinder the working elements of the world being at one period more
    numerous and yet more intense; at another period less intense as
    well as fewer’” (i., 218). [The italics are mine.]

It is worth remarking that on the opposite page some of my views are
characterized as “astounding feats of philosophical jugglery”!




DESTRUCTIVE EFFECTS OF VAGRANT ELECTRICITY.

BY HUBERT S. WYNKOOP, M. E.


Reverting to the dictionary for a definition, electrolysis is “the
process of decomposing a chemical compound by the passage of an
electric current through it.” Electroplating is a popular illustration
of this definition, having been numbered among the industrial arts for
nearly a century.

If in a bath of sulphate-of-copper solution are placed a copper plate
and a plumbago-covered wax mold, the passage of an electric current
through the solution, _from_ the plate _to_ the mold, will result
in the deposition of copper upon the mold, or negative electrode,
and the wasting away of the plate of copper, or positive electrode.
Generalizing from this and other experiments, it may be broadly
stated that the passage of an electric current through a solution of
electrolyzable metallic salt, _from_ an oxidizable metal _to_ some
other conductor, will be attended by the separation of the salt into
two parts: first, the metal, appearing at the negative electrode;
and, second, an unstable compound of the remaining elements. This
unstable compound is supposed to unite with the hydrogen of the water,
liberating oxygen, and forming an acid. Both oxygen and acid appear
only at the positive electrode, which is thus made subject to a double
decay--a corrosion by oxygen and a solution by acid.

There is nothing new about this. It is not even a novel statement of
a fundamental electro-chemical truth. In times past, however, we were
wont to consider this matter as pertaining solely to the laboratory
or to the electroplating industry; now we are forced to see that the
reproduction of this experiment on a grand scale is attended with
results as disagreeable as they are widespread.

Hidden beneath our highways lie gas pipes, water pipes, railway tracks,
Edison tubes, cement-lined iron subway ducts, and lead-covered cables.
These are the electrodes. In contact with these conductors is the
soil, containing an electrolyzable salt--chloride, nitrate or sulphate
of ammonia, potash, soda, or magnesia, generally. In the presence of
moisture this soil becomes an electrolyte, or salt solution. In the
absence of electricity no appreciable damage occurs; but the passage of
an electric current, no matter how small, from one pipe to another is
sure, sooner or later, to leave its traces upon the positive conductor
in the form of a decay other than mere oxidation. It is to this decay
that has been given the name of _electrolysis_; so that when this
heading appears in the daily press or in technical journals one may
interpret the term popularly as “the electrolytic corrosion of metals
buried in the soil.”

[Illustration: COPPER DRIP PIPE AFTER SEVENTEEN DAYS’ EXPOSURE IN SALT
WATER TO THE ACTION OF ELECTRICITY. Half size.]

To produce electrolytic disintegration of pipes, etc., on a scale
grand enough to cause apprehension, a bountiful source of electricity
is essential. Unfortunately, this condition is not lacking to-day in
any town in which the usual overhead trolley electric railway is in
operation. This system of electric propulsion is based upon the use of
a “ground return”--that is to say, the electricity passes out from the
power house to the bare trolley wire, thence to the pole on the roof of
the car, thence through the motors to the wheels, whence it is expected
to return to the power house, _via_ the rails.

As a matter of fact, however, the released electricity by no means
confines itself to the rails and the copper return feeders--legitimate
paths provided for it. It avails itself, on the other hand, of what may
be termed, for brevity’s sake, the illegitimate return--comprising all
underground electrical conductors except the rails and return feeders,
and including subterranean water-courses, sewers, and metallic earth
veins.

[Illustration: WROUGHT-IRON SERVICE PIPE FOR WATER AFTER ONE YEAR’S
BURIAL BENEATH A TROLLEY TRACK.

The fibrous appearance of the surface is characteristic of wrought iron
and steel.]

In the light of our experience of the last eight years, it is easy
to identify as electrolysis the effects shown in the accompanying
cuts of buried metals that have been actually subjected to a flow of
electricity. It is not to be inferred that the destructive action here
depicted is universal throughout our towns, but, rather, that the
damage occurs in spots, its rate of progress being dependent upon the
amount of current and the duration of the flow. Dry, sandy soils tend
to keep down the flow of current by interposing a high resistance, so
that in such localities electrolytic effects are not as pronounced
as in wet, loamy soils. In the same way, the character of the pipe
surface--or coating, if there be any--acts as a partial barrier to
check the passage of electricity.

Until recently it was generally supposed that cast iron was not
attacked--at least not rapidly enough to cause alarm. In Brooklyn the
water mains, of very hard, dense, even-grained cast iron, containing
alloyed rather than combined carbon, have not been appreciably
corroded. At Dayton, Ohio, on the other hand, seventy-seven thousand
dollars’ worth of damage has already resulted. One peculiarity of
electrolyzed cast iron is that the original shape is usually retained,
the iron being eaten away and leaving a punky formation of pure or
nearly pure graphite. In such a case a superficial examination detects
nothing wrong, and it requires a mechanical scraping to show that the
strength is not there. For this reason good photographs of cast-iron
electrolysis are somewhat hard to obtain.

[Illustration: LEAD SERVICE PIPE AFTER EIGHT MONTHS’ BURIAL IN
BUILDERS’ SAND. The collapsed appearance of the pipe is due entirely
to the removal of the lead by electrolysis, the bore retaining its
original shape. The dark spot on the upper surface of the pipe is the
point of rupture. One third size.]

The reason for the comparative immunity of cast iron is not as yet
definitely understood. It certainly does not lie particularly in the
asphaltic varnish usually applied, for this varnish affords little or
no protection when used upon wrought iron or other metals. Nor can it
be accounted for by the composition of cast iron itself, inasmuch as a
fractured or brightly scraped surface of cast iron shows approximately
the same symptoms as other metals when acted upon by a given current
for a given time. Whether the iron oxide is the saving feature, or
whether the “skin” due to the process of casting acts as an insulator,
is not yet settled.

When the trouble first appeared in Boston, in 1891, its cause was
promptly identified. The electric-railway construction of those days
was so crude, however, that many well-informed electricians fell into
the error of assuming that heavier rails, more and larger return
feeders, and better bonding (i. e., wire connections from rail to rail,
around the joints, designed to decrease the resistance) would prove a
panacea for all electrolytic ills. Indeed, this view is still held by a
surprisingly large number of men versed in matters electrical.

I am of the opinion that it is impossible, from a financial standpoint,
to provide so satisfactory a legitimate return that considerable
electricity will not seek a path through pipes, cable covers, etc.;
for, in order to confine the electric current to the rails, the
resistance of the earth and its contained pipes would have to be
infinitely great, and this condition can be realized only by making the
resistance of the rail infinitely small as compared with that of the
earth. The cost of arriving at this condition is prohibitive, and the
improved track return is, and always must be, a palliative merely, not
a cure.

[Illustration: LEAD SERVICE PIPE SHOWING THE EFFECTS OF EIGHT MONTHS’
ELECTROLYTIC ACTION, AND CLEARLY ILLUSTRATING THE FACT THAT DAMAGE
OCCURS ONLY WHERE THE ELECTRICITY LEAVES THE CONDUCTOR. The interior
surface is unattacked.]

Assuming, then, that under the most favorable character of
electric-railway construction some of the current may be expected to
stray from the straight and narrow path, it behooves us to consider how
it may best be cared for in order that it may not cause electrolysis.
Since corrosion of this nature occurs only at those points where
electricity _leaves_ the metal, one might suppose that the attachment
of a conducting wire to the affected part would result in the harmless
carrying away of the current. In isolated cases, in small towns,
such a plan might accomplish the desired result. It is open to the
objection, however, that it in a measure legalizes the conveyance of
electricity on conductors other than those designed for the purpose.
In larger towns, with more than one power house and with car lines
radiating from and circumscribing the business center, the attachment
of conducting wires entails a ceaseless disturbance of the electrical
equilibrium, curing the evil in spots and developing new danger
points. Furthermore, these connections tend to decrease the resistance
of the total illegitimate return, thereby tempting a greater flow
of electricity along other paths than the rails and track feeders.
It has been generally believed that this increased current would
develop electrolysis at the ends of the pipes, due to the jumping of
the electricity around the presumably high resistance of the joints;
and, indeed, many samples of such corrosion are in existence. I have
found, however, that it is possible to calk a bell-and-spigot joint
in cast-iron pipe in such a manner that the resistance is practically
_nil_; and as for wrought iron or steel, the joint resistance may be
made as low as we please by fitting the surfaces so carefully that
white-leading is unnecessary.

Arguing from the fact that the negative electrode is not attacked, it
has been suggested to employ an auxiliary dynamo and a special system
of wiring, in order to maintain the pipes, etc., at all times and
at all points, negative to the rails. Could this ideal condition be
realized, the rails alone would suffer. We can not hope, however, to
thus easily solve the problem in towns where the distribution of buried
conductors is at all complex.

[Illustration: LEAD SERVICE PIPE SHOWING THE IRREGULARITY OF
ELECTROLYTIC ACTION, OR WHAT IS TECHNICALLY KNOWN AS “PITTING.”]

It has been suggested, also, to discourage the flow of electricity
along pipes and cable covers by inserting insulating sections of wood
or terra cotta. This plan has never been tried on a scale large enough
to afford a suitable demonstration of its utility. While it might
reasonably be tried on new construction, its application to old work
is almost prohibited by the attendant expense.

[Illustration: LEAD SERVICE PIPE ILLUSTRATING THE LOCAL EFFECTS OF
EIGHT MONTHS’ ELECTROLYSIS.

The other side of this pipe is smooth and clean.]

Attacking the problem from a directly opposite standpoint, there seems
to be a chance of successfully invoking the aid of some purely chemical
method of rendering lead and iron innocuous, electrolytically speaking.
If we can obtain an insulating oxide, lacquer, or varnish that will
retain its high-resistance properties during the ordinary lifetime of
the buried metal, it will be possible to effectually protect pipes and
cable coverings by coating them prior to burial. Or, if we can stumble
upon an electrolysis-proof alloy, formed by the addition of a few per
cent of some foreign metal to the pipe material during manufacture, the
buried conductor will need no protection whatever.

But, supposing that we discover this lacquer or this alloy and by such
means guard against damage to all new construction, how are we to care
for the metals already buried? We can not dig them all up and paint
them, neither can we attempt to replace them by the new alloy. I do
not see that the state of the art to-day presents any solution of the
difficulty, other than the banishment of the single trolley system.
None of the electrical remedies (so called) offers more than partial
and temporary relief, and the chemical field is just beginning to be
explored.

Permit me to state most emphatically that this is not intended as an
argument in favor of the abolishment of single trolley systems. Our
civilization owes more to them than could be rehearsed in catalogue
form within the limits of one issue of this magazine. We have
nothing at present that can be employed as a satisfactory substitute
for the ordinary electric railway. The underground trolley is a
safe substitute, but the great expense of installation renders it
available for very few localities. The overhead trolley, with two
wires and no ground return, is cumbersome, vexatious, and unsightly.
The storage battery is more or less experimental in its nature. The
electro-magnetic contact systems, with plates set in the pavement at
stated intervals, make no pretense of avoiding electrolytic troubles.
The compressed-air motor has yet to receive popular approval.

[Illustration: LEAD SERVICE PIPE SHOWING THE DEPTH TO WHICH THE PIPE
HAS BEEN AFFECTED.

In this instance the outer covering consists of a salt of lead, having
no strength whatever.]

There seems to be a mistaken impression abroad that the railway
companies are indifferent to this subject. So far as my experience and
information go, this is not the case. They are only too anxious to
find a remedy--not, as some electricians have stated, to save their
coal-pile, for energy is wasted in forcing the electricity back to the
power house, no matter what the path, but because they fear that at
some future date the taxpayer, the corporation, and the municipality
will band together, present overwhelming bills for damages, and
sweep the trolleys off the face of the earth. The instinct of
self-preservation, if nothing else, demands that the electric-railway
companies should put forth every endeavor to solve the electrolysis
problem.

And yet, conservative judgment requires that the railway companies
should not take the initiative. It is one of boyhood’s maxims not to
shoot arrows at a hornet’s nest unless one has mud handy to apply to
the subsequently afflicted part. Thus it happens that the railway
company remains apparently inactive, bearing the burden of public
condemnation, while we, whose lethargy is responsible for failing
pipes, read electrolysis articles in the daily press and wonder how
soon the impending catastrophe is likely to occur.

This condition of affairs is deplorable; for, while we may not care
how extensively or how frequently the city authorities or the private
corporations are obliged to renew their underground metals, we are
at least vitally concerned as to whether the stray electricity is
endangering our steel office buildings, our bridges, our water supply,
our immunity from conflagrations, and the safety of the hundred and one
appliances that go to make up our modern civilization.

Are the Brooklyn Bridge anchor plates going to pieces, or are they
not? Are the elevated railroad structures about to fall apart, or are
they not? The consulting electrical engineer says “Yes,” the railway
man says “No.” The municipal authorities say nothing. “When doctors
disagree----”

I deem it doubly unfortunate that so much valuable brain energy has
been inefficiently expended in the discussion of electrolysis. Each
writer has viewed it from his own standpoint. Electrical literature has
acquired in this way a series of views, interesting and instructive,
but also bewildering. There is no composite view, such as might be
obtained from the report of a commission composed of a technical
representative of each of the interests affected. So far as I am able
to learn, such a commission has never existed.

       *       *       *       *       *

    A curious coincidence of superstitions, illustrating anew how all
    men are kin, is exemplified in the native belief, mentioned in Mrs.
    R. Langloh Perkins’s book of More Australian Legendary Tales, that
    any child who touches one of the brilliant fungi growing on dead
    trees--which are called “devil’s bread”--will be spirited away
    by ghosts. An English reviewer of the book remembers having been
    dragged away from a fungus of this kind for the same reason. In the
    north of England children used to be told that, if they touched the
    dangerous growths, a fungus of the same kind would grow from the
    tip of every finger.




WINTER BIRDS IN A CITY PARK.

BY JAMES B. CARRINGTON.


Most of us are so used to thinking of birds, if we notice them at all,
as belonging to spring and summer that we easily fail to see or hear
the comparatively few feathered winter visitors. Among these, however,
are some of the most attractive and amusing of birds, and to hear
their cheery notes and to watch their busy hunt for food on a cold
winter day adds a very considerable pleasure to a walk in a city park
or the near-by woods. In New York city bird lovers have learned that
Central Park is one of the very best places in which to watch birds
both summer and winter. There is room enough there and the conditions
are varied enough to offer congenial dwelling places for nearly all of
the better-known birds. In the spring and fall the beautiful and tiny
migrating wood warblers find the park a good feeding ground, and a safe
place wherein to linger for a brief time on their journeys north and
south.

[Illustration: MR. CHICKADEE TAKING OBSERVATIONS.]

With the approach of winter the innumerable fat and saucy robins
that have hunted angleworms and strutted about the lawns of the park
since early spring disappear, except for an occasional hardy fellow
who perhaps prefers the dangers of a northern winter to those of the
long journey southward. The wood- and the hermit-thrush; the veery, or
Wilson’s thrush; the yellow warbler, so abundant and so musical; the
perky little redstart, whose song of “Sweet, sweet, sweeter” closely
resembles the yellow warbler’s; the somber-colored blackbirds; the
Baltimore and the orchard oriole; the scarlet tanager; the catbird;
Phœbe; Jenny Wren; the tiny chipping sparrow; the vireos; and many
other familiar warm-weather friends have also journeyed southward.

The bare trees and the ground brown with fallen leaves have to some
a bleak and dreary look, but this is because a wrong impression has
gone abroad concerning them. Nature in winter is not dead, not even
sleeping; she is all the time storing up energy to enable her to greet
the returning sun in her very best dress. If you will look carefully
at the bare limbs and branches of the trees and bushes, you will see
the little buds that are slowly but surely swelling up with the pride
of young, active, vigorous life, only waiting, with the great patience
of Nature, for the proper and suitable time to break away from their
winter retirement and take up their part in the new year.

[Illustration: GETTING ACQUAINTED.]

Some of the pleasantest days I have ever known in the open have
been spent in the winter woods, when the snow was on the ground and
everything _seemed_ still and unfamiliar. Every little sound is
accented on a cold day, and the creaking of a swaying limb or the note
of a bird comes to you with almost startling distinctness. Somehow you
feel on such days that you are more a part of the things about you than
in the full flush of summer. It is like meeting people stripped of all
the artificial distinctions of clothes and position.

There is something fine in the way the trees stand up in winter; no one
can fail to understand what is meant by the “sturdy oak.” They seem to
feel pretty much as you do, and show a spirit of vigorous resistance
and power to enjoy and cope with the worst that Jack Frost can bring,
and the bright sun sends the sap tingling through their limbs just as
it does the blood through yours. One day especially that I remember in
Central Park brought me a somewhat novel experience, and gave me the
privilege of transferring some old bird acquaintance to the list of
my bird friends. It was after a fall of snow, and the air was crisp
and sharp, indeed it was nipping, and standing still was a chilly
occupation. From long familiarity I knew just about where to go to
find certain birds, and I was not disappointed in my hunt. My overcoat
pocket, it is needless to say, was fully stocked with peanuts and a box
of bird seed, and demands were very soon made upon the peanut supply by
the fat and friendly gray squirrels that come bravely up to your hand
to be fed. They have a most attractive and appealing way of approaching
you. The more timid ones stop often to sit up inquiringly, and put one
hand on their heart, as if to stop its excited beating.

[Illustration: THE SILENT WINTER WOODS.]

The first birds I saw were the rugged and noisy English sparrows,
written down in most bird books as “pests,” but I confess I could not
resist giving them a crumb or two, for they appeal to my sympathies
much as the plucky little _gamin_ newsboys of the streets do, and
then, too, I have learned that their loud chatter and rush for food
attract more desirable acquaintances. I soon heard the sharp, shrill
peep of the white-throated sparrows, and listened to their scratching
“with both feet” under the bushes. Now and then one would try his
throat with his full song, two sweet whistles followed by very plain
calls for “Peabody, peabody, peabody.” They are called the peabody
bird by many. There is no mistaking this beautiful sparrow. Among a
bunch of his noisy English neighbors the rich brown of his feathers
is easily seen, and the three white stripes on his head and the white
patch on the throat attract your eye at once. In a group of thirty or
forty whitethroats that were feeding on my bird seed I noticed also
two plump song sparrows. They are brown, too, but smaller than the
whitethroats, and their breasts are streaked with dark-brown stripes,
with a spot right in the center. This is the sparrow that makes music
for us from very early spring until late in the autumn. I have heard
them in February, with the snow yet on the ground, perched on the tip
of some bush and singing away with a joyfulness that made everything
take on a more cheerful look. While I was watching the whitethroats
I heard the jolly little song that I especially hoped for, and very
soon had a near view of wee Mr. Chickadee himself, with his jet-black
head, throat, and chin, and gray cheeks. He, in company with several
of his friends, came down to feed at once, and hopped about my feet
and a near-by bench to pick up the bits of peanut I had dropped for
his benefit. The chickadees are always “chummy” little birds, and
seem to have found their human acquaintances in general pretty good
sort of people. After a time I put some peanut crumbs in my hand and
held it out invitingly. The chickadees would alight on the tree over
my head, sing their song, look down inquiringly, and then fly off,
apparently interested in searching for some important business they had
overlooked on the bark of another tree. Gradually, however, one became
more familiar and finally lighted on my hand with entire confidence,
selected the largest piece of peanut to be had, and flew away to eat
it. He held the bit between both feet on a bench, and leaned forward
and pecked away until it disappeared. Occasionally he would hold a
small piece in one foot only. One little fellow stopped to sing me
his Chick-a-dee-dee-dee, as he perched on my little finger, before
selecting his morsel. They followed me about the paths, and wherever
I stopped there were sure to be several chickadees peeping about the
tree trunks asking me to please give them more peanuts. While this was
going on I heard a hoarse “Quank, quank, quank!” that sounded very
near, and on looking up saw a white-breasted nuthatch, a blue-gray bird
with a very distinct black band on the top of his head that extends
back across his shoulders. His short tail and legs make him look very
funny when on the ground. On a tree, however, he is a regular circus,
walking head up or head down on the limbs and trunk, and now and then
doing the giant swing, completely circling some twig, just to show what
he can do when he tries. He was attracted by the noise and conduct of
the chickadees, his winter companions, and was calling for something
for himself. His long, slim bill is not made for cracking things as
the sparrows can with their short, strong bills, but he punches holes
in them very much as the woodpeckers do. When he came down to the path
and picked up a peanut he flew off to a near-by tree and hunted up and
down until he found a place in the bark where he could wedge the nut in
and then proceeded to hatch or crack it into bits to suit his taste.
A brown creeper was walking up his tree a short distance away very
much as the nuthatch does, poking his long, curved bill into the bark,
though I did not see him for some time, as his brown and gray feathers
were so like the color of the tree on which he walked. He circles round
the trunk or limb, and you have to keep a sharp lookout to get more
than an occasional rapid glance at him. A loud rapping and a noise
that sounded a good deal like a giggle attracted my attention to a
downy black-and-white woodpecker, with a bright-red spot on the back
of his head. He was hammering away with all his might, and the limb on
which he hung, back down, fairly rattled as he drove his chisel-like
bill into the wood. Another woodpecker, the big and beautifully marked
flicker, with his brown back barred with black, his spotted breast
with its big black crescent and the red band on the back of his head,
stopped for a minute or two on a tree a hundred feet away. His cry
of alarm rang out shrilly as he flew away. All of these birds are
handsomely marked, though none of them compare, in the mere matter of
color, with some of the many beautiful summer species. There was one
bird there that day, though, whose brilliant plumage and altogether
tropical aspect comes as a great surprise to the unaccustomed visitor
to the park in winter. As he lighted on the snow-covered ground among
a group of feeding whitethroats the cardinal, with his splendid crest,
stood out like a jet of flame, and the black spot at the base of his
bill only made the rest of him seem the brighter. Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal
spend their winters regularly in Central Park, and I hear or see them
every time I go there. His only note now is a sharp squeak of alarm,
but a little later he will perch high up in some tree near the lake
and awake the echoes with his loud whistling. High over my head, mere
specks of shining white against the blue-gray of the sky, I could see
several gulls floating along on their way to the reservoir, where
hundreds of them often gather in the open water that is usually found
in the center. As I walked toward the entrance of the park, on my way
to the car, I heard, on some cedars near the border of the lake, the
gurgling music of a party of goldfinches. They had on their winter
coats of yellowish brown, but their song and dipping flight made them
easily recognizable.

Once you become acquainted with a few birds, every flutter of a wing or
cheep or peep becomes an object of interest and a motive for many days
in the open. It is very easy also to sentimentalize about Nature and to
assume a patronizing air toward her, but the more you know of her and
her ways the sooner you get over this. You can not help being impressed
with the fact that the life and ways of the animals and birds are,
after all, in many ways very like your own. Birds, you will find, are
very human indeed, and show a wide diversity in disposition and habit.
There is one thing sure to follow an interest of this kind, and that is
a greater respect and care for wild life. The cruelty of egg-collecting
and the wanton destruction of birds for millinery purposes are becoming
less tolerable every year in civilized communities.




OLD RATTLER AND THE KING SNAKE.

BY DAVID STARR JORDAN,

PRESIDENT OF LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY.

  “I only know thee humble, bold,
  Haughty, with miseries untold,
  And the old curse that left thee cold,
  And drove thee ever to the sun
  On blistering rocks....
                  Thou whose fame
  Searchest the grass with tongue of flame,
  Making all creatures seem thy game,
  When the whole woods before thee run,
  Asked but--when all is said and done--
  To lie, untrodden, in the sun!”--BRET HARTE.


Old Rattler was a snake, of course, and he lived in the King’s River
Cañon, high up and down deep in the mountains of California.

He had a hole behind and below a large, flat granite rock, not far from
the river, and he called it his home; for in it he slept all night and
all winter, but when the sun came back in the spring and took the
frost out of the air and the rocks, then he crawled out to lie until he
got warm. The stream was clear and swift in the cañon, the waterfalls
sang in the side gulch of Roaring River, the wind rustled in the long
needles of the yellow pines, and the birds called to their mates in the
branches. But Old Rattler did not care for such things. He was just
a snake, you know, and his neighbors did not think him a good snake
at that, for he was surly and silent, and his big, three-cornered,
“coffin-shaped” head, set on a slim, flat neck, was very ugly to see.
But when he opened his mouth he was uglier still, for in his upper jaw
he had two long fangs, and each one was filled with deadly poison.
His vicious old head was covered with gray and wrinkled scales, and
his black, beadlike eyes snapped when he opened his mouth to find out
whether his fangs were both in working order.

Old Rattler was pretty stiff when he first came from his hole on the
morning of this story. He had lain all night coiled up like a rope
among the rocks, and his tail felt very cold. But the glad sun warmed
the cockles of his heart, and in an hour or two he became limber, and
this made him happy in his snaky fashion. But, being warm, he began to
be hungry, for it had been a whole month since he had eaten anything.
When the first new moon of August came, his skin loosened everywhere
and slipped down over his eyes like a veil, so that he could see
nothing about him, and could not hunt for frogs by the river nor for
chipmunks among the trees. But with the new moon of September all this
was over. The rusty brown old coat was changed for a new suit of gray
and black, and the diamond-shaped checkers all over it were clean and
shiny as a set of new clothes ought to be.

There was a little striped chipmunk running up and down the sugar-pine
tree over his head, pursing his little mouth and throwing himself
into pretty attitudes, as though he were the center of an admiring
audience, and Old Rattler kept a steady eye on him. But he was in no
hurry about it all. He must first get the kinks out of his neck, and
the cold cramps from his tail. There was an old curse on his family,
so the other beasts had heard, that kept him always cold, and his tail
was the coldest part of all. So he shook it a little, just to show
that it was growing limber, and the bone clappers on the end rustled
with a sharp, angry noise. Fifteen rattles he had in all--fifteen and
a button--and to have so many showed that he was no common member of
his hated family. Then he shook his tail again, and more sharply. This
was to show all the world that he, Old Rattler, was wide awake, and
whoever stepped on him would better look out. Then all the big beasts
and little beasts who heard the noise fled away just as fast as ever
they could; and to run away was the best thing they could do, for when
Old Rattler struck one of them with his fangs all was over with him.
So there were many in the cañon, beasts and birds and snakes too, who
hated Old Rattler, but only a few dared face him. And one of these was
Glittershield,[B] whom men call the King of Snakes, and in a minute I
shall tell you why.

    [B] _Lampropeltis zonatus._

And when Old Rattler was doing all that I have said, the King Snake
lay low on a bed of pine needles, behind a bunch of fern, and watched
with keen, sharp eye. The angry buzz of Rattler’s tail, which scared
the chipmunks and the bullfrogs and all the rest of the beast folk, was
music for Glittershield. He was a snake too, and snakes understand some
things better than any of the rest of us.

Glittershield was slim and wiry in his body, as long as Old Rattler
himself, but not so large around. His coat was smooth and glossy, not
rough and wrinkly like Old Rattler’s, and his upraised head was small
and pretty--for a snake. He was the best dressed of all his kind, and
he looked his finest as he faced Old Rattler. His head was shiny black,
his throat and neck as white as milk, while all down his body to the
end of his tail he was painted with rings, first white, then black,
then crimson, and every ring was bright as if it had just been freshly
polished that very day.

So the King Snake passed the sheltering fern and came right up to Old
Rattler. Rattler opened his sleepy eyes, threw himself on guard with a
snap and a buzz, and shook his bony clappers savagely. But the King of
Snakes was not afraid. Every snake has a weak spot somewhere, and that
is the place to strike him. If he hadn’t a weak spot no one else could
live about him, and then perhaps he would starve to death at last. If
he had not some strong points, where no one could harm him, he couldn’t
live himself.

As the black crest rose, Old Rattler’s tail grew cold, his head
dropped, his mouth closed, he straightened out his coil, and staggered
helplessly toward his hole.

This was the chance for Glittershield. With a dash so swift that all
the rings on his body--red, white, and black--melted into one purple
flash, he seized Old Rattler by his throat. He carried no weapons, to
be sure. He had neither fangs nor venom. He won his victories by force
and dash, not by mean advantage. He was quick and strong, and his
little hooked teeth held like the claws of a hawk. Old Rattler closed
his mouth because he couldn’t help it, and the fangs he could not use
were folded back against the roof of his jaw.

The King Snake leaped forward, wound his body in a “love-knot” around
Old Rattler’s neck, took a “half-hitch” with his tail about the
stomach, while the rest of his body lay in a curve like the letter S
between the two knots. Then all he had to do was to stiffen up his
muscles, and Old Rattler’s backbone was snapped off at the neck.

All that remained to Glittershield was to swallow his enemy. First he
rubbed his lips all over the body, from the head to the tail, till it
was slippery with slime. Then he opened his mouth very wide, with a
huge snaky yawn, and face to face he began on Old Rattler. The ugly
head was hard to manage, but, after much straining, he clasped his
jaws around it, and the venom trickled down his throat like some fiery
sauce. Slowly head and neck and body disappeared, and the tail wriggled
despairingly, for the tail of the snake folk can not die till sundown,
and when it went at last the fifteen rattles and the button were
keeping up an angry buzz. And all night long the King of Snakes, twice
as big as he ought to be, lay gorged and motionless upon Old Rattler’s
rock.

And in the morning the little chipmunk ran out on a limb above him,
pursed up his lips, and made all kinds of faces, as much as to say, “I
did all this, and the whole world was watching while I did it.”




REMARKABLE VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS IN THE PHILIPPINES.

BY R. L. PACKARD.


Every one knows that the Philippine archipelago, like other regions
in its neighborhood, abounds in volcanoes, some of which are still
active, while the majority are extinct. Some geologists have tried to
distribute the Philippine volcanoes into two parallel belts or lines
running in a general northwest and southeast direction, following
the trend of the island group, and extending from the southern end
of Mindanao to the northern part of Luzon--some sixteen degrees of
latitude. Early, possibly prehistoric, volcanic activity in the group
has left its imprint upon the native mythology, as was the case in the
Mediterranean, and an explanation of some of the mythical stories is to
be found in earth movements. The Spaniards have given accounts of many
eruptions in the last three hundred years, which were remarkable either
from the destruction they caused or the terror they inspired. Some of
these accounts were written by the terrified eyewitnesses themselves,
such as the monks in charge of parishes where the greatest damage was
done, and are sufficiently vivid, however much they may lack of what
would now be called “scientific” accuracy.

Probably the most remarkable volcanic outburst in historical times, on
account of the distance apart of the simultaneous eruptions, although
its intensity might not be regarded as great when compared with that
of Krakatoa, was that of January 4, 1641, when a volcano on the
southeastern extremity of Mindanao, another on the northern coast of
the island of Sulu to the west, and a third in Luzon far to the north,
became active at the same time. A translation of the original Spanish
report of this extraordinary phenomenon, which is extremely rare and
practically inaccessible to students, is given in Jagor’s _Reisen in
den Philippinen_. From this it appears that upon two occasions, toward
the end of December, 1640, volcanic ashes fell at Zamboanga (on the
southwest coast of Mindanao) and covered the fields like a light frost.
On January 1, 1641, the auxiliary fleet carrying troops from Manila to
the island of Ternate was off Zamboanga, and on the 3d, at about 7 P.
M., people in the latter place heard what they supposed was artillery
and musketry firing at some miles’ distance. Believing that an enemy
was attacking the coast, preparations were made to meet him, and the
commander of the galleys sent a boat out to see if any of the vessels
of the fleet needed assistance, but the boat returned without finding
the fleet.

On the next day, January 4, 1641, at about 9 A. M., the noise of the
supposed cannonading increased to such an extent that it was feared
in Zamboanga that the Spanish fleet had been attacked by the Dutch,
with whom the Spaniards were then at war. This noise lasted about half
an hour, when it became evident that it was not caused by artillery,
but proceeded from the outbreak of a volcano, for, toward noon, thick
darkness began to spread over the sky to the south, which soon covered
that part of the heavens and gradually spread over the whole sky, so
that by 1 P. M. it was as dark as night, and by 2 P. M. the darkness
had so increased that one could not distinguish objects a short
distance off. Candles were lighted, and a great fear fell upon the
people, who fled to the churches to pray and confess. This darkness,
during which no light was visible in the whole horizon, lasted until 2
A. M., when the moon became visible, to the great joy of both Spaniards
and Indians, who were afraid of being buried beneath the ashes which
had been falling since 2 P. M. The fleet, which was then passing the
southern end of Mindanao, was thrown into confusion by the tumult of
the elements, and was in darkness earlier than Zamboanga--viz., at
10 A. M.--because it was nearer the volcano. The darkness was so
intense that the crews believed the last day had come, and the vessels
were endangered by the heavy shower of stones, ashes, and earth which
fell upon them and which the men hastened to throw overboard. The
ships’ lanterns were lighted as at night. The volcano could be seen,
at a considerable distance, throwing up columns of flame which, on
descending, set the neighboring woods on fire. The darkness covered
the greater part of Mindanao, which is a very large island, and the
ashes were carried to Cebu, Panay, and other islands, and there was
an especially heavy fall on the island of Jolo (Sulu), which is more
than forty leagues west by south from the southeast point of Mindanao,
where the volcano burst out. On this island, on account of the darkness
and the general uproar, the source of the ashes which fell there was
not known at the time, but when it became light enough to see it was
found that at the same time with the eruption on Mindanao a second
volcano had burst out upon a small island which lies off the mouth of
the principal river of Sulu. There the earth had opened with a violent
commotion, and had vomited out flames mingled with trees and huge
stones. So great was the disturbance that the sea bottom was mingled
with the interior of the earth, and the volcano threw out quantities
of shells and other things that grow upon the bottom of the sea. The
mouth of this volcano remained open afterward. It was very broad, and
the eruption had burned up everything upon the island. But what excited
the greatest amazement was that a third volcano broke out on the same
day and hour with the two just mentioned, in the province of Ilocos, in
Luzon, and at least six hundred miles north; and this volcano ejected
water. The outbreak was preceded by a violent storm and earthquake. The
earth swallowed up three mountains, on the sides of one of which were
three villages. All three mountains were torn from their foundations
and blown into the air, together with a vast amount of water, and the
chasm which took their place formed a broad lake, that showed no trace
of the mountains which had stood on the spot. The letter from which
the foregoing account is taken goes on to say that the noise of this
outbreak, which occurred between 9 and 10 A. M., was heard not only
in Manila but in all the Philippine Islands and the Moluccas. It even
reached the mainland of Asia in the kingdoms of Cochin China, Champa,
and Cambodia, as was learned from priests and others who came to Manila
from those countries afterward. The noise sounded like heavy artillery
and musketry fire at two or three leagues’ distance. In Manila it was
supposed that the firing was going on in Cavite, while at Cavite it was
referred to Manila, and messengers were sent from one place to the
other to make inquiries, and a similar impression prevailed in all the
islands, cities, and villages in a circuit of nine hundred leagues,
within which the noise was heard. Malacca was taken by the Dutch on
the 13th of January, and was already hard pressed on the 4th, and many
pious Spaniards believed, after the news had come of the capture of the
place, that Heaven had taken this volcanic means of warning them of the
great injury which would result to the archipelago from the loss of so
important a city.

The missionaries in Cochin China gave January 5th as the date of the
outbreak, instead of the 4th, there being one day’s difference between
the reckoning of the Portuguese, who sailed from west to east, and
that of the Spaniards, who sailed from east to west, to their Eastern
possessions.

The volcano of Mayon, or Albay, in the province of Camarines, has been
in frequent eruption from 1616 down to within thirty years. Some of
the eruptions were very destructive to life and property. After an
activity in July, 1766, of six days’ duration, accompanied by a great
flow of lava, on October 23, 1766, during a violent storm, which began
at about 7 P. M. from north-northwest and at 3 A. M. suddenly veered to
the south and blew down all the houses of one of the villages in the
neighborhood, the volcano ejected such a vast quantity of water that
several torrents of thirty varas (ninety feet) wide ran down to the
sea between the villages Tibog and Albay. Between Bacacay and Malinao
the floods were over eighty varas (two hundred and forty feet) wide,
and the highways were obliterated. One village was entirely destroyed,
nearly all the houses of the region were swept away, and the fields
were covered with sand; another village was partly destroyed, its
remainder forming an island, or rather a hill, surrounded by deep,
broad ravines, through which the stream of sand and water ran. In
another place palms and other trees were buried in sand to their tops.
Some fifty persons lost their lives. As far as could be judged, the
account declares, this [cold?] water came from the interior of the
volcano, while we should be inclined to regard it as a cloudburst. The
outbreak of February 1, 1814, however, was the most destructive of all.
An eyewitness writes that at about 8 A. M. the mountain suddenly threw
out a thick column of stones, sand, and ashes, which quickly rose to
the highest layers of the air. The sides of the volcano became veiled
and disappeared from the view of the spectators, while a stream of
fire ran down the mountain and threatened to annihilate them. Every
one fled to the highest attainable point for safety, while the roar of
the volcano struck terror into all. The darkness increased, and many
of the fleeing ones were struck down by the falling stones. Houses
afforded no protection, because the red-hot stones set them on fire,
and the most flourishing villages of the Camarines were thus laid in
ashes. Toward 10 A. M. the rain of stones ceased, and was replaced by
one of sand, and at about 2 P. M. the noise had lessened and the sky
began to clear. Twelve thousand persons were killed and many wounded
by this eruption. After the mountain had become quiet it presented a
frightful appearance, its former picturesque, highly cultivated slopes
being covered with barren sand, which enveloped the cocoanut trees to
their tops, and some one hundred and twenty feet of its summit had been
carried away during the eruption. An enormous opening had been formed
on its southern side, near which three other mouths appeared, which
continued to emit ashes and smoke. The finest villages of the Camarines
were destroyed, and the best part of the province was converted into a
sandy waste.

This mountain has been active at short intervals down to the present
time. Sometimes its activity has been continuous for a year or more.
Its eruptions were frequently accompanied by earthquakes and storms.
The next outbreak after that described above was in 1827. In 1834
and 1835 the mountain was active nearly all the time. There was no
eruption of ashes, but every night a stream of molten lava could be
seen running into the higher ravines. In 1845 there was an eruption
of ashes which lasted several days; a violent eruption occurred in
1846, two unimportant ones in 1851, and another violent ash and stone
eruption occurred on July 27, 1853, during which thirty-one persons
were killed. Others occurred in 1855, 1857, 1858, 1859, 1860, 1865, and
1871. The heights of the Philippine volcanoes vary from ten thousand
and nine thousand feet (Albay or Mayon) down to Taal, only seven
hundred and eighty feet high. This curious volcano is upon an islet in
the middle of Lake Bombon, south of Manila. Lake Bombon was originally
probably a vast crater. It is separated from the China Sea by a narrow
isthmus. Taal contains secondary craters, crevasses emitting vapors,
and lakelets of acid water. It is the principal “show” volcano of the
islands, and was in action in 1885, when all the vegetation upon the
island was burned up. Lake Bombon was doubtless formerly connected with
the sea, the intervening barrier being formed of eruptive _scoriæ_. Its
water is still saline, and its marine fauna has adapted itself to its
modified environment.

On the small island Camiguin, on the northwest coast of Mindanao, is
the extinct volcano Catarman, with a crater lake upon its summit whose
level has been subject to great fluctuations. Sometimes the lake
dried up, and again it has overflowed and inundated the low lands in
the neighborhood, as in 1827 and 1862. Often its water has been set
boiling by escaping gases. It would be interesting to know what varying
pressure caused the changes in the level of this lake on the top of
Mount Catarman.

A further idea of the volcanic activity of this region may be gained
from the circumstance that a volcanic island emerged from the sea on
the north coast of Luzon in 1856, which grew to seven hundred feet in
height by 1860, and is now about eight hundred feet high. Every one
has seen photographs of the streets of Manila after an earthquake,
which form of subterranean activity is so common that it is taken into
account in building.




THE SCAVENGERS OF THE BODY.

BY M. A. DASTRE.


The labors of M. Metchnikoff have made known one of the most curious
mechanisms--perhaps the most effective--which Nature employs to protect
the organism against the invasion and ravages of microbes. We are only
beginning to learn the means which are provided for our defense against
the countless swarms of enemies of this class, some of them exceedingly
dangerous, among which we have to live and move. In the first rank of
these defenses is phagocytosis. The struggle of the organism against
its minute assailants is an image of human wars. The cutaneous or
mucous integument, continuous over the whole body, constitutes a kind
of fortified inclosure which the microbe can not penetrate, except
where some breach has been made. On one side of that wall, in the
living city, the phagocytes or leucocytes (white cells) form an immense
defensive army in a state of continual mobilization, or, as M. Duclaux
would say, an innumerable and vigilant police.

These phagocytes or leucocytes are the nomadic elements of our economy.
The animal body may be compared to an organized city in which all the
living corpuscles, all the cellular elements, are sedentary, each
having its place and staying there. Hence the comparison, often made,
with the stones of a building, which is not exact, however, because
these vital elements grow and increase, enlarging the structure
without change of arrangement, while the stones do not. The growth and
nutrition of these anatomical elements, it should be added, are carried
on exclusively at the expense of liquid matters. Nothing solid can
enter them or come out from them.

An exception to these two fundamental rules is found in the single case
of the leucocytes or white globules of the blood. They have no fixed
or determined place in the organism. Besides being carried passively
by the flow of the blood in a perpetual circulation along with the red
corpuscles, they possess a motion of their own. They can swim in the
current that carries them, fix themselves to the walls, and travel in a
sort of creeping way, which has been called the amœboid motion.

They are also exceptions to the second law, according to which living
cells can dispose only of liquefied matters. All solid bodies that pass
within reach of the leucocytes are seized and incorporated by them,
provided they are small or inert enough to be enveloped. The nature of
the body is of little import. Whatever it may be, it is swallowed and
quickly inclosed within the mass of the leucocyte and submitted to the
dissolving action of its juices--or, in a way, eaten. Hence the names
“phagocyte,” or devouring cell, given to the enveloping white globule,
and “phagocytosis” to the process. No other element of the organism,
or hardly any other, possesses this singular faculty of seizure and
swallowing (_inglobement_).

All the other characteristics of the white globules flow from these
two of mobility and phagocytism, the significance of which has been
set in a clear light by M. Metchnikoff. These characteristics are the
attributes of the most primitive types of animal life. They appertain
to cells not yet differentiated, to the unicellular organisms which
occupy the first stages of life. They translate the vital energy of
elements still independent and isolated, without definite place in
the social organization and as yet without special high function,
but for that very reason better adapted to the needs of the simplest
animality. Their voracity is useful for the preservation of the social
organism. By eliminating old, exhausted, diseased cells they rejuvenate
the structure and prepare the way for new generations. And when the
fecundity of these is exhausted the leucocytes come in to occupy the
vacated situations, and conduct the organism thus patched up through a
senile degeneracy to natural death.

The leucocytes, white globules, or phagocytes, by virtue of their
mobility, are found everywhere--in the blood, in all the organs,
and in all parts of the body--but are perhaps most abundant in the
blood. The study of them proceeds slowly, and we are still engaged in
distinguishing the varieties among them. The most abundant and best
known of them--those which answer most closely the description we have
given--are those called the polynuclear, neutrophilous leucocytes. They
are colored with neutral hues, and have a nucleus like a rolled-up
scroll in structure. Other varieties--the eosinophiles, lymphocytes,
etc.--are less mobile and have still less marked phagocytic properties.

The roll-call of the phagocytic army would be a long task. The
phagocytes are numerous in the sanguineous fluid, but are still six
hundred and fifty times less so than the red corpuscles. They are
almost as numerous in the lymph and the conjunctival tissue, where,
besides occurring in their normal condition, they sport into a variety
which appears to have abandoned its migratory habit, for a time at
least, and into a giant variety one hundred times larger than the
ordinary leucocytes, which M. Ranvier calls clasmatocytes. They are
further found in such tissues as the skin and the mucous membrane,
where, notwithstanding the cells are so crowded, they make their way
into the intestine, and, by a sort of diapedesis (passage through the
pores or interstices) called the phenomenon of Stoehr, toward all the
free surfaces, whither exterior soluble substances invite them. As they
go they destroy the microbes which, advancing in an inverse direction,
would invade the organism and provoke an infection of intestinal origin.

The fact that this immense army of phagocytes is always in motion was
first clearly recognized by Cohnheim, in 1867. He saw, in inflamed
regions, where the vessels are gorged and distended, the white globules
thrusting out a prolongation which seemed to pierce the wall, but in
reality simply insinuated itself between its elements, and elongating
itself, drew its entire body, as it were, through the narrow channel.
This emigration, which is produced without making a break, through
the pores and interstices of the vascular wall, has been designated
_diapedesis_. It is ordinarily provoked by some foreign body, a
pathogenic microbe, for instance, which has introduced itself into
the place and spread its irritating secretion or cause of infection
there. The phagocytes, attracted from the interior of the vessel, come
up and devour the invader. But if they are incapable of dissolving it
they bear it away to work their own ruin; they degenerate in their
turn, become transformed into globules of pus, and the inflammation
results in purulence. The study of the mechanism by means of which the
leucocytes traverse the tissues is very interesting.

These remarkable wandering elements are found in all classes of
animals, and in all present the same essential characteristics. They
are more like free existences than the other cells living in society
which compose the bodies of animals, and their history is substantially
like that of the naked one-celled organisms. Their various functions
and properties are of the highest interest in all departments of
physiology. It has been demonstrated, in particular, that the white
globules of the blood give rise to the most energetic and most special
agencies of living chemistry, to the ferments which determine the
coagulation of the blood when drawn from the vessels (coagulating
ferment, or thrombosis) and the consumption of sugar (glycolytic
ferment), and to numerous diastases. The presence of nuclein in their
bodies involves consequences which we are only beginning to perceive.

Behaving like independent beings, the leucocytes or phagocytes
perform similar functions with those of the highest animals, feeding,
respiring, and reproducing themselves; they move and feel--that is,
are impressed by internal excitants. These operations, however, assume
with them a character of extreme simplicity. They seem to be the direct
result of the physical and chemical properties of the protoplasm that
composes them, so that the mysterious side of those vital functions
nearly vanishes when we scan them in these their very beginnings. Their
respiration is the effect of a sort of affinity between their substance
and the vital gas--a chimiotactism directing them toward oxygen. This
may be illustrated by forming a microscopic preparation of fresh lymph,
imprisoning a few bubbles of air, and sealing it hermetically with
paraffin. After two or three hours we can see the leucocytes grouped
around the bubbles. When the provision of air is exhausted, several
hours afterward, the leucocytes will cease to move and become inert. On
inserting a needle, the contact of the air revives them.

The faculty possessed by the leucocytes of seizing solid corpuscles
coming in contact with them, inglobing them, and absorbing them, or, as
M. Metchnikoff calls it, intracellular digestion or phagocytosis, is
easily observed. If we mix fine granulations of carmine or cinnabar,
mingled with slightly salted water, with a drop of lymph, we can see
the coloring matter penetrating the leucocytary protoplasmic mass,
which is soon stuffed with it. The anatomo-pathologists had already
observed, in tattooed subjects, white globules charged with grains of
charcoal or vermilion. It is legitimate to conclude that some parts of
the coloring matter that had been introduced under the epidermis had
been taken up by the white globules. This proceeding has been observed
in the very act by M. Metchnikoff.

A classic experiment illustrating this operation is now common in our
laboratories, and the fact of phagocytosis has come to be regarded as
incontestable.

The generality of the phenomenon results from the leucocyte preserving
its phagocytic faculty in all its peregrinations, and these
peregrinations are unlimited. The tendency of the nomadic elements
to push on and insinuate themselves into the finest interstices and
the narrowest passages is a rudiment of a tactile sense, to this
extent simply a physical phenomenon, which MM. Mascart and Bordet have
clearly distinguished. As soon as a leucocyte touches a resisting body
it reacts to the contact by applying the largest possible surface to
it. It spreads out, becomes thin, stretches itself along, and ceases
deforming itself only after it has obtained the maximum of contact.
By such mechanism it penetrates objects that offer it any breach and
overcomes them. When the foreign body has been disaggregated into
fragments, into small enough grains, phagocytosis intervenes and
disposes of the remains. In this way the organism sometimes rids itself
of splinters of bone that remain in the tissues after a fracture. So,
too, the leucocytes, when occasion arises, repair the blunders of
surgeons by extracting and absorbing forgotten objects left in wounds,
while at other times they act as auxiliaries by destroying things that
have been voluntarily abandoned in them, like threads of catgut in
buried sutures and drains of decalcified bone.

There are two conditions, under normal circumstances, in which
phagocytosis plays a marked part. The first is the case where vital
action brings on the destruction of the organs or the tissues, or,
to use exact language, their disintegration in a solid form. The
wastes of organic activity are usually in liquid form, and, turned
into the blood, they are eliminated in that state through the natural
emunctories. Sometimes, however, disintegration results in solid
wastes, and the phagocytes do the work of carrying them away. This is
the case with the red globules of the blood, which, after a longer or
shorter career, are deposited in the spleen and break up into _débris_,
some of the parts of which are insoluble in the interstitial liquids.
The leucocytes collect around these residues so thickly as sometimes
to fuse themselves into a solid mass, a sort of plasmodium or giant
cell which digests the _débris_. At other times, and more rarely the
isolated leucocytes are not able to absorb the incorporated matters.
They then conduct them to the surface of the intestine and discharge
them there. A like phenomenon occurs in the liver. The coloring matter
of the blood frequently gives rise to insoluble ferruginous deposits
which the leucocytes have to convey to the digestive tube. This occurs
when a wound provokes an effusion of blood and a mortification of the
red globules or of the neighboring anatomical elements. All of the
waste that can not take the liquid form and pass in that condition into
the circulatory passages is incorporated within the phagocytes. The
mechanism of resorption of bone does not seem different.

The phagocytes perform a similar function in another process which
very frequently takes place in various animals that pass through
metamorphoses, as in insects whose organs are transformed in changing
from one stage of their existence to another, and in tadpoles which
lose their tails in becoming frogs; the old parts that disappear are
devoured by phagocytes.

Especially in the case of infectious diseases has the protective part
performed by the leucocytary phagocytes been brought into full view
by M. Metchnikoff. He has shown that the white globules rush to meet
the bacterides of inflammation that are introduced through any wound,
absorb them, and render them powerless to do harm. In the lymphatic
organs--the spleen, the lymphatic ganglions, and the marrow--the white
globules are normally accumulated, and there is where the struggle is
most active between the bacterides of inflammation which are swarming
in the blood and the defensive agents of the organism. The same
takes place with the spirilla of recurrent typhus and the microbe of
erysipelas.

The leucocytes are capable of adapting themselves to conditions
different from those in which they usually live, provided the change
is not too abrupt. It may sometimes occur that the poison secreted
by a microbe will paralyze and kill the leucocyte, unless care
has been taken, by inoculations of virus, at first attenuated and
afterward gradually increasing in virulence, to create an immunity
in the phagocyte, to make it refractory to the poison and capable of
swallowing the toxic bacterium without suffering from it. Explanations
have been sought in this property for the virtue of vaccination and the
immunity that results from it, but they are evidently only fragmentary,
and there are other theories of immunity.

The leucocytes are not always victorious over the microbes, and when
these excel in numbers or force it sometimes comes to pass that
they are overcome and succumb. Poisoned by the substance they have
incorporated, they undergo a fatty degeneration and become globules of
pus. Pus is therefore formed of the cadavers of conquered leucocytes.
Although that humor ought, for the good of the system, to be rejected,
like every other mortified part, it is nevertheless true that the
production of it is a beneficent effort, and a salutary reaction of
Nature against the morbid agent.

It will be an enduring honor to the name of M. Metchnikoff that he has
revealed the importance of the function of phagocytes, and has enriched
science with a large number of new truths. A part of this honor will be
reflected upon the Pasteur Institute, which has welcomed the eminent
biologist for many years, and has intrusted the direction of one of
its services to him. The learned Russian, in creating the study of
phagocytism, with its causes, mechanism, and consequences, has opened a
very extensive field of research to which we have given only a distant
and cursory glance.--_Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from
the Revue des Deux Mondes._




Editor’s Table.


_LIBERAL EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY._

In a most thoughtful article, in the Modern Education Series of The
Cosmopolitan, President Hadley, of Yale, remarks that the conception of
a liberal education changes as forms of government change. “It takes
one shape,” he proceeds to say, “in a military state, and quite another
shape in a state ruled by public opinion. In the former case it will
teach the sterner virtues of courage and pride. In the latter case it
will teach respect for law, progressiveness, and human sympathy. But
in either case a liberal education is an education for citizenship; a
development of those distinguishing qualities moral, intellectual, and
physical by which the people are to be ruled.”

It is a happy definition of “a liberal education” to say that it is
“an education for citizenship.” From this point of view the _most_
liberally educated man will be he who is educated to be a citizen of
the world and to feel his relation not only to the present but to
the past, and the future as well. Comte had much the same idea when
he taught that the moral and social education of the individual was
accomplished first by the family, then by the state, and finally by the
race. In other words, the egoism of the individual is first tamed by
family life, then broadened by political life, and, lastly, humanized
in the full sense by conscious participation in the age-long progress
of mankind. President Hadley has well chosen the qualities which he
says a liberal education under a democracy should aim at developing,
but we think he might with much advantage have added another. He will
remember that when the poet Horace would describe the character of a
high-principled citizen, a man just and firm of purpose, he says that
his mind is shaken neither by the lowering countenance of a tyrant nor
by the frenzy of the populace commanding vicious courses of policy. In
our land and time the _vultus instantis tyranni_ is no longer, if it
ever was, an object of terror, but the _civium ardor prava jubentium_
is a danger, we fear, which has yet to be reckoned with.

In a state, therefore, which is ruled by public opinion one of the
qualities which a liberal education should most distinctly aim to
impart is firmness to resist popular pressure when exerted in a wrong
direction. In like manner, under an aristocracy a truly liberal
education would not be one that would tend to perpetuate in the
rising generation the faults of the preceding one, or to shut out all
criticism of the established _régime_; on the contrary, its tendency
should be to temper whatever was extreme or one-sided in the views of
the ruling class. The liberality of an education comes in just here,
in opening out wider views than would probably be acquired in actual
contact with private business or public affairs. When William Pitt,
while Prime Minister of England, betook himself to the study of Adam
Smith’s recently published Wealth of Nations, and began to consider
how he could apply the enlightened and philosophical views contained
therein to the fiscal policy of the British Empire, he was converting
his old-fashioned liberal education into a liberal education of the
best kind.

A liberal education, let it be thoroughly understood, is not one which
delivers over an individual to the dominant influences of his place and
time, whatever they may be, but one which enables him to react, when
necessary, against such influences under the guidance of wider views
and deeper principles. It is an _illiberal_ education, let it embrace
what it may, which simply equips a man for exploiting for his own
benefit the conditions and tendencies which he finds prevailing in the
society around him; and too much of what passes for liberal education
has, we fear, had no better result. In a country like ours, liable to
be swept by gusts of popular excitement, not to say passion, the aim of
all higher education should be to create a class of citizens trained
for social influence, and yet able to stand on their guard against
sensational politics, to distinguish between true and false patriotism,
and to uphold the claims of justice and honor when threatened by
popular infatuation and tumult. We read in Thucydides that Cleon, the
typical demagogue of ancient Athens, did not hesitate to tell his
fellow-citizens that republics were not adapted for holding distant
territories in subjection. If Cleon was a demagogue, what are we to
think of the highly educated men who in our country echo the popular
cry for an imperial policy, and say that millions of people beyond sea
who ask only for liberty should be compelled by force of arms to be
our subjects? Let our colleges and universities see to it that they
understand “a liberal education” in the right sense.


_EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL AGGRESSION._

Much surprise has been expressed at the unusual prevalence of violence
of all kinds in the United States during the past year. It has seemed
quite extraordinary that in a nation devoted, as the American nation
is, to vast schemes of philanthropy at home and abroad, such atrocious
crimes as the mutilation and burning of negroes and the explosion of
dynamite under street cars should be committed. From the sympathetic
and self-sacrificing spirit manifested in the enthusiastic response to
the appeal to arms to free Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spanish cruelty
and despotism, and the repression of the insurrection in the Philippine
Islands for the purpose of introducing order and civilization,
something quite different was expected. There should have been a deeper
interest in the welfare of the negro and a greater effort to protect
him in the enjoyment of his rights. There should have been created a
tie between capital and labor that no differences about wages or hours
of toil could have ruptured with murderous animosities. In a word,
there should have been a manifestation of fraternal feeling among
all classes and in all sections that would have advanced the United
States a long step toward the goal of civilization. So general has
been the anticipation of these fruits from the war with Spain that one
of the most familiar arguments in favor of it has been the subjective
regeneration that would follow the attempt at objective regeneration.
That is to say, the American people were to find a cure for their own
moral disorders in their cure of the moral disorders of their neighbors.

To a student of the social philosophy of Herbert Spencer it will
be no surprise nor disappointment that this expectation, so worthy
of a generous and self-sacrificing people, has not been and is not
likely to be realized. No truth set forth in his works is more firmly
established than his profound induction that external aggression always
begets internal aggression--that assaults upon the rights of others
abroad leads to assaults upon the rights of others at home. “As it is
incredible,” he says, “that men should be courageous in the face of
foes and cowardly in the face of friends, so it is incredible that
other feelings fostered by perpetual conflicts abroad should not come
into play at home. We have just seen,” he adds, alluding to the proofs
of this truth that he has given, “that with the pursuit of vengeance
outside the society there goes the pursuit of vengeance inside the
society, and whatever other habits of thought and action constant war
necessitates must show their effects on social life at large.” The
facts in support of Mr. Spencer’s generalization are to be found in
the history of every militant people. He mentions himself the Fijian’s
sacrifice of their own people at their cannibal festivals, and the
prevalence of assassination among the Turks from the earliest times
down to the present. He mentions also the hideous acts of cruelty that
are to be found in the records of Greek and Roman civilization. To
these examples may be added the atrocities committed by Italians upon
Italians during the last days of the mediæval republics, and those
committed by Frenchmen upon Frenchmen during the French Revolution.
“The victories of the Plantagenets in France,” said Goldwin Smith,
pointing out not long ago the futility of war as a cure for national
factiousness, “were followed by insurrections and civil wars at home,
largely owing to the spirit of violence that the raids in France
excited. The victories of Chatham were followed by disgraceful scenes
of cabal and faction, as well as corruption, terminating in the
prostration of patriotism and the domination of George III and North.”

It is impossible to hope that the United States can be an exception
to the social law thus established. However pure the motive that
may lie at the bottom of a war of aggression, it can not annul the
law. The shedding of blood and the seizure of territory produce a
callousness of feeling and a perverted view of the rights of others
that are certain to turn the hands striking a foreign foe to the work
of domestic strife. Already we have seen with what bitterness such
men as Prof. Charles Eliot Norton and Mr. Edward Atkinson have been
assailed. We have seen, too, how attempts have been made to discredit
the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and to show that
the Constitution must not be permitted to stand in the way of what
has been politely called the fulfillment of the destiny of the United
States. We have seen, finally, how proposals for the disfranchisement
of American citizens have been listened to in all parts of the country
with a toleration that must cause the old abolitionists to turn in
their graves. But the spirit thus manifested has not, we may be sure,
failed to contribute to the perpetration of the outrages that have
shocked every right-minded observer of current events. It is not a
difference of kind but only one of degree that separates the slaughter
of Spaniards in Cuba and Tagals in Luzon from the slaughter of negroes
in the South and the explosion of dynamite under street cars in the
North. The inhuman instincts that impel to the one impel to the other.




Fragments of Science.


=Zola’s Anthropological Traits.=--Mr. Arthur MacDonald has published,
originally in the Open Court, a minute anthropological study of the
personality of Émile Zola. Passing all the physical points noted, we
select a few only of the most peculiar mental traits mentioned by the
author. Fear is spoken of as Zola’s principal emotion, connected in
him with the instinct of self-preservation. He is not much afraid of
the bicycle, but shrinks from a ride through a forest at night. He has
no fear of being buried alive, yet sometimes when in a tunnel on a
railroad train he has been beset with the idea of the two ends of the
tunnel falling in and burying him. Some morbid ideas have developed in
him, but they do not cause him pain when not satisfied. He lets them
run into their “manias,” and is then contented. The idea of doubt is
one. He is always in fear of not being able to do his daily task, or
of being incapable of completing a book. He never rereads his novels,
for fear of making bad discoveries. He has an arithmetical mania,
and when in the street he counts the gas jets, the number of doors,
and especially the number of hacks. In his home he counts the steps
of the staircases, the different things on his bureau. He must touch
the same pieces of furniture a certain number of times before he
goes to sleep. Some numbers have a bad influence for him, and there
are good numbers. In the night he opens his eyes seven times, to
prove that he is not going to die. He is regarded by the author as a
neuropath, or a man whose nervous system is painful but does not seem
to affect the soundness of his mind. “In brief, the qualities of Zola
are fineness and exactitude of perception, clearness of conception,
power of attention, sureness in judgment, sense of order, power of
co-ordination, extraordinary tenacity of effort, and, above all, a
great practical utilitarian sense.”

       *       *       *       *       *

=The Simplon Tunnel.=--The following facts are taken from a brief
account of this great engineering feat in the Engineering Magazine:
There is at present no direct rail connection between western
Switzerland and Italy, and to reach Milan it has been necessary to
go around to Lucerne and so on through by the St. Gothard route.
The distance by rail from Milan to Calais by the Mont Cenis is 665
miles, and by the St. Gothard 680 miles. The distance by way of the
Simplon Tunnel will be only 585 miles. The Jura-Simplon Railway from
Geneva around the lake and up the Rhone Valley ascends to Brieg at an
altitude of about 2,300 feet, while on the Italian side the railway
from Milan stops at Domodossola, at an altitude of 900 feet. Between
the two, which are 41 miles apart and over an elevation of 6,590 feet,
lies the famous Simplon Pass. Connection is now made by diligence,
the trip occupying a whole day. The plan of the new railway includes
the prolongation of the present line on the Italian side to Iselle,
at an altitude of about 2,100 feet, where the Italian entrance to the
tunnel was begun in August, 1898. On the Swiss side the entrance is at
Brieg, and the tunnel will connect these two towns, being 12.26 miles
long. This is nearly three miles longer than the St. Gothard, but the
altitude is only 2,300 feet above the sea, instead of 3,800 feet, as at
the St. Gothard. The tunnel is to be straight laterally, but higher in
the middle than at either end, the grade being 1 in 143 on the Italian
and 1 in 500 on the Swiss side. The principal difference between the
Simplon Tunnel and those previously pierced through the Alps is that,
instead of one single tunnel, two separate tunnels, fifty-five feet
apart, are to be constructed, connected by lateral passageways every
650 feet. At first but one of these is to be completed to the full
dimensions, the other being carried through at only about a quarter of
the ultimate cross-section, and not enlarged and put into use until
the traffic demands it. Both tunnels are now being bored by the use of
the Brandt hydraulic rotary drills, water being supplied at a pressure
of 70 to 100 atmospheres. The borings are through gneiss, limestone,
and slate. Holes two inches and three quarters in diameter and four or
five feet deep are bored and the rock dislodged by means of dynamite.
A narrow-gauge railway is used to remove the _débris_. It is expected
that the tunnel will be completed in five years and a half. At the
close of 1898, 300 feet had been penetrated on the south side and 1,300
on the north. The estimated cost of the complete double-track tunnels
is 69,000,000 francs. This does not include the construction of the
permanent way. The Mont Cenis Tunnel cost 75,000,000 francs, and the
St. Gothard 59,750,000 francs. The work is practically controlled by
the Jura-Simplon Railway.

       *       *       *       *       *

=Grant Allen.=--The death of our contributor, Mr. Grant Allen, was
mentioned in the last number of the Popular Science Monthly. Mr. Allen
was born in February, 1848, the son of the Rev. J. A. Allen, of Wolfe
Island, Canada. He attended schools in the United States, in France,
and in Birmingham, England, and entered Merton College, Oxford, whence
he took his degree of B. A. in 1870. He afterward spent a few years
in Jamaica as principal of a college for the higher education of the
negro, which had only a brief career. He returned to England and
settled down in London for literary work, writing rather on social and
scientific than political subjects, for various journals. While he
loved and appreciated scientific truth, he rather regarded his subject
from the æsthetic side, and this gave a peculiar charm to his articles.
He published books on Physiological Æsthetics and The Color Sense,
which did not prove profitable. Finding it hard to gain a livelihood
from his scientific work, he turned to fiction, and soon found, as
the London Times has it, “that his worst fiction was more profitable
than his best science.” His love of science, however, “approached
enthusiasm,” and he contributed frequent popular scientific articles to
the magazines, so that “for years past hardly one of those publications
has been reckoned complete” without contribution of this character from
him. He removed from London to Dorking, and afterward went to southern
France and Italy for his health. Then, having so far recovered that he
could spend his winters in England, he made himself a home at Hindhead,
Surrey. Here he died, October 25th, after several weeks’ suffering from
a painful internal malady. Among his scientific works, his books on
Physiological Æsthetics, The Color Sense, and the Evolution of the Idea
of God deserve special mention.

       *       *       *       *       *

=Japanese Paper.=--The peculiar qualities of Japanese paper, most of
them excellent ones, and the great variety of uses to which it is
applied, are known everywhere. It is a wood or bark paper, and derives
its properties from the substances of which it is made and the method
of its manufacture. Several plants are cultivated for the manufacture,
which, in the absence of English names, must be called by their
Japanese or scientific ones, of which the principal are “mitsumata”
(_Edgeworthia papyrifera_), the “sozo” (_Brossonia papyrifera_), and
the “gampiju” (_Wiekstroannia canecensis_). Bamboo bark also furnishes
a good paper, but is not much used. The _mitsumata_ ramifies into three
branches, and is cultivated in plantations, being propagated from
seeds and by cuttings. It is fit for use in the second year if the
soil is good. Its cultivation and exportation have reached an enormous
importance, largely because the Imperial Printing Office uses it for
bank notes and official documents. The _sozo_ is propagated by seeds,
and somewhat resembles the mulberry. The _gampiju_ is a small shrub
which is cut in its third year. To make paper, the bark is steeped
in a kettle with buckwheat ashes to extract the resin in it. When
it is reduced to a pulp, a sieve-bottomed frame with silk or hempen
threads is plunged within, very much as in Western paper-making. This,
letting out the water, holds the pulp, which, felting, is to form the
future sheet of paper. This is pressed, to squeeze all the water out,
and is left to dry. The uses made of paper in Japan are innumerable,
particularly in old Japan, which treasures up its past. The papers,
though all made in a similar way, are called by different names,
according to the uses to which they are applied and their origin.
Window lights are made of paper, and partitions between rooms, when it
is stretched on frames, which work as sliding doors. The celebrated
lanterns, called _gifu_, are made of it at Tokio and Osaka. Under the
name of _shibuganni_ it is applied to the covering of umbrellas which
are sold in China and Korea. As _zedogawa shi_ bank notes are printed
on it. Oiled it is _kappa_, impermeable and suitable for covering
packages and for making waterproof garments. Handkerchiefs are made
from it, cords by twisting. For light, solid articles it is mixed and
compressed very much as our papier-maché. Covered with thick paste and
pounded, it forms tapestries. Imitations of Cordova leather are made
of it by spreading it and pressing it with hard brushes upon boards in
which suitable designs have been cut. It is then covered with oil and
varnish. Japan produced nearly five million dollars’ worth of paper
in 1892. Unfortunately, European methods of manufacture have been
introduced, and there is danger of the paper losing its distinctive
qualities.

       *       *       *       *       *

=The Deeps of the Ocean.=--In his geographical address at the British
Association, Sir John Murray showed that the deep oceanic soundings
are scattered over the different ocean basins in varying proportions,
that they are now most numerous in the North Atlantic and Southwest
Pacific, and in these two regions the contour lines of depth may be
drawn with greater confidence than in the other divisions of the great
ocean basins. On the whole, it may be said that the general tendency
of recent soundings is to extend the area with depths greater than
one thousand fathoms, and to show that numerous volcanic cones rise
from the general level of the floor of the ocean basins up to various
levels beneath the sea surface. Considerably more than half of the
sea floor lies at a depth exceeding two thousand fathoms, or more
than two geographical miles. On the Challenger charts all areas where
the depth exceeds three thousand fathoms have been called “deeps,”
and distinctive names have been conferred upon them. Forty-two such
depressions are now known--twenty-four in the Pacific Ocean, three
in the Indian Ocean, fifteen in the Atlantic Ocean, and one in the
Southern and Antarctic Oceans. The area occupied by these deeps is
estimated at 7,152,000 geographical square miles, or about seven per
cent of the total water surface of the globe. Within these deeps
more than 250 soundings have been recorded, of which twenty-four
exceed 2,000 fathoms, including three exceeding 5,000 fathoms. Depths
exceeding 4,000 fathoms, or four geographical miles, have been recorded
in eight of the deeps. Depths exceeding 5,000 fathoms have been
hitherto recorded only within the Aldrich Deep of the South Pacific,
to the east of the Kermadecs and Friendly Islands, where the greatest
depth is 5,155 fathoms, or 530 feet more than five geographical miles.
This is about 2,000 feet more below the level of the sea than the
summit of Mount Everest, in the Himalayas, is above it.

       *       *       *       *       *

=Death of Sir William Dawson.=--By the death of Sir J. William
Dawson, at Montreal, November 19th, America loses one of its most
highly distinguished geologists. Sir William was born at Pictou, Nova
Scotia, in October, 1820, and was deeply interested in the study of
Nature from his early college days, when he made extensive collections
of various kinds. When he was twenty-two years old a happy fortune
brought him in contact with Sir Charles Lyell, then visiting America,
and he was that eminent geologist’s traveling companion during his
scientific tour of Nova Scotia. He studied chemistry at the University
of Edinburgh. Returning to Nova Scotia in 1850, he engaged in teaching,
and was associated with the first normal school in the province. He
was afterward connected with the new University of New Brunswick, and
from 1855 to 1893 was Principal of McGill College and University.
Although his duties in the college were very exacting, Professor
Dawson’s industry in scientific research was never relaxed, and he
was the author of contributions of very great value to the geology
and paleontology of Canada. Among these were the discoveries of the
_Dendrepeton acadianum_--the first reptile found in the American
coal formations--and the _Pupa vetusta_--the first-known Paleozoic
land shell. His discovery and exposition of the _Eozoon canadense_
attracted great attention, and was much discussed, but his views of
its importance do not seem to have been justified, for some doubts now
exist among geologists whether it represents any organic structure.
He was the first President of the Royal Society of Canada, which was
organized in 1882; was one of the sectional presidents of the British
Association at its Montreal meeting (1884), and was president of that
body at its Birmingham meeting, 1886. Among his published works are the
Description of the Devonian and Carboniferous Flora of Eastern North
America, constituting two volumes of the Reports of the Geological
Survey of Canada; Air-Breathers of the Coal Formation; Acadian Geology;
The Story of the Earth and Man; Origin of Animal Life; Fossil Men;
the Canadian Ice Age; the Meeting Place of Geology and History; the
Geological History of Plants (in the International Scientific Series);
Relics of Primeval Life (Lowell Lectures); The Chain of Life in
Geological Times; Modern Science in Bible Lands; the Dawn of Life;
Modern Ideas of Evolution; a book of travels in Egypt and Syria; and
many contributions to scientific periodicals. He received numerous
degrees and honors from learned bodies and institutions, among them
the Lyell medal of the Geological Society of London, in 1882. A sketch
of Principal Dawson, as he was then called, was published, with a
portrait, in the Popular Science Monthly for December, 1875 (vol. viii,
p. 132).

       *       *       *       *       *

=Glacial Lakes in New York.=--A glacial lake is defined by H. P.
Fairchild, in his paper on Glacial Waters in the Finger Lake Region of
New York (Geological Society of America, Rochester, N. Y.), as a body
of static water existing by virtue of a barrier of ice. Such impounded
waters may exist where a glacier blocks a stream, or where the general
land surface inclines toward the glacier foot. The lakes described in
Mr. Fairchild’s paper belongs to the second class, and were formed
in the southern part of the Ontario basin, where the land slopes
northward from a plateau of two thousand feet elevation down to Lake
Ontario, two hundred and forty-six feet. The high plateau was deeply
gashed by the preglacial stream erosion, and in these trenches along
the northern border of the plateau lie the present “Finger Lakes.”
The topography was peculiarly favorable to the production against the
bold ice front of a series of distinct valley lakes, in many respects
unequaled elsewhere. Between twenty and thirty of these lakes are
described in Professor Fairchild’s paper, which occupied sites now
partly represented by nineteen streams and lakes, beginning with
Tonawanda Creek on the west and extending to Butternut Creek (Jamesburg
and Apulia) on the east. The local lakes were not of long duration, and
their surface level was unstable, changing with the down-cutting of the
outlets and with the greatly increased volume of the summer melting
of the ice sheet. Consequently, true beaches are usually wanting.
The conspicuous evidences are the deltas of land streams, with their
terraces, embankments, bars and spits, and the outlet channels. The
records of these extinct waters are the very latest phenomena connected
with the ice invasion, and are the connecting link between the glacial
condition and the present hydrography. They are of lively interest,
perhaps, to only a few persons, but the details are necessary to the
more general study of the Pleistocene. No economic or practical result
from the knowledge is foreseen, “but as pure science the study of
these waterless lakes, waveless shores, and streamless channels has a
fascination and romance.”

       *       *       *       *       *

=The Environment In Education.=--“Two considerations of equal and
fundamental importance,” says Mr. Wilbur S. Jackman, “are included
in teaching--the choice of the subject-matter and its presentation,
and the reaction of the pupil as the result of the presentation. No
presentation ever reaches consciousness without a reaction, however
feeble, from which results an immediate and inevitable corresponding
mental construction. Certain instincts called primitive, it may be
generally agreed, exist in children, and, by taking intelligent
advantage of these, definite educative presentation may be begun at
a much earlier age than was once supposed. Under the theory that
the child repeats the racial history in its growth, a practice has
arisen of meeting the early instincts of childhood with presentations
from the adult lives of primitive peoples. Presentations are made to
stimulate the idea of hunting and fishing, of building wigwams and the
like.” But it is a fundamental error, Mr. Jackman believes, to suppose
that while the child may be Indianlike in his instincts he is to be
considered or treated as an Indian. Another factor of which evolution
makes a great deal--the nature of the environment--must be considered,
and it is very powerful. The material for satisfying the cravings of
the early instincts should therefore be chosen from the immediate
environment, to which the pupil’s reaction is at once positive and
definite. “It is scarcely possible to overmagnify the benefits of
an education that seeks first to make the most out of the immediate
things of life. Its results and its ideals are about us everywhere. The
ability to use in the most intelligent and skillful way the materials
of our environment is the necessary condition for the highest purposes
and the most glorified ideals. One must have a profound respect for the
education that proposes to give us clean cities and hygienic homes.”

       *       *       *       *       *

=An Athabascan Indian Lodge.=--The caribou-skin lodge of the northern
Athabascan Indians is described by Mr. Frank Russell, in his
Explorations in the Far North, as supported by a framework of from
twelve to thirty poles. In pitching camp in winter, sticks are thrust
through the snow in order to find solid earth for a floor. If the stick
enters soft moss the place is avoided, as the camp fire would spread
and undermine the lodge. When a suitable site is found, the men clear
away the snow with their snowshoes, and perhaps assist the women in
cutting and carrying the lodge poles. It is the women’s duty to carry
bundles of spruce boughs with which to cover the floor of the lodge.
The brush is carefully laid, branch by branch, so that the stems are
under the tops and point away from the center. This floor is renewed
every Saturday afternoon. The fireplace is surrounded by a pole of
green wood, three or four inches in diameter, cut so as to be bent in
the form of a polygon. Above the doorway a pole eight feet long is
lashed to the lodge-poles in a horizontal position, six feet from the
ground; this, and a similar pole on the opposite side, support from
six to twelve poles, crossing above the fire, making a stage on which
to thaw and dry meat. Each hunter’s powder-horn and shot-pouch are
suspended from a lodge-pole or his back, while his gun stands in its
cover against a pole or lies on a stage outside. Near the door flap
are several hungry and watchful dogs, which, by constantly running in
and out, make an opening for the cold wind to enter. The dogs are tied
at night. The side of the fire next to the entrance is allotted to the
children and visiting women. On either side sit the wives, for there
are usually two families in one lodge. Behind them are _muskimoots_
and an inextricable confusion of rags, blankets, bones, meat, etc. If
a crooked knife, a tea bag, or anything that is in the heap is needed,
everything is tumbled about until it is found. The sled-wrapper is
extended behind the lodge-poles and serves as a catch-all for stores
of meat, bones to be pounded and boiled to extract the grease, and
odds and ends not in constant use. The next space is occupied by the
men of the house; that farthest from the door is reserved for the
young men and the men guests. At night each adult rolls up in a single
three-point blanket or a caribou-skin robe, and sleeps on an undressed
caribou skin. A piece of an old blanket generally covers the small
children in a bunch.

       *       *       *       *       *

=The Sand Grouse.=--Pallas’s sand grouse is a native of the Kirghiz
steppes of central Asia, and occasionally, driven by some pressure of
circumstances of which we can only conjecture the nature, makes visits
to England. Its presence in that country has never been recorded till
this century--more, perhaps, for lack of observers than of migrating
birds--but it has appeared in 1863, 1872, 1873, 1888, 1889, and 1899.
The principal migration in recent years was in 1888, when many examples
were seen and shot in different parts of the country. In the same year
it was seen “far and wide” in western Europe, and as far north as
Trondhjem, in western Norway. A writer in the Saturday Review remarks
on the resemblance of this sand grouse, as described by Prjevalski in
central Asia, to the various sand grouse he has seen in South Africa.
At the drinking places they circle round the water. Presently they
alight and, Prjevalski says, “hastily drink and rise again, and, in
cases where the flocks are large, the birds in front get up before
those at the back have time to alight. They know their drinking places
very well, and very often go to them from distances of tens of miles,
especially in the mornings, between nine and ten o’clock, but after
twelve at noon they seldom visit these spots.” In the Kalahari country,
at the scant desert waters, the Saturday Review writer says, three
kinds of sand grouse “are to be seen flocking in from all parts of the
country from eight to ten o’clock A. M. for their day’s drink. Circling
swiftly round the pool with sharp cries, they suddenly stoop together
toward the water. The noisy rustle of their wings as they alight and
ascend is most remarkable. We noticed that the birds nearest the water
drank quickly and moved off, allowing those in the rear to take their
places and slake their thirst, the whole process being accomplished
with unfailing order and regularity.... The spectacle of these punctual
creatures, streaming in from all points of the compass with unfailing
regularity between eight and ten o’clock was always most fascinating.
After drinking they circled once or twice round the water pool, and
then flew off with amazing swiftness for their day of feeding in the
dry, sun-scorched desert. The seeds of grass and other desert plants
seem to constitute their principal food. The sand grouse has some
characteristics of the pigeon and some of the grouse, which suggest a
‘singular blending’ of the two orders.”

       *       *       *       *       *

=Plantations for Rural School Grounds.=--A paper on the Laying out and
Adornment of Rural School Grounds, by Prof. L. H. Bailey, published
as a Bulletin of Cornell University Experiment Station, lays down
as a general principle in plantation that it should be in the main
for foliage effects. “Select those trees and shrubs which are the
commonest, because they are the cheapest, hardiest, and likeliest to
grow. There is no district so poor and bare that enough plants can not
be secured without money for the school yard. You will find them in the
woods, in old yards, along the fences.... Scatter in a few trees along
the fences and about the buildings. Maples, basswood, elms, ashes,
buttonwood, pepperidge, oaks, beeches, birches, hickories, poplars, a
few trees of pine or spruce or hemlock--any of these are excellent.
If the country is bleak, a rather heavy planting of evergreens about
the border, in the place of so much shrubbery, is very good. For
shrubs, use the common things to be found in the woods and swales,
together with the roots which can be found in every old yard. Willows,
osiers, witch-hazel, dogwood, wild roses, thorn apples, haws, elders,
sumac, wild honeysuckles--these and others can be found in every
school district. From the farmyards can be secured snowballs, spireas,
lilacs, forsythias, mock-oranges, roses, snowberries, barberries,
flowering currants, honeysuckles, and the like. Vines can be used to
excellent purpose on the outbuildings or on the schoolhouse itself.
The common wild Virginia creeper is the most serviceable on brick or
stone schoolhouses. The Boston ivy or the Japanese ampelopsis may be
used, unless the location is very bleak. Honeysuckle, clematis, and
bittersweet are also attractive.” Flowers may be used for decorations.

       *       *       *       *       *

=Destruction of the Birds.=--A circular sent us by the New York
Zoölogical Society opens with the declaration which is only a moderate
expression of the truth, that “the annihilation of the finest birds
and quadrupeds of the United States is a crime against civilization
which should call forth the disapproval of every intelligent American.”
The second annual report of the society (for 1897) contains an
article on this subject by Mr. William T. Hornaday, which sets forth
some remarkable facts concerning the rate at which the destruction
of Nature’s fair creatures is proceeding. It is not creditable to
American science or American manhood that most of the measures that
have been adopted for the protection of animal life in this country
have been taken in the interest and at the urgency of sportsmen; or,
to prevent killing the poor creatures in an irregular way, in order
that they may be more conveniently killed in the regular way. Mr.
Hornaday has a fairly satisfactory number of reports in answer to his
inquiries concerning the rate at which birds are disappearing from
thirty-six States. From these he has compiled a graphic table for
thirty States, taking care to keep within the conservative limit in
every particular, which shows that forty-six per cent of the birds of
the country have been destroyed within the last fifteen years--the
State averages ranging from ten per cent in Nebraska and twenty-seven
per cent in Massachusetts to seventy-five per cent in Connecticut,
Indian Territory, and Montana, and seventy-seven per cent in Florida.
In North Carolina, Oregon, and California the balance of bird life
has been maintained; and in Kansas, Wyoming, Washington, and Utah it
has increased--Kansas, with its law absolutely forbidding traffic in
certain birds, being the “banner State.” “The western part of the State
of Washington reveals the uncommon paradox of a locality being filled
up with bird forms because of the clearing away of the timber.” The
agencies bringing about the destruction of our animal life are many
and various. There are the “sportsmen,” of whom Mr. Hornaday registers
five kinds, all eager to “kill something,” hunting for one hundred
and fifty-four species of “game birds,” and when these fail, taking
the song birds in their place. If the reports are true, the boys of
America are the chief destroyers of our passerine birds and other small
non-edible birds generally. “The majority of them shoot the birds, a
great many devote their energies to gathering eggs, and some do both.”
Then there are the women wearing birds or feathers in their hats. Egg
collecting, which was fostered at one time as encouraging interest in
natural history, has increased till it has become an abuse as dangerous
and destructive as any of the others, and even genuine scientific
collectors are advised to call a halt. Mr. Hornaday concludes that
“under present conditions, and excepting in a few localities, the
practical annihilation of all our birds, except the smallest species,
and within a comparatively short period, may be regarded as absolutely
certain to occur.”

       *       *       *       *       *

=Annual Flowers.=--In a Cornell University Agricultural Experiment
bulletin on Annual Flowers the authors, G. N. Lauman and Prof. L. H.
Bailey, teach that the main planting of any place should be trees and
shrubs. The flowers may then be used as decorations. They may be thrown
in freely about the borders of the place, but not in beds in the center
of the lawn. They show off better when seen against a background, which
may be foliage, a building, a rock, or a fence. Where to plant flowers
is really more important than what to plant. “In front of bushes, in
the corner of the steps, against the foundation of the residence or
outhouse, along a fence or a walk--these are places for flowers. A
single petunia plant against a background of foliage is worth a dozen
similar plants in the center of the lawn.... The open-centered yard
may be a picture; the promiscuously planted yard may be a nursery or a
forest. A little color scattered here and there puts the finish to the
picture.” If the person wants a flower garden, the primary question is
one not of decoration of the yard, but of growing flowers for flowers’
sake. The flower garden, therefore, should be at one side of the
residence or at the rear, for it is not allowable to spoil a good lawn
even with flowers. A good small garden is much more satisfactory than a
poor large garden. Many annual plants make effective screens and covers
for unsightly places. Wild cucumber, cobœa, and sweet peas may be used
to decorate the tennis screen or the chicken-yard fence. Efficient
screens can be made of many strong-growing and large-leaved plants,
such as cannas, castor-beans, sunflowers, or tobacco.

       *       *       *       *       *

=A Thirteenth-Century Miracle.=--The legend of St. Prokopy relates that
on the 25th of June, 1290, the city of Wilikij Ustjug, government of
Vologda, southern Russia, was imminently threatened by a violent storm.
The populace appealed to the saint, and, by virtue of his prayers, the
storm changed its direction, and, passing on one side of the city,
spent its fury upon a desert spot about fifteen miles away, where
it left, with hail, a mass of fire-marked stones, the fall of which
wrought great havoc with the undergrowth. The incident made a deep
impression upon the minds of the people, so that the story is still
current and alive after the lapse of six hundred years. A testimony
to what the people believe is its truth may be found by visiting the
spot, where a surface extending along about four miles is covered with
blocks of stone, assumed to be meteorites. A church dedicated to St.
Prokopy has been built in the neighboring village of Loboff or Catoval,
and near it stands a curious little wooden chapel of great antiquity,
the foundation of which was made of the stones that fell. The church is
decorated with pictures of St. Prokopy and of incidents of the meteoric
storm, and one of the stones that fell has been mounted on a pedestal
in the cathedral of Ustjug, where it is an object of devotion. Mr.
Melnikoff, Conservator of the Mineralogical Collections of the Mining
Institute of St. Petersburg, has examined the place and the stones,
and finds that they are not meteoric and heavenly at all, but simply
earthly granite and sandstone. Yet M. Stanislas Meunier suggests, in
_La Nature_, that the story, so carefully treasured up for six hundred
years, may have a foundation. That such stones as lie on the ground
at Catoval may have been taken up and transplanted by a tornado of
extreme violence he regards as within the possibilities. M. Meunier
has himself investigated a phenomenon of the kind in France, where
the ground was “mitrailled” with stones measuring one, two, and three
cubic centimetres, which had been brought a distance of one hundred
and fifty kilometres. Another possible explanation is that the stones
were already there, so concealed by the dense growth as not to attract
particular attention, but became more plainly obvious when the ground
had been cleared by the tornado.




MINOR PARAGRAPHS.


While it recognizes the desirability of agreeing upon some language as
a general medium of communication between nations, the London Spectator
presents certain forcible reasons for not seeking to institute one
universal language. “Mankind,” it says, “will never adopt a universal
language, nor is it to be desired that it should. The instrument for
expressing thought must vary with the character, history, and mental
range of those who have thoughts to express, and if all men spoke
alike, ninety-nine per cent of them would be speaking stiffly--not
using, that is, a natural and self-developed vehicle of expression.
Arabic could not have grown up among Englishmen, or English among
Arabs. The seclusion of nations, too, from one another by the want of
a common tongue is by no means all loss, and we may doubt with reason
why the higher races would not be degraded if they understood without
effort all that the lower races say to one another. They would be bred,
as it were, in the servants’ hall, not to their advantage.”

       *       *       *       *       *

In a recent address on The Chemistry of the Infinitely Little, M.
Grimaux referred to the fact, with which all who have thought about it
have been struck, that pathogenic microbes being diffused all through
the atmosphere, everybody must breathe and absorb all sorts of them,
including germs of typhoid fever, scarlet fever, diphtheria, etc., and
yet we are not all attacked with those diseases. Why? Because each
person has a peculiar temperament, and cells adapted, to a greater
or less extent, to resist the microbe, to destroy it when it enters
the organism, and thus constitutes, as the case may be, a good or a
bad cultural medium. Every one, we might say, is immune against some
or other of the pathogenic microbes. Like immunity belongs also to
certain animal species, and if a microbe pathogenic to man or to some
other species is injected into them they will resist it. The blood of
refractory animals probably contains principles not yet known which
oppose the development of the infectious microbe. From this fact the
idea has been suggested of injecting the blood of refractory animals
and communicating an artificial immunity to the individual to whom the
injection is applied.

       *       *       *       *       *

M. J. CRÉPIN, of Paris, “an enthusiast concerning the goat,” as M.
de Parville calls him in _La Nature_, has established a model goat
dairy, and is endeavoring to diffuse a taste for goat’s milk and its
products. As a means to this end, he has sought to procure an improved
breed of goats, and has obtained a stock of very satisfactory quality
by crossing the best native goats with the Nubian buck. The latter
animal is rather awkward in form and movement, but M. Crépin hopes to
breed that out. Otherwise the Nubian is well acclimated, vigorous, and
indifferent to cold, hornless, and a most excellent milker. Goat’s milk
generally is richer in caseine than cow’s milk, and owes some of its
special qualities to this fact, and to the further circumstance that
the flecks of goat-milk cheese are smaller, softer, and more easily
broken up--consequently more digestible--than those of cow’s milk.
Further, goat’s milk is more nearly than any other common milk like in
composition to human mother’s milk; and it has the very great advantage
that, the goat being less subject to attacks of tuberculosis and other
dangerous disorders, it is comparatively free from the liability to
convey infection. A single objection to the general use of goat’s milk
is the odor which is supposed to be characteristic of it, but M. Crépin
affirms that this is not apparent when the goats are properly bred and
kept. M. Crépin is experimenting with butter from goat’s milk, and
represents that he finds it very nice.

       *       *       *       *       *

The fundamental principle involved in the new form of telemeter, or
instrument for estimating the distance of visible objects without
actual measurement, invented by Herr Zeiss, of Jena, is that of
the stereoscopic effect which appears in natural vision, where the
inclination of the eyes in concentrating on the object gives the sense
of distance. The base line between the eyes is increased in the Zeiss
instrument by means of a system of prisms so as to give a widened base
of binocular vision, and of mirrors which give magnifying power. Double
images are formed, the distance between which varies in proportion
to the distance from the observer, and appliances are provided
for measuring how far apart they are. The arrangement is fairly
satisfactory for moderate distances--say of 3,000 metres, or about
10,000 feet.

       *       *       *       *       *

M. Moissan believes that he has found a solution of the problem of
the manufacture of ammonia from the atmosphere, and consequently
of rendering atmospheric nitrogen available in agriculture, by the
artificial production of calcium nitride. While calcium undergoes no
change in contact with nitrogen at the ordinary temperature, it is
affected by it under the operation of heat, and finally burns in it,
absorbing it rapidly and giving rise to a bronze-colored nitride.
Thrown into water, this substance decomposes with effervescence,
producing ammonia and calcium hydrate.

       *       *       *       *       *

Prof. A. E. Dolbear, of Tufts College, Massachusetts, patented an
invention for telegraphing without wires in 1886, which he claims
covers all that Marconi is doing. He has sent messages with it for as
long distances as five miles. According to his account he invented the
system and made successful experiments with it as far back as 1882.
He made an application for a patent, which was rejected by the Patent
Office with the statement that it was contrary to science and would
not work. “But as it did work, the claim was maintained in the office,
and four years later, in 1886, a patent for it was issued.” Professor
Dolbear does not wish it to be understood that his patent is on the
“art of wireless telegraphy,” but that it covers everything that has
been so far done in the art.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the occasion of the visit of the French Association to the British
Association, Prof. J. J. Thomson gave an exposition of the lines of
research by which it has been concluded that the atom is not the
smallest existing quantity of matter. Electro-chemical phenomena
teach us to associate a definite amount of electricity with each atom
of matter; but these recent researches indicate that under certain
circumstances a much larger quantity of negative electricity may be
conveyed by the atom, or else that the negative electrical charge
resides on a small detachable portion of the “atom,” which alone
is concerned in the experiments. The positive charge seems to be
distributed over the whole mass of the atom.

       *       *       *       *       *

The merits of two methods of clarifying sewage--by dilution and by
bacterial action--are discussed by Mr. Rudolph Hering in articles in
the Engineering Magazine. Disposal by dilution in large streams of
water is regarded as satisfactory in many places--where the water of
the stream is not to be used for drinking or cooking--provided the
flow of the stream is always copious enough to dilute and disperse the
sewage so widely as to prevent putrefaction and substitute oxidation.
For purification by bacterial action no single method is found adapted
to all conditions. The method by filtration and aëration is declared
practicable only in localities where a sufficient area of porous land
is available, upon which the crude sewage can be spread in sufficient
quantity, into which it can filter with the proper velocity, and
from which it can emerge as a thoroughly purified water. Where these
conditions are absent, other methods must be adopted, of which the
experiments in artificial filtration by tanks, as practiced at
Exeter and Sutton, England, are described. These experiments promise
to improve the present method, but perhaps not as greatly as is
anticipated by the promoters. The author regards a prior separation of
the suspended or dissolved organic matter as essential to permanent
success when the amount of land is limited.

       *       *       *       *       *

By using the tuberculin test the faculty of the Ohio Agricultural
Experiment Station have learned that in cattle the tubercle bacillus
usually first obtains its foothold in some of the minor glands, that
it may exist there for months and years before any other organs are
affected, and that it is only in advanced cases that the lungs become
diseased. While the growth of the organism is limited to these minor
glands the health of the animal usually shows no sign of impairment.
During this period there is no evidence that any unwholesome effect
is being produced upon the flesh, and so long as the infection is
localized in this way in one or two organs the Government inspectors
pass the meat as sound. Tuberculosis, therefore, is a very different
complaint from such diseases as pleuropneumonia or Texas fever, in
which the whole system is saturated from the first instant with the
febrile symptoms.


NOTES.

Mr. James Weir tells of a spider which stretched its web in the
division between two parts of a sawmill, where the lower fastenings of
the structure were frequently broken by the repeated passing of lumber
through. Discovering the situation, the insect gave up the use of guy
threads, and, finding a nail, wove it into the lower edge of its web,
so that it should operate as a sinker to keep the web stretched.

       *       *       *       *       *

N. G. Johnson, of the Maryland Agricultural Experiment Station, telling
the Society for the Promotion of Agricultural Science the story of
his fight with the pea louse, represented that the pea raisers in his
State had lost this year more than three million dollars by the ravages
of this insect. A parasite had been discovered which practically
annihilated the pest, but the discovery was not made in time to save
the crops in some parts of the State from destruction.

       *       *       *       *       *

The American Society for the Promotion of Agricultural Science,
after hearing the account of the work of the Gypsy Moth Commission
of Massachusetts, which has spent more than a million and a half of
dollars in trying to exterminate the mischievous insect, approved the
action of the Massachusetts Legislature in maintaining the commission,
and requested that the work be kept up for a short time longer. This
was because it was represented that the moth was now confined to a
limited area, and could be easily exterminated by the expenditure of a
small amount more of money.

       *       *       *       *       *

The history of science has sustained a great loss by the burning of
most of the relics which had been collected for the Volta Centenary
Exhibition at Como, Italy. Only a few things were saved, comprising a
sword presented by Napoleon Bonaparte to Volta, a cast of the skull of
the great electrician, his watch, and a few personal relics. On the
other hand, his books and manuscripts, his collection of batteries,
the only authentic portrait of him, and his will, were destroyed.
Nevertheless, the celebration was not stopped. The fire was attributed
to the fusing of some electric wires.

       *       *       *       *       *

An example of patient industry is the sorting of hogs’ bristles as
it is carried on at Tientsin, China. Each one of the hairs of the
six hundred thousand kilogrammes exported from that place in 1897
had to be picked out, measured, and placed in the bundle of hairs of
corresponding length; and the different lengths by which the hairs are
sorted are very numerous.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is stated by M. Léon Vaillant that the late M. A. d’Abbadie had
and used an effective remedy against the bites of insects and the
infections they bring by fumigating the entire body with sulphur. For
this purpose he covered the unclothed body with a suitable envelope,
under which the sulphur was burned. The remedy was communicated to M.
d’Abbadie by a hippopotamus hunter who had, by using it, escaped all
the diseases incident to the swamps to which he had to resort.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Gregorian Calendar is to be adopted by the Russian Government on
January 1, 1901, or at the beginning of the new century.

       *       *       *       *       *

The following figures, from the Engineering and Mining Journal, are of
interest as showing the enormous quantity of iron and steel which was
manufactured in 1898, and the leading position which the United States
has already assumed in the industry:

IRON AND STEEL PRODUCTION, IN METRIC TONS.[C]

  ----------------+-------------------------+-------------------------
                  |        PIG IRON.        |          STEEL.
   COUNTRIES.     +------------+------------+------------+------------
                  |    1897.   |   1898.    |   1897.    |   1898.
  ----------------+------------+------------+------------+------------
  United States   |  9,807,123 | 11,962,817 |  7,289,300 |   9,045,815
  United Kingdom  |  8,980,088 |  8,769,249 |  4,559,736 |   4,639,042
  Germany         |  6,889,087 |  7,402,717 |  5,091,294 |   5,784,807
                  +------------+------------+------------+------------
      Total       | 25,626,296 | 28,134,383 | 16,940,330 |  19,418,664
                  |            |            |            |
  Austria-Hungary |  1,205,000 |  1,250,000 |    553,000 |     605,500
  Belgium         |  1,024,666 |    982,748 |    616,604 |     658,130
  Canada          |     41,500 |     46,880 |      --    |       --
  France          |  2,472,143 |  2,584,427 |  1,281,595 |   1,441,638
  Italy           |     12,500 |     12,850 |     57,250 |      58,750
  Russia          |  1,857,000 |  2,228,850 |    831,000 |   1,095,000
  Spain           |    282,171 |    261,799 |    121,800 |     112,605
  Sweden          |    533,800 |    570,550 |    268,300 |     289,750
  All other       |    450,000 |    545,000 |    310,000 |     355,000
                  +------------+------------+------------+------------
    Grand total   | 33,506,076 | 36,507,487 | 20,979,179 |  24,030,032
  ----------------+------------+------------+------------+------------

    [C] A metric ton is about 2,200 pounds.

       *       *       *       *       *

Although fewer casual members or members for the year than usual were
present at the recent meeting of the British Association at Dover, the
attendance of distinguished men of science and of active scientific
workers, according to the London Times, seemed to be greater. And so
far as the proper work of the association is concerned, the meeting
should take a high rank. Excellent and serious work was done in all the
sections.

       *       *       *       *       *

A paper has been published by Pliny T. Sexton, of Palmyra, N. Y.,
setting forth reasons for favoring the unification of the whole
educational system of the State of New York under the jurisdiction of
a single board--that of the Regents of the University. The reasons
are presented in the form of various newspaper articles which were
published last year against a proposition of an opposite character--to
abolish the present Department of Public Instruction and create a State
Commission of Education, the affiliations of which would be political.
Mr. Sexton has further offered two prizes of one hundred dollars each
for articles or essays by women and similar productions by men in
support of the proposed unification.

       *       *       *       *       *

M. Hildebert Richard, of Avignon, France, relates that he experimented
upon two adult geranium plants, both healthy and of vigorous growth,
under like conditions of exposure, watering one (A) with well water and
the other (B) with water containing a measured proportion of butylic
alcohol daily. A kept on with its healthy growth. B, after four days of
alcoholization, showed an enfeebled growth, with symptoms of jaundice,
drowsiness, and intoxication; a special odor perceptible in all parts
of the plant, partially burned spots, and melanosis and geotropism in
the leaves.

       *       *       *       *       *

In his papers on The Art and Customs of Benin, Mr. Ling Roth concludes
that the art of that savage land consists of mixed elements, partly
European forms which the native mind was prone to copy, partly
introduced from other parts of Africa. It is characterized by boldness,
freedom, clearness in execution, originality, and variety. Among
the customs he mentions are the practice of human sacrifice and the
sprinkling of the blood of the animals killed at the periodical
sacrifices on the ivories and on the cast-iron or bronze figure-heads
placed on the altars. When there was too much rain, a woman had a
message saluting the rain god put into her mouth. She was then killed
and set up in the execution tree, so that the rain might see.

       *       *       *       *       *

Our scientific obituary list of the month includes the names of Sir
William Dawson, the distinguished Canadian geologist, of whom a fuller
notice is given in another place; Dr. Luther Dana Woodbridge, Professor
of Anatomy and Physiology in Williams College, at Williamstown,
Mass., of heart disease, November 3d, aged forty-nine years; Dr.
Oscar Baumann, African explorer, geographer to the Austrian Congo
Expedition of 1885, who made studies for the projected railroad from
Tanga to Karog; Dr. F. Kuhla, botanical explorer, at Manáos, Brazil;
Percy B. Pilcher, inventor of flying machines, from an accident while
experimenting, September 2d; Professor Hayduck, Privat Docent in
Chemistry in Berlin; M. A. Snow, Instructor in Entomology in Leland
Stanford Junior University, drowned October 10th in San Francisco
Harbor; he had also been Instructor in Entomology in the Universities
of Kansas and of Illinois, and was the author of several systematic
papers on _Diptera_; Prof. J. B. Carnoy, of the Catholic University
of Louvain, author of _Biologie Cellulaire_ and of papers on the
development of sexual elements, and founder of the journal _La
Cellule_, at Schuls, Switzerland, September 6th; Dr. A Ernst, Director
of the National Museum, Caracas, Venezuela; Dr. Edward Petri, Professor
of Geography and Anthropology in the University of St. Petersburg, aged
forty-five years; Dr. Ottmar Mergenthaler, inventor of the linotype
type machine, in Baltimore, Md., October 28th; and Dr. Henry Hicks,
an English geologist and Lyell medalist, at Hendon, England, November
18th, aged sixty-two years.




PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.


Agricultural Experiment Stations. Bulletins and Reports. Delaware
College: No. 45. The Pruning of Young Fruit Trees. By G. Harold Powell.
Pp. 16.--New Jersey: No. 137. Dairy Experiments, etc. Pp. 24; No.
138. Crude Petroleum as an Insecticide. Pp. 22; No. 139. Fertilizer
Analyses. Pp. 60.--Ohio: Press Bulletin No. 199. Plums (Comparison
of Varieties). Pp. 2; No. 200. Fall Treatment of Insect Pests. Pp.
2.--United States Department of Agriculture: Results of a Biological
Survey of Mount Shasta, California. By C. Hart Merriam. Wilt Disease of
Cotton, Watermelon, and Cowpea. By Erwin F. Smith. Pp. 54, with plates.

Association Review, The. Frank W. Booth, editor. Bimonthly. Vol. I, No.
1. An Educational Magazine. Published by the American Association to
promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf. Mount Airy, Philadelphia.
Pp. 128. $2.50 a year.

Bullard, Frank D. The Aristophilon. A Nemesis of Faith (Poem). Chicago:
R. R. Donnelly & Sons Company. Pp. 109.

Bulletins, Reports, and Proceedings. Alabama Geological Survey:
Map of the Warrior Coal Basin. By Henry McCalley, Assistant State
Geologist.--Boston Society of Natural History: The Blood-Vessels of
the Heart in Carcharis, Baja, and Amia. By G. H. Parker and Frederick
K. Davis. Pp. 16, with plates; Marine Mollusca of Cold Spring Harbor,
Long Island. By F. N. Balch. Pp. 30, with plates; The Development
of Persilia Schmackeri, Richard. By M. T. Sudler. Pp. 20.--Colorado
College Studies. Three Papers. Pp. 48.--Buitenzorg Botanical Institute:
Bulletin, No. 1. Pp. 40; United States Department of Labor; No. 24.
Statistics of Cities. Pp. 140.--Iowa, State University of: Report on
the Ophiuroidea collected by the Bahama Expedition in 1893. By Prof.
A. E. Varrill. Pp. 86, with plates.--Linnæan Society of New York: The
Turtles and Lizards of the Vicinity of New York City. Pp. 36--Wagner
Free Institute of Science, Philadelphia: The Salenodont Artiodactyles
of the Uinta Eocene. By W. B. Scott. Pp. 121, with plates.

Constantin, J. La Nature Tropicale. (Tropical Nature.) Paris: Félix
Alcan. (Bibliothèque Scientifique Internationale.) Pp. 315.

Demoor, Jean, Massart, Jean, and Vandervelde, Emile. Evolution by
Atrophy. New York: D. Appleton and Company. (International Scientific
Series.) Pp. 322. $1.50.

Fiske, John. A Century of Science, and other Essays. Boston and New
York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Pp. 477. $2.

Germania. A Monthly Magazine for the Study of the German Language and
Literature. A. W. Spanhoofd and P. E. Kunzer, editors. Boston: New
England College of Languages. Pp. 27. 15 cents. $1 a year.

Gilman, Nicholas Paine. A Dividend to Labor. A Study of Employers’
Welfare Institutions. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Pp.
400. $1.50.

Hill, Robert T. The Geology and Physical Geography of Jamaica. A Study
of a Type of Antillean Development. With an Appendix on Corals by T.
W. Vaughan. Cambridge, Mass.: Museum of Comparative Zoölogy of Harvard
College. Pp. 250, with plates.

Holden, Edward S. The Family of the Sun. Conversations with a Child.
(Appletons’ Home-Reading Books.) New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp.
252. 50 cents.

Interstate Commerce Commission. Eleventh Annual Report on the
Statistics of Railways in the United States for the Year ending June
30, 1898. Washington. Pp. 692.

Jordan, David Starr. The Story of Knight and Barbara. Being a Series of
Stories Told to Children. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 265.
$1.50.

Jordan, David Starr, Stejneger, Leonhard, Lucas, F. A., and other
official associates. The Fur Seals and Fur-Seal Islands of the North
Pacific Ocean. Washington: Government Printing Office. Pp. 629.

MacCorkle, W. A. Some Phases of the Race Question. Cincinnati: The
Robert Clarke Company. Pp. 49.

MacGregor, Prof. J. G. On the Utility of Knowledge-making as a Means of
Liberal Training. Halifax, N. S. Pp. 24.

MacMillan, Conway. Minnesota Plant Life. St. Paul: State Botanical
Survey. Pp. 568.

Newman, George. Bacteria, especially as they are related to the Economy
of Nature, to Industrial Processes, and to the Public Health. New York:
G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Pp. 348.

Reprints. Chesmit, V. K. Preliminary Catalogue of Plants Poisonous to
Stock. Pp. 36.--Fernow, B. G. Forest Policies and Forest Management
in Germany and British India. Pp. 64; Forestry in the United States
Department of Agriculture. Pp. 44; Brief History of the Forestry
Movement in the United States. Pp. 44.--Gerhard, William Paul. The
Safety of Theatre Audiences and of the Stage Personnel against Danger
from Fire and Panic. Pp. 30.--Girsdansky, Max. Dust in the Etiology
of Tuberculosis. Pp. 10.--Hay, O. P. On Some Changes in the Names,
Generic and Specific, of Certain Fossil Fishes. Pp. 10; Two new
Species of Tortoises from the Tertiary of the United States. Pp.
24, with plates.--Howard, W. L. Physiologic Rhythms. The Practical
Value of their Recognition in the Treatment of Functional Neuroses.
Pp. 7.--Langmuir, A. C., and Baskerville, Charles. Index to the
Literature of Zirconium. (Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections.) Pp.
32.--Prosser, Charles S. Correlation of Carboniferous Rocks of Nebraska
with those of Kansas.--Roth, Filibert. Résumé of Investigations carried
on in the United States Division of Forestry, 1889 to 1898. Pp. 64.

Schimmell & Co. (Fritzsche Brothers.) Leipsic and New York. Semi-annual
Report, October, 1899. (Essential Oils, etc.) Pp. 75.

Steel Portland Cement. Chicago: Illinois Steel Company. Pp. 96.

Stewart, Sara Elizabeth, and Day, R. E. Two Prize Essays on Educational
Unification in the State of New York. Palmyra, N. Y.: The Unification
Prize Committee. Pp. 19.

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413. The Pearly Fresh-Water Mussels of the United States. By Charles
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Transcribers’ Notes


Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not
changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced
quotation marks retained.

Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.

Page 315: The illustration’s caption, describing line thickness, was
printed as actual lines, but has been changed to words by the
Transcriber.

Page 329: “_cito tuto_” may be two separate terms that should be
separated with a comma.

Page 339: “_cortége_” was printed with an acute accent.

Page 352: Unmatched right-parenthesis removed after “p. 429.”