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Title: The Progress of the Century
Author: Various
Language: English
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THE PROGRESS
OF THE
CENTURY
BY ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE; PROF. WILLIAM RAMSAY; PROF. WILLIAM MATTHEW
FLINDERS-PETRIE; SIR JOSEPH NORMAN LOCKYER; EDWARD CAIRD; WILLIAM
OSLER; W. W. KEEN; PROF. ELIHU THOMSON; PRESIDENT THOMAS CORWIN
MENDENHALL; SIR CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE; CAPTAIN ALFRED T. MAHAN;
ANDREW LANG; THOMAS C. CLARKE; CARDINAL JAMES GIBBONS; REV. ALEXANDER
V. G. ALLEN; PROF. RICHARD J. H. GOTTHEIL; PROF. GOLDWIN SMITH
[Illustration]
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1901
Copyright, 1901, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
Copyright, 1901, by THE SUN PRINTING AND PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION.
_All rights reserved._
CONTENTS
PAGE
EVOLUTION. BY ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE, LL.D., D.C.L., F.R.S 3
CHEMISTRY. BY PROF. WILLIAM RAMSAY, PH.D., F.R.S., F.C.S.,
OFFICER OF THE LEGION OF HONOR 33
ARCHÆOLOGY. BY PROF. WILLIAM MATTHEW FLINDERS-PETRIE, D.C.L.,
LL.D., EDWARDS PROFESSOR OF EGYPTOLOGY, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE,
LONDON 73
ASTRONOMY. BY SIR JOSEPH NORMAN LOCKYER, C.B., F.R.S.,
DIRECTOR OF SOLAR PHYSICS OBSERVATORY, SOUTH KENSINGTON 105
PHILOSOPHY. BY EDWARD CAIRD, LL.D., D.C.L., PROFESSOR OF
MORAL PHILOSOPHY, GLASGOW 145
MEDICINE. BY WILLIAM OSLER, LL.D., PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE AND
PHYSICIAN TO HOSPITAL, JOHNS HOPKINS MEDICAL SCHOOL 173
SURGERY. BY W. W. KEEN, M.D., LL.D., F.R.C.S. (HON.),
PROFESSOR OF THE PRINCIPLES OF SURGERY AND OF CLINICAL
SURGERY, JEFFERSON MEDICAL COLLEGE, PHILADELPHIA 217
ELECTRICITY. BY PROF. ELIHU THOMSON, A.M., PH.D., CHEVALIER
AND OFFICER OF THE LEGION OF HONOR 265
PHYSICS. BY PRESIDENT THOMAS CORWIN MENDENHALL, PH.D., D.SC.,
LL.D., MEMBER NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 303
WAR. BY THE RIGHT HON. SIR CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE, LL.M. 333
NAVAL SHIPS. BY CAPTAIN ALFRED T. MAHAN, LATE U.S.N., D.C.L.,
LL.D. 355
LITERATURE. BY ANDREW LANG, HON. FELLOW MERTON COLLEGE,
OXFORD 389
ENGINEERING. BY THOMAS C. CLARKE. PAST PRESIDENT OF THE
AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CIVIL ENGINEERS 421
RELIGION:
CATHOLICISM. BY CARDINAL JAMES GIBBONS 455
PROTESTANTISM. BY REV. ALEXANDER V. G. ALLEN, PROFESSOR OF
CHURCH HISTORY IN THE EPISCOPAL THEOLOGICAL SCHOOL AT
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. 477
THE JEWS AND JUDAISM. BY PROFESSOR RICHARD J. H. GOTTHEIL 498
FREE-THOUGHT. BY PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH 539
EVOLUTION
Among the great and fertile scientific conceptions which have either
originated or become firmly established during the nineteenth century,
the theory of evolution, if not the greatest of them all, will
certainly take its place in the front rank. As a partial explanation
(for no complete explanation is possible to finite intelligence) of the
phenomena of nature, it illuminates every department of science, from
the study of the most remote cosmic phenomena accessible to us to that
of the minutest organisms revealed by the most powerful microscopes;
while upon the great problem of the mode of origin of the various
forms of life—long considered insoluble—it throws so clear a light
that to many biologists it seems to afford as complete a solution, in
principle, as we can expect to reach.
THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF EVOLUTION
So many of the objections which are still made to the theory of
evolution, and especially to that branch of it which deals with living
organisms, rest upon a misconception of what it professes to explain,
and even of what any theory can possibly explain, that a few words on
its nature and limits seem to be necessary.
Evolution, as a general principle, implies that all things in the
universe, as we see them, have arisen from other things which
preceded them by a process of modification, under the action of those
all-pervading but mysterious agencies known to us as “natural forces,”
or, more generally, “the laws of nature.” More particularly the term
evolution implies that the process is an “unrolling,” or “unfolding,”
derived probably from the way in which leaves and flowers are usually
rolled up or crumpled up in the bud and grow into their perfect form
by unrolling or unfolding. Insects in the pupa and vertebrates in the
embryo exhibit a somewhat similar condition of folding, and the word
is therefore very applicable to an extensive range of phenomena; but
it must not be taken as universally applicable, since in the material
world there are other modes of orderly change under natural laws to
which the terms development or evolution are equally applicable. The
“continuity” of physical phenomena, as illustrated by the late Sir
William Grove in 1866, has the same general meaning, but evolution
implies more than mere continuity or succession—something like growth
or definite change from form to form under the action of unchangeable
laws.
The point to be especially noted here is, that evolution, even if it
is essentially a true and complete theory of the universe, can only
explain the existing conditions of nature by showing that it has been
derived from some pre-existing condition through the action of known
forces and laws. It may also show the high probability of a similar
derivation from a still earlier condition; but the further back we
go the more uncertain must be our conclusions, while we can never
make any real approach to the absolute beginnings of things. Herbert
Spencer, and many other thinkers before him, have shown that if we
try to realize the absolute nature of the simplest phenomena, we are
inevitably landed either in a contradiction or in some unthinkable
proposition. Thus, suppose we ask, Is matter infinitely divisible, or
is it not? If we say it is, we cannot think it out, since all infinity,
however it may be stated in words, is really unthinkable.
If we say there is a limit—the ultimate atom—then, as all size is
comparative, we can imagine a being to whom this atom seems as large
as an apple or even a house does to us; and we then find it quite
unthinkable that this mass of matter should be in its nature absolutely
indivisible even by an infinite force. It follows that all explanations
of phenomena can only be partial explanations. They can inform us of
the last change or the last series of changes which brought about the
actual conditions now existing, and they can often enable us to predict
future changes to a limited extent; but both the infinite past and the
remote future are alike beyond our powers. Yet the explanations that
the theory of evolution gives us are none the less real and none the
less important, especially when we compare its teachings with the wild
guesses or the total ignorance of the thinkers of earlier ages.
THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF THE IDEA OF EVOLUTION
If we trace, however briefly, the gradual development of knowledge and
speculation on this subject, we shall perhaps appreciate more fully the
advance we have really made during the present century.
The first speculations on the nature and source of the phenomena of the
universe, of which we have any knowledge, are those of the early Greek
philosophers, such as Thales, Anaximander, Anaxagoras, and Empedocles;
but as the more important of their teachings are embodied, with some
approach to system and with much acuteness of reasoning, in the great
poem of the Latin author Lucretius, “On the Nature of Things,” it will
be sufficient to give a sketch of his main conclusions, making use
of the excellent prose translation by Mr. H. A. J. Munro, of Trinity
College, Cambridge.
Lucretius had a very clear idea of the indestructibility of matter.
He argues that things cannot have come out of nothing, and he says:
“A thing never returns to nothing, but all things, after disruption,
go back into the first bodies of matter.” He then argues that, as
the actual processes of growth, decay, and other natural changes are
imperceptible to us, therefore “Nature works by unseen bodies.” He
justly claims great importance for the demonstration of the fact that
in all matter whatever, however solid and hard it may be, there are
vacancies, or, as he expresses it, “Mixed up in all things there is
void or empty space.” He thus anticipated the modern doctrine that the
molecules of matter do not come into actual contact. He then defines
atoms thus: “First bodies are solid and without void”; and as nothing
can be produced from nothing, he concludes that these first bodies
(atoms or molecules) must be everlasting, and that they supply matter
for the reproduction of all things.
He then goes on to prove that these “first beginnings are of solid
singleness, not formed of parts, but strong in everlasting singleness.”
He further proves that these “first beginnings” (atoms) cannot be
infinitely small, and also that the universe cannot be limited—that
it is infinite. He thus anticipated the main ideas as to atoms and the
universe which have been held by most materialistic thinkers down to
our own times.
Lucretius was an absolute materialist, for though he did not deny the
existence of the gods he refused them any share in the construction of
the universe, which, he again and again urges, arose by chance, after
infinite time, by the random motions and collisions and entanglements
of the infinity of atoms. He assumes some forces analogous to
gravitation and the molecular motions of gases in the following
passage: “For the first beginnings of things move first of themselves;
next these bodies which form a small aggregate and come nearest, so
to say, to the powers of the first beginnings are impelled and set in
movement by the unseen strokes of these first bodies, and they next in
turn stir up other bodies which are a little larger.”
He also anticipated Galileo as to the equal speed of all falling bodies
when not checked by the air in the following precise statement: “For
whenever bodies fall through water and thin air they must quicken their
descents in proportion to their weights, because the body of water and
subtle nature of air cannot retard everything to an equal degree; on
the other hand, empty void cannot offer resistance to anything in any
direction at any time, but must continually give way; and for this
reason all things must be moved and borne along with equal velocity,
though of unequal weights, through the unresisting void.”
This is a wonderfully accurate general statement of the equal rate
of motion of all kinds of matter under the same forces; and when we
consider that there is no indication of any experimental basis for this
conclusion, and that nothing equivalent to our sciences of physics or
chemistry existed, we are amazed at the general correctness of many
of his views, derived solely by a process of reasoning from the most
obvious phenomena of nature. He argues that, given infinite matter and
space and inherent motion, “things must go on and be completed,” and
his general conclusion is thus expressed: “If you will apprehend and
keep in mind these things, nature, free at once and rid of her haughty
lords, is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself without the
meddling of the gods.”
It is when he attempts to deal with the origin of living organisms
that the absence of all knowledge of chemistry, physiology, and
histology renders his task impossible and leads him into what seem to
us the wildest absurdities. He has an elaborate but very unconvincing
argument that sensation can arise out of atoms which have no sensation;
and, taking the appearance of worms, etc., in the earth and in putrid
matter as a proof that they are still actually produced _de novo_ in
it, he argues that at some remote epoch the now worn-out earth was more
fertile, and produced in like manner all kinds of animals. The first
human infants he supposes to have been formed at some very remote time
in the manner following: “For much heat and moisture would then abound
in the fields; and therefore wherever a suitable spot offered wombs
would grow, attached to the earth by roots; and when the warmth of the
infants, flying the wet and craving the air, had opened these in the
fulness of time, nature would turn to that spot the pores of the earth
and constrain it to yield from its opened veins a liquid most like to
milk. To the children the earth would furnish food, the heat raiment,
the grass a bed rich in abundance of soft down.... Wherefore, again and
again I say, the earth, with good title, has gotten and keeps the name
of mother, since she of herself gave birth to mankind, and at a time
nearly fixed shed forth every beast that ranges wildly over the great
mountains, and at the same time the fowls of the air with all their
varied shapes.”
The fact that this mode of origin commended itself to one of the
brightest intellects of the first century B. C., enlightened by the
best thought of the Grecian philosophers, may enable us the better to
appreciate the immense advance made by modern evolutionists.
THE FIRST REAL STEPS TOWARDS EVOLUTION
We have now a great blank of fifteen centuries—the dark ages of human
progress—after which the era of observation and experiment began, and
for the first time men really set themselves to study nature, thus
laying the foundation for all the great theoretical advances of our
time. As leading to the next great step in theories of evolution, we
must note the life-long observations by Tycho Brahe of the apparent
motions of the planets; the grand discovery of Kepler that all these
apparently erratic motions were due to their revolution round the sun
in elliptic orbits, with a fixed relation between their distance from
the sun and their periods of revolution; and Newton’s epoch-making
theory of universal gravitation by which all these facts and many
others since discovered were harmonized and explained.
But all this implied no law of development, and it was long thought
that the solar system was fixed and unchangeable—that some altogether
unknown or miraculous agency must have set it going, and that it had in
itself no principle of change or decay, but might continue as it now is
to all eternity. It was at the very end of the eighteenth century that
Laplace announced his “Nebular Hypothesis,” the first attempt ever made
to explain the origin of the solar system under the influence of the
known laws of motion, gravitation, and heat, acting upon an altogether
different antecedent condition of things—a true process of evolution.
Laplace supposed that the whole matter of the solar system was once in
a condition of vapor, and that it formed an enormous nebulous mass many
times larger than the then known dimensions of the planetary sphere.
He showed how, under the influence of gravitation, this nebula would
condense, and that such irregularities of motion and density as would
be sure to exist would lead to rotation of the mass. Under the law of
gravitation this would lead to outer rings being left behind by the
contraction of the central mass, which rings would at a later period
become drawn together at some point of initial greater density and
thus form planets. The whole process is admitted to be mathematically
demonstrable, given the initial conditions; but recent extensions
of our knowledge of the interplanetary and interstellar spaces have
shown that the supposed void is really full of invisible solid matter,
ranging from the bulk of the smaller planets down to the finest dust,
and it is very difficult to imagine any possible causes which would
keep all the solid matter of the system in a state of vapor, when
subject, on the confines of the mass, to the cold of interstellar
space. The antecedent condition of our system is now thought to have
been either wholly or partially meteoritic, but in either case we have
a genuine theory of its evolution which has now been so extended as
to include the appearance of comets and meteors, of nebulæ, and star
clusters, of temporary, periodic, and colored stars, and many other
phenomena of the stellar universe. It is no objection to these grand
theories to urge that they do not explain the origin of the matter of
the universe, either what it is or how it came to be where we now find
it. We can only take one step at a time, and even if in these greater
problems any further advance should be as yet denied us, it is still
a great thing to have been able to take even one secure step into the
vast and mysterious depths of the interstellar spaces.
EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH’S CRUST
Although Pythagoras (500 B. C.) believed that sea and land must often
have changed places, and a few other observers at different epochs came
to the same conclusion, yet, till quite recent times, the earth was
generally supposed to have been always very much as it is now; people
spoke of “the eternal hills”; and the great mountain ranges, the mighty
ravines and precipices, as well as the deep seas and oceans, were
believed to be the direct work of the Creator.
It was only in the latter half of the eighteenth century that a few
observers began to see the importance of studying the nature of the
earth’s crust, so far as it could be reached in ravines, quarries, and
mines; and one of the most earnest of these students, Dr. Hutton, of
Edinburgh, after more than thirty years of travel and study, published
his great work, _The Theory of the Earth_, which must be considered to
be the starting-point of modern geology. He maintained that it was only
by observing causes now in action that we can explain the phenomena
presented by the stratified and igneous rocks; he showed that the
former must have been laid down by water, and that the larger part of
them, containing as they do marine shells and other fossils, must have
been deposited on the sea-bottom. He showed how rain and rivers, frost
and snow, wind and heat disintegrated the hardest rocks and would in
time excavate the deepest valleys; while earthquakes, however small
an elevation any one of them might produce, would in time raise the
sea-bottom sufficiently high to form, when denuded, mountain ranges,
plains, and valleys like those we now see everywhere upon the earth’s
surface. He also showed that the most ancient stratified rocks, those
that lie at the very base of the series, presented every indication of
having been formed in exactly the same way as the most recent ones.
Hence he stated a conclusion which excited a storm of opposition, in
these words: “In the economy of the world I can find no traces of a
beginning, no prospect of an end.” This was thought to imply a denial
of creation, and was quite sufficient at that period to prevent the
work of any man of science from being judged impartially.
But although Playfair and a few others upheld Hutton’s views, they
were too novel to receive much support by his contemporaries, and this
was especially the case as regards the slow and continuous action
of existing causes being sufficient to account for all the known
phenomena presented by the crust of the earth. Hence the belief in
catastrophes and cataclysms—in great convulsions tearing mountains
asunder, and vast floods sweeping over whole continents—continued to
prevail, till finally banished by the genius and perseverance of one
man, Sir Charles Lyell. His _Principles of Geology_ was first published
in 1830, and successive editions, revised and often greatly extended,
continued to appear till the author’s death, forty-five years later. As
this work affords a fine example of the application of the principles
of evolution to the later phases of the earth’s history, and as it not
only revolutionized scientific opinion in its own domain, but prepared
the way for the acceptance of the still more novel and startling
application of the same principles to the entire organic world, it
will be necessary to show what opinions prevailed at the time it first
appeared in order that we may understand how great was the change it
effected.
In the earlier years of the nineteenth century the standard geological
work, both in Great Britain and on the Continent, was Cuvier’s _Essay
on the Theory of the Earth_. In 1827 a fifth edition of the English
translation appeared, and there was a German translation so late as
1830—sufficient proofs of its wide popularity. Yet this work abounds
in statements which are positively ludicrous to any one conversant
with modern geology. It never appeals to known causes, but again and
again assumes forces to be at work for which no evidence is adduced and
which are totally at variance with what we see in the world to-day. A
few examples justifying these statements must be here given. Cuvier
shows that he was acquainted with the theory of modern causes, but he
altogether rejects it, saying that “the march of nature is changed,
and none of the agents she now employs would have been sufficient
for the production of her ancient works.” He adduces “the primitive
mountains” whose “sharp and bristling ridges and peaks are indications
of the violent manner in which they have been elevated.” He allows
that atmospheric agencies may form sea-cliffs, alluvial deposits, and
taluses of loose matter at the foot of the precipices, but he adds:
“These are but limited effects to which vegetation in general puts
a stop, and which, besides, presuppose the existence of mountains,
valleys, and plains—in short, all the inequalities of the globe—and
which, therefore, cannot have given rise to those inequalities.” He
contrasts the calm and peaceful aspect of the surface of the earth
with the appearances discovered when we examine its interior. Here, in
the raised beds of shells, the fractured rocks, the inclined or even
vertical stratification, he finds abundant proofs “that the surface of
the globe has been broken up by revolutions and catastrophes.”
He also refers to the numerous large blocks of the primitive rocks
scattered over the surface of secondary formations, and separated by
deep valleys or even by arms of the sea from the peaks or ridges from
which they must have been derived, as further proofs of catastrophes;
for, it is argued, they must have been either ejected by volcanic
eruptions or carried by waters, which, in either case, “must have
exceeded in violence anything we can imagine at the present day,” and
he therefore concludes that “it is in vain we search among the powers
which now act upon the surface of the earth for causes sufficient to
produce the revolutions and catastrophes, the traces of which are
exhibited in its crust.” He is quite confident that all these changes
go on rapidly, periods of catastrophe alternating with periods of
repose. The present surface of the earth he holds to be quite recent,
and he maintains “that, if anything in geology be established, it
is that the surface of our globe has undergone a great and sudden
revolution, the date of which cannot be referred to a much earlier
period than five or six thousand years ago; that this revolution
overwhelmed and caused to disappear the countries which were previously
inhabited by man, and the species of animals now best known; that, on
the other hand, it laid dry the bottom of the last sea, and formed
of it the countries which are at the present day inhabited.” And he
further declares that “this event has been sudden, instantaneous,
without any gradation; and what is so clearly demonstrated with respect
to this last catastrophe is not less so with reference to those which
preceded it.”
The method followed by Lyell was the very reverse of that of Cuvier.
Instead of assuming hastily that modern causes were totally inadequate,
and appealing constantly to purely imaginary and often inconceivable
catastrophes, Lyell investigated these causes with painstaking
accuracy, applying the tests of survey and time measurement, so as in
many cases to prove that, given moderately long periods of time—not
a few thousands only, but hundreds of thousands of years—they were
fully adequate to explain the phenomena. He also showed that the
imaginary causes of Cuvier would not explain the facts, for that
everywhere in the crust of the earth we found conclusive proofs of very
slow continuous changes exactly analogous to what now occur, never
of great convulsions, except quite locally, as we have them now. He
showed that modern volcanoes had poured out vast masses of melted rock
during a single eruption, covering areas as extensive as those which
any ancient volcano could be proved to have ejected in an equally
short period; that strata were now in process of formation comparable
in extent and thickness with any ancient strata; that organic remains
are being preserved in them just as in the older rocks; that the land
is almost everywhere rising or sinking as of old; that valleys are
being excavated and plateaus or mountains upheaved; that earthquake
shocks are producing faults beneath the surface; that vegetation is
still preparing future coal beds; that limestones, clays, sandstones,
metamorphic and igneous rocks are all still being formed; and that,
given time, and the intermittent or continuous action of the causes we
can now trace in operation, and all the varied features of the earth’s
surface, as well as all the contortions and fractures which we discover
in its crust, and every other phenomenon supposed to necessitate
catastrophes and cataclysms will be again produced.
In the massive volumes of the later editions of the _Principles of
Geology_ all these points are discussed and illustrated with such a
wealth of facts and such cogent yet cautious reasoning as have carried
conviction to all modern students. It affords us perhaps the very best
proof yet given of evolution in one department of the universe—that of
the surface and the crust of the earth we inhabit. Not only have all
the chief modifications during an almost unimaginable period of time
been clearly depicted, but they have in almost every case been shown to
be the inevitable results of real and comparatively well-known causes,
such as we now see at work around us.
The grand generalizations of Lyell have been strengthened since his
death by more complete investigations of certain phenomena and their
causes than were possible in his day; while the only objections to them
seem to be founded, to some extent, upon a misconception. He has been
termed a “Uniformitarian,” and it is alleged that it is unphilosophical
to take the limited range of causes we now see in action, as a measure
of those which have acted during all past geological time. But neither
Lyell nor his followers make any such assumption. They merely say, we
do not find any proof of greater or more violent causes in action in
past times, and we do find many indications that the great natural
forces then in action—seas and rivers, sun and cloud, rain and
hail, frost and snow, as well as the very texture and constituents
of the older rocks, and the mode in which the organisms of each age
are preserved in them, must have been in their general nature and
magnitude very much as they are now. Other objections, such as that
the internal forces were greater when the earth was hotter, and that
tidal effects must have been more powerful when the moon was nearer
the earth, are altogether beside the question until we can obtain
more definite measures of past time than we now possess in reference
to both geological and cosmical phenomena. It may well be that the
physical changes above referred to have been so slow that they would
have produced no perceptibly increased effect at the epoch of the
early stratified rocks. Lyell’s doctrine is simply that of real
against imaginary causes, and he only denies catastrophes and more
violent agencies in early times, because there is no clear evidence
of their actual existence, and also because known causes are quite
competent to explain all geological phenomena. It must be remembered,
too, that uniformitarians have never limited the natural forces of
past geological periods to the precise limits of which we have had
experience during the historical period. What they maintain is, that
forces of the same _nature_ and of the same _order of magnitude_ are
adequate to have brought about the evolution of the crust of the earth
as we now find it.
ORGANIC EVOLUTION, ITS LAWS AND CAUSES
We now come to that branch of the subject which is the most important
and distinctive of our age, and which, in popular estimation, alone
constitutes evolution—the mode of origin of the innumerable species of
animal and plant life which now exist or have ever existed upon the
earth.
The origin of the different forms of life has till quite recent times
been looked upon as an almost insoluble problem, although a few
advanced thinkers, even in the eighteenth century, perceived that it
was probably the result of some natural process of modification or
evolution; but no force or law had been set forth and established
in any way adequate to produce it until the publication of Darwin’s
_Origin of Species_, in 1859. In the later editions of that work,
Darwin has given a historical sketch of the progress of opinion on the
subject. I shall, therefore, now only notice a few great writers which
he has not referred to.
We have seen what an impossible and even ludicrous explanation had
to be given by Lucretius; and from his day down to the middle of the
eighteenth century no advance had been made. Either the problem was
not referred to at all, or the theological doctrine of a special
creation was held to be the only possible one. But in the middle of
the eighteenth century the great French naturalist, Buffon, published
his very important work, _Histoire Naturelle_, in fifteen volumes
(1749–1767), in which, besides describing the characters and habits
of all the animals then known, he introduced much philosophical and
speculative thought, which would probably have been carried much
further had he not felt obliged to conform to the religious prejudices
of the age. We are indebted to Mr. Samuel Butler for having brought
together all the important passages of Buffon’s voluminous and now
little-read works bearing upon the question of evolution, and it is
from his volume that I quote.
Buffon lays stress on the great resemblance of all mammalia in internal
structure, showing that the most unlike creatures may be really alike
structurally. He says: “The horse, for example—what can at first
sight seem more unlike mankind? Yet when we compare man and horse,
point by point and detail by detail, our wonder is excited rather by
the resemblances than by the differences between them.” He then shows
that all the parts of the skeleton agree, and that it is only in
proportions, the increase of some bones and the suppression of others,
that they differ, adding: “If we regard the matter thus, not only the
ass and the horse, but even man himself, the apes, etc., might be
regarded as forming members of one and the same family.” Then, after a
few more illustrations, he remarks: “If we once admit that there are
families of plants and animals, so that the ass may be of the family
of the horse, and that the one may only differ from the other by
degeneration from a common ancestor, we might be driven to admit that
the ape is of the family of man, that he is but a degenerate man, and
that he and man have had a common ancestor.... If it were once shown
that we had right grounds for establishing these families, if the point
were once gained that among plants and animals there have been even a
single species which had been produced in the course of direct descent
from another species, then there is no further limit to be set to the
power of nature, and we should not be wrong in supposing that with
sufficient time she could have evolved all other organized forms from
one primordial type.”
This indicates clearly enough his own opinion, but to save himself from
the ecclesiastical authorities he at once adds this saving clause: “But
no! It is certain, from revelation, that all animals have alike been
favored with the grace of an act of direct creation, and that the first
pair of every species issued full formed from the hands of the Creator.”
Such examples of disarming religious prejudice are frequent, but he
continually recurs to statements as to mutability which neutralize
them. Here, for example, is a broad claim for nature as opposed to
creation. He has been showing how variable are many animals, and how
changes of food, climate, and general surroundings influence both their
forms and their habits; and then he exclaims:
“What cannot nature effect with such means at her disposal? She can do
all except either create matter or destroy it. These two extremes of
power the Deity has reserved for Himself only; creation and destruction
are the action of His omnipotence. To alter and undo, to develop and
renew—these are powers which He has handed over to the charge of
nature.”
Here we have a claim for the power of nature in the modification of
species which fully comes up to the requirements of the most advanced
evolutionist. It is remarkable, too, how clearly he perceived the
great factors so important for the evolution of organisms, rapid
multiplication, great variability, and the struggle for existence.
Thus he remarks: “It may be said that the movement of nature turns
upon two immovable pivots—one, the illimitable fecundity which she
has given to all species; the other, the innumerable difficulties
which reduce the results of that fecundity and leave throughout time
nearly the same quantity of individuals in every species.” Here the
term “difficulties” corresponds to the “positive checks” of Malthus,
and to the “struggle for existence” of Darwin; and he again and again
refers to variability—as when he says: “Hence, when by some chance,
common enough with nature, a variation or special feature makes its
appearance, man has tried to perpetuate it by uniting together the
individuals in which it has appeared.”
As Buffon thus clearly understood artificial selection, thoroughly
appreciated the rapid increase of all organisms, and equally well saw
that their inordinate increase was wholly neutralized through such
destructive agencies as hunger, disease, and enemies, and as, at the
same time, he had such unbounded faith in the power of nature to modify
animal and vegetable forms, we feel assured that this great writer and
original thinker only needed freedom to pursue this train of thought a
little further and he would certainly have anticipated Darwin’s great
discovery of natural selection by a whole century. Even as it is we
must class him as one of the great pioneers of organic evolution.
The next distinct step towards a theory of organic evolution was made
by the poet Goethe at the very end of the eighteenth century, in his
views of the metamorphosis of plants. He pointed out the successive
modifications of the leaf which produced all the other essential parts
of the higher plants—the simple cotyledons or seed leaves became
modified into the variously formed leaves of the fully grown plants;
these again were successively modified into the calyx, corolla,
stamens, and ovary of the flower. He supposed this to be due to the
increased refinement of the sap under the influence of light and air,
and to indicate the steps by which the various parts of the flower
had been developed. It was, therefore, a theory of evolution; but it
was very unsatisfactory, inasmuch as it in no way accounted for the
wonderful variety of the floral organs, or indicated any purpose served
by the most prominent and conspicuous part of the flower, the highly
colored and often strangely formed corolla. It was also erroneous in
supposing that the corolla was a modified calyx, whereas it is now
known to be a modification of the stamens.
Next came the great work of Lamarck in the first decade of the
nineteenth century, in which he proposed a general system of
evolution of the whole animal world. Hence he may be termed the
first systematic evolutionist. His system has been rather fully
described by Lyell, who, in his _Principles of Geology_, devotes
a whole chapter to a summary of his doctrines; while Mr. Butler
gives copious quotations in three chapters of his _Evolution Old and
New_; and any one who is not acquainted with the original work of
Lamarck should read these two authors in order to understand how wide
was his knowledge, how ingenious his explanations, and in how many
important points he anticipated the views both of Lyell and Darwin.
But he was half a century in advance of his age, and his only alleged
causes of modification—changed conditions, use and disuse, habit
and effort—were wholly insufficient to account for the vast range
of the phenomena presented by the innumerable minute adaptations of
living organisms to their conditions of life. He even imputed all the
modifications of domestic animals to the changed conditions of food and
habits to which they have been subjected by man, making no reference to
the use of selection by breeders, in this respect falling short of his
great predecessor, Buffon.
The general laws which Lamarck deduces from his elaborate study of
nature are these:
“Firstly. That in every animal which has not passed its limit of
development, the more frequent and sustained employment of any organ
develops and aggrandizes it, giving it a power proportionate to the
duration of its employment, while the same organ, in default of
constant use, becomes insensibly weakened and deteriorated, decreasing
imperceptibly in power until it finally disappears.
“Secondly. That these gains or losses of organic development, due to
use or disuse, are transmitted to offspring, provided they have been
common to both sexes, or to the animals from which the offspring have
descended.”
The whole force of this argument depends upon the second clause—the
inheritance of those individual modifications due to use and disuse.
But no direct evidence of this has ever been found, while there is
a good deal of evidence showing that it does not occur. Again, there
are many structures which cannot have been produced by use, such, for
example, as the feathers of the peacock’s train, the poison in the
serpent’s fangs, the hard shells of nuts, the prickly covering of many
fruits, the varied armor of the turtle, porcupine, crocodile, and many
others. For these reasons Lamarck’s views gained few converts; and
although some of his arguments have been upheld in recent years, the
fatal objections to his general principle as a means of explaining the
evolution of organic forms has never been overcome.
Between the periods of Lamarck and Darwin many advances were made
which clearly pointed to a general law of evolution in nature. Such
were Sir William Grove’s lectures on the “Correlation of the Physical
Forces,” in 1842; Helmholtz on the “Conservation of Energy,” in 1847;
and Herbert Spencer’s essay on “The Development Hypothesis,” in 1852.
This latter work was a complete and almost unanswerable argument for a
natural process of continuous evolution of the whole visible universe,
including organic nature, man, and social phenomena. It is further
extended in the later editions of the author’s _First Principles_,
which, as a coherent exposition of philosophy, co-ordinating and
explaining all human knowledge of the universe into one great system of
evolution everywhere conforming to the same general principles, must
be held to be one of the greatest intellectual achievements of the
nineteenth century. It left, however, the exact method of evolution
of organisms untouched, and thus failed to account for those complex
adaptations and appearances of design in the various species of animals
and plants which have always been the stronghold of those who advocated
special creation. This difficulty was met by Darwin’s theory of _The
Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection_, published in 1859,
and the series of works that succeeded it; and to a brief sketch of
this theory the remainder of our space must be devoted.
THE THEORY OF “NATURAL SELECTION”
Although, as we have seen, a succession of great writers and thinkers
had for more than half a century shown the necessity for some process
of evolution as the only rational or intelligible mode of origin
of existing species of animals and plants, as well as of the whole
physical universe, yet these views were by no means generally accepted
by the educated classes, while few bodies of students were less
influenced by them than zoologists and botanists, generally known as
naturalists.
Now, Darwin wrote especially for these classes, and no one knew better
than he did their great prejudice on this matter. Not only had such
men as Sir Charles Lyell and Sir John Herschel expressed themselves
strongly against all theories of the transmutation of species, but
the universal contempt and indignation of naturalists as well as
theologians against _The Vestiges of Creation_, published anonymously
a few years earlier, and giving a most temperate and even religious
exposition of the general arguments for the universality of evolution,
showed what any one might expect who advocated and attempted to
demonstrate a similar theory. This accounts for Darwin writing to Sir
Joseph Hooker, in 1844, of his being “almost convinced that species are
not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable,” and again, in 1845, to
the Rev. L. Blomefield, that he now saw the way in which new varieties
become exquisitely adapted to the external conditions of life and to
other surrounding beings, and he adds: “I am a bold man to lay myself
open to being thought a complete fool, and a most deliberate one.”
It is only by a consideration of the frame of mind of even advanced
thinkers at the time Darwin was preparing his work, and remembering
how small was the effect which had been produced by Buffon, Goethe,
Lamarck, the author of _Vestiges of Creation_, and the earlier writings
of Herbert Spencer, that we can adequately realize the marvellous work
that he accomplished. Let us now briefly consider the essential nature
of this new theory, which in a few brief years became the established
belief of the great majority of the students of nature, and which also
gave a new interest in nature to the whole thinking world.
The theory of natural selection is founded upon a few groups of
thoroughly ascertained and universally admitted facts, with the direct
and necessary results of those facts.
The first group of facts consists of the great powers of increase
of all organisms and the circumstance that, notwithstanding this
great yearly increase, the actual population of each species remains
stationary, there being no permanent increase. Now, these two facts
were recognized by Buffon, but though, of course, known to all
subsequent writers, were fully appreciated or thought out to their
logical results by none of them. Lamarck, so far as I can ascertain,
took no notice of them whatever. Darwin has given illustrations of
these facts in Chapter IV. of the _Origin of Species_, and I have added
others in the second chapter of my _Darwinism_. That the population
of each species remains stationary, with, of course, considerable
fluctuations, is both a matter of observation and of reasoning. The
powers of increase of all creatures are so great that if there is in
any country room and food for a larger number of any species they will
be produced in a year or two. It is impossible, therefore, to believe
that, in a state of nature, where all kinds of animals and plants have
lived together as they best could for thousands of years, there can be
any important difference in their numbers from year to year or from
century to century.
Now, it is as a consequence of these two indisputable facts that the
struggle for existence necessarily results. For if every year each pair
of animals or each plant produces only ten young animals or plants,
and this is very far below the average, and if the adult life of these
is taken at ten years, again below the average of the higher plants
and animals, then, unless some of the parents die, the whole of the
offspring must die off every year; or, in other words, only as many
young can survive as are necessary to replace the old ones that die.
Hence the deaths must always (on the average and in the long run) equal
the births. This terrible yearly destruction is an absolutely certain
fact, as well as an inevitable result of the two preceding facts, and
it is said to be due to the struggle for existence. This struggle
is manifold in its nature. Individuals of the same species struggle
together for food, for light, for moisture; they struggle also against
other species having the same wants; they struggle against every kind
of enemy, from parasitic worms and insects up to carnivorous animals;
and there is a continual struggle with the forces of nature—frosts,
rains, droughts, floods, and tempests.
These varied causes of destruction may be seen constantly at work
by any one who looks for them. They act from the moment of birth,
being more especially destructive to the young; and, as only one in
ten or fifty or a thousand (according to the rate of increase of
the particular species) can possibly come to the full breeding age,
we feel compelled to ask ourselves: What determines the nine or the
forty-nine or the nine hundred and ninety-nine, as the case may be,
which die, and the one which survives? Darwin calls this process of
extermination one of “natural selection”—that is, by this process
nature weeds out the weak, the unhealthy, the unadapted, the imperfect
in any way. Of course, what may be called chance or accident produces
many deaths of individuals otherwise well fitted to live, but if we
think of the process going on day by day and year by year till only
one in a hundred of those born in a given area are left alive, it is
impossible to suppose that the _one_ which has passed through all
the dangers and risks which have been fatal to, say, his ninety-nine
relations was not, in all the faculties and qualities essential to the
continuance of the race, decidedly better organized than the bulk of
those which succumbed. Herbert Spencer calls the process the “survival
of the fittest,” and though the term may not be strictly accurate in
the case of any one species in any one year, yet when we consider that
the struggle is going on _every_ year, during the whole duration of
each species, we cannot doubt that, on the whole, and in the long run,
those which survive are among the fittest. The struggle is so severe,
so incessant, that the smallest defect in any sense organ, any physical
weakness, any imperfection in constitution, will almost certainly, at
one time or another, be fatal.
This continual weeding out of the less fit, in every generation, and
with exceptional severity in recurring adverse seasons, will produce
two distinct effects, which require to be clearly distinguished. The
first is the preservation of each species in the highest state of
adaptation to the conditions of its existence; and, therefore, so
long as these conditions remained unchanged, the effect of natural
selection is to keep each well-adapted species also unchanged. The
second effect is produced whenever the conditions vary, when, taking
advantage of the variations continually occurring in all well-adapted
and therefore populous species, the same process will slowly but surely
bring about complete adaptation to the new conditions. And here another
fact—the normal variability of all populous or dominant species, which
is seldom realized except by those who have largely and minutely
compared the individuals of many species in a state of nature—comes
into play. There are some writers who admit all the preceding facts
and reasoning, so far as the action of natural selection in weeding
out the unfit and thus keeping every species in the highest state of
efficiency is concerned, but who deny that it can modify them in such a
way as to adapt them to new conditions, because they allege that “the
right variations will not always occur at the right time.” This seems
a strong and real objection to many of their readers, but to those
who have studied the variability of species in nature, it is a mere
verbal difficulty dependent on ignorance of the actual facts. A brief
statement of the facts must therefore be given.
Of late years, and chiefly since Darwin’s works were written, the
variability of animals and plants in a state of nature has been
carefully studied, by actual comparison and measurement of scores,
hundreds, and even thousands of individuals of many common, that is,
abundant and widely distributed species; and it is found that in almost
every case they vary greatly, and, what is still more important, that
every organ and every appendage varies independently and to a large
amount. Some of the best known of these facts of variation are adduced
in my _Darwinism_, and are illustrated by numerous diagrams, and much
more extensive series have since been examined, always with the same
general result. By large variability is meant a variation of from ten
to twenty-five per cent. on each side of the mean size, this amount
of variation occurring in at least five or ten per cent. of the whole
number of individuals, and in every organ or part as yet examined,
external or internal.
Now, as the weeding-out process is so severe, only from one in ten to
one in a hundred of those born surviving to produce young, the above
proportion of variations affords ample scope for the selection of
any variation needed in order to modify the species so as to bring it
into harmony with new or changing conditions. And this will be the
more easy and certain if we consider how slowly land-surfaces and
climates undergo permanent changes; and these are certainly the kind of
changes that initiate and compel alterations, first, perhaps, in the
distribution, and afterwards in the structure and habits of species.
It follows, therefore, as an absolutely necessary conclusion from the
facts, if natural selection can and does keep each continually varying
species in close adaptation to an unchanging environment, that it
preserves the fixity of its mean or average condition, and almost every
objector admits this. Then, given a slowly changing environment, the
same power must inevitably bring about whatever corresponding change is
needed for the well-being and permanent survival of the various species
which are subjected to those changed conditions.
I shall not add here a further consideration of the objections and
difficulties alleged by critics of the theory. All of these have,
I believe, been fully answered either by Darwin or myself, many of
the most recent having been discussed in review articles. Suffice
it to say here that this theory of natural selection—meaning the
elimination of the least fit, and therefore the ultimate “survival of
the fittest”—has furnished a rational and precise explanation of the
means of adaptation of all existing organisms to their conditions,
and therefore of their transformation from the series of distinct but
allied species which occupied the earth at some preceding epoch. In
this sense it has actually demonstrated the “origin of species,” and,
by carrying back this process step by step into earlier and earlier
geological times, we are able mentally to follow out the evolution of
all forms of life from one or a few primordial forms. Natural selection
has thus supplied that motive power of change and adaptation that was
wanting in all earlier attempts at explanation, and this has led to its
very general acceptance both by naturalists and by the great majority
of thinkers and men of science.
The brief sketch now given of the progress of human thought on the
questions of the fact and the mode of the evolution of the material
universe indicates how great has been the progress during the
nineteenth as compared with all preceding centuries.
Although the philosophical writers of classical times obtained a few
glimpses of the action of law in nature regulating its successive
changes, nothing satisfactory could be effected till the actual facts
had been better ascertained by the whole body of workers who, during
the last five centuries, have penetrated ever more and more deeply into
nature’s mysteries and laws. By their labors we became possessed of
such a body of carefully observed facts that, towards the end of the
eighteenth century, such thinkers as Laplace and Hutton were enabled
to give us the first rudiments of theories of evolution as applied to
the solar system and the earth’s crust, both of which have been greatly
developed and rendered more secure during the century just passed away.
In like manner Buffon and Goethe may be said to have started the idea
of organic evolution, more systematically treated a little later by
Lamarck, but still without any discovery of laws adequate to produce
the results we see everywhere in nature. The subject then languished,
till, after twenty years of observation and research, Charles Darwin
produced a work which at once satisfied many thinkers that the
long-desired clew had been discovered. Its acceptance by almost the
whole scientific world soon followed: it threw new light on almost
every branch of research, and it will probably take its place, in the
opinion of future generations, as the crowning achievement of the
nineteenth century.
ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE.
CHEMISTRY
The progress of the science of chemistry forms one phase of the
progress of human thought. While at first mankind was contented to
observe certain phenomena, and to utilize them for industrial purposes,
if they were found suitable, “philosophers,” as the thinking portion
of our race loved to call themselves, have always attempted to assign
some explanation for observed facts, and to group them into similars
and dissimilars. It was for long imagined, following the doctrines of
the Greeks and of their predecessors, that all matter consisted of four
elements or principles, names which survive to this day in popular
language. These were “fire,” “air,” “water,” and “earth.” It was not
until the seventeenth century that Boyle in his _Sceptical Chymist_
(1661) laid the foundations of the modern science, by pointing out
that it was impossible to explain the existence of the fairly numerous
chemical substances known in his day, or the changes which they can be
made to undergo, by means of the ancient Greek hypotheses regarding the
constitution of matter. He laid down the definition of the modern
meaning of the word “element”; he declined to accept the current view
that the properties of matter could be modified by its assimilating
the qualities of fire, air, earth, or water, and he defined an element
as the _constituent_ of a compound body. The first problem, then, to be
solved, was to determine which of the numerous forms of matter were
to be regarded as elementary, and which are compound, or composed of
two or more elements in a state of combination; and to produce such
compounds by causing the appropriate elements to unite with each other.
One of the first objects to excite curiosity and interest was the air
which surrounds us, and in which we live and move and have our being.
It was, however, endowed with a semi-spiritual and scarcely corporeal
nature in the ideas of our ancestors, for it does not affect the
senses of sight, smell, or taste, and though it can be felt, yet it
eludes our grasp. The word “gas,” moreover, was not invented until Van
Helmont devised it to designate various kinds of “airs” which he had
observed. The important part which gases play in the constitution of
many chemical compounds was accordingly overlooked; and, indeed, it
appeared to be almost as striking a feat of necromancy to produce a
quantity of a gas of great volume from a small pinch of solid powder
as for a “Jinn” of enormous stature but of delicate texture to issue
from a brass pot, as related in the _Arabian Nights Entertainments_.
Gradually, however, it came to be recognized, not merely that gases
have corporeal existence, but that they even possess weight. This,
though foreshadowed by Torricelli, Jean Rey, and others, was first
clearly proved by Black, professor of chemistry in Edinburgh, in 1752,
through his masterly researches, as carbonic acid.
The ignorance of the material nature of gases and of their weight
lies at the bottom of the “Phlogistic Theory,” a theory devised by
Stahl about the year 1690, to account for the phenomena of combustion
and respiration and the recovery or “reduction” of metals from their
“earths” by heating with charcoal or allied bodies. According to
this inverted theory, a substance capable of burning was imagined
to contain more or less phlogiston, a principle which it parted
with on burning, leaving an earth deprived of phlogiston, or
“dephlogisticated,” behind if a metal. This earth, when heated with
substances rich in phlogiston, such as coal, wood, flour, and similar
bodies, recovered the phlogiston, which it had lost on burning, and,
with the added phlogiston, its metallic character. Other substances,
such as phosphorus and sulphur, gave solids or acid liquids, to
which phlogiston was not so easy to add; but even they could be
rephlogisticated. On this hypothesis, it was the earths, and such acid
liquids as sulphuric or phosphoric acids, which were the elements; the
metals and sulphur and phosphorus were their compounds with phlogiston.
The discovery of oxygen by Priestley and by Scheele in 1774, and
the explanation of its functions by Lavoisier during the following
ten years, gave their true meaning to these phenomena. It was then
recognized that combustion was union with oxygen; that an “earth” or
“calx” was to be regarded as the compound of a metal with oxygen; that
when a metal becomes tarnished, and converted into such an earthy
powder, it is being oxidized; that this oxide, on ignition with
charcoal or carbon, or with compounds such as coal, flour, or wood,
of which carbon is a constituent, gives up its oxygen to the carbon,
forming an oxide of carbon, carbonic oxide on the one hand, or carbonic
“acid” on the other, while the metal is reproduced in its “reguline”
or metallic condition, and that the true elements are metals, carbon,
sulphur, phosphorus, and similar bodies, and not the products of their
oxidation.
The discovery that air is in the main a mixture of nitrogen, an inert
gas, and oxygen, an active one, together with a small proportion of
carbonic “acid” (or, as it is now termed, anhydride)—a discovery
perfected by Rutherford, Black, and Cavendish—and that water is a
compound with oxygen of hydrogen, previously known as inflammable air,
by Cavendish and by Watt, finally overthrew the theory of phlogiston;
but at the beginning of this century it still lingered on, and was
defended by Priestley until his death in 1804. Such, in brief, was
the condition of chemical thought in the year 1800. Scheele had died
in 1786, at the early age of forty-four; Lavoisier was one of the
victims of the French Revolution, having been guillotined in 1794;
Cavendish had ceased to work at chemical problems, and was devoting his
extraordinary abilities to physical problems of the highest importance,
while living the life of an eccentric recluse, and Priestley, driven
by religious persecution from England to the more tolerant shores of
America, was enjoying a peaceful old age, enlivened by occasional
incursions into the region of sectarian controversy.
The first striking discovery of our century was that of the compound
nature of the alkalies and of the alkaline earths. This discovery was
made by Humphry Davy. Born in Cornwall in 1778, he began the study of
chemistry, self-taught, in 1796; and in 1799 he became director of
the “Pneumatic Institution,” an undertaking founded by Dr. Beddoes,
at Bristol, for the purpose of experiments on the curative effects
of gases in general. Here he at once made his mark by the discovery
of the remarkable properties of “laughing gas,” or nitrous oxide. At
the same time he constructed a galvanic battery, and began to perform
experiments with it in attempting to decompose chemical compounds by
its means. In 1801 Davy was appointed professor of chemistry at the
Royal Institution, a society or club which had been founded a few
years previously by Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, for the purpose
of instructing and amusing its members with recent discoveries in
chemistry and natural philosophy. In 1807 Davy applied his galvanic
battery to the decomposition of damp caustic potash and soda, using
platinum poles. He was rewarded by seeing globules of metal, resembling
mercury in appearance, at the negative pole; and he subsequently proved
that these globules, when burned, reproduced the alkali from which
they had been derived. They also combined with “oxymuriatic acid,” as
chlorine (discovered by Scheele) was then termed, forming ordinary
salt, if sodium be employed, and the analogous salt, “muriate of
potash,” if the allied metal, potassium, were subjected to combustion.
By using mercury as the negative pole, and passing a current through a
strong solution of the chloride of calcium, strontium, or barium, Davy
succeeded in procuring mixtures with mercury or “amalgams” of their
metals, to which he gave the names calcium, strontium, and barium.
Distillation removed most of the mercury, and the metal was left
behind in a state of comparative purity. The alkali metals, potassium
and sodium, were found to attack glass, liberating “the basis of the
silex,” to which the name silicon has since been given.
Thus nearly the last of the “earths” had been decomposed. It was proved
that not merely were the “calces” of iron, copper, lead, and other
well-known metals compounds of the respective metals with oxygen, but
Davy showed that lime, and its allies, strontia and baryta, and even
silica or flint, were to be regarded as oxides of elements of metallic
appearance. To complete our review of this part of the subject,
suffice it to say that aluminum, a metal now produced on an industrial
scale, was prepared for the first time in 1827 by Wöhler, professor of
chemistry at Göttingen, by the action of potassium on its chloride,
and alumina, the earthy basis of clay, was shown to be the oxide of
the metal aluminum. Indeed, the preparation of this metal in quantity
is now carried out at Schoffhausen-on-the-Rhine and at the Falls of
Foyers, in Scotland, by electrolysis of the oxide dissolved in melted
cryolite, a mineral consisting of the fluorides of sodium and aluminum,
by a method differing only in scale from that by means of which Davy
isolated sodium and potassium in 1806.
To Davy, too, belongs the merit of having dethroned oxygen from its
central position among the elements. Lavoisier gave to this important
gas the name “oxygen,” because he imagined it to be the constituent
of all acids. He renamed the common compounds of oxygen in such a
manner that the term oxygen was not even represented in the name—only
inferred. Thus a “nitrate” is a compound of an oxide of nitrogen
and an oxide of a metal; a “sulphate,” of the oxide of a metal with
one of the oxides of sulphur, and so on. Davy, by discovering the
elementary nature of chlorine, showed, first, that it is not an
oxide of hydrochloric acid (or muriatic acid as it was then called);
and, second, that the latter acid is the compound of the element
chlorine with hydrogen. This he did by passing chlorine over white-hot
carbon—a substance eminently suited to deprive oxy-compounds of their
oxygen—and proving that no oxide of carbon is thereby produced; by
acting on certain chlorides, such as those of tin or phosphorus with
ammonia, and showing that no oxide of tin or phosphorus is formed; and,
lastly, by decomposing “muriatic acid gas” (gaseous hydrogen chloride)
with sodium, and showing that the only product besides common salt is
hydrogen. Instead, therefore, of the former theory that a chloride was
a compound of the unknown basis of oxymuriatic acid with oxygen and
the oxide of a metal, he introduced the simpler and correct view that
a chloride is merely a compound of the element chlorine with a metal.
In 1813 he established the similar nature of fluorine, pointing out
that on the analogy of the chlorides it was a fair deduction that the
fluorides are compounds of an undiscovered element, fluorine, with
metals; and that hydrofluoric acid is the true analogue of hydrochloric
acid. The truth of this forecast has been established of recent years
by Henri Moissan, who isolated gaseous fluorine by subjecting a mixture
of hydrofluoric acid and hydrogen potassium fluoride contained in a
platinum U tube to the action of a powerful electric current. He has
recently found that the tube may be equally well constructed of copper;
and this may soon lead to the industrial application of the process.
The difficulty of isolating fluorine is due to its extraordinary
chemical energy; for there are few substances, elementary or compound,
which resist the action of this pale yellow, suffocating gas. In 1811
iodine, separated by Courtois from the ashes of sea-plants, was shown
by Davy to be an element analogous to chlorine. Gay-Lussac subsequently
investigated it and prepared many of its compounds; and in 1826 the
last of these elements, bromine, was discovered in the mother-liquor
of sea-salt by Balard. The elements of this group have been termed
“halogens,” or “salt producers.”
While Davy was pouring his researches into the astonished ears of
the scientific and dilettante world, John Dalton, a Manchester
school-master, conceived a theory that has proved of the utmost service
to the science of chemistry, and which bids fair to outlast our day. It
had been noticed by Wenzel, by Richter, by Wollaston, and by Cavendish,
towards the end of the last century, that the same compounds contain
the same constituents in the same proportions, or, as the phrase runs,
“possess constant composition.” Wollaston, indeed, had gone one step
farther, and had shown that when the vegetable acid, oxalic acid, is
combined with potash, it forms two compounds, in one of which the acid
is contained in twice as great an amount relatively to the potash as
in the other. The names _monoxalate_ and _binoxalate_ of potash were
applied to these compounds, to indicate the respective proportions of
the ingredients. Dalton conceived the happy idea that by applying the
ancient Greek conception of atoms to such facts the relative weights
of the atoms could be determined. Illustrating his views with the two
compounds of carbon with hydrogen, marsh gas and olefiant gas, and with
the two acids of carbon, carbonic oxide, carbonic “acid,” he regarded
the former as a compound of one atom of carbon and one of hydrogen, and
the second as a compound of one atom of carbon and two of hydrogen, and
similarly for the two oxides of carbon. Knowing the relative weights
in which these elements enter into combination, we can deduce the
relative weights of the atoms. Placing the relative weight of an atom
of hydrogen equal to unity, we have:
Marsh Olefiant | Carbonic Carbonic
Gas Gas | Oxide Acid
Carbon 6 6 | Carbon 5 6
Hydrogen 1 2 | Oxygen 8 16
Thus the first compound, marsh gas, was regarded by Dalton as
composed of an atom of carbon in union with an atom of hydrogen; or,
to reproduce his symbols, as ⊜◉; while the second, olefiant gas, on
this hypothesis, was a compound of two atoms of hydrogen with one of
carbon, or ◉◍◉. Similarly the symbols ◍○, and ○◍○ were given to the two
compounds of carbon with oxygen. So water was assigned the symbol ◉○,
for Dalton imagined it to be a compound of one atom of hydrogen with
one of oxygen. Compounds containing only two atoms were termed by him
“binary”; those containing three, “ternary”; four, “quaternary,” and
so on. The weight of an atom of oxygen was eight times that of an atom
of hydrogen; while that of an atom of carbon was six times as great
as the unit. By assigning symbols to the elements, consisting of the
initial letters of their names, or of the first two letters, formulas
were developed, indicating the composition of the compound, the atomic
weights of the elements being assured. Thus, NaO signified a compound
of an atom of sodium (natrium), weighing twenty-three times as much as
a similar atom of hydrogen, with an atom of oxygen, possessing eight
times the weight of an atom of hydrogen. Therefore, thirty-one pounds
of soda should consist of twenty-three pounds of sodium in combination
with eight pounds of oxygen, for, according to Dalton, each smallest
particle of soda contains an atom of each element, and the proportion
is not changed, however many particles be considered.
It has been pointed out by Judge Stallo, of Philadelphia, in his
_Concepts of Physics_, that such a hypothesis as that of Dalton is
no explanation; that a fact of nature, as, for example, the fact of
simple and multiple proportions, is not _explained_ by being minified.
Allowing the general truth of this statement, it is, nevertheless,
undoubted that chemistry owes much to Dalton’s hypothesis—a lucky
guess at first, it represents one of the fundamental truths of nature,
although its form must be somewhat modified from that in which Dalton
conceived it. Dalton’s work was first expounded by Thomas Thomson,
professor at Glasgow, in his _System of Chemistry_, published in 1805;
and subsequently in Dalton’s own _New System of Chemical Philosophy_,
the three volumes of which were published in 1808, in 1810, and in 1827.
The determination of these “Constants of Nature” was at once followed
out by many chemists, Thomson among the first. But chief among the
chemists who have pursued this branch of work was Jacob Berzelius,
a Swede, who devoted his long life (1779–1848) to the manufacture
of compounds, and to the determination of their composition, or, as
it is still termed, the determination of the “atomic weights”—more
correctly, “equivalents”—of the elements of which they are composed.
It is to him that we owe most of our analytical methods, for, prior to
his time, there were few, if any, accurate analyses. Although Lavoisier
had devised a method for the analysis of compounds of carbon, viz.,
by burning the organic compounds in an atmosphere of oxygen contained
in a bell-jar over mercury, and measuring the volume of carbon dioxide
produced, as well as that of the residual oxygen, Berzelius achieved
the same results more accurately and more expeditiously by heating the
substance, mixed with chlorate of potassium and sodium chloride, and
then estimating the hydrogen as well as the carbon; this process was
afterwards perfected by Liebig. Berzelius, however, was able to show
that compounds of carbon, like those of other elements, were instances
of combination in constant and in multiple proportions.
In 1815 two papers were published in the _Annals of Philosophy_ by Dr.
Prout, which have had much influence on the progress of chemistry. They
dealt with the figures which were being obtained by Thomson, Berzelius,
and others, at that time supposed to represent the “atomic weights” of
the elements. Prout’s hypothesis, based on only a few numbers, was that
the atomic weights of all elements were multiples of that of hydrogen,
taken as unity. There was much dispute regarding this assertion at the
time, but as it was contradicted by Berzelius’s numbers, the balance
of opinion was against it. But about the year 1840 Dumas discovered an
error in the number (12.12) given by Berzelius as the atomic weight of
carbon; and with his collaborator, Stas, undertook the redetermination
of the atomic weights of the commoner elements—for example, carbon,
oxygen, chlorine, and calcium. This line of research was subsequently
pursued alone by Stas, whose name will always be remembered for the
precision and accuracy of his experiments. At first Dumas and Stas
inclined to the view that Prout’s hypothesis was a just one, but it
was completely disproved by Stas’s subsequent work, as well as by that
of numerous other observers. It is, nevertheless, curious that a much
larger proportion of the atomic weights approximate to whole numbers
than would be foretold by the doctrine of chances, and perhaps the last
has not been heard of Prout’s hypothesis, although in its original
crude form it is no longer worthy of credence.
One of the most noteworthy of the discoveries of the century was
made by Gay-Lussac (1778–1850) in the year 1808. In conjunction with
Alexander von Humboldt, Gay-Lussac had rediscovered about three years
before what had previously been established by Cavendish—namely,
that, as nearly as possible, two volumes of hydrogen combine with one
volume of oxygen to form water, the gases having been measured at the
same temperature and pressure. Humboldt suggested to Gay-Lussac that
it would be well to investigate whether similar simple relations exist
between the volumes of other gaseous substances when they combine with
each other. This turned out to be the case; it appeared that almost
exactly two volumes of carbonic oxide unite with one volume of oxygen
to form carbon dioxide; that equal volumes of chlorine and hydrogen
unite to form hydrochloric acid gas; that two volumes of ammonia
gas consist of three volumes of hydrogen in union with one volume
of nitrogen, and so on. From such facts, Gay-Lussac was led to make
the statement that: The weights of equal volumes of both simple and
compound gases, and therefore their densities, are proportional to
their empirically found combining weights, or to rational multiples
of the latter. Gay-Lussac recognized this discovery of his to be a
support for the atomic theory; but it did not accord with many of the
then received atomic weights. The assumption that equal volumes of
gases contain equal numbers of particles, or, as they were termed by
him, _molécules intégrantes_, was made in 1811 by Avogadro, professor
of physics at Turin (1776–1856). This theory, which has proved of the
utmost importance to the sciences both of physics and of chemistry,
had no doubt occurred to Gay-Lussac, and had been rejected by him for
the following reasons: A certain volume of hydrogen, say one cubic
inch, may be supposed to contain an equal number of particles (atoms)
as an equal volume of chlorine. Now these two gases unite in equal
volumes. The deduction appears so far quite legitimate that one atom of
hydrogen has combined with one atom of chlorine. But the resulting gas
occupies two cubic inches, and must therefore contain the same number
of particles of hydrogen chloride, the compound of the two elements,
as one cubic inch originally contained of hydrogen, or of chlorine.
Thus we have two cubic inches containing, of uncombined gases, twice
as many particles as is contained in that volume, after combination.
Avogadro’s hypothesis solved the difficulty. By premising two different
orders of particles, now termed _atoms_ and _molecules_, the solution
was plain. According to him, each particle, or molecule, of hydrogen is
a complex, and contains two atoms; the same is the case with chlorine.
When these gases combine, or rather _react_, to form hydrogen chloride,
the phenomenon is one of a change of partners; the molecule, the double
atom, of hydrogen splits; the same is the case with the molecule of
chlorine; and each liberated atom of hydrogen unites with a liberated
atom of chlorine, forming a compound, hydrogen chloride, which equally
consists of a molecule, or double atom. Thus two cubic inches of
hydrogen chloride consist of a definite number of molecules, equal
in number to those contained in a cubic inch of hydrogen, plus those
contained in a cubic inch of chlorine. The case is precisely similar,
if other compounds of gases be considered.
Berzelius was at first inclined to adopt this theory, and indeed went
so far as to change many of his atomic weights to make them fit it.
But later he somewhat withdrew from his position, for it appeared to
him that it was hazardous to extend to liquids and solids a theory
which could be held only of gases. Avogadro’s suggestion, therefore,
rested in abeyance until the publication, in 1858, by Cannizzaro, now
professor of chemistry in Rome, of an essay in which all the arguments
in favor of the hypothesis were collected and stated in a masterly
manner. It will be advisable to revert to this hypothesis at a later
point, and to consider other guides for the determination of atomic
weights.
In 1819, Dulong (1785–1838), director of the Ecole Polytechnique at
Paris, and Petit (1791–1820), professor of physics there, made the
discovery that equal amounts of heat are required to raise equally the
temperature of solid and liquid elements, provided quantities are taken
proportional to their atomic weights. Thus, to raise the temperature of
56 grammes of iron through one degree requires approximately the same
amount of heat as is required to raise through one degree 32 grammes of
sulphur, 63.5 grammes of copper, and so on; these numbers representing
the atomic weights of the elements named. In other words, _equal
numbers of atoms have equal capacity for heat_. The number of heat
units, or calories (one calory is the amount of heat required to raise
the temperature of 1 gramme of water through 1° C.), which is necessary
to raise the atomic weight expressed in grammes of any solid or liquid
element through 1° C. is approximately 6.2; it varies between 5.7 and
6.6 in actual part. This affords a means of determining the true value
of the atomic weight of an element, as the following example will show:
The analysis of the only compound of zinc and chlorine shows that it
contains 47.49 per cent. of zinc and 52.16 per cent. of chlorine. Now
one grain of hydrogen combines with 35.5 grains of chlorine to form
36.5 grains of hydrogen chloride; and, as already remarked, one volume
of hydrogen and one volume of chlorine combine, forming two volumes of
hydrogen chloride. Applying Avogadro’s hypothesis, one molecule of
hydrogen and one molecule of chlorine react to yield two molecules of
hydrogen chloride; and as each molecule is supposed to consist in this
case of two atoms, hydrogen chloride consists of one atom of each of
its constituent elements. The amount of that element, therefore, which
combines with 35.5 grains of chlorine may give the numerical value of
the atomic weight of the element, if the compound contains one atom
of each element; in that case the formula of the above compound would
be zinc, and the atomic weight of zinc, 32.7; but if the formula is
ZuCl3, the atomic weight of zinc would be 32.7 × 2; if ZuCl3, 32.7 × 3,
and so on. The specific heat of metallic zinc enables this question to
be solved. For it has been found, experimentally, to be about 0.095;
and 6.2 ÷ 0.095 = 65.2, a close approximation to 32.7 × 2 = 65.4. The
conclusion is therefore drawn that zinc chloride is composed of one
atom of zinc in combination with two atoms of chlorine, that the atomic
weight of zinc is 65.4, and that the molecular weight of zinc chloride
is 65.4 + (35.5 × 2) = 136.4. Inasmuch as the relative weight of a
molecule of hydrogen is 2 (that of an atom being 1), zinc chloride in
the gaseous state should be 136.4 ÷ 2 = 68.2 times that of hydrogen,
measured at the same temperature and pressure. This has been found,
experimentally, to be the case.
The methods of determining the vapor densities, or relative weights of
vapors, are three in number; the first method, due to Dumas (1827),
consists in vaporizing the substance in question in a bulb of glass or
of porcelain, at a known temperature, closing the bulb while still hot,
and weighing it after it is cold. Knowing the capacity of the bulb,
the weight of hydrogen necessary to fill it at the desired temperature
can be calculated, and the density of the vapor thus arrived at.
A second method was devised by Gay-Lussac and perfected by A. W.
Hofmann (1868); and a third, preferable for its simplicity and ease of
execution, is due to Victor Meyer (1881).
In 1858, as already remarked, Cannizzaro showed the connection between
these known facts, and for the first time attention was called to
the true atomic weights, which were, up to that time, confused with
equivalents, or weights of elements required to replace one unit weight
of hydrogen. These were generally regarded as atomic weights by Dalton
and his contemporaries.
Some exceptions had been observed to the law of Dulong and Petit, viz.,
beryllium, or glucinium, an element occurring in emeralds; boron,
of which borax is a compound; silicon, the component of quartz and
flint, and carbon. It was found by Weber that at high temperatures
the specific heats of these elements are higher, and the atomic heats
approximate to the number of 6.2; but this behavior is not peculiar to
these elements, for it appears that the specific heat of all elements
increases with rise of temperature.
A certain number of exceptions have also been noticed to the law of
Gay-Lussac, which may be formulated: the molecular weight of a compound
in a gaseous state is twice its density referred to hydrogen. Thus
equal volumes of ammonia and hydrogen chloride unite to form ammonium
chloride. It was to be expected that the density should be half the
molecular weight, thus:
NH3 + HCl = NH4Cl; and 53.5 ÷ 2 = 26.75 = density.
(14+3) (1+35.5) 53.5
But the density actually found is only half that number, viz., 13.37;
and for long this and similar cases were supposed to be exceptions
to the law of Gay-Lussac, viz., that equal volumes of gases at the
same pressure expand equally for equal rise of temperature. In other
instances the gradual decrease in density with rise of temperature can
be followed, as with chloral hydrate, the products of which are chloral
and water.
It was recognized by St. Claire Deville (1857) that the decrease
in density of such mixtures of gases was due, not to their being
exceptions to Avogadro’s law, but to the gradual decomposition of the
compound body with rise of temperature. To this gradual decomposition
he gave the name _dissociation_. This conception has proved of the
utmost importance to the science, as will be seen in the sequel. To
take the above instance of ammonium chloride, its abnormal density is
due to its dissociation into ammonia and hydrogen chloride; and the gas
which is obtained on raising its temperature consists, not of gaseous
ammonium chloride, but of a mixture of ammonia and hydrogen chloride,
which, as is easily seen, occupy, when separate, twice the volume that
would be occupied by the gaseous compound. Of recent years it has been
shown by Brereton Baker that, if perfectly free from moisture, ammonium
chloride gasifies as such, and that its density in the state of vapor
is, in fact, 26.75.
The molecular complexity of gases has thus gradually become
comprehended, and the truth of Avogadro’s law has gained acceptance.
And as a means of picturing the behavior of gaseous molecules, the
“Kinetic Theory of Gases” has been devised by Joule, Clausius, Maxwell,
Thomson (Lord Kelvin), and others. On the assumption that the pressure
of a gas on the walls of the vessel which contains it is due to the
continued impacts of its molecules, and that the temperature of a gas
is represented by the product of the mass of the molecules, or the
square of their velocity, it has been possible to offer a mechanical
explanation of Boyle’s law, that at constant temperature the volume
of a gas diminishes in proportion as the pressure increases; of
Gay-Lussac’s law, that all gases expand equally for equal rise of
temperature, provided pressure is kept constant; the condition being
that equal volumes of gases contain equal numbers of molecules. A
striking support is lent to this chain of reasoning by the facts
discovered by Thomas Graham (1805–1869), professor at University
College, London, and subsequently master of the Royal Mint. Graham
discovered that the rate of diffusion of gases into each other is
inversely as the square roots of their densities. For instance, the
density of hydrogen being taken as unity, that of oxygen is sixteen
times as great; if a vessel containing hydrogen be made to communicate
with one containing oxygen, the hydrogen will pass into the oxygen and
mix with it; and, conversely, the oxygen will pass into the hydrogen
vessel. This is due to the intrinsic motion of the molecule of each
gas. And Graham found, experimentally, that for each volume of oxygen
which enters the hydrogen vessel four volumes of hydrogen will enter
the oxygen vessel. Now, 4 = √16; and as these masses are relatively
1 and 16, and their temperatures are equal, the square of their
velocities are respectively 1 and 16.
The question of the molecular complexity of gases being thus disposed
of, it remains to be considered what are the relative complexity of
liquid molecules. The answer is indicated by a study of the capillary
phenomena of liquids, one method of measuring which is the height of
their ascent in narrow or capillary tubes. We shall not enter here into
detail as to the method and arguments necessary; suffice it to say that
the Hungarian physicist Eötvös was the first to indicate the direction
of research, and that Ramsay and Shields succeeded in proving that the
complexity of the molecules of most liquids is not greater than that
of the gases which they form on being vaporized; and also that certain
liquids, _e.g._, water, the alcohols, and other liquids, are more or
less “associated,” _i.e._, their molecules occur in couplices of two,
three, four, or more, and as the temperature is raised the complexity
of molecular structure diminishes.
As regards the molecular complexity of solids, nothing definite
is known, and, moreover, there appears to be no method capable of
revealing it.
While the researches of which a short account has now been given have
led to knowledge regarding the nature of molecules, the structure
of the molecule has excited interest since the early years of the
century, and its investigation has led to important results. The
fact of the decomposition of acidified water by an electric current,
discovered by Nicholson and Carlisle, and of salts into “bases” and
“acids” by Berzelius and Hisinger in 1803, led to the belief that
a close connection exists between electric energy, or, as it was
then termed, “electric force,” and the affinity which holds the
constituents of chemical compounds in combination. In 1807 Davy
propounded the theory that all compounds consist of two portions, one
electro-positive and the other electro-negative. This idea was the
result of experiments on the behavior of substances, such, for example,
as copper and sulphur—if portions of these elements be insulated and
then brought into contact they become oppositely electrified. The
degree of electrification is intensified by rise of temperature until,
when combination ensues, the electrification vanishes. Combination,
therefore, according to Davy, is concurrent with the equalization of
potentials. In 1812 Berzelius brought forward an electro-chemical
theory which for the following twenty years was generally accepted.
His primary assumption was that the atoms of elements, or, in certain
cases, groups of atoms, are themselves electrified; that each atom, or
group of atoms, possesses two poles, one positive, the other negative;
that the electrification of one of these poles predominates over
that of the other, so that the atom or group is itself, as a whole,
electro-positive, or electro-negative; that combination ensued between
such oppositely electrified bodies by the neutralization, partial or
complete, of their electric charges; and, lastly, that the polarity
of an element or group could be determined by noting whether the
element or group separated at the positive or at the negative pole of
the galvanic battery, or electrolysis. For Berzelius, oxygen was the
most electro-negative and potassium the most electro-positive of the
elements, the bridge between the “non-metals” and the “metals” being
hydrogen, which, with nitrogen, forms a basic, or electro-positive,
group, while with chlorine, etc., it forms electro-negative groups.
The fact that an electric current splits compounds in solution
into two portions led Berzelius to devise his “dualistic” system,
which involved the assumption that all compounds consist of two
portions, one electro-positive, the other electro-negative.
Thus sulphate of magnesium and potassium was to be regarded as
composed of electro-positive potassium sulphate in combination
with electro-negative magnesium sulphate; the former in its turn
consisted of electro-negative sulphur trioxide (SO3) in combination
with electro-positive oxide of potassium (K2O); while each of these
proximate constituents of potassium sulphate were themselves composed
of the electro-negative oxygen in combination with electro-positive
sulphur, or potassium. On contrasting sulphur with potassium, however,
the former was considered more electro-negative than the latter; so
that the group SO3 as a whole was electro-negative, while K2O was
electro-positive. The symbols given above, which are still in universal
use, were also devised by Berzelius for the purpose of illustrating and
emphasizing his views. These views, however, met with little acceptance
at the time in England.
Lavoisier’s idea, that oxygen was the necessary constituent of all
acids, began about this time to lose ground. For Davy had proved the
elementary nature of chlorine; and hydrochloric acid, one of the
strongest, was thus seen to contain no oxygen, and Davy expressed the
view, founded on his observation, that iodic “acid,” I2O5, was devoid
of acid properties until dissolved in water, and that the essential
constituent of all acids was hydrogen, not oxygen. The bearing of this
theory on the dualistic theory is, that while, _e.g._, sulphuric acid
was regarded by Berzelius as SO3, containing no hydrogen, and was
supposed to be separated as such at the positive pole of a battery,
Davy’s suggestion led to the opposite conclusion that the formula
of sulphuric acid is H2SO4, and that by the current it is resolved
into H2 and SO4. Faraday’s electrolytic law, that when a current is
passed through electrolytes in solution the elements are liberated in
quantities proportional to their equivalents, led to the abandonment
of the dualistic theory. For when a current is passed in succession
through acidified water, fused lead chloride, and a solution of
potassium sulphate, the quantities of hydrogen and oxygen from the
water, of lead and chlorine from the lead chloride, and the potassium
of the sulphate are in accordance with Faraday’s law. But in addition
to the potassium there is liberated at the same pole an equivalent of
hydrogen. Now, if Berzelius’s theory be true, the products should be
SO3 and K2O, but if the opposite view be correct, then K2 is liberated
first and by its subsequent action on water it yields potash and
its equivalent of hydrogen. This was pointed out first by Daniell,
professor at King’s College, London, and it was regarded as a powerful
argument against Berzelius’s system. In 1833, too, Graham investigated
the phosphoric acids, and prepared the salts of three, to which he
gave the names, _ortho-_, _pyro-_, and _meta-_ phosphoric acids. To
understand the bearing of this on the doctrine of dualism it must be
remembered that P2O5, pentoxide of phosphorus, was at that date named
phosphoric acid. When dissolved in water it reacts with bases, forming
salts—the phosphates. But the quantity of water necessary was not then
considered essential; Graham, however, showed that there exist three
series of salts—one set derived from P2O5,3H2O, one from P2O5,2H2O,
and a third from P2O5,H2O. His way of stating the fact was that water
could play the part of a base; for example, the ordinary phosphate
of commerce possessed, according to him, the formula P2O5,2Na2O,H2O,
two-thirds of the “water of constitution” being replaced by oxide of
sodium. Liebig, then professor at Giessen (1803–1873), founded on these
and on similar observations of his own the doctrine of poly-basic
acids—acids in which one, two, three, or more atoms of hydrogen
were replaceable by metals. Thus, instead of writing, as Graham did,
P2O5,2Na2O,H2O, he wrote, PO4Na2H; and for orthophosphoric acid
PO4H3. The group of atoms (PO4), therefore, existed throughout the
whole series of orthophosphates, and could exist in combination with
hydrogen, with hydrogen and metals, or with metals alone. Similarly
the group (P2O7) was characteristic of pyrophosphates and (PO3) of
metaphosphates, for P2O5,2H2O=(P2O7)H4; and P2O5,H2O=2(PO3)H.
The first clear ideas of the structure of the molecule were, however,
gained from the study of the compounds of carbon. It was difficult to
apply the dualistic theory to them. For few of them are electrolytes,
and therefore their products of electrolysis, being non-existent,
could not be classified. Nevertheless, Gay-Lussac regarded alcohol,
C2H6O, as a compound of C2H4, ethylene, and H2O, water; and oxalic
acid (anhydrous), C2O3, as one of CO2 with CO. The discovery of
“isomeric compounds,” _i.e._, of compounds which possess the same
ultimate formula and yet differ entirely in their properties,
forced upon chemists the necessity of attending to the structure of
the molecule; for only by such a supposition could the difference
between two isomeric bodies be explained. In 1823 Liebig discovered
that silver fulminate and silver cyanate both possessed the empirical
formula AgCNO; in 1825 this was followed by the discovery by Faraday
that oil gas contains a hydrocarbon identical in composition with
ethylene, C2H4, yet differing from it in properties; and in 1829
Wöhler, professor in Göttingen (1800–1882), discovered that urea, a
constituent of urine, could be produced by heating ammonium cyanate,
NH4CNO, a substance of the same formula. It therefore became clear that
the identity of a compound must depend on some other cause than its
ultimate composition.
In 1833 Liebig and Wöhler took an important step in elucidating this
question by their investigations on benzoic acid and acid obtainable
by distilling a resin named gum benzoin. They showed that this acid,
C7H6O2, could be conceived as consisting of the group C7H5O, to which
they gave the name “benzoyl,” in combination with OH; that benzoic
aldehyde, C7H6O, might be regarded as its compound with hydrogen; that
it also formed compounds with chlorine, and bromine, and sulphur,
and replaced hydrogen in ammonia (C7H6O,NH2). They termed this
group, benzoyl, a “compound element” or a “radical.” This research
was followed by one by Robert Bunsen, professor at Heidelberg, born
in 1811, and recently (1899) dead, which bore reference to cacodyl,
a compound of arsenic, carbon and hydrogen, in which the idea of a
radical was confirmed and amplified.
The idea of a radical having thus become established, Jean Baptiste
Andrée Dumas, professor in Paris (1800–1884), propounded the theory
of “substitution,” _i.e._, that an element such as chlorine or oxygen
(which, be it noticed, is electro-negative on Berzelius’s scale) could
replace hydrogen in carbon compounds, atom for atom, the resulting
compound belonging to the same “type” as the one from which it was
derived. And Laurent, warden of the mint at Paris (1807–1853), and
Gerhardt, professor at Montpelier and at Strasburg (1816–1856),
emphasized the fact that one element, be it what it may, can replace
another without fundamentally altering its chemical character, and
also that an atom of hydrogen can be replaced by a group of atoms or
radical, behaving for the occasion like the atom of an element. It is
to Laurent and Gerhardt that we owe the definition of an atom—_the
smallest quantity of an element which can be present in a compound_; an
equivalent—_that weight of an element which combines with or replaces
one part by weight of hydrogen_; and a molecule—_the smallest quantity
which can exist in a free state, whether of an element or a compound_.
They recognized, too, that a molecule of hydrogen, chlorine, etc.,
consists of two atoms.
In 1849 Wurtz, professor in Paris (1817–1884), and Hofmann, then
professor in the College of Chemistry in London, afterwards at Berlin
(1818–1892), discovered a series of compounds allied to ammonia, NH3,
in which one or more atoms of hydrogen were replaced by a group or
radical, such as methyl (CH3), ethyl (C2H5), or phenyl (C6H5). Wurtz
referred such compounds to the ammonia “type.” They all resemble
ammonia in their physical properties—smell, taste, etc.—as well as
in their power of uniting with acids to form salts resembling ammonium
chloride (NH4Cl), and other ammonium compounds. Shortly afterwards
Williamson, professor at University College, London, added the “water
type,” in consequence of his researches on “mixed ethers”—bodies in
which the hydrogen of water might be regarded as replaced by organic
radicals. Thus we have the series:
H. O. H.; CH3. O. H.; CH3. O. CH3; and NH3; NH2; H3; NH(CH3)2; and
N(CH3)3; the first representing compounds following the water type,
the latter the ammonia type. This suggestion had been previously made
by Laurent, in 1846. But Williamson extended his views to inorganic
compounds; thus, sulphuric acid was represented as constructed on the
double water type—HO. SO2. OH, being derived from H. O. (H. H) O.
H, the two hydrogen atoms enclosed in brackets being replaced by the
radical SO2. To these types Gerhardt added the hydrogen and hydrogen
chloride types, H.H. and H.Cl; and, later, Kekulé, professor in Bonn
(1829), added the marsh gas type C(H)4. The next important step was
taken by Frankland, professor in the Royal School of Mines, London;
his work, however, had been anticipated by Cunn Brown, professor at
Edinburgh University, in a pamphlet even yet little known. It was to
attribute to elements one or more powers of combination. To these
he gave the name “valency,” and the capacity of possessing valency
was called “quantivalence.” Thus hydrogen was taken as a “monad,” or
monovalent. Chlorine, because it unites with hydrogen atom to atom,
is also a monad. Oxygen, having the power to combine with two atoms
of hydrogen, was termed a dyad, or divalent; nitrogen a triad, or
trivalent; carbon a tetrad, or tetravalent, and so on. This is evident
from inspection of the formulas of their compounds with hydrogen, thus:
H H H
/ \ /
H——Cl; H——O——H; H——N ; C
\ / \
H H H
Instances of penta, hexa, and even hepta-valency are not wanting.
This was the key to unlock the structure of chemical compounds; and
Frankland’s views, just stated, are still held by chemists. The
determination of the constitution of compounds, chiefly those of
carbon, occupied the attention of chemists, almost exclusively, until
1880. The plan of action is much the same as that of a mechanician who
wishes to imitate a complicated mechanism. He must first dissect it
into groups of mechanical contrivances; these are next constructed; and
they are finally built together into the complete machine. In certain
cases the atoms of carbon are arranged in “chains,” as, for example, in
pentyl alcohol:
H3C——C——C——C——C——O——H
H2 H2 H2 H2
each atom being tetrad, and its “affinities,” or powers of combination,
saturated either with hydrogen or with those of neighboring atoms of
carbon; in others they are in the form of a “ring,” as in benzene, the
formula of which was first suggested by Kekulé, viz.:
H H
C——C
/ \
HC CH;
\ /
C==C
H H
or in both, as in ethyl benzene,
H H
C——C
/ \ H H
HC C——C——CH.
\ / H H
C==C
H H
One or more atoms of nitrogen, or of oxygen, may form part of the
circle, as in pyridine:
H H H H
C——C C C
/ \ /
N CH and furfurane, O == ,
\ / \
C==C C C
H H H H
and so on. By means of conceptions such as these many interesting
compounds have been built up out of the elements which they contain;
_e.g._, urea and uric acid, constituents of urine; theobromine and
caffeine, the essential principles of cocoa and tea; alizarine and
indigo, valuable dyestuffs; and several of the alkaloids, bitter
principles contained in plants, of great medicinal value.
They have led, too, to the discovery of many brilliant colors, now
almost universally employed, to the exclusion of those less brilliant,
because less pure, derived from plants, and in one or two cases
from animals; the manufacture of gun-cotton, dynamite, and similar
high explosives; and to the development of the candle industry; the
sugar manufacture; to improvement in tanning, in brewing, and in the
preparation of gas and oils for illuminating purposes. In short, it may
be said that the industrial progress of the latter half of the century
has been due to the theoretical views of which a short sketch has just
been given.
Such formulas, however, can evidently not represent the true
constitution of matter, inasmuch as the atoms are imagined to lie
on a plane, whereas it is evident that they must occupy space
of three dimensions and possess the attributes of solidity. The
conception which led to the formulation of such views was due first
to Pasteur, in his later years director of the institute known by
his name at Paris, and more directly to LeBel and Van’t Hoff, now
professor at Berlin, independently of each other. In 1848 Pasteur
discovered that it was possible to separate the two varieties of
tartaric acid from each other; and that that one which rotated the
plane of polarized light to the right gave crystals with an extra
face, unsymmetrically disposed with regard to the other faces of the
crystal. The variety, the solution of which in water was capable of
producing left-handed rotation, also possessed a similar face, but so
placed that its reflection in a mirror reproduced the right-handed
variety. Pasteur also showed that a mixture of these acids gave
crystals not characterized by an unsymmetrically placed face; and
also that the solution was without action on polarized light. These
observations remained unexplained, until LeBel and Van’t Hoff, in
1874, simultaneously and independently devised a theory which has,
up till now, stood the test of research. It is briefly this: Imagine
two regular tetrahedra, or three-sided pyramids, standing each on its
triangular base. An idea can best be got by a model, easily made by
laying on a table three lucifer matches so as to form an equilateral
triangle, and erecting a tripod with three other matches, so that
each leg of the tripod stands on one corner of the triangle. At the
centre of such a tetrahedron, an atom of carbon is supposed to be
placed. Marsh gas, CH4, is supposed to have such a structure, each
corner, or solid angle of the structure (of which there are four),
being occupied by an atom of hydrogen. This represents the solid or
_stereochemical_ formula of methane or marsh gas. Now, suppose one of
the atoms of hydrogen in each of these structures to be replaced by
chlorine, the group (OH), or any other monovalent element or group. It
is evident that if not exactly similar (owing to the replacement not
having been made at similar corners in each), the two structures can be
made similar by turning one of them round, until the position of the
substituting atom or group (which we will term X) coincides in position
with X in the stationary one. If two such replacements be made, say,
with X and Y in each, coincidence can again be made to take place; but
the same is not the case if X, Y, and Z replace three atoms of hydrogen
in the structure; for there is one way of replacement which is the
optical image of the other, and represents the other’s reflection in a
mirror.
[Illustration: (Tetrahedron XYZ) and (Tetrahedron XZY)]
Now, it is found that when the four corners of such a structure are
occupied by four separate atoms or groups, or when (as the expression
goes) the body contains an “asymmetrical carbon atom,” if the substance
or one of its derivations can be obtained in a crystalline form, the
crystals are also asymmetric, _i.e._, arc develops a face which is the
mirror-reflection of a similar face developed on the other variety;
and if a beam of polarized light be passed through the solution of
the substance, its plane is rotated to the left if one variety be
used, and, if the other, to the right. This hypothesis of LeBel’s
and Van’t Hoff’s has had an enormous influence on the progress of
organic chemistry. By its means Fischer, now professor at Berlin, has
explained the reason of the existence of the enormous number of bodies
analogous to grape and cane sugar, and has prepared many new varieties;
and it appears likely that the terpenes, a class of bodies allied to
turpentine, and comprising most of the substances to which the odor of
flowers is due, may thereby find their explanation. It may be mentioned
in passing that Pasteur, having found that ordinary mould destroyed
one variety of tartaric acid rather than the other in a mixture of
the two, and made use of this observation in order to prepare the
unattached variety in a state of purity, was led to study the action
of organisms more or less resembling mould; and that this has led
to the development of the science of bacteriology, which has had an
enormous influence on our views regarding fermentation in general,
and guides the work of our physicians, our surgeons (witness Lister’s
antiseptic treatment), our sanitary engineers in their estimate of
the purity of drinking-water and of the disposal of sewage, of our
manufacturers of beer and spirits, of wine-growers, and more recently
of farmers. All these processes depend upon the action of organisms
in producing chemical changes, whether in the tissues of the body,
causing or curing disease, or in the production of flavored alcohol
from sugar, or in the manufacture of butter and cheese, or in preparing
the land for the reception of crops. We also owe to the genius of
Van’t Hoff the most important advance of recent times in the region
of physical chemistry. It has been observed by Raoult, professor at
Grenoble, that the freezing-point of a solvent as a general rule is
lowered to the same extent if there be dissolved in it quantities of
substances proportional to their molecular weights. Thus, supposing
1.80 grams of grape-sugar be dissolved in 100 grams of water and the
solution cooled below 0° with constant stirring, ice separates suddenly
in thin spicules, and the temperature rises to −0.185°. If 3.42 grams
of cane-sugar be similarly dissolved in 100 grams of water, the
freezing-point of the solution is again −0.185°. Now, 1.80 and 3.42 are
respectively the hundredth part of the molecular weights of grape-sugar
(C6H12O6) and cane-sugar (C12H22O11). Similarly, Raoult found that
quantities proportional to molecular weights dissolved in a solvent
depress the vapor pressure of that solvent equally, or, what comes to
the same thing, raise its boiling-point by an equal number of degrees.
But ordinary salts, such as sodium chloride, potassium nitrate, etc.,
dissolved in water, give too great a depression of the freezing-point
and too high a boiling-point. Next, it has been observed by botanists,
Devries, Pfeffer, and others, who had examined the ascent of sap in
plants, that if a vessel of unglazed porcelain, so treated as to cause
a film of cupric ferrocyanide (a slimy red compound) to deposit in the
pores of its walls, be filled with a weak (about 1 per cent.) solution
of sugar or similar substance, and plunged in a vessel of pure water,
water entered through the pores. By attaching a monometer to the porous
vessel the pressure exerted by the entering water could be measured.
Such pressure was termed “osmotic pressure,” referring to the “osmosis”
or passage through the walls of the vessel. Such prepared walls are
permeable freely to water, but not to sugar or similar bodies. Van’t
Hoff pointed out that the total pressure registered is proportional to
the amount of substance in solution, and that it is proportional to
the absolute temperature, and he showed, besides, that the pressure
exerted by the sugar molecules is the same as that which would be
exerted at the same temperature were an equal number of molecules of
hydrogen to occupy the same volume as the sugar solution. This may
be expressed by stating that when in dilute solution sugar molecules
behave _as if_ they were present in the gaseous state. Here again,
however, it was noticed that salts tended to give a higher pressure; it
was difficult to construct a semi-permeable diaphragm, however, which
would resist the passage of salt molecules, while allowing those of
water to pass freely. Lastly, Arrhenius, of Stockholm, had shown that
the conductivity of salt solutions for electricity may be explained on
the assumption that when a salt, such as KNO3 is dissolved in water,
it dissociates into portions similar in number and kind to those it
would yield if electrolyzed (and if no secondary reactions were to
take place). Such portions (K and NO3, for example) had been named
ions by Faraday. The conductivity of such solutions becomes greater,
per unit of dissolved salt, the weaker the solution, until finally a
limit is reached, after which further dilution no longer increases
conductivity. Now Van’t Hoff united all these isolated observations
and showed their bearing on each other. Stated shortly, the hypothesis
is as follows: When a substance is dissolved in a large quantity of
a solvent, its molecules are separated from each other to a distance
comparable with that which obtains in gases. They are, therefore,
capable of independent action; and when placed in a vessel the walls of
which are permeable to the solvent, but not to the dissolved substance
(“semi-permeable membrane”), the imprisoned molecules of the latter
exert pressure on the interior surface of these walls as if they
were gaseous. Van’t Hoff showed the intimate connection between this
phenomenon and the depression of freezing-point and the use of vapor
pressure already alluded to. He pointed out further that the exceptions
to this behavior, noticed in the case of dissolved salts, are due to
their “electric dissociation,” or “ionization,” as it is now termed;
and that in a sufficiently dilute solution of potassium nitrate,
for example, the osmotic pressure, and the correlated depression of
freezing-point and rise of boiling-point, are practically equal to what
would be produced were the salt to be split into its ions, K and NO3.
These views were vigorously advocated by Ostwald, professor at Leipzig,
in his _Zeitschrift für physikalische Chemie_, and he and his pupils
have done much to gather together facts in confirmation of this theory,
and in extending its scope.
It must be understood that the ions K and NO3 are not, strictly
speaking, atoms; they are _charged_ atoms; the K retains a +, and the
NO3 a − charge. On immersing into the solution the poles of a battery,
one charged + and the other −, the + K atoms are attracted to the −
pole, and are there discharged; as soon as they lose their charge they
are free to act on the water, when they liberate their equivalent of
hydrogen. Similarly, the − NO3 groups are discharged at the + pole, and
abstract hydrogen from the water, liberating an equivalent quantity
of oxygen. Thus the phenomenon of electrolysis, so long a mysterious
process, finds a simple explanation. The course of ordinary chemical
reactions is also readily realized when viewed in the light of this
theory. Take, for example, the ordinary equation:
AgNO3.Aq + NaCl.Ag = AgCl + NaNO3.Aq;
_i.e._, solutions of silver nitrate and sodium chloride give a
precipitate of silver chloride, leaving sodium nitrate in solution. By
the new views, such an equation must be written:
+ − + − + −
Ag.Aq + NO3.Aq + Na.Aq + Cl.Aq = AgCl + Na.Aq + NO3.Aq.
The compound, silver chloride, being insoluble in water, is formed
by the union of the ions Ag and Cl, and their consequent discharge,
forming an electrically neutral compound; while the sodium ions,
charged positively together with the NO3 ions, negatively charged,
remain in solution.
One more application of the principle may be given. Many
observers—Andrews, Favre, and Silbermann, but especially Julius
Thomsen, of Copenhagen, and M. Berthelot, of Paris—have devoted much
labor and time to the measurement of the heat evolved during chemical
reactions. Now, while very different amounts of heat are evolved when
chlorine, bromine, or iodine combine respectively with sodium or
potassium, the number of heat units evolved on neutralizing sodium
or potassium hydroxide with hydrochloric, hydrobromic, hydriodic, or
nitric acids is always about 13,500. How can this fact be explained? It
finds its explanation as follows: These acids and bases are ionized in
solution as shown in the equation:
+ − + − + −
H.Aq + Cl.Aq. + Na.Aq + OH.Aq = H.OH + Na.Aq + Cl.Aq.
Water is the only compound formed; and it is produced by the union
of the hydrogen-ion originally belonging to the acid, and the OH or
hydroxyl-ion originally belonging to the base. No further change has
occurred; hence the uniform evolution of heat by the interaction of
equivalent quantities of these acids and bases.
It now remains to give a short account of the greatest generalization
which has as yet been made in chemistry. It has been termed the
“Periodic Arrangement of the Elements.”
In 1864 Newlands, of London, and Lothar Meyer, late of Tübingen, found
that by arranging the elements in the order of their atomic weights
certain regularities were to be observed between each element, and
in general the eighth in succession from it, in the order of their
numerical value. Such similar elements formed groups or quantities;
while the elements separating them belong to a _period_, hence the name
“periodic arrangement.” Commencing with lithium, a light, lustrous
metal found in silicate in certain minerals, we have the following
series:
Lithium Beryllium Boron Carbon Nitrogen Oxygen Fluorine Neon
7 9.2 11 12 14 16 19 20
Sodium Magnesium Aluminum Silicon Phosphorus Sulphur Chlorine Argon
23 24.3 27 28 31 34 35.5 40
and so on. It is unnecessary to point out in detail the resemblances
between the elements which stand in the vertical columns; but it
may be stated that the resemblance extends also to the formulas and
properties of their compounds. Thus the chlorides of lithium and sodium
are each white soluble salts, of the formulas LiCl and NaCl; oxides of
magnesium and of beryllium are both insoluble white earthy powders,
MgO and BeO (GeO), and so on. Newlands, in his preliminary sketch,
termed this order the “Law of Octaves,” and predicted the existence of
certain undiscovered elements which should occupy unfilled positions in
the table. Mendeléef, professor at St. Petersburg, in 1869 amplified
and extended these relations; and he and Meyer pointed out that the
volume occupied by equal numbers of atoms of such elements underwent
a periodic variation when the elements are classified as above.
The prediction of undiscovered elements was made by Mendeléef in a
more assured manner; and in several cases they have been realized.
Thus what Mendeléef called “ekaboron” has since been discovered by
Lecoq de Boisbandron and named, patriotically, “gallium”; Mendeléef’s
“eka-silicon” is now known as “germanium,” discovered by Winkler; and
“eka-aluminum” is now Cléve’s “scandium.” Moreover, the atomic weights
of cæsium, beryllium, molybdenium, and mercury have been altered so
that they fit the periodic table; and further research has justified
the alteration.
The valency of these elements increases from right to left, as will be
seen by inspection of the following series:
LiCl BeCl3 BCl3 CCl4 NH4Cl
Na2O MgO B2O3 SiO2 PCl3
Monad. Dyad. Triad. Tetrad. Triad and Pentad.
OH2 FH Ne——
SO3 Cl(OH)O3 A——
Dyad and Hexad. Monad and Heptad. No valency.
The elements of no valency are of recent discovery. In 1894 Lord
Rayleigh had determined the density of the nitrogen of the atmosphere,
having separated from it the oxygen and carbon dioxide which is mixed
with nitrogen in air. He found it to be of somewhat higher density
than that obtainable from ammonia and other compounds of nitrogen.
In conjunction with Ramsay he investigated atmospheric nitrogen; it
was absorbed either by a method devised by Cavendish, or by making it
combine with magnesium at a red heat. They found that the unabsorbable
residue possessed an unknown spectrum, and that its density was nearly
20. To this new gas they gave the name “argon,” or inactive, seeing
that all attempts to cause it to enter into combination had failed.
In 1895 Ramsay, searching for possible combinations of argon in
minerals, experimented with one which had been previously examined by
Hillebrand, of Baltimore, and obtained from it helium, a gas of density
2, possessing a spectrum which had been previously discovered in 1868
in the chromosphere of the sun, by Jannsen, of Paris, and named helium
by Frankland and Lockyer. Subsequent liquefaction of crude argon by
means of liquid air, prepared by a process invented simultaneously by
Linde and Hampson, gave a residue which was named by its discoverers,
Ramsay and Travers, “neon.” Liquid argon has yielded two other gases
also, “krypon” and “xenon.” These elements form a separate group in the
Periodic Table, commencing with helium, with atomic weight, 4; neon,
20; argon, 40; krypon, 82; and xenon, 128. They all agree in being
mono-atomic, _i.e._, their molecules consist of single atoms; and they
have no tendency to form compounds, _i.e_., they possess no valency.
In this sketch of the progress of chemistry during the century which
has just passed, attention has been paid chiefly to the progress
of thought. Allusions must, however, be made to the applications
of chemistry to industrial purposes. The development of the soda
industry, the preparation of carbonate of soda and caustic from common
salt—initiated in France by LeBlanc (1742–1806)—has been developed
by Tennant, in Scotland, and Muspeath and Gossage, and by Hargreaves,
Weldon, and Maetea, in England; this process has at present a serious
rival in the ammonia-soda process, developed by Solway, in Belgium,
and by Brunner and Mond, in England. The main action of sulphuric
acid, so long associated with the alkali process, has made enormous
strides during the present century, but is still, in the main, the
original process of causing sulphur dioxide in presence of water to
absorb the oxygen of the air through nitric oxide. But the saving of
the oxides of nitrogen through the invention of a sulphuric acid power
by Gay-Lussac, known by his name, and the re-utilization of these
oxides in the “Glover” power, invented by John Glover, of Newcastle,
have greatly lessened the cost of the acid. Concentration of the acid
in iron vessels is now common, the cost of platinum or of fragile
glass vessels being thereby saved. The desulphurization of iron and
the removal of silicon, carbon, and phosphorus by Bessemer’s process,
modified by Thomas and Gilchrist through the introduction of a “basic
magnesia lining” for the convertors, has made it possible to obtain
pure iron and steel from ores previously regarded as of little value.
The use of artificial manures, prepared by mixing refuse animal
matters with tetra-hydrogen, calcium phosphate, and nitrate of soda,
or sulphate of ammonia, first introduced by Liebig, has created
a revolution in agricultural methods and in the weight of crops
obtainable from a given area of soil. The influence of manures on
crops has been fully studied by Lawes and Gilbert for more than fifty
years in their experimental farm at Rothampstead. The most remarkable
advances which have been made, however, are due to cheap electric
current. The electrolysis of alumina, dissolved in fused cryolite to
obtain aluminum, an operation carried out at Schaffhausen-on-the-Rhine,
and at the Falls of Foyers, in Scotland; the electro-deposition of pure
copper for electric wires and cables, electro-silvering, gilding, and
nickelling, all these are instances where decomposition of a compound
by the electric current has led to important industrial results. At
present soda and chlorine are being manufactured by the electrolysis
of salt solution contained in rocking trays, one of the electrodes
being mercury, by the Castner-Kellner process. This manufacture is
being carried on at Niagara, as well as in England. But electricity
as a heating agent finds ever-extending application. Louis Moisson,
professor at Paris, led the way by utilizing the enormous heat of
the ore in his electric furnace, thereby, among other interesting
reactions, manufacturing diamonds, small, it is true, though none the
less real. The use of electricity as a heating agent has received
new applications. Phosphorus is now made by distilling a mixture of
phosphates of lime and alumina with coke; a new polishing agent has
been found in “carborundum,” a compound of carbon and silicon, produced
by heating in an electric furnace a mixture of sand and coke; and
cyanide of potassium, almost indispensable for the extraction of gold
from ores poor in gold, is now manufactured by heating a mixture of
carbon and carbonate of barium in an electric furnace in a current
of carbon monoxide. These are but some of the instances in which
electricity has been adopted as an agent in effecting chemical changes;
and it may be confidently predicted that the earlier years of the
twentieth century will witness a great development in this direction.
It may be pointed out that the later developments of industrial
chemistry owe their success entirely to the growth of chemical theory;
and it is obvious that that nation which possesses the most competent
chemists, theoretical and practical, is destined to succeed in the
competition with other nations for commercial supremacy and all its
concomitant advantages.
WILLIAM RAMSAY.
ARCHÆOLOGY
To write of the progress of archæology in this century is scarcely
possible, as the idea of the subject was unknown a hundred years ago;
it is, therefore, the whole history of its opening and development
that we have to deal with. The conception of the history of man being
preserved to us in material facts, and not only in written words, was
quite disregarded until the growth of geology had taught men to read
nature for themselves, instead of trusting to the interpretations
formed by their ancestors. Even down to the present the academic view
is that classical archæology is more important than other branches,
because it serves to illustrate classical literature. Looked at as
archæology, it is, on the contrary, the least important branch, because
we already know so much more of the classical ages than we do of others.
It is only within the present generation that it has been realized that
wherever man has lived he has left the traces of his action, and that
a systematic and observant study of those remains will interpret to us
what his life was, what his abilities and tastes were, and the extent
and nature of his mind. Literature is but one branch of the archæology
of the higher races; another—equally important for the understanding
of man—is art; these two give the highest and most complex and
characteristic view of the nature of a race. At the opposite end of the
scale are the rudest stone weapons which remain as the sole traces of
the savages who used them. These highest and lowest evidences of mind,
and all that lies between them, are the domain of archæology.
We now purpose to review the growth of archæology in contact with
geology, where it concerns man as the last of the links of life on the
globe; and then to notice the archæology of each country in turn, as
it leads on to the times of historical record, and so passes down to
modern times.
A century ago the world of thought was divided between the old and new
ideas very differently from what is now the case. Then there stood on
one side the idea of a special creation of an individual man, at 4000
B. C.; the compression of all human history into a prehistoric age
of about three thousand years, and a fairly logical solution of most
of the difficulties of understanding in a comfortable teleology. On
the other hand stood many who felt the inherent improbability of such
solutions of the problem of life, and who were feeling their way to
some more workable theory on the basis of Laplace, Lamarck, Erasmus
Darwin, and others; vaguely mingling together questions of physics,
geology, archæology, anthropology, and theology, each of which we
now see must be treated on its own basis, and be decided on internal
evidence, before we can venture to let it affect our judgment on other
points.
The great new force which thrust itself in to divide and decide on
these questions is the scientific study of man and his works. Strangely
shaped flints had been noticed, but no one had any knowledge of their
age. One such, when found with the bones of a mammoth, was attributed
to the Roman age, because no person could have brought elephants into
Britain except some Roman general. The argument was excellent and
irrefutable until geology found plenty more remains of the mammoth and
showed that it was here long before the Romans. It was less than half
a century ago that our eyes began to open to the abundant remains of
flint-using man. Then a single rude stone weapon was an unexplained
curiosity; now an active collector will put together his tens of
thousands of specimens, will know exactly where they were found, their
relation of age and of purpose, and their bearing on the history of man.
Not only have worked flint implements been found in the river gravels
of France and England, where they were first noticed in the middle of
this century, but also in most parts of Europe, in Egypt on the high
desert, in Somaliland, at the Cape of Good Hope, in India, America, and
other countries; and the most striking feature is the exact similarity
in form wherever they have been found. So precisely do the same types
recur, so impossible would it be to say from its form whether a flint
had been found in Europe, Asia, or Africa, that it appears as if the
art of working had spread from some single centre over the rest of the
world. This is especially the case with the river-gravel flints—the
earlier class—usually called Paleolithic. Soon after the general
division had been made between polished stone-work of the later or
Neolithic times, found on the surface, and the rough chipped work of
the earlier or Paleolithic times, found in geological deposits, a
further sub-division was made by separating the Paleolithic age into
that of the river gravels and that of the cave-dwellers. The latter has
again been divided into three classes by French writers, named, from
their localities, _Mousterien_, _Solutrien_, _Magdalenien_; and, though
these classes may be much influenced by locality, they probably have
some difference of age between them.
And now within the last few years a still earlier kind of workmanship
has been recognized in flints found in England on the high hills in
Kent. Though at first much disputed, the human origin of the forms is
now generally acknowledged, and they show a far ruder ability than
even the most massive of the Paleolithic forms. The position also of
these flints, in river deposits lying on the highest hills some six
hundred feet above the present rivers, shows that the whole of the
valleys has been excavated since they were deposited, and implies a far
greater age than any of the gravel beds of the Paleolithic ages.
We, therefore, have passed now at the beginning of this century to
a far wider view of man’s history, and classify his earlier ages in
Europe thus:
First—Eolithic: Rudest massive flints from deposits 600 feet up.
Second—Paleolithic: Massive flints from gravels 200 feet up and
less (Achuleen).
Third—Paleolithic—Cave-dwellers: Flints like the preceding and
flakes (Mousterien).
Fourth—Paleolithic—Cave-dwellers: Flints well worked and finely
shaped (Solutrien).
Fifth—Paleolithic—Cave-dwellers: Abundant bone working and
drawing (Magdalenien).
Sixth—Neolithic: Polished flint working, pastoral and
agricultural man.
What time these periods cover nothing yet proves. The date of 4000
B. C. for man’s appearance, with which belief the nineteenth century
started, has been pushed back by one discovery after another. Estimates
of from 10,000 to 200,000 years have been given from various possible
clews. In Egypt an exposure of 7000 years or more only gives a faint
brown tint to flints lying side by side with Paleolithic flints that
are black with age. I incline to think that 100,000 years B. C. for the
rise of the second class, and 10,000 B. C. for the rise of the sixth
class will be a moderate estimate.
Passing now from Paleolithic man of the latest geological times whose
works lie under the deposit of ages, to Neolithic man of surface
history whose polished stone tools lie on the ground, we find also how
greatly views have changed. For ages past metal-using man has looked
on the beautifully polished or chipped weapons of his forefathers as
“thunderbolts,” possessing magic powers, and he often mounted the
smaller ones to wear as charms. At the beginning of this century
well-finished stone weapons were only preserved as curiosities which
might belong to some remote age, but without any definite ideas about
them. The recognition of long ages of earlier unpolished stone work has
now put these more elaborate specimens to a comparatively late period,
and yet they are probably older than the date to which our forefathers
placed the creation of man.
The beginning of a more intelligent knowledge of such things was laid
by the systematic excavations of the burial mounds scattered over the
south of England, which was done in the early part of this century by
Sir Richard Colt Hoare. A solid basis of facts was laid, which began
to supersede the romances woven by Stukeley and others in the last
century. Gradually more exact methods of search were introduced, and in
the last thirty years Canon Greenwell has done much, and General Pitt
Rivers has established a standard of accurate and complete work with
perfect recording, which is the highest development of archæological
study. These and other researches have opened up the life of Neolithic
man to us, and we see that he was much as modern man, if compared
with the earlier stage of man as a hunter. The Neolithic man made
pottery, spun and wove linen, constructed enormous earthworks both for
defence and for burial, and systematically made his tools of the best
material he could obtain by combined labor in mining. The extensive
flint-mines in chalk districts of England show long-continued labor;
and the perfect form and splendid finish of many of the stone weapons
show that skilled leisure could be devoted to them, and that æsthetic
taste had been developed. The large camps prove that a thorough tribal
organization prevailed, though probably confined to small clans.
About the middle of the century a new type of dwelling began to be
explored—the lake dwelling; this system of building towns upon piles
in lakes had the great advantage of protection from enemies and wild
beasts, and a constant supply of food in the fish that could be hooked
from the water below. Though such settlements were first found in the
Swiss lakes, and explored there by Keller, they have since been found
in France, Hungary, Italy, Holland, and the British Isles. The earlier
settlements of this form belong to the Neolithic age, but only in
central Europe. In these earliest lake dwellings weaving was known,
and the cultivation of flax, grapes, and other fruit and corn; while
the usual domestic animals were kept and cattle were yoked to the
plough; pottery was abundant, and was often ornamented with geometric
patterns. The type of man was round-headed. Following the Neolithic
lake dwellings came those of the Bronze age, and as the bronze objects
are similar to those found in other kinds of dwellings we shall notice
them in the Bronze age in general. The type of man was longer-headed
than in the earlier lake settlement. The domestication of animals shows
an advance; the horse was common, and the dog, ox, pig, and sheep were
greatly improved. Pottery was better made and elaborately decorated,
often with strips of tin-foil.
The Bronze age marks a great step in man’s history. In many countries
the use of copper, hardened by arsenic or oxide, was common for long
before the alloy of copper and tin was used. In other countries,
where the use of metals was imported, copper only appears as a native
imitation of the imported bronze. Hence there is a true age of copper
in lands where the use of metals has grown. It must by no means be
supposed that copper excluded the use of flint; it was not until bronze
became common that flint was disused. The existence of a Bronze age
was first formulated, as distinct from a Stone age, about seventy years
ago; and the existence of a Copper age has been much disputed in the
last thirty years, but has only been proved clearly ten years ago, in
Egypt.
In the eighteenth century the bronze weapons found in England were
attributed to the Romans by some writers, though others, with more
reason, argued that they were British. In the first year of the
century began the comparative study of such weapons with reference to
modern savage products. The development of the metal forms from stone
prototypes was pointed out in 1816; the tracing out of the succession
of the forms and the modes of use appeared in 1847. Further study
cleared up the details, and within the last twenty years the full
knowledge of the Bronze age in other countries has left no question as
to the general facts of the sequence of its history. In each type of
tool and weapon there appears first a very simple form imitated from
the stone implements which were earlier used. Gradually the facilities
given by the casting and toughness of the metal were used, and the
forms were modified; ornamentation was added, and thin work in embossed
patterns gave the stiffness and strength which had been attained before
by massive forms. The general types are the axe—first a plain slip of
metal, later developed with a socket; then the chisel, gouge, sickle,
knife, dagger, sword, spear, and shield; personal objects, as pins,
necklets, bracelets, ear-rings, buttons, buckles, and domestic caldrons
and cups. Most of these forms were found together, all worn out and
broken, in the great bronze-founder’s hoard at Bologna.
Lastly in the prehistory of Europe comes the Iron age, which so much
belongs to the historical period that we can best consider it in
noticing separate countries.
From the recent discoveries in Egypt we can gain some idea of the date
of these periods. We ventured to assign about 10,000 B. C. for the rise
of the Neolithic or polished-stone period (it may very possibly be
earlier); the beginning of the use of copper may be placed about 5000
B. C.; the beginning of bronze was perhaps 3000 or 2000 B. C., as its
free use in Egypt is not till 1600 B. C.; and the use of iron beginning
about 1000 B. C., probably in Armenia, spreading thence through Europe
until it reached Italy, perhaps 700 years B. C., and Britain about 400
B. C. Such is the briefest outline of the greater part of the history
of man, massed together in one general term of “prehistoric,” before we
reach the little fringe of history nearest to our own age. The whole of
this knowledge results from the work of the century.
We now turn to the historical ages of each of the principal countries,
to review what advance has been made even where a basis of written
record has come down to us, equally accessible in all recent times.
EGYPT
At the beginning of the century Egypt was a land of untouched and
inexplicable mystery; the hieroglyphics were wondered at, and puzzled
over, without any idea of how they were to be read, whether as symbols
or as letters. The history was entirely derived from the confused
accounts of Greek authors, the lists remaining of Manetho’s history,
written about 260 B. C., and the allusions in the Bible. The attempt to
make everything fit to the ideas of the Greeks, and to make everything
refer to the Biblical history, greatly retarded the understanding of
the monuments, and is scarcely overcome yet. The first great step
forward was when an inscription was found at Rosetta, in 1799, written
in two methods, the monumental hieroglyphic and the popular demotic,
along with a Greek version. By 1802 some groups of each writing had
been translated. Young identified more signs, and Gell, by 1822, could
successfully apportion three-quarters of the signs to the Greek words.
The next step was to apply the modern Coptic language, descended from
the ancient Egyptian, to the reading of the words. Gell had been doing
so, but it needed a student of Coptic—Champollion—to carry this out
thoroughly, as he did in 1821–32. Since then advance in reading has
been only a matter of detail, not requiring any new principles.
The knowledge of the art began with the admiration for the debased work
of Roman times, the principal interest at the beginning of the century.
Then the excavations among the Rameside monuments at Thebes, about
1820–30, took attention back to the age of 1500–1000 B. C. The work of
Lepsius, and later of Mariette, from 1840–80, opened men’s eyes to the
splendid work of the early dynasties, about 4000–3000 B. C. And lastly
the excavations of 1893–99 have fascinated scholars by a view of the
rise of the civilization and the prehistoric period before 5000 B. C.
Throughout the greater part of the century the archæology of Egypt lay
untouched; all attention was given to the language; and even Gardner
Wilkinson’s fine view of the civilization (1837) depended largely on
Greek authors, and had no perspective of history in tracing changes and
development. It is only in the last ten or fifteen years that any exact
knowledge has been acquired about the rise and progress of the various
arts of life; this study now enables us to date the sculpture, metal
work, pottery, and other art products as exactly as we can those of the
Middle Ages.
The view that we now have of the rise and decay of this great
civilization and its connection with other lands is more complete and
far-reaching than that of any other country. In the early undated
age, before the monarchy which began about 4800 B. C., a flourishing
civilization was spread over upper Egypt. Towns were built of brick,
as in later times; clothing was made of woven linen and of leather;
pottery was most skilfully formed, without the potter’s wheel,
hand-made, yet of exquisite regularity and beauty of outline, while the
variety of form is perhaps greater than in any other land; stone vases
were made entirely by hand, without a lathe, as perfect in form as the
pottery, and of the hardest rocks, as diorite and granite; wood was
carved for furniture; the art of colored glazing was common, and was
even applied to glazing over large carvings in rock crystal; ornaments
and beads were wrought of various stones and precious metals; ivory
combs with carved figures adorned the hair; ivory spoons were used
at the table; finely formed weapons and tools of copper served where
strength was needful, while more useful were flint knives and lances
which were wrought with a miraculous finish that has never been reached
by any other people; and games were played with dainty pieces made of
hard stone and of ivory. But all this tasteful skill of 6000–5000 B. C.
had its negative side; in the artistic copying of nature the mechanical
skill of these people carried them a very little way; their figures and
heads of men and animals are strangely crude. And they had no system
of writing, although marks were commonly used. They always buried the
body doubled up, and often preserved the head and hands separately.
Commerce was already active, and large rowing-galleys carried the wares
of different countries around the Mediterranean. These people were the
same as the modern Kabyle, of Algeria, and akin to the South European
races, but with some negro admixture. Our whole knowledge of this age
has only been gained within the last five years.
At about 5000 B. C. there poured into Egypt a very different people,
probably from the Red Sea. Having far more artistic taste, a commoner
use of metals, a system of writing already begun, and a more organized
government, these fresh people started a new civilization in Egypt;
adopting readily the art and skill of the earlier race, they formed by
their union the peculiar culture known as Egyptian, a type which lasted
for four thousand years. The same foundation of a type is seen in the
bodily structure; the early historical people had wider heads and more
slender noses than the prehistoric, but from 4000 B. C. down to Roman
times the form shows no change.
From this union of two able races came one of the finest peoples ever
seen, the Egyptians of the old kingdom, 4500—3500 B. C. Full of grand
conceptions, active, able, highly mechanical, and yet splendid artists,
they have left behind them the greatest masses of building, the most
accurate workmanship and exquisite sculptures in the grand pyramids
and tombs of their cemeteries. They perfected the art of organizing
combined labor on the immense public works. In all these respects
no later age or country has advanced beyond this early ability. The
moral character and ideas are preserved to us in the writings of these
people; and we there read of the ability, reserve, steadfastness, and
kindliness which we see reflected in the lifelike portraiture of that
age.
After a partial decay about 3000 B. C. this civilization blossomed out
again nobly in the twelfth dynasty about 2600 B. C.; though the works
of this age hardly reach the high level of the earlier times, yet they
are finer than anything that followed them. At this period more contact
with other countries is seen; both Syria and the Mediterranean were
known, though imperfectly.
To this succeeded another decadence, sealed by the disaster of the
foreign invasion of the Hyksos. But this was thrown off by the rise of
a third age of brilliance—the eighteenth dynasty, 1500 B. C.—which,
though inferior to early times in its highest work, yet shines by the
widespread of art and luxury throughout the upper classes. Magnificence
became fashionable, and the lower classes contented themselves with
most barefaced imitations of costly wares. Foreign islands came
closely in contact with Egypt. The ships of the Syrian coast and
Cyprus continually traded to and fro, exchanging silver, copper, and
precious stones for the gold of Egypt. Greece also traded its fine
pottery of the Mycenæan age for the showy necklaces of gold and the
rings and amulets with names of Pharaohs. Egypt then dominated the
shores of the western Mediterranean, the plains of the Euphrates, and
the fertile Soudan. But this power and wealth led to disaster. Like
Rome, later on, she could not resist the temptation to live on plunder;
heavy tribute of corn was exacted, large numbers were employed in
unproductive labor, and national disaster was the natural consequence.
Egypt never recovered the dominion or the splendor that were hers in
this age. Of this period some slight notions are given us from literary
remains in the Bible and Greek authors; but archæology is, so far, our
only practical guide, as in the earlier ages. The great temples and
monuments of the eighteenth-twentieth dynasties (1600–1100 B. C.) bear
hundreds of historical inscriptions, the tombs are covered with scenes
of private life, the burials and the ruins of towns furnish us with all
the objects of daily use. This age is one of the fullest and richest
in all history, and hardly any other is better known even in Greece or
Italy. Yet all this has been brought to light in the century, and the
knowledge of the foreign relations of Egypt is entirely the result of
the last fifteen years.
The final thousand years of the civilization of Egypt is checkered
with many changes; sometimes independent, as in the ages of Shishak
of Necho, and of the Ptolemies; at other times a prey to Ethiopians,
Persians, Greeks, or Romans. Its arts and crafts show a constant decay,
and there was but little left to resist the influence of Greek taste
and design, which ran a debased course in the country. There was,
however, a spread of manufactures and of cheap luxuries into lower and
lower classes; and the wealth of the country accumulated under the
beneficent rule of the earlier Ptolemies (300–200 B. C.).
The principal discoveries about these later ages have been in the
papyri, which have been largely found during the last twenty years.
The details of the government and life of the country in the Ptolemaic
(305–30 B. C.) and Roman (30 B. C.–640 A. D.) periods have been cleared
up; and many prizes of classical literature have also been recovered.
The archæology of the Middle Ages in Egypt has also been studied.
Many of the Arabic buildings have been recently cleaned and put in
good condition, and the splendid collection of manuscripts in Cairo
has opened a view of the beautiful art of the thirteenth-fifteenth
centuries so closely akin to what was done in Europe at the same time.
Egypt is, then, before all other lands, the country of archæology. A
continuous history of seven thousand years, with abundant remains of
every period to illustrate it, and a rich prehistoric age before that,
give completeness to the study and the fullest value to archæological
research.
MESOPOTAMIA
The valley of the Euphrates might well rival that of the Nile if it
were scientifically explored, but unhappily all the excavation has been
done solely with a view to inscription and sculpture, and no proper
record has been made, nor have any towns been examined, the only work
being in palaces and temples.
The earliest study on the ground was by Rich (1818–20), who gathered
some few sculptures and formed an idea of Assyrian art. The French
Consul, Botta, excavated Khorsabad (founded 700 B. C.) in 1834–35, and
Layard excavated Nimrud in 1845–47; these were both Assyrian sites.
The older Babylonian civilization was touched at Erech by Loftus, in
1849–52; and this age has attracted the most important excavations
made since, at Tello by Sarzec (1876–81), and at Nippur by Peters and
Haynes, of Philadelphia, during the last few years.
The cuneiform characters were absolutely unexplained until Grotefend,
in 1800, resolved several of them by taking inscriptions which he
presumed might contain names of Persian kings and comparing them
alongside of the known names; thus—without a single fixed point to
start from—he tried a series of hypotheses until he found one which
fitted the facts. Bournouf (in 1836) and Lassen (1836–44) rectified and
completed the alphabet. But the cuneiform signs were used to write many
diverse languages, as the Roman alphabet is used at present; and the
short Persian alphabet was only a fraction of the great syllabary of
six hundred signs used for Assyrian. Rawlinson had independently made
out the Persian alphabet, using the Zend and Sanskrit for the language.
He next, from the trilingual Behistun inscription in Persian, Assyrian,
and Vannic, resolved the long Assyrian syllabary, using Hebrew for the
language. Since then other more obscure languages written in cuneiform
have been worked with more or less success; the most important is
the Turanian language, used by the earlier inhabitants of Babylonia
before the Semitic invasion; this is recorded by many syllabaries and
dictionaries, and translations compiled by the literary Semitic kings.
The general view of the civilization which has been obtained by these
labors of the century shows it to have been more important to the
world than any other. Cuneiform was the literary script of the world
for at least six thousand years, the only medium of writing from the
Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. The Babylonian culture was almost
certainly the source of the oldest present civilization—that of China.
And the arts were developed probably even earlier than in Egypt. The
first inhabitants were called Sumirian (or river folk) in distinction
from the Accadian (or highland) people, who came from Elam down into
the Euphrates valley, bringing with them the use of writing. Their
earliest writing was of figure symbols (like the Egyptian and Hittite);
but as in the valley clay tablets were the only material for writing,
the figures became gradually transformed into groups of straight lines
and spots impressed on the clay; hence the signs were formalized into
what we call cuneiform. The Semitic invaders were using cuneiform
characters by about 3000 B. C.
The early civilization was intensely religious, the main buildings
being the temples, which were placed on enormous piles of brick-work.
The sculpture was at a high level in the time of Naram-Sinn, about
3750 B. C.; and yet below his ruins at Nippur there are no less than
thirty-five feet depth of earlier ruins, which must extend back to
6000 or 7000 B. C. In early times stone implements were used alongside
of copper and bronze, as we find in Egypt 4000 B. C. Pottery was well
made, and also reliefs in terra-cotta. Personal ornaments of engraved
gems and gold-work were common.
The main landmarks in the later time of this civilization are the
Elamite invasion of Kudur-nan-khundi (2280 B. C.) which upset the
Semitic rulers, and the Assyrian invasion of Tiglath-Adar (1270
B. C.), after which interest centres in the Assyrian kingdom and its
development of the Mesopotamian culture which it borrowed. The main
buildings of the Assyrian kings were their enormous palaces, the mass
of which was of unbaked bricks, faced with alabaster slabs; such were
the works of Assurnazir-pal (Nimrud, 880 B. C.), Sargon (Khorsabad,
710 B. C.), Sennacherib and Assurbani-pal (Kouyunjik, 700 B. C.). The
later, Assyrian, form of the civilization was to the earlier Chaldean
much what Rome was to Greece, a rather clumsy borrower, who laboriously
preserved the literature and art. Some of the Assyrian sculpture
of animals is, however, perhaps unsurpassed for vivid action. The
systematic libraries, containing copies of all the older literature
for general study, were most creditable, though the Assyrian himself
composed nothing better than chronicles. Nearly all that we possess
of Babylonian religion, and much of the history, is in the copies
scrupulously made from the ancient tablets by the Assyrian scribes, who
noted every defect in the original with critical fidelity.
The Mesopotamian civilization has left its mark on the modern world.
Its religion greatly influenced Hebrew, and thence Christian, thought,
the psalms, for instance, being a Babylonian form of piety. Its science
fixed the signs of the zodiac, the months of the year, the days of the
week, and the division of the circle in degrees, all of which are now
universal. And its art, carried by the Phœnicians, was copied by the
Greeks and Etruscans, and thus passed on into modern design.
SYRIA
The knowledge of Palestine was but slight, and of northern Syria
nothing to speak of, a century ago. Travellers with some scientific
ability, such as Robinson (1838 and 1852), De Saulcy (1853), and
Van de Velde (1854), greatly extended our view and led up to the
splendid survey by the Palestine Exploration Fund (1866 and on), which
exhausted the surface study of the land. The more archæological work of
excavation was begun at Jerusalem (1867–70), and resumed (1892–99) at
Lachish, Jerusalem, etc. The topographical results are all important,
and leave nothing to be done until excavation can be freely applied;
and the small amount of digging yet done has fixed the varieties of
pottery back to 2000 B. C. and given some early architecture. But the
ruins of Syria, and indeed of Turkey in general, are practically yet
untouched. The discovery (1868) of the inscription of Mesha, King of
Moab (896 B. C.), opened a new prospect of research which cannot yet
be entered upon. In the north of Syria nothing has been done except
the German work at Singerli, from which came an Aramean inscription of
about 740 B. C. And in the south a large number of early inscriptions
of the Arabian dynasties, reaching back some centuries B. C., have been
copied; but there, also, excavation is impossible.
The main new light from Syria has been on the Hittite power.
Burckhardt, in 1812, had noticed a new kind of hieroglyph at Hamath.
After several ineffective copies, Wright made casts of the stones
in 1872. Several other such inscriptions have been found, and from
these and the Egyptian and Assyrian references to the Hittites we now
realize that they were a northern people, with a great capital on the
Euphrates, at Karkhemish, and ruling over nearly all Syria and Asia
Minor. Little has yet been fixed about the writing; a few signs are
read and some have passed into the Cypriote alphabet. A striking proof
of the spread of Babylonian culture is seen in the tablets found in
Egypt at Tel-el-Amarna in 1887, which show that all the correspondence
between Egypt and Syria in the fifteenth century B. C. was carried on
in cuneiform. These hundreds of letters give a vivid picture of life in
Syria at that early date.
GREECE
The revival of interest in Greek civilization was at first purely
literary, and remained so during two or three centuries. But during the
last century various travellers and residents abroad made collections
which awoke an interest in the art; and though most of these collectors
were content with merely showy sculpture, greatly restored and
falsified for the market, yet some—such as Hamilton—took a real
archæological interest in the unearthing and collecting of ancient art.
The condition of study at the end of the eighteenth century was that
many private men of wealth had bought large quantities of sculpture
which was but little understood, and looked on more from a decorative
than a scientific point of view, while there were the beginnings of a
serious appreciation of it which had been just laid down by Winckelmann.
The nineteenth century opened with a grand work of publishing the
principal treasures of classical art in England, which was finally
issued in 1809 by Payne, Knight, and Townley; this marks the highest
point of the dilettante collecting spirit, which was soon eclipsed by
truer knowledge. Hitherto the best sculpture had hardly been known but
at second hand through Roman copies; a closer acquaintance began with
the travels of Dodwell, Gell, and Leake, all in the first decade of
the century. The free opening of the British Museum, in 1805, and the
accumulation there of all the best collections within the first quarter
of the century, also served to educate a public taste. The first
struggle of scientific and artistic knowledge against the dilettante
spirit was over the Elgin marbles; by 1816 they were accepted as the
masterpieces which all later criticism has proved them to be. The
Æginetan and Phigaleian sculptures, brought to Munich and London,
helped also to show the nobility of early Greek art; so that the last
two generations have had a canon of taste to rely upon, the value of
which cannot be overestimated.
Following on this noble foundation, other collectors worked in
Greece and Asia Minor, and the British Museum profited by the
labors of Burgon, Fellows, and Woodhouse between 1840 and 1860. The
diplomatically supported work of Newton on the Mausoleum (1857–58),
and Wood at Ephesus (1863–75), filled out our knowledge of the middle
period of Greek art (350 B. C.). Comparatively little has been done
since then by England, but the activity of the Germans at Olympia
has given us the only original masterpiece that is known—the Hermes
of Praxiteles (350 B. C.), and their work at Pergamon revealed the
great altar belonging to the later age (180 B. C.). The excavations
at Athens (in 1886) have produced the impressive statues dedicated to
Athene about 520 B. C., which reveal the noble rise of Attic sculpture.
But attention during the last quarter-century has been largely fixed
upon the earlier ages. The discoveries of Schliemann at Hissarlik
(Troy, 1870–82), Mycenæ (1876), Orchomenos (1880–81), and Tiryns
(1884), opened a new world of thought and research. Though at first
bitterly attacked, it is now agreed that these discoveries show us the
civilization of Greece between 2000 and 1000 B. C. Lastly, during ten
years past Egypt has provided the solid chronology for prehistoric
Greece by discoveries of trade between the two countries.
We can now very briefly estimate the present position of our knowledge
as gained during the century. Setting aside the early foreign pottery
found in Egypt, which belongs probably to Greece or Italy at 5000 and
3000 B. C., we first touch a civilized city in the lowest town of Troy,
where metal was scarcely yet in use, which is certainly before 2000
and probably about 3000 B. C. in date. Succeeding that is the finely
built second Troy, rich in gold vases and ornaments, which—though
mistaken by Schliemann for the Homeric Troy—must yet be long before
that, probably before 2000 B. C. After the burning of that come three
other rebuildings before we reach the town of the age of Mycenæ, about
1500 B. C. Of this, which was in Greece the climax of the prehistoric
civilization, there are the splendid treasures found at Mycenæ, the
magnificent domed tombs, the abundance of fine jewelry and metal-work,
of beautiful pottery and glazed ornament. To this age belong the
great palaces of Mycenæ, Tiryns, Athens, and other hill fortresses,
of which hardly more than the plans can now be traced. And it is this
civilization which traded eagerly with Egypt, exchanging the valued
manufactures of each country. This period was at its full bloom from
1500–1200 B. C., and began to decay by 1100 B. C., this dating being
given by the contact with Egypt.
This natural decadence of art in Greece was hastened by the invasion
of the barbarous Dorians about 1000 B. C. Art, however, was by no
means extinguished, but only repressed by the troubles of the age; and
Athens, which was not conquered by the Dorians, was the main centre of
the revival of the arts. Other examples of such a history are familiar
in Egypt (after the Hyksos invasion) and in Italy (after the Lombards),
where earlier abilities revive and bloom afresh when vigorous invaders
become united to an artistic stock. After the centuries of warfare
a quieter age allowed the growth of fine arts again in the seventh
century B. C., largely influenced by Egyptian and Assyrian work at
second hand, through the Greek settlements in Cyprus and Egypt. By
600 B. C. definite types of sculpture were started, and a course
was begun which only ended in the fall of classical civilization.
The century before the Persian invasion, in 480 B. C., was one of
rapid development; and in sculpture and vase-painting we see that
this century carried forward the arts to technical perfection and the
highest power of expression. Immediately after the Persian wars came
the supreme works of Pheidias and Myron, most familiar in the Parthenon
and the Discobolus; and in vase-painting comes the reversal from vases
drawn in black on a red ground to the blocking out of the ground in
black, leaving the figure in red, thus giving far greater scope to the
filling in of finely drawn detail. The civilization of Athens was also
at its height in this age, under Pericles, and the minor arts received
their most refined and perfect treatment. After this comes nothing but
ripening to decay. It must always be remembered that we have but very
few examples of original work of the great artists. Nearly all the
actual marbles preserved are copies made in later times, which show
little of the delicacy of the original; and the few original marbles
that remain are mostly of unknown subjects by unknown men. The great
work in Greek archæology during the last fifty years has been comparing
the records of ancient art (in Pliny, Pausanias, etc.) with the
remaining sculptures, critically assigning the various types of statues
to their celebrated originals, and thus forming some idea of the real
history of Greek art.
From these studies, full of detail and controversy, we may briefly sum
up the characteristics of the principal artists and their imitators. At
about 440 B. C. Pheidias showed in the Parthenon the highest expression
of divine and mythic forms, in a simple and heroic style which was
never equalled. Half a century later Polykleitos followed a more human
expression, using motives (as in the Doryphoros), but yet portraying an
abstract humanity. By 330 B. C. Praxiteles brought the expression of
moods to his works, graceful, animated, and with a full ripeness, as
in the Hermes of Olympia, or the Faun. Skopas, slightly later, marked
his work by his great vigor and strong personality. This was the second
turning-point, when ripeness passed into decay; and in Lysippos there
is mere vivid naturalism and an impressionist manner without much soul
or thought, as in his Apoxyomenos, about 330 B. C. After this mere
triviality and genre subjects are usual, portraiture is a common aim,
and dignity was vainly striven for in colossal size. The glorification
of showing dead and vanquished enemies is seen in the Dying Gaul and
figures of slain foes at Pergamon. Later on, about 180 B. C., we
see the violent, complicated, and straining action of the figures
around the great altar of Pergamon, which also appears in the groups
of the Laocoon and Farnese Bull. In the Græco-Roman age a conscious
artificiality took the place of life and expression, as we see in the
Apollo Belvidere, the Venus di Medici, and the Farnese Hercules. Art
was saved in the first century A. D. by the devotion of portraiture,
which gave a sense of reality and conviction which is entirely absent
in the imaginative works. Lastly, a painstaking study and admiration of
earlier works led, under the wealthy patronage of Hadrian (130 A. D.),
to an eclectic revival which was wholly artificial, and passed away
within a generation. We have fixed on sculpture as the most complete
expression of Greek art; in other directions there is neither enough
material nor enough research to give us a connected view. Not a single
town, hardly a single house, in Greece has been excavated; there is no
consecutive knowledge of the ordinary products and objects of life;
and there is very little recorded of the discoveries of the tombs. The
artistic interest of the sculpture and architecture has starved other
branches of archæology, and for Greece more remains to be done than for
some less celebrated lands.
ITALY
The interest in Italy at the beginning of the nineteenth century was
mainly for the sake of its second-hand version of Greek art, and for
the architecture and painting of the Renaissance. On the contrary, now
the objects from Greece itself have far eclipsed the Italian copies,
and the interest lies in the early Italian civilization and its purely
Roman derivatives; while modern taste values the mediæval art of Italy
far from the bastard products of the florid age which followed. The
first detailed studies in Italy were those on Pompeii, especially by
Gell (1817), which made that debased style very popular, and paved the
way for appreciation of better work. The various isolated discoveries
of Etruscan tombs were summed up in the admirable work of Dennis
(1848), which presented a general view of that civilization which has
not been superseded. The earlier Italic culture has been examined in
many places where accidental discoveries have revealed it during the
latter half of the nineteenth century, and especially in the systematic
work of Zannoni, at Bologna (1870–75), and of Orsi, lately, in Sicily.
The history of the city of Rome has been almost rewritten in the
last thirty years owing to the great changes of the new government;
these have been largely worked by Lanciani, and recorded by him and
Middleton. The view of Italian history at present begins in the Stone
age, which has been well studied, and has links with the later periods,
as in the general use of black pottery. The earliest metal objects are
very simple blades of daggers, found in graves, mingled with flint
arrow-heads and knives. The admirable Italian plan of preserving whole
burials undisturbed in museums enables us to see these graves complete
in the Kircherian Museum. A special branch of the early Bronze age
life was the system of lake dwellings (natural or artificially water
girt), which abound in the northern Italian lakes and over the plain
of Lombardy. These towns (“terra mare”) are arranged on a rectangular
plan, and form the earliest stage of many of the present cities. The
full development of the Bronze age civilization seems to have been
later than in Greece, at about 800 B. C., to which belong the great
discoveries of tombs, weapons, and tools at Bologna, and the cemetery
of Falerii.
Upon all the native Italic civilization came an entirely different
influence from the immigrant Etruscan. Traditionally coming from
Asia Minor, he brought art and religion which had no relation to the
Italic. The earliest Etruscan paintings are strongly northern in style,
influenced by north European feeling (Veii). But soon the Etruscan
borrowed largely from other races, from the Greek mainly, but also
from Assyria and Egypt. Thus the fascinating problem in Italy is to
distinguish the various sources of Italic, Etruscan, Græco-Etruscan,
Oriental-Etruscan, and pure Greek, which are found in all degrees of
combination before Roman times, and which can still be traced through
the Roman age. The characteristics of Etruscan taste are: (1) The
extraneous objects and figures, such as rows of pendants to a metal
vase, monstrous heads standing out from a bowl, and statuettes placed
for handles; (2) in forms of vases and furniture, the combination of
many different parts and curves which never form a whole design; (3)
and in sculpture the large round head and staring eyes. In general, an
air of clumsy adaptation by a race deficient in originality. The glory
of the Etruscan was his engineering, which he handed as a legacy to
Rome. Strange to say, although thousands of Etruscan inscriptions are
known, and many words are translated, yet the language is sealed to us,
and none of the many attempts to read it has succeeded. The scientific
study of Etruscan tombs has been well followed lately, as shown in the
Florence Museum, where a separate room is devoted to each city.
In the south of Italy Greek art prevailed, and many of the finest
works belong to this civilization. The Greek in Italy had rather
different ideals to those of Greece; he started more from the level
of Polykleitos and Praxiteles than from the severe age; his favorite
type is that of youth and adolescence, never of maturity. The grace and
feeling of such bronze statues as the Hermes and so-called Sappho of
Herculaneum are peculiar to southern Italy. And when the Greek artist
penetrated north and allied himself with the mechanical skill of the
Etruscan, such splendid work was done as the Orator of Sanguineto.
Rome in the earlier centuries was an Italic town which came under
Etruscan influence as Tuscany was conquered. But from the age of
foreign conquest in the first century B. C., Greek art in a debased
form ruled over all else, and ran into utter degradation in the third
century A. D. It was this art that the power of Rome spread around the
whole Mediterranean, from Palmyra to Britain, and is the parent of most
modern decoration. But in the great reconstruction of the empire under
Diocletian the debased Greek taste was mostly shaken off, and Rome
went back to the old Italic-Etruscan style and motives. The statues
have the round heads and staring eyes of old Etruria; the taste for
quaint accessories, such as lions supporting objects, came back and
passed into mediæval art, and the exaggerated, lengthy forms of men and
animals reappeared.
Of the Christian period De Rossi’s work in the catacombs has given
a firm base of facts for the third to the sixth century A. D., the
actual tomb and body of Saint Cecilia being the most striking result.
The later Roman and mediæval age in Italy is full of interest, but in
that—as in the rest of mediæval Europe—research has been mainly on
architecture and objects which are not the result of excavation.
INDIA
The Hindus have never been chronologists or historians, and their
great Sanskrit literature tells practically nothing about the rise of
Buddhism, the invasion of Alexander, or the spread of civilization in
Indo-China. All before the Islamic conquest in the tenth century A. D.
is in a mist of Puranic mythology. Here, then, more than in other
countries, archæology has restored the history, and done so entirely
within the nineteenth century.
The existence of Sanskrit literature was revealed to the West by Sir
William Jones at the end of the last century, and this gave scope to
Oriental scholars, while antiquities only interested the collector. But
serious exploration was led by Prinsep, whose decipherment of the Asoka
inscriptions in 1837, which ranks with the achievements of Champollion
and Rawlinson, gave the key to a mass of inscriptions.
His assistant, Cunningham, excavated many sites and collected coins,
being head of the Archæological Survey from 1861 to 1885. Fergusson
was the historian of Indian architecture; Burgess has published the
cave-temples in west and south India; Sewell in Madras and Führer in
the northwest have excavated and explored, and a few native pundits
have been educated to such research. The government, in financial
difficulty, has withdrawn from the work, but the congress of
Orientalists in 1897 resolved to establish an Indian exploration fund.
Inscriptions abound in India, on copper plate, stone pillars, and
native rock. Those in Sanskrit, or modern vernaculars, are records of
land grants or local dynasties. The oldest—in two different alphabets
(of Semitic origin)—are the famous edicts of Asoka (third century
B. C.), who has been called The Buddhist Constantine. He placed these
monuments of his power and religion around his frontiers of northern
India; but their meaning was forgotten until Prinsep’s decipherment.
The Hindus seem to have a coinage of stamped silver plate before
Alexander; but regular coinage begins in the Bactrian kingdoms (200
B. C.–200 A. D.), with Greek and native inscriptions. Since then the
coinage is continuous, and invaluable for history. No stone building
or sculpture is older than Alexander (327 B. C.), or certainly earlier
than Asoka (264–233 B. C.). Greek influence is plain in the Punjab,
but native style is seen in the cave-temples. The richest results have
been from the mounds, some of which are ruins of forts or palaces,
but the more important are the _stupas_, lofty domes erected two to
one thousand years ago to enshrine Buddhist relics. These domes are
surrounded with sculptured reliefs of scenes in the life of Buddha,
and are often dated by inscriptions. From one lately opened the Buddha
relic has been sent to the King of Siam, the only Buddhist king. Much
has been done by the government in publishing and providing casts and
photographs; but India yet needs a scientific archæologist to record
details with the accuracy demanded by modern research.
AMERICA
Archæological work in the United States and in Central America was
begun by Squier about the middle of the century, and the attention
thus drawn to the subject has borne fruit in the more accurate and
scientific explorations connected with the surveying and geological
departments, and, above all, those of the Smithsonian Bureau of
Ethnology. The names of Whitney, Wright, Cyrus Thomas, Holmes, Fowke,
Mindeleff, and others, will be familiar to all American readers by
their work of the last twenty years, and need no introducing here.
The earliest remains of man in America—or perhaps in the world—are
those beneath the great lava beds of California; since those were
deposited the rivers have cut their beds through two thousand to four
thousand feet of lava rock, implying an erosion during tens, or perhaps
hundreds, of thousands of years. But little can be assigned, however,
with any certainty to a date before the Christian era, though mounds of
refuse on both ocean shores may probably belong to an age before any
human history.
The most important studies have been those on the highest civilization
of the continent, that of Central America. The destroying Spaniards
preserved but little of native record, except incidentally, and the
first collector of Aztec manuscripts was Benaduci (1736), of whose
treasures but an eighth survived his imprisonments and persecutions,
one of the greatest disasters to history. The first great publication
of manuscripts was the magnificent work of Lord Kingsborough (1830);
and almost at the same time appeared Prescott’s history. Though the
later researches have shown that the land was divided into many small
kingdoms, rather than under one power, as Prescott supposed, yet his
account of the calendar and chronology of the Aztecs has been verified
and added to, and far more has been done in reading the manuscripts
than he supposed possible. Aubin, after years of work in Mexico,
brought to Europe manuscripts of an entirely new kind, showing a fully
developed system of phonetic writing, which he has largely deciphered
with success, having analyzed over one hundred syllabic values
correctly.
One of the most complete studies has been that of the Mayan Quiché
peoples, and especially of the Mayans of Yucatan. In 1864 Landa’s work
on Yucatan (written 1566) was rediscovered, and the account of the
calendar has sufficed to enable Goodman to discover the meaning of a
very large number of signs (1897); these enable the numerical documents
to be translated, and show that a period of as much as eight thousand
years was dealt with by the Mayans, perhaps belonging to mythical ages.
The alphabetic signs of Landa have proved useless so far, and Goodman
even disbelieves in any record except that of numbers. Seler has shown
the identical origin of the signs used by Aztecs and Mayans for the
days and months. Little had been done to make known these remains until
the recent explorations, casts, and publications of Maudsley, who
has worked magnificently for seventeen years at Copan, Palenque, and
Chichen-Itza; these, however, are but three of innumerable cities of
Guatemala and Yucatan that need exploration.
In New Mexico the many ruins from the Colorado to the Rio Grande have
been proved to resemble those of the modern Pueblo Indians, and to have
none of the characteristics of Central American architecture; there
are no sculptures, and the rock inscriptions are too primitive to be
interpreted. Nothing points to an Aztec occupation, and probably the
ancestors of the present people were the builders.
The innumerable earthworks of the Mississippi valley were formerly
supposed to belong to some vanished race. And the view that they were
connected with the Central American civilization is favored by the
pyramid mound, which was hardly known otherwise, and by the excellence
of the minor sculpture. But there are great differences between the two
civilizations. The mound-builders were far inferior in metal-working,
and their burial customs are peculiar. The use of materials from both
east and west coasts shows an extensive commerce. The best summing up
of the researches is that by Prof. Cyrus Thomas, after his extensive
excavations. He concludes that the remains of the mound-builders show
no great antiquity; that they were formed by tribes like the existing
Indians; that the builders were of the same culture as were the Indians
when discovered; that such mounds continued to be made and used for
burial during the European period, and that the principal builders were
the Cherokees.
It will be seen now how totally our view of man’s history has been
changed by the study of archæology, and how fundamentally this science
affects our ideas of the past and our expectations for the future of
our race. The main outlines have been dimly seen; but in every country
the greater part yet remains to be done, and in Turkey, Persia, and
China most important civilizations are as yet quite untouched by
exploration. The new century will no doubt see a harvest from these
lands; and it is to be hoped that what yet remains in the safe keeping
of the earth may be found by able men, who will preserve it for
instruction and enable posterity to trace the fortunes of our species.
[India and America are here treated with the assistance of Mr. J. S.
Cotton and Mr. D. MacIver.]
W. M. FLINDERS PETRIE.
ASTRONOMY
In looking back over a century’s work in the oldest of the sciences,
one is struck not only by the enormous advance that has been made in
those branches of the science dealing with the motions of the heavenly
bodies which were cultivated at least eight thousand years ago by
early dwellers in the valleys of the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates,
but with the fact that during the century that has just passed away
a perfectly new science of astronomy arose. By annexing physics and
chemistry astronomers now study the motions of the particles of which
all celestial bodies are composed; a new molecular astronomy has now
been firmly established side by side with the old molar astronomy which
formerly alone occupied the thoughts of star-gazers.
Along this new line our knowledge has advanced by leaps and bounds, and
the results already obtained in expanding and perfecting man’s views of
nature in all her beauty and immensity are second to none which have
been garnered during the last hundred years.
THE POSITION AT THE BEGINNING OF THE CENTURY
It may be well before attempting to obtain a glimpse of recent progress
that we should try to grasp the state of the science at the time when
the nineteenth century was about to dawn, and this, perhaps, can be
best accomplished by seeing what men were working at this period, at
which the greatest activity was to be found in Germany; there was
no permanent observatory in the southern hemisphere or in the United
States.
First and foremost among the workers—he has, in fact, been described
as “the greatest of modern astronomers”—was William Herschel, a German
domiciled in England. In the year 1773 he hired a telescope, and with
this small instrument he obtained his first glimpses of the rich fields
of exploration open in the skies. From that time onward he had one
fixed purpose in his mind, which was to obtain as intimate knowledge as
possible of the construction of the heavens.
To do this, of course, great optical power was necessary, and such was
his energy that, as large instruments were not to be obtained at any
price, he set to work and made them himself.
Herschel presented the beginning of the nineteenth century not only
with a definite idea of the constitution of the stellar system, based
on a connected body of facts and deductions from facts, as gleaned
through his telescopes, but observations without number in many fields.
He discovered a new planet, Uranus, and several satellites of the
planets; published catalogues of nebulæ; established the gravitational
bond between many “double stars,” and carried on observations of the
sun, then supposed to be a habitable globe. What Herschel did for
observational astronomy and deductions therefrom, Laplace did for the
furtherance of our knowledge concerning the exact motions of the bodies
comprising the solar system. Newton had long before announced that
gravitation was universal, and Laplace brought together investigations
undertaken to determine the validity of this law. These were given to
the world in his wonderful book on _Celestial Mechanics_, the first
volumes of which appeared in 1799.
A survey of the work of these two great astronomers gives one an idea
of what was going on in observational and mathematical astronomy at
the beginning of the century.
The study was now destined to make rapid strides, as not only were new
optical instruments—some designed for special purposes—introduced,
new mathematical processes applied, fresh fields for research
opened up, but the number of workers was considerably augmented by
the increased means available; so much so, indeed, that the first
astronomical periodical was founded by Von Zach in 1800 to facilitate
intercommunications between the observers.
The first evening of the nineteenth century (January 1, 1801) augured
well for progress. It had long been thought that all the members of
the solar system had not as yet been discovered, and there was a very
notable gap between the planets Mars and Jupiter, indicated by Bode’s
law. Observers were organized to make a thorough search for the missing
planet, portions of the sky being divided between them for minute
examination. It fell to the Italian observer, Piazzi, to discover a
small body which was moving in an orbit between these two planets on
the date named. The century thus began with a sensation, and because
the new body, which was named “Ceres,” was not of sufficient size to be
accepted as the “missing planet,” the idea was suggested that perhaps
it was a fragment of a larger planet that had been blown to pieces in
the past.
An opportunity here arose for mathematical astronomy to come to the
help of the observer, for Ceres soon was lost in the solar rays, and in
order to rediscover it, after it had passed conjunction, an approximate
knowledge of its path and future position was necessary.
With the then existing methods of computation of orbits it was
imperative to have numerous measured positions to use as data for the
calculation. The scanty data available in the case of Ceres were not
sufficient for the application of the method. The occasion discovered a
man, one of the greatest mathematicians of the nineteenth century, Karl
Frederick Gauss, who, although only twenty-five years of age, undertook
the solution of the problem by employing a system which he had devised,
known as “the method of least squares,” which enabled him to obtain a
most probable result from a given set of observations.
This, with a more general method of orbit computation, also elaborated
by himself, was sufficient to enable him to calculate future positions
of Ceres, and on the anniversary of the original discovery, Olbers,
another great pioneer in orbit calculations, found the planet in very
nearly the position assigned by Gauss. So great was the curiosity
regarding the other portions of the planet, which was supposed to have
been shattered, that numerous observers at once commenced to search
after other fragments.
These were the _actualities_ of 1801 and thereabouts; but the seed
of much future work was sown. Kant and Laplace had already occupied
themselves with theories as to the world formation, and spectrum
analysis as applied to the heavenly bodies may be said to have been
started by Wollaston’s observations of dark lines in the solar spectrum
in 1802. Fraunhofer was then a boy at school. In the same year the
first photographic prints were produced by Wedgewood and Davy.
OBSERVATORIES
It has been stated that at the beginning of the century there were
no permanent observatories either in the southern hemisphere or in
the United States. The end of the century finds us with two hundred
observatories all told, of which fourteen are south of the equator
and forty-seven in the United States, among which latter are the
best-equipped and most active in the world.
The observatory of Parramatta was the first established (1821) in the
southern hemisphere. This was followed by that at the Cape of Good Hope
in 1829. Of the more modern southern observatories from which the best
work has come we may mention Cordova, the seat of Gould’s important
investigations, established in 1868, and Arequipa, a dependency of
Harvard, whence the spectra of the southern stars have been secured,
erected still more recently (1881).
I believe, but I do not know, that the large number of American
observatories have radiated from Cincinnati, where, in consequence of
eloquent appeals, both by voice and pen, from Mitchell, then professor
of astronomy, an observatory was commenced in 1845. There can be no
doubt that at the present moment, with the numerous well-equipped and
active observatories, and the careful and thorough teaching established
side by side with them, which enables numberless students to use the
various instruments, the United States, in matters astronomical, fills
the position occupied by Germany at the beginning of the century.
In Europe special observatories have been established at Meudon,
Kensington, and Potsdam, so that new astrophysical inquiries may be
undertaken without interfering with the prosecution or extension of the
important meridional work carried on at Paris, Greenwich, and Berlin.
A large proportion of the observations made by the Lick and Yerkes
observatories in the United States has been astrophysical.
One of the special inquiries committed to the charge of the Solar
Physics Observatory at Kensington at its establishment by the
British government had relation to the possibility of running home
meteorological changes on the earth, especially those followed by
drought and famines in various parts of the empire, to the varying
changes in the sun indicated by the ebb and flow of spots on its
surface. With this end in view observations of the sun were commenced
in India and the Mauritius to supplement those taken at Greenwich. At
the same time other daily observations of sun spots by a different
method were commenced at Kensington.
This kind of work was at first considered ideally useless; we shall see
later on what has become of it.
IMPROVEMENTS IN TELESCOPES
The progress in astronomical science throughout the nineteenth century
has naturally to a great extent depended upon the advances made both
in the optics of the telescope and the way in which they are mounted,
either with circles to record exact times and positions, or made to
move so as to keep a star or other celestial objects in the field of
view while under observation. The perfection of definition and the
magnitude of the lenses employed in the modern instrument have been
responsible for many important discoveries.
Ever since the telescope was invented—Galileo’s lens was smaller
than those used in spectacles—men’s minds have been concentrated on
producing instruments of larger and larger size to fathom the cosmos to
its innermost depths.
At the beginning of the century we were, as we have seen already, in
possession of reflectors of large dimensions; Herschel’s four-foot
mirror, the instrument he was using in 1801, which had a focal length
of forty feet, was capable of being employed with high magnifying
powers; and it was the judicious use of these, on occasions when the
finest of weather prevailed, that enabled him to enrich so extensively
our knowledge of the stellar and planetary systems. For the ordinary
work of astronomy, however, especially when circles are used,
refractors are the more suitable instruments. This form suffers less
from the vicissitudes of weather and temperature, and is, therefore,
more suited where exact measurements are required.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century a Swiss artisan, Pierre
Guinard, after many years of patient labor, succeeded in producing pure
disks of flint glass as large as six inches in diameter. The modern
refracting telescope thus became possible.
In 1804 there was started at Munich the famous optical and mechanical
institute, which soon made its presence felt in the astronomical world.
Reforms in instrument making were soon taken in hand, and under the
leadership of the great German astronomer, Bessel, great strides were
made in instruments of precision. Fraunhofer, who had been silently
working away at the theory of lenses, and making various experiments
in the manufacture of glass, was joined, in 1805, by Guinard. In 1809
Troughton invented a new method of graduating circles, according to
Airy the greatest improvement ever achieved in the art of instrument
making.
In 1824 Fraunhofer successfully completed and perfected an object-glass
of 9.9 inches in diameter for the Dorpat Observatory. This objective
might literally have been called a “giant,” for nothing approaching it
in size had been previously made.
England, which was at one time the exclusive seat of the manufacture of
refracting telescopes, was now completely outstripped by both Germany
and France, and for this we had to thank “the short-sighted policy of
the government, which had placed an exorbitant duty on the manufacture
of flint glass.” In 1833 the Dorpat refractor was eclipsed by one of
fifteen inches aperture made for the Pulkowa Observatory by Merz &
Mähler, Fraunhofer’s successors, who about ten years later supplied a
similar instrument to Harvard College. At that time Lord Rosse emulated
with success the efforts of Herschel and rehabilitated the reflector by
producing a metallic mirror of six-foot aperture and fifty-four-foot
focal length which he mounted at Parsonstown. The speculum weighed
no less than four tons. To mount this immense mass efficiently and
safely was a work of no light nature, but he successfully accomplished
it, and eventually both mirror and the telescope, which weighed now
altogether fourteen tons, were so well counterpoised that they could be
easily moved in a limited direction by means of a windlass worked by
two men. The perfection of the “seeing” qualities of this instrument
and its enormous light-grasping powers were particularly striking, and
observational astronomy was considerably enriched by the discoveries
made with it.
Speculum metal was not destined to stay; ten years later (1857) the
genius of Léon Foucault introduced glass mirrors with a thin coating of
silver deposited chemically, and these have now universally superseded
the metallic ones.
The long supremacy of Germany in the matter of refractors was broken
down ultimately by the famous English optician and engineer, Thomas
Cooke, of York. His first considerable instrument, one of seven
inches aperture, was finished in 1851; and in 1865, a year before his
lamented death, he completed the first of our present giant refractors,
one of twenty-five inches aperture, for Mr. Newall, of Gateshead.
In consequence of the success of Cooke’s achievement other large
refractors were soon undertaken.
Alvan Clarke, the famous optician of Cambridgeport, Massachusetts,
at once commenced a twenty-six-inch for the Washington Observatory.
The next was one of twenty-seven inches, made by Grubb for the Vienna
Observatory. Object-glasses now grew inch by inch in size, depending
on the increased dimensions of disks that could be satisfactorily cast.
Gautier, of Paris, completed a twenty-nine-and-a-half-inch for the Nice
Observatory, while Alvan Clarke made an objective of thirty inches for
Pulkowa. In 1877 the latter successfully completed the mounting of
an objective of thirty-six inches for the Lick Observatory, but this
immense lens was only achieved after a great number of failures. Even
this large object-glass was surpassed in size by the completion in 1892
of the forty-inch which he made for the Yerkes Observatory, and by that
made by Gautier for the Paris Exhibition of 1900.
So much, then, for the largest refractors. In recent years, since the
introduction of the silver on glass mirrors, with their stability of
figure and brilliant surface, which can be easily renewed, reflectors
of large apertures are again being produced. The first of these was
one of thirty-six inches aperture made by Calver for Dr. Common, who
demonstrated its fine qualities and his own skill by the beautiful
photographs of the nebula of Orion he was enabled to secure with
it. Dr. Common himself has since turned his attention to the making
and silvering of large mirrors of this kind, and the largest he has
actually completed and mounted equatorially is one with a diameter of
five feet. Another of thirty-six inches aperture is in use at the Solar
Physics Observatory at Kensington.
The progress of depositing silver on glass has led of late years to
important developments in which _plane_ mirrors are used. Foucault was
the first to utilize such mirrors in his “siderostat,” in which such a
mirror is made to move in front of a horizontal fixed telescope, which
may be of any focal length, and no expensive dome or rising floor is
required. The plane mirror of the siderostat in the Paris Exhibition
telescope is six feet in diameter.
A variation of this instrument is the cœlostat more recently advocated
by Lippmann. The Coudé equatorial mounting also depends upon the use of
plane mirrors; with such a telescope the observer is at rest at a fixed
eye-piece or camera in a room which may be kept at any temperature.
Now that in astronomical work eye observations are indispensably
supplemented by the employment of photography, an important
modification of the refracting telescope has become necessary; this was
first suggested by Rutherfurd.
The ordinary achromatic object-glass consists, as a rule, of two
lenses, one made of flint and the other of crown glass; but in this
form the photographic rays are not brought to the same focus as the
visual rays. This, however, can be achieved by employing three lenses
instead of two, each of different kinds of glass. The most modern
improvement in the telescope is due to Mr. Dennis Taylor, of Cooke &
Sons, and to Dr. Schott and Professor Abbe, whose researches in the
manufacture of old and new varieties of optical glass have rendered
Mr. Taylor’s results feasible. By the Taylor lens outstanding color is
abolished, all the rays being brought absolutely to the same focus;
such lenses can therefore be used either for visual observations or for
photography for spectroscopy.
SPECTROSCOPIC ASTRONOMY
The branch of physics which at the present day has assumed such mighty
and far-reaching proportions in astronomical work is that dealing with
spectrum analysis, which, although suggested as early as the time of
Kepler, did not receive any impetus as regards its application to
celestial bodies until the beginning of the present century at the
hands of Wollaston and Fraunhofer. Then, however, it still lacked the
chemical touch supplied afterwards by Kirchhoff and Bunsen. They showed
us that the spectrum observed when the light from any heated body is
passed through a prism is an index to the chemical composition of the
light source; the constitution of a vapor when in a condition to absorb
light can be determined by an extension of the same principle, first
demonstrated by Stokes, Angström, and Balfour Stewart, when the century
was about half completed.
The first celestial body towards which the spectroscope was turned was
our central luminary, the sun.
Wollaston first discovered that its spectrum was crossed by a few
dark lines; we learned next from Fraunhofer, who in 1814 worked with
instruments of greater power, that the solar spectrum was crossed
not only by a few dark lines, but by some hundreds. Not content with
examining the light of the sun, Fraunhofer turned his instrument
towards the stars, the light of which he also examined, so that he may
be justly called the inventor of stellar spectrum analysis. It is not
to the credit of modern science that from this time forward spectrum
analysis did not become a recognized branch of scientific inquiry, but,
as a matter of fact, Fraunhofer’s observations were buried in oblivion
for nearly half a century. The importance of them was not recognized
till the origin of the dark lines, both in sun and stars, had been
explained by Stokes and others, as before stated. The lines in the
solar spectrum were mapped with great diligence by Kirchhoff in 1861
and 1862, and later by Angström and Thalen, and this was done side by
side with chemical work in the laboratory. The chemistry of the sun was
thus to a great extent revealed; it was no longer a habitable globe,
but one with its visible boundary at a fierce heat, surrounded by an
atmosphere of metallic vapors, chief among them iron, also in a state
of incandescence. To these metallic vapors Angström added hydrogen
shortly afterwards.
Here, then, was established a firm link between the heavens and the
earth; the first step to the problem of the chemistry of space had been
taken.
It was only natural that as advances were made the instrumental
equipment should keep pace with them. Spectroscopes were built on
a larger scale; more prisms, which meant greater dispersion, were
employed to render the measurements of the lines in spectra more
accurate. The growth of our knowledge especially necessitated the
making of maps of the lines in the solar spectrum, and in the spectra
of the chemical elements which had been compared with it on a natural
scale. This was done by Angström, who utilized for this purpose the
diffraction grating invented by Fraunhofer, and defined the position of
all lines in spectra by their “wave lengths,” in ten-millionths of a
millimetre or “tenth-metres.”
In 1862 Rutherfurd extended Fraunhofer’s work on the stars by a first
attempt at classification. Two years later Huggins and Miller produced
maps of the spectra of some stars. Donati demonstrated that comets gave
radiation spectra, and Huggins did the same for nebulæ.
By these observations comets and nebulæ were shown to be
spectroscopically different from stars, which at that time were studied
by their dark lines only.
Chiefly by the labors of Pickering, the energetic head of the Harvard
Observatory, science has been enriched during the later years by
observations of thousands of stellar spectra, the study of which has
brought about the most marvellous advance in our knowledge.
These priceless data have enabled us now to classify the stars not only
by their brightness, or their color, but by their chemistry.
Next to be chronicled is the application of the so-called
Doppler-Fizeau principle, which teaches us that when a light source
is approaching or receding from us the light waves are crushed
together or drawn out, so that the wave length is changed. The amount
of change gives us the velocity of approach or recess, so that the
rate of movement of stars towards or from the earth, or the up-rush
or down-rush of the solar vapors on the sun’s disk can be accurately
determined. A further utilization of this principle is found when the
stars are so close together that they appear as one if the plane of
motion passes near the earth. A line common to the spectra of both
stars will appear double twice in each revolution, when the motion to
or from the earth, or, as it is termed, “in the line of sight,” is
greatest. “Spectroscopic doubles,” as these stars are called, yield
up many of their secrets which otherwise would elude us. Their time
of revolution, the size of the orbit, and the combined mass can be
determined.
To return from the stars to the sun.
By the device of throwing an image of the sun on the slit of the
spectroscope the spectra of solar spots have been studied from 1866
onward, and a little later the brighter portions of the sun’s outer
envelopes, revealed till then only during eclipses, were brought within
our ken spectroscopically, so that they are now studied every day.
CELESTIAL PHOTOGRAPHY
Wedgewood and Davy, in 1802, made prints on paper by means of silver
salts, but it was not until 1830 that Niepce and Daguerre founded
photography, which Arago, in an address to the French Chamber, at once
suggested might subsequently be used to record the positions of stars.
In 1839 we find Sir John Herschel carrying out a series of experiments
so important for our correct knowledge of the sequence of steps in the
early stages of photography that I have no hesitation in quoting from
one of Herschel’s manuscripts relating to a deposit on a glass plate
of “muriate” [chloride] of silver from a mixed solution of the nitrate
with common salt. The manuscript states: “After forty-eight hours [the
chloride] had formed a film firm enough to bear draining the water off
very slowly by a siphon. Having dried it, I found that it was very
little affected by light, and by washing it with nitrate of silver,
weak, and drying it, it became highly sensitive. In this state I took a
camera picture of the telescope on it.”
The original of the above-mentioned photograph, the first photograph
ever taken on glass, is now in the science collection at the Victoria
and Albert Museum, South Kensington.
In the early days of photography colored glasses were first used
to investigate the action of different colors on the photographic
plate. Sir John Herschel was among the first to propose that such
investigations should be made direct with a spectrum, and he, like Dr.
J. W. Draper, stated that he had found a new kind of light beyond the
blue end of the spectrum, as the photographic plate showed a portion of
the spectrum there which was not visible to the eye. Advance followed
advance, and in 1842 Becquerel photographed the whole solar spectrum,
in colors, with nearly all the lines registered by the hand and eye
of Fraunhofer, not only the blue end, but the complete spectrum, from
Draper’s “latent light,” as he called the ultra-violet rays, to the
extreme red end.
The first photograph of a celestial object was one of the moon, secured
by Dr. J. W. Draper in 1840; we had to wait till 1845, so far as I
know, before a daguerreotype was taken of the sun; this was done by
Foucault and Fizeau, while the first photograph of a star—Vega—was
taken at Harvard in 1850. After the introduction of the wet-collodion
process regular photography of the sun’s surface was commenced, at Sir
John Herschel’s recommendation, at Kew in 1858, and the total solar
eclipse of 1860 was made memorable by the photographs of De La Rue, who
before that time had secured most admirable photographs of the moon, as
also had Rutherfurd.
Photography now began to pay the debt she owed to spectrum analysis.
The first laboratory photograph of the spectra of the chemical elements
was taken by Dr. W. A. Miller in 1862.
Rutherfurd was the first to secure a photograph of the solar spectrum
with considerable dispersion by means of prisms.
In 1863 Mascart undertook a complete photographic investigation of
the ultra-violet portion of the solar spectrum, a work of no mean
magnitude. He, however, did not employ a train of prisms for producing
the spectrum, but a diffraction grating, using the light reflected
from the first surface. The first photograph of the spectrum of a star
was secured by Henry Draper, the son of Dr. J. W. Draper, one of the
pioneers in photography in 1872.
It was not till the introduction of dry plates in 1876 that the
photography of the fainter celestial objects or of their spectra was
possible, as a long exposure was naturally required. Stellar spectra
were photographed by Huggins in 1879, and in the next year Draper
photographed the nebula of Orion. As the dry plates became more rapid,
and as longer exposures were employed, revelation followed revelation;
the nebulæ as seen by the naked eye, and even some stars, were found
by the Henrys, Roberts, Max Wolf, Barnard, and others, to be but the
brighter kernels of large nebulous patches.
This new application of photography, depending upon long exposures (the
longest one I know of has extended to forty hours), had an important
reflex action on the mechanical parts of the telescope; it was not
only necessary to keep the faintest star exactly on the same part of
the plate during the whole of the exposure, but night after night the
stellar image must be brought on to the same part of the plate so that
the exposure might be continued.
A system of electric control of the going of the driving-clock of the
telescope by means of a sidereal clock was introduced, the simplest one
being designed by Russell, of Sydney; a most elaborate one by Grubb, of
Dublin.
Another application of the method of long exposures has been the
discovery of minor planets by the trails impressed by their motion
among the stars on the photographic plates on which the images of both
are impressed.
A complete spectroscopic survey of the stars by means of photography
was commenced in 1886 at Harvard College, as a memorial to Draper, who
died while he was laboring diligently and successfully in securing
advances in astrophysical inquiries. To carry on this work at Harvard,
Professor Pickering wisely reverted to the method first employed by
Fraunhofer, and utilized by Respighi and another in 1871, of placing
prisms in front of the object-glass.
In the photographing of stellar spectra by means of objective prisms,
the driving-clock of the telescope must _not_ go exactly at sidereal
rate, but at certain speeds depending on the brightness and position of
the star under examination.
This is necessary because the image of the spectrum of a star on
the photograph is only a thin line in which it is impossible to see
the spectral lines; the spectrum must be broadened, and this is
accomplished by making the star image “trail” to a certain degree on
the plate. This trailing is accomplished by means of the clock, the
rate of which is made to vary. In this way the trail of a spectrum of
a star on the photographic plate is always obtained of the same width,
while the density of the image is made fairly constant by increasing
the rate for bright stars and decreasing it for fainter ones. In this
way spectra of the brighter stars rivalling in perfection and detail
those obtained of the spectrum of the sun itself thirty years ago
have been obtained. Such photographs have rendered a minute chemical
classification of the stars possible.
One of the most interesting applications of photography to spectrum
analysis during the latter part of the century has been the utilization
by Messrs. Deslandres and Hale of a suggestion made by Janssen, that
by employing photography images of the sun and its surroundings can
be obtained in light on one wave length. In this way we can study
the distribution of any one of the chemical constituents of the sun
separately, and note its behavior, not only on the sun itself, but in
the atmosphere which enfolds the disk.
It is strange that, in spite of the suggestions of Faye, and others
after him, one of the great advantages of the employment of photography
in astronomical work, namely, the abolition of “personal equation,” has
so far been almost entirely neglected. What “personal equation” is can
be perhaps illustrated by considering an observer who is observing the
transit of a star over the wires in a transit instrument.
His object is to note the exact time, to a fraction of a second, when
a star passes each wire; and this is done by listening to the beats
of a clock near at hand and estimating the fractions. Some observers
constantly note the time either a little in advance or a little later
than the actual time, and this small distance between the observer
and the true times is more or less constant for each observer. This
difference has to be taken into account for every observation. Even
the use of the chronograph in transit work, by which the observation
is electrically recorded, does not entirely eliminate the error.
The photographic method of transit work has been experimented on,
but, so far as I know, it has not yet been used at more than one or
two observatories. It will doubtless eventually rid us of “personal
equation” entirely, for the star image may be photographed and the time
recorded by the same current of electricity.
At the end of the century we could almost say that except in relation
to the work of the meridional observatories, photographic methods of
recording observations had become exclusively used. One of the cases
in which its utility is most in evidence is in the matter of eclipse
observations. Spectra of the sun’s surroundings containing a thousand
lines are taken in a second of time, thus replacing five or six
doubtful eye observations by wealth of results which have enabled the
recent vast progress to be secured.
CATALOGUES
Catalogues of the stars were among the first scientific records
started by man, and so long as only the naked eye was used the work
was not difficult, as only approximate positions were attempted,
even by Hipparchus; but long before the eighteenth century dawned
the problem was entirely changed by the invention of the telescope
and by the provision of accurately divided circles; not only could
better positions be recorded, but the number of stars to be catalogued
was enormously increased, and, furthermore, other objects, nebulæ,
presented themselves in considerable numbers.
In 1801 the star catalogues chiefly relied on were those of Lacaille,
containing about three thousand stars scattered over the whole heavens.
Maskelyne, who was then Astronomer Royal, had published in 1790
a catalogue of thirty-six fundamental stars, chiefly for the
purposes of navigation. The first great catalogue of the century
was the _Fundamenta Astronomiae_ of Bessel, produced in 1818. This
contained three thousand two hundred and twenty-two stars. The Bonn
_Durchmüsterung_, with its catalogue of three hundred and twenty-four
thousand one hundred and ninety-eight stars in the northern hemisphere,
and the corresponding atlas published in 1857–63, was the next
memorable achievement in this direction. For it we have to thank Bessel
and Argelander and a perfect system of work.
Another monumental catalogue dealing with the stars in the southern
heavens has been that of the southern stars observed by Gould (1866).
While the century was closing, another catalogue, far more stupendous
than anything which could be conceived possible a few years ago, was
steadily being compiled. This we owe to the far-sightedness and energy
of Admiral Mouchez, a late director of the Paris Observatory. The work
was commenced in 1892.
The whole heavens, north and south alike, have been divided into zones,
and the chief observatories on the earth’s surface are busy night after
night in taking photographs of that part intrusted to them. The whole
heavens are thus being made to write their autobiography, and the total
gain to the astronomy of the future of this most priceless record can
perhaps be scarcely grasped as yet, although the advantage of being
able at any point of future time to see on a photographic plate what
the heavens are telling now is sufficiently obvious.
Catalogues of the stars have, of course, led to other minor catalogues
of various classes of stars, binary, variable, and the like. In the
later years catalogues of stars according to their spectra have
enriched science.
The first extensive catalogue of stellar spectra was published by
Vogel. It dealt with four thousand and fifty-one stars, and appeared in
1883; it has since been followed by the Draper catalogue, based upon
photographs of the spectra, which contains a much larger number. With
regard to nebulæ, Herschel published his third catalogue in 1802. The
last catalogue of this nature is by Dreyer (1888), and contains seven
thousand eight hundred and forty of these objects. In the time of Tycho
they could be counted on the fingers of one hand.
INVESTIGATIONS OF SOME IMPORTANT ASTRONOMICAL CONSTANTS
The nineteenth century was fruitful in the determination of many
numerical values which are all important in enabling us to determine
the distance and masses of the heavenly bodies, thereby giving us a
firm grasp not only of the dimensions of our own system, but of those
scattered in the celestial spaces.
To take the distances first. We must begin with the exact measure of
the earth; for this we must measure the exact length of an arc of
meridian or of parallel—that is, a stretch of the earth’s surface
lying north and south or east and west, between places of which the
latitudes are accurately known in the former case, and the longitude in
the latter. In either case we can determine the number of miles which
go to a degree. Beginning at the opening of the nineteenth century with
an arc of meridian of two degrees measured by Gauss, from Göttingen to
Altona, the arcs of meridian grew longer as the century grew older,
till, at the close, the measurement of an arc of meridian from the Cape
to Cairo, embracing something like sixty-eight degrees of latitude, was
mooted.
The measurements of arcs of parallel have been developed by the rapid
extension of telegraphic communications, which now permit the longitude
of the terminal stations to be determined with the greatest accuracy.
Thanks to this work, we now have the size of our planet to a few miles.
The polar diameter is 41,709,790 feet, but the equator is not a circle:
the equatorial diameter from longitude 8 degrees 15 minutes west to
longitude 188 degrees 15 minutes west is 41,853,258 feet; that at right
angles to it is 41,850,210 feet—that is, some thousand yards shorter.
The earth, then, is shaped like an orange slightly squeezed.
Knowing the earth’s diameter, we can obtain the sun’s distance by
several methods, the old one by observing transits of Venus, one of
which Cook went out to observe in 1768, and two of which recurred in
1874 and 1882; new ones by observations of Mars or one of the minor
planets at a favorable opposition, and by determining the velocity of
light.
The recent discovery of a minor planet, Eros, which in one part of its
orbit is nearer the earth than Mars, has recently revived interest in
this method, and a combined attack is in contemplation.
It has been long known that light has a finite velocity, but we had
to wait till the 60’s before Fizeau and Foucault showed us how to
determine its exact value. The methods introduced by them have been
recently applied by Cornu, Newcomb, and Michelson, and the resulting
value is slightly less than three hundred thousand metres per second.
Combining this with the constant of aberration, the distance of the sun
can be determined.
It is wonderful how these vastly different methods agree in the
resulting mean distance. At the beginning of the century it stood
roughly at ninety-five million miles; this has been reduced to
ninety-three million nine hundred and sixty-five thousand miles.
The extreme difference between the old and new values of the solar
parallax, two-fifths of a second of arc, is represented by the apparent
breadth of a human hair viewed at a distance of about one hundred and
twenty-five feet.
Knowing the distance of the sun, the way is open to us to determine,
by a method suggested by Galileo, the distances of those stars which
occupy a different position among their fellows, as seen from opposite
points in the earth’s orbit round the sun, points one hundred and
eighty-six million miles apart. We now know the distances of many such
stars, Bessel having determined the first in 1838. The nearest star
to us, so far as we know, is Centauri, the light of which takes four
and a half years to reach us. Not many years ago Pritchard applied
photography to this branch of inquiry; we may, therefore, expect a
still more rapid progress in the future.
With regard to masses. We naturally must first know that of the earth;
having its size, if we can determine its density, the rest follows.
The problem of determining the mean density of the earth occupied the
minds of many workers during the nineteenth century. Newton (about
1728) pointed out how it could be deduced by observing the deviation
from the vertical of a plumb-line suspended near a large mass of
matter—a mountain, the volume and density of which could be previously
determined. This method, which is very laborious and requires the
greatest skill and most delicate instruments, has been employed several
times, by Bouguer and Condamine, in 1738, at Chimborazo; Maskelyne, in
1774, at Schehallien in Scotland; and James, at Arthur’s Seat, near
Edinburgh.
At the beginning of the century another method was introduced by
Cavendish. This consists in measuring the attraction of two large
spheres of known size and mass, such as two balls of lead on two very
small and light spheres, by means of a torsion balance constructed by
Mitchell for this purpose.
The most recent determination by this method, and one which is
considered to give us perhaps the most accurate value, is that which
is due to the skill and ingenuity of Professor Boys. His improvement
consisted in constructing a most delicate torsion balance; the
attracted spheres consisted of small gold balls suspended by a quartz
fibre carrying a mirror to indicate the amount of twist. The whole
instrument was quite small, and could easily be protected from air
currents and changes of temperature, while the use of the quartz
fibres reduced to a minimum one of the greatest difficulties of the
Cavendish experiment. The value of the mean density of the earth is
now considered to be 5.6, which means that if we have a globe of water
exactly the same size as our own earth, the real earth would weigh
just 5.6 times this globe of water. The earth’s weight, in tons,
does not convey much idea, but that it is six thousand trillions may
interest the curious. This determination has enabled the masses of the
sun, moon, planets and satellites, and many sidereal systems to be
accurately known in relation to the mass of the earth.
SOME ACHIEVEMENTS OF MATHEMATICAL ANALYSIS
Uranus, a planet unknown to the ancients, was discovered by its
movement among the stars by William Herschel in 1781. It was not until
1846 that another major planet was added to the solar system, and this
discovery was one of the sensations of the century.
The story of the independent discovery of Neptune by Adams and Le
Verrier, who were both driven to the conclusion that certain apparent
regularities in the motion of Uranus were due to the attraction of
another body travelling on an orbit outside it, has been often told.
The subsequent discovery of the external body not far from the place at
which their mathematical analysis had led them to believe it would be
seen, will forever be regarded as a fine triumph of the human intellect.
But the results of the inquiries which now concern us are generally
of not so sensational a character, although they lie at the root of
our knowledge of celestial motions. They more often take the shape of
tables and discussions relating to the movements of the bodies which
make up our solar system.
Gauss may be said to have led the way during the nineteenth century by
his _Theoria molus corporum coelestium solem ambientium_. This was a
worthy sequel to the _Méchanique Céleste_, in which work, towards the
end of the eighteenth century, Laplace had enshrined all that was known
on the planetary results of gravitation.
In later years Le Verrier and Newcomb have been among the chief workers
on whom the mantle of such distinguished predecessors has fallen. From
them the planet and satellite tables now in use have been derived.
But the motion of our own satellite, the moon, has had fascinations for
other analysts besides those we have named.
The problem, indeed, of the moon’s motion is one of the most difficult,
and has taxed the ingenuity of astronomers from an early date. Even at
the present day it is impossible to predict the exact position of the
moon at any one moment owing to inequalities and perturbations, the
exact varying values of which are not known.
The two most important theories of the motion of the moon completed
towards the middle of the century were due to Hansen and Delaunay.
The former’s appeared in 1838, the lunar tables being published later
(1857), while the latter’s was published in 1860.
Hansen’s theory had for its chief object the formation of tables;
to avoid the inconvenience of using in his calculations series which
slowly converge, he inserted numerical values throughout. In Hansen’s
solution the problem is one actually presented by nature, allowance
being made for every known cause of disturbance. There is one
disadvantage, namely, that should observations demand a change in any
of the constants used, there is no means of making any correction in
the results.
Delaunay’s theory surmounted this difficulty, but at the expense
of still greater inconvenience for making an ephemeris. The slow
convergence of certain series involved an immense amount of labor to
give sufficiently approximate results.
More recently, as the century was closing, Dr. Brown took up the
subject and made a fresh attempt to calculate the motion of our
satellite. It may be stated that he adopts all Delaunay’s modifications
of the problem and works them out algebraically; but there are many
technical differences which it would be out of place to mention here.
Enough has been stated to show that there is not likely to be any
breach of continuity in the treatment of this most important problem.
Another attack on the moon, and, incidentally, its motion, has recently
been made by another analyst, Professor George Darwin; grappling with
all the consequences of tidal friction, he has been able to present to
us the past and future history of our satellite. Beginning as a part of
the material congeries from which subsequently some fifty million years
ago both earth and moon, as separate bodies, were formed, it has ever
since been extending its orbit, and so retreating farther away from its
centre of motion, while the period of the earth’s rotation has been
increasing at the same time, from a possible period of some three hours
when the moon was born, to one of one thousand four hundred hours when
the day and month will be equal, something like one hundred and fifty
million years being required for the process.
STELLAR EVOLUTION
It was only in the 80’s, after thousands of observations of the spectra
of stars, nebulæ, and comets had been secured, that the full meaning of
the revelations of the spectroscope began to dawn upon the world.
Before the introduction of spectrum analysis all stars were supposed
to be suns, and the only difference recognized among them was one of
brilliancy and the variation of brilliancy in the case of some of them.
It ultimately came out that great classes might be recognized by
the differences of their spectra, which were ultimately traced to
differences in their chemistry and in their temperature, as determined
by the extension of the spectra in the ultra-violet, the whiter stars
being hotter than the red ones, as a white-hot poker is hotter than a
red-hot poker.
Next there was evidence to show that a large proportion of the stars
were not stars at all like the sun, but swarms of meteorites; and in
this way the mysterious new stars which appear from time to time in
the heavens, and a large number of variable stars, were explained as
arising from collisions among such swarms.
The inquiry which dealt with the spectroscopic results, having thus
introduced the ideas of meteor swarms and collisions to explain many
stellar phenomena, went further and showed that the various chemical
changes observed in passing from star to star might also be explained
by supposing the whole stellar constitution to arise from cool
meteoritic swarms represented by nebulæ, the changes up to a certain
point being explained by a rise of temperature due to condensation
towards a centre. Here the new view was opposed to that of Laplace,
advanced during the last century, that the stars were produced by
condensation and cooling; but Kelvin had shown, before the new view
was enunciated, that Laplace’s view was contrary to thermodynamics,
a branch of science which had developed since Laplace published his
famous _Exposition du Système du Monde_.
After all the meteorites in the parent swarm had been condensed into
the central gaseous mass, that mass had to cool. So that we had in
the heavens not only stars more or less meteoritic in structure,
of _rising_ temperature, but stars chiefly gaseous, of falling
temperature. It was obvious that representatives of both these classes
of stars might have nearly the same mean effective temperature, and
therefore more or less the same spectrum. A minute inquiry entirely
justified these conclusions.
So far had the detailed chemistry of the stars been carried in the
latter years of the century that the question of stellar evolution gave
rise to that of inorganic evolution generally, the sequence in the
phenomena of which can only be studied in the stars, for laboratory
work without stint has shown that in them we have celestial furnaces,
the heat of which transcends that of our most powerful electric sparks.
In this way astronomy is paying the debt she owes to chemistry.
THE SUN AND HIS SYSTEM
Although the outer confines of space have, as we have seen, been
compelled to bring their tribute of new knowledge by means of the
penetrating power possessed by modern telescopes, and the cameras and
spectroscopes attached to them, the study of the _near_ has by no means
been neglected, and for the reason that in astronomy especially we must
content ourselves in the case of the more distant bodies by surmising
what happens in them from the facts gathered in the region where alone
detailed observations are possible.
Thus what we can learn about the sun helps to explain what we discern
much more dimly in the case of stars; a study of the moon’s face we
are compelled to take as showing us the possibilities relating to the
surface condition of other satellites so far removed from us that they
only appear as points of light.
To begin, then, with the sun. Where a volume might be written, a few
words must suffice. I have already stated that at the beginning of the
nineteenth century the prevailing opinion was that it was a habitable
globe. It was limited to the fiery ball we see. At the end of the
century it is a body of the fiercest heat, and the ball we see is only
a central portion of a huge and terribly interesting mechanism, the
outer portions of which heave and throb every eleven years. Spots,
prominences, corona, everything feels this throbbing.
Although the discovery of spots on the sun was among Galileo’s first
achievements, it was reserved for the last half of the nineteenth
century to demonstrate their almost perfect periodicity.
Thanks to the labors of Schwabe, Wolf, Carrington, and De la Rue,
Stewart, and Loewy, we now know that every eleven years the spots wax
and wane; Tacchini and Ricco, during the last thirty years, have proved
that the prominences follow suit, and the fact that the corona also
obeys the same law was established during the American eclipse of 1878.
The study of solar physics consists in watching and recording the
thermal, chemical, and other changes which accompany this period. Some
of these effects can be best studied during those times when the ball
itself is covered by the moon in an eclipse. Then the outer portions of
the sun are revealed in all their beauty and majesty, and all the world
goes to see.
But it is the quiet daily work in the laboratory which has enabled us
to study the sun’s place in relation to the other stars, and so to
found a chemical classification of all the stars that shine.
From the sun we may pass to his system, and first consider the nearest
body to us—the moon.
While some astronomers have been discussing the movements and evolution
of our satellite, others have been engaged upon maps of its surface,
upon questions dealing with a lunar atmosphere, or a study of the
origin of the present conformations and of possible changes. The
science of selenology may be said to have been founded by Schröter
at the beginning of the century, but it required the application of
photography in later years to put it on a firm basis. Maps of the moon
have been prepared by Lohrmann, Beer and Mädler, and Schmidt, the
latter showing the positions of more than thirty thousand craters.
Very erroneous notions are held by some as to what we may hope to do
in the examination of the moon’s surface by a powerful telescope. A
power of a thousand enables us to see it as if we were looking at
York from London. It is recorded that Lassell once said that with his
largest reflector in a “fit” of the finest definition he thought he
might be able to detect whether a carpet as large as Lincoln’s Inn
Fields was round or square. Under these circumstances, then, we may
well understand that the question of changes on the surface has been
raised from time to time never to be absolutely settled one way or the
other. By many the existence of an atmosphere is denied, and this is a
condition which would negative changes, anything like the geological
changes brought about on the surface of the earth, but the idea is now
held by many that there is still an atmosphere, though of great tenuity.
The last few years of the century were rendered memorable from the
lunar point of view by the publication and minute study of a most
admirable series of photographs of the moon obtained by the great
equatorial Coudé of the Paris Observatory by Loewy and Puiseaux.
One of the chief points aimed at has been to determine the sequence
of the various events represented by the rills, craters, and walled
plains, the mountain ranges and seas. This work is still in progress,
the fourth part of the atlas being published in 1900; but enough has
already appeared to indicate that the results of the inquiry when
completed will be of the most important kind. The authors have already
come to the conclusion that the lunar and terrestrial sea-bottoms
much resemble each other, inasmuch as both have convex surfaces. The
lunar seas began by sinking of vast regions; the formidable volcanic
eruptions of which the moon has been the scene have taken place in
times equivalent to those labelled “recent” in geological parlance.
There is evidence that the axis of the moon has undergone great
displacements, and four great periods of change have been made out.
Finally they state that there is serious ground to believe that there
is an atmosphere of some sort remaining.
It may readily be understood that with each increase of optical power
new satellites of the various planets have been discovered. Soon after
the discovery of Neptune a satellite was noted by Lassell. In 1846
both he and the eagle-eyed observer Dawes independently discovered
another satellite (Hyperion) of Saturn. Lassell was rewarded in the
next year by the discovery of two more satellites of Uranus; but,
strangest observation of all, in 1877 Hall discovered at Washington
two satellites of Mars some six or seven miles only in diameter, one
of them revolving round the planet in seven and one-half hours at a
distance of less than four thousand miles. As the day on Mars is not
far different in duration from our own, this tiny satellite must rise
in the west and south three times a day!
Wonderful as this discovery was, it is certainly not less wonderful
when we consider it in connection with a passage in _Gulliver’s
Travels_, so true is it that truth is stranger than fiction. Swift,
in his satirical reference to the inhabitants of Laputa, writes:
“They have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which
revolve round Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the centre
of the primary planet exactly three of his diameters and the outermost
five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours; and the latter in
twenty-one and a half.”
The last discovery of this kind has been that of an inner satellite of
Jupiter by Barnard in 1892.
The planets from Mercury to Saturn were known to the ancients. I
have already referred to the discovery of Uranus by Herschel’s giant
telescope, not long before the nineteenth century was born, and of
Neptune, by analysis, towards the end of the first half of the century.
With regard to what modern observations have done in regard to their
physical appearance, the first place in general interest must be given
to Saturn and Mars.
Saturn has always been regarded as the most interesting of the
planetary family on account of its unique rings. Many subdivisions of
the rings, and a dusky ring, first seen by Dawes and Bond, have been
discovered during the last sixty years.
The meteoritic nature of the rings was suggested by Clerk Maxwell in
1857, and Keeler’s demonstration of the truth of this view by means
of the spectroscope, a few years ago, was brilliant in conception and
execution.
But during the last half of the century the interest centred in Mars
has been gradually increasing. The drawings made during the opposition
of 1862, when compared with those made by Beer and Mädler (1830–40),
made it perfectly clear that in this planet we had to deal with one
strangely like our own in many respects. There were obviously land and
water surfaces; the snow at the poles melted in the summer-time; clouds
were seen forming from time to time, and the changing tones of the
water surfaces suggested fine and rough weather.
Afterwards came the revelation of the hawk-eyed Schiaparelli, beginning
in the year 1877, and his wonderful map of the planet’s surface. The
land surfaces, instead of being unbroken, were cut up, as an English
farm is cut up by hedges; straight lines of different breadths and
tints crossed the land surfaces in all directions, and at times some of
them appeared double. Schiaparelli naturally concluded that they were
rivers—water channels—and being an Italian he used the appropriate
word _canali_. This, unfortunately, as it turned out, was translated
_canals_. Now canals are dug, _ergo_ there were diggers. From this the
demonstration, not of the habitability, but of the actual habitation,
of Mars was a small step, and the best way of signalling to newly found
kinsmen across some thirty millions of miles of space was discussed.
The world of science owes a debt of gratitude to Mr. Percival Lowell
for having taken out to the pure air and low latitude of Arizona an
eighteen-inch telescope for the sole purpose of accumulating facts
tending to throw light upon this newly raised question. This he did
in 1894. Schiaparelli has continued his magnificent observations
through each opposition when the planet is most favorably situated for
observation, and since 1896 Signor Cerulli, armed with a fifteen-inch
Cooke, in the fine climate of Italy, has joined in the inquiry, so
that facts are now being rapidly accumulated. It has been stated that
markings similar to the strange so-called “canals” on Mars are to be
seen on Mercury, Venus, and even on the satellites of Jupiter. Mr.
Percival Lowell does not hesitate to proclaim himself in favor of their
being due, _in Mars_, to an intelligent system of irrigation. Signor
Cerulli claims that _wherever seen_ they are mere optical effects.
We may be well content to leave to the twentieth century a general
agreement on this interesting subject.
Finally, in our survey of our own system, come comets and meteor
swarms. One of the most fruitful discoveries of the century, that
comets are meteor swarms, we owe to the genius of Schiaparelli, A. H.
Newton, and other workers on those tiny celestial messengers which give
rise to the phenomena of “falling” or “shooting” stars.
The magnificent displays of 1799, 1833, 1866, and, alas! that which
failed to come in 1899, we now know must be associated with Tempel’s
Comet. This is by no means the only case so far established; the
connection will in the future be closer still when the orbits of the
various swarms observed throughout the year shall be better known.
Comets which attract public attention by their brightness and grandeur
of form are rather rare, and, in fact, only twenty-five of such have
been seen since 1800. We have, however, with the great advance in
instrumental equipment, been able to discover many which are scarcely
visible to the naked eye, and this has swollen the number of comets
very considerably. In the seventeenth century we find that only
thirty-two were observed, while in the eighteenth this number was more
than doubled (seventy-two). In the nineteenth century more than three
hundred were placed on record, which is practically more than four
times the number seen in the eighteenth.
The last great comet visible any considerable time was that discovered
by Donati in 1858, and so carefully observed by Bond. It is unfortunate
that since the importance, in so many directions, of spectroscopic
observations of comets has been recognized they have been conspicuous
by their absence.
THE CONNECTION BETWEEN SOLAR AND TERRESTRIAL WEATHER
Everybody agrees that all the energy utilized on this planet of ours,
with the single exception of that supplied by the tides, comes from
the sun. We are all familiar with the changes due to the earth’s daily
rotation bringing us now on the side of our planet illuminated by
the sun, then plunging us into darkness; that changes of season must
necessarily follow from the earth’s yearly journey round the sun is
universally recognized.
On the other hand, it is a modern idea that those solar phenomena which
prove to us considerable changes of temperature in the sun itself,
may, and indeed should, be echoed by changes on our planet, giving us
thereby an eleven-year period to be considered, as well as a year and a
day.
This response of the earth to solar changes was first observed in the
continuous records of those instruments which register for us the
earth’s magnetism at any one place. The magnetic effects were strongest
when there were more spots, taking them as indicators of solar changes.
Lamont first (without knowing it) made this out, at the beginning of
the latter half of the century (1851), from the Göttingen observations
of the daily range of the declination needle. Sabine the next year not
only announced the same cycle in the violence of the “magnetic storms”
observed at Toronto, but at once attributed them to solar influence,
the two cycles running concurrently. It is now universally recognized
that terrestrial magnetic effects, including auroræ, minutely echo the
solar changes.
The eleven-year period is not one to be neglected.
Next comes the inquiry in relation to meteorology. Sir William
Herschel, in the first year of the century, when there were practically
neither sun-spot nor rainfall observations available, did not hesitate
to attack the question whether the price of wheat was affected by the
many-or-few-spot solar condition. He found the price to be high when
the sun was spotless, and _vice versa_.
By 1872, however, we had both rainfall and sun-spot observations,
and the cycle of the latter had been made out. Meldrum, the most
distinguished meteorologist living at the time, and others, pronounced
that the rainfall was greatest at sun-spot maximum, and, further, that
the greatest number of cyclones occurred in the East and West Indies at
such times.
This result with regard to rainfall was not generally accepted, but
Chambers showed shortly afterwards an undoubted connection between the
cycles of solar spots and barometric pressure in the Indian area.
By means of a study of the widened lines observed in sun spots an
attempt has been recently made to study the temperature, history of the
sun since about 1877, and the years of mean temperature and when the
heat was in excess (+) and defect (-) made out, have been as follows:
Heat
condition mean + mean − mean + mean − mean
Years 1869 1876 1881 1886–87 1891–92
1870–75 1877–80 1882–86 1881–91 1892
Having these solar data, the next thing to do was to study the Indian
rainfall during the southwest monsoon for the years 1877–1886, the
object being to endeavor to ascertain if the + and − temperature pulses
in the sun were echoed by + and − pulses of rainfall. The Indian
rainfall was taken first because in the tropics the phenomena are
known to be the simplest. It was found that in many parts of India the
+ and − conditions of solar temperature were accompanied by + and −
pulses, producing pressure changes and heavy rains in the Indian Ocean
and the surrounding land. These occurred generally in the first year
following the mean condition, that is, in 1877–78 and 1882–83.
The rainfalls at Mauritius, Cape Town, and Batavia were next collated
to see if the pulses felt in India were traceable in other regions
surrounding the Indian Ocean to the south and east. This was found to
be the case.
A wider inquiry was followed, we are told, with equal success, so that
we are justified in hoping that the question of the dependence of
terrestrial upon solar weather has made a step in advance.
But just as the general public and practical men took little heed of
the connection between sun spots and magnetism until experience taught
them that telegraphic messages often could not “get through” when
there were many sun spots, so the same public will not consider the
connection in regard to meteorology unless the forecasting of droughts
and famines be possible.
The recent work suggests that, if the recent advances in solar physics
be considered, the inquiries regarding rainfall may be placed on a
firmer basis than they could possibly have had in 1872, and that such
forecastings may become possible.
What was looked for in 1872 was a change in the quantity of rain at
maximum sun spots only, the idea being that there might be an effective
change of solar temperature, either in excess or defect, at such times
and that there would be a gradual and continuous variation from maximum
to maximum.
We see that the rainfalls referred to above justify the conclusions
derived from the recent work that two effects ought to be expected in a
sun-spot cycle instead of one. There was excess of rainfall, not only
near the sun-spot maximum, but near the minimum.
If the authors of this communication to which I refer are right, then
droughts and famines occur in India because the rain pulses, which are
associated with the solar-heat pulses, are of short duration. When
they cease the quantity of rain which falls in the Indian area is not
sufficient, without water storage, for the purposes of agriculture;
they are followed, therefore, by droughts, and at times subsequently by
famines. They divide the period 1877—89 as under:
{ 1877.
Rain from − pulse { 1878.
{ 1879 (part).
{ 1879 (part).
No rain pulse { 1880 (central year).
{ 1881 (part).
{ 1881 (part).
{ 1882.
Rain from + pulse { 1883.
{ 1884 (part).
{ 1884 (part).
{ 1885 }
No rain pulse { 1886 } (central year).
{ 1887 (part).
{ 1887 (part).
Rain from − pulse { 1888.
{ 1889.
Their statement is based on the fact that all the famines which have
devastated India for the last seventy years have occurred at intervals
of eleven years, or thereabouts, working backward and forward from the
central years 1880 and 1885–86 in the above table, the middle years,
that is, between the pulses.
Mr. Willcocks, in a paper read at the Meteorological Congress at
Chicago, remarked that “famines in India are generally years of low
flood in Egypt.”
It is now pointed out that the highest Niles follow the years of the +
and − pulses, as does the highest rainfall in the Indian area.
Even if these results, which were communicated to the Royal Society
of London five weeks before the end of the century, be confirmed, it
may be pointed out that Sir William Herschel’s suggestion of 1801 will
have required a whole century for its fulfilment, so slowly do those
branches of science move which have not already led to some practical
development.
NORMAN LOCKYER.
PHILOSOPHY
It is a natural illusion that makes us think of each century as
exhibiting the continuous development of one tendency of mind through
a series of stages whose differences are only of secondary importance,
and, on the other hand, to regard the steps from one century to another
as corresponding to some marked transition of thought, as if the world
had been suddenly precipitated into a new sphere of existence. For
some purposes a rough generalization of this kind, that breaks at
stated intervals the continuity of time, may, perhaps, be convenient.
When, however, we begin to look at things more closely, we discover
that it is impossible thus to cut through the historical connection of
events, as it were, “with a hatchet.” We discover, for example, that
the characteristics of the eighteenth century were strongly marked
only in one period of it; and that what we call the spirit of the
nineteenth century was born some time before the year 1800, and has
never quite prevailed over other tendencies. At the same time, there is
an important difference indicated by these two loosely used names, and
as it is always easier to define things by contrast, it may help us to
make our subject more definite to consider what they mean.
I
It is too late now to “abuse the eighteenth century,” which had its
good and evil, like other periods. It is commonly conceived as the
era of individualism and analysis, the era of logical enlightenment
and sceptical criticism; and, again, as the era of liberation from
groundless superstitions and fictitious claims of authority; the era
in which mankind seemed for the first time to throw off the weight
of the past and to enter without fear upon the enjoyment of their
earthly heritage. The science of Newton had given the last blow to
the astronomy that made the earth the centre of the universe. It had
undermined and discredited the simple theology that explained the
whole material world as a cosmos arranged for the supply of human
needs. At the same time, the progress of biology was bringing man to a
consciousness that as a physical being he is only _primus inter pares_
in the animal kingdom, and the decay of religious belief was making him
realize his finitude, the limits of his natural existence, as, perhaps,
he had never done before, at least never since the beginning of the
Christian era. Earth seemed to be disconnected from heaven, and the
human race thrown upon its own resources. By the new enlightenment all
powers, ecclesiastical or political, were stripped of the mysterious
sanctity that had once invested them. “The nimbus was taken away from
the heads of the gods and rulers of the world.” Every authority that
claimed man’s homage was weighed in the scales of the understanding,
and, so weighed, every such authority was found wanting. The State had
come to be regarded as only a collection of individuals who had agreed
to live together under a ruler deriving all his claims from their
consent, and invested with no divine right to their allegiance. The
Church was no longer a sacred institution governed by priests who held
their commission directly from God, but only a sort of spiritual police
agency, an ally of the State in the restraint of vice and crime, or,
at best, in Protestant countries, a society for mutual improvement.
Men were “free and equal,” each standing face to face with his
fellows, admitting no superiority or superstition of hero-worship in
regard to any one of them. And the Deity, if his existence were not
denied, tended to become a mere “Supreme Being,” who was removed to
such a distance from mankind that he could hardly be reached by their
reverence, still less by their love.
At the same time, the influences which, in one point of view, seemed to
limit and narrow human existence, in another point of view tended to
liberate and enlarge it. If they excluded the idea of the infinite from
man’s life, they emancipated him from many degrading superstitions,
which in an earlier age had held him “all his lifetime subject to
bondage.” And as the pressure from above was lightened the individual
seemed to become master of himself and of his destiny. If the king
could no longer say, “_L’Etat c’est moi_,” the rights of the subject
were vindicated; if the authority of the Church was weakened, the bonds
of free inquiry were broken; if imagination ceased to fill men with the
awe and wonder of higher powers, the way was opened up for scientific
and industrial development; if God was regarded as unknowable, “the
proper study of mankind was man,” and that study could now be pursued
without fear or hinderance. Poetry and religion might be impoverished,
the sense of the binding force of social relations might be weakened,
but interest in the bettering of man’s earthly condition was awakened,
and with it came a new desire for justice to all, a new intolerance
of human suffering, and a new demand that the lot of the class “which
is most numerous and poor” should be made less wretched and insecure,
and, towards the end of the century, a new turn was given to its
leading thought, for an effort was made to discover in the nature of
the individual himself the equivalent of those universal powers which
the enlightenment had banished from the external world and from the
life of society. Rousseau carried individualism to an extreme point,
at which it became its own correction, and taught men to find _within_
their own souls the infinite which they could no longer discover
_without_. Rejecting in the first instance all social conventions as
unjust limitations of the natural man, and adopting the prevailing
theory of the time, that the State is only the product of a contract
between independent persons, he yet discovered in the individual thus
liberated from all external pressure a “common reason,” and “a general
will,” which could reorganize his life and bind him to his fellow-men
and to God. This great idea, which appears in Rousseau rather as a
stroke of insight, an intuition of genius—lifting him above his
first thoughts and insensibly changing their meaning—was grasped
by Kant as the principle of a new philosophy and worked out in a
comprehensive system that dealt with all the great problems of thought
and life. Kant, indeed, seemed, like Rousseau, to begin on the plane
of eighteenth-century individualism, but, influenced as he was by the
philosophy of Leibnitz, he from the first conceived the individual as
in himself universal; or, to speak more exactly, as having a universal
principle realized in him. Thus, though in one aspect of his being man
is a finite object among other objects, confined within limits of space
and time, and forming only a link in the chain of natural causation,
in another aspect of it, as a conscious self, he is emancipated
from all these limitations. For—such is Kant’s argument—a knowing
subject, for whom the whole finite world, including his own finite
existence, is an object of knowledge, cannot himself be comprehended
in that world or limited by any of its conditions. As there can be no
world of objects except for a self, it is impossible that such a self
should be merely one of these objects. Thus, as knowing, or capable
of knowing, all things, man cannot be identified with any of them;
or if, from one point of view, as an individual, he is so identified,
yet he has within him a universal principle that carries him beyond
the limits of his individuality. And this contrast shows itself also
in his practical life. For if as an object he appears to be but an
animal organism, moved by the impressions of pleasure and pain which
he receives from other objects, yet in his inner moral life man is
revealed to himself as a self-determining subject, emancipated from all
sensuous motives and from the necessity of nature which they bring with
them, and conscious of subordination only to the law of duty, which is
the law of his own reason. And that law, in spite of every pressure of
circumstance from without, and of every impulse of passion from within,
he knows that he ought to obey, and therefore he knows that he _can_
obey it. Thus, in Kant’s theory, the two extreme views of humanity, as
natural and as spiritual, as limited to a finite individuality, hemmed
in by necessities on every side, and yet as possessing a universal
capacity of knowing, and an absolute power of self-determination,
these two views are presented in sharp antithesis, and at the same
time held together as different aspects of one life. In fact, we have
here, as it were, compressed into a nutshell, the result of the whole
history of eighteenth-century individualism, which began by depressing
man and ended by exalting him; which, with one of its voices, seemed
to reduce him to the level of an animal, a mere part of the partial
world, a transitory phenomenal existence among other phenomena; and
then, with its other voice, proceeded to recognize him as a member of
the intelligible world, a “spectator of all time and existence,” and
gifted with the absolute freedom of a will which could be determined
by nothing but itself. “The solitary,” says Aristotle, “must be either
a god or a beast,” and the eighteenth century, in its conception of
the individual, seemed to oscillate between the one and the other
till Kant, awaking to the impossibility of omitting either aspect of
his being, demanded that he should be conceived as both at once. Kant
thus set the problem of the future; and if he did not solve it, he
at least showed the futility of any narrow or one-sided solution and
the direction in which an adequate solution could alone be sought. In
short, Kant asked the question to which the nineteenth century, in all
its philosophical reflection, has been striving to find an answer.
For in philosophy, as in other departments of knowledge, the work of
the nineteenth century has been one of mediation and reconciliation.
It has been an endeavor to break down the sharp antithesis of
philosophical and scientific theories that was characteristic of an
earlier time. In the writings of the greatest thinkers, the oppositions
of materialism and spiritualism, of sensationalism and idealism, of
empiricism and _a priori_ speculation, of individualism and socialism,
all the great oppositions of theoretical and practical philosophy,
which formerly were held to be absolute and irreconcilable, have
been modified, restated, reduced to the _relative_ antagonism of the
different aspects of one truth. The great controversies of the past
have thus passed into a new phase, in which absolute statements _pro_
and _con_ have become, as it were, antiquated; and the question is
no longer whether a particular doctrine or its opposite is true, but
what are the elements of truth and error in each of them, and how we
can attain to a comprehensive view of things, in which justice is done
to both. And if it be asked, what are the principles or ideas that
have suggested this reconciling work, and have been the guides of the
greatest scientific or philosophic writers in attempting to achieve
it, I think the answer must be that they are _the idea of organic
unity_, and, as implied in that, _the idea of development_. Goethe and
Hegel, in Germany; Comte, in France; Darwin and Spencer, in England,
are writers who almost span the whole range of difference in modern
thought; but they, and a multitude of others in every department of
study, have been inspired by the ideas of organism and development.
And they have all used them somewhat in the same way to turn the edge
of the old controversial weapons, or to lift thought above the “yes”
and “no” of opposing dogmatisms. It is true that the definitions or
interpretations of the ideas of organism and development given by these
writers are very different, and often, indeed, so sharply opposed that
they seem to bring back the old controversies in a new form. But this
does not alter the significance of the general fact; for, in the first
place, the use of an idea by any writer is by no means always limited
by his own interpretation of it; and, in the second place, the true
interpretation of the idea is that which contains the secret of its
power and prevalence, and it must in the long run gain the victory over
all other interpretations of it. We may, therefore, fairly say that
these ideas have been the marked ideas of the century, the conscious
or unconscious stimulus of its best thought; and that they have been
working, and are working still, in the direction of a deeper and more
comprehensive irenicon between the different tendencies of the human
mind than has been attained in any previous stage of the history of
philosophy.
Against such a general characterization of an age, there is the same
objection which Burke indicated when he said that “he could not draw up
an indictment against a nation.” We are taking a distant and general
view of a period, in which all its inequalities of movement, all the
ebb and flow of opinion, are lost sight of, and only one main current
of thought is visible. We may get a step nearer to the subject by
distinguishing three periods in the century, in which there is a
partial difference of tendency. The first period, which we may roughly
define as lasting well on into the 30’s, is, in the main, a period of
construction, of creative thought, in which the great germinating ideas
that distinguished the century are more or less adequately expressed
in different countries, and in which they receive a first, somewhat
hasty, application to all departments of human knowledge. Idealistic
philosophy, which gave the fullest expression to those ideas, seems
for a time to carry all before it in Germany; and a similar movement
of thought, less definitely reflective or speculative, enriches the
literature of other countries. In the next period, lasting until the
70’s, the new ideas do not lose their hold upon men’s minds, but there
is a certain critical recoil against them, a tendency to explain
them away. The first premature synthesis of idealistic philosophy is
attacked by a scepticism, which seems at times as if it would measure
back the whole way to the individualistic materialism of an earlier
age, or which only avoids that extreme to fall into a scientific
agnosticism, at first sight even more hostile to the claims of
philosophy. But the lesson of Kant could never be altogether forgotten,
nor could the negative or sceptical tendencies of the _Critique of Pure
Reason_ be permanently separated from the positive results of his later
writings. And the great scientific movement of the time, which at first
seemed to draw away all interest from speculative inquiry, tended in
the long run, especially by the advance of biological study, to raise
metaphysical questions which the methods of science were incapable of
answering. Hence, in the latest decades of the century, there has come
a revival of interest in philosophy, and especially in the idealistic
philosophy of its first years. But if philosophy has revived, it is
in a more critical and cautious form, and accompanied by a clear
consciousness that the only true idealism is that which is able to
absorb and assimilate all the data supplied by empirical investigation,
and do justice to all the results of the special sciences. The general
movement of thought in the nineteenth century has thus, on the whole,
taken an idealistic direction; but there has come with it also a deeper
consciousness of the immense difficulty of a comprehensive synthesis;
of the inefficacy of any easy monism or optimism, that would pluck
the fruit of knowledge before it is ripe; of the infinite labor and
patience, the sympathetic appreciation of the opposing views of others,
and constant and unsparing criticism of our own, which are needed for
the construction of a true philosophy.
II
In a short article like this, it is impossible to give more than a
few indications of the way in which this three-fold _schema_ of the
history of nineteenth-century philosophy should be filled up. To give
any definite impression, the writer must, so to speak, put on the
seven-leagued boots of Jack the Giant Killer; in other words, however
conscious he may be of the truth that _dolus latet in generalibus_, he
must generalize and be content to mention only a few leading names in
illustration of the tendencies of thought of which he speaks.
It is the instinct of each new generation to vindicate its freedom
by rebelling against the authority of its predecessors; and when a
new idea begins to influence human thought, it usually, on its first
appearance, shows that side which is most antagonistic to the spirit
of the past. Thus the peculiar nineteenth-century movement begins with
a reassertion of the _universal_ as against the _individual_, which
is so emphatic that it looks like a return to Spinozism. Schelling is
the most prominent philosophical representative of this tendency. In
the works which he wrote about the beginning of the century, he broke
away even from the universalized individualism of Fichte, and gave
emphatic prominence to the great philosophical commonplace—which had
been almost forgotten by the previous age—that there is an identity
which is below or above all distinction, and that the universe is one
through all its multiplicity, and permanent through all its changes.
His maxim—that there are none but _quantitative_ differences in
things, and that all these, even the difference of mind and matter,
disappear in the “indifference” of the Absolute—was like a declaration
of war against the “enlightenment.” It meant that philosophy was no
longer content to regard the whole as the sum of the parts, but could
look upon the distinction of the parts only as a differentiation of
the whole. With Schelling, indeed, this differentiation was in danger
of being reduced to a mere appearance and the unity of the Absolute
was on the point of vanishing in a bare or abstract identity. But his
strong assertion of the unity beneath all difference, of the priority
of the universal to all particulars, was perhaps necessary, ere the
true conception of the organic unity of the world could be arrived
at. And the correction soon came with Hegel, who maintained that the
absolute is “not substance, but subject.” For this meant that the
absolute is a self-differentiating principle, realizing itself in a
world of difference which is no mere appearance, but its own essential
manifestation; and again—what is the counterpart or complementary
truth to this—that in the world there are “degrees of reality,” and
that “mind is higher in degree than nature.” But these ideas could
hardly have been understood until the uncompromising assertion of the
absolute unity had been made, and until the subjectivity of the Kantian
and Fichtean points of view had once for all been set aside.
The philosophy of Hegel derives its power from the way in which
it strikes what, as I have already said, was the key-note of the
nineteenth-century philosophy. In the first place, it is a philosophy
of reconciliation, which attempts, through a criticism of the
oppositions of philosophical theory, to reach a point of view in
which they are all seen to be subordinated to the unity of one
principle. His attack upon the “law of contradiction,” as formulated
by scholastic logicians, meant simply that absolute distinctions are
unmeaning, and that the only real differences are differences within
a unity. On this principle he tried to show that all the oppositions
of thought and things which have found expression in philosophy are
relative oppositions, which find a solution or reconciliation in the
life and movement of the whole. Hence he maintained that in all the
great controversies that have divided the world, in metaphysics and
psychology, in ethics and theology, the combatants have really been
co-operators. Both sides, to use the expression of Leibnitz, have been
“right in what they affirmed and wrong only in what they denied.”
And their conflict has been the means of the evolution of a fuller
truth than that which was contained in the doctrine of either party.
In the second place, Hegel is guided throughout by the conception of
the universe—and, in a sense, of every even relatively independent
existence in it—as an organism, every element in which implies the
whole, every change in which is a phase of its self-evolution. For
his logical doctrine of the “_notion_” (as _Begriff_ is commonly
translated) means simply that we do not see anything truly until
we comprehend it as a whole, in which one principle manifests
itself through all the difference of the parts and—just through
their distinctions and their relations—binds itself into one
individual—reality. In this sense, everything just so far as it has
an independent individual existence at all is an organism. Lastly,
while thus conceiving the universe as organic, Hegel maintained that
it is not a natural but a spiritual organism. For the limited scope of
a natural organism and its process cannot be regarded as commensurate
with a universe, which comprehends all existence, whether classed as
organic or inorganic. Only the conscious and self-conscious unity
of mind can overreach and overcome such extreme antagonisms, and
reduce them all to elements in the realization of its own life. We
must, therefore, think of the universe as an organism which includes
nature, but manifests its ultimate principle only in the life of man.
We may add that in all this Hegel attempted to show that he was only
working out in the sphere of speculative thought what Christianity had
already expressed for the ordinary consciousness, according to its
half-pictorial methods of representation.
While this is the general meaning of Hegelianism, it must be added
that Hegel was more successful in formulating these ideas in their
logical or metaphysical form than in applying them to the results of
the special sciences of nature, which he only knew at second hand; or
even to the different provinces of the spiritual life and history of
man, which he had studied more thoroughly. In both cases his data were
very incomplete, and the scientific interpretation of them had not then
been carried far enough to prepare—as, according to Hegel himself, it
should prepare—for the final interpretation of philosophy. There is
another circumstance to be taken into account, a circumstance which
deeply affected Hegel and all the writers of his time. In the slow
process of human history the new wine is always at first poured into
old bottles, and only when the old bottles burst is an effort made
to find new ones that will contain it safely. Hence the development
of the new spirit in philosophy seemed often to go hand-in-hand with
a movement of restoration in politics and religion which was not
easily distinguishable from reaction. Just as the politicians of the
time could find for the newly awakened spirit of nationality no other
embodiment than the institutions of the ancient _régime_, and tried
to revive the old system destroyed by the Revolution, with only a
few repairs and additions, so the great philosophical writers sought
generally to reanimate the old scheme of life and thought by means of
the new ideas, rather than completely to recast it in accordance with
them. Hence, although Hegel’s _principle_ of evolution was as hostile
to reaction as to revolution, as hostile to an authoritative system
that denied the rights of the individual as to mere individualism, his
particular doctrines, both in politics and theology, took a strongly
conservative tinge. When we look more closely we see that it is only as
restoration is at the same time reformation, as it makes the old forms
the expression of a new life, that Hegel could logically defend them.
But the form which he gave to his ideas was perplexing; it tended in
many minds to identify the principle of development, which means that
the future can only spring _out_ of the past and the present, with the
defence of the _status quo_ in Church and State; and, on the other
hand, to confuse the forces of progress with those of revolution. Thus
the mediating, reconciling power of the new doctrine was for a time
obscured, and its effect in raising men’s minds above the old levels of
controversy was delayed.
III
In other countries during the earlier decades of the century a similar
movement of thought is discernible, though it was not carried out
anywhere with the same philosophical thoroughness as in Germany. In
France the organic idea did not find any very powerful representative
till the time of Comte, and even in his expression of it there is a
certain ambiguity. In his well-known law of development, indeed, he
seems to reproduce the individualistic doctrine of the eighteenth
century, and to deny the reality of the _universal_, both in its
theological and its philosophical form. But already in the last volume
of his _Positive Philosophy_, when he begins to deal with human
society, he maintains that “the individual man is an abstraction,
and that there is nothing real but humanity”; and in his _Positive
Politics_ he treats this unity of mankind as not only real, but divine.
In that work, moreover, he makes another step. Rejecting at once the
obstructions of the individualists and those of the socialists, he
rises to the conception of a social organism, which gives play to
the competitive energy of individuals, and yet binds them together
in its own more comprehensive life. In England, before the close of
the eighteenth century, the same spirit had found a representative
in Burke, who rejected entirely the idea of a social contract, and
maintained that the State is based on an unconscious reason of
society, which is far wiser than the conscious reason of even the
wisest individuals. In general, however, the spiritualistic movement
of the earlier part of the century took, among the English-speaking
people, rather a poetic and literary than a philosophical form.
And the imperfect attempts of Coleridge to transplant German ideas
into England—attempts followed up with signal energy by Frederic
Denison Maurice—hardly constitute an exception to this rule. In
this connection, also, as one who partly grasped the organic idea of
social life and its development, but who gave it a somewhat imperfect
and even contradictory expression, I may mention a later writer,
Thomas Carlyle, whose imaginative genius and moral enthusiasm did
much to breathe a new life into history. Though not a philosopher in
any technical sense, he was, like his friend Emerson, a vehicle of
philosophical ideas, and he contributed greatly to scatter the seed of
idealism upon British soil. His Calvinistic pessimism, indeed, makes a
curious contrast with the fearless optimism of the new country which is
characteristic of Emerson; but whether great men are to be regarded as
“heroes to be worshipped,” according to the teaching of the one, or as
“representative men,” who are to be followed because they express what
all are thinking, according to the ideas of the other, we are led, in
both cases, to a deeper view of the solidarity of human society and of
its spiritual basis.
IV
It is difficult to determine more than approximately the beginning
of special movements of thought; for the different nations of the
civilized world are not exactly contemporaneous in their development,
and in each nation there are always individuals who lag behind the time
or hasten on before it. But, speaking generally, we may say that as
early as the fourth decade of the century a certain reaction had set
in against the conclusions of idealistic philosophy, and especially
against the organic idea of human life; and a tendency was even
shown to revert, so far as possible, to the methods and ideas of the
eighteenth century. The reasons for this change are various. In Germany
the succession of great philosophers had come to an end, and their
followers were smaller men, who were inclined too much to repeat the
formulas, but had little of the creative power, of their predecessors.
More attention, therefore, began to be paid to the protests of writers
like Herbart and Schopenhauer, who, even in the hour of its triumph,
had criticised and attacked the prevailing philosophy. Again, the
physical sciences were advancing by “leaps and bounds,” and there was
a growing inclination to believe in the universal validity of the
mechanical methods of explanation to which _they_ owed their success,
and even in those sociological and historical studies to which the
idealistic philosophy had given so great an impetus. The progress of
empirical research and the increase of the materials of knowledge
caused much of the work of Hegel and his followers to seem inadequate,
if not entirely to set it aside. Even in Germany, where the new ideas
had taken a distinctly philosophical shape, they seemed to lose
their hold in the controversies that attended the breaking up of the
Hegelian school; and in other countries, where they never found such a
systematic expression, they were even less able to resist the attack
now made upon them. Furthermore, as I have already indicated, writers
of an idealistic tendency, in their recoil from the enlightenment, had
devoted themselves so much to an appreciation of institutions derived
from the past that they seemed to have no eyes for the defects of these
institutions, and to confuse evolution with restoration.
The general result of all these influences was, then, to discredit
philosophy and exalt science, so far as might be, into its place.
Either the abstract methods of the physical sciences were proclaimed
as adequate for the discovery of all truth, or, if this was seen to
be impossible, agnosticism was professed in regard to all subjects
to which these methods could not be applied. Even the phenomena of
life were supposed to be capable of explanation by the action and
reaction of the parts or elements of the physical organism, and Huxley
looked forward to the time when man with all his spiritual endowments
should be shown to be only the “cunningest of nature’s clocks.” The
new science of psychophysics, which arose in Germany and has been
cultivated with so much zeal by Wundt and others in all civilized
countries, seemed to carry the method of physics into the investigation
of mind, and some of its students were ready to maintain that it
was the only psychology that deserved the name of science. Darwin’s
great work on the _Origin of Species_, in so far as it set aside the
idea of special creation and referred the “purposiveness” of organic
structures to a process in which the external environment, and not any
inward power of self-adaptation, was the controlling factor, seemed
to bring a new reinforcement to the same way of thinking. And he and
his followers were not slow to apply the theory of natural selection
to the life of man, as well as to that of plants and animals. Finally,
the historical studies, which were now cultivated with an energy to an
extent hitherto unexampled, and immensely extended the knowledge of the
process whereby the present has grown out of the past, were invaded
by a similar spirit; and the historical method was maintained to be a
solvent which could disintegrate all metaphysical conceptions of ethics
or politics or even of theology. The account of the genesis of any
idea was regarded as reducing its claims to the level of the elements
or rudiments out of which it had sprung, and thus as enabling the
scientific historian to explain, or explain away, the spiritual by the
natural in all human life and experience. All things appeared again to
be pointing towards a system of thought which would resolve ethics and
psychology into physiology, and physiology into chemistry and physics.
At the same time the victory of this tendency was always more apparent
than real. In the first place, “out of the eater came forth meat”—that
very advance of the special sciences, which in its earlier stages had
tended to throw all speculative thought into the shade, in the long run
caused the need of philosophy to be again felt. In particular, the
study of development in the organic world, which had received so great
a stimulus from the work of Darwin, could not be carried on without
the aid of higher conceptions than were required for the guidance
of the physicist. The hypothesis of natural selection might expel
the idea of design in the cruder form of a special creation of every
distinct species; and the emphasis which it had laid upon the outward
conditions of growth might seem unfavorable to the higher conception
of an immanent teleology of the organism, but it was confessed by
its author to be an incomplete theory of development, and Darwin
himself, when he turned his attention to the evolution of man, found
it necessary to supplement it by what might be called the converse
theory of sexual selection; thus adding a principle of co-operation
to his first principle of competition. And Mr. Spencer, who defined
growth as a process of integration and differentiation, little as he
might himself intend it, was really putting into popular language the
Hegelian idea of evolution—an idea which necessarily involved the
conception of a self-determined end. Evolutionists might cling, as they
still cling, to the belief that, though constantly and necessarily
speaking of purpose, they could eliminate it from the result of their
investigations by the hypothesis of Darwin, or, subsequently, of
Weissmann; but their discussions, especially when they were extended
to the historical development of man, could not but reawaken the great
controversy whether in the _ultimate_ explanation of things it is more
reasonable to “level up,” or to “level down,” to explain the higher
by the lower, or the lower by the higher. That both explanations are
necessary, nay, that no teleology can be of much worth which does not
presuppose a thorough inquiry into the causal connections of particular
phenomena, was admitted by all modern idealists. But they began to
press the question whether the unity of the whole is not prior to
its distribution into parts, and does not govern their relations with
each other; and, in particular, whether it is possible in the case
of organic beings, and especially of organic beings possessed of
consciousness and self-consciousness, to be satisfied with a mode of
explanation that treats them as mere collections of material elements
which act and react externally upon each other. Whatever its value as
a provisional hypothesis, can such a mode of explanation be finally
regarded as adequate for the explanation of the nature of the world
as a whole, or, indeed, of any one existence in it, that has even a
relative independence or separate being of its own?
But, in the second place, a revival of the idealistic philosophy was
made necessary by an obvious weakness which clung to the scientific
materialism of the nineteenth century from the very beginning. The
Kantian criticism of knowledge, which could not be entirely neglected,
had convincingly proved that in our experience objects can be known
only in relation to a subject, and matter only in relation to mind.
But, if so, how could the latter be explained by the former? Even
to those who had not fully understood this doctrine, it became
evident that mind is at least co-ordinate with matter, and cannot be
treated as a mere “_epiphenomenon_” of it. Mr. Spencer, therefore,
had to take refuge in the strange notion that we are possessed of
“two consciousnesses”: the consciousness of ideas within us, and the
consciousness of motions without us; and that neither of these can be
resolved into the other, though both are the phenomena of an unknowable
Absolute. It is in this citadel of ignorance that Huxley tries to
intrench himself; but the place was taken before it could be occupied.
The self-contradiction of an unknowable Absolute, and the equal though
less obvious self-contradiction of a dualistic separation between
two aspects of our life—which, as a matter of fact, are never,
and logically can never be, divided—could not long be maintained
against a criticism armed with the weapons of Kant and his idealistic
successors. Already, in the 50’s, the cry “Back to Kant” was raised
in Germany, and, not long after, it led in England and America to a
renewed study of the German idealistic writers, in which Dr. Hutchison
Sterling and the late Professor Green took a leading part. It was soon
obvious to every one who had learned the lesson of critical philosophy
that the agnostic dualism of Mr. Spencer was due to a fundamental
misconception of what is meant by the subjectivity of knowledge. It was
pointed out that if we have the consciousness of object and subject
only in relation to each other, it is not necessary to seek for the
principle of their unity in any _Tertium Quid_ which is neither the
one nor the other. That which Mr. Spencer sought in an unknowable
Absolute was “in our mouths and in our hearts”; it was to be found
in the inseparable unity of experience, in which the inward and the
outward are correlative elements. Agnosticism was a sort of spiritual
refuge for the destitute constructed by those who had renounced their
heritage: who, in other words, had by their abstractions separated the
elements of experience from each other, and were thus forced to seek
beyond experience for the unity which they had lost. The true remedy
for the evil was to give up such abstract ways of thinking and to learn
to “think things together”; in other words, to recognize the organic
relation of the inner and the outer life, and to explain the parts by
the whole, and not the whole by the artificially severed parts.
V
The great distinguishing feature of the last two decades of the century
has been a movement of approximation, partly conscious and partly
unconscious, between the representatives of science, and particularly
of those sciences that deal with special aspects or elements of
human life, on the one hand, and the representatives of idealistic
philosophy on the other. The reconciling ideas of an earlier time
have become better understood and have shown more effectively their
power to reconcile. Not that this mediating power had previously been
entirely unfelt. Even in the time when philosophy was most discredited
in Germany, Lotze, in whom a cautious critical temper was combined
with deep moral and religious sympathies, and a practical knowledge
of the biological and medical sciences with careful studies of Kant
and Hegel, sought to show how an idealistic view of the universe
and of human life could be maintained consistently with the fullest
recognition of scientific methods and results. And though his system
was, on the whole, rather a compromise than a true reconciliation
of philosophy and science, yet it has undoubtedly had very great
influence in modifying the ideas of the opposing schools of thought
and narrowing the ground of controversy between them. Thus the old
English empirical psychology, which was represented by the Mills and
by Mr. Bain, has gradually widened its scope in the hands of writers
like Professor Ward and Mr. Stout, at first probably through the study
of Herbart and then by contact with the revived idealistic movement.
On the other hand, we may notice how idealistic writers, like Mr.
Bradley and Mr. Bosanquet, have tried to absorb every lesson that can
be learned from empiricism, and to shun with the utmost care the very
suspicion of anything like dogmatism. Mr. Bradley’s denunciations of
a “too easy monism” and a philosophy that turns the living world into
a “ballet of bloodless categories” are too well known to be more than
referred to. Nor is this the place to discuss whether his fear of
such a result has not sometimes led him into compromises which are
inconsistent with his own fundamental principle that the world must be
conceived as an intelligible system. In any case, we may fairly point
to his work and to the work of other writers animated by a similar
spirit, as showing the growing prevalence of that reconciling spirit
which seeks at once to do justice to all the results of empirical
inquiry and of the investigations of the special sciences, and yet
at the same time to give them a new interpretation in the light of
an idealistic philosophy. It is impossible within our limits to
illustrate this view of the tendencies of the time by further reference
to the recent philosophical literature of England and America, or of
Germany and France. Still less can I refer to the numerous books on
special departments of inquiry in ethics and theology, in sociology
and in history, in which the “ideally organic view of life and the
world,” as we may call it, has shown its mediating and reconciling
influence. Nor can I do more than refer to the counter current of
pessimism, which has found its most distinguished representatives in
Hartmann and Nietzsche; the former a man of great wealth of thought
and dialectical power, whose philosophy is idealistic in all but its
ultimate principle, and is indeed pessimistic only by an exaggeration
of the opposition between the conscious and the unconscious working of
reason; the latter, hardly a philosopher at all but rather a writer
of pungent and suggestive aphorisms, winged with indignant passion
against prevalent opinions—aphorisms which always contradict some one,
and often contradict each other. From Nietzsche at his best we may
receive a useful warning against too easily satisfying ourselves with
the commonplaces of idealistic optimism; from Hartmann we may derive
very considerable help in estimating the difficulties that have to be
met by those who would seek to work out idealistic principles into a
systematic view of the world. But, without attempting to enter upon any
more detailed criticism of these or other important writers of recent
years, I shall devote the space that remains to one general thought as
to the present state of controversy, in relation to the fundamental
principles of philosophy.
VI
Ever since the revival of the study of Kant, the main conflict in
philosophy has ceased to lie between materialism and idealism.
It has rather become a conflict between those who take up some
position analogous to that of Kant and those who seek to carry out
the idealistic principle to all its consequences. For the essential
characteristic of Kant’s position lay in his sharp division between
the spheres of knowledge and of faith—between a knowledge which was
confined to phenomena and their connection in experience, and a faith
of practical reason, which reached beyond experience to apprehend that
which is noumenally real. Even the agnosticism of Mr. Spencer might
be regarded as a modification of the Kantian point of view, in so far
as his denial of the possibility of knowing the absolute is based on
Mansel’s version of the Kantian antinomies; while his description of
the “vague consciousness” of the absolute which he bids us worship may
be regarded as representing that faith which, in Kant’s view, enables
us to pierce the veil of the phenomena and grasp the ultimate reality
of things. And in the latter part of the century there has been a
continual germination of similar theories, theories agreeing with the
Kantian philosophy at least in making some kind of dualistic division
between the sphere of clearly defined knowledge and the sphere of ideal
or spiritual faith, and also in confining the former to phenomena
while the latter is held to be capable of rising in some way from the
phenomenal to the real. One of the earliest fruits of the Neo-Kantian
movement in Germany was Lange’s _History of Materialism_, which
insisted on the strictest interpretation of the lesson of the _Critique
of Pure Reason_, that scientific knowledge is confined to the empirical
and phenomenal, but which maintained also the chartered freedom of
imagination to feed our hopes with the idea of a world not realized,
or realizable, under the conditions of finite experience. And, with
a different aim, but in a similar spirit, Ritschl, borrowing some of
his weapons from Lotze, sought to take away from philosophy the right
to investigate the spiritual truths of religion, and maintained that
such truths were given in a kind of intuition of faith which is above
criticism and which some of his followers identify, like Kant, with
the demands or postulates of the moral consciousness. Other writers,
following Schopenhauer, have sought to emancipate the will from the
intelligence and to give it an independent power of estimating values.
The great effort to bring science and philosophy together—which, as
we have seen, has characterized the later years of the century—has
itself naturally given rise to many such dualistic compromises, of
which Lotze’s philosophy was among the earliest. And it is partly to
Lotze’s influence that we owe the tendency, visible in some of the most
important recent contributions to philosophy, to regard our actual
experience as having an intuitive completeness which is beyond all
analysis, while reflective thought on the other hand is conceived as
having a purely analytic and discursive operation, which can grasp only
the severed fragments of the given reality and connect them externally
to each other, but which can never restore the organic whole again.
Here, too, we seem by another way to be landed in the same conclusion,
viz., that we are perpetually poised between an ideal which we cannot
verify, but which yet is held to be our only vision of reality, and a
definite result of knowledge, which only gives us what is abstract and
phenomenal. Yet it is difficult to understand how such an organic idea
of the universe can exist except for the thinking intelligence, and how
the thought that grasps it can be separated from the discursive thought
by which the different elements of reality are brought into relation.
How, indeed, can there be any thought which is not both discursive and
intuitive at once, any thought which connects the parts without resting
upon the unity of the whole to which they belong?
All these different compromises are really different forms of the
Kantian dualism, but they supply convenient cities of refuge for those
who are unwilling to admit that faith is but implicit reason, and
that it is always possible to translate its intuitions of truth into
explicit logic. There is much excuse, indeed, in many cases for such
unwillingness when we consider how often reason has presented itself
as purely a critical or dissolving power, and how often abstract
theories which grasp only one aspect of things have been set forth as
complete explanations of religion or morality or some other of the
higher interests of life. It has always to be kept in view that it
is in something like immediate perception that truth is given in the
first instance, and that philosophy, therefore, must always be in a
sense toiling after the intuitions of faith. Yet, on the other hand,
to hold that there is anywhere an abstract division between the two is
to hold that faith is essentially irrational; it is to exalt it above
reason in a way that inevitably leads in the end to its being depressed
below reason. If, however, this view can be maintained it must lead in
the long run to the rejection of all dualistic compromises. And there
are already many who hold that after the unstable equilibrium of the
Kantian theory has been shaken there is no secure standing-ground for
philosophy short of a thorough-going idealism. Yet even they have
learned by experience how dangerous it is to snatch prematurely at the
readiest idealistic interpretation of facts; and they are aware how
easy it is to fall into a simple optimistic theory, which slurs over
difficulties instead of solving them. They know that if Hegel or any
one ever pretended, or could reasonably be interpreted as pretending,
to construe the universe _a priori_, the pretence was futile, and
that a true and valuable idealism can be reached only through the
interpretation of the data of experience by the special sciences, and
the reinterpretation of the results of these sciences by philosophy.
They hold, in short, that if the well-known saying of Hegel is to
be taken for truth, both of its clauses must be equally emphasized,
and that no philosophy can safely maintain that “what is rational is
actual” which has not gone through all the effort that is necessary to
prove that “what is actual is rational.”
EDWARD CAIRD.
MEDICINE
INTRODUCTION
For countless generations the prophets and kings of humanity have
desired to see the things which men have seen, and to hear the things
which men have heard in the course of the wonderful nineteenth century.
To the call of the watchers on the towers of progress there had been
the one sad answer—the people sit in darkness and in the shadow of
death. Politically, socially, and morally the race had improved,
but for the unit, for the individual, there was little hope. Cold
philosophy shed a glimmer of light on his path, religion in its various
guises illumined his sad heart, but neither availed to lift the curse
of suffering from the sin-begotten son of Adam. In the fulness of time,
long expected, long delayed, at last Science emptied upon him from
the horn of Amalthea blessings which cannot be enumerated, blessings
which have made the century forever memorable; and which have followed
each other with a rapidity so bewildering that we know not what next
to expect. To us in the medical profession, who deal with this unit,
and measure progress by the law of the greatest happiness to the
greatest number, to us whose work is with the sick and suffering,
the great boon of this wonderful century, with which no other can be
compared, is the fact that the leaves of the tree of Science have been
for the healing of the nations. Measure as we may the progress of the
world—materially, in the advantages of steam, electricity, and other
mechanical appliances; sociologically, in the great improvement in
the conditions of life; intellectually, in the diffusion of education;
morally, in a possibly higher standard of ethics—there is no one
measure which can compare with the decrease of physical suffering in
man, woman, and child when stricken by disease or accident. This is the
one fact of supreme personal import to every one of us. This is the
Promethean gift of the century to man.
THE GROWTH OF SCIENTIFIC MEDICINE
The century opened auspiciously, and those who were awake saw signs of
the dawn. The spirit of Science was brooding on the waters. In England
the influence of John Hunter stimulated the younger men to the study
of the problems of anatomy and pathology. On the Continent the great
Boorhaave—the Batavian Hippocrates—had taught correct ways in the
study of the clinical aspects of disease, and the work of Haller had
given a great impetus to physiology. The researches of Morgagni had,
as Virchow had remarked, introduced anatomical thinking into medicine.
But theories still controlled practice. Under the teaching of Cullen,
the old idea that humors were the seat of disease had given place to a
neuro-pathology which recognized the paramount influence of the nervous
system in disease. His colleague at Edinburgh, Brown, brought forward
the attractive theory that all diseases could be divided into two
groups, the one caused by excess of excitement—the sthenic—the other
by a deficiency—the asthenic—each having its appropriate treatment,
the one by depletion, the other by stimulation. In a certain measure
Hahnemann’s theory of homœopathy was a reaction against the prevalent
theories of the day, and has survived through the century, though in a
much modified form. Some of his views were as follows:
“The only vocation of the physician is to heal; theoretical knowledge
is of no use. In a case of sickness he should only know what is curable
and the remedies. Of the diseases he cannot know anything except the
symptoms. There are internal changes, but it is impossible to learn
what they are; symptoms alone are accessible; with their removal by
remedies the disease is removed. Their effects can be studied in the
healthy only. They act on the sick by causing a disease similar to that
which is to be combated, and which dissolves itself into this similar
affection. The full doses required to cause symptoms in the well are
too large to be employed as remedies for the sick. The healing power
of a drug grows in an inverse proportion to its substance. He says,
literally: ‘Only potencies are homœopathic medicines.’ ‘I recognize
nobody as my follower but him who gives medicine in so small doses
as to preclude the perception of anything medicinal in them by means
either of the senses or of chemistry.’ ‘The pellets may be held near
the young infant when asleep.’ ‘Gliding the hand over the patient
will cure him, provided the manipulation is done with firm intention
to render as much good with it as possible, for its power is in
the benevolent will of the manipulator.’ Such is the homœopathy of
Hahnemann, which is no longer recognized in what they call homœopathy
to-day.”—(A. JACOBI.)
The awakening came in France. In 1801 Bichat, a young man, published
a work on general anatomy, in which he placed the seat of disease,
not in the organs, but in the tissues or fabrics of which they were
composed, which gave an extraordinary impetus to the investigation
of pathological changes. Meanwhile, the study of the appearances of
organs and bodies when diseased (morbid anatomy), which had been
prosecuted with vigor by Morgagni in the eighteenth century, had been
carried on actively in Great Britain and on the Continent, and the
work of Broussais stimulated a more accurate investigation of local
disorders. The discovery by Laennec of the art of auscultation, by
which, through changes in the normal sounds within the chest, various
diseases of the heart and lungs could be recognized, gave an immense
impetus to clinical research. The art of percussion, discovered by
Avenbrugger in the eighteenth century, and reintroduced by Corvisart,
contributed not a little to the same. Laennec’s contributions to the
study of diseases of the lungs, of the heart, and of the abdominal
organs really laid the foundation of modern clinical medicine. A little
later Bright published his researches on diseases of the kidneys, from
which we date our knowledge of this important subject. One of the most
complicated problems of the first half of the century related to the
differentiation of the fevers. The eruptive fevers, measles, scarlet
fever, and small-pox, were easily recognized, and the great group of
malarial fevers was well known; but there remained the large class of
continued fevers, which had been a source of worry and dispute for
many generations. Louis clearly differentiated typhoid fever, and by
the work of his American pupils, W. W. Gerhard and Alfred Stillé, of
Philadelphia, and George B. Shattuck, of Boston, typhus and typhoid
fevers were defined as separate and independent affections. Relapsing
fever, yellow fever, dengue, etc., were also distinguished. The work of
Graves and Stokes, of Dublin, of Jenner and Budd, in England, of Drake,
Dickson, and Flint, in America, supplemented the labors of the French
physicians, and by the year 1860 the profession had reached a sure and
safe position on the question of the clinical aspects of fevers.
The most distinguishing feature of the scientific medicine of
the century has been the phenomenal results which have followed
_experimental investigations_. While this method of research is not
new, since it was introduced by Galen, perfected by Harvey, and
carried on by Hunter, it was not until well into the middle of the
century that, by the growth of research laboratories, the method
exercised a deep influence on progress. The lines of experimental
research have sought to determine the functions of the organs in
health, the conditions under which perversion of these functions occur
in diseases, and the possibility of exercising protective and curative
influences on the processes of disease.
The researches of the physiological laboratories have enlarged in every
direction our knowledge of the great functions of life—digestion,
assimilation, circulation, respiration, and excretion. Perhaps in no
department have the results been more surprising than in the growth
of our knowledge of the functions of the brain and nerves. Not only
has experimental science given us clear and accurate data upon the
localization of certain functions of the brain and of the paths of
sensatory and of motor impulses, but it has opened an entirely new
field in the diagnosis and treatment of the diseases of these organs,
in certain directions of a most practical nature, enabling us to resort
to measures of relief undreamed of even thirty years ago.
The study of physiology and pathology within the past half-century
has done more to emancipate medicine from routine and the thraldom of
authority than all the work of all the physicians from the days of
Hippocrates to Jenner, and we are as yet but on the threshold.
THE GROWTH OF SPECIALISM
The restriction of the energies of trained students to narrow fields
in science, while not without its faults, has been the most important
single factor in the remarkable expansion of our knowledge. Against
the disadvantages in a loss of breadth and harmony there is the
compensatory benefit of a greater accuracy in the application of
knowledge in specialism, as is well illustrated in the cultivation of
special branches of practice. Diseases of the skin, of the eye, of the
ear, of the throat, of the teeth, diseases of women and of children,
are now studied and practised by men who devote all their time to one
limited field of work. While not without minor evils, this custom
has yielded some of the great triumphs of the profession. Dentistry,
ophthalmology, and gynæcology are branches which have been brought
to a state of comparative perfection, and very largely by the labors
of American physicians. In the last-named branch the blessings which
have been brought to suffering women are incalculable, not only as
regards the minor ailments of life, but in the graver and more critical
accidents to which the sex is liable.
One of the most remarkable and beneficial reforms of the century has
been in the attitude of the profession and the public to the subject of
insanity, and the gradual formation of a body of men in the profession
who labor to find out the cause and means of relief of this most
distressing of all human maladies. The reform movement inaugurated by
Tuke in England, by Rush in the United States, by Pinel and Esquirol in
France, and by Jacobi and Hasse in Germany, has spread to all civilized
countries, and has led not only to an amelioration and improvement in
the care of the insane, but to a scientific study of the subject which
has already been productive of much good. In this country, while the
treatment of the insane is careful and humanitarian, the unfortunate
affiliation of insanity with politics is still in many States a serious
hinderance to progress.
It may be interesting to take a glance at the state of medicine in
this country at the opening of the nineteenth century. There were
only three schools of medicine, the most important of which were the
University of Pennsylvania and the Harvard. There were only two
general hospitals. The medical education was chiefly in the hands of
the practitioners, who took students as apprentices for a certain
number of years. The well-to-do students and those wishing a better
class of education went to Edinburgh or London. There were only two or
three medical journals, and very few books had been published in the
country, and the profession was dependent entirely upon translations
from the French and upon English works. The only medical libraries
were in connection with the Pennsylvania Hospital and the New York
Hospital. The leading practitioners in the early years were Rush and
Physick, in Philadelphia; Hossack and Mitchill, in New York; and James
Jackson and John Collins Warren, in Boston. There were throughout the
country, in smaller places, men of great capabilities and energy, such
as Nathan Smith, the founder of the Medical Schools of Dartmouth and of
Yale, and Daniel Drake in Cincinnati. After 1830 a remarkable change
took place in the profession, owing to the leaven of French science
brought back from Paris by American students. Between 1840 and 1870
there was a great increase in the number of medical schools, but the
general standard of education was low—lower, indeed, than had ever
before been reached in the medical profession. The private schools
multiplied rapidly, diplomas were given on short two-year sessions, and
nothing contributed more to the degeneration of the profession than
this competition and rivalry between ill-equipped medical schools. The
reformation, which started at Harvard shortly after 1870, spread over
the entire country, and the rapid evolution of the medical school has
been one of the most striking phenomena in the history of medicine
in the century. University authorities began to appreciate the fact
that medicine was a great department of knowledge, to be cultivated
as a science and promoted as an art. Wealthy men felt that in no
better way could they contribute to the progress of the race than
by the establishment of laboratories for the study of disease and
hospitals for the care of the sick poor. The benefactions of Johns
Hopkins, of Sims, of Vanderbilt, of Pierpont Morgan, of Strathcona, of
Mount-Stephen, of Payne, and of Levi C. Lane and others have placed
scientific medicine on a firm basis.
THE GROWTH OF PREVENTIVE MEDICINE
Sanitary science, hygiene, or preventive medicine may claim to be one
of the brightest spots in the history of the nineteenth century. Public
hygiene was cultivated among the Egyptians, and in the Mosaic law it
reached a remarkable organization. The personal hygiene of the Greeks
was embraced in the saying, “The fair mind in the fair body,” and the
value of exercise and training was fully recognized. The Romans, too,
in public and private hygiene, were our superiors in the matter of
water supply and baths. But modern sanitary science has a much wider
scope and is concerned with the causes of disease quite as much as with
the conditions under which these diseases prevail. The foundations of
the science were laid in the last century with Jenner’s discovery of
vaccination. Howard, too, had grasped the association of fever with
overcrowding in the jails, while the possibility of the prevention of
scurvy had been shown by Captain Cook and by Sir Gilbert Blaine.
Preventive medicine was a blundering, incomplete science until
bacteriology opened unheard-of possibilities for the prevention of
disease. Before discussing some of the victories of preventive medicine
it will be well to take a brief survey of the growth of the following
subject:
SCIENCE OF BACTERIOLOGY
From the brilliant overthrow by Pasteur, in 1861, and by Koch and Cohn,
in 1876, of the theory of spontaneous generation, we may date its
modern growth. Wrapped up in this theory of spontaneous generation,
upon which speculation raged centuries before the invention of the
microscope, lies the history of bacteriology.
The ancient Greek and Roman philosophers wrestled with the question,
and very interesting views of the relation of germ life to disease
are preserved to us in their manuscripts. With the invention of the
microscope we can mark the first positive step towards the goal of
to-day. A Jesuit priest, Kircher, in 1671, was the first to investigate
putrefying meat, milk, and cheese with the crude microscope of his
day, and left us indefinite remarks concerning “very minute living
worms” found therein. Four years after Kircher a Dutch linen merchant,
Antonius von Leeuwenhoek, by improving the lenses of the microscope,
saw in rain-water, putrefying fluids, intestinal contents, and saliva,
minute, moving, living particles, which he called “animalculæ.” In
medical circles of his day these observations aroused the keenest
interest, and the theory that these “animalculæ” might be the cause
of all disease was eagerly discussed. Pleincz, of Vienna, after much
observation of various fluids, putrefying and otherwise, wrote in
1762 that it was his firm belief that the phenomena of diseases and
the decomposition of animal fluids were wholly caused by these minute
living things.
Notwithstanding such assertions, from his day on until Pasteur, Koch,
and Cohn finally proved its misconceptions in 1876, the theory of
spontaneous generation held the upper hand in all discussions upon the
question.
The stimulus to research as to the causes of disease along the line
of bacterial origin did not entirely cease to be felt, and the names
of Pollender and Davaine are linked together in the first undoubted
discovery of micro-organisms in disease, when the cause of anthrax, a
disease of cattle, was solved in 1863. Following closely upon Davaine’s
researches, the primary causes of wound infection were worked out, and
to the efforts of the British surgeon Lister are due the great advances
of modern surgery.
In rapid succession the presence of bacteria was clearly demonstrated
in relapsing fever, leprosy, and typhoid fever; but far eclipsing all
former discoveries, on account of the magnitude of the difficulties
encountered and overcome, were the brilliant demonstrations of the
cause of consumption and allied diseases, and that of Asiatic cholera,
by Dr. Robert Koch in 1882 and in 1884 respectively.
From that time onward innumerable workers have satisfied the critical
scientific world as to the causes of pneumonia, diphtheria, tetanus,
influenza, and bubonic plague, besides many diseases of cattle, horses,
sheep, and other animals and insects.
Having glanced hastily at the history of bacteriology, we may next
consider some facts concerning the germs themselves. What are they? To
the lay mind the words germ, microbe, bacterium, and bacillus often
convey confused ideas of invisible, wriggling, worm-like creatures,
enemies of mankind, ever on the watch to gain a stealthy entrance
into our bodies, where they wreak harm and death. Scientifically
considered, however, they are the smallest of living things yet known.
They are not animals, but are members of the vegetable kingdom, and are
possessed of definite yet varying shapes. They consist of a jelly-like
substance called protoplasm, which is covered in and held in place by a
well-formed membrane of a relatively hard and dense character, exactly
similar in composition to the woody fibre of trees.
According to their shape the bacteria are divided into three chief
groups, called respectively cocci, bacilli, and spirilla. The cocci
are spherical bodies and may exist singly or in pairs, in fours, in
clusters, or in chains. In this group we find the smallest bacteria
known, many of them not over 1-150,000 of an inch in diameter. The
bacilli are rod-like bodies, varying much in size in different species
and in members of the same species. They are larger than the cocci,
measuring in length from 1-25,000 of an inch to 1-4000, and in breadth
from 1-125,000 to 1-16,000 of an inch. Many varieties are possessed of
organs of locomotion called flagella.
The spirilla resemble the bacilli, except that they are twisted into
corkscrew shapes, or have gently undulating outlines. Upon an average
they are much longer than the bacilli, one species being very long,
measuring about 1-600 of an inch. As seen in the natural state bacteria
are found to be colorless, but it is by the application of various
aniline dyes that they are usually studied. These minute plants
increase by a simple method of division into two equal parts, or by
a more complex process of forming a seed—the so-called spore—which
later on develops into the adult form. Under favorable conditions they
are able to multiply at an enormous rate; for instance, it has been
calculated that a bacillus dividing once every hour would at the end
of twenty-four hours have increased to seventeen millions; and if the
division continued at the same rate we should find at the end of the
third day an incalculable number of billions, whose weight would be
nearly seven thousand five hundred tons!
But, fortunately for our welfare, nature by various means renders the
possibility of such a happening entirely beyond the slightest chance of
realization, her greatest barrier being the lack of an adequate food
supply.
The distribution in nature of bacteria is wellnigh universal,
occurring as they do in the air we breathe, the water and milk we
drink, upon the exposed surfaces of man and animals, and in their
intestinal tracts, and in the soil to a depth of about nine feet. But
it has been noted that at very high altitudes and in glacier ice none
exist, while in the Arctic regions and at sea far from land their
numbers are very few.
The conditions governing their growth involve many complex problems,
but a few of the chief factors concerned are moisture, air, food,
temperature, and light. All bacteria must have moisture, else they
die sooner or later, depending upon the hardness of the species, and
none can multiply without it. A supply of air is by no means essential
to all germs. To some it is absolutely necessary, and such germs
are called aerobes. To others air is wholly detrimental, and they
constitute the anaerobes, while to the majority of bacteria air supply
is a matter of indifference, and in consequence they are grouped under
the term facultative anaerobes.
The food supply of many consists of dead animal and vegetable
materials, a few require living tissues, while a small number can exist
wholly upon mineral salts, or even the nitrogen of the air. The lowest
temperature at which some bacteria can multiply is the freezing-point
of water, and the highest 170 degrees Fahrenheit. However, the average
range of temperature suitable to the majority lies between 60 and 104
degrees Fahrenheit, 98 2-5 degrees Fahrenheit being the most suitable
for the growth of disease-producing germs. Light, ordinarily diffused
daylight, or its absence, is a matter of no moment to most germs,
whereas direct sunlight is a destroyer of all bacteria.
The study of the life histories of these diminutive plants excites the
wonder of those who make observations upon them. It is truly marvellous
to know that these bacteria can accomplish in their short lives of
possibly a few hours or days feats which would baffle the cleverest of
chemists if given years of a lifetime to work upon. They give to the
farmer the good quality of his crops, to the dairyman superior butter
and cheese; they assist in large measure in freeing our rivers and
lakes from harmful pollutions. Here it should be strongly emphasized
that those bacteria which cause disease are only of a few species, all
others contributing to our welfare in countless ways.
Quite as astonishing is the discovery that within the root-knobs of
pease and beans live bacteria which by splitting up mineral salts
containing nitrogen, and by absorbing nitrogen from the air, give it
over to the plant so that it is enabled to grow luxuriantly, whereas,
without their presence, the tiller of the soil might fertilize the
ground in vain. It is quite possible that not alone pease and beans,
but all grasses and plants and trees depend upon the presence of such
germs for their very existence, which in turn supply man and animals
with their means of existence. Hence we see that these nitrifying
bacteria, as they are called, if swept out of existence, would be the
cause of cessation of all life upon the globe. And arguing backward,
one prominent authority states it as his belief that the first of all
life on this earth were those lowly forms of plants which only required
the nitrogen of air or salts to enable them to multiply.
Limiting observation now to the sphere of medicine, it will be readily
perceived that the presence of bacterial life in a causative relation
to disease is an object of paramount regard. The following paragraphs
will briefly treat of the diseases associated with micro-organisms and
the common modes of infection in each, the chain of events subsequent
to an infection, and the possibilities of protection or cure by means
of substances elaborated in the body of an individual or animal
recently recovered from an infectious disease:
_Anthrax._—A disease chiefly of cattle and sheep, occasionally of
man, is caused by the _Bacillus anthracis_, discovered in 1849–50 by
Pollender and Davaine. It enters the body through abrasions of the
skin, by inhalation of the spores, or seeds, into the lungs, or by
swallowing infected material.
_Leprosy._—This disease is caused by a bacillus known as _Bacillus
leprae_, which was discovered by Hansen in 1879. It is doubtful if it
has been grown outside the body. It is supposed to enter by abrasions
of the skin, but it is very feebly contagious, notwithstanding popular
ideas as to its supposedly highly contagious nature.
_Tuberculosis._—All forms of this disease, among which is ordinary
consumption, are caused by a bacillus closely resembling that of
leprosy. It was discovered by Koch in 1880–82, and named _Bacillus
tuberculosis_. The ways of infection are by inhaling the dried sputum
of consumptives, drinking infected cow’s milk, or eating infected meat.
_Typhoid Fever._—A disease of human beings only. Eberth in 1880
discovered the germ causing it and called it _Bacillus typhosus_. It
gains entrance to our bodies chiefly in the milk and water we drink,
which comes from infected sources; a rarer method is by inhalation of
infected air.
_Diphtheria._—A disease of human beings chiefly. It is caused by a
bacillus which was described in 1883–84 by Klebs and Loeffler, and is
known as _Bacillus diphtheriae_, or Klebs-Loeffler bacillus. Its mode
of entry is by inhaling infected air, or by drinking or eating infected
milk or food.
_Cholera._—This disease is peculiar to human beings. Its native home
is on the banks of the river Ganges in India, where Koch in 1884 was
able to isolate its causative spirillum. Man is infected by drinking
contaminated water or by contact.
_Lockjaw, or Tetanus._—Afflicts man, horses, and dogs. The _Bacillus
tetani_ is the most deadly of all known bacteria. It enters the body by
wounds. It was discovered in 1884 by Nicolaier.
_Influenza, or the Grip._—Caused by one of the smallest-known bacilli;
discovered in 1892 by Canon and Pfeiffer. Infection spreads by the
scattering about by air-currents of the dried nasal and bronchial
secretion of those suffering from the disease, and its portal of entry
is by the nose and bronchial tubes.
_Pneumonia._—Caused by a coccus which grows in pairs and small chains.
It enters the body by means of the respiratory tract. It is present in
the saliva of twenty per cent. of healthy persons. Proved by Frankel in
1886 to be the cause of this disease.
_Bubonic Plague._—In 1894 Kitasato and Yersin isolated a small
bacillus in a large number of cases and proved it to be the cause. It
enters the body by means of wounds of the skin, and through bites of
fleas from infected rats, which are said to be one of the chief factors
in spreading this dread malady.
_Yellow Fever._—The cause of this disease is still under discussion.
Such are a few of the infectious diseases which we can readily
attribute to the presence of definite micro-organisms in respective
cases. But strange as it may seem, the most typical of all infectious
diseases, small-pox, scarlet fever, measles, and hydrophobia, have as
yet not yielded up their secrets. This is possibly due to the minute
size of the micro-organisms concerned, which make it beyond the power
of the best microscope to demonstrate them. In this connection it has
recently been shown by Roux and Nocard that in the case of the disease
known as pleuro-pneumonia of cattle the causative agent is so very
small as just to be barely visible. Again, it is quite possible that
these diseases may be caused by living things we know nothing about,
which may be quite dissimilar from the bacteria.
INFECTION—ITS PROCESSES AND RESULTS
In the foregoing list of diseases associated with specific bacteria,
attention has been drawn to the common modes of infection, or, as they
are technically called, “portals of entry,” and it now remains to touch
upon the main factors, processes, and results following upon the entry
into the body of such disease-producing microbes.
It is a well-known fact that the normal blood has of itself to a
considerable extent the power of killing germs which may wander into
it through various channels. Likewise the tissue cells of the body
in general show similar action depending upon the different cell
groups, state of health, general robustness, and period of life. The
germ-killing power varies in different individuals, though each may be
quite healthy. Considered as a whole, this power possessed by the body
against germs is known as “general resistance.” And when by any means
this power of resistance is lost or diminished, we run grave risks of
incurring disease.
Granted a case of infection, let us now trace up briefly what occurs.
Between the period when the bacteria gain a lodgment and that in which
the disease assumes a noticeable form, the patient simply feels out of
sorts. It is during this stage that the blood and tissues are deeply
engaged in the attempt to repel the attacks of the invading microbes.
With varying speed the germs multiply throughout the body generally,
or may be at first localized, or even, as in lockjaw, remain localized
throughout the entire disease. Multiplying in the tissues, they
generate in increasing amounts their noxious poisons, which soon cause
profound changes throughout the body; the patient becomes decidedly
ill, and shows now the signs of an unmistakable infection.
Does the body now give up the fight entirely? No; on the contrary, the
white blood-cells, the wandering cells, and the cells of the tissues
most affected still carry on an unequal fight. From the lymphatic
glands and spleen, armies of white cells rush to the fray and attempt
to eat up and destroy the foe, but possibly in vain; the disease runs
its course, to end either in death or recovery.
How, then, in cases of recovery, are the microbes finally overcome?
This question involves many complex processes which at present are by
no means thoroughly understood, but we will concern ourselves with the
simple principles.
It has been previously mentioned that once the bacteria get a good
foothold the body is subjected to the action of generated poisons,
which are known as toxins. They give rise to such symptoms as loss of
appetite, headache, fever, pains and aches, and even a state of stupor
or unconsciousness. In addition to the active warfare of the white
blood-cells, groups of cells throughout the body, after recovering from
the first rude shock of the toxins, begin to tolerate their presence,
then effect a change in the chemical constitution of the toxins, and
finally elaborate substances which antagonize the toxins and destroy
their action altogether, thus lending aid to the warrior cells, which
at last overcome the invading microbes. Recovery is brought about, and
a more or less permanent degree of immunity against the special form of
disease ensues.
Now if we could use these antagonizing substances, or, as they are
called, antitoxins, upon other men or animals sick with a similar
disease, would their bodies be at once strengthened to resist and
finally overcome the disease? Yes, in a certain majority of cases they
would, and this is exactly what scientific observers have noted,
worked out, and have successfully applied. A new art in the healing of
disease, which is spoken of broadly as serum-therapy, or medication by
curative or protective serums, has thus been discovered.
The first observers in this new field were Pasteur and Raynaud in
France in 1877–78, and Salmon and Smith in this country in 1886.
Raynaud, by injecting serum from a calf which had had an attack of
cow-pox, prevented the appearance of the disease in a calf freshly
inoculated with the virulent material of the disease. Pasteur, by using
feebly infective germs of fowl cholera, conferred immunity upon healthy
fowls against the disease, and was able to cure those which were ill.
Salmon and Smith injected small and repeated amounts of the elaborated
toxins or poisons of the bacillus of hog cholera into healthy swine,
and were able to confer immunity upon them.
However, it was not until Behring in 1892 announced his discovery of
an antitoxin serum for diphtheria, along with an undisputed proof of
its value in treatment, that the attention of the scientific world
was finally aroused and stimulated to the appreciation of the great
possibilities of serum-therapy.
Strange as it may seem, much opposition arose to this new method of
treatment, not alone from the lay portions of the community, but even
from the ranks of the medical profession itself. This opposition was
due in part to misconceptions of the principles involved in the new
doctrine, and in part to the falsely philanthropic prejudices of the
pseudo-scientific sections of both parties. But by the persevering work
of the enthusiastic believers in serum-therapy, positive conviction has
now replaced misconception and prejudice in the minds of the majority
of its former opponents.
The accumulation of statistical evidence, even where all allowance is
made for doubtful methods of compilation, shows that the aggregate
mortality of diphtheria has been reduced fully fifty per cent. since
the introduction of antitoxic treatment by Behring in 1892.
Since the method of preparation of the commercial diphtheria antitoxin
illustrates the general principles involved in the search for the
production of curative or protective serums for infectious diseases in
general, a summary of the steps in its manufacture will now be given.
A race of diphtheria bacilli, which has been found to yield a poison of
great virulence in alkaline beef broth, is grown for a week or ten days
in this medium. The toxin is then separated and its virulence exactly
determined. It is preserved in sterile receptacles for immediate or
future use. The next step is the inoculation of a suitable animal with
the toxin. Of all animals the horse has been found to meet nearly every
requirement. Such an animal, in a state of perfect health, receives
an injection of twenty cubic centimetres of toxin, along with ten
or fifteen of standard antitoxin, beneath the skin of the neck or
fore-quarters, upon three separate occasions at intervals of five days.
After this it receives increasing doses of toxin, alone, at intervals
of six to eight days, until, at the end of two months, it is able to
stand with little discomfort doses of such strength that if given in
the first stage these doses would have quickly caused death.
At this period the horse is bled to a small extent, and its serum
tested to ascertain if prospects are good for the production by the
animal of a high grade of antitoxin. If satisfactory progress has been
made, the injections are continued for another month, when, as a rule,
the maximal degree of antitoxic power in the serum will have been
attained.
The horse is now bled to the proper extent, the blood being received
in a sterile jar and placed in an ice-box. Here it coagulates, and
the serum separates from it. When the separation of clot and serum
is complete, the latter is drawn off, taken to the laboratory, and
standardized. This being finished, an antiseptic fluid is added to
preserve the serum from decomposition. It is then bottled, labelled,
and sent out for use.
In similar fashion tetanus antitoxin is prepared; and quite recently
Calmette has produced an antitoxic serum for use in snake bite, by
injecting horses with minute increasing doses of snake venom. His
experiments have given some remarkable results, not only in laboratory
work, but also in cases of actual snake bite occurring in man. Thus
bacteriological scientists, after years of laborious work, in the face
of much criticism and severe denunciation, may confidently announce
that they have in their possession a magic key to one of nature’s
secret doors. The lock has been turned. The door stands partly open,
and we are permitted a glimpse of the future possibilities to be
attained in the great fight against disease.
PREVENTIVE MEDICINE
The following are some of the diseases which have been remarkably
controlled through preventive medicine:
_Small-pox._—While not a scourge of the first rank, like the plague
or cholera, at the outset of the century variola was one of the
most prevalent and dreaded of all diseases. Few reached adult life
without an attack. To-day, though outbreaks still occur, it is a
disease thoroughly controlled by vaccination. The protective power
of the inoculated cow-pox is not a fixed and constant quantity.
The protection may be for life, or it may last only for a year or
two. The all-important fact is this: That efficiently vaccinated
persons may be exposed with impunity, and among large bodies of
men (_e.g._, the German army), in which revaccination is practised,
small-pox is unknown. Of one hundred vaccinated persons exposed to
small-pox, possibly one might take the disease in a mild form; of one
hundred unvaccinated persons so exposed, one alone might escape—from
twenty-five to thirty would die. To be efficient, vaccination must be
carried out systematically, and if all the inhabitants of this country
were revaccinated at intervals small-pox would disappear (as it has
from the German army), and the necessity for vaccination would cease.
The difficulty arises from the constant presence of an unvaccinated
remnant, by which the disease is kept alive. The Montreal experience in
1885 is an object-lesson never to be forgotten.
For eight or ten years vaccination had been neglected, particularly
among the French-Canadians. On February 28, 1885, a Pullman car
conductor, who came from Chicago, where the disease had been slightly
prevalent, was admitted into the Hôtel Dieu. Isolation was not carried
out, and on the 1st of April a servant in the hospital died of
small-pox. Following her death the authorities of the hospital sent to
their homes all patients who presented no symptoms of the disease. Like
fire in dry grass the contagion spread, and within nine months there
died of small-pox three thousand one hundred and sixty-four persons.
It ruined the trade of the city for the winter, and cost millions of
dollars. There are no reasonable objections to vaccination, which is
a simple process, by which a mild and harmless disease is introduced.
The use of the animal vaccine does away with the possibility of
introduction of other disorders, such as syphilis.
_Typhus Fever._—Until the middle of the present century this disease
prevailed widely in most of the large cities, particularly in Europe,
and also in jails, ships, hospitals, and camps. It was more widely
spread than typhoid fever and much more fatal. Murchison remarks of
it that a complete history of its ravages would be the history of
Europe during the past three centuries and a half. Not one of the acute
infections seems to have been more dependent upon filth and unsanitary
conditions. With the gradual introduction of drainage and a good water
supply, and the relief of overcrowding, the disease has almost entirely
disappeared, and is rarely mentioned now in the bills of mortality,
except in a few of the larger and more unsanitary cities. The following
figures illustrate what has been done in England within sixty years:
In 1838 in England twelve hundred and twenty-eight persons died of
fever (typhus and typhoid) per million of living. Twenty years later
the figures were reduced to nine hundred and eighteen; in 1878 to three
hundred and six of typhoid and to thirty-six of typhus fever. In 1892
only one hundred and thirty-seven died of typhoid fever and only three
of typhus per million living!
_Typhoid Fever._—While preventive medicine can claim a great victory
in this disease also, it is less brilliant, since the conditions which
favor its prevalence are not those specially relating to overcrowding
as much as to imperfect water supply and the contamination of certain
essential foods, as milk. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that,
with a pure water supply and perfect drainage, typhoid fever almost
disappears from a city. In Vienna, after the introduction of good
water, the rate of mortality from typhoid fever fell from twelve per
ten thousand of the inhabitants to about one. In Munich the fall
was still more remarkable; from above twenty-nine per ten thousand
inhabitants in 1857 it fell to about one per ten thousand in 1887.
That typhoid fever in this country is still a very prevalent disease
depends mainly upon two facts: First, not only is the typhoid bacillus
very resistant, but it may remain for a long time in the body of
a person after recovery from typhoid fever, and such persons, in
apparent good health, may be a source of contamination. With many of
the conditions favoring the persistence and growth of the bacillus
outside the body we are not yet familiar. The experience in the
Spanish-American War illustrates how dangerous is the concentration
together of large numbers of individuals. But, second, the essential
factor in the widespread prevalence of typhoid fever in the United
States, particularly in country districts, is the absence of anything
like efficient rural sanitation. Many counties have yet to learn the
alphabet of sanitation. The chief danger results from the impure
water supplies of the smaller towns, the local house epidemics due to
infected wells, and the milk outbreaks due to the infection of dairy
farms.
The importance of scrupulously guarding the sources of supply was never
better illustrated than in the well-known and oft-quoted epidemic in
Plymouth, Pennsylvania. The town, with a population of eight thousand,
was in part supplied with drinking-water from a reservoir fed by a
mountain-stream. During January, February, and March, in a cottage by
the side of and at a distance of from sixty to eighty feet from this
stream, a man was ill with typhoid fever. The attendants were in the
habit at night of throwing out the evacuations on the ground towards
the stream. During these months the ground was frozen and covered
with snow. In the latter part of March and early in April there was
considerable rainfall and a thaw, in which a large part of the three
months’ accumulation of discharges was washed into the brook not sixty
feet distant. At the very time of this thaw the patient had numerous
and copious discharges. About the 10th of April cases of typhoid fever
broke out in the town, appearing for a time at the rate of fifty a day.
In all about twelve hundred were attacked. An immense majority of
the cases were in the part of the town which received water from the
infected reservoir.
The use of boiled water and of ice made from distilled water, the
systematic inspection of dairies, the scrupulous supervision of the
sources from which the water is obtained, an efficient system of
sewage removal, and, above all, the most scrupulous care on the part
of physicians and of nurses in the disinfection of the discharges of
typhoid fever patients—these are the factors necessary to reduce to a
minimum the incidence of typhoid fever.
_Cholera._—One of the great scourges of the present century made
inroads into Europe and America from India, its native home. We have,
however, found out the germ, found out the conditions under which it
lives, and it is not likely that it will ever again gain a foothold
in this country or Great Britain. Since the last epidemic, 1873, the
disease, though brought to this country on several occasions, has
always been held in check at the port of entry. It is communicated
almost entirely through infected water, and the virulence of an
epidemic in any city is in direct proportion to the imperfection of
the water supply. This was shown in a remarkable way in the Hamburg
epidemic of 1892. In Altona, which had a filtration plant, there
were only five hundred and sixteen cases, many of them refugees from
Hamburg. Hamburg, where the unfiltered water of the Elbe was used, had
some eighteen thousand cases, with nearly eight thousand deaths.
_Yellow Fever._—The cause of this disease is still under discussion.
It has an interest to us in this country from its continued prevalence
in Cuba, and from the fact that at intervals it makes inroads into
the Southern States, causing serious commercial loss. The history of
the disease in the other West India islands, particularly Jamaica,
indicates the steps which must be taken for its prevention. Formerly
yellow fever was as fatal a scourge in them as it is to-day in Cuba. By
an efficient system of sanitation it has been abolished. The same can
be done (and will be done) in Cuba within a few years. General Wood has
already pointed out the way in the cleansing of Santiago.
_The Plague._—One of the most remarkable facts in connection with
modern epidemics has been the revival of the bubonic plague, the most
dreaded of all the great infections. During the present century the
disease in Europe has been confined almost exclusively to Turkey and
Southern Europe. Since 1894, when it appeared at Hong-Kong, it has
gradually spread, and there have been outbreaks of terrible severity
in India. It has extended to certain of the Mediterranean ports, and
during the past summer it reached Glasgow, where there has been a
small outbreak. On this hemisphere there have been small outbreaks in
certain of the South American ports, cases have been brought to New
York, and there have been to November 1st twenty-one cases among the
Chinese in San Francisco. Judging from the readiness with which it has
been checked and limited in Australia, and in particular the facility
with which the recent outbreak in Glasgow has been stamped out, there
is very little risk that plague will ever assume the proportions which
gave to it its terrible reputation as the “black death” of the Middle
Ages. As I have already mentioned, the germ is known, and prophylactic
inoculations have been made on a large scale in India, with a certain
measure of success.
_Tuberculosis._—In all communities the _white plague_, as Oliver
Wendell Holmes calls it, takes the first rank as a killing disease. It
has been estimated that of it one hundred and twenty thousand people
die yearly in this country. In all mortality bills tuberculosis of
the lungs, or consumption, heads the list, and when to this is added
tuberculosis of the other organs, the number swells to such an extent
that this disease equals in fatality all the other acute infective
diseases combined, if we leave out pneumonia. Less than twenty years
ago we knew little or nothing of the cause of the disease. It was
believed to be largely hereditary. Koch discovered the germ, and with
this have come the possibilities of limiting its ravages.
The following points with reference to it may be stated: In a few very
rare instances the disease is transmitted from parent to child. In a
large proportion of all cases the disease is “caught.” The germs are
widely distributed through the sputum, which, when dry, becomes dust,
and is blown about in all directions. Tubercle bacilli have been found
in the dust of streets, houses, hospital wards, and much-frequented
places. A single individual may discharge from the lungs countless
myriads of germs in the twenty-four hours. Dr. Nuttall estimated from a
patient in the Johns Hopkins Hospital, who had only moderately advanced
consumption, that from one and a half to four and a third billions of
germs were thrown off in the twenty-four hours. The consumptive, as has
been well stated, is almost harmless, and only becomes harmful through
bad habits. The germs are contained in the sputum, which, when dry,
is widely scattered in the form of dust, and constitutes the great
medium for the transmission of the disease. If expectorated into a
handkerchief, the sputum dries quickly, particularly if it is put into
the pocket or under the pillow. The beard or mustache of a consumptive
is smeared with the germs. Even in the most careful the hands are apt
to be soiled with the germs, and in those who are dirty and careless
the furniture and materials which they handle readily become infected.
Where the dirty habit prevails of spitting on the floor, a room, or the
entire house, may contain numbers of germs. In the majority of all
cases the infection in tuberculosis is by inhalation. This is shown
by the frequency with which the disease is met in the lungs, and the
great prevalence of tuberculosis in institutions in which the residents
are restricted in the matter of fresh air and a free, open life. The
disease prevails specially in cloisters, in jails, and in asylums.
Infection through milk is also possible; it is doubtful whether the
disease is transmitted through meat. So widespread are the germs that
post-mortem examination has shown that a very large number of persons
show slight signs of the disease who have never during life presented
any symptoms; in fact, some recent investigations would indicate that a
very large proportion of all persons at the age of forty have somewhere
in their bodies slight tuberculous lesions. This shows the importance
of the individual predisposition, upon which the older writers laid so
much stress, and the importance of maintaining the nutrition at its
maximum.
One of the most remarkable features of modern protective medicine is
the widespread interest that has been aroused in the crusade against
tuberculosis. What has already been accomplished warrants the belief
that the hopes of even the most enthusiastic may be realized. A
positive decline in the prevalence of the disease has been shown in
many of the larger cities during the past ten years. In Massachusetts,
which has been a hot-bed of tuberculosis for many years, the death-rate
has fallen from forty-two per ten thousand inhabitants in 1853 to
twenty-one and eight-tenths per ten thousand inhabitants in 1895. In
the city of Glasgow, in which the records have been very carefully
kept, there has been an extraordinary fall in the death-rate from
tuberculosis, and the recent statistics of New York City show, too, a
similar remarkable diminution.
In fighting the disease our chief weapons are: First, education of the
public, particularly of the poorer classes, who do not fully appreciate
the chief danger in the disease. Secondly, the compulsory notification
and registration of all cases of tuberculosis. The importance of this
relates chiefly to the very poor and improvident, from whom, after
all, comes the greatest danger, and who should be under constant
surveillance in order that these dangers may be reduced to a minimum.
Thirdly, the foundation in suitable localities by the city and by the
State of sanatoria for the treatment of early cases of the disease.
Fourthly, provision for the chronic, incurable cases in special
hospitals.
_Diphtheria._—Since the discovery of the germ of this disease
and our knowledge of the conditions of its transmission, and the
discovery of the antitoxin, there has been a great reduction in its
prevalence and an equally remarkable reduction in the mortality. The
more careful isolation of the sick, the thorough disinfection of the
clothing, the rigid scrutiny of the milder cases of throat disorder,
a more stringent surveillance in the period of convalescence, and the
routine examination of the throats of school-children—these are the
essential measures by which the prevalence of the disease has been very
markedly diminished. The great danger is in the mild cases, in which
the disease has perhaps not been suspected, and in which the child may
be walking about and even going to school. Such patients are often a
source of widespread infection. The careful attention given by mothers
to the teeth and mouth of children is also an important factor. In
children with recurring attacks of tonsillitis, in whom the tonsils
are enlarged, the organs should be removed. Through these measures the
incidence of the disease has been very greatly reduced.
_Pneumonia._—While there has been a remarkable diminution in the
prevalence of a large number of all the acute infections, one disease
not only holds its own, but seems even to have increased in its
virulence. In the mortality bills, pneumonia is an easy second to
tuberculosis. It attacks particularly the intemperate, the feeble,
and the old, though every year a large number of robust, healthy
individuals succumb. So frequent is pneumonia at advanced periods of
life that to die of it has been said to be the natural end of old men
in this country. In many ways, too, it is a satisfactory disease, if
one may use such an expression. It is not associated with much pain,
except at the onset, the battle is brief and short, and a great many
old persons succumb to it easily and peacefully.
We know the cause of the disease; we know only too well its symptoms,
but the enormous fatality (from twenty to twenty-five per cent.) speaks
only too plainly of the futility of our means of cure, and yet in no
disease has there been so great a revolution in treatment. The patient
is no longer drenched to death with drugs, or bled to a point where
the resisting powers of nature are exhausted. We are not without hope,
too, that in the future an antidote may be found to the toxins of the
disease, and of late there have been introduced several measures of
great value in supporting the weakness of the heart, a special danger
in the old and debilitated.
_Hydrophobia._—Rabies, a remarkable, and in certain countries a
widespread, disease of animals, when transmitted to a man by the bite
of rabid dogs, wolves, etc., is known as hydrophobia. The specific
germ is unknown, but by a series of brilliant observations Pasteur
showed (1) that the poison has certain fixed and peculiar properties in
connection with the nervous system; (2) that susceptible animals could
be rendered refractory to the disease, or incapable of taking it, by a
certain method of inoculation; and (3) that an animal unprotected and
inoculated with a dose of the virus sufficient to cause the disease
may, by the injection of proper anti-rabic treatment, escape. Supported
by these facts, Pasteur began a system of treatment of hydrophobia in
man, and a special institute was founded in Paris for the purpose. When
carried out promptly the treatment is successful in an immense majority
of all cases, and the mortality in persons bitten by animals proved to
be rabid, who have subsequently had the anti-rabic treatment, has been
reduced to less than one-half per cent. The disease may be stamped out
in dogs by careful quarantine of suspected animals, and by a thoroughly
carried out muzzling order.
_Malaria._—Among the most remarkable of modern discoveries is the
cause of malarial fever, one of the great maladies of the world, and
a prime obstacle to the settlement of Europeans in tropical regions.
Until 1880 the cause was quite obscure. It was known that the disease
prevailed chiefly in marshy districts, in the autumn, and that the
danger of infection was greatest in the evening and at night, and
that it was not directly contagious. In 1880 a French army surgeon,
Laveran, discovered in the red blood-corpuscles small bodies which have
proved to be the specific germ of the disease. They are not bacteria,
but little animal bodies resembling the amœba—tiny little portions
of protoplasm. The parasite in its earliest form is a small, clear,
ring-shaped body inside the red blood-corpuscle, upon which it feeds,
gradually increasing in size and forming within itself blackish grains
out of the coloring matter of the corpuscle. When the little parasite
reaches a certain size it begins to divide or multiply, and an enormous
number of these breaking up at the same time give off poison in the
blood, which causes the paroxysms of fever. During what is known as
the chill, in the intermittent fever, for example, one can always find
these dividing parasites. Several different forms of the parasites
have been found, corresponding to different varieties of malaria.
Parasites of a very similar nature exist abundantly in birds. Ross,
an army surgeon in India, found that the spread of this parasite from
bird to bird was effected through the intervention of the mosquito. The
parasites reach maturity in certain cells of the coats of the stomach
of these insects, and develop into peculiar thread-like bodies, many of
which ultimately reach the salivary glands, from which, as the insect
bites, they pass with the secretion of the glands into the wound. From
this as a basis, numerous observers have worked out the relation of the
mosquito to malaria in the human subject.
Briefly stated, the disease is transmitted chiefly by certain varieties
of the mosquito, particularly the _Anopheles_. The ordinary _Culex_,
which is present chiefly in the Northern States, does not convey
the disease. The _Anopheles_ sucks the blood from a person infected
with malaria, takes in a certain number of parasites, which undergo
development in the body of the insect, the final outcome of which is
numerous small, thread-like structures, which are found in numbers in
the salivary glands. From this point, when the mosquito bites another
individual, they pass into his blood, infect the system, and in this
way the disease is transmitted. Two very striking experiments may be
mentioned. The Italian observers have repeatedly shown that _Anopheles_
which have sucked blood from patients suffering from malaria, when sent
to a non-malarial region, and there allowed to bite perfectly healthy
persons, have transmitted the disease. But a very crucial experiment
was made a short time ago. Mosquitoes which had bitten malarial
patients in Italy were sent to London and there allowed to bite Mr.
Manson, son of Dr. Manson, who really suggested the mosquito theory of
malaria. This gentleman had not lived out of England, and there is no
acute malaria in London. He had been a perfectly healthy, strong man.
In a few days following the bites of the infected mosquitoes he had a
typical attack of malarial fever.
The other experiment, though of a different character, is quite as
convincing. In certain regions about Rome, in the Campania, malaria is
so prevalent that in the autumn almost every one in the district is
attacked, particularly if he is a new-comer. Dr. Sambron and a friend
lived in this district from the 1st of June to the 1st of September,
1900. The test was whether they could live in this exceedingly
dangerous climate for the three months without catching malaria, if
they used stringent precautions against the bites of mosquitoes. For
this purpose the hut in which they lived was thoroughly wired, and they
slept with the greatest care under netting. Both of these gentlemen at
the end of the period had escaped the disease.
The importance of these studies cannot be overestimated. They explain
the relation of malaria to marshy districts, the seasonal incidence of
the disease, the nocturnal infection, and many other hitherto obscure
problems. More important still, they point out clearly the way by which
malaria may be prevented: First, the recognition that any individual
with malaria is a source of danger in a community, so that he must
be thoroughly treated with quinine; secondly, the importance of the
draining of marshy districts and ponds in which mosquitoes breed; and,
thirdly, that even in the most infected regions persons may escape the
disease by living in thoroughly protected houses, in this way escaping
the bites of mosquitoes.
_Venereal Diseases._—These continue to embarrass the social economist
and to perplex and distress the profession. The misery and ill-health
which they cause are incalculable, and the pity of it is that the cross
is not always borne by the offender, but innocent women and children
share the penalties. The gonorrhœal infection, so common, and often so
little heeded, is a cause of much disease in parts other than those
first affected. Syphilis claims its victims in every rank of life, at
every age, and in all countries. We now treat it more thoroughly, but
all attempts to check its ravages have been fruitless. Physicians have
two important duties: the incessant preaching of continence to young
men, and scrupulous care, in every case, that the disease may not be
a source of infection to others, and that by thorough treatment the
patient may be saved from the serious late nervous manifestations.
We can also urge that in the interests of public health venereal
diseases, like other infections, shall be subject to supervision by
the State. The opposition to measures tending to the restriction of
these diseases is most natural: on the one hand, from women, who feel
that it is an aggravation of a shocking injustice and wrong to their
sex; on the other, from those who feel the moral guilt in a legal
recognition of the evil. It is appalling to contemplate the frightful
train of miseries which a single diseased woman may entail, not alone
on her associates, but on scores of the innocent—whose bitter cry
should make the opponents of legislation feel that any measures of
restriction, any measures of registration, would be preferable to the
present disgraceful condition, which makes of some Christian cities
open brothels and allows the purest homes to be invaded by the most
loathsome of all diseases.
_Leprosy._—Since the discovery of the germ of this terrible disease
systematic efforts have been made to improve the state of its victims
and to promote the study of the conditions under which the disease
prevails. The English Leprosy Commission has done good work in calling
attention to the widespread prevalence of the disease in India and
in the East. In this country leprosy has been introduced into San
Francisco by the Chinese, and into the Northwestern States by the
Norwegians, and there are foci of the disease in the Southern States,
particularly Louisiana, and in the province of New Brunswick. The
problem has an additional interest since the annexation of Hawaii
and the Philippine Islands, in both of which places leprosy prevails
extensively. By systematic measures of inspection and the segregation
of affected individuals the disease can readily be held in check. It is
not likely ever to increase among native Americans, or again gain such
a foothold as it had in the Middle Ages.
_Puerperal Fever._—Perhaps one of the most striking of all victories
of preventive medicine has been the almost total abolition of so-called
child-bed fever from the maternity hospitals and from private practice.
In many institutions the mortality after child-birth was five or six
per cent., indeed sometimes as high as ten per cent., whereas to-day,
owing entirely to proper antiseptic precautions, the mortality has
fallen to three-tenths to four-tenths per cent. The recognition of the
contagiousness of puerperal fever was the most valuable contribution to
medical science made by Oliver Wendell Holmes. There had been previous
suggestions by several writers, but his essay on the “Contagiousness
of Puerperal Fever,” published in 1843, was the first strong, clear,
logical statement of the case. Semmelweis, a few years later, added
the weight of a large practical experience to the side of the
contagiousness, but the full recognition of the causes of the disease
was not reached until the recent antiseptic views had been put into
practical effect.
THE NEW DISPENSATION IN TREATMENT
The century has witnessed a revolution in the treatment of disease,
and the growth of a new school of medicine. The old schools—regular
and homœopathic—put their trust in drugs, to give which was the
alpha and the omega of their practice. For every symptom there were
a score or more of medicines—vile, nauseous compounds in one case;
bland, harmless dilutions in the other. The new school has a firm faith
in a few good, well-tried drugs, little or none in the great mass of
medicines still in general use. Imperative drugging—the ordering
of medicine in any and every malady—is no longer regarded as the
chief function of the doctor. Naturally, when the entire conception
of the disease was changed, there came a corresponding change in our
therapeutics. In no respect is this more strikingly shown than in our
present treatment of fever—say, of the common typhoid fever. During
the first quarter of the century the patients were bled, blistered,
purged and vomited, and dosed with mercury, antimony, and other
compounds to meet special symptoms. During the second quarter, the
same, with variations in different countries. After 1850 bleeding
became less frequent, and the experiments of the Paris and Vienna
schools began to shake the belief in the control of fever by drugs.
During the last quarter sensible doctors have reached the conclusion
that typhoid fever is not a disease to be treated with medicines, but
that in a large proportion of all cases diet, nursing, and bathing
meet the indications. There is active, systematic, careful, watchful
treatment, but not with drugs. The public has not yet been fully
educated to this point, and medicines have sometimes to be ordered for
the sake of the friends, and it must be confessed that there are still
in the ranks _antiques_ who would insist on a dose of some kind every
few hours.
The battle against poly-pharmacy, or the use of a large number of drugs
(of the action of which we know little, yet we put them into bodies of
the action of which we know less), has not been fought to a finish.
There have been two contributing factors on the side of progress—the
remarkable growth of the skeptical spirit fostered by Paris, Vienna,
and Boston physicians, and, above all, the valuable lesson of
homœopathy, the infinitesimals of which certainly could not do harm, and
quite as certainly could not do good; yet nobody has ever claimed that
the mortality among homœopathic practitioners was greater than among
those of the regular school. A new school of practitioners has arisen
which cares nothing for homœopathy and less for so-called allopathy.
It seeks to study, rationally and scientifically, the action of drugs,
old and new. It is more concerned that a physician shall know how to
apply the few great medicines which all have to use, such as quinine,
iron, mercury, iodide of potassium, opium, and digitalis, rather than a
multiplicity of remedies the action of which is extremely doubtful.
The growth of scientific pharmacology, by which we now have many
active principles instead of crude drugs, and the discovery of the art
of making medicines palatable, have been of enormous aid in rational
practice. There is no limit to the possibility of help from the
scientific investigation of the properties and action of drugs. At any
day the new chemistry may give to us remedies of extraordinary potency
and of as much usefulness as cocaine. There is no reason why we should
not even in the vegetable world find for certain diseases specifics of
virtue fully equal to that of quinine in the malarial fevers.
One of the most striking characteristics of the modern treatment
of disease is the return to what used to be called the natural
methods—diet, exercise, bathing, and massage. There probably never
has been a period in the history of the profession when the value
of _diet_ in the prevention and the cure of disease was more fully
recognized. Dyspepsia, the besetting malady of this country, is largely
due to improper diet, imperfectly prepared and too hastily eaten. One
of the great lessons to be learned is that the preservation of health
depends in great part upon food well cooked and carefully eaten. A
common cause of ruined digestion, particularly in young girls, is the
eating of sweets between meals and the drinking of the abominations
dispensed in the chemists’ shops in the form of ice-cream sodas, etc.
Another frequent cause of ruined digestion in business men is the
hurried meal at the lunch-counter. And a third factor, most important
of all, illustrates the old maxim, that more people are killed by over
eating and drinking than by the sword. Sensible people have begun to
realize that alcoholic excesses lead inevitably to impaired health. A
man may take four or five drinks of whiskey a day, or even more, and
thinks perhaps that he transacts his business better with that amount
of stimulant; but it only too frequently happens that early in the
fifth decade, just as business or political success is assured, Bacchus
hands in heavy bills for payment, in the form of serious disease of the
arteries or of the liver, or there is a general breakdown. With the
introduction of light beer there has been not only less intemperance,
but a reduction in the number of the cases of organic disease of the
heart, liver, and stomach caused by alcohol. While temperance in
the matter of alcoholic drinks is becoming a characteristic feature
of Americans, intemperance in the quantity of food taken is almost
the rule. Adults eat far too much, and physicians are beginning to
recognize that the early degenerations, particularly of the arteries
and of the kidneys, leading to Bright’s disease, which were formerly
attributed to alcohol, are due in large part to too much food.
_Nursing._—Perhaps in no particular does nineteenth-century practice
differ from that of the preceding centuries more than in the greater
attention which is given to the personal comfort of the patient and to
all the accessories comprised in the art of nursing. The physician has
in the trained nurse an assistant who carries out his directions with a
watchful care, and who is on the lookout for danger-signals, and with
accurate notes enables him to estimate the progress of a critical case
from hour to hour. The intelligent, devoted women who have adopted the
profession of nursing, are not only in their ministrations a public
benefaction, but they have lightened the anxieties which form so large
a part of the load of the busy doctor.
_Massage and Hydrotherapy_ have taken their places as most important
measures of relief in many chronic conditions, and the latter has been
almost universally adopted as the only safe means of combating the high
temperatures of the acute fevers.
Within the past quarter of a century the value of _exercise_ in the
education of the young has become recognized. The increase in the means
of taking wholesome out-of-door exercise is remarkable, and should show
in a few years an influence in the reduction of the nervous troubles
in young persons. The prophylactic benefit of systematic exercise,
taken in moderation by persons of middle age, is very great. Golf and
the bicycle have in the past few years materially lowered the average
incomes of the doctors in this country as derived from persons under
forty. From the senile contingent—those above this age—the average
income has for a time been raised by these exercises, as a large
number of persons have been injured by taking up sports which may be
vigorously pursued with safety only by those with young arteries.
Of three departures in the art of healing, brief mention may be made.
The use of the extracts of certain organs (or of the organs themselves)
in disease is as old as the days of the Romans, but an extraordinary
impetus has been given to the subject by the discovery of the curative
powers of the extract of the thyroid gland in the diseases known
as cretinism and myxœdema. The brilliancy of the results in these
diseases has had no parallel in the history of modern medicine, but
it cannot be said that in the use of the extracts of other organs for
disease the results have fulfilled the sanguine expectations of many.
There was not, in the first place, the same physiological basis, and
practitioners have used these extracts too indiscriminately and without
sufficient knowledge of the subject.
Secondly, as I have already mentioned, we possess a sure and certain
hope that for many of the acute infections antitoxins will be found.
A third noteworthy feature in modern treatment has been a return to
psychical methods of cure, in which _faith in something is suggested_
to the patient. After all, faith is the great lever of life. Without
it, man can do nothing; with it, even with a fragment, as a grain of
mustard-seed, all things are possible to him. Faith in us, faith in
our drugs and methods, is the great stock in trade of the profession.
In one pan of the balance, put the pharmacopœias of the world, all
the editions from Dioscorides to the last issue of the United States
Dispensatory; heap them on the scales as did Euripides his books in
the celebrated contest in the “Frogs”; in the other put the simple
faith with which from the days of the Pharaohs until now the children
of men have swallowed the mixtures these works describe, and the bulky
tomes will kick the beam. It is the _aurum potabile_, the touchstone of
success in medicine. As Galen says, confidence and hope do more good
than physic—“he cures most in whom most are confident.” That strange
compound of charlatan and philosopher, Paracelsus, encouraged his
patients “to have a good faith, a strong imagination, and they shall
find the effects” (Burton). While we often overlook or are ignorant of
our own faith-cures, doctors are just a wee bit too sensitive about
those performed outside our ranks. They have never had, and cannot
expect to have, a monopoly in this panacea, which is open to all, free
as the sun, and which may make of every one in certain cases, as was
the Lacedemon of Homer’s day, “a good physician out of Nature’s grace.”
Faith in the gods or in the saints cures one, faith in little pills
another, hypnotic suggestion a third, faith in a plain, common doctor
a fourth. In all ages the prayer of faith has healed the sick, and
the mental attitude of the suppliant seems to be of more consequence
than the powers to which the prayer is addressed. The cures in the
temples of Æsculapius, the miracles of the saints, the remarkable
cures of those noble men, the Jesuit missionaries, in this country,
the modern miracles at Lourdes and at St. Anne de Beaupré in Quebec,
and the wonder-workings of the so-called Christian Scientists, are
often genuine, and must be considered in discussing the foundations of
therapeutics. We physicians use the same power every day. If a poor
lass, paralyzed, apparently, helpless, bed-ridden for years, comes to
me, having worn out in mind, body, and estate a devoted family; if she
in a few weeks or less by faith in me, and faith alone, takes up her
bed and walks, the saints of old could not have done more. St. Anne and
many others can scarcely to-day do less. We enjoy, I say, no monopoly
in the faith business. The faith with which we work, the faith, indeed,
which is available to-day in every-day life, has its limitations. It
will not raise the dead; it will not put in a new eye in place of a
bad one (as it did to an Iroquois Indian boy for one of the Jesuit
fathers), nor will it cure cancer or pneumonia, or knit a bone; but,
in spite of these nineteenth-century restrictions, such as we find it,
faith is a most precious commodity, without which we should be very
badly off.
_Hypnotism_, introduced by Mesmer in the eighteenth century, has
had several revivals as a method of treatment during the nineteenth
century. The first careful study of it was made by Braid, a Manchester
surgeon, who introduced the terms hypnotism, hypnotic, and nervous
sleep; but at this time no very great measure of success followed
its use in practice, except perhaps in the case of an Anglo-Indian
surgeon, James Esdaile, who, prior to the introduction of anæsthesia,
had performed two hundred and sixty-one surgical operations upon
patients in a state of hypnotic unconsciousness. About 1880 the French
physicians, particularly Charcot and Bernheim, took up the study,
and since that time hypnotism has been extensively practised. It may
be defined as a subjective psychical condition, what Braid called
nervous sleep, resembling somnambulism, in which, as Shakespeare says,
in the description of Lady Macbeth, the person receives at once the
benefit of sleep and does the effects or acts of watching or waking.
Therapeutically, the important fact is that the individual’s natural
susceptibility to suggestion is increased, and this may hold after the
condition of hypnosis has passed away. The condition of hypnosis is
usually itself induced by suggestion, requesting the subject to close
the eyes, to think of sleep, and the operator then repeats two or three
times sentences suggesting sleep, and suggesting that the limbs are
getting heavy and that he is feeling drowsy. During this state it has
been found that the subjects are very susceptible to suggestion. Too
much must not be expected of hypnotism, and the claims which have been
made for it have been too often grossly exaggerated. It seems, as it
has been recently well put, that hypnotism “at best permits of making
suggestions more effective for good or bad than can be done upon one
in his waking state.” It is found to be of very little use in organic
disease. It has been helpful in some cases of hysteria, in certain
functional spasmodic affections of the nervous system, in the vicious
habits of childhood, and in suggesting to the victims of alcohol and
drugs that they should get rid of their inordinate desires. It has
been used successfully in certain cases for the relief of labor pains,
and in surgical operations; but on the whole, while a valuable agent
in a few cases, it has scarcely fulfilled the expectations of its
advocates. It is a practice not without serious dangers, and should
never be performed except in the presence of a third person, and its
indiscriminate practice by ignorant persons should be prevented by law.
One mode of faith-healing in modern days, which passes under the
remarkable name of Christian Science, is probably nothing more than
mental suggestion under another name. “The patient is told to be calm,
and is assured that all will go well; that he must try to aid the
healer by believing that what is told him is true. The healer then,
quietly but firmly, asserts and reiterates that there is no pain, no
suffering, that it is disappearing, that relief will come, that the
patient is getting well.” This is precisely the method which Bernheim
used to use with such success in his hypnotic patients at Nancy,
iterating and reiterating, in a most wearisome way, that the disease
would disappear and the patient would feel better. As has been pointed
out by a recent writer (Dr. Harry Marshall), the chief basis for the
growth of Christian Science is that which underlies every popular
fallacy: “Oliver Wendell Holmes outlined very clearly the factors
concerned, showing (a) how easily abundant facts can be collected
to prove anything whatsoever; (b) how insufficient ‘exalted wisdom,
immaculate honesty, and vast general acquirements’ are to prevent an
individual from having the most primitive ideas upon subjects out
of his line of thought; and, finally, demonstrating ‘the boundless
credulity and excitability of mankind upon subjects connected with
medicine.’”
WILLIAM OSLER.
SURGERY
The end of the eighteenth century was made notable by one of the most
remarkable and beneficent discoveries which has ever blessed the human
race, the discovery of the means of preventing small-pox. On May 14,
1796, Dr. Edward Jenner inoculated James Phipps. When we remember that
two million persons died in a single year in the Russian Empire from
small-pox; that in 1707 in Iceland, out of a population of thirty
thousand, sixty per cent., or eighteen thousand, died; that in Jenner’s
time “an adult person who had not had small-pox was scarcely met with
or heard of in the United Kingdom, and that owing to his discovery
small-pox is now one of the rarest diseases,” the strong words I have
used seem fully justified. But the eighteenth century was not to
witness the end of progress in medicine. The advances in the nineteenth
century have been even more startling and more beneficent. What these
advances have been in the department of medicine has been related by
Professor Osler. It is my province to speak only of surgery.
METHOD OF TEACHING
The first advance which should be mentioned is a fundamental
one—namely, methods of medical teaching. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century there were only three medical schools in the United
States: the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania,
established in 1765; the Medical Department of Harvard, established
in 1783; and the Medical Department of Dartmouth, established in
1797. The last report of the Commissioner of Education gives a list
of one hundred and fifty-five medical schools now in existence in
this country, many of them still poorly equipped and struggling for
existence, but a large number of them standing in the first rank, with
excellent modern equipment, both in teachers, laboratories, hospitals,
and other facilities. The medical curriculum then extended over
only two years or less, and consisted of courses of lectures at the
most by seven professors who, year after year, read the same course
of lectures, without illustrations and with no practical teaching.
The medical schools, even when connected with universities, were
practically private corporations, the members of which took all the
fees, spent what money they were compelled to spend in the maintenance
of what we now should call the semblance of an education, and divided
the profits. Until within about twenty years this method prevailed in
all our medical schools. But the last two decades of the century have
seen a remarkable awakening of the medical profession to the need of
a broader and more liberal education, and that, as a prerequisite,
the medical schools should be on the same basis as the department of
arts in every well-regulated college. To accomplish this the boards of
trustees have taken possession of the fees of students, have placed the
faculties upon salaries, and have used such portion of the incomes of
the institutions as was needed for a constant and yet rapid development
along the most liberal lines.
COLLEGE HOSPITALS
The first step has been the establishment in connection with most
schools of general hospitals in which the various teachers in the
college should be the clinical instructors, and where the students
would have the means not only of hearing theoretically what should be
done to the sick, but of actually examining the patients under the
supervision of their instructors, studying the cases so as to become
skilled in reaching a diagnosis and indicating what in their opinion
was necessary in the way either of hygiene, medicine, or surgical
operation. More than that, in most of the advanced schools to-day the
students assist the clinical faculties of the hospitals in the actual
performance of operations, so that when they graduate they are skilled
to a degree utterly unknown twenty years ago.
ESTABLISHMENT OF LABORATORIES
Another step which was equally important, and in some respects even
more so, has been the establishment of laboratories connected with each
branch of instruction. A laboratory of anatomy (the dissecting room)
every medical school has always had, but all the other laboratories are
recent additions. Among these may be named a laboratory of clinical
medicine, a laboratory of therapeutics, in which the action of drugs
is studied; a laboratory of chemistry, a laboratory of microscopy, a
laboratory of pathology for the study of diseased tissues, a laboratory
of embryology for the study of the development of the human body and
of the embryos of animals, a laboratory of hygiene, a laboratory of
bacteriology, a laboratory of pharmacy, a surgical laboratory, in which
all the operations of surgery are done on the cadaver by each student,
a laboratory of physiology, and in many colleges private rooms in which
advanced work may be done for the discovery of new truths.
In all these laboratories, instead of simply hearing about the
experiments and observations, each student is required to handle the
drugs, the chemicals, the apparatus, to do all the operations, to look
through the microscope, etc.; in other words, to do all that which is
necessary for the proper understanding of the case in hand. In fact,
it may be said that in view of the opportunities and the requirements
of modern hospitals, it is undoubtedly true that a hospital patient,
the poorest of the poor, often has his case more thoroughly studied and
more accurately observed than the wealthy patient who is attended at
his home. On the other hand, however, so many laboratories with their
expensive apparatus and a large staff of assistants mean an enormous
increase in the expense of a medical education, for which the student
does not pay anything like an equivalent. Hence the need in all of our
best modern medical schools for endowments, in order that such work may
be carried on properly, and yet the student not be charged such fees as
to be practically prohibitory, excepting for the rich, or at the least
the well-to-do. I do not hesitate to say that at the end of the second
year many a diligent student of to-day is better fitted to practise
medicine than was the graduate of half a century ago.
ANATOMICAL MATERIAL
One of the most important means of the study of medicine, and
especially of surgery, is a thorough acquaintance with the anatomy of
the human body. No one would think of placing an engineer in charge
of a complicated piece of machinery, who had never become intimately
acquainted with all the parts of such a machine, so that he could take
it to pieces and put it together again with ease and intelligence.
Yet, until comparatively recently, this knowledge of anatomy was
both required of, and yet at the same time the means of obtaining it
was forbidden to, the medical student. If he performed an operation
and was guilty of negligence or error, due to his want of anatomical
knowledge, he was liable to a suit for malpractice. Yet his only
means of becoming acquainted with the anatomy of the human body was
by stealing the bodies of the dead. In England, up to 1832, this was
equally true. A regular traffic in human bodies existed there as
well as here, and, by reason of its perils, the cost of bodies for
dissection was very great; but it was only a question of money. In
his testimony before the Parliamentary Committee, Sir Astley Cooper
made a shiver run down the backs of the noble lords who listened to
him when he said that in order to dissect the body of any of them it
was only necessary for him to pay enough. The large pecuniary profits
of such business, when the supply was very small, led to the horrible
atrocities of Burke and Hare in Edinburgh in 1832. They deliberately
murdered a considerable number of persons, and sold the bodies to the
dissecting rooms in that city. The discovery of their crimes finally
led to the passage of the Anatomy Act, which has been in force in
Great Britain ever since. Similar violations of graveyards in this
country have led to the passage in various States of somewhat similar
laws, usually giving for dissection the bodies of those who were so
poor in friendship that no one would spend the money necessary for
their burial. Even to-day, in a large number of our States, the former
anomalous condition of affairs exists. The increase of anatomical
material which has resulted from the enactment of wise and salutary
laws for this purpose has given a great impetus to the study of
anatomy, and has produced a far better educated class of physicians
in most parts of the United States within the last few years. The
enlightened sense of the community has perceived that to deny the
medical schools the means of properly teaching anatomy was a fatal
mistake, and resulted in an ignorance of which the community were
the victims. As a result, it is possible now, by law, in most States
to obtain a reasonable number of cadavers, not only for the study of
anatomy, but for the performance of all the usual operations.
MEDICAL LIBRARIES
Along with this there has been throughout this country a marked
movement in favor of medical libraries. It is to the credit of the
government of the United States that the whole world is debtor to us,
not only for the foremost medical library in the world, that of the
surgeon-general of the army in Washington, but also for the magnificent
index-catalogue, not only of the books, but all the journal articles
in every language in the world. No better investment of money was ever
made than the establishment of this library, and its allied museum, and
the publication of the index-catalogue.
EMBRYOLOGY
As a result of all these means and methods of study, and as a part of
the great educational and scientific movement of the century, medical
men now take a wholly different view of the normal and abnormal
structures of the human body. The study of embryology has shown us that
many of the deviations from the normal development of the human body
are easily explained by embryology. One of the most important changes
in our idea, for example, of tumors is due to the fact that the study
of embryology and of the tissues of the embryo have shown us that
diseased structures, which lack explanation entirely, when compared
with the adult human tissues, readily find their explanation and fall
into an unexpected order when compared with the tissues of the embryo.
Not only, however, has the study of embryological tissues thrown a
flood of light on diseased structures, but we have obtained new views
of the relation of man to all creatures, lower in the scale of life.
Largely owing to the doctrine of evolution, we now recognize the fact
that, so far as his body is concerned, man is kindred to the brutes;
that his diseases, within certain limitations, are identical with
similar diseases of the lower animals; that his anatomy and physiology
are, in essence, the same as the anatomy and physiology of the lower
animals, even the very lowest, and that many of his diseases can be
best studied in the lower animals, because upon them we can make exact
experiments which would be impossible in man. While it is true that
each animal has disorders which are peculiar to itself, and that it is
not subject to some of the disorders to which man is a victim, and,
_per contra_, that man is a victim to some disorders from which animals
do not suffer, yet, taking them as a whole, the diseases of man and of
animals, and the action of remedies on both, are practically identical.
To this I shall have occasion to refer again.
PATHOLOGY
Among the laboratories which I mentioned, one of the most important is
that of pathology and morbid anatomy, or the study of diseased tissues
and organs. The first work on pathology written in this country was
by one of our best-known surgeons, the late Samuel D. Gross, and one
of his most important contributions to surgical progress consisted in
his persistent advocacy of the need for the study of pathology as a
basis for all our means of cure. This is evident, if we consider the
illustration I used a moment ago of a steam-engine. Unless he knows
precisely the defects of such a machine, the influence of fresh or
salt water on a boiler, the influence of rust, the effect of oils,
entirely apart from the mere mechanism of the engine, an engineer
might make the most serious mistake, resulting in fatal damage, both to
the machine and probably to life. So, surgical pathology is the study
of the processes of disease, the alterations in the minute structure
of tissues and organs, without which no surgeon can be fitted for
his task, much less can he be called an accomplished surgeon. All of
these laboratories mark the difference between the scientific and the
empirical method. The old student of medicine went from case to case,
heard many a good maxim, and learned many a useful trick; but, after
all, it was only an empirical knowledge which he obtained. It did
not go to the foundation of things, it was not scientific, as is the
collegiate instruction of to-day.
Having now glanced rapidly at the improvement in medical instruction,
let me turn next to a few of the principal discoveries which have made
the surgery of to-day so much superior to the surgery of a hundred
years ago.
ANÆSTHESIA
After vaccination, the most important medical event of the century is
the discovery of anæsthesia. While there were some prior attempts at
anæsthesia, practically it dates from October 16, 1846, when Dr. John
C. Warren, in the Massachusetts General Hospital, first performed a
major surgical operation, without inflicting the slightest pain. I
cannot enter into the merits of the various claimants for the credit
of first using an anæsthetic, but ether was then for the first time
publicly administered by Morton, and the very sponge which was then
used is now a precious trophy of the Massachusetts General Hospital.
I may, perhaps, quote from an address which I delivered before the
Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of the State of Maryland, at their
centennial anniversary, in April, 1899, the following in relation to
anæsthesia:
“The news went like wildfire, and anæsthesia was soon introduced
into every clinic and at almost every operation throughout
the civilized world. Prior to that time a surgical operation
was attended with horrors which those who live in these days
cannot appreciate. He was the best surgeon who could perform any
operation in the least possible time. The whole object of new
methods of operating was to shorten the period of frightful agony
which every patient had to endure. Every second of suffering
saved was an incalculable boon. To submit to any operation
required then a heroism and an endurance which is almost
incomprehensible to us now. All of the more modern, deliberate,
careful, painstaking operations, involving minute dissection,
amid nerves and blood-vessels, when life or death depends on the
accuracy of almost every touch of the knife, were absolutely
impossible. It was beyond human endurance quietly to submit one’s
self for an hour, for an hour and a half, for two hours, or even
longer, to such physical agony.
“It is a striking commentary on the immediate results of
anæsthesia to learn that, in five years before the introduction
of ether, only one hundred and eighty-four persons were
willing to submit themselves to such a dreadful ordeal in the
Massachusetts General Hospital—an average of thirty-seven
operations per annum, or three per month.... During the last
year, in the same hospital—a Mecca for every surgeon the world
over—over thirty-seven hundred operations were performed. It is
not an uncommon thing at the present day for any one of the more
active surgeons of this country to do as many as four or five
hundred operations in a year. I have known as many as nineteen
operations to be done in the Jefferson Medical College Hospital
in a single day—equalling six months’ work in Boston before the
introduction of ether.”
The next year, 1847, witnessed the introduction of chloroform by Sir
James Y. Simpson, of Edinburgh. Until I became acquainted with the
striking figures just quoted, I had often wondered at the hospital
scene in that most touching story, _Rab and His Friends_, by the late
gifted and well-beloved physician, Dr. John Brown, of Edinburgh.
Nowadays students do not rush into the surgical amphitheatre when they
learn that an operation is to be done, but it is taken as a matter of
course, for practically every day many operations are done in most of
our large hospitals. But, at the time when Rab’s mistress was operated
upon, an operation, as has been stated, was a very rare event. Few had
the fortitude to endure its dreadful pangs. Now, thanks to the blessed
sleep of anæsthesia, sufferers from even the most dreadful disorders
can have long and difficult operations done, accurate and tedious
dissections made, and yet feel not a twinge of pain.
Besides general anæsthesia by ether, chloroform, and a few other
agents, there have been introduced several means for producing “local
anæsthesia,” _i.e._, agents which destroy the sensibility of the part
of the body to be operated upon while not producing unconsciousness.
Freezing the part by ice and salt, or by a quickly evaporating spray
of rhigolene or chloride of ethyl, are sometimes used. But cocaine
and a somewhat similar substance, eucaine, have of late been more
extensively used on man, after their harmlessness had been first shown
by experiments on animals. In 1885 Corning, of New York, injected a
solution of cocaine as near to the spinal cord as was possible, and
produced insensibility of all the body below the point of injection
by the effect of the cocaine upon the spinal cord. A few years ago
Quincke, of Kiel, in Germany, devised a means of puncturing the spinal
canal itself in the lumbar region (the lowest part of the small
of the back) for the purpose of drawing off some of the fluid for
examination. This suggested to Bier, then of Kiel, who was apparently
ignorant of Corning’s work, that cocaine could be injected through a
hollow needle inserted into the spinal canal by “lumbar puncture” and
so produce anæsthesia of all the body below this point. This method
was published by him in 1899, and was soon repeated in America. In
France, however, it has been practised more than elsewhere, Tupper,
of Paris, having successfully done over two hundred operations by
“spinal anæsthesia.” All of the body below the diaphragm can thus be
deprived of sensibility. The method will probably never replace ether
and chloroform, but in many cases is a valuable aid to the surgeon.
But it has its dangers and its inconveniences. The ideal anæsthetic
is not that which destroys sensibility and yet leaves the patient
perfectly conscious, as spinal anæsthesia does. A patient to whom I
recently proposed it for certain special reasons rejected it, saying,
with probable truth, that she could never bear the strain of lying on
the table perfectly conscious of all that was being done and frightened
by any surgical emergency which might easily arise in such a long,
difficult, and dangerous operation. The ideal anæsthetic is that
which will abolish pain and consciousness without danger to life. The
twentieth century will undoubtedly see the discovery of this safe and
efficient anæsthetic.
ANTISEPSIS
But the limits of surgical progress were not yet reached. Let me quote
again from the address before alluded to:
“Even the introduction of anæsthesia, however, did not rid
surgery of all its terrors. The acute pain of the operation was
abolished, but the after-suffering, as I know only too well,
in my early surgical days, was something dreadful to see. The
parched lips of the poor sufferer, tossing uneasily during
sleepless nights; wounds reeking with pus, and patients dying by
scores from blood-poisoning, from erysipelas, from tetanus, from
gangrene, were only too familiar sights in the pre-antiseptic
days. Then, again, there arose one of these deliverers of the
human race whose name can never be forgotten and whose fame will
last so long as time shall endure. Jenner, Warren, and Lister
are a triumvirate of names of which any profession may well be
proud. Thank God, they all sprang from virile Anglo-Saxon loins!
No praise, no reward, no fame is too great for them. That Lord
Lister still lives to see the triumph of his marvellous services
to humanity is a joy to all of us. And when the profession arose
_en masse_, within the last few years, at the International
Congress of Berlin, and at the meeting of the British Medical
Association in Montreal, and welcomed him with cheer after cheer,
it was but a feeble expression of gratitude for benefits which no
words can express.
“Before Lister’s day erysipelas, tetanus, gangrene, and
blood-poisoning in its various phases were the constant
attendant of every surgeon. They were dreaded guests at almost
any operation; and when in rare cases we obtained primary union
without a drop of pus, without fever, and with but little
suffering, it was a marvellous achievement. Now it is precisely
reversed. The surgeon who does not get primary union without
a drop of pus, with no fever, and with little suffering, asks
himself—what was the fault in my technic? To open the head, the
abdomen, or the chest thirty years ago was almost equivalent to
signing the death-warrant of a patient. The early mortality of
ovariotomy was about sixty per cent.; two out of three died. Now
many a surgeon can point to a series of one hundred abdominal
operations with a fatality of only two or three per cent. When
Sir Spencer Wells recorded his first one thousand cases of
ovariotomy it was calculated that after deducting the years which
the patients who died from the operation would have lived had no
operation been done the net result of the thousand cases was an
addition of twenty thousand years to human life. One thousand
ovariotomies under antiseptic precautions at the present would
certainly add at least thirty thousand years to human life. Would
not such a guerdon be enough for any man?
“This, too, is a direct result of laborious laboratory
researches, beginning with the investigations of Liebig and
Pasteur on fermentation. Lister went still further. Even before
the discovery of the bacteria of suppuration, of tetanus, and
of erysipelas he showed us experimentally how, by surgical
cleanliness, we could avoid all infection and so banish these
pests from our hospitals and bring life and health to many who
otherwise would have perished from operations which are now
perfectly safe.
“The mortality of compound fractures in the pre-antiseptic days
was about sixty per cent. It was one of the most dreaded of
all accidents. Its mortality now is perhaps not over three per
cent., and the mortality from sepsis after such a fracture, in
the hands of well-instructed surgeons, is almost nil. Prior to
Lister’s day the mortality of major amputations varied from fifty
to sixty-three per cent. Now it is from ten to twenty per cent.
And so I might go on with operation after operation and show how
they have become so safe that one need not dread any, saving
exceptional cases.
“These two modern discoveries, anæsthesia and antisepsis, have
utterly revolutionized modern surgery. They have made possible
operations which, by reason of their length and pain and danger,
were utterly unjustifiable in former days, but are now the daily
occupation of a busy surgeon. And, far better than this, they
have enabled us to bring to homes and hearts, which otherwise
would have been broken up and wrung with sorrow, the comfort of
life restored to dear ones upon whom depended the happiness and
support of the families. Translate figures into happy hearts and
prosperous homes if you can, and then you can tell me what Warren
and Lister have done for humanity!”
The result of these two wonderful discoveries has been to separate us
from the surgical past, as by a great gulf.
“Great theologians, such as a Calvin or a Jonathan Edwards,
were they recalled to life, could discourse as learnedly as
ever of predestination and free will; great preachers, as
a Beecher or a Spurgeon, could stir our souls and warm our
hearts as of old; great jurists, as a Justinian or a Marshall,
could expound the same principles of law which hold good for
all time; great forensic orators, as a Burke or a Webster,
could convince us by the same arguments and arouse us by the
same invectives or the same eloquence that made our fathers
willing captives to their silver tongues. But to-day, so rapid
has been our surgical progress, a Velpeau, a Sir William
Ferguson, or a Pancoast, all of whom have died within the
last thirty years, could not teach modern surgical principles
nor perform a modern surgical operation. Even our every-day
surgical vocabulary—staphylococcus, streptococcus, infection,
immunity, antisepsis and asepsis, toxin and antitoxin—would be
unintelligible jargon to him; and our modern operations on the
brain, the chest, the abdomen, and the pelvis would make him
wonder whether we had not lost our senses, until, seeing the
almost uniform and almost painless recoveries, he would thank God
for the magnificent progress of the last half-century, which had
vouchsafed such magical, nay, such almost divine, power to the
modern surgeon.”
THE SURGERY OF WAR
One of the immediate consequences of the introduction of the antiseptic
method has been a remarkable mitigation of the horrors of war. Our
recent war with Spain has proved, and the present military operations
in the Philippines and of the British in South Africa will still
further prove, its advantages. Witness a little book written by
Professor von Esmarch, of Kiel, Germany, with the apt title, _The Fight
of Humanity Against the Horrors of War_; with an appendix, entitled,
“The Samaritan on the Battle-field.” One of the most valuable means
for the preservation of human life is carried by every soldier in a
modern civilized army as a part of his regulation outfit, a “First
Aid Package” for the treatment of any wound or injury; and one of the
most valuable and interesting papers read before the American Surgical
Association, at its meeting in Chicago in 1899, was by Professor
Senn on the “First Aid Package.” This first aid package contains an
antiseptic dressing, which can be applied to all but the gravest wounds
for the purpose of preventing infection, which is the principal danger
to life after accident or injury. The universal testimony of our
surgeons in Cuba was that by its use most wounds were prevented from
becoming infected, and, therefore, inflamed, and that the number of
operations was greatly diminished by reason of its use.
BACTERIOLOGY
In experimental science, two methods of progress are observed; first,
in actual practice certain methods are adopted because they are found
to be the most advantageous and useful, though we cannot explain why
it is so—_i.e._, practice outstrips theory. Again, as a result of
experimental investigation, certain facts are discovered which explain
why the practical methods just alluded to are the best, and this in
turn suggests further improvements in our practice—_i.e._, theory
outstrips practice and enlarges its domain. Thus outstripping theory,
the practical advance made by Lister was an example of the first. His
striking results in turn stimulated scientific observers to make new
discoveries of the greatest importance, and thus science immensely
improved and widened our practical methods.
No definite year or day can be assigned as the birth-date of Lord
Lister’s antiseptic methods, as we can, for instance, for vaccination
or for anæsthesia. We may assume, at least for this country, the
summer of 1876 as the starting-point. During that year Lord Lister
attended the International Medical Congress held in Philadelphia,
and demonstrated his then methods and convinced a few surgeons of
their immense advantages. Even before that date there had been very
many experiments and observations, especially on the blood. In 1863
Davaine, in France, had discovered little rod-like bodies in the
blood in wool-sorters’ disease, or anthrax, which he named from their
shape “bacteria,” or “little rods.” This name has been adopted for
all forms of germs, though many of them are not rod-like in their
shape. Not until 1881 was the cause of inflammation and suppuration
(the formation of pus or “matter”) discovered. In that year Ogston, of
Aberdeen, published experiments which he believed demonstrated the
fact that certain bacteria were the cause of suppuration. Since then
this has been amply confirmed not only by experiments upon animals,
but by observation in man. In 1882 Robert Koch, of Berlin, discovered
the cause of tuberculosis, a little rod-like body, which is named the
“bacillus” of tuberculosis. In 1883 Fehleisen discovered the germ
of erysipelas, and in 1887 Nicolaier and Rosenbaum discovered the
bacillus of tetanus or lockjaw. So recent have been the discoveries
in bacteriology which have led to vast improvements in our methods of
treatment of wounds and the performance of operations.
While the principles established by Lord Lister have remained
unchanged, the details in the treatment have been greatly simplified
and made more efficient. For the information of the general reader, let
me state a few facts. Bacteria are divided into two principal classes,
in accordance with their form. One, known as “cocci,” from the Greek
word coccus—“berry”—may be likened to billiard-balls. Some of these
occur in bunches, which have been likened to bunches of grapes, and
hence are called, again from a Greek term, “staphylococci.” Others are
arranged in chains, like beads, and are called “streptococci.” These
last are very much more virulent and dangerous than the staphylococci.
Both of these produce pus or matter, and they are the most widely
diffused and most common forms found in infected or suppurating
wounds. One form is the cause of erysipelas. A second form, known as
“bacilli,” may be likened to a lead-pencil. Among the various bacilli
that have been discovered are those of tuberculosis, glanders, tetanus
or lockjaw, etc. I omit many others found in medical disorders, as they
do not concern this paper. How important these discoveries are may be
seen by the following facts: Tuberculosis, next to that of suppuration,
is, perhaps, the most widely extended infection to which man, as
well as animals, is liable. We are all familiar with it in the form
of “consumption,” but the non-medical reader is, perhaps, not aware
of the fact that it affects not only the lungs, but also the bowels
in consumption of the bowels; the bones, as is seen by every surgeon
almost daily, and especially as the cause of the crooked backs seen
in spine diseases; in the joints, as is seen in hip-joint disease,
white swelling of the knee, ankle-joint disease, and similar disease
of all the other large joints of the body; in the brain, in tubercular
meningitis; in the abdominal cavity, in tubercular peritonitis; in
the skin, in certain forms of ulceration, commonly called lupus; in
the glands, as in the swollen glands, or “bunches,” in the neck, and
endless other varieties which I need not name.
The bacillus of lockjaw is found in great abundance around stables, and
this explains the fact that hostlers, drivers, cavalrymen, all of whom
had to do with horses, are especially liable to attacks of lockjaw.
Moreover, certain bacteria thrive best when exposed to the open air.
Other bacteria, and among them the bacilli of lockjaw, thrive best when
the air is excluded, and this explains the danger of treading on a
rusty nail, which is popularly and rightly known as peculiarly liable
to produce lockjaw. The reason is not because it is a nail, nor because
it is old, nor because it is rusty, but because from the earth in which
it lies it is most apt to be the means of introducing into a punctured
wound the bacilli of lockjaw. Such a wound bleeds but very little, the
blood soon crusts and excludes the air, and if any of the bacilli of
lockjaw have been carried into the body, they find in such a closed
wound, from which the air is excluded, the most favorable conditions
for growth and infection of the whole body. Knowing these facts from
experiment, the treatment is clear. Lay open such a wound and disinfect
it.
These two forms, the “cocci,” or berry-like bacteria, and the
“bacilli,” or rod-like bacteria, comprise the great majority of
dangerous bacteria.
It must be remembered that there is an enormous number of bacteria
which are not dangerous; some of them are entirely harmless even
if introduced into the human body. Others are the bacteria of
decomposition, or putrefaction, which are known as “saprophytic”
bacteria. All of the harmless ones are known as “non-pathogenic,” that
is, non-producers of disease. Those which produce disease are known
as “pathogenic,” and those which produce suppuration as “pyogenic” or
pus-producing bacteria.
All of these bacteria are plants, and not, as is very frequently
supposed, animals of a low form. The danger from their introduction
into the body can be best appreciated, perhaps, by the statement
of Belfield, who estimated that a single bacterium which weighs,
approximately, only the 1-40,000,000 part of a grain, if given plenty
of food and plenty of “elbow room,” would so rapidly develop that in
three days it would form a mass weighing 800 tons! It is the old story
of the blacksmith who was to get a penny for the first nail, two for
the second, four for the third, and so on till a set of shoes would
cost more than Crœsus could pay for.
The effect of the bacteria has been determined by experiment to be
proportionate to the dose. A cubic centimetre is a cube two-fifths
of an inch on each side. One-tenth of such a cube of pure culture of
one bacterium (_Proteus vulgaris_) contains 225,000,000 bacteria,
and if injected under the skin of a rabbit will produce death.
Less than 18,000,000 will produce no effect whatever. Of one kind
of staphylococcus, if 250,000,000 are introduced under the skin of
a rabbit there will be produced a small abscess, but it requires
1,000,000,000 to produce speedy death. On the other hand, of the
bacillus of lockjaw it requires only 1000 to produce death, so virulent
is this germ.
Moreover, their effect on tissues and persons in different states
varies very much. Thus, it is found that when a certain number of
bacteria are injected into the cavity of the abdomen of an animal, if
the animal is healthy and the peritoneum (the thin lining membrane
of the abdomen) is healthy, the animal will recover perfectly well;
but if the peritoneum be scraped and torn (and it must be remembered
that the healthy peritoneum is devoid of sensation), that the same
dose which before was harmless will now produce a violent peritonitis
and very likely death. The practical lesson from this experiment upon
animals is very evident. Every surgeon who opens the abdomen is most
careful, if possible, not to injure the peritoneum, but manipulates
with the greatest care lest fatal results follow any serious injury
to that membrane. So, too, if the general health be impaired, it is
found that an injection from which a healthy animal would recover will
be followed by fatal consequences if the general health is below par.
Again, if an animal has a simple fracture of his thigh-bone, and that
is the only injury that he receives, no infection from the exterior
having occurred, he will make a good recovery; but if at the same time
he receives a lacerated wound, it may be even in another part of the
body, and this wound, not being cared for most scrupulously, becomes
infected, the infection will fasten on the distant spot of least
resistance, the broken thigh-bone, and will produce a most dangerous
and very frequently fatal form of inflammation.
I need scarcely point out in this connection, as in fact throughout
this entire consideration of bacteriology, how important a part in
its development has been played by experiment upon animals. The
experimental facts just stated are of vital importance in the treatment
of surgical diseases, and evidently could not have been determined
upon mankind. It is not too much to say that had vivisection been
restricted or prohibited the surgery of to-day would be the barbarous
surgery of thirty years ago.
Even granting that an enormous number of the bacteria are harmless,
the wonder is that with so many foes on every hand we live an ordinary
lifetime. Fortunately, however, in the human body there is not only a
lack of food sufficient and “elbow room” enough for them to work their
dire effects, but there is that which “makes for righteousness” in our
physical organization as well as in our souls.
The moment that bacteria are introduced into the human body a certain
number of cells hasten to destroy them. These are called “phagocytes”
or devouring cells, because they eat up the bacteria. Whether the
patient survives or dies depends on whether the bacteria get the upper
hand of the phagocytes or the phagocytes the upper hand of the bacteria.
These statements are very easy to make, but the results have only been
obtained by prolonged and laborious investigations in the laboratory
and by experiments upon animals which have demonstrated these facts.
The bacteria are recognized by various methods: First, by form. Many
which are identical in appearance, however, differ greatly in effects.
A handful of turnip-seed and a handful of rape-seed look very much
alike, but if they are planted the plants differ so greatly that we can
recognize the difference in the seed by the difference in the crop;
hence the second method of recognizing differences in bacteria is by
planting them. Different methods have been practised. Some are sown on
the raw surface of a potato; others on bread paste; others in certain
jelly-like materials, such as gelatine or agar-agar. It was soon found
as a result of these experiments that the bacteria flourished best,
some in one soil, some in another. Again, the crops of mould which come
from them differ greatly in color, some being black, some red, some
white, some yellow, etc. A third method also is by staining them with
various dyes, when it is found that some bacteria will take one stain
best, others will take another, and so on through the whole list.
At first it was thought that these bacteria existed chiefly in the air,
and hence in Lister’s early methods powerful spray-producing apparatus
were used; but while it is true that they do exist in the air, it is
found that this is not the principal source of infection. There is no
substance (which has not been disinfected) that is not covered with
the germs of these little plants. They exist in our food and drink;
but the intestine is, one may say, a natural home in which many exist
without harm to the body. For surgical purposes their existence is most
important, first, in the earth, where, as I have already shown, the
bacillus of lockjaw is most frequently found. So, too, the bacillus of
wool-sorters’ disease (_Anthrax_) exists in the earth. If an animal
dying of anthrax is buried, worms coming from the carcass up through
the ground carry the infection, so that other animals grazing over
this surface will become readily infected. The means by which we can
avoid infection from the earth is very evident, viz., every person
who has been run over by the cars or who has fallen on the ground and
broken his leg, etc., must have the wound most carefully cleansed from
all dirt. If this is scrupulously done the danger of tetanus or other
similar earth-born bacterial disease is almost nothing.
A still greater danger to every patient, however, is found in the
clothing, in the skin, and all dressings which are applied to wounds.
The skin is full of bacteria of the most dangerous kind; even the
spotless hands of the bride, in the eyes of the surgeon, are dirty.
No one can touch a wound with ordinarily clean hands without infecting
it. All clothing, dressings—_e.g._, lint and soft linen rags, and such
like—are full of bacteria of the most dangerous kind. Perhaps the most
dangerous place is the space under the nails of the surgeon’s hand, for
the mere mechanical removal of any dirt under the nails by cleansing
them does not make them clean surgically. The nails must be cut short
and prepared in a way I shall mention directly, or they are full of
peril to any patient into whose wound a non-disinfected finger is
introduced. Again, another source of infection which thirty years ago
we never thought of is our instruments. Then instruments were washed
with soap and water and were made clean to the eye, but they were still
covered with invisible death-dealing bacteria which hid especially in
the joints and irregularities of the surface of all instruments.
All of these somewhat detailed statements lead up to a consideration
of the difference between the old surgery and the new. Thirty years
ago when an operation was to be performed or an accident cared for we
laid out our instruments which were visibly clean, used them with hands
which were as clean as those of any gentleman, and applied soft linen
rags, lint, and other dressings. To-day we know that these apparently
clean instruments, hands, and dressings are covered with bacteria,
which produce infection, and, therefore, suppuration, and frequently
run riot in blood-poisoning, erysipelas, lockjaw, and death.
How does a modern surgeon perform an operation? All bacteria can be
killed by heat. Cold has no effect upon them, but the temperature of
boiling water (212° Fahr.) is sufficient to destroy them all usually
within fifteen or twenty minutes; hence, first, instruments are all
boiled; and, secondly, dressings are either steeped in such solutions
as have been found to destroy the bacteria, such as carbolic acid or
corrosive sublimate, or other preparations, or, still better, are
placed in sterilizers, that is to say, metal cylinders, which are
then filled with steam, usually under pressure, so as to obtain a
temperature of 240° Fahr., and thus make sure of the death of the
bacteria. Unfortunately, our hands cannot be boiled or steamed, but
the modern surgeon first uses soap and water most vigorously over
his hands and arms up to the elbow. The nails are cut short and the
scrubbing-brush is especially applied to the nails so as to clean the
fingers at the ends. Then by various means, such as pure alcohol, which
is one of our best disinfectants, or solutions of corrosive sublimate,
and other means too technical to mention, the hands are sterilized.
Rubber gloves are frequently used, so as to preclude infection, as they
can be steamed to 240° Fahr. Removing at least his outer clothing, the
surgeon puts on a cotton gown which has been steamed and so made free
from bacteria. Not a few surgeons also wear sterilized caps, so that
any bacteria in the hair will not be sifted into a wound, and some wear
respirators of sterile gauze over the mouth and beard for the same
reason. All the dressings have been sterilized by superheated steam.
All the threads by which blood-vessels are tied have been either boiled
or otherwise sterilized. All the material for sewing up the wounds, and
the needles with which they are sewn, have been similarly disinfected.
The skin of the patient is also sterilized, usually the day beforehand,
in the same manner in which the surgeon’s hands have been disinfected,
and are disinfected a second time just at the moment of the operation.
If the case is one of accident, such as a crushed leg from a
trolley-car, all of the dirt is most carefully washed away with soap
and water, and the parts are disinfected, not only on the exterior, but
also by prolonged washing with some cleansing agent in the interior of
the wound, the patient being under the influence of ether, of course.
It is easily seen from such a description of a modern operation that no
case can receive due care in one of our modern homes, even the best.
The facilities do not exist, and hence surgeons are more and more
declining to do operations, whether for accident or disease, in private
houses, except in a case of absolute necessity, and a happy custom
is growing more and more in favor with the community of having all
operations and all accidents cared for in a well-equipped hospital.
RESULTS OF MODERN SURGERY
As the result of our ability to perform operations without pain, thanks
to anæsthesia, and our ability to perform operations without infection,
and, therefore, almost without danger, thanks to antisepsis, the range
of modern surgery has been enormously increased. Unless one has lived
through the old surgery and into the new he scarcely can appreciate
this widening of the field of operative surgery. Thirty years ago, in
consequence of the great danger of opening the head, the chest, or the
abdomen, or, in fact, of making an incision anywhere about the body,
the surgeon never dared to interfere until he was obliged to do so.
Hence, not only were many modern operations not even thought of, but in
obscure cases we had to wait until time and disease developed symptoms
and physical signs such that we were sure of our diagnosis, and then,
knowing that death would follow if we did not interfere, we ventured
to operate. Now we anticipate such a fatal termination, and in most
cases can avert it. In perhaps no class of cases has the benefit of
this immunity from infection and danger been shown than in the obscure
diseases of the brain and the abdomen. To-day, if we are uncertain as
to whether there is serious danger going on which, if unchecked, will
result in death, we deliberately open the one cavity or the other,
in order to find out the exact state of affairs. Supposing that the
mischief is trifling, or even that there is no mischief, we then know
how to deal with the symptoms which have been puzzling us. So far as
the exploratory operation is concerned, the patient recovers from it
in a short time, and, meantime, perhaps has also been cured of the
symptoms which were before so ill understood. If any serious disease
is found, in the majority of cases we can cope with it successfully.
Before the days of antisepsis and anæsthesia the field of operation was
greatly restricted, and practically the removal of tumors, amputations,
and a few other operations were all that were done. Now all the then
inaccessible organs are attacked with an intrepidity born of an
assurance of safety. Recovery usually sets the seal of approval on
the judgment of the surgeon. Thirty years ago, taking all operations
together, fully one-third of our patients died, many of them often from
slight operations which were followed by infection. To-day, including
even the far more grave operations which are now done, the general
mortality will scarcely exceed five per cent., and many surgeons are
able, in a series of several hundred operations, to save ninety-seven
out of every hundred patients!
SERUM TREATMENT
Another remarkable recent discovery, the result of numerous and careful
investigations in the laboratory, is a wholly new means of treatment,
viz., that method which is known as orrhotherapy, or serumtherapy,
or the treatment by injecting certain antitoxins under the skin by
a hypodermatic syringe. It would lead me too far to enter into the
theory upon which these were first used. Suffice it to say that in
the blood of an animal that has passed through a certain disorder
the liquid part of the blood contains an antidote or antitoxin. If a
certain amount of this is injected under the skin of an animal or man
suffering from the same disorder in its incipient stages, the antitoxin
prevents the development of the disease. The use of this method has
thus far been much more medical than surgical, and its results in
diphtheria and other medical disorders have been perfectly marvellous.
In surgery, however, less favorable results have been obtained, but in
all probability in the future we shall be able to do for some of our
surgical disorders what the physician can do to-day for diphtheria.
[For the results in diphtheria, see Professor Osler’s paper.]
There has also been discovered another means which in surgery has
rendered some valuable service. From certain organs, as, for instance,
the thyroid gland (the gland whose enlargement produces goitre), we can
obtain a very potent extract of great value. In cases of goitre very
noteworthy results have already been obtained by the administration
of the thyroid extract. A number of other organs in the body of
animals have been used to combat certain disorders in the human body
with advantage. The chief development of both of these new forms of
medication, however, will take place in the twentieth century.
INSTRUMENTS OF PRECISION
Another direction in which the century has seen enormous progress is
in the introduction of instruments of precision. When I was a student
in the early 60’s, instruction in microscopy was conspicuous only
by its absence from our medical curriculum. Now every student who
graduates is more or less of an accomplished microscopist, and carries
into his practice the methods and observations which the microscope
furnishes. At the same period I remember being greatly interested in a
discussion which two of my teachers had as to whether it was possible
to make an application accurately to the vocal chords in the larynx.
Now every tyro in medicine makes such applications to the larynx as a
routine procedure in cases requiring it, and similar methods have been
applied by the ophthalmoscope to examine the interior of the eye; the
rhinoscope, to examine the interior of the nose; the otoscope, for
examination of the ear; and other similar instruments for examining all
the other hollow organs in the body. If I add to these the hypodermatic
syringe; the aspirator, which may be described as a large hypodermatic
syringe for suction instead of injection; the clinical thermometer,
which was introduced in the late 60’s; the hemostatic forceps, for
controlling hemorrhage by seizing the blood-vessels and clamping them
till we have time to tie them; and other instruments intended to
facilitate our operative methods, it will be seen at once that the
armamentarium of the modern surgeon is very different from that of his
predecessor at the beginning, or even at the middle, of the century.
THE RÖNTGEN RAY
One of those extraordinary discoveries which startle the whole world
came nearly at the end of the nineteenth century, in the winter of
1895–96. At that time a modest professor in the University of Würzburg
announced that he could readily see the skeleton inside the body
through the flesh! Naturally, the first announcement was received with
almost absolute incredulity; but very soon his discovery was confirmed
from all sides, and it has now taken its place among the recognized
phenomena of science. By means of certain rays, which, being of unknown
nature, were called “X”-rays, after the well-known mathematical X, or
unknown quantity, Professor Röntgen has shown us that not only can the
bones be seen, but that almost every substance in the body can be seen
and reproduced in pictures. The reason for this is because they are
all obstacles to the passage of these X-rays and so produce shadows
on a sensitized photographic plate. If the exposure is sufficiently
prolonged the rays penetrate even through the bones and act upon the
photographic plate, so that no shadow remains. If the rays are allowed
to penetrate for a shorter time the bones show dense shadows, and one
can get a light shadow of the soft parts. If the exposure is still
shorter, then we can recognize the dense shadow of the bone, the much
less dense shadows of the muscles, and the still lighter shadows of
the layer of fat immediately under the skin. The heart can be seen
beating, and its shadow is now a well-recognized feature in skiagraphs
of the chest. At first it was thought impossible to discover anything
inside the bony skull, but there are now on record nearly a score of
instances in which bullets have been detected within the skull, and
after trephining have been found and removed exactly at the location
indicated. It is a very common thing now to locate a piece of steel
or other similar foreign bodies within the eyeball by the method of
Dr. Sweet, or some similar method, within one or two millimetres (a
millimetre is one-twenty-fifth of an inch). It is now well recognized
that even stones in the kidney will throw shadows sufficiently strong
for them to be recognized, and by noting their level in relation to
the vertebræ we can tell precisely in what part of the kidney to make
the incision in order to find and remove them. It has happened to
myself and many other surgeons in the past to cut down upon a kidney,
believing that there was a stone in the kidney, only to find that we
had been misled by the apparently clear symptoms of such a foreign
body. In future no such mistake should be made by any surgeon within
reach of a skilful skiagrapher. Unfortunately, gall stones and numerous
other foreign bodies, vegetable substances such as beans, corn, wood,
etc., being as transparent to the X-rays as are the soft parts, are not
revealed by means of this new method of investigation; but cavities
in the lung, abscesses in bone, and similar diseases which produce
thinning of the lung, bone, and other such organs, and so lighten
instead of deepen the shadows, can now be recognized by means of light
spots in the pictures as well as others by means of a shadow.
I spoke a moment ago of the need of a “skilful” skiagrapher, for
it must be remembered that there may be the same difference in the
personal skill, and, therefore, in the reliability of the results in
skiagraphy as there is in photography. A poor photographer will get
very different results from a skilful one, even if he uses precisely
the same quality of plates and precisely the same camera. Personal
skill and experience in the skiagrapher is, therefore, one of the most
important elements in success. It must be remembered also that the
X-rays in not a few cases may mislead us. I have, personally, fractured
a bone on account of deformity, taken an X-ray picture immediately
after the operation, the picture showing not the slightest evidence
of a fracture, which I absolutely knew existed. Moreover, foreign
bodies found on the outside of the person may mislead us, as, for
example, the metal part of suspenders, a coin in one’s pocket, and
such like. They look in the picture as if they were inside rather than
outside the body, and any article the shape or size of which would not
reveal its nature might easily be mistaken for a foreign body within
the patient. Therefore, in many cases only an expert can determine
precisely what the skiagraph means. I especially mention this, because
there is a tendency at present to utilize skiagraphs in court in
order to convince the jury that such a picture is an evidence of
malpractice. Such pictures always need an interpreter in order to judge
correctly of their meaning. It is precisely as if the jury were asked
to look through a microscope. I have been myself accustomed to use the
microscope for thirty years, but there are many instances even yet in
which I am obliged to ask a pathologist or bacteriologist what I really
am looking at in the microscope. While one may make a mistake of small
moment in some cases, yet if a man’s life or liberty or purse is at
the mercy of a jury which does not know how to interpret a skiagraph,
and, may, therefore, give a verdict which is “precisely wrong,” as
Professor Lincoln, my old teacher of Latin, used to call many of our
translations, it will be a very serious matter and lead to gross
injustice.
CITY AND VILLAGE HOSPITALS
Another great improvement in our means of caring for our surgical
patients is the establishment of hospitals all over the land. These,
happily, are not limited to our great cities, but in every country town
and not a few large villages small but well-equipped and well-managed
hospitals have been established which have done incalculable good. It
is not too much to say that every city or town establishing such a
hospital is repaid a hundredfold.
TRAINED NURSES
The trained nurse has fortunately come to stay. In fact, our antiseptic
methods as above described have made the trained nurse indispensable.
The old nurse, who, by many clumsy experiments on her patients,
had obtained a certain rule-of-thumb knowledge of the care of the
sick, can no longer assist in a surgical operation or properly care
for any surgical patient. The modern nurse must of necessity be a
well-educated, well-trained woman, knowing thoroughly modern antiseptic
methods, and on the alert to observe every symptom of improvement and
every signal of danger.
Without a well-trained nurse it is impossible at the present day
properly to care for any serious surgical case, and I gladly bear
witness to the intelligence, fidelity, and skill of scores of nurses
who have assisted me, and without whom I should have felt as one blade
of a scissors without its fellow.
SPECIAL OPERATIONS
_Amputations and Compound Fractures._—Having now traced the different
modes of thought which have aided surgical progress in the nineteenth
century and the improved means of investigation, let us turn finally to
the progress in individual operations. As to amputations and compound
fractures, I have already indicated the immense improvements which have
followed the introduction of anæsthesia, and especially of antisepsis,
which have brought the mortality of amputations down from fifty or
sixty per cent. to ten or fifteen per cent., and in compound fractures,
once so dreaded, since the mortality was not infrequently as high as
two out of three, to a relatively insignificant danger.
_Tumors._—In no department, perhaps, has the introduction of
antisepsis, and the use of catgut and silk ligatures after the
antiseptic method, brought about a greater improvement than in
operations for tumors. The startling reluctance of Sir Astley Cooper
to operate on King George IV. for so simple and small a tumor as a
wen, lest erysipelas might follow and even destroy his life, is in
marked contrast with the success and therefore the boldness of modern
surgeons. Tumors in all parts of the body, whether they be external or
internal, whether they involve the wall of the chest or are inside the
abdomen, are now removed with almost perfect safety. Anæsthesia has
made it possible to dissect out tumors in so dangerous a region as the
neck, where the surgeon is confronted with adhesions to the jugular
vein, the carotid artery, and the nerves of the neck and of the arm,
with the greatest impunity. Such an operation not uncommonly lasts from
three-quarters of an hour to an hour and a half, and involves often
the removal of two or three inches of the jugular vein and many of the
large nerves, the removal of which a few years ago would have been
deemed an impossibility.
_Goitre._—One of the most striking instances of progress is operations
on goitre. Writing in 1876, the late Professor Samuel D. Gross noted it
as something remarkable that Dr. Green, of Portland, Maine, had removed
seven goitres with two deaths, and the late Dr. Maury, of Philadelphia,
had extirpated two goitres with one death. In marked contrast to this
Professor Kocher, of Berne, in 1895, reported one thousand cases, of
which eight hundred and seventy were non-cancerous, and he lost of
these last but eleven cases, or a little over one per cent. In 1898 he
reported six hundred additional cases, with only one death in the five
hundred and fifty-six non-cancerous cases, or a mortality of only 0.1
per cent. It will be seen, therefore, that an operation which a few
years ago was excessively fatal has become almost, one might say, a
perfectly safe operation.
_Surgery of the Bones._—Operations on bones, apart from amputations,
show also a similar improvement. In cases of deformity following
fracture we now do not hesitate to cut down upon the bone and
refracture it or remove the deformed portion, join the ends together,
dress the part in plaster of Paris to secure fixation, and have the
patient recover with little or no fever and no suppuration. Above the
elbow a large nerve runs in a furrow in the arm bone, and in case of
fracture this is liable to be torn and a portion of it destroyed. The
result of it is paralysis of all the muscles on the back of the forearm
from the elbow down and consequent inability to extend either wrist or
fingers, making the hand almost useless. In a number of cases the nerve
has been sought for and found, but the ends have been too far apart
for successful union and sewing them together. In such cases we do not
hesitate now, in order to bring the two ends of the nerve together,
to remove one or two inches of the arm bone, wire the shortened
bone, sew the now approximated ends of the nerve together, put the
arm in plaster, and as soon as the wound is healed, with appropriate
later treatment to the muscles we can obtain in a reasonable number
of cases a perfect, or almost perfect, union of the nerves with a
re-establishment of the usefulness of the hand.
In very many cases the bones are deformed as a result of rickets, and
in some cases in consequence of hip-joint disease. In such cases the
leg is crooked or flexed, and cannot be used for walking. Such cases
of stiff joints and crooked legs are now operated on, one might say,
wholesale. At the International Medical Congress, held in Copenhagen in
1884, Professor Macewen, of Glasgow, reported 1800 operations on 1267
limbs in 704 patients, in which he had sawn or chiselled through the
bones so as to fracture them, placed them in a straight position, and
after a few weeks the bone has become consolidated and the leg or arm
made straight. Every one of these operations was successful, excepting
five cases, and even these deaths were not due to the operation, but
to some other disorder, such as an unexpected attack of pneumonia,
diphtheria, or scarlet fever.
_Surgery of the Head and Brain._—In the surgery of the head we find
one of the most remarkable illustrations of the modern progress of
surgery. Fractures of the skull have been the most dangerous and fatal
of accidents until within a short time. Of course, many of them must
necessarily, even now, be fatal, from the widespread injury to the
bones and the brain. But our modern methods, by which we can disinfect
the cavities of the ear, the nose, and the mouth, with which these
fractures often communicate, and through these avenues become infected,
are so successful that such cases, instead of being looked upon as
hopeless, are in a majority of instances followed by recovery. Even
gun-shot wounds, in which the ball may remain inside the cavity of the
head, are successfully dealt with, unless the injury produced by the
ball has been necessarily fatal from the start. Fluhrer, of New York,
has reported a very remarkable case of gun-shot wound, in which the
ball entered at the forehead, traversed the entire brain, was deflected
at the back of the skull, and then pursued its course farther downward
in the brain. By trephining the skull at the back he found the ball,
passed a rubber drainage tube through the entire brain from front to
back, and had the satisfaction of seeing the patient recover.
Until 1884 it was excessively difficult to locate with any degree
of accuracy a tumor within the brain, but in that year Dr. Bennett,
of London, for the first time accurately located a tumor within the
skull without there being the slightest evidence on the exterior of
its existence, much less of its location. Mr. Godlee (surgeons in
England are not called “Dr.,” but “Mr.”) trephined the skull at the
point indicated, found the tumor, and removed it. True, this patient
died, but the possibility of accurately locating a tumor of the
brain, reaching it and removing it, was now demonstrated, which is
far more important to humanity at large than whether this individual
patient survived or not. Since then there have been a very large
number of tumors successfully removed. The latest statistics are those
of Von Bergmann, of Berlin, in 1898. He collected 273 operations for
brain tumors, of which 169 (61.9 per cent.) recovered, and 104 (38.1
per cent.) died. This is by far the best percentage of results so
far reported, but there is reason to believe that with the constant
improvement in our ability to locate such tumors and in our methods of
removing them, the mortality rate will be still further lessened.
Even more successful than the surgery of brain tumors has been the
surgery of abscess of the brain. I have no available statistics of
the exact numbers, but it is certain that several hundred have been
operated on, and with even better success than in the case of brain
tumors. The most frequent cause for such abscesses is old and neglected
disease of the ear. No child suffering from a “running from the ear,”
which is especially apt to follow scarlet fever and other similar
disorders, should be allowed to pass from under the most skilled
treatment until a cure is effected. This is the commonest cause of
abscess of the brain. The inflammation in the ear, which begins in the
soft lining of the cavities of the ear, finally extends to the bone,
and after years of intermittent discharge, will suddenly develop an
abscess of the brain, which, if not relieved, will certainly be fatal.
Prompt surgical interference alone can save life, and, happily, though
we cannot promise recovery in all, a very large percentage of success
is assured.
In epilepsy, as a result of injuries of the head, in a moderate number
of cases, we can obtain a cure of the disease by operation, but in the
great majority of cases, and, one may say, practically in all of the
cases in which the epilepsy originates “of itself,” that is to say,
without any known cause, it is useless to operate, certainly at least
after the epileptic habit has been formed. Possibly were operation done
at the very beginning we might obtain better results than experience
thus far has shown us is possible.
Very many cases of idiocy are constantly brought to surgeons in
the hope that something can be done for these lamentable children.
Unfortunately, at present surgery holds out but little hope in such
cases. In a few exceptional instances it may be best to operate, but a
prudent surgeon will decline to do any operation in the vast majority
of cases.
_Surgery of the Chest and Heart._—The chest is the region of the
body which has shown the least progress of all, and yet even here
the progress is very marked. When, as a result of pleurisy, fluid
accumulates on one side of the chest, even displacing the heart, we
now do not hesitate to remove an inch or two of one or more ribs and
thoroughly drain the cavity, with not only a reasonable, but in a
majority of cases, one may almost say, a certain, prospect of cure.
We have also entered upon the road which will lead us in time to a
secure surgery of the lung itself. A few cases of abscess, of serious
gun-shot wound, attended by otherwise fatal hemorrhage, and even of
tubercular cavities in the lungs have been successfully dealt with, but
the twentieth century will see, I have no doubt, brilliant results in
thoracic surgery.
One of the most striking injuries of the chest has recently assumed a
new importance, viz., wounds of the heart itself. In several instances
an opening has been made in the bony and muscular walls of the chest,
and a wound of the heart itself has been sewed up. The number is as
yet small, but there have been several recoveries, which lead us to
believe that here, too, the limits of surgery have by no means been
reached.
_Surgery of the Abdomen._—Of the abdomen and the pelvis a very
different story can be told. These cavities might almost be called the
playground of the surgeon, and the remarkable results which have been
obtained warrant us in believing that even greater results are in store
for us in the future.
In the earlier part of this article I spoke of the advantages of
the study of the pathological anatomy or the diseased condition of
individual organs. Perhaps no better illustration of the value of
this can be given than in the studies of appendicitis. This operation
has been one of the contributions to the surgery of the world in
which America has been foremost. While there were one or two earlier
papers, Willard Parker, of New York, in 1867, first made the profession
listen to him when he urged that abscesses appearing above the right
groin should be operated on and the patient’s life saved. But it was
not until Fitz, of Boston, in 1888, published his paper, in which
he pointed out, as a result of a study of a series of post-mortem
examinations of persons dying from such an abscess above the right
groin, that the appendix was the seat of the trouble, that this so
frequent disease was rightly understood and rightly treated.
As a result of the facts gathered in his paper, the treatment was
perfectly clear, not only that we ought to operate in cases of abscess,
but that in the case of patients suffering from two or more attacks,
and often from even one attack of appendicitis, the appendix should be
removed to prevent such abscess.
The mortality in cases in which such an abscess has formed is, perhaps,
quite twenty or twenty-five per cent., whereas, if patients are
operated on “in the interval,” that is to say, between attacks, when
the abdominal cavity is free from pus, the mortality is scarcely more
than two or three per cent., and may be even less than that.
Surgeons are often asked whether appendicitis is not a fad, and whether
our grandfathers ever had appendicitis, etc. As a matter of fact, in
my early professional days, appendicitis was well known. It was called
“localized peritonitis” or localized “abscess,” but while the disease
was very frequent, its relation to the appendix was not recognized
until from his study of its pathology an American pointed it out. Even
now European surgeons, with a few exceptions, are not alive to the need
for operation in such cases.
There is little doubt that the great prevalence of grippe during the
last few years has increased the number of cases of appendicitis,
both of them being catarrhal conditions of the lining membrane of the
same continuous tract of the lungs, the mouth, the stomach, and the
intestines.
One of the most fatal accidents that can befall a patient is to have
an ulcer of the stomach perforate so that the contents of the stomach
escape into the general abdominal cavity. Until 1885 no one ventured
to operate in such a case. In an inaugural dissertation by Tinker, of
Philadelphia, two hundred and thirty-two cases of such perforating
ulcers of the stomach were reported, of which one hundred and
twenty-three recovered, a mortality of 48.81 per cent. In not a few of
them, if prompt instead of late surgical help had been invoked, a very
different result would have been reported. If no operation had been
done, the mortality would have been one hundred per cent.
In cancer of the stomach itself we are able, as a rule, to make a
positive diagnosis only when a perceptible tumor is found. By that
time so many adhesions have formed, and the infection has involved the
neighboring glands to such an extent, that it is impossible to remove
the tumor, but the statistics even here are not without encouragement,
at least for comfort if not for life. In many cases the tumor has
been removed and the stomach and intestine joined together by various
devices, and the mortality, which is necessarily great, has been
reduced by Czerny to twelve per cent. and by Carle to seven per cent.
Even the entire stomach has been removed in several cases, and recovery
has followed in about one-half. Most of these patients, however, have
died from a return of the disease.
When, as a result of swallowing caustic lye or other similar
substances, the gullet (the œsophagus) becomes contracted to such an
extent that no food can be swallowed, we now establish an opening into
the stomach through which a tube is inserted at meal-time, and the
patient has his breakfast, dinner, and supper poured into his stomach
through the tube. If the stricture of the œsophagus is from malignant
disease, of course this only prolongs life by preventing a horrible
death by starvation, but in cases in which it is non-malignant life
is indefinitely prolonged. The mortality of such an operation is very
small.
By a freak of nature or by disease the stomach sometimes is narrowed
in the middle, forming what is called an “hour-glass stomach.” In such
a case we open the abdomen, make an opening into the two parts of the
stomach and unite the two so that we re-establish the single cavity
of the stomach. The mortality of the operation is very slight, eight
per cent. Again, sometimes the stomach becomes unduly dilated, thus
interfering seriously with its function. A number of surgeons in such
cases have simply folded over the wall of the stomach upon itself and
have sewed the two layers together, taking a plait or “tuck” in the
stomach wall, and have restored it to its normal capacity and function.
One of the most important advances has been made in the treatment
of gall stones. The bile in the gall bladder is in a state of
quiescence, which is favorable to a deposit of crystals from the bile.
These crystals become agglutinated together into larger or smaller
solid masses called gall stones. Sometimes the number of these is
very small, from one to four or five; sometimes they accumulate in
enormous numbers, several hundreds having been reported in a number of
instances. When they are small they can escape through the duct of the
gall bladder into the bowel and create no disturbance, but when they
are large, so that they cannot make their escape, they not uncommonly
are causes not only of serious discomfort and prolonged ill-health, but
often prove fatal. Nowadays one of the safest operations of surgery
is to open the abdomen and the gall bladder and remove this menace
to life, and the great majority of such patients recover without any
untoward symptoms. Even large abscesses of the liver, and, what is
still more extraordinary, large tumors of the liver, are now removed
successfully. A year ago all of the reported cases of tumor of the
liver were collected which had been operated from 1888 to 1898,
seventy-six in all. The termination in two cases was unknown, but
of the other seventy-four, sixty-three recovered and eleven died, a
mortality of only 14.9 per cent.
The surgery of the intestines by itself is a subject which could well
occupy the entire space allowed to this article. I can only, in a very
superficial way, outline what has been done. Hernia or rupture is a
condition in which through an opening in the abdominal wall a loop of
the bowel escapes. If it can be replaced and kept within the abdomen
by a suitable truss this was the best we could do till within the
last ten or fifteen years. The safety and the painlessness of modern
surgery which have resulted from the introduction of anæsthesia and
antisepsis are such that now no person suffering from such a hernia,
unless for some special personal reason, should be allowed to rely upon
a truss, which is always a more or less treacherous means of retaining
the hernia. We operate on all such cases now with impunity. Coley has
recently reported a series of six hundred and thirty-nine cases, all of
which recovered with the exception of one patient. Even in children,
if a truss worn for a reasonable time, a year or so, does not cure the
rupture, operation affords an admirable prospect of cure.
Every now and then a band forms inside the abdomen, stretching like
a string across the cavity. If a loop of bowel slips under such a
band, it can be easily understood that total arrest of the intestinal
contents ensues, a condition incompatible with life. There are other
causes for such “intestinal obstruction,” which are too technical to
be described in detail, but this may be taken as a type of all. It is
impossible, of course, to tell before opening the abdomen precisely
the cause of the obstruction, but the fact is quickly determined in
most cases. If we open the abdomen promptly, we can cut such a band or
remove the other causes of obstruction in the majority of cases, and
if the operation has not been too long delayed, the prospect of entire
recovery is good. The mortality which has followed such operations has
been considerable, and by that I mean, say, over twenty per cent.,
but a very large number of the fatal cases have been lost because the
operation has been delayed. In fact, it may be stated very positively
that the mere opening of the abdomen to find out precisely the nature
of any disease or injury is attended with but little danger. If further
surgical interference is required, the danger will be increased
proportionately to the extent and gravity of such interference.
But “exploratory operations,” as we call them, are now undertaken
constantly with almost uniform success.
Even in cancer of the bowel, we can prolong life, if we cannot save
it. Cancer of the bowel sooner or later produces “obstruction” and
so destroys life, but in such cases we can either make a permanent
opening in the bowel above the cancer, and so relieve the constant pain
and distress which is caused by the obstruction, or, in a great many
cases, we make an opening in the bowel above the cancer, and another
below it, and, by uniting the two openings, if I may so express it,
“side-track” the contents of the bowel. If the cancer has no adhesions
and the patient’s condition allows of it, we can cut out the entire
portion of the bowel containing the cancer, unite the two ends, and
thus re-establish the continuity of the intestinal canal. As much as
eight feet, nearly one-third of the entire length of the bowel, have
been removed by Shepherd, of Montreal, and yet the patient recovered
and lived a healthy life.
Similarly in gun-shot wounds, stab wounds, etc., involving the
intestine, the modern surgeon does not simply stand by with folded
hands and give opium and morphine to make the patient’s last few hours
or days relatively comfortable, but he opens the abdomen, finds the
various perforations, closes them, and recovery has followed even in
cases in which as many as seventeen wounds of the intestine have been
produced by a gun-shot wound.
The kidney, until thirty years ago, was deemed almost beyond our
reach, but now entire volumes have been written on the surgery of the
kidney, and it is, one might say, a frequent occurrence to see the
kidney exposed, sewed fast if it is loose, opened to remove a stone in
its interior, drained if there be an abscess, or, if it be hopelessly
diseased, it is removed in its entirety. The other kidney, if not
diseased, becomes equal to the work of both.
Of the pelvic organs, it would not be becoming to speak in detail,
but one operation I can scarcely omit: namely, ovariotomy. One of my
old teachers was Washington L. Atlee, who, with his brother, was among
the first ovariotomists in this country who placed the operation on
a firm foundation. I heard a very distinguished physician in 1862,
in a lecture to his medical class, denounce such men as “murderers”;
but to-day how differently does the entire profession look upon the
operation! Instead of condemning the surgeon because he did remove such
a tumor, the profession would condemn him because he did not remove it.
The operation had its rise in America. Ephraim McDowell, of Kentucky,
in 1809, first did the operation which now reflects so much credit upon
modern surgery. The mortality of the Atlees was about one in three.
Now, owing to the immense improvement introduced by the antiseptic
methods, the deaths, in competent hands, are not over five per cent.,
or even three per cent.
The limits of this article compel me to stop with the story very
imperfectly told, but yet, perhaps, it has been sufficient in detail
to show somewhat of the astonishing progress of surgery within the
century, but especially within the last quarter of the century.
About two decades ago one of the foremost surgeons of London, Mr.
Erichsen, said, in a public address, that “surgery had reached its
limits.” How short was his vision is shown by the fact that surgery
at that time was just at the beginning of its most brilliant modern
chapter.
We have reached, in many respects, apparently, the limits of our
success, but just as anæsthesia and antisepsis and the Röntgen rays
have opened new fields wholly unsuspected until they were proclaimed,
so I have no doubt that the twentieth century will see means and
methods devised which will put to shame the surgery of to-day as much
as the surgery of to-day puts to shame that of thirty years ago,
and still more of a century ago. The methods by which this will be
attained will be by the more thorough and systematic study of disease
and injury, so as to better our means of diagnosis, and so prepare
us for immediate surgical interference, instead of delaying it, as
we now do in many cases, for want of certain knowledge; by the use
of new chemical and pharmaceutical means to perfect our antisepsis
and possibly to introduce other methods of treatment; but, above
all, we shall obtain progress by the exact experimental methods of
the laboratory. We can never make progress except by trying new
methods. New methods must be tried either on man or on animals, and
as the former is not allowable, the only way remaining to us is to
test all new methods, drugs, and applications first upon animals.
He who restricts, and, still more, he who would abolish our present
experiments upon animals, is, in my opinion, the worst foe to the human
race, and to animals, as well, for they, as well as human beings,
obtain the benefit derived from the method. He may prate of his
humanity, but he is the most cruel man alive.
W. W. KEEN.
ELECTRICITY
The great importance which electricity has attained in many departments
of human activity is so constantly evident that we have difficulty
in realizing how short is the time which has been occupied in its
development. The latter half of the nineteenth century must ever remain
memorable, not only for the great advances in nearly all the useful
arts, but for the peculiarly rapid electric progress, and the profound
effect which it has had upon the lives and business of the people.
In the preceding century we find no evidences of the application
of electricity to any useful purpose. Few of the more important
principles of the science were then known. Franklin’s invention of
the lightning-rod was not intended to utilize electric force, but
to guard life and property from the perils of the thunder-storm.
The numerous instructive experiments in frictional electricity, the
first-known form of electric manifestation except lightning, made clear
certain principles, such as conduction and insulation, and served to
distinguish the two opposite electric conditions known as positive
and negative. Franklin’s kite experiment confirmed the long-suspected
identity of lightning and electric sparks. It was not, however, until
the discovery by Alexander Volta, in 1799, of his pile, or battery,
that electricity could take its place as an agent of practical value.
Volta, when he made this great discovery, was following the work of
Galvani, begun in 1786. But Galvani in his experiments mistook the
effect for the cause, and so missed making the unique demonstration
that two different metals immersed in a solution could set up an
electric current. Volta, a professor in the University of Pavia and
a foreign member of the Royal Society of England, communicated his
discovery to the president of the society in March, 1800, and brought
to the notice of the world the first means for obtaining a steady flow
of electricity. Before this event electric energy had been known to the
experimenter in pretty effects of attraction and repulsion of light
objects, in fitful flashes of insignificant power, or, as it appeared
in nature, in the fearful bursts of energy during a thunder-storm,
uncontrolled and erratic. The analogous and closely related phenomena
of magnetism had already found an important application in the
navigator’s compass.
The simplest facts of electro-magnetism, upon which much of the later
electrical developments depend, remained entirely unknown until near
the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Magnetism
itself, as exemplified in loadstone or in magnetized iron or steel, had
long before been consistently studied by Dr. Gilbert, of Colchester,
England, and in 1600 his great work, _De Magnete_, was published. It
is a first example, and an excellent one, too, of the application
of the inductive method, so fruitful in after-years. The restraints
which a superstitious age had imposed upon nature study were gradually
removed, and at the beginning of the century just past occasional
decided encouragement began to be given to physical research. It was
this condition which put into the hands of Humphry Davy, of the Royal
Institution, in London, at the opening of the century, a voltaic
battery of some 250 pairs of plates. With this a remarkably fruitful
era of electric discovery began. In 1802 Davy first showed the electric
arc or “arch” on a small scale between pieces of carbon. He also
laid the foundation for future electro-chemical work by decomposing
by the battery current potash and soda, and thus isolating the alkali
metals, potassium and sodium, for the first time. This was in 1807,
and the result was not only to greatly advance the youthful science of
chemistry, but to attract the attention of the world to a new power
in the hands of the scientific worker, electric current. A fund was
soon subscribed by “a few zealous cultivators and patrons of science,”
interested in the discovery of Davy, and he had at his service in 1801
no less than 2000 cells of voltaic battery. With the intense currents
obtained from it he again demonstrated the wonderful and brilliant
phenomenon of the electric arc, by first closing the circuit of the
battery through terminals of hardwood charcoal and then separating
them for a short distance. A magnificent arch of flame was maintained
between the separated ends, and the light from the charcoal pieces
was of dazzling splendor. Thus was born into the world the electric
arc light, of which there are now many hundreds of thousands burning
nightly in our own country alone.
Davy probably never imagined that his brilliant experiment would soon
play so important a part in the future lighting of the world. He may
never have regarded it as of any practical value. In fact, many years
elapsed before any further attempt was made to utilize the light of
the electric arc. The reason for this is not difficult to discover.
The batteries in existence were crude and gave only their full power
for a very short time after the circuit was closed. They were subject
to the very serious defect of rapid polarization, whereby the activity
was at once reduced. A long period elapsed before this defect was
removed. Davy in his experiments had also noted the very intense heat
of the electric arc, and found that but few substances escaped fusion
or volatilization when placed in the heated stream between the carbon
electrodes. Here again he was pioneer in very important and quite
recent electric work, employing the electric furnace, which has already
given rise to several new and valuable industries.
The conduction of electricity along wires naturally led to efforts to
employ it in signalling. As early as 1774 attempts were made by Le
Sage, of Geneva, to apply frictional electricity to telegraphy. His
work was followed before the close of the century by other similar
proposals. Volta’s discovery soon gave a renewed impetus to these
efforts. It was easy enough to stop and start a current in a line of
wire connecting two points, but something more than that was requisite.
A good receiver, or means for recognizing the presence or absence of
current in the wire or circuit, did not exist. The art had to wait for
the discovery of the effects of electric current upon magnets and the
production of magnetism by such currents. Curiously, even in 1802 the
fact that a wire conveying a current would deflect a compass needle was
observed by Romagnosi, of Trente, but it was afterwards forgotten, and
not until 1819 was any real advance made.
It was then that Oersted, of Copenhagen, showed that a magnet tends to
set itself at right angles to the wire conveying current and that the
direction of turning depends on the direction of the current. The study
of the magnetic effects of electric currents by Arago, Ampère, and the
production of the electro-magnet by Sturgeon, together with the very
valuable work of Henry and others, made possible the completion of the
electric telegraph. This was done by Morse and Vail in America, and
almost simultaneously by workers abroad, but, before Morse had entered
the field, Professor Joseph Henry had exemplified by experiments
the working of electric signalling by electro-magnets over a short
line. It was Henry, in fact, who first made a practically useful
electro-magnet of soft iron. The history of the electric telegraph
teaches us that to no single individual is the invention due. The Morse
system had been demonstrated in 1837, but not until 1844 was the first
telegraph line built. It connected Baltimore and Washington, and the
funds for defraying its cost were only obtained from Congress after a
severe struggle. This can easily be understood, for electricity had not
up to that time ever been shown to have any practical usefulness. The
success of the Morse telegraph was soon followed by the establishment
of telegraph lines as a means of communication between all the large
cities and populous districts. Scarcely ten years elapsed before the
possibility of a transatlantic telegraph was mooted. The cable laid
in 1858 was a failure. A few words passed, and then the cable broke
down completely. This was found to be due to defects in construction.
A renewed effort to lay a cable was made in 1866, but disappointment
again followed: the cable broke in mid-ocean and the work again ceased.
The great task was successfully accomplished in the following year, and
the pluck and pertinacity of those who were staking their capital, if
not their reputations for business sagacity, were amply rewarded. Even
the lost cable of 1866 was found, spliced to a new cable, and completed
soon after as a second working line. The delicate instruments for the
working of these long cables were due to the genius of Sir William
Thomson, now Lord Kelvin, whose other instruments for electrical
measurement have for years been a great factor in securing precision
both in scientific and practical testing. The number of cables joining
the Eastern and Western hemispheres has been increased from time to
time, and the opening of a new cable is now an ordinary occurrence,
calling for little or no especial note.
The introduction of the electric telegraph was followed by the
invention of various signalling systems, the most important being
the fire-alarm telegraph, as suggested by Channing and worked out
by Farmer. We now, also, have automatic clock systems, in which a
master clock controls or gives movement to the hands of distant clock
dials by electric currents sent out over the connecting or circuit
wires. Automatic electric signals are made when fire breaks out in a
building, and alarms are similarly rung when a burglar breaks in. Not
only do we have telegraphs which print words and characters, as in the
stock “ticker,” but in the form known as the telautograph, invented
by Dr. Elisha Gray, the sender writes his message, which writing is
at the same time being reproduced at the receiving end of the line.
Even pictures for drawings are “wired” by special instruments. The
desirability of making one wire connecting two points do a large amount
of work, and thus avoiding the addition of new lines, has led to two
remarkable developments of telegraphy. In the duplex, quadruplex, and
multiplex systems several messages may at the same time be traversing
a single wire line without interference one with the other. In the
rapid automatic systems the working capacity of the line is increased
by special automatic transmitting machines and rapid recorders, and the
electric impulses in the line itself follow each other with great speed.
Improvement in this field has by no means ceased, and new systems for
rapid transmission are yet being worked out. The object is to enlarge
the carrying capacity of existing lines connecting large centres of
population. The names of Wheatstone, Stearns, Edison, and Delaney are
prominent in connection with this work. For use in telegraphy the
originally crude forms of voltaic battery, such as Davy used, were
replaced by the more perfect types such as the constant battery of
Daniell, the nitric-acid battery of Grove, dating from 1836, and the
carbon battery of Bunsen, first brought out in 1842. Such was the power
of the Grove and Bunsen batteries that attention was again called
to the electric arc and to the possibility of its use for electric
illumination. Accordingly, we find that suggestions were soon made for
electric-arc lamps, to be operated by these more powerful and constant
sources of electric current. The first example of a working type of
an arc lamp was that brought to notice by W. E. Staite, in 1847, and
his description of the lamp and the conditions under which it could be
worked is a remarkably exact and full statement, considering the time
of its appearance. Staite even anticipated the most recent phase of
development in arc lighting, namely, the enclosure of the light in a
partially air-tight globe, to prevent too rapid waste of the carbons
by combustion in the air. In a public address at Newcastle-on-Tyne,
in 1847, he advocated the use of the arc, so enclosed, in mines,
as obviating the danger of fire. But it was a long time before the
electric arc acquired any importance as a practical illuminant. There
was, indeed, no hope of its success so long as the current had to be
obtained from batteries consuming chemicals and zinc. The expense was
too great, and the batteries soon became exhausted. In spite of this
fact, occasional exhibitions of arc lighting were made, notably in
1856, by Lacassagne and Thiers, in the streets of Paris.
For this service they had invented an arc lamp involving what is known
as the differential principle, afterwards applied so extensively to
arc lamps. The length of the arc or the distance between the carbons
of the lamp was controlled with great nicety, and the light thus
rendered very steady. Even as late as 1875 batteries were occasionally
used to work single electric arc lamps for public exhibitions, or for
demonstration purposes in the scientific departments of schools.
The discovery of the means of efficiently generating electricity
from mechanical power constitutes, however, the key-note of all the
wonderful electrical work of the closing years of the nineteenth
century. It made electrical energy available at low cost. Michael
Faraday, a most worthy successor of Davy at the Royal Institution, in
studying the relations between electric currents and magnets, made the
exceedingly important observation that a wire, if moved in the field of
a magnet, would yield a current of electricity. Simple as the discovery
was, its effect has been stupendous. Following his science for its own
sake, he unwittingly opened up possibilities of the greatest practical
moment. The fundamental principle of the future dynamo electric machine
was discovered by him. This was in 1831. Faraday’s investigations
were so complete and his deductions so masterly, that little was
left to be done by others. Electro-magnetism was supplemented by
magneto-electricity. Both the electric motor and the dynamo generator
were now potentially present with us. Faraday contented himself with
pointing the way, leaving the technical engineer to follow. In one of
Faraday’s experiments a copper disk mounted on an axis passing through
its centre was revolved between the poles of a large steel magnet. A
wire touched the periphery of the disk at a selected position with
respect to the magnet, and another was in connection with the axis.
These wires were united through a galvanometer or instrument for
detecting electric current. A current was noted as present in the
circuit so long as the disk was turned. Here, then, was the embryo
dynamo. The century closed with single dynamo machines of over 5000
horse-power capacity, and with single power stations in which the total
electric generation by such machines is 75,000 to 100,000 horse-power.
So perfect is the modern dynamo that out of 1000 horse-power expended
in driving it, 950 or more may be delivered to the electric line as
electric energy. The electric motor, now so common, is a machine like
the dynamo, in which the principle of action is simply reversed;
electric energy delivered from the lines becomes again mechanical
motion or power.
Soon after Faraday’s discoveries in magneto-electricity attempts
were made to construct generators of electricity from power. But the
machines were small, crude, and imperfect, and the results necessarily
meagre.
Pixii, in Paris, one year after Faraday’s discovery was announced, made
a machine which embodied in its construction a simple commutator for
giving the currents a single direction of flow. This is the prototype
of the commutators now found on what are called continuous-current
dynamos. After Pixii followed Saxton, Clarke, Wheatstone and Cooke,
Estohrer, and others, but not until 1854 was any very notable
improvement made or suggested. In that year Soren Hjorth, of
Copenhagen, described in a patent specification the principle of
causing the electric currents generated to traverse coils of wire so
disposed as to reinforce the magnetic field of the machine itself.
A year subsequently the same idea was again more clearly set out by
Hjorth. This is the principle of the modern self-exciting dynamo,
the field magnets of which, very weak at the start, are built up or
strengthened by the currents from the armature or revolving part of the
machine in which power is consumed to produce electricity.
In 1856 Dr. Werner Siemens, of Berlin, well known as a great pioneer in
the electric arts, brought out the Siemens armature, an innovation more
valuable than any other made up to that time. This was subsequently
used in the powerful machines of Wilde and Ladd. It still survives in
magneto call-bell apparatus for such work as telephone signalling,
in exploders for mines and blasting, and in the simpler types of
electroplating dynamos.
The decade between 1860 and 1870 opened a new era in the construction
and working of dynamo machines and motors. It is notable for two
advances of very great value and importance. Dr. Paccinotti, of
Florence, in 1860, described a machine by which true continuous
currents resembling battery currents could be obtained. Up to that
time machines gave either rapidly alternating or fluctuating currents,
not steady currents in one direction. The Paccinotti construction, in
modified forms, is now almost universally employed in dynamo machines,
and even where the form is now quite different the Paccinotti type has
been at least the forerunner, and has undergone modifications to suit
special ends in view. Briefly, Paccinotti made his armature of a ring
of iron with iron projections between which the coils of insulated
wire were wound. Although full descriptions of Paccinotti’s ring
armature and commutator were given out in 1864, his work attracted but
little attention until Gramme, in Paris, about 1870, brought out the
relatively perfect Gramme machine. In the mean time the other great
development of the decade took place.
Although Hjorth had, as stated before, put forward the idea that a
dynamo generator might itself furnish currents for magnetizing its own
magnets, this valuable suggestion was not apparently worked out until
1866, when a machine was constructed for Sir Charles Wheatstone. This
appears to have been the first self-exciting machine in existence.
Wheatstone read a paper before the Royal Society in February, 1867, “On
the Augmentation of the Power of a Magnet by the Reaction thereon of
Currents Induced by the Magnet Itself.” This action later became known
as the reaction principle in dynamo machines.
As often happens, the idea occurred to other workers in science almost
simultaneously, and Dr. Werner Siemens also read a paper in Berlin
about a month earlier than that of Wheatstone, clearly describing
the reaction principle. Furthermore, a patent specification had
been filed in the British Patent Office by S. A. Varley, December
24, 1866, clearly showing the same principle of action, and he was,
therefore, the first to put the matter on record. The time was ripe
for the appearance of machines closely resembling the types now in
such extended use. Gramme, in 1870, adopting a modified form of the
Paccinotti ring and commutator, and employing the reaction principle,
first succeeded in producing a highly efficient, compact, and durable
continuous-current dynamo. The Gramme machine was immediately
recognized as a great technical triumph. It was in a sense the
culmination of many years of development, beginning with the early
attempts immediately following Faraday’s discovery, already referred
to. Gramme constructed his revolving armature of a soft iron wire ring,
upon which ring a series of small coils of insulated wire were wound
in successive radial planes. These coils were all connected with a
continuous wire and from the junctions of the coils one with another
connections were taken to a range of copper bars insulated from each
other, constituting the commutator. In 1872 Von Hefner Alteneck, in
Berlin, modified the ring winding of Gramme and produced the “drum
winding,” which avoided the necessity for threading wire through the
centre of the iron ring as in the Gramme construction. The several
coils of the drum were still connected, as in Gramme’s machine, to the
successive strips of the commutator.
In modern dynamos and motors the armature, usually constructed of
sheet-iron punchings, is a ring with projections as in Paccinotti’s
machine, and the coils of wire are in most cases wound separately and
then placed in the spaces between the projections, constituting in fact
a form of drum winding. In the early 70’s a few Gramme ring and Siemens
drum machines had been applied to the running of arc lights, one
machine for each light. There were also some Gramme machines in use for
electroplating.
At the Centennial Exhibition, held at Philadelphia in 1876, but two
exhibits of electric-lighting apparatus were to be found. Of these
one was the Gramme and the other the Wallace-Farmer exhibit. The
Wallace-Farmer dynamo machine is a type now obsolete. It was not a good
design, but the Wallace exhibit contained other examples reflecting
great credit on this American pioneer in dynamo work. Some of these
machines were very similar in construction to later forms which went
into very extensive use. The large search-lights occasionally used in
night illumination during the exhibitions were operated by the current
from Wallace-Farmer machines. The Gramme exhibit was a remarkable
exhibit for its time. Though not extensive, it was most instructive.
There were found in it a dynamo running an arc lamp; a large machine
for electrolytic work, such as electroplating or electrotyping, and,
most novel and interesting of all, one Gramme machine driven by power
was connected to another by a pair of wires and the second run as a
motor. This in turn drove a centrifugal-pump, and raised water which
flowed in a small fall or cataract. A year or two previously the Gramme
machine had been accidentally found to be as excellent an electric
motor as it was a generating dynamo. The crude motors of Jacobi,
Froment, Davenport, Page, Vergnes, Gaume, and many others, were thus
rendered obsolete at a stroke. The first public demonstration of the
working of one Gramme machine by another was made by Fontaine at the
Vienna Exhibition of 1873.
Here, then, was a foreshadowing of the great electric-power
transmission plants of to-day; the suggestion of the electric station
furnishing power as well as light, and, to a less degree, the promise
of future railways using electric power. Replace the centrifugal pump
of this modest exhibit by a turbine wheel, reverse the flow of water so
as to cause it to drive the electric motor so that the machine becomes
a dynamo, and, in like manner, make of the dynamo a motor, and we
exemplify in a simple way recent great enterprises using water-power
for the generation of current to be transmitted over lines to distant
electric motors or lights.
The Centennial Exhibition also marks the beginning—the very birth,
it may be said—of an electric invention destined to become, before
the close of the century, a most potent factor in human affairs. The
speaking telephone of Alexander Graham Bell was there exhibited for the
first time to the savants, among whom was the distinguished electrician
and scientist Sir William Thomson. For the first time in the history of
the world a structure of copper wire and iron spoke to a listening ear.
Nay, more, it both listened to the voice of the speaker and repeated
the voice at a far-distant point. The instruments were, moreover, the
acme of simplicity. Within a year many a boy had constructed a pair of
telephones at an expenditure for material of only a few pennies. In
its first form the transmitting telephone was the counterpart of the
receiver, and they were reversible in function. The transmitter was in
reality a minute dynamo driven by the aërial voice waves; the receiver,
a vibratory motor worked by the vibratory currents from the transmitter
and reproducing the aërial motions. This arrangement, most beautiful
in theory, was only suited for use on short lines, and was soon
afterwards replaced by various forms of carbon microphone transmitter,
to the production of which many inventors had turned their attention,
notably Edison, Hughes, Blake, and Hunnings. In modern transmitters
the voice wave does not furnish the power to generate the telephone
current, but only controls the flow of an already existing current from
a battery. In this way the effects obtainable may be made sufficiently
powerful for transmission to listeners 1500 miles away.
There is no need to dwell here upon the enormous saving of time secured
by the telephone and the profound effect its introduction has had upon
business and social life. The situation is too palpable. Nevertheless,
few users of this wonderful invention realize how much thought and
skill have been employed in working out the details of exchange
switchboards, of signalling devices, of underground cables and overhead
wires, and of the speaking instruments themselves. Few of those who
talk between Boston and Chicago know that in doing so they have for
the exclusive use of their voices a total of over 1,000,000 pounds of
copper wire in the single line. There probably now exist in the United
States alone between 75,000 and 100,000 miles of hard-drawn copper wire
for long-distance telephone service, and over 150,000 miles of wire in
underground conduits. There are upward of three-quarters of a million
telephones in the United States, and, including both overhead and
underground lines, a total of more than half a million miles of wire.
Approximately one thousand million conversations are annually conveyed.
The possibility of sub-oceanic telephoning is frequently discussed, but
the problem thus far is not solved. It involves grave difficulties, and
we may hope that its solution is to be one of the advances which will
mark the twentieth century’s progress.
The advent of the telephone in 1876 seemed to stimulate invention in
the electric field to a remarkable degree. Its immediate commercial
success probably acted also to inspire confidence in other proposed
electric enterprises. Greater attention than ever before began to
be given to the problem of electric lighting. An electric arc lamp,
probably the only one in regular use, had been installed at Dungeness
Light-house in 1862, after a long set of trials and tests. It was fed
by a Holmes magneto-electric machine of the old type, very large and
cumbrous for the work. Numerous changes and improvements had before
1878 been made in arc lamps by Serrin, Duboscq, and many others.
But the display of electric light during the Paris Exposition of
1878 was the first memorable use of the electric light on a large
scale. The splendid illumination of the Avenue de l’Opéra was a grand
object-lesson. The source of light was the “electric candle” of Paul
Jablochkoff, a Russian engineer. It was a strikingly original and
simple arc lamp. Instead of placing the two carbons point to point,
as had been done in nearly all previous lamps, he placed them side by
side, with a strip of baked kaolin between them. The candle so formed
was supported in a suitable holder, whereby, at the lower end, the
two parallel carbons were connected with the circuit terminals. By a
suitable device the arc was started at the top and burned down. The
electric candle seemed to solve the problem of allowing complicated
mechanism for feeding the carbons to be discarded; but it survived
only a short time. Owing to unforeseen difficulties it was gradually
abandoned, after having served a great purpose in directing the
attention of the world to the possibilities of the electric arc in
lighting.
Inventors in America were not idle. By the close of 1878, Brush, of
Cleveland, had brought out his series system of arc lights, including
special dynamos, lamps, etc., and by the middle of 1879 had in
operation machines each capable of maintaining sixteen arc lamps
on one wire. This was, indeed, a great achievement for that time.
Weston, of Newark, had also in operation circuits of arc lamps, and the
Thomson-Houston system had just started in commercial work with eight
arc lamps in series from a single dynamo. Maxim and Fuller, in New
York, were working arc lamps from their machines, and capital was being
rapidly invested in new enterprises for electric lighting. Some of the
great electric manufacturing concerns of to-day had their beginning
at that time. Central lighting stations began to be established in
cities, and the use of arc lights in street illumination and in stores
grew rapidly. More perfect forms of arc lamps were invented, better
generating dynamos and regulating apparatus brought out. Factories
for arc-light carbon making were built. The first special electrical
exhibition was held in Paris in 1881. In the early 80’s, also, the
business of arc lighting had become firmly established, and soon the
bulk of the work was done under two of the leading systems. These were
afterwards brought together under one control, thus securing in the
apparatus manufactured a combination of the good features of both.
Until about 1892 nearly all the arc lamps in use were worked under the
series system, in which the lights are connected one after another on a
circuit and traversed by the same current. This current has a standard
value, or is a constant current. Sometimes as many as a hundred lamps
were on one wire. As the mains for the supply of incandescent lamps
at constant pressure, or potential, were extended, attention was more
strongly turned to the possibility of working arc lights therefrom.
Within a few years of the close of the century this placing of arc
lamps in branches from the same mains which supply incandescent lamps
became common, and the enclosure of the arc in a partially air-tight
globe, a procedure advocated by Staite, in 1847, was revived by
Howard, Marks, and others for saving carbons and attention to the lamp.
The enclosed arc lamp was also found to be especially adapted to use in
branches of the incandescent lamp circuits, which had in cities become
greatly extended. The increasing employment of alternating currents
in the distribution of electric energy has led also to the use of
alternating current arc lamps, and special current-regulating apparatus
is now being applied on a large scale to extended circuits of these
lamps. It can be seen from these facts that the art is still rapidly
progressing and the field ever widening. A little over twenty years
ago practically no arc lamps were used. At the close of the century,
they were numbered by hundreds of thousands. The annual consumption of
carbons in this country has reached two hundred millions.
Almost simultaneously with the beginning of the commercial work of arc
lighting, Edison, in a successful effort to provide a small electric
lamp for general distribution in place of gas, brought to public notice
his carbon filament incandescent lamp.
A considerable amount of progress had previously been made by various
workers in attempting to reduce the volume of light in each lamp and
increase the number of lights for a given power expended. Forms of
incandescent arc lamps, or semi-incandescent lamps, were tried on a
considerable scale abroad, but none have survived. So, also, many
attempts to produce a lamp giving light by pure incandescence of solid
conductors proved for the most part abortive. Edison himself worked
for nearly two years on a lamp based upon the old idea of incandescent
platinum strips or wires, but without success. The announcement of
this lamp caused a heavy drop in gas shares, long before the problem
was really solved by a masterly stroke in his carbon filament lamp.
Curiously, the nearest approach to the carbon filament lamp had been
made in 1845, by Starr, an American, who described in a British patent
specification a lamp in which electric current passed through a thin
strip of carbon kept it heated while surrounded by a glass bulb in
which a vacuum was maintained. Starr had exhibited his lamps to
Faraday, in England, and was preparing to construct dynamos to furnish
electric current for them in place of batteries, but sudden death put
an end to his labors. The specification describing his lamp is perhaps
the earliest description of an incandescent lamp of any promise, and
the subsequently recorded ideas of inventors up to the work of Edison
seem now to be almost in the nature of retrograde movements. None of
them were successful commercially. Starr, who was only twenty-five
years of age, is reported to have died of overwork and worry in his
efforts to perfect his invention. His ideas were evidently far in
advance of his time.
The Edison lamp differed from those which preceded it in the extremely
small section of the carbon strip rendered hot by the current, and in
the perfection of the vacuum in which it was mounted. The filament
was first made of carbonized paper, and afterwards of bamboo carbon.
The modern incandescent lamp has for years past been provided with a
filament made by a chemical process. The carbon formed is exceedingly
homogeneous and of uniform electric resistance. Edison first exhibited
his lamp in his laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, in December,
1879; but before it could be properly utilized an enormous amount of
work had to be done. His task was not merely the improvement of an art
already existing; it was the creation of a new art. Special dynamo
machines had to be invented and constructed for working the lamps;
switches were needed for connecting and disconnecting lamps and groups
of lamps; meters for measuring the consumption of electric energy were
wanted; safety fuses and cut-offs had to be provided; electroliers or
fixtures to support the lamp were required; and, lastly, a complete
system of underground mains with appurtenances was a requisite for city
plants.
Even the steam-engines for driving the dynamos had to be remodelled
and improved for electric work, and ten years of electric lighting
development did more towards the refinement and perfection of
steam-engines than fifty years preceding. Steadiness of lights meant
the preservation of steady speed in the driving machinery. The Pearl
Street station in New York City was the first installation for the
supply of current for incandescent lighting in a city district. The
constant pressure dynamos were gradually improved and enlarged. The
details of all parts of the system were made more perfect, and in the
hands of Edison and others the incandescent lamps, originally of high
cost, were much cheapened and the quality of the production was greatly
improved. Lamps originally cost one dollar each. The best lamps that
are made can be had at present for about one-fifth that price. Millions
of incandescent lamps are annually manufactured. Great lighting
stations furnish the current for the working of these lamps, some
stations containing machinery aggregating many thousands of horse-power
capacity. Not only do these stations furnish electric energy for the
working of arc lamps and incandescent lamps, but, in addition, for
innumerable motors ranging in size from the small desk fan of one-tenth
horse-power up to those of hundreds of horse-power. The larger sizes
replace steam or hydraulic power for elevators, and many are used in
shops and factories for driving machinery such as printing-presses,
machinery tools, and the like.
In spite of the fact that it was well known that a good dynamo when
reversed could be made a source of power, few electric motors were
in use until a considerable time after the establishment of the first
lighting stations. Even in 1884, at the Philadelphia Electrical
Exhibition, only a few electric motors were shown. Not until 1886 or
thereafter did the “motor load” of an electric station begin to be a
factor in its business success. The motors supplied are an advantageous
adjunct, inasmuch as they provide a day load, increasing the output
of the station at a time when the lighting load is small and when the
machinery in consequence would, without them, have remained idle. The
growth of the application of electric motors in the closing years of
the century has been phenomenal, even leaving out of consideration
their use in electric railways.
Twenty years ago an electric motor was a curiosity; fifty years ago
crude examples run by batteries were only to be occasionally found in
cabinets of scientific apparatus. Machinery Hall, at the Centennial
Exhibition of 1876, typified the mill of the past, never again to be
reproduced, with its huge engine and lines of heavy shafting and belts
conveying power to the different tools or machines in operation. The
modern mill or factory has its engines and dynamos located wherever
convenient, its electric lines and numerous motors connected thereto,
and each of them either driving comparatively short lines of shafting
or attached to drive single pieces of machinery. The wilderness of
belts and pulleys which used to characterize a factory is gradually
being cleared away, and electric distribution of power substituted.
Moreover, the lighting of the modern mill or factory is done from the
same electric plant which distributes power.
The electric motor has already partly revolutionized the distribution
of power for stationary machinery, but as applied to railways in place
of animal power the revolution is complete. The period which has
elapsed since the first introduction of electric railways is barely a
dozen years. It is true that a few tentative experiments in electric
traction were made some time in advance of 1888, notably by Siemens,
in Berlin, in 1879 and 1880, by Stephen D. Field, by T. A. Edison, at
Menlo Park, by J. C. Henry, by Charles A. Van Depoele, and others. If
we look farther back we find efforts such as that of Farmer, in 1847,
to propel railway cars by electric motors driven by currents from
batteries carried on the cars. These efforts were, of course, doomed to
failure, for economical reasons. Electric energy from primary batteries
was too costly, and if it had been cheaper, the types of electric motor
used yielded so small a return of power for the electric energy spent
in driving them that commercial success was out of the question. These
early efforts were, however, instructive, and may now be regarded
as highly suggestive of later work. Traction by the use of storage
batteries carried on an electric car has been tried repeatedly, but
appears not to be able to compete with systems of direct supply from
electric lines. The plan survives, however, in the electric automobile,
many of which have been put into service within a year or two. The
electric automobile is not well fitted for country touring; it is
best adapted to cities, where facilities for charging and caring for
the batteries can be had. Moreover, the electric carriage is of all
automobile carriages the most easily controlled, most ready; it emits
no smell or hot gases and is nearly noiseless.
About 1850, Hall, a well-known instrument maker of Boston, catalogued
a small toy electric locomotive dragging a car upon rails which were
insulated and connected with a stationary battery of two Grove cells.
This arrangement was sold as a piece of scientific apparatus, and
appears to be the first example of an electrically driven vehicle
connected by rolling contacts to an immovable energy source. Other
early experimenters, such as Siemens, Field, and Daft, subsequently
to Hall, used in actual railway work the supply by insulated tracks.
This was supplanted later by overhead insulated wires or by the
insulated third rail. Siemens & Halske, of Berlin, used a special
form of overhead supply in 1881, and during the electrical exhibition
in Paris in that year, a street tramway line was run by them. Later,
Edison experimented with a third-rail-supply line at Menlo Park; and
at Portrush, in Ireland, an actual railway was put in operation by
Siemens & Halske, using the third-rail system. This was about 1883. The
power of the Portrush railway was that of a water-wheel driving the
generating dynamo.
The modern overhead trolley, or under-running trolley, as it is called,
seems to have been first invented by Van Depoele, and used by him
in practical electric railway work about 1886 and thereafter. The
universality of this invention for overhead supply marks the device
as a really important advance in the art of electric traction. Van
Depoele was also a pioneer in the use of an underground conduit, which
he employed successfully in Toronto in 1884. The names of Edward M.
Bentley and Walter H. Knight stand out prominently in connection with
the first use of an underground conduit, tried under their plans in
August, 1884, at Cleveland, on the tracks of the horse-railway company.
We have barely outlined the history of the electric-motor railway up to
the beginning of a period of wonderful development, resulting in the
almost complete replacement by electric traction of horse traction or
tramway lines, all within an interval of scarcely more than ten years.
The year 1888 may be said to mark the beginning of this work, and in
that year the Sprague Company, with Frank J. Sprague at its head,
put into operation the electric line at Richmond, Virginia, using
the under-running trolley. Mr. Sprague had been associated with
Edison in early traction work, and was well known in connection with
electric-motor work in general. The Richmond line was the first large
undertaking. It had about thirteen miles of track, numerous curves,
and grades of from three to ten per cent. The enterprise was one of
great hardihood, and but for ample financial backing and determination
to spare no effort or expenditure conducive to success, must certainly
have failed. The motors were too small for the work, and there had not
been found any proper substitute for the metal commutator brushes on
the motors—a source of endless trouble and of an enormous expense for
repairs. Nevertheless, the Richmond installation, kept in operation as
it was in spite of all difficulties, served as an object-lesson, and
had the effect of convincing Mr. Henry M. Whitney and the directors
of the West End Street Railway, of Boston, of the feasibility of
equipping the entire railway system of Boston electrically. Meanwhile
the merging of the Van Depoele and Bentley-Knight interests into the
Thomson-Houston Electric Light Company brought a new factor into the
field, the Sprague interests being likewise merged with the Edison
General Electric Company.
The West End Company, with two hundred miles of track in and around
Boston, began to equip its lines in 1888 with the Thomson-Houston
plant. The success of this great undertaking left no doubt of the
future of electric traction. The difficulties which had seriously
threatened future success were gradually removed.
The electric railway progress was so great in the United States that
about January 1, 1891, there were more than two hundred and forty lines
in operation. About thirty thousand horses and mules were replaced by
electric power in the single year of 1891. In 1892 the Thomson-Houston
interests and those of the Edison General Electric Company were merged
in the General Electric Company, an event of unusual importance, as
it brought together the two great competitors in electric traction at
that date. Other electric manufacturers, chief among which was the
Westinghouse Company, also entered the field and became prominent
factors in railway extension. In a few years horse traction in the
United States on tramway lines virtually disappeared. Many cable lines
were converted to electric lines, and projects such as the Boston
Subway began to be planned. Not the least of the advantages of electric
traction is the higher speed attainable with safety. The comfort and
cleanliness of the cars, lighted brilliantly at night, and heated in
winter by the same source of energy which is used to propel them, are
important factors.
All these things, together with the great extension of the lines into
suburban and country districts, and the interconnection of the lines
of one district with those of another, cannot fail to have a decidedly
beneficial effect upon the life, habits, and health of the people.
While the United States and Canada have been and still are the theatre
of the enormous advance in electric traction, as in other electric
work, many electric car lines have in recent years been established in
Great Britain and on the continent of Europe. Countries like Japan,
Australia, South Africa, and South America have also in operation many
electric trolley lines, and the work is rapidly extending. Most of
this work, even in Europe, has been carried out either by importation
of equipment from America, or by apparatus manufactured there, but
following American practice closely. The bulk of the work has been done
with the overhead wire and under-running trolley, but there are notable
instances of the use of electric conductors in underground slotted
conduits, chief of which are the great systems of street railway in New
York City.
In Chicago the application of motor-cars in trains upon the elevated
railway followed directly upon the practical demonstration at the
World’s Fair of the capabilities of third-rail electric traction on the
Intramural Elevated Railway, and the system is rapidly extending so as
to include all elevated city roads. A few years will doubtless see the
great change accomplished.
The motor-car, or car propelled by its own motors, has also been
introduced upon standard steam roads to a limited extent as a
supplement to steam traction. The earliest of these installations are
the one at Nantasket, Massachusetts, and that between Hartford and
New Britain, in Connecticut. A number of special high-speed lines,
using similar plans, have gone into operation in recent years. The
problem of constructing electric motors of sufficient robustness for
heavy work and controlling them effectively was not an easy one, and
the difficulties were increased greatly because of the placing of
the motors under the car body, exposed to wet, to dust and dirt of
road. The advantage of the motor-car, or motor-car train, is that the
traction or hold upon the track increases with the increase of the
weight or load carried. It is thus able to be accelerated rapidly
after a stop, and also climb steep grades without slipping its wheels.
Nevertheless, there are circumstances which favor the employment of a
locomotive at the head of a train, as in steam practice. This is the
case in lines where a train of coal or ore cars is drawn by electric
mining locomotives. Many such plants are in operation, and, at the same
time the electric power is used to drive fans for ventilating, pumps
for drainage, electric hoists, etc., besides being used for lighting
the mines. The trains in the tunnels of the Metropolitan Underground
Railway of London have for many years been operated by steam
locomotives with the inevitable escape of steam, foul, suffocating
gases, and more or less soot.
A number of years ago the tunnel of the City and South London Railway
was put into successful operation with electric locomotives drawing the
trains of cars, and the nuisance caused by steam avoided. This work
recalls the early efforts of Field, of Daft, and Bentley and Knight
in providing an electric locomotive for replacing the steam plant of
the elevated roads in New York City. Well-conceived as many of these
plans were, electric traction had not reached a sufficient development,
and the efforts were abandoned after several more or less successful
trials. It is now seen that the motor-car train may advantageously
replace the locomotive-drawn train in such instances as these elevated
railways.
The three largest and most powerful electric locomotives ever put
into service are those which are employed to take trains through the
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad tunnel at Baltimore. They have been in
service about seven or eight years, and are fully equal in power to
the large steam locomotives used on steam roads. Frequently trains of
cars, including the steam locomotive itself, are drawn through the
tunnel by these huge electric engines, the fires on the steam machines
being for the time checked so as to prevent fouling the air of the
tunnel. There was opened, in London, in 1900, a new railway called the
Central Underground, equipped with twenty-six electric locomotives for
drawing its trains. The electric and power equipment, which embodied in
itself the latest results of American practice, was also manufactured
in America to suit the needs of the road. Other similar railways are
in contemplation in London and in other cities of Europe. As on the
elevated roads in New York City, the replacement of underground steam
traction, where it exists, by electric traction is evidently only a
question of a few years.
An electric railway may exemplify a power-transmission system in which
power is delivered to moving vehicles. But the distances so covered are
not generally more than a few miles from the generating station. Where,
however, abundant water-power exists, as at Niagara, or where fuel is
very expensive and power is to be had only at great distances from
the place at which it is to be used, electricity furnishes the most
effective means for transmission and distribution. Between the years
1880 and 1890 the device called alternating current transformer was
developed to a considerable degree of perfection. It is, in reality, a
modified induction coil, consisting of copper wire and iron, whereby a
current sent through one of its coils will induce similar currents in
the other coils of apparatus. It has the great advantage of having no
moving parts. Faraday, in 1831, discovered the fundamental principle
of the modern transformer. Not only, however, will the current in
one coil of the apparatus generate by induction a new current in an
entirely separate coil or circuit, but by suitably proportioning the
windings we may exchange, as it were, a large low-pressure current for
a small but high-pressure current, or _vice versa_. This exchange may
be made with a very small percentage of loss of energy. These valuable
properties of the transformer have rendered it of supreme importance
in recent electrical extension. The first use made of it, in 1885–86,
was to transform a high-pressure current into one of low pressure in
electric lighting, enabling a small wire to be used to convey electric
energy at high pressure, and without much loss, to a long distance
from the station. This energy at high pressure reaches the transformer
placed within or close to the building to be lighted. A low-pressure
safe current is conveyed from the transformer to the wires connected to
the lamps. In this way a current of two thousand volts, an unsafe and
unsuitable pressure for incandescent lighting, is exchanged for one
of about one hundred volts, which is quite safe. In this way, also,
the supply station is enabled to reach a customer too far away to be
supplied directly with current at one hundred volts, without enormous
expense for copper conductors.
The alternating current transformer not only greatly extended the
radius of supply from a single station, but also enabled the station
to be conveniently located where water and coal could be had without
difficulty. It also permitted the distant water-powers to become
sources of electric energy for lighting, power, or for other service.
For example, a water-power located at a distance of fifty to one
hundred miles or more from a city, or from a large manufacturing centre
where cost of fuel is high, may be utilized as follows: A power-station
will be located upon the site of the water-power, and the dynamos
therein will generate electricity at, say, two thousand volts pressure.
By means of step-up transformers this will be exchanged for a current
of thirty thousand volts for transmission over a line of copper or
aluminum wire to the distant consumption area. Here there will be a set
of step-down transformers which will exchange the thirty-thousand-volt
line current for one of so low a pressure as to be safe for local
distribution to lamps, to motors, etc., either stationary or upon a
railway. The same transmission plant may simultaneously supply energy
for lighting, for power, for heat, and for charging storage batteries.
It may, therefore, be employed both day and night.
These long-distance power transmission plants are generally spoken of
as “two-phase,” “three-phase,” or “polyphase” systems. Before 1890
no such plants existed. A large number of such installations are now
working over distances of a few miles up to one hundred miles. They
differ from what are known as single-phase alternating systems in
employing, instead of a single alternating current, two, three, or
more, which are sent over separate lines, and in which the electric
impulses are not simultaneous, but follow each other in regular
succession, overlapping each other’s dead points, so to speak. Early
suggestions of such a plan, about 1880, and thereafter, by Bailey,
Deprez, and others, bore no fruit, and not until Tesla’s announcement
of his polyphase system, in 1888, was much attention given to the
subject. A widespread interest in Tesla’s work was invoked, but several
years elapsed before engineering difficulties were overcome. This work
was done mainly by the technical staffs of the large manufacturing
companies, and it was necessary to be done before any notable power
transmissions on the polyphase system could be established. After 1892
the growth became very rapid.
The falls of Niagara early attracted the attention of engineers to
the possibility of utilizing at least a fraction of the power. It
was seen that several hundred thousand horse-power might be drawn
from it without materially affecting the fall, itself equivalent to
several millions of horse-power. A gigantic power-station has lately
been established at Niagara, taking water from a distance above the
falls and delivering it below the falls through a long tunnel which
forms the tail race. Ten water-wheels, located in an immense wheel-pit
about two hundred feet deep, each wheel of a capacity of five thousand
horse-power, drive large vertical shafts, at the upper end of which
are located the large two-phase dynamos, each of five thousand
horse-power. The electric energy from these machines is in part raised
in pressure by huge transformers for transmission to distant points,
such as the city of Buffalo, and a large portion is delivered to the
numerous manufacturing plants located at moderate distances from the
power-station. Besides the supply of energy for lighting, and for
motors, including railways, other recent uses of electricity to which
we have not yet alluded are splendidly exemplified at Niagara. Davy’s
brilliant discovery of the alkali metals, sodium and potassium, at
the opening of the century, showed the great chemical energy of the
electric current. Its actions were afterwards carefully studied,
notably by the illustrious Faraday, whose discoveries in connection
with magnetism and magneto-electricity have been briefly described.
The electric current was found to act as a most potent chemical force,
decomposing and recomposing many chemical compounds, dissolving and
depositing metals. Hence, early in the century arose the art of
electroplating of metals, such as electro-gilding, silver-plating,
nickel-plating, and copper deposition as in electrotyping. These arts
are now practised on a very large scale, and naturally have affected
the whole course of manufacturing methods during the century. Moreover,
since the introduction of dynamo current, electrolysis has come to
be employed in huge plants, not only for separating metals from each
other, as in refining them, but in addition for separating them from
their ores, for the manufacture of chemical compounds before unknown,
and for the cheap production of numerous substances of use in the
various arts on a large scale. Vast quantities of copper are refined,
and silver and gold often obtained from residues in sufficient amount
to pay well for the process.
At Niagara also are works for the production of the metal aluminum from
its ores. Similar works exist at other places here and abroad where
power is cheap. This metal, which competes in price with brass, bulk
for bulk, was only obtainable before its electric reduction at $25 to
$30 per pound. The metal sodium is also extracted from soda. A large
plant at Niagara also uses the electric current for the manufacture of
chlorine for bleach, and caustic soda, both from common salt. Chlorate
of potassium is also made at Niagara by electrolysis. The field of
electro-chemistry is, indeed, full of great future possibilities. Large
furnaces heated by electricity, a single one of which will consume more
than a thousand horse-power, exist at Niagara. In these furnaces is
manufactured from coke and sand, by the Acheson process, an abrasive
material called carborundum, which is almost as hard as diamond, but
quite low in cost. It is made into slabs and into wheels for grinding
hard substances. The electric furnace furnishes also the means for
producing artificial plumbago, or graphite, almost perfectly pure, the
raw material being coke powder.
A large amount of power from Niagara is also consumed for the
production in special electric arc furnaces of carbide of calcium
from coke and lime. This is the source of acetylene gas, the new
illuminant, which is generated when water is brought into contact
with the carbide. The high temperature of the electric furnace thus
renders possible chemical actions which under ordinary furnace heat
would not take place. Henri Moissan, a French scientist, well known
for his brilliant researches in electric furnace work, has even shown
that real diamonds can be made under special conditions in the electric
furnace. He has, in fact, probably practised in a small way what has
occurred on a grand scale in nature, resulting in diamond fields such
as those at Kimberley. One problem less is thus left to be solved. The
electro-chemical and kindred arts are practised not alone at Niagara,
but at many other places where power is cheap. Extensive plants have
grown up, mostly within the five years before the close of the century.
All of the great developments in this field have come about within the
last decade.
The use of electricity for heating is not confined to electric
furnaces, in which the exceedingly high temperature obtainable is the
factor giving rise to success. While it is not likely that electricity
will soon be used for general heating, special instances, such as the
warming of electric cars in winter by electric heaters, the operation
of cooking appliances by electric current, the heating of sad-irons and
the like, give evidence of the possibilities should there ever be found
means for the generation of electric energy from fuel with such high
efficiency as eighty per cent. or more. Present methods give, under
most favorable conditions, barely ten per cent., ninety per cent. of
the energy value of the fuel being unavoidably wasted.
Another application of the heating power of electric currents is
found in the Thomson electric welding process, the development of
which has practically taken place in the past ten years. In this
process an exceedingly large current, at very low electric pressure,
traverses a joint between two pieces of metal to be united. It heats
the joint to fusion or softening; the pieces are pushed together and
welded. Here the heat is generated in the solid metal, for at no time
during the operation are the pieces separated. The current is usually
obtained from a welding transformer, an example of an extreme type
of step-down transformer. Current at several hundred volts passed
into the primary winding is exchanged for an enormous current at only
two or three volts in the welding circuit in which the work is done.
The present uses of this electric welding process are numerous and
varied. Pieces of most of the metals and alloys, before regarded as
unweldable, are capable of being joined not only to pieces of the same
metal, but also to different metals. Electric welding is applied on
the large scale, making joints in wires or rods, for welding wagon and
carriage wheel tires, for making barrel-hoops and bands for pails,
for axles of vehicles, and for carriage framing. It has given rise to
special manufactures, such as electrically welded steel pipe or tube,
wire fencing, etc. It is used for welding together the joints of
steel car-rails, for welding teeth in saws, for making many parts of
bicycles, and in tool making. An instance of its peculiar adaptability
to unusual conditions is the welding of the iron bands embedded within
the body of a rubber vehicle tire for holding the tire in place. For
this purpose the electric weld has been found almost essential.
Another branch of electric development concerns the storage of
electricity. The storage battery is based upon principles discovered by
Gaston Planté, and applied, since 1881, by Brush, by Faure, and others.
Some of the larger lighting stations employ as reservoirs of electric
energy large batteries charged by surplus dynamo current. This is
afterwards drawn upon when the consumer’s load is heavy, as during the
evening. The storage battery is, however, a heavy, cumbrous apparatus,
of limited life, easily destroyed unless guarded with skill. If a
form not possessing these faults be ever found, the field of possible
application is almost limitless.
The above by no means complete account of the progress in electric
applications during the century just closed should properly be
supplemented by an account of the accompanying great advances regarded
from the purely scientific aspect. It is, however, only possible to
make a brief reference thereto within the limits of this article. The
scientific study of electricity and the application of mathematical
methods in its treatment has kept busy a host of workers and drawn
upon the resources of the ablest minds the age has produced. Gauss,
Weber, Ampère, Faraday, Maxwell, Helmholtz, are no longer with us.
Of the early founders of the science we have yet such men as Lord
Kelvin, formerly Sir William Thomson, Mascart, and others, still
zealous in scientific work. Following them are a large number, notable
for valuable contributions to the progress of electrical science,
in discoveries, in research, and in mathematical treatment of the
various problems presented. Modern magnetism took form in the hands
of Rowland, Hopkinson, Ewing, and many other able workers. Maxwell’s
electro-magnetic theory of light is confirmed by the brilliant
researches of the late Dr. Hertz, too early lost to science. Hertz
proved that all luminous phenomena are in essence electrical.
The wireless telegraphy of to-day is a direct outcome of Hertz’s
experiments on electric waves. It is but little more than ten years
since Hertz announced his results to the world. His work, supplemented
by that of Branly, Lodge, Marconi, and others, made wireless telegraphy
a possibility.
The wonderful X-ray, and the rich scientific harvest which has followed
the discovery by Röntgen of invisible radiation from a vacuum tube, was
preceded by much investigation of the effects of electric discharges in
vacuum tubes, and Hittorf, followed by Crookes, had given special study
to these effects in very high or nearly perfect vacua. Crookes, though
especially enriching science by his work, missed the peculiar X-ray,
which, nevertheless, must have been emitted from many of his vacuum
tubes, not only in his hands, but in those of subsequent students. It
was as late as 1896 that Röntgen announced his discovery. Since that
time several other sources of invisible radiation have been discovered,
more or less similar in effect to the radiations from a vacuum tube,
but emitted, singular as the fact is, from rare substances extracted
from certain minerals. Leaving out of consideration the great value
of the X-ray to physicians and surgeons, its effect in stimulating
scientific inquiry has almost been incalculable. The renewed study of
effects of electric discharge in vacuum tubes has already, in the work
of such investigators as Lenard, J. J. Thomson, and others, apparently
carried the subdivision of matter far beyond the time-honored chemical
atom, and has gone far towards showing the essential unity of all the
chemical elements. It is as unlikely that the mystery of the material
universe will ever be completely solved as it is that we can gain an
adequate conception of infinite space or time. But we can at least
extend the range of our mental vision of the processes of nature as we
do our real vision into space depths by the telescope and spectroscope.
There can now be no question that electric conditions and actions are
more fundamental than many hitherto so regarded.
The nineteenth century closed with many important problems in
electrical science unsolved. What great or far-reaching discoveries are
yet in store, who can tell? What valuable practical developments are
to come, who can predict? The electrical progress has been great—very
great—but after all only a part of that grander advance in so many
other fields. The hands of man are strengthened by the control of
mighty forces. His electric lines traverse the mountain passes as well
as the plains. His electric railway scales the Jungfrau. But he still
spends his best effort, and has always done so, in the construction and
equipment of his engines of destruction, and now exhausts the mines
of the world of valuable metals, for ships of war, whose ultimate
goal is the bottom of the sea. In this also electricity is made to
play an increasingly important part. It trains the guns, loads them,
fires them. It works the signals and the search-lights. It ventilates
the ship, blows the fires, and lights the dark spaces. Perhaps all
this is necessary now, and, if so, well. But if a fraction of the
vast expenditure entailed were turned to the encouragement of advance
in the arts and employments of peace in the twentieth century, can
it be doubted that, at the close, the nineteenth century might come
to be regarded, in spite of its achievements, as a rather wasteful,
semi-barbarous transition period?
ELIHU THOMSON.
PHYSICS
On January 7, 1610, Galileo, turning his telescope towards Jupiter,
was the first to see the beautiful system of that planet in which the
universe is epitomized. He had already studied the variegated surface
of the moon, and he had seen the spots upon the sun. A little later,
in spite of the feeble power of his instrument, he had discovered
that the sun rotates upon an axis, and something of the wonderful
nature of the planet Saturn had been revealed to him. The overwhelming
evidence thus afforded of the truth of the hypothesis of Copernicus
made him its chief exponent. The time had come for man to know, as
he had never known or even dreamed before, his true relation to the
universe of which he was so insignificant a part. In a single year
nearly all of these capital discoveries were made. It was truly an
era of intellectual expansion; never before and never since has man’s
intellectual horizon enlarged with such enormous rapidity. One needs
little imagination to share with this ardent philosopher the enthusiasm
of the moment when, because some, fearing the evidence of their senses,
refused to look through the slender tube, he wrote to Kepler: “Oh, my
dear Kepler, how I wish we could have one hearty laugh together!...
Why are you not here? What shouts of laughter we should have at this
glorious folly!”
Galileo died in 1642, and in the same year Newton was born. When
twenty-four years old he “began to think of gravity extending to the
orb of the moon,” and before the end of the century he had discovered
and established the great law of universal gravitation. Thus, at the
end of the seventeenth century, the foundations of modern physics were
in place. During the eighteenth century they were much built upon, but
it was the nineteenth that witnessed not only the greatest advance in
detail, but the most important generalizations made since the time of
Galileo and Newton.
In endeavoring to present to the intelligent but perhaps unscientific
reader a brief review of the accomplishments of that “wonderful
century” in the domain of physics, one must not attempt more than an
outline of greater events, and it will be convenient to arrange them
under the several principal subdivisions of the science, according to
the usually accepted classification.
HEAT
Although more than one philosopher of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries suggested the identity of heat and molecular motion, the
impression made was not lasting, and up to very near the beginning
of the nineteenth century the _caloric_ theory was accepted almost
without dispute. This theory implied that heat was a subtle fluid,
definite quantities of which were added to or subtracted from material
substances when they became hot or cold. As carefully conducted
experiments seemed to show that a body weighed no more or no less when
hot than when cold, it was necessary to attribute to this fluid called
caloric the mysterious property of imponderability, that is, unlike all
forms of ordinary matter, it possessed no weight. To avoid calling it
matter, it was by many classed with light, electricity, and magnetism,
as one of the _imponderable agents_. Various other properties were
attributed to caloric, necessary to the reasonable explanation of a
steadily increasing array of experimental facts. It was declared to be
elastic, its particles being mutually self-repellent. It was thought
to attract ordinary matter, and an ingenious theory of caloric was
constructed, modelled upon Newton’s famous but erroneous corpuscular
theory of light. During the latter part of the eighteenth century
Joseph Black, professor in the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh,
developed his theory of _latent heat_, which, although founded upon a
false notion of the nature of heat, was a most important contribution
to science. The downfall of the caloric theory must be largely credited
to the work of a famous American who published the results of his
experiments just at the close of the eighteenth century. Benjamin
Thompson, generally known as Count Rumford, was born in the town of
Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1753. His inclination towards physical
experimentation was strong in his early youth, and he received much
instruction and inspiration from the lectures of Professor John
Winthrop, of Harvard College, some of which he was enabled to attend
under trying conditions. Having received special official consideration
by appointment to office under one of the colonial governors, he was
accused at the breaking out of the Revolutionary War of a leaning
towards Toryism, and was thus prevented from making his career among
his own people. At the age of twenty-two years he fled to England,
returning to America only for a brief period in command of a British
regiment. In England he soon became eminent as an experimental
philosopher, and in 1778 became a Fellow of the Royal Society. He
afterwards entered the service of the Elector of Bavaria, by whom
he was made a Count of the Holy Roman Empire. In 1799 he returned
to London and founded the “Royal Institution,” which was destined
during the next hundred years to surpass all other foundations in the
richness and importance of its contributions to physical science. It
was while at Munich that Rumford made his famous experiments on the
nature of heat, to which he had been led by observing the great amount
of heat generated in the boring of cannon. Finding that he was able
to make a considerable quantity of water actually boil by the heat
generated by a blunt boring tool, he concluded that the supply of heat
from such a source was practically inexhaustible and that it could be
generated continuously if only the motion of the tool under friction
was kept up. He declared that anything which could thus be produced
without limitation by an insulated body or system of bodies could not
possibly be a material substance, and that under the circumstances of
the experiment, the only thing that was or could be thus continuously
communicated was _motion_.
Count Rumford’s conclusions were not for a long time accepted. Davy,
the brilliant professor and eloquent lecturer at the newly established
Royal Institution, espoused the mechanical theory of heat and made
the striking experiment of melting two pieces of ice by rubbing them
together remote from any source of heat. His contemporary, Thomas
Young, who overturned Newton’s corpuscular theory of light and showed
that it was a wave phenomenon, also advocated Rumford’s notion of the
nature of heat, but even among physicists of high rank it had made
little headway as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. In
the eighth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, published in 1856,
the immediate predecessor of the current issue, heat is defined as “a
material agent of a peculiar nature, highly attenuated.” And this, in
spite of the fact that previous to that date the mechanical theory had
been completely proved by the labors of Mayer, Joule, Helmholtz, and
William Thomson (Lord Kelvin). By these men a solid foundation for the
theory had been found in a great physical law of such importance that
it is justly considered to be the most far-reaching generalization in
natural philosophy since the time of Newton. Some account of this law
and its discovery will be given later in this paper.
Among the most important of the century’s contributions to our
knowledge of heat must be included the work of Fourier, as embodied
in his _Theorie Analytique de la Chaleur_, published in 1822. Joseph
Fourier was born in 1768, and died in 1830. He belonged to that
splendid group of philosophers of which the French nation may always
be proud, whose work constitutes a large part of the lustre of
intellectual France during her most brilliant period, the later years
of the eighteenth and the earlier years of the nineteenth century. His
contemporaries included such men as Laplace, Arago, Lagrange, Fresnel,
and Carnot. Fourier wrote especially of the movement of heat in solids,
and as his thesis depended in no way on the nature of heat it will
always be regarded as a classic. His assumption that conductivity was
independent of temperature was shortly proved to be erroneous, but
his general argument and conclusions were not greatly affected by
this discovery. His work is one of the most beautiful examples yet
produced of the application of mathematics to physical research, and
mathematical and physical science were equally enriched by it. In
its broader aspects his law of conduction includes the transfer of
electricity in good conductors, and is the real basis of Ohm’s law.
One of the most skillful and successful experimenters in heat was also
a Frenchman, Henri Victor Regnault (1810–78). He greatly improved the
construction and use of the thermometer, and was the first to discover
that the indications of an air thermometer and one of mercury did not
exactly agree, because they did not expand in the same degree for
equal increases of temperature. His most important work was on the
expansion of gases, vapor pressure, specific heat of water, etc., and
for careful, patient measuring he had a positive genius. Until he
proved the contrary it had been assumed that all gases had the same
coefficient of expansion, and Boyle’s law that the volume of a gas was
inversely proportional to its pressure had not been questioned. His
tables of the elastic force of steam have been of immense practical
value, but his studies of the expansion of gases are of greater
interest because they have pointed the way to one of the most important
accomplishments of the century, the liquefaction of all known gases.
During the earlier years of this century it was the custom to consider
vapors and gases as quite distinct forms of matter. Vapors always
came, by evaporation, from liquids, and could always be “condensed” or
reduced to the liquid form without difficulty, but it was not thought
possible to liquefy the so-called “permanent” gases. The first man to
attack the problem systematically was Michael Faraday, who, before
the end of the first third of the century, had liquefied several
gases, mostly by producing them by chemical reactions under pressure.
Several of the more easily reducible gases or vapors, such as ammonia,
sulphurous acid, and probably chlorine, had been previously liquefied
by cold, but a quarter of a century elapsed after Faraday’s researches
before the true relation of the liquid and gaseous states of matter
was understood, and it was found that both increase of pressure and
lowering of temperature were, in general, essential to the liquefaction
of a gas. It was Thomas Andrews, of Belfast, who first showed, in a
paper published in 1863, that there was a continuity in the liquid
and gaseous states of matter, that for each substance there was a
critical temperature at which it became a homogeneous fluid, neither a
liquid nor a gas: that above this temperature great pressure would not
liquefy, while below it the substance might exist as partly liquid and
partly gas. He pointed out the fact that for the so-called permanent
gases this critical temperature must be exceedingly low, and if such
temperature could be reached liquefaction would follow.
Subsequent progress in the liquefaction of gases came about by
following this suggestion. Very low temperatures were produced by
subjecting the gas to great reduction in volume by pressure, removing
the heat of compression by conduction and radiation, and then by sudden
expansion its temperature was greatly lowered. As early as 1877 two
Frenchmen, Pictet and Cailletet, had succeeded in liquefying oxygen,
hydrogen, nitrogen, and air. During the past twenty years great
improvements have been made in the methods of accomplishing these
transformations, so that to-day it is easy to produce considerable
quantities of all of the principal gases in a liquid form, and by
carrying the reduction in temperature still further portions of the
liquid may be changed to the solid state. The most important work along
this line has been done by Wroblewski and Olszewski, of the University
of Cracow, and Professor Dewar, of the Royal Institution in London.
Temperatures as low as about two hundred and fifty degrees C. below
the freezing-point of water have been produced, the “absolute zero”
being only two hundred and seventy-three degrees C. below that point.
These experiments promise to throw much light on the nature of matter,
and they are especially interesting as revealing its extraordinary
properties at extremely low temperatures. Among the most curious and
suggestive is the fact that the electrical resistance of pure metals
diminishes at a rate which indicates that at the absolute zero it would
vanish, and these metals would become perfect conductors of electricity.
The dynamics of heat, or “thermo-dynamics,” was an important field of
research in the early part of the century, on account of its practical
application to the improvement of the steam-engine. The science was
created by Carnot, who, in spite of the fact that his views regarding
the nature of heat were erroneous, discovered some of the most
interesting relations among the quantities involved, and discussed
their applications to the heat engines with great skill. Subsequent
contributors to the theory and practice of thermo-dynamics were
Clausius, Rankine, Lord Kelvin, and Professor Tait.
The mechanical theory of heat naturally led up to what has already been
referred to as the most important generalization in physical science
since the time of Newton, the doctrine of
THE CONSERVATION OF ENERGY
This principle puts physics in its relation to energy where chemistry
has long been in its relation to matter. If matter were not
conservative, if it could be created or destroyed at will, chemistry
would be an impossible science. Physics is put upon a solid foundation
by the assumption of a like conservatism in energy; it can neither be
created nor destroyed, although it may appear in many different forms
which are, in general, mutually interconvertible.
Many men have contributed to the establishment of this great principle,
but it was actually discovered and proved by the labors of three or
four. Although it was practically all done before the middle of the
nineteenth century, its general popular recognition did not come
until a quarter of a century later. The doctrine was first distinctly
formulated by Robert Mayer, a German physician, who published in 1842 a
suggestive paper on “The Forces of Inorganic Nature,” which, however,
attracted little or no attention. Mayer had not approached the problem
from an experimental stand-point, but at about the same time it was
attacked most successfully from this side by a young Englishman,
James Prescott Joule, son of a wealthy brewer of Manchester, England.
Joule made the first really accurate determination of the mechanical
equivalent of a given quantity of heat, a physical constant which
Rumford had tried to measure, reaching only a rough approximation.
Substantially Joule’s result was that the heat energy necessary to
raise the temperature of any given mass of water one degree Fahr. is
the equivalent of the mechanical energy required to lift that mass
through a height of seven hundred and seventy-two feet against the
force of the earth’s attraction; and, conversely, if a mass of water
be allowed to fall through a distance of seven hundred and seventy-two
feet under the action of gravity, and at the end of its motion be
instantly arrested, the heat generated will suffice to raise its
temperature one degree Fahr. Of such vast importance is this numerical
coefficient that it has been called the golden number of the nineteenth
century. Since Joule’s time it has been redetermined by several
physicists, notably by Professor Rowland, of Baltimore, the general
conclusion being that Joule’s number was somewhat, but not greatly, too
small.
The first clear and full exposition of the doctrine of the conservation
of energy was given by Joule in a popular lecture in Manchester in
1847, but it attracted little attention until a few months later, when
the author presented his theory at a meeting of the British Association
for the Advancement of Science. Even among scientific men it would
have passed without comment or consideration had it not been for the
presence of another young Englishman, then as little known as Joule
himself, who began a series of remarks, appreciative and critical,
which resulted in making Joule’s paper the sensation of the meeting.
This was William Thomson, who had been, only a year before, at the age
of twenty-two years, appointed professor of natural philosophy at the
University of Glasgow, now known as Lord Kelvin, the most versatile,
brilliant, and profound student of physical science which the century
has produced. From that day to the death of Joule (1889) these two men
were closely associated in the demonstration and exploitation of a
great principle of which they were at first almost the sole exponents
among English-speaking people.
By an interesting coincidence, in the same year in which Joule
announced the result of his experiments, the Physical Society of
Berlin listened to a paper almost identical with Joule’s in character
and conclusions, but prepared quite independently, by a young German
physician, Herman von Helmholtz, destined to rank at the time of his
death, in 1893, as one of the very first mathematicians of the age,
doubtless the first physiologist of his time, and as a physicist with
whom not more than one other of the nineteenth century may be compared.
Helmholtz’s paper was rejected by the editor of the leading scientific
journal of Germany, but his work was so important that he must
always share with Joule and Kelvin in the glory of this epoch-making
generalization.
Even a brief sketch of the history of the doctrine of the conservation
of energy would be incomplete if mention were not made of the work
of Tyndall. Although by original research he contributed in no small
degree to the demonstration of the theory, it is mainly through his
wonderful skill in popular presentation of the principles of physical
science that he becomes related to the great movement of the middle of
the century. His masterful exposition of the new theory in a course
of lectures at the Royal Institution, given in 1862 and published in
1863 under the title _Heat as a Mode of Motion_, was the means of
making the intelligent public acquainted with its beauty and profound
significance, and the history of science affords no more admirable
example of the possibilities and wisdom of popular scientific
writing than this book. As for the principle of the conservation of
energy itself it is not too much to say that during the last half
of the century it has been the guiding and controlling spirit of
all scientific discovery or of invention through the application of
scientific principles.
LIGHT
The revival and final establishment of the undulatory or wave theory of
light is one of the glories of the nineteenth century, and the credit
for it is due to Thomas Young, an Englishman, and Fresnel, a Frenchman.
Newton had conceived, espoused, and, owing to the great authority
of his name, almost fixed upon the learned world the corpuscular or
emission theory, which assumes that all luminous bodies emit streams of
minute corpuscles, which are reflected, refracted, and produce vision.
Many ordinary optical phenomena were explained by this hypothesis
only with great difficulty, and some were quite unexplainable. The
transmission of a disturbance or vibratory motion by means of waves, as
in the case of sound, was a well-recognized principle, and Young and
Fresnel applied it most successfully to the phenomena of light. Wave
motion, in a general way, is only possible in a sensibly continuous
medium, such as water, air, etc., and the theory that light was a
vibratory disturbance transmitted by means of waves necessitated the
assumption of the existence of such a medium throughout all space in
which light travelled. What is known as the ethereal medium, at first
a purely imaginary substance, but whose real existence is practically
established, satisfies this demand, and the hypothesis that light is
transmitted by waves in such a medium, originating in a vibratory
disturbance at the source, has been of inestimable value to physical
science.
The work of Thomas Young was done in the very first years of the
nineteenth century. He was for two years professor of Natural
Philosophy in the Royal Institution just founded by Count Rumford, and
he was the first to fill that chair. In 1801, in a paper presented to
the Royal Society, he argued in favor of the undulatory theory, showing
how the interference of waves would explain the color of thin plates.
His papers were not, for several years, received favorably, and they
were severely criticised by Lord Brougham. Augustus Fresnel followed
Young, but quite independently, about ten years later, and by him the
undulatory theory received elaborate experimental and mathematical
treatment.
In the mean time another Frenchman had made a capital discovery in
optics, which seemed at first to be quite incompatible with the wave
theory. This was the discovery of what is known as _polarization of
light_ by Malus, a French engineer, who hit upon it while investigating
double refraction of crystals, for a study of which the French
Institute had offered a prize in 1808. Malus found that when light fell
upon a surface of glass at a certain angle a portion of the reflected
light appeared to have acquired entirely new properties in regard to
further reflection, and the same was true of that part of the beam
which was transmitted through the glass. The light thus affected was
incapable of further reflection under certain conditions, and as the
beam seemed to behave differently according to how it was presented
to the reflecting surface, the term polarization was applied to the
phenomenon. It was found that the two rays into which a single beam
of light was split by a doubly refracting crystal (a phenomenon which
had long been known) were affected in this way, and that light was
polarized by refraction as well as by reflection. Malus was a believer
in the corpuscular theory of light, but it was shortly proved, first
by Thomas Young, that the phenomenon of polarization was not only
not opposed to the wave theory, but that that theory furnished a
rational explanation of it. This explanation, in brief, assumes that
ordinary light is a wave produced by a vibratory motion confined to
no particular plane, the direction of vibration being at right angles
to the direction of the wave, and in any, or, in rapid succession, in
_all_ azimuths. When light is polarized the vibratory motion in the
ether is restricted to one particular form, a line if plane polarized,
a circle or an ellipse if circularly or elliptically polarized. This
simple hypothesis has been found quite adequate, and through its
application to the various phenomena of polarization, together with
the application of Young’s theory of the interference of waves to
the production of color, the undulatory theory of light was firmly
established before the middle of the century. There were many noted
philosophers, however, who stood out long against it, notably Brewster,
the most famous English student of optics of the early part of the
century, who declared that his “chief objection to the undulatory
theory was that he could not think the Creator guilty of so clumsy a
contrivance as the filling of space with ether in order to produce
light.” In studying the nature of light it became very important to
know how fast a light wave travelled. A tolerably good measure of the
velocity of light had been made long before by means of the eclipses of
Jupiter’s moons and by observations upon the positions of the stars as
influenced by the motion of the earth in its orbit. It was found to be
approximately one hundred and eighty thousand miles per second, a speed
so great that it seemed impossible that it should ever be measured by
using only terrestrial distances.
This extremely difficult problem has been solved, however, in a most
satisfactory manner by nineteenth-century physicists. Everybody
knows that in a uniform motion velocity is equal to space or distance
divided by time. If, then, the time occupied in passing through a
given distance can be measured, the velocity is at once known. As the
velocity of light is very large, unless the distance is enormously
great, the time will be extremely small, and if moderate distances
are to be used the problem is to measure very small intervals of time
very accurately. Light will travel one mile in about the one hundred
and eighty-sixth thousandth part of a second, and if by using a mile
as the distance the velocity of light is to be determined within
one per cent., it is necessary to be able to detect differences of
time as small as about one twenty-millionth of a second. This has
been made possible by the use of two distinct methods. Foucault, on
the suggestion of Arago, used a rapidly revolving mirror, a method
introduced by Wheatstone, the English electrician, who used it in
finding the duration of an electric spark. The essential principle is
that a mirror may be made to revolve so rapidly that it will change its
position by a measurable angle, while light which has been reflected
from it passes to a somewhat distant fixed mirror and returns to the
moving reflector. In the other method a toothed wheel is revolved so
rapidly that a beam of light passing between two consecutive teeth to
a distant fixed mirror is cut off on its return to the wheel by the
tooth, which has moved forward while the light has made its journey.
This method was first used by Fizeau. In either method, if the speed
of rotation is known, the time is readily found. In point of time,
Fizeau was the first to attack the problem, which he did about 1849.
Foucault was perhaps a year later in getting results, but his method
is generally considered the best. Both methods have been used by other
experimenters, and very important improvements in Foucault’s method
were made in the United States by Michelson about 1878. Michelson’s
method increased enormously the precision of the measurements, and
it has been applied by him and by Newcomb, not only for the better
determination of the velocity of light in air, but for the solution
of many other related problems of first importance. Michelson’s final
determination of the absolute velocity of light (in the ether) is
everywhere accepted as authoritative.
Another discovery in optics entirely accomplished during the nineteenth
century and of the very first importance is generally known as
“Spectrum Analysis.” This discovery has not yet ceased to excite
admiration and even amazement, and especially among those who best
understand it. By its use hitherto unknown substances have become
known; to the physicist it is an instrument of research of the greatest
power, and perhaps more than anything else it promises to throw light
on the ultimate nature of matter; to the astronomer it has revealed
the composition, physical condition, and even the motions of the most
distant heavenly bodies, all of which the philosophy of a hundred years
ago would have pronounced absolutely impossible.
The beginning of spectrum analysis was in 1802, when an Englishman, Dr.
Wollaston, observed dark lines interrupting the solar spectrum when
produced by a good prism upon which the sunlight fell after passing
through a narrow slit. About ten years later, Fraunhofer, at Munich, a
skilful worker in glass and a keen observer, discovered in the spectrum
of light from a lamp two yellow bands, now known as the sodium, or
“D” lines. Combining the three essential elements of the modern
spectroscope, the slit, the prism, and the observing telescope, he saw
in the spectrum of sunlight “an almost countless number of dark lines.”
He was the first to use a grating for the production of the spectrum,
using at first fine wire gratings and afterwards ruling fine lines
upon glass, and with these he made the first accurate measures of the
length of light waves. He did not, however, comprehend the full import
of the problem which he thus brought to the attention of physicists.
About twenty years later Sir John Herschell studied the bright line
spectra of different substances and found that they might be used to
detect the presence of minute quantities of a substance whose spectrum
was known. Wheatstone studied the spectrum of the electric arc passing
between metals, and in 1874 Dr. J. W. Draper published a very important
paper on the spectra of solids with increasing temperature. Although
quite in the dark as to the real nature of the phenomena with which
they were dealing, these observers paved the way for the splendid work
of the two Germans, Kirchoff and Bunsen, who, about 1860, found the key
to this wonderful problem and made the science of spectrum analysis
substantially what it is to-day. Its fundamental principles may be
considered as few and comparatively simple.
Waves of light and radiant heat originate in ether disturbances
produced by molecular vibration, and have impressed upon them all of
the important qualities of that vibration. Molecules of different
substances differ in their modes of vibration, each producing a wave
peculiar to and characteristic of itself. A useful analogy may be found
in the fact that when one listens to the music of an orchestra without
seeing it it is easy to recognize the tones that come from each of
the several instruments, the characteristic vibrations of each being
impressed upon the waves in air which carry the sound to the ear. So
delicate and so sure is this impression of vibration peculiarities that
it is even possible to know the maker of a violin, for instance, by a
characteristic _timbre_ which must have its physical expression in the
sound wave. The ear, more perfect than the eye, analyzes the resultant
disturbance into its component parts so that each element may be
attributed to its proper source. Unaided, the eye cannot do this with
light, but the spectroscope separates the various modes of vibration
which make up the confused whole, so that varieties of molecular
activity are recognizable. The speed at which a source of sound is
approaching or receding from the ear can be ascertained by noting the
rise or fall in pitch due to the crowding together or stretching out
of the sound waves, and in the same way the motion of a luminous body
is known from the increase or decrease of the refrangibility of the
elements of its spectrum.
Indeed, had nineteenth-century science accomplished nothing else than
the discovery of spectrum analysis, it would have marked the beginning
of a new epoch. By this device man is put in communication with every
considerable body in the universe, including even the invisible. The
“goings on” of Sirius and Algol, of Orion and the Pleiads are reported
to him across enormous stretches of millions of millions of miles of
space, empty save of the ethereal medium itself, by this most wonderful
“wireless telegraphy.” And it is by the vibratory motion of the
invisibly small that all of this is revealed; the infinitely little has
enabled us to conquer the inconceivably big.
Many important contributions to the theory and practice of spectrum
analysis have been made since the time of Kirchoff and Bunsen, only
two or three of which can be referred to here. Instrumental methods by
which spectra are produced and examined have been greatly perfected,
and this is especially true of what is known as the “diffraction
grating” first used by Fraunhofer. A quarter of a century ago
Rutherford, of New York, constructed a ruling engine by means of which
gratings on glass and spectrum metal were ruled with a precision
greatly exceeding what had before been possible. A few years later
Rowland, of Baltimore, made a notable advance in the construction of
a screw far more perfect than any before made, producing gratings of
a fineness and regularity of spacing far ahead of any others, and
especially by the capital discovery of the concave grating, by means
of which the most beautiful results have been obtained. Very recently
Michelson, of Chicago, has invented the echelon spectroscope, which,
although greatly restricted in range, exceeds all others in power of
analysis of spectral lines. In his hands this instrument has been most
effective in the study of the influence of a strong magnetic field
upon the character of the spectrum from light produced therein, a most
interesting phenomenon first observed by Zeeman and one which promises
to reveal much concerning the relation of molecular activity to light
and to magnetic force.
The development of spectrum analysis was necessarily accompanied by a
recognition of the identity of radiant heat and light. The study of
radiant heat, which was carried on during the earlier years of the
century by Leslie, and later by Melloni and Tyndall, by what might be
called thermal methods, has been industriously pursued during the last
two decades by processes similar to those adopted for visual radiation.
The most notable contribution to this work is the invention of the
_bolometer_, by Langley, who, at Allegheny, and later at Washington,
has made exhaustive studies of solar radiation in invisible regions
of the spectrum, especially among the waves of greater length than
those of red light, where he has found absorption lines and bands
similar in character to those observed in the visible spectrum. He has
also studied the absorption of the earth’s atmosphere, the relation
of energy to visual effect, and many other interesting problems, the
solution of which was made possible by the use of the bolometer.
Mention must also be made of the invention by Michelson of an
interference comparator, by means of which linear measurements by
optical methods can be accomplished with a degree of accuracy hitherto
unheard of. With this instrument Michelson has determined the length of
the international prototype metre in terms of the wave length of the
light of a particular spectral line, thus furnishing for the first time
a satisfactory _natural_ unit of length.
By far the most important contribution to the theory of light made
during the last half of the century is that of Maxwell, who, in 1873,
announced the proposition that electro-magnetic phenomena and light
phenomena have their origin in the same medium, and that they are
identical in nature. This far-reaching conclusion has been generally
accepted and formed the basis of much of the most important work in
physical research in process of elaboration as the century closed. To
some of this reference will presently be made.
ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM
In no other department of physical science have such remarkable
developments occurred during the past century as in electricity and
magnetism, for in no other department have the practical applications
of scientific discovery been so numerous and so far reaching in their
effect upon social conditions. In a brief review of the contributions
of the nineteenth century to the evolution of the telegraph, telephone,
trolley-car, electric lighting, and other means of utilizing
electricity, it will be possible to consider only a very few of the
fundamental discoveries upon which the enormous and rather complex
superstructure of to-day rests. Happily these are few in number, and
their presentation is all the more important because of the fact that
in the popular mind they are not accorded that significance to which
they are entitled, if, indeed, they are remembered at all.
The first great step in advance of the electricity of Franklin and his
contemporaries (and his predecessors for two thousand years) was taken
very near the end of the eighteenth century, but it must be regarded
as the beginning of nineteenth-century electricity. Two Italian
philosophers, Galvani and Volta, contributed to the invention of what
is known as the galvanic or voltaic battery, the output of which was
not at first distinctly recognized as the electricity of the older
schools. By this beautiful discovery electricity was for the first time
enslaved to man, who was now able to generate and control it at times
and in such quantities as he desired. Although the voltaic battery is
now nearly obsolete as a source of electricity, its invention must
always be regarded as one of the three epoch-making events in the
history of the science during the past one hundred and twenty years.
For three-quarters of a century it was practically the only source of
electricity, and during this time and by its use nearly all of the
most important discoveries were made. Even in the first decade of the
century many brilliant results were reached. Among the most notable
were the researches of Sir Humphry Davy, who, by the use of the most
powerful battery then constructed, resolved the hitherto unyielding
alkalies, discovering sodium and potassium, and at the same time
exhibited in his lectures in the Royal Institution in London the first
electric arc light, the ancestor of the millions that now turn night
into day.
The cost of generating electricity by means of a voltaic battery is
relatively very great, and this fact stood in the way of the early
development of its applications, although their feasibility was
perfectly well understood. Without any other important invention or
discovery than that of the voltaic battery much would have been
possible, including both electric lighting and the electric telegraph.
Indeed, electric telegraphy had long been a _possibility_, even before
the time of Galvani and Volta, but its actual construction and use was
almost necessarily postponed until a second capital discovery came to
remove most of the difficulties.
This was the discovery of a relation between electricity and magnetism,
the existence of which had long been suspected and earnestly sought.
A Danish professor, Hans Christian Oersted, was fortunate in hitting
upon an experiment which demonstrated this relation and opened up an
entirely new field of investigation and invention. What Oersted found
was that when a conductor, as a copper wire, carrying an electric
current, was brought near a freely suspended magnet, like a compass
needle, the latter would take up a definite position with reference
to the current. Thus an electric current moved a magnet, acted like a
magnet in producing a “magnetic field.” The subject was quickly taken
up by almost every physicist in Europe and America. Arago found that
iron filings would cling to a wire through which a current was passing,
and he was able to magnetize steel needles by means of the current.
Ampère, another French physicist, studied Oersted’s wonderful discovery
both experimentally and mathematically, and in an incredibly short time
so developed it as to deserve the title of creator of the science of
electro-dynamics.
The first to make what is known as an electro-magnet was an Englishman
named Sturgeon, who used a bar of soft iron bent in a horseshoe form
(as had long been common in making permanent steel magnets), and,
after varnishing the iron for insulation, a single coil of copper
wire was wrapped about it, through which the current from a battery
was passed. There were thus two ways of producing visible motion by
means of an electric current: that of Oersted’s simple experiment,
in which a suspended magnetic needle was deflected by a current, and
that made possible by the production, at will, of an electro-magnet.
The application of both of these ideas to the construction of an
electric telegraph was quickly attempted, and two different systems of
telegraphy grew out of them. One, depending on Oersted’s experiment,
was developed in England first and afterwards in Europe; the other,
that involving the use of signals produced by an electric magnet, was
developed in America, and was generally known as the American method.
It has long ago superseded the first method in actual practice. Its
possibility depended on perfecting the electro-magnet and especially
on an understanding of the principles on which that perfecting
depended. For the complete and satisfactory solution of this problem
we are indebted to the most famous student of electricity America has
produced during the century, Joseph Henry. In 1829, while a teacher in
the academy at Albany, New York, Henry exhibited an electro-magnet of
enormously greater power than any before made, involving all of the
essential features of the magnet of to-day. The wire was insulated
by silk wrapping, and many coils were placed upon the iron core, the
intensity of magnetization being thus multiplied. Henry studied, also,
the best form and arrangement of the battery under varying conditions
of the conductor. An electro-magnetic telegraph had been declared
impossible in 1825, by Barlow, an Englishman, who pointed out the
apparently fatal fact that the resistance offered to the current was
proportional to the length of the conducting wire and that the strength
of the current would be thus so much reduced for even short distances
as to become too feeble to be detected. Henry showed that what is known
as an “intensity battery” would overcome this difficulty, discovering
experimentally and independently the beautifully simple law showing
the relation of current to electro-motive force which Ohm had announced
in 1827. He also invented the principle of the relay, by which the
action of a very feeble current controls the operation of a more
powerful local system. It will thus be seen that the essential features
of the so-called American system of telegraphy are to be credited to
Henry, who had a working line in his laboratory as early as 1832.
Morse made use of the scientific discoveries and inventions of Henry,
and by his indefatigable labors and persistent faith the commercial
value of the enterprise was really established. In the mean time
considerable progress was made in Europe. Baron Schilling, a Russian
Councillor of State, devised and exhibited a needle telegraph. The
two illustrious German physicists, Gauss and Weber, established a
successfully working line two or three miles long in 1833, and this
system was commercially developed by Steinheil in 1837. In England, Sir
Charles Wheatstone made many important contributions, although using
the needle system, which was afterwards abandoned. Before the middle of
the century the commercial success of the electro-magnetic telegraph
was assured, and in the matter of the transmission of messages distance
was practically annihilated.
Oersted, Arago, Ampère, Sturgeon, and Henry had made it possible to
convert electricity into mechanical energy. Motors of various types
had been invented, and the possibility of using the new source of
power for running machinery, cars, boats, etc., was fully recognized.
Several attempts had been made to do these things, but the great
cost of producing the current by means of a battery stood in the way
of success. Another epoch-making discovery was necessary, namely, a
method of reversing the process and converting mechanical energy
into electricity. This was supplied by the genius of Michael Faraday,
who had succeeded Davy in the Royal Institution at London. In 1831
Faraday discovered _induction_, the key to the modern development of
electricity. He showed that while Oersted had proved that a current of
electricity would generate a magnetic field and set a magnet in motion,
this process was reversible. A magnet set in motion in a magnetic
field by a steam-engine or any other source of power would produce,
in a conductor properly arranged, a current of electricity, and thus
the dynamo came into existence. In this brilliant investigation he was
almost anticipated by Henry, who was working at Albany along the same
lines, but under much less favorable conditions. Indeed, in several of
the most important points, the American actually did anticipate the
Englishman. Nearly half a century elapsed before this most important
discovery was sufficiently developed to become commercially valuable,
and it is impossible in this place to trace the steps by which, during
the last quarter of a century, the production and utilization of
electricity as existing to-day was accomplished, as a result of which
the century closed, as one might say, in a blaze of light; and it is
unnecessary, because most people have witnessed the spread of the fire
which Faraday and Henry kindled.
Faraday’s discovery of induction furnished the basis of that marvellous
improvement upon the telegraph by which actual speech is transmitted
over hundreds and even thousands of miles. In connection with the
invention of the telephone the names of Philip Reiss, Graham Bell,
Elisha Gray, and Dolbear will always be mentioned, each of whom,
doubtless independently, hit upon a way of accomplishing the result
with more or less success. To Bell, however, belongs the honor of
having first practically solved the problem and of devising a system
which, with numerous modifications and improvements, has come into
extensive use in all parts of the world. No other application of
electricity has come into such universal use, and none has contributed
more to the comfort of life.
While it is doubtless true that since Faraday’s time no discovery
comparable with his in real importance has been made, the past
twenty-five years have not lacked in results of scientific research,
some of which may, in the not distant future, eclipse even that in the
value of their practical applications. Among these must be ranked Clerk
Maxwell’s theory of electric waves and its beautiful verification in
1888 by the young German physicist, Hertz. This brilliant student of
electricity succeeded in actually producing, detecting, and controlling
these waves, and out of this discovery has come the “wireless
telegraphy” which has been so rapidly developed within the last few
years. Many other discoveries in electricity of great scientific
interest and practical promise have been recorded in the closing years
of the century, but the necessary limits of this article forbid their
consideration.
No account of the progress of physical science during the nineteenth
century would be even approximately complete without mention of other
investigations of profound significance. For instance, the study of
the phenomena of sound has yielded results of great scientific and
some practical value. The application of the theory of interference
by Thomas Young; the publication of Helmholtz’s great work, the
_Tonempfindungen_, in which his theory of harmony was first fully
presented; the publication of Lord Rayleigh’s treatise; the invention
and construction by König of acoustic apparatus, the best example
yet furnished of scientific handicraft; all of these mark important
advances, not only in acoustics but in general physics as well. The
phonautograph of Scott and König, by which a graphic record of the
vibrations of the vocal chords was made possible, was ingeniously
converted by Edison into a speech recording and reproducing machine,
the phonograph, by which the most marvellous results are accomplished
in the simplest possible manner.
The century is also to be credited with the discovery and development
of the art of photography, which, although not of the first importance,
has contributed much to the pleasure of life, and as an aid to
scientific investigation has become quite indispensable.
The wonderfully beautiful experiments of Sir William Crookes, on the
passage of an electric discharge through a high vacuum, and other
phenomena connected with what has been called “radiant matter,” begun
about a quarter of a century ago and continued by him and others up to
the present time, laid the foundation for the brilliant work of Röntgen
in the discovery and study of the so-called “X”-rays, the real nature
of which is not yet understood. Their further investigation by J. J.
Thomson, Becquerel, and others, seems to have revealed new forms and
phases of radiation, a fuller knowledge of which is likely to throw
much light on obscure problems relating to the nature of matter.
Concerning the “Nature of Matter,” the ablest physicists of the century
have thought and written much, and doubtless our present knowledge
of the subject is much more nearly the truth than that of a hundred
years ago. The molecular theory of gases has met with such complete
experimental verification, and is so in accord with all observed
phenomena, that it must be accepted as essentially correct. As to
the ultimate nature of what is called matter, as distinguished from
the ethereal medium, what is known as the “vortex theory of atoms”
has received the most consideration. This theory was developed by
Lord Kelvin out of Helmholtz’s mathematical demonstration of the
indestructibility of a vortex ring when once formed in a medium
possessing the properties which are generally attributed to the ether.
Perhaps the most remarkable as well as the most promising fact relating
to physical science at the close of the nineteenth century is the
great and rapidly increasing number of well-organized and splendidly
equipped laboratories in which original research is systematically
planned and carried out. When one reflects that for the most part
during the century just ended the advance of science was more or less
of the nature of a guerrilla warfare against ignorance, it seems safe
to predict for that just beginning victories more glorious than any yet
won.
T. C. MENDENHALL.
WAR
It is doubtful how far, even if as civilians we get over our natural
dislike of talking of military change as “progress,” there has been any
considerable advance in the larger aspects of military science within
the century. The genius of Bonaparte, working upon the foundations laid
by Frederick the Great, established a century ago principles which are
essentially applicable to the military matters of the present day; and
although the scientific developments of artillery and musketry have
affected the dispositions of battle-fields, the essential principles of
the art of preparation for war and of strategy stand where they stood
before.
Scharnhorst was the Prussian officer who began to reduce the
Napoleonic military system to rules applicable to the use of German
armies. Under Bonaparte the whole management of the army was too
often concentrated in the hands of the man of genius, and the actual
method of Napoleon had the defect that, failing the man of genius
at the head of the army, it broke down. The main change made by the
Germans, who followed Scharnhorst, in the course of the century has
been to codify the Napoleonic system so that it was possible to more
generally decentralize in practice without impairing its essence. They
have also established a division of its supply department (under a
Minister of War) from the “brain of the army,” as Mr. Spenser Wilkinson
has well called it, which manages the preparation for the strategy
of war and the strategy itself. These so-called Prussian principles
of decentralization and “initiative” are, however, not new and not
Prussian, and may be discovered in the conversations of Napoleon
Bonaparte. The French in 1870 had forgotten his teaching, and the
Germans had retained it. It is, nevertheless, the case that the number
of men placed in the field by the military powers having increased,
the intelligent initiative of corps commanders and even of generals
commanding divisions has become the more essential. It is impossible
that the great general staff can give orders in advance which will
cover the responsibility of all the inferior generals, and brains
have to be added in all ranks to obedience. The commander-in-chief in
the field cannot with advantage drown himself in details, and he can
only provide in his orders an outline sketch which his subordinates
in various parts of the field of operations have to fill in. The
“initiative of subordinates” is but the natural division of labor.
If I, a civilian student of military politics, rather than a military
expert, have been called upon to write upon the military progress of
the century, it must be because of a desire to bring largely into the
account the changes in military organization which on the continent
of Europe have made it permanently national, and which in the United
States made it temporarily national during the Civil War, and would
make it so again in the event of any fresh struggle on a great scale in
which the North American continent might become involved.
Although the “armed nation” has replaced in France, Germany,
Switzerland, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Roumania, and Bulgaria the smaller
professional armies of the eighteenth century, the popular belief that
the numerical strength of field armies has enormously increased is not
so completely well founded as at first sight might be supposed. It is
true that each nation can put into the entire field of warfare larger
numbers than that nation could put into the field a century ago.
But it is still not beyond the bounds of possibility that in certain
cases small armies may produce results as remarkable as those which
attended British operations in the Peninsula in the early part of the
nineteenth century, and, on the other hand, although there will, upon
the whole, in future continental wars, be larger armies in the field,
no one general is likely personally to handle or to place upon a field
of battle a larger army than that with which Napoleon traversed Europe
before he invaded Russia.
The principles of pure military science as set forth in books have
not been greatly changed during the nineteenth century. The Prussian
Clausewitz only explained for us the doctrines of Bonaparte; and the
latest writers—such as the Frenchmen Derrécagaix and Lewal—only
continue Clausewitz. The theory of the armed nation has received
extension, but, after all, the Prussian system in its essentials
dates from Jena, and the steps by which it has produced the admirable
existing armies of France, Austria, and Roumania have been but slow.
The United States stand apart. Their resources are so fabulously great
that they and they alone are able to wait for war before making war
preparations. No power will attack the United States. All powers will
submit to many things and yield many strong points rather than fight
the United States. The only territorial neighbors of the republic
are not only not in a position to enter into military rivalry with
her on the American continent, but are not advancing their military
establishments with the growth of their or of her population. They are
of themselves not only unable to attack, but equally unable in the long
run effectively to resist her.
The whole question, then, unfortunately for us Europeans, is a
European question, and I need make but little reference to happier
lands across the greater seas.
In Europe the United Kingdom stands absolutely apart. The existence of
the British Empire depends less upon our armies than on our fleets.
India is garrisoned by a small but costly army, sufficient for present
needs, but insufficient to meet their probable growth. The home army,
kept mainly in England and Ireland (and in Ireland now only because
life is cheap in Ireland and the country healthy and well fitted for
the drill and discipline of troops), has been chiefly a nursery for the
white army in India, and will be for that in South Africa and in India.
The expeditions which the country is obliged to send from time to time
across the seas have but a domestic interest, and are unimportant when
viewed from a world-wide military stand-point. In the event of war the
attention of the country would be concentrated upon her fleets, with a
view to retain that command of the sea without which her old-fashioned
army would be useless.
Belgium has an old-fashioned army of another type. A small force of
conscripts is “drawn” and the men are allowed to find substitutes for
money. But Belgium and the other smaller Powers, except Switzerland,
Roumania, and Bulgaria, may be neglected in our survey. Switzerland has
developed an excellent army of a special local type, a cheap but highly
efficient militia, the most interesting point about which is that,
while field artillery is supposed to be difficult of creation and only
to be obtained upon a costly and regular system, Switzerland produces
an excellent field artillery upon a militia footing. The garrison
artillery militia of Great Britain have longer training than the field
artillery of the Swiss Federation, but the results of the training
are very different. Similarly, while cavalry is supposed to be in the
same position as artillery in these matters, Hungary produces a good
cavalry upon a militia system. It is, however, to the native army in
India that we have to turn if we want to see what long service cavalry
in past centuries used to be, for in these days of shorter service
cavalry at least has suffered a decline, and, so far from cavalry, on
the whole, presenting us with a picture of military progress in the
century, the cavalry of the present day is not to be compared with the
cavalry of the past. Roumania and Bulgaria, although small countries,
have remarkable armies of the most modern type, of great strength
when considered proportionately to their populations; but these need
not come under our examination, because substantially they are on the
Prussian plan.
Russia differs from Germany, France, and Austria in having an immense
peace army. Her peace army is indeed as large as that of the whole
of the Triple Alliance, and the enormous distances of Russia and the
difficulties of mobilization and concentration force her into the
retention and development of a system which is now peculiar to herself.
The armies of Russia resemble more closely (although on a far larger
scale) the old armies of the time before the changes which followed
1866 than the French, German, and Austrian armies of to-day. Italy is
decreasing her army, and has been driven by her financial straits to
completely spoil a system which was never good except on paper. It is
doubtful whether now in a sudden war the Italians could put into the
field any thoroughly good troops, except their Alpine battalions, which
are equal to those of the French. The Austrian system does not differ
sufficiently from those of Germany and of France to be worthy special
note, although it may be said in passing that the Austrian army is now
considered by competent observers to be excellent. We may take as our
type of the armies of to-day those of Germany and of France. These
armies are also normal as regards their cost. Great Britain having no
conscription, and being in the habit of paying dearly for all services,
is extravagant in her military expenditure for the results obtained.
Switzerland and Russia, with their different systems, and for different
reasons, obtain their armies very cheaply; and if we wish to know the
cost of the modern military system it is to Germany and to France that
we should turn.
Those who would study the French or German army for themselves will
find a large literature on the subject. The principles which govern
the establishment of an armed nation upon the modern Prussian scale,
improved after the experiences of 1866 and again after those of 1870,
are explained in the work of Von der Goltz, _The Nation in Arms_. Those
who would follow these principles into their detailed application, and
see how the armies are divided between, and nourished and supplied from
the military districts of one of the great countries, will find the
facts set forth in such publications as the illustrated _Annual of the
French Army_, published each year by Plon, Nourrit, et Cie., or in the
official handbooks published by the Librairie Militaire Baudoin.
In the time of Bonaparte and even in the time of the Second Empire in
France army corps were of varying strength, and there was no certain
knowledge on the part of administrators less admirable than the first
Napoleon himself of the exact numbers of men who could be placed in
the field. In 1870 Louis Napoleon was wholly misinformed as to his
own strength and as to that of his opponents, which were, however,
accurately known to Von Moltke. In these days such confusions and
difficulties are impossible. The army corps of the great military
powers are of equal strength and would be equally reinforced in the
extraordinarily rapid mobilization which would immediately precede and
immediately follow a declaration of war. The chief changes in the
century have been a greater exactitude in these respects, a general
increase of numbers (especially a great increase in the strength of
field artillery), and in these last years a grouping of the army corps
into armies, which exist in Germany, France, and Russia even in time of
peace, with all their generals and staffs named ready for war. In each
of the great military countries the army is guided by the counsel of a
general staff. Around the chief of the staff and the Minister of War
are the “generals of armies,” and in France a potential generalissimo
(who on the outbreak of war would often be superseded by another
general in the actual command). In the case of Germany the command
would now be exercised by the young Emperor. In the case of France it
would be exercised by the generalissimo, with the chief of the staff
as his “Berthier” or major-general. Enormously important duties in the
case of armies so unwieldy as the entire forces of the first line and
of the second line in Germany or France and of the first line in Russia
would be exercised by the “generals of armies.” These generals in time
of peace are called “inspectors of armies” in France, Germany, and
Austria, and they inspect groups of army corps which would be united
in war to form the armies which these generals would actually command.
These generals also form the council of war or principal promotion
board and committee of advice for the generalissimo and chief of the
staff. In Germany and in Austria-Hungary the German Emperor and the
Emperor-King respectively are virtual general inspectors-in-chief of
the whole army, but in France and in Russia there is less unity of
command. The Minister of War in Russia, in Germany, and in France is
intended to be at the head of the supplies of the army in time of war,
directing the administration from the capital, and not taking his place
in the field.
The Prussian system, as far as the men are concerned, was adopted
after the disasters of Prussia early in the century, in order to pass
great numbers of men through the ranks without attracting attention by
keeping up a large peace army. The system is now maintained by Germany,
Austria, and France for a different reason. Such powers desire to
have an enormous force for war, but, for budgetary reasons, to keep
with the flag in time of peace the smallest force which is consistent
with training the men sufficiently to enable them upon mobilization
to be brought back to their regiments as real soldiers. It is these
considerations which have induced the younger and more thoughtful of
the Prussian generals to force on Germany a reduction of the period
of infantry service to two years. The army in time of peace becomes
a mere training-school for war, and the service is made as short as
possible, given the necessity of turning out a man who for some years
will continue to have the traditions of a soldier. It is a question
whether something has not been sacrificed, in France, at all events,
to uniformity. A longer period of training is undoubtedly necessary
to make an efficient cavalry soldier than is necessary to make an
efficient infantry private; and a man who has served about two and a
half years only in a cavalry regiment cannot in the majority of cases
be brought back into the cavalry after he has returned to civil life.
Cavalry, in the modern armies, is likely to be a diminishing force as
war goes on. The armies will enter upon war with a number of infantry
which can be kept up, the losses of war being supplied by reserve men
as good as the men of the first line; but each army will enter upon
war with a force of cavalry which will be rapidly destroyed if it is
much used, and which will not be replaced in the same manner. The
reserve cavalry of which the French press boasts is a paper force,
and the pretended mobilization of two of its regiments a farce. The
French would take the field with the cavalry of the first line only,
seventy-nine regiments of five hundred horses (all over six years old),
or less than half the eighty-four thousand cavalry with which Napoleon
marched in 1812. The same thing might possibly be said of artillery as
is said of cavalry but for the fact that Switzerland tells a different
story as to the possibility of rapidly training artillerymen with a
considerable measure of success. The French improvised artillery of the
latter part of the war of 1870 were also a creditable force, while it
was discovered to be impossible to create a cavalry.
The efficiency of the reserves in France, Germany, and Austria is
tested by the calling out of large portions of them every year for
training, and they are found, as far as the infantry go, thoroughly
competent for the work of war. The difficulties as regards cavalry are
so obvious that it is becoming more and more recognized by Germany
and by France that the cavalry will have to take the field as they
stand in peace, and that their reserve men will have to be kept back
with a view to the selection among them of those who are fit to serve
as cavalry, and the relegation of the greater number to the train
and other services where ability to ride and manage horses is more
necessary than the smartness of a good cavalryman. France and Germany
nominally look forward to the creation of two kinds of armies in time
of war, one of the first line to take the field at once, and the other
to guard the communications and garrison and support the fortresses,
but in fact it is the intention of these powers to divide their armies
into three—a field army of the first line, a field army of the second
line, out of which fresh army corps will at once be created on the
outbreak of war, and, thirdly, a territorial army for communications
and for fortress purposes and as a last reserve. It is a portion of the
French and German system that each army corps of the first line—and
the same would be the case in war with the second line corps—has its
separate organization of ammunition train and baggage train, and draws
as largely as possible its supplies from its own territorial district.
The peace strength of the great modern armies is for France and Germany
about five hundred thousand men each, and the war strength between four
million and five million men each. The peace strength of Russia is now
over nine hundred thousand men. Of the war armies the training is not
uniformly complete, but there are in Germany, France, Austria, and
Roumania sufficient reserves of clothing and rifles to equip the war
armies of those powers for the field.
The cost of the system of a modern army is very much less than that
of the old-fashioned armies. The United Kingdom spent till lately
(including loan money) about eighteen million pounds sterling upon
her army, India rarely less than fourteen million pounds sterling and
an average of fifteen million pounds, and the British Empire, outside
the United Kingdom and India, two million pounds, or an average of
thirty-five million pounds sterling in all upon land forces. The
expenditure of the United Kingdom upon land forces has been permanently
increased to an enormous extent by the South African war and cannot now
be estimated. The expenditure of France and Germany upon land forces is
greatly less; and of Russia, large as is her peace army, less again.
But France and Germany in the event of war can immediately each of them
place millions of armed men in the field in proper army formation and
with adequate command, whereas the United Kingdom can place a doubtful
three corps in the field in India with great difficulty, and, in the
true sense of the word, no organized force at all at home without
an incredible amount of reorganization and waste of time after the
declaration of war. It is contended by the authorities responsible
for the British army that two army corps could be placed in the field
at home, and elaborate paper arrangements exist for this purpose; but
the facts are as I state them, and not as they are professed to be.
It is pretended that three corps of regulars were despatched to South
Africa. But the cavalry and artillery were, in fact, created by lavish
expenditure a long time after the war had begun and after disasters
caused by their non-existence.
Centralized as is the administrative system of France and Germany
in everything except war, the necessities of modern warfare have
forced upon the governments of those countries a large amount of
decentralization as concerns military matters, and the less efficient
military machines of the United Kingdom and of Russia are far more
centralized than are the more efficient machines of Germany and of
France. The army corps districts have in the latter countries so much
autonomy as to recall to the political student the federal organization
of the United States rather than the government of a highly centralized
modern power. As soon, however, as war breaks out, the military states
of time of peace would be grouped, and the four or five groups known
as “armies,” also, of course, theoretically, brought together under
the directing eye of the generalissimo. In the case, at all events, of
Germany, unity of direction is perfectly combined with decentralization
and individual initiative.
The mode in which a modern army on the anticipation of war prepares
itself for the field is extraordinarily rapid in point of time as
compared with the mode found necessary in the time of Napoleon
Bonaparte; and it is this rapidity of mobilization and concentration
which strikes the observer as the greatest change or progress of the
century in connection with armies. But it is a mere consequence of
railroads and telegraphs, and is only the application to military
purposes of those increased facilities of locomotion which have
played so great a part in the progress of the century. Mobilization
is, of course, the union at points fixed beforehand of the men of the
reserves who bring the army up to its war footing, and the clothing and
equipment of these men, and the distribution to the mobilized regiments
of their full materials of war. The cavalry and horse artillery kept
upon the frontier are now in a condition of permanent readiness in
the principal military countries, as they would be used to cover the
mobilization of the remainder of the army. The moment mobilization is
accomplished concentration takes place—on the frontier in the case of
the principal powers. Near the line of concentration are forts, which
play a greater part in the French scheme of defence than they do in
the German. The French in the days of their weakness after 1870 both
constructed a line of intrenched camps and built a kind of wall of
China along the most exposed portion of their eastern frontier; whereas
the Germans are prepared to rely upon their field armies, supported by
a few immense fortresses, such as those (on their western frontier) of
Metz and Strasburg. The French keep in front of their fortresses at
Nancy a strong division, which is virtually always on a war footing,
and both in France and Germany the frontier corps are at a higher peace
strength than those of the interior, and are meant to take the field
at once so as to help the cavalry and horse artillery to protect the
mobilization and concentration of the remainder, and, if possible, to
disturb the mobilization and concentration of the foe. Those who would
study modern armies for themselves should visit Nancy and Metz, but
should not neglect the Swiss annual manœuvres.
The work of the recruit of Germany and of France, during his two years’
or nearly three years’ training as the case may be, is as hard as any
human work; and the populations of the continental countries submit,
not on the whole unwillingly, from patriotic motives, to a slavery
of which the more fortunate inhabitants of the United Kingdom and of
the United States have no conception. The British or the Belgian paid
recruit would mutiny if forced to work as works the virtually unpaid
and ill-fed recruit of Russia, Germany, Austria, and France. The
enormous loss to many industries which is caused by the withdrawal of
the men at the age of twenty, just when they are most apt to become
skilled workmen, is in the opinion of some Germans compensated for by
the habit of discipline and the moral tone of stiffness and endurance
which is communicated to the soldier for the rest of his life. This is
perhaps more true of the German character than it is of the inhabitants
of the other countries; and in France, at least, the soldier training
of the entire population is a heavy drawback to industrial and
to intellectual life. There are, however, as will be seen in the
concluding passage of this article, other considerations to be taken
into account, some of which tell the other way.
The one successful exception to the prevailing military system of the
day is to be found in Switzerland, which has a very cheap army of the
militia type, but one which is, nevertheless, pronounced efficient by
the best judges. The mobilization of Switzerland in 1870 was more rapid
than that of either Germany or France, and, great as are the strides
that both France and Germany have made in rapidity of organization
and as regards numbers since 1870, the Swiss also have reorganized
their mobilization system since that time, and are still able, at a
much less proportional cost, to place in the field at least as large a
proportional force as Germany, and this force believed to be efficient,
although not largely provided with cavalry.
The greatest change in the battle-fields of the future, as compared
with those of a few years ago, will be found in the development and
increased strength of the artillery. A modern army, when it takes up a
position, has miles of front almost entirely occupied with guns, and
the guns have to fire over the infantry, because there is no room for
such numbers of guns to be used in any other way. The attacking side
(if both, indeed, in one form or another, do not attempt attack) will
be chiefly occupied in obtaining positions on which to place its guns,
and the repeating-rifle itself, deadly as is its fire, cannot contend
at ranges over a thousand yards, unless the riflemen are heavily
intrenched, with the improved shrapnel fire of modern guns. The early
engagements of a war will, indeed, be engagements of cavalry massed
upon the frontier on the second day of mobilization, so rapid will the
opening of war in the future be. This cavalry will be accompanied by
horse artillery and followed by light infantry, constantly practised in
rapid marching in time of peace, or by mounted infantry. But the great
battle-fields of the later weeks will be battle-fields, above all, of
artillery. The numbers engaged will be so great that the heaviest of
all the responsibilities of the generals will be the feeding of their
troops during the battles prolonged during several days, which will
probably occur, and it is doubtful how far the old generals (often
grown unwieldy in time of peace) will be able to stand the daily
and nightly strain of war. Jomini has said that when both sides are
equally strong in numbers, in courage, and in many other elements of
force, the great tragedy of Borodino is the typical battle. Lewal
has pointed out that in the battles of the future such equality must
be expected: “The battle will begin on the outbreak of war in the
operations of the frontier regiments. The great masses as they come
to the field will pour into a fight already raging. The battle will
be immense and prolonged.” Promotion will probably be rapid among the
generals, owing to incompetence and retirement, and certainly among
other officers owing to their exposure in these days of smokeless
powder, when good shots can pick off officers in a manner unknown in
wars which have hitherto occurred. Whether it will be possible to get
armies to advance under heavy fire after the officers have been killed
is doubtful, when we remember that modern armies consist of the whole
population, cowards and brave men alike, and that regimental cohesion
is weakened by the sudden infusion of an overwhelming proportion of
reserve men at the last moment. On the other hand, in the German army
the reserve men will be fewer in the first line than in the French, and
the regimental system more available in the field, while on the French
side the greater military aptitude of the French race may perhaps be
counted upon to remedy the comparative defect. The Prussians make up
for the inferior military aptitude of the German people by patriotism,
discipline, and the conferring of honor and of civil employment, in
after life, on all who do their duty in war. They also provide more
effectively than do the French against incapacity in high place. Above
all, however, we should attach importance to the wisdom of successive
Kings of Prussia in treating the Prussian army as an almost sacred
institution, and in constantly working in time of peace to make it and
keep it a perfect instrument of war.
The weakest point, relatively speaking, in the French organization,
and the strongest point, relatively speaking, in the German, is the
officering of the second and third line. The one-year-volunteer system
gives the Germans excellent “territorial” officers, while the French
have been forced virtually to abolish it as impossible of successful
application in a country so jealous of privilege as is modern France.
The territorial infantry regiments of France would be excellent for
the defence of fortresses, but would for field purposes be inferior
to that part of the Prussian landwehr which would remain over after
the completion of the reserve corps. The reserve cavalry regiments of
France have been created in order to provide promotion and sinecure
appointments, and would not produce a cavalry fit for true cavalry
service in the field. It would carry us beyond the proper limits of
this article to explain how it is that the French could create a field
artillery of the second line in time of war which would probably be
superior to that of Germany. This forms a set-off against some other
inferiority of the French.
The newest point in the development of modern armies is the recent
separation in the German army of the cavalry intended for patrol duties
from the cavalry intended for fighting in the field. We have had to
face the same problem in South Africa, but this condition of our war
was peculiar.
It has been said that the history of warfare is the history of the
struggle among weapons, and that each change in tactics and even in
strategy has come from scientific change affecting weapons. In the
century we have seen the change from the smooth-bore to the rifle
and from the ordinary to the repeating rifle. We have seen the
modifications of artillery, which are beginning to give an application
of the quick-firing principle to field artillery, and the use of high
explosive shells, likely to affect by their explosion even those who
are near the bursting shell and who are not struck by its fragments.
Smokeless powder has altered the look of battles and has reduced their
noise. It provides excuse for the incompetent. It would be easy,
however, to exaggerate the importance of these changes as regards
tactics, and still more with regard to strategy, while with tactics we
are not here concerned. The great continental military nations have
hitherto not allowed themselves to be much affected by the changes in
the weapons, and many of the modern fads which are adopted in small
armies are condemned by the leaders of these great forces. The British
machine guns, for example, like British mounted infantry, are generally
regarded on the continent as a fancy of our own. All nations have their
military fads, except, perhaps, the severely practical Germans. Russia
has its dragoon organization, from which it is receding; America has
her dynamite gun; the French have their submarine torpedo-boats. Our
machine guns are not thought much more of by most Prussians than the
steam-gun of 1844, ridiculed by Dickens in _Martin Chuzzlewit_. If
great change was to have been made in the art of war by modern weapons,
one would have thought that the first things to disappear would be all
vestige of protective armor and the use of cavalry in the field. Yet
protective armor has been recently restored to as large a proportion
of many armies as used it in the wars of the beginning of the century,
and the use of cavalry in the field is defended as still possible by
all the highest authorities on the continent. My own opinion on such
matters is that of a layman and should be worthless, but it agrees with
that of several distinguished military writers. I confess that I doubt
whether in future wars between good armies, such as those of France and
Germany, it will be possible to employ cavalry on the field of battle,
and I go so far as to think that the direct offensive, still believed
in by the Prussians, will be found to have become too costly to be
possible. Our South African experience is not, however, regarded by
continental authorities as conclusive.
The author of _Ironclads in Action_, Mr. Wilson, who has made a very
thorough study of the future of naval war, has pointed out with great
force the most striking difficulties of war in the future as caused by
the enormous concentration of forces in a particular tract of country.
The result of that concentration must be great difficulties about
supply, prolonged battles of an indecisive kind leading to exposure,
absence of sleep, and to conditions which would form the severest
strain for professional men of war, while those who will now be subject
to them will be the ordinary population, not very specially warriors,
except so far as patriotism may in some cases make up as regards
courage and endurance for absence of military tradition. The vast
number of wounded will be exposed for longer periods than was the case
in many of the earlier wars; but when we remember Leipsic, and Dresden,
and the retreat from Moscow, it is again easy to see that the change
is rather in the direction of generalization of conditions, which
were formerly exceptional, than a change to conditions wholly without
precedent.
I have all through this article written of Germany and France as the
modern military countries to be taken as a standard in all comparisons.
The French have imitated the Germans very closely since the war of
1870. But, although imitation is generally feeble, it must always be
borne in mind that the French people have greater military aptitude
than the German, and that unless beaten at the beginning of a war they
are always in the highest degree formidable. The perfection of system
is to be found in Germany, and the peculiarities of the German system
are the combination of enlightened patriotism in all its individuality
with iron discipline. The system is so strong that unless well managed
it would crush out individual responsibility; but the system itself
encourages this individual responsibility all down the gradations of
the army to the humblest non-commissioned officer and even to the
detached private. The universality of promotion by a certain high
standard of merit and the absence of jobbery are more thoroughly
obtained in Germany than in any other army, and Lord Wolseley’s
criticisms on the 1898 manœuvres of our own army, criticisms renewed in
1900, in which he told us that no one had done well in the field, and
that this proved that no one could have done his duty during the past
year, would be impossible in Germany, and must have shocked military
opinion throughout that country.
It is not unusual to assume that the enormous military establishments
of the continent of Europe are an almost unmixed evil. But this may
perhaps be disputed on two grounds. In some cases, such as that of
Italy, the army acts as a kind of rough national university in which
the varied life of districts often discordant is fused into a patriotic
whole, dialects are forgotten, and a common language learned. In
the case of France the new military system is a powerful engine of
democracy. There is a French prince (not of the blood) serving at
this moment in a squad of which the corporal is a young peasant from
the same department. A few years ago I found the Duc de Luynes, who
is also Duc de Chaulnes and Duc de Chevreuse, the owner of Dampierre,
the personal friend of kings, serving, by his own wish, for, as the
eldest son of a widow, he was exempt, as a private of dragoons, and
respectfully saluting young officers, some of whom were his own
tenants. The modern military system of the continent, in the case of
France and Germany at least, may also, I think, be shown to have told
in favor of peace. It is possible for us to occasionally demand a war
with the greater freedom, because we do not as a rule know what war
means. Those of us who have seen something of it with our own eyes are
a very small minority. But every inhabitant of France and Germany has
the reality of war brought home to him with the knowledge that those
of his own kin would have to furnish their tribute of “cannon flesh”
(as the French and Germans call it) at the outbreak of any war; and the
influence of the whole of the women of both countries is powerfully
exerted in consequence upon the side of peace.
CHARLES W. DILKE.
NAVAL SHIPS
In the conditions of naval warfare the century now closed has seen a
revolution unparalleled in the rapidity of the transition and equalled
in degree only by the changes which followed the general introduction
of cannon and the abandonment of oars in favor of sails for the
propulsion of ships of war. The latter step was consequent, ultimately,
upon the discovery of the New World and of the sea-passage to India by
the Cape of Good Hope. The voyage to those distant regions was too long
and the remoteness from ports of refuge too great for rowing galleys, a
class of vessels whose construction unfitted them for developing great
size and for contending with heavy weather. The change of motive power
made possible and entailed a different disposition of the fighting
power, the main battery weight of ships being transferred from the bows
and sterns—end-on fire—to the broadsides. The combination of these
two new factors caused ships and fleets necessarily to be fought in a
different manner from formerly—entailed, to use the technical word,
new tactics.
The innovations thus briefly mentioned, though equally radical, were
much more gradual in their progress than those witnessed by our
generation. The latter have occurred not merely within the lifetime but
within the memory of many who are still among us. They are embraced,
easily and entirely, within the reign of Queen Victoria. It has been
said, plausibly, that if a naval officer who died half a century ago
could revisit the earth he would find himself more at home in the ships
of Elizabeth than in those of her present successor. No such sudden
and sharp contrast troubled the seamen of the earlier era. It is true
and interesting to note that the battle of Lepanto in 1573, although a
few vessels of broadside type therein exercised a decisive influence,
was fought chiefly by galleys, while in the contest with the Spanish
Armada in the English Channel fifteen years later sailing ships played
the leading part; but while the fact gives a valuable assistance to
precision of memory by fixing an approximate date when the one type was
definitely supplanted by the other, it remains that the turning-point
thus indicated was reached long after cannon and sails first were
used afloat, and that another century elapsed before the galley was
definitively abandoned.
BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF THE TRANSITION
A few dates will illustrate the swiftness of our recent
transformations. In 1838, when the French navy reduced San Juan de
Ulloa, the principal defence of Vera Cruz, and in 1840, in the British
attack upon Acre, the fighting power was wholly in sailing ships
such as had fought at Trafalgar thirty-five years before. Two small
paddle steamers towed the French frigate into position, while the
four British vessels of the same type contributed only a desultory
addition to the broadsides of seven sailing ships of the line, which
compelled the surrender of the fortress. The first screw ship of the
line in the British navy was launched in 1852; the last sailing ship
of that class went out of commission in 1860. All alike, the ships of
Vera Cruz and of Acre, and their short-reigning successors, the steam
frigates and ships of the line, are now as much things of the past,
in sails, in engines, and in guns, as are the galleys of Lepanto and
the ships of the Armada. By 1870 it had been recognized everywhere
that a type of vessel corresponding in essential features with the
present armored battle-ships had displaced all competitors. The span
of a single generation had seen the transition of the ships of Drake
and Nelson to those of our own day. The career of Farragut was run in
the intermediate period. His success for the most part was achieved and
his renown won with vessels substantially of the older type, but with
auxiliary steam-power.
It is almost needless to remark that this seemingly abrupt transition
is but one incident in the startling progress made during the century
in all the arts of peace as of war. Like the others, it is due to an
intellectual activity, greater probably than that of our predecessors,
and directed since the peace of 1815 less upon external political
interests than upon scientific investigation, and upon the application
of the results to the improvement of processes of every kind. The
changes in conception and in development of the instruments of naval
warfare result from the increased power of dealing with refractory
material which has been acquired by scientific and practical men in
the laboratory and the workshop. Thus viewed, though so rapid in
realization as to amount to a revolution, not only is the change
seen to be the outcome of a long, though silent preparation, but it
is brought also into its due relation to the general movement of the
age, and found to share its special characteristics. Our ancestors of
the eighteenth century had their own problems, noble and absorbing,
but chiefly political in character. While new worlds were being
gathered into the embrace of European civilization, the leading powers
struggling among themselves for pre-eminence in the work, and while
the harvest was ripening for the French Revolution, science crept
forward, but slowly and silently, the pre-occupation of the few, not
the interest of the many.
The object of the present article is to describe the type of war vessel
prevalent universally among civilized nations when the nineteenth
century opened, and to trace historically the sequence of ideas and of
facts which have resulted in the type whose general acceptance is seen
now in the practice of the chief naval states.
SAILING SHIPS AND BROADSIDE BATTERIES
When the nineteenth century began, the ships that contended for the
control of the sea were, and for two centuries had been, sailing
ships with broadside batteries: the guns, that is, were distributed
along both sides from the bow to the stern on one, two, three, or
four decks. From the largest down, all were of this type until the
very smallest class was reached. In the latter, which could scarcely
be considered fighting ships, the gun power was at times concentrated
into a single piece, which swept from side to side round the horizon,
thus anticipating partially the modern turreted ironclad with its
concentrated revolving battery.
The arrangement of guns in broadside involved anomalies and
inconveniences which seem most singular when first noted. A ship in
chase of another, for instance, had no guns which threw straight ahead.
If it were wished to fire, in order to cripple the fleeing enemy,
it was necessary to deflect from the course; and in order to bring
most of the guns on one side into play the vessel had to swing round
nearly at right angles to the direction of pursuit. This, of course,
lost both time and ground. Broadside fire—the distribution of guns
in broadside—rests, however, upon an unchangeable condition, which
controls now as it did a century ago. Ships then were from three to
four times as long as they were broad; the proportion now is, length
from four to six times the breadth—or beam, as it is technically
called. Therefore, except in small vessels, where the concentration
of the whole weight that can be carried in battery gave but one piece
effective against a probable target, a full development of fire
required the utilization of the long side of the ship rather than of
its short cross-section. This is precisely analogous to the necessity
that an army has of deploying into line, from any order of march, in
order to develop its full musketry fire. The mechanical attainment of
the last century did not permit the construction of single guns that
would contain the weight of the whole battery of a big ship: but even
had it, guns are not wanted bigger than will penetrate their target
most effectively. When an ounce of lead will kill a man it is useless
to fire a pound. The limit of penetration once reached, it is numbers,
not size, that tell: and numbers could be had only by utilizing
the broadside. This condition remains operative now; but as modern
battle-ships present two or more kinds of target—the heavy armored
and that which is light armored, or unprotected—the application of
the principle in practice becomes more complicated. Batteries now are
necessarily less homogeneous than they once were, because targets vary
more.
DISAPPEARANCE OF BOW FIRE
The adoption of broadside batteries followed, therefore, necessarily
upon increase of size and consequent length, but not upon that only. It
is instructive to observe that the sailing fighting ship was derived,
in part, at least, from the galley, and its resemblance in form to the
latter is traceable for at least a century after the general disuse
of the oar. As the galley, however, was small, it could concentrate
its fire advantageously in one or two pieces, for which small number
the cross-section offered a sufficient line of emplacement: and as,
when it could move at all, it could move in any direction, there was a
further advantage in being able to fire in the direction of its motion.
Hence, bow fire prevailed in galleys to the end, although the great
galleasses of Lepanto and the Armada had accepted broadside batteries
in great part, and whenever the galley type has recurred, as on Lake
Champlain during our Revolutionary War, bow fire has predominated. The
sailing ship, on the contrary, was limited as to the direction in which
she could move. Taking her as the centre of a circle, she could not
steer directly for much more than half the points on the circumference.
Bow fire consequently was much less beneficial to her, and, further,
it was found that, for reasons not necessary to particularize, her
sailing, steering, and manœuvring were greatly benefited by the
leverage of sails carried on the bowsprit and its booms, projecting
forward of the bow, where they interfered decisively with right-ahead
fire.
For all these reasons, bow fire disappeared and broadside fire
prevailed; but the fundamental one to be remembered is the greater
development of fire conferred by greater length. All ships—except
the very small ones known as schooners, cutters, and gunboats—were
broadside vessels, moved by canvas which was carried commonly on two
or three masts; but into the particulars of the sails it is presumed
readers will not care to enter. Being thus homogeneous in general
characteristics, the ships of this era were divided commonly into
three principal classes, each of which had subdivisions; but it was
recognized then, as it is now in theory though too little in practice,
that such multiplication of species is harmful, and our forerunners, by
a process of gradual elimination, had settled down upon certain clearly
defined medium types.
The smallest of the three principal classes of fighting ships were
called sloops-of-war, or corvettes. These had sometimes two masts,
sometimes three; but the particular feature that differentiated them
was that they had but one row of guns in broadside, on an uncovered
deck. The offices discharged by this class of vessel were various, but
in the apprehension of the writer they may be considered rightly as
being above all the protectors or destroyers of commerce in transit.
All ships of war, of course, contributed to this end; but the direct
preying upon commerce, upon merchant ships, whose resisting power
was small, was done most economically by small vessels of relatively
small power. Having a given amount of tonnage to devote to commerce
destroying, many small vessels are more effective than a few big
ones of unnecessary force. Such being the nature of the attack, the
resistance must be similar in kind. That is, a flock of merchant
ships being liable to attack by many small adversaries, several
small protectors would be more efficient than one or two large ones.
Sloops-of-war served also as despatch vessels and lookouts of a fleet,
but were less well adapted to this service than the frigate was.
THE FRIGATE AND HER GUNS
This latter celebrated and favorite class of ship stood next in order
of power above the corvette, with which it might also be said to
have blended; for although in the frigate class there were two, or
at the most three, rates that predominated vastly in numbers over
all the rest, yet the name covered many differing degrees of force.
The distinguishing feature of the frigate was that it carried one
complete row of guns upon a covered deck—upon a deck, that is, which
had another deck over it. On this upper or spar deck there were also
guns—more or fewer—but lighter in weight than those on the covered
deck, usually styled the main deck. The two principal classes of
frigates at the beginning of this century were the thirty-two-gun
and the thirty-eight-gun. That is, they carried nominally sixteen or
nineteen guns on each side; but the enumeration is misleading, except
as a matter of comparison, for guns of some classes were not counted.
Ships generally had a few more cannon than their rate implied. The
United States thirty-two-gun frigate _Essex_, for example, carried at
first twenty-six long twelves on the main deck, with sixteen carronades
and two chase guns on the spar deck. Above these two classes came the
forty-four-gun frigate, a very powerful rate, which was favored by
the United States navy and received a development of strength then
unprecedented.
Being such as here described, the frigate was essentially, though not
exclusively, the appendage of a fleet of line-of-battle ships. Wars are
decided not by commerce destroying nor by raids, however vexatious, but
by fleets and armies, by great organized masses—that is, by crushing,
not by harassment. But ships of the line, to perform their function,
must keep together, both when cruising and when on the field of battle,
in order to put forth their strength in combination. The innumerable
detached services that must be discharged for every great organized
force need for a fleet to be done by vessels of inferior strength,
yet so strong that they cannot be intercepted or driven off lightly
by every whipper-snapper of an armed ship that comes along. Moreover,
a fact not always realized, speed—speed to hasten on a mission, to
overtake a foe, or to escape pursuit—depends upon size, masts that
can carry sail and hold way amid heavy seas. Hence the frigate, not
the lighter sloop, was indicated for the momentous duties upon which
depended the intelligence and the communications of the fleet. Such
leading considerations are needed to be stated and to be kept in mind,
for they affected the warfare of the last decade of the century quite
as really as they did that of the first, and a paper would indeed be
incomplete which confined itself to indicating points of difference
of progress, so-called, and failed to recognize those essential and
permanent conditions which time will never remove. Frigates and sloops
have disappeared in name and form, in motive power and in armament.
Their essential functions remain, and will remain while war lasts.
DUTIES OF THE FRIGATE
The truth of this statement will be evident from a brief mention of
the duties frigates actually used to perform. While attending the
fleet, not merely a part of it, the frigates were thrown out far
in advance and on each side, as cavalry on land scours the country
towards or through which the army advances. The distance to which
they would be thus detached would sometimes amount to one hundred or
two hundred miles, and the absence to days, rejoining being assured
by the assignment of a rendezvous, or by an adequate knowledge of the
admiral’s intended movements. It will be recognized that when thus
alone frigates might meet equal or superior forces, to resist or to
escape from which both strength and speed were needed. An extreme and
particular case of such service was the watching of an enemy’s port
by one or more frigates, when they had to keep close to the entrance,
although a fleet might be within. Again, frigates were placed in
certain central positions, rendezvous known only to the superior
officers, where they cruised steadily, having information as to the
whereabouts of the fleet, or instructions for expected vessels. They
were there centres of intelligence, round which the movements of the
whole body revolved.
When the fleet was actually in touch with a hostile fleet, in pursuit,
or when expecting battle, the frigates were placed between their own
force and the enemy; nearer, however, to the latter, as the essential
point was to keep knowledge of his whereabouts and probable intentions.
Such a position was at times extremely exposed. The frigates had to
avoid equally capture and being driven and shaken off; they must keep
close, yet not be caught. When engagement ensued they passed through to
the off side of their own fleet, where they were dispersed at intervals
abreast the main line, like the file closers of a military line ashore.
Here they fulfilled one special purpose, besides others. As the fleet
fought with broadsides only, its ships were ranged one ahead of the
other. Consequently signals made on the masts of the admiral could not
be seen always by those ahead or astern of him; but the frigates in the
other line made the same signals, “repeated,” as it was said, where
they could be read more certainly. But frigates did also more hazardous
work. They went to crippled ships of the line and towed them into other
positions, into or out of fire, and at times the admiral summoned a
frigate alongside to carry a message to some part of the battle. “I
noticed,” says Marryatt, in one of his novels, “the look of pride on
the faces of our officers when it appeared that the loss on board our
frigate was greater than that of some of the ships in the line.”
For such offices it is evident there were wanted a strength and a
weight which the corvette did not have. A corvette would make poor
work of towing a heavy ship, and could not carry as surely the
sail needed to maintain a position. At the same time it should be
observed that excess of size above the requirements stated should
be exceptional. In the opinion of the writer the forty-four-gun
frigate in her day possessed a fighting force and a weight of body
in excess of that required by the ordinary functions of her nominal
class. For exceptional reasons, a few of the type were permissible
in a large navy. On the other hand, it may be inferred from the long
experience of the British navy, and the resultant practice, that ships
of twenty-eight, twenty-four, and twenty guns, though often styled
frigates, were not found satisfactory as such. In the distribution of
tonnage between size and numbers, a mean must be found; and it must be
added that a just mean is a very different thing from a compromise.
These considerations also apply to present-day problems.
EARLY SHIPS OF THE LINE
In the fleet-ship, likewise the ship of the line, as the opening
century styled the class of vessel known in the closing days as the
battle-ship, our predecessors had reached a mean conclusion. The
line-of-battle ship, or the ship of the line, as more usually called,
differed from the frigate generically, in that it had two or more
covered decks. There were one or two cases of ships with four decks,
but, as a rule, three were the extreme; and ships of the line were
roughly classed as two or three deckers. Under these heads two-deckers
carried in their two centuries of history from fifty to eighty-four
guns; three-deckers from ninety to one hundred and twenty. The increase
in number of guns, resulting, as it did, from increase of size, was not
the sole gain of ships of the line. The bigger ships got, the heavier
were their timbers, the thicker their planking, the more impenetrable,
therefore, their sides. There was a gain, in short, of defensive as
well as offensive strength, analogous to the protection given by armor.
“As the enemy’s ships were big,” wrote a renowned British admiral,
“they took a great deal of drubbing.”
Between the great extremes of strength indicated by fifty and one
hundred and twenty guns—whose existence at one and the same time
was the evidence of blind historical development, rather than of
intelligent relative processes—the navy of a century ago had settled
upon a mean, to appreciate which the main idea and purport of the ship
of the line must be grasped. The essential function of the ship “of the
line” was, as the name implies, to act in combination with other ships
in a line of battle. To do this was needed not only fighting power,
but manœuvring ability—speed and handiness—and in order that these
qualities might approach homogeneousness throughout the fleet, and so
promote action in concert, the acceptance of a mean type was essential.
To carry three decks of guns, a ship had to expose above water a side
disproportionately high relatively to her length, her depth, and her
hold upon the water. She consequently drifted rapidly when her side was
turned to the wind; while, if her length was increased, and so her hold
on the water, she needed more time and room to tack and to wear—that
is, to turn around. Ships of this class also were generally—though not
necessarily—slow.
ADVANTAGES OF THE SEVENTY-FOURS
The two-decked ship was superior in speed and in handiness, and for
that reason, even when acting singly, she could put forth such power
as she possessed more quickly and more certainly. But these qualities
were most conspicuously valuable when ship had to act with ship. The
great secret of military success, concerted action in masses, was in
the hands of the two-decked ship, because in her were united to the
highest point individual power and facility for combined action. And
this was true not only of two-deckers in general, but of the particular
species known as the seventy-four-gun ship. Ships below that rate
lacked individual fighting power. Ships above it, the eighty and
eighty-four, lost manœuvring power because of their greater length and
weight. Under the conditions of sail a fleet of seventy-fours could get
out the whole power of the force more surely and more rapidly than the
equivalent number of guns in ships of any other kind. Thus offensive
power dictated its survival. To our own day it reads the lesson that
offensive power, the _sine quâ non_ of a military organization, lies
not merely in the greatest strength of the single ships, but in
the uniformity of their action and rapidity of their movements, as
conducive to the quick putting forth of the strength of the whole body
at once and in mutual support.
It may be asked naturally, why, then, were there any ships bigger
or smaller than this favored type? For smaller, the answer is that
short ships of lighter draught are best suited for shoal or intricate
navigation. The shoals of Holland forbade heavy ships to the Dutch
navy, materially reducing its fighting strength. Before France entered
our Revolutionary struggle the British sent only sixty-fours to
operate upon our comparatively shallow coasts and bars. As regards
bigger ships, they were useful exceptionally, as were forty-four-gun
frigates, and for the following reason: Every line of battle has three
particularly dangerous points—the centre, because there the line,
if pierced, divides into the two smaller fragments; and the flanks,
or ends, because the extremities are supported less easily by the
rest of the force than the centre is, one extremity being farther
from the other than the centre is from either. Such local weakness
could not be remedied by the use of two ships, for, if the line were
properly closed, one of them could fire at the enemy only through or
over the other. The sole way of giving the strength there required
was by concentrating it into individual ships, either by putting on
the additional battery, which gives a three-decker, or by making the
seventy-four heavier, resulting in an eighty-gun ship on two decks.
These stronger vessels were, therefore, stationed in the centre or on
the flanks of a line of battle. The particular functions, the _raison
d’être_, of the three leading classes of ships of war—the sloop, the
frigate, and the ship of the line—have now been stated. It remains to
give an account of the chief features of the armament carried on their
broadsides, as described.
BATTERIES SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO
When the nineteenth century began, batteries of ships were composed
of two principal classes of guns: the long gun and the short gun, or
carronade. The difference between these lay in the way the weight of
metal allowed for each was utilized. The long gun, as its name implies,
was comparatively long and thick, and threw a small ball with a heavy
charge of powder. The ball, therefore, flew swiftly, and had a long
range. A carronade of the same weight was short and comparatively thin,
could use only a small charge of powder, lest it burst, and threw a
large ball. Its shot, therefore, moved slowly and had short range.
Fired at a target—a ship’s side—within range of both guns, the shot
from the long gun penetrated quickly, the wood had not time to splinter
badly, and a clean hole was the result. The carronade’s shot, on the
contrary, being both larger and slower, penetrated with difficulty,
all the surrounding wood felt the strain and broke up into splinters,
leaving a large jagged hole, if the shot got through. These effects
were called respectively piercing and smashing, and are reproduced,
in measure, upon targets representing the side of a modern ironclad.
They have been likened familiarly to the effect of a pistol-ball and
of a stone upon a window pane: the one goes through clean, the other
crashes.
The smashing of the carronades, when fully realized, was worse than
penetration, and was greatly dreaded; but, on the other hand, a ship
which feared them in an opponent might keep out of their range. This
expedient was so effective that carronades, which did great damage
until their tactics were understood, gradually fell into disfavor.
Nevertheless, they remained in use till after the peace of 1815. In
1814 the battery of the U. S. S. _Essex_ was chiefly carronades, and
their inadequate range was a large factor in her defeat.
At the period in question guns of all sorts fired only non-explosive
projectiles, solid or hollow shot. The destructive shell of the present
day was used only by pieces called mortars, in vertical firing, which
will be spoken of farther on. Such were not mounted on the ships of
the fleet generally, nor used against shipping, except when packed in
a small harbor. They did not enter into naval warfare proper. The ram
and the torpedo of present warfare were unknown. On the other hand,
there was practised a form of fighting which is thought now to have
disappeared forever, namely, boarding and fighting hand-to-hand on the
deck. Even then, however, boarding did not decide the main issue of a
sea-fight, except occasionally in very small vessels. The deck of a
large and fresh ship was not to be reached easily. Boarding was like
the cavalry charge that routs a wavering line; the ship had been beaten
at the guns before it occurred.
The real fighting was done by the long guns and carronades disposed
in the broadsides. Besides rapidity and precision of fire, always
invaluable, the two opponents sought advantage of position by
manœuvring. They closed, or they kept apart, according to their
understanding of the other’s weight and kind of battery. Each tried,
when possible, to lie across the bow or the stern of the enemy, for
then his guns ranged from end to end of the hostile ship, while the
latter’s broadside could not reply. Failing this extreme advantage
of position, the effort was made so to place one’s self that the
opponent’s guns could not bear—for they swept only a few degrees
before and abaft the broadside—while your own could. If this also
was impossible, the contestants lay side to side at a greater or less
distance, and the affair became an artillery duel.
BRITISH AND FRENCH STYLES OF FIGHTING
Besides these recognized advantages of position, there was also a
question upon what part of the enemy the fire should be directed. In
this there were two principal schools of tactics, one of which aimed at
the hull, to break down the fire of the hostile ship and destroy her
fighting men, while the other sought, by pointing higher, to cut away
the sails, rigging, and masts, rendering the foe helpless. The latter,
in general, was the policy of the French; the former, and, it may be
affirmed, the more surely successful, was the practice of the British.
The two schools find their counterpart in the tactical considerations
which now affect the question of rapid-fire and of heavy guns, each
of which has its appropriate target, covering in the latter case the
motive power, in the former the personnel.
These three leading classes of vessels, with their functions,
armaments, and tactics of the single ship, as described, performed in
their day and during the great maritime contests of two centuries all
the duties that at any time can be required of a maritime fighting
organization. By them the control of the sea in the largest sense was
disputed and was determined; by them commerce was attacked, and by them
it was protected. They themselves have passed away, but the military
factors remain the same. The mastery of the sea and the control of its
commerce—of which blockade is but a special case—are now and must
remain always the chief ends of maritime war. The ends continuing the
same, the grand disposition of navies—their strategy—reposes upon the
same principles that it ever did. Similarly, while the changes in the
characteristics of ships will cause the individual vessel to be fought
in manners different from its predecessors, the handling of masses
of ships in battle—fleet tactics—must proceed on the same general
principles as of old. The centre and the two extremities of all orders
are always the points of danger; concentration upon one or two of the
three, however effected, must be always the principle of action. These
things, which cannot vary, form, therefore, no part of a paper which
deals with changes.
THEY HAD THEIR BREAK-DOWNS THEN, TOO
There should be added for the general public the caution that the
difficulties, the imperfections, and the frequent halting state of
ships-of-war in commission for sea service at the present day are no
new things. To the naval historian familiar with the correspondence of
the past they are the inevitable attendants of all government action,
wherein the most economical methods are always dominated, historically,
by considerations of expediency which are political in character. The
necessity of keeping the public in good-humor, and of not laying open
points upon which opposition can enlarge, induces apparent economies,
which sacrifice not only economy, but the best results. This is a
great evil, as yet apparently inseparable from public enterprises as
distinguished from private ones. If any one supposes that the ships
with which Great Britain overthrew Napoleon, and with which Nelson
and his contemporaries won their as yet unparalleled victories, were
always or generally in good material condition, he is greatly mistaken.
What is different in our day, apparently, is a tendency in ships to
rely for their repairs and material efficiency more upon dock-yards
and workshops than upon their own resources, a disposition also to be
unduly discouraged by imperfections in the motive enginery. War will
correct this or war will fail. In maintaining efficiency while keeping
the sea, quite as much as in fighting skill, lay the supreme excellence
of officers like Nelson and Jervis. Men now ought to appreciate better
than they do what difficulties of this sort seamen underwent a hundred
years ago and how they refused to yield to them. “The difference
between myself and the French marshals,” the Duke of Wellington is
reported to have said, “was as when a man starts on a journey with a
new harness. What if something gives way, as in war something is sure
to go wrong? Shall you stop or go back for a workman? Not so; hitch up
the break with a bit of rope, or whatever comes handy, and go on. That
is what I did.”
The succession of cause and effect which has produced the present
ship-of-war will be traced in rapid outline, in order to leave as much
room as may be for the description of the essential feature of the ship
herself as she now exists.
Two chief factors concur to a ship-of-war—motive power and fighting
power. The displacement of sails by engines, and the progressive
development of the latter, are features of the general progress of the
century. The engines of a ship-of-war are differentiated from those of
merchant ships chiefly by the necessity of protection. This affects
their design, which must be subordinated to the requirement of being as
far as possible below the water-line. The further great protection now
afforded is incident rather to the use and development of armor as a
part of the fighting power.
Fighting power divides into offensive and defensive. Armor now
represents the latter. The fighting ship in every age is the product
of the race between the two, and in the nineteenth century this was
unprecedented in the ground covered and in the rapidity of the pace,
due to the increased power of dealing with materials, already alluded
to.
CONTEST OF ARMOR AND PROJECTILE
The modern contest began with the introduction of horizontal shell
fire in the third decade of the century. This term must be explained.
It has been said that all ships’ guns up to 1815 threw non-explosive
projectiles. In practice this is true; although Nelson alludes to
certain shell supplied to him for trial, which he was unwilling to
use because he wished not to burn his prizes, but to take them alive.
A shell is a hollow projectile filled with powder, the idea of which
is that upon reaching the enemy it will burst into several pieces,
each capable of killing a man, and the flame not impossibly setting
woodwork on fire. It was necessary that the powder within should not
explode from the combustion of the cartridge of the gun, for if it
did its force, combined with the latter, might burst the gun; yet the
process that should result in bursting must begin at that moment or
else it would not take place at all. This difficulty was met by a short
column of hard, compressed powder called the fuse, which extended from
the outside to the inside of the shell. The outer end was inflamed
by the charge of the gun, but from its density it burned slowly, so
that the charge of the shell was not enkindled for five, ten, or more
seconds. This expedient was in use over a century ago; but owing to
imperfections of manufacture, no certainty was attained that the fuse
might not be driven in or broken by the force of the discharge, or the
shell itself be cracked and so explode prematurely. Shell, therefore,
were fired with very light charges; and, to obtain sufficient range—go
far enough—they were used in very short, very thick guns, called
bombs or mortars, to which great elevation was given. Such firing,
because the shell flew high in the air, was called vertical firing,
in contradistinction to the fire of the long gun or carronade, called
horizontal fire because their projectiles rose little above the level.
The destructiveness of shell from ordinary guns was so obvious,
especially for forts to use against wooden ships, that the difficulties
were gradually overcome, and horizontal shell fire was introduced soon
after the cessation of wars allowed men time for thought and change.
But although the idea was accepted and the fact realized, practice
changed slowly, as it tends to do in the absence of emergency. In the
attack on Vera Cruz, in 1848, Farragut was present, and was greatly
impressed, as with a novelty, by the effect of what he called the
“shell shot,” a hybrid term which aptly expresses the transition state
of men’s minds at the time. I remember an officer who entered the
navy in 1840 telling me the respectful awe and distrust with which
his superiors then regarded the new weapon, a very few of which for
each gun were supplied tentatively. Ten years more, however, saw a
great change, and in 1853 the attack of the Russian squadron of wooden
sailing-ships upon the Turkish vessels in the Bay of Sinope gave an
object-lesson that aroused the naval world to what wooden ships must
expect from horizontal shell fire. In a few minutes three out of seven
Turkish frigates were in flames; while of nine sailing-ships and two
steamers only one of the latter escaped.
HORIZONTAL SHELL FIRE
The Crimean War followed quickly, and in 1854 the wooden steamships of
the line of the allies, vessels identical in fighting characteristics
with those of Trafalgar, attempted to silence masonry works at
Sebastopol. Though the disaster was not so great, the lesson of Sinope
was reaffirmed. Louis Napoleon, a thoughtful man though scarcely a man
of action, had foreseen the difficulty, and had already directed the
construction of five floating batteries which were to carry armor.
Before the war ended these vessels attacked the forts at Kinburn, which
they compelled to surrender, losing, themselves, no men except by
shells that entered the gun ports. Their armor was not pierced.
Horizontal shell fire had called for iron armor, and the two, as
opposing factors, were now established in the recognition of men. The
contest between the two sums up the progression and the fluctuations
of military ideas which have resulted in the battle-ship of to-day,
which, as the fleet-ship, remains the dominant factor in naval warfare,
not only in actual fact but in present probability. From the first
feeble beginnings at Kinburn to the present time, although the strife
has waxed greatly in degree, it remains unchanged in principle and in
kind. To exclude the shell, because, starting as one projectile, it
became many after penetration, in what does it differ from excluding
the rapid-fire gun, whose projectiles are many from the first, and
penetrate singly?
There occurred, however, one singular development, an aberration from
the normal line of advance, the chief manifestation of which, from
local and temporary conditions, was in our own country. This was the
transient predominance of the monitor type and idea; the iron-clad
vessel, with very few very heavy guns, mounted in one or two circular
revolving turrets, protected by very heavy armor. The monitor type
embodied two ideas. The first was the extreme of defensive power, owing
to the smallness of the target and the thickness of its armor—the
hull of the vessel rising but little above the water—the turret was
substantially the only target. The second was an extreme compression
of offensive power, the turret containing two of the heaviest guns of
the day, consequently guns of the heaviest penetration, which could
fire, not in one direction, nor in several, but in all directions as
the turret revolved, and which were practically the sole armament
of the ship. The defensive power of the monitor was absolute up to
the extreme resisting endurance of its armor. Its offensive power
must be considered relatively to the target to which its guns were
to be opposed. If much in excess of that target’s resistance, there
was waste of power. Actually in our Civil War monitors were opposed
to fortifications, except in one or two instances when they had to
contend with the imperfect structures which the Confederates could put
afloat. The target, therefore, was not in excess of their gun power.
Moreover, being for coast warfare, the monitor then was necessarily of
small draught and small tonnage. Her battery weight, therefore, must
be small, and consequently lent itself to concentration into two guns,
just as the battery weight of a schooner a century since found its best
disposition in one long traversing gun.
This was the infancy period of the iron-clad ship. The race between
guns and armor was barely begun, and manufacturing processes still
were crude. As these improved, with astounding rapidity, the
successful production of rifled cannon of ever-increasing dimensions
and penetrative force imposed an increased armor protection, which at
the first was obtained chiefly by an increase of thickness, _i.e._,
of weight. As guns and armor got heavier, ships had to be bigger to
carry them, and, if bigger, of course longer. But the monitor idea,
admirably suited to small ships, had now fast hold of men’s minds—in
England especially, for the United States lapsed into naval somnolence
after the war—and it was carried irreflectively into vessels of huge
dimensions whose hulls rose much above the water. Weight for weight,
the power of the gun outstripped the resistance of armor, and it soon
became evident that even in a large ship perfect protection could be
given only to a part of the structure. Passing over intermediate steps,
the extreme and final development of the monitor idea was reached in
the _Inflexible_, planned in 1876 by the British Admiralty, built in
the following years, and still in service. This vessel was of eleven
thousand eight hundred and eighty tons displacement. She was three
hundred and twenty feet long, and of that length only the central one
hundred and ten feet had protection, but that was by armor two feet
thick, while armored partitions extended from each end of this side
belt across the vessel, forming a box one hundred and ten feet long by
seventy-four broad. Within this box were two turrets, each with sixteen
inches of armor, and carrying two guns which threw a shell of a ton
weight.
THE COMING OF THE MONITOR
The first monitor has been called an epoch-making ship, for she began
an era. The _Inflexible_ was also epoch-making, for she closed the era
of the monitor pure and simple. Upon a development of three hundred
and twenty feet of length she carried only four guns, of which it is
not too much to say that their power was very far in excess of almost
all targets that could be opposed to them. If, indeed, her possible
opponents could have carried such an armor as her own all over their
exposed surface, her guns would have been no heavier than needed,
and the fewness must be accepted; but this was not the case. Like
herself, ships of twelve thousand tons must have a penetrable target
far exceeding in surface the almost impregnable box she presented.
The unreasonableness of the result struck men at once, though of
course she had advocates. As an exception, such a ship might pass;
as a type, never. It was pointed out that guns of very small power
could pierce the exposed ends about the water-line, and that, as water
entered by numerous holes, she would not only sink lower, but for
constructional reasons, not necessary here to give, she would lose
stability rapidly—become liable to overset. If under such conditions
she attempted to turn round, the inclination vessels take in so doing
would be enough alone to cause her to capsize. Her defenders did not
deny this; but they said that the likelihood of her exposed ends being
so riddled was too slight to justify alarm.
Under artillery conditions, then, this reply was plausible, though
it soon ceased to be so. Even then, however, it was true that a ship
with only four guns that fired very slowly, and with such an exposed
surface, was liable to serious injury from a nimble antagonist firing
many guns rapidly. The defensive weakness of the _Inflexible_ is
apparent; her offensive power, great as in the aggregate it was, was
much impaired by lack of proper development, by undue compression
into very few guns, the larger part of whose effect was wasted,
except in the rare instances when they struck a target not often to
be encountered. But this was not the only deduction from her strength
through the excess of concentration. Very large guns fire very slowly,
yet they are as subject to inaccuracy from the motion of the ship as
is the smallest piece. Where the target is missed, it is immaterial
whether the shot weighs a ton or a pound; and a gun that fires ten
times to another’s once has ten times the chance of hitting. It is
evident, therefore, taking the _Inflexible_ as she was, that a ship
of the same weight and length with ten guns in broadside—twenty
altogether—and with similar armor over her engines only, would have
at the least a fair chance against the _Inflexible_, and would be much
more efficient against vessels with average armor. Each of her ten guns
firing once a minute, while the _Inflexible’s_ cannon required five
minutes for discharge, would give over ten shots to one.
CRITICISM OF THE _INFLEXIBLE_
While the _Inflexible_ was building there was born the idea whose
present maturity enforces the abandonment of the pure monitor, except
for vessels comparatively small and for special purposes. Machine guns,
the Gatling, and the mitrailleuse were already known, and the principle
was being applied to throw projectiles of a pound weight and over,
which were automatically loaded and fired, requiring only to be aimed.
Upon these followed the rapid-fire gun, of weight greatly exceeding
theirs, the principle of which may be said to be that it is loaded
by hand, but with ammunition so prepared and mechanism for loading
so simple and expeditious as to permit a rate of firing heretofore
unparalleled. The highest extension of this principle is reached in the
five-inch gun, up to which size the cartridge and the projectile make a
single package called fixed ammunition, which is placed by one motion.
Together they weigh ninety-five pounds, about as much as an average
man can handle in a seaway, the projectile itself weighing fifty
pounds. There are, it is true, six-inch rapid-fire guns, but in them
the cartridge and shell are placed separately, and it is questionable
whether such increase of effect, through greater weight, as they give
is not gained at a loss of due rapidity.
The _Inflexible_ exemplified in an extreme form the elements of
offensive and defensive strength and weakness. Four guns of enormous
calibre and no other battery, except pieces so light as to be useless
against the thinnest armor, an impenetrable wall, covering a very
limited area, and the remainder of the hull exposed, to be cut to
pieces by a battery of numerous light cannon. When to the latter the
rapid-fire idea was successfully applied, multiplying their efficiency
three or fourfold, her position, as an example to be followed, became
untenable. The monitor idea, which refused to utilize the broadside for
developing fire, and aimed chiefly at minimizing the target, evidently
needed qualification after a certain moderate limit of size was passed;
and that limit of size was when the entire weight of battery the ship
could carry sufficed only for two, or, at the most, four guns of power
great enough to pierce heavy armor. Strictly, in the opinion of the
writer, the monitor type should not prevail beyond the size that can
bear only one turret.
In the strife of guns with armor, therefore, increase of power in
guns, outstripping continually the increase of resistance in armor,
called for bigger ships to bear the increased armor weight, till the
latter could not possibly be placed all over the ship’s body. Hence the
exposed target, upon which plays the smaller battery of rapid-fire guns.
To comprehend fundamentally the subsequent development, we must recur
to the rudimentary idea that a ship of war possesses two chief factors,
motive force and fighting force, the latter being composed of guns
mainly and of men. Corresponding to these two chief powers there were
of old, and there are still, two vulnerable elements, two targets, upon
one or the other of which hostile effort logically and practically
must be directed. A century ago the French, aiming at sails and spars,
sought the destruction of the motive force; the British directed their
fire upon the guns and men. In strict analogy now, the heavy guns seek
the motive power, over which the heaviest armor is concentrated; the
rapid-fire guns, searching the other portions of the ship, aim at the
guns and men there stationed.
BATTLE-SHIPS OF THIS DAY
The logical outcome of these leading ideas is realized in the present
battle-ships as follows: There are two turrets, protected by armor,
the thickest that can be given them, considering the other weights
the ship has to carry, and of the highest resisting quality that
processes of manufacture can develop. Armor of similar character and
weight protects the sides about the engines. In each turret are guns
whose power corresponds to the armor which protects them. Their proper
aim—not, of course, always reached—is the heavy armored part of
the enemy, chiefly the engines, the motive power. When they strike
outside of this target, as often must happen, there is excess of blow,
and consequent waste. The turrets are separated, fore and aft, by a
distance as great as possible, to minimize the danger of a single shot
or any other local incident disabling both. The fact that the ends
of ships, being comparatively sharp, are less waterborne and cannot
support extreme weights, chiefly limits this severance of the turrets.
Between the two, and occasionally before or abaft them, is distributed
the broadside rapid fire of the ship, which in its development is in
contradistinction to the compressed fire of the monitor. This fire is
rapid because the guns are many and because individually they can fire
fast. Thus, the turret gun, twelve or thirteen inch in bore, fires once
in five minutes; the five-inch rapid-fire gun thrice in one minute. The
rapid-fire battery aims outside of the heaviest armor. When it strikes
that, unless it chance to enter a gun port, its effect is lost; but as
much the greater part of the ship is penetrable by it, the chance of
wasting power is less than in the case of the heavier guns. As most of
a ship’s company are outside the protection of the heaviest armor, the
rapid-fire gun aims, as did the British in the old line-of-battle ship,
at the personnel of the enemy.
The reader will comprehend that in the application of these leading
ideas there is considerable variety in detail. The two turrets may be
looked upon at present as the least variable factor; and in disposing
armor all practice agrees that the turrets and engines receive the
greatest protection. But how to distribute the total available
weight of armor gives rise to varieties of practice which find
their reflection in similar variety in the sizes and numbers of the
rapid-fire guns, to whose penetrative force there is a corresponding
thickness of armor. For example, two battle-ships now building for the
United States navy have four thirteen-inch guns in turrets, and in
broadside fourteen five-inch, twenty six-pounder, and six one-pounder
rapid-fire guns; between the two classes they have four eight-inch
guns, also mounted in smaller turrets, superimposed on the main
turrets. A ship since designed will have the same thirteen-inch gun
fire, but in place of the eight-inch and five-inch will have fourteen
six-inch rapid-fire guns. An expert officer, discussing these, says:
“In the former the weight of fire per minute is two thousand and fifty
pounds on the broadside and five hundred ahead or astern, while with
the latter plan it is only one thousand seven hundred and fifty on the
broadside and five hundred ahead and astern. But the main objection
to the second plan is that the volume of effective fire is enormously
diminished by the omission of eight-inch guns. The larger area covered
with their armor is fairly safe from the six-inch gun at fighting
ranges, whereas the eight-inch projectile at any range, and at even a
considerable angle of incidence, will penetrate it.” In the judgment
of the present writer the weight of this argument depends upon what is
behind the armor the eight-inch only will penetrate. If battery and
men, it is strong, if not decisive; if motive power only, not.
HISTORY’S TEACHING AND THE FUTURE
The object of this paper has been not to present an accumulation of
details, but to elucidate the principles upon which the details rest.
The latter, when correct, are but the application of principles to
practice. Subject to the imperfections attendant on all human work,
the writer is persuaded that the greatest errors in practice—and
especially the lack of homogeneousness which characterizes the
present battle-ships—arise chiefly from the failure to refer back
to principles. Until war has given us the abundant experience which
led our predecessors to the broadside seventy-four as the rule, with
occasional exceptions, we must depend upon reasoning alone for the
solution of our problems; and the reasoner keeps within the limits of
safety only by constant reference to fundamental facts.
The one experience of war which ships really contemporary have had
was in the battle of the Yalu. Its teachings lose some value from the
fact that the well-drilled Japanese used their weapons to advantage,
while the Chinese were ill trained; still, some fair inferences can
be made. The Japanese had a great many rapid-fire guns, with few
very heavy ones, and their vessels were not battle-ships properly
so-called. The Chinese, besides other vessels, had two battle-ships
with heavy armor and heavy guns. Victory remained with the Japanese.
In the opinion of the writer two probable conclusions can be reached:
That rapid-fire guns in due proportion to the entire battery will beat
down a ship dependent mainly upon turret guns; that is, between two
ships whose batteries are alike the issue of the contest will depend
upon the one or the other gaining first a predominance of rapid fire.
That done, the turret guns of the predominant ship will give the final
blows to the engines and turrets of the other, whose own turret guns
cannot be used with the necessary deliberation under the preponderant
storm of projectiles now turned upon them. The other conclusion, even
more certain than the first, is that rapid-fire guns alone, while
they may determine an action, cannot make it decisive. Despite the
well-established superiority of the Japanese rapid fire in that action,
the Chinese battle-ships, though overborne, were not taken. Their
heaviest armor being unpierced, the engines and turret guns remained
effective, and they withdrew unmolested.
BATTLE-SHIPS THAT ARE TOO LARGE
The battle-ship constituted as described remains for the present the
fighting ship upon which the issues of war will depend. The type is
accepted by all the leading naval states, though with considerable
variations in size. As regards the latter feature, the writer believes
that the enormous tonnage recently given is excessive, and that the
reasons which support it, too numerous and various to be enumerated at
length, have the following fundamental fault: they look too much to the
development of the individual ship and too little to the fact that the
prime requisite of the battle-ship is facility for co-operating with
other ships of its own type—facility in manœuvring together, facility
in massing, facility also in subdividing when occasion demands. It
may be remarked, too, that the increase of size has gone much more to
increase of defensive power than of offensive—a result so contrary to
the universal teachings of war as of itself to suggest pausing.
Does the present hold out any probabilities of important changes in the
near future, of revolutionary changes? No. For twenty-five or thirty
years now we have been expecting from the ram and from the torpedo
results which would displace the gun from its supremacy of centuries.
Those results, however, are not yet visible. No one disputes the
tremendous effects of the ram and of the torpedo when successfully
used; but I believe I am correct in saying that the great preponderance
of professional opinion does not attribute to them a certainty, or an
approach to certainty, impairing the predominance of the gun. This
is not the conclusion of mere conservation in a profession naturally
conservative. The fluctuations of professional opinion have been
sufficiently marked and the matter sufficiently argued to dispose of
that contention. Nor is this supremacy of the gun probably a transient
matter, liable to pass away with improvements greater than those of
the last quarter of a century. The advantage of the gun depends upon
conditions probably permanent—upon its greater range, its greater
accuracy, its greater rapidity. The individual effect of each shot may
be less than that of a torpedo or of a ram thrust; but, as was said in
comparing very heavy guns with rapid fire, the probability of many hits
prevails over the possibilities of one great blow.
THE GUN AND THE TORPEDO
In none of these features is either of the other weapons likely to
overtake the gun. The torpedo relies mainly upon stealth, the ram
mainly upon a happy chance for effective use. Both stealth and chance
have their place in war; stratagem and readiness, each in place,
may contribute much. But the decisive issues of war depend upon the
handling of masses with celerity and precision, according to certain
general principles of recognized universality. Afloat, such massed
force, to be wielded accurately and rapidly, must consist of units not
too numerous because of their smallness—as torpedo craft would be—nor
too unwieldy because of their size. We may not be able to determine
yet, in advance of prolonged experience of war, just what the happy
mean may be corresponding in principle to the old seventy-four, but
we may be reasonably sure that it will be somewhere in the ranks of
the present battle-ships; and that in the range, accuracy and rapidity
of their gun-fire—especially when acting in fleets—will be found a
protection which the small vessels that rely upon the torpedo or ram
alone will not be able to overcome, though they may in rare instances
elude.
Concerning the frigates and sloops of our predecessors, their place
is now taken, and their duties will be done, by the classes of
vessel known generically as cruisers, protected or unprotected. The
protection, the defensive element of strength, has reference mainly to
the engines, to the motive power. The battery, the offensive factor,
tends upon the whole to revert more and more to the development of
fire, to utilizing the length of the vessel by multiplying the number
of guns and diminishing their individual size; and the tendency is
increased by the fact that, as such ships are expected to fight only
vessels of their own kind, their probable target is penetrable by light
guns. Speed is the great element in the efficiency of cruisers, and
whatever the speed in smooth water, a great advantage inures to larger
ships in heavy winds and seas. As for “armored” cruisers, of which
there are many, they belong rather to the class of battle-ships than
of cruisers. Whatever the advantages of the particular ships, the name
suggests a regrettable confusion of purpose, and, in practice, a still
more regrettable departure from homogeneity.
A. T. MAHAN.
LITERATURE
“Time and space,” a noble philosopher has observed, “are but
hallucinations.” It may be so, and from the point of view of the
metaphysician ours may have been merely a “so-called nineteenth
century.” Certain it is that to judge literature in blocks of centuries
is to make a convenient but illogical cross-division. The early, and
perhaps the most important, literary influences of the century were in
existence long before 1801. Thus, if we look at whatever is now called
_fin de siècle_, at violent antagonism to tradition and convention, at
discontent of every sort with everything—with rank, wealth, morality,
law, marriage, the family—we find that this passion was as noisy
and self-complacent a hundred years ago as it is to-day. The French
Revolution was the lurid playground of “New Women,” full of what they
supposed to be new ideas. The German drama of 1780–1800, now best
remembered by the parody called “The Rovers,” in the _Anti-Jacobin_,
was replete with the humorless paradoxes and strained situations of
Ibsen. The shortest way to an understanding of the antiquity of our
“new ideas” is, in fact, a study of the Poetry of the _Anti-Jacobin_.
Romance, again, as far as romance depends for her effects on desperate
deeds, on the rhetoric of noble brigands, on the phantasms of the
sheeted dead shivering down dark passages among skeletons, on clanking
chains, and on distressed damsels, was as much alive in the end of
the eighteenth century as at any age of literary history. Goethe,
Schiller, Bürger, Mrs. Radcliffe, all following in the Gothic wake of
honest Horace Walpole and his _Castle of Otranto_, were preparing the
ground for Scott and Dumas. Once more the old “popular” elements so
necessary to literature (which, like Antæus, regains vigor on touching
mother-earth) had been wholly absent from the poetry and prose of
the last reigning Stuart and of the first two Hanoverian kings of
England. But, about 1770–1780, literature had returned to its archaic
popular sources. Percy had made _volks-lieder_ fashionable, Fergusson
and Burns had revived the rustic muse of Scotland, and Macpherson
had given mankind a draught, though an adulterated draught, from the
cup of the sorceries of the Celtic enchantress. In opposition to the
urban self-restraint and contented complacency of the Augustan age,
Rousseau had preached the pleasures of virtue, sentiment, and of a
“blessed state of Nature”; young Werther had gotten him a stool to be
sad upon, like Master Stephen: weeping was the mode. Rousseau, as Mr.
Pater once observed in conversation, was “the grandmother of us all,”
and as tearful as Mrs. Gummidge in _David Copperfield_. Meanwhile the
“emancipation” born of science had set in; people thought they knew
all about everything; the elder Darwin could explain the universe
without a God, quite as easily as any modern Darwinian, if not so
elaborately. He may not have been always correct in his theories and
facts, still, there they were, and they were “emancipating.” Yet,
far from being laughed out of court by the gratifying progress of
science, a more mystical religion and a life more austere had come in
from the preaching of Wesley, who was practically the parent of our
neo-Catholicism in its varying forms. The “Oxford Movement,” with all
the strange after-symptoms which it has left behind it, is directly
descended from Wesley. Thus romance, sentiment, freedom and variety
in poetic form, philanthropy, revolt against the past, return to and
reverence for the past, scientific doubt, weariness of life, love
of nature, wistful belief, relapse on the forms of the Church, and
everything else which stamps the literature of the nineteenth century
were alive and active in the last half of the eighteenth century. The
year 1801 made no sudden break. The nineteenth century merely went on
evolving the principles, revolutionary or reactionary, of the last half
of the eighteenth century.
Thus Crabbe, the precursor of whoever, Englishman, American, Frenchman,
or Slav, has written of the sombre tragedies of the poor, was born in
1754. Blake, whose perfectly un-Augustan rhapsodies and mystic lyrics
were made fashionable about 1870, was born in 1757, out of due time,
for his best side is Elizabethan in quality. Burns, born in 1759, is
as much at home in the nineteenth century as Tolstoï, while Godwin
could not be more “advanced,” or Mary Wollstonecraft more of “a New
Woman,” if the former belonged to our “Forward Liberals” and the latter
perorated at congresses of her sex. The first twenty-five years of Miss
Austen belong to the eighteenth century; yet, except for a certain
“old-fashioned” primness of style, she is the first, and, beyond all
doubt, the greatest of all nineteenth-century “realistic” novelists
of domestic life. For, though a “realist,” she is a humorist, and the
combination is almost unexampled. Your common realist is a gloomy
thing, with no more sense of the comic than M. Zola.
Of the new poets, revolutionary in metre and matter, Wordsworth,
Scott, Coleridge, and Southey were born in 1770–1774; they were mature
before the nineteenth century dawned. His northern home, among the
hills and lakes, fitted Wordsworth to be the austere and mystical poet
of nature and of man in relation to nature. Born a poet, his genius
was determined by his environment, while his ardent sympathy with the
Revolution at once turned his attention to the unregarded poor, and
inspired his not wholly successful attempt to shake off the trammels
of Augustan “poetic diction,” the survival of the Latinism of Boileau
and Pope. Later, of course, Wordsworth became the Tory, the patriot,
the Churchman, and the Stamp Collector. But his poetical creed he never
consciously changed, though he often lapsed from it unconsciously. If
Scott was to be a poet at all he was fated to be influenced by the New
World, not in its emancipated ideas, but in its wistful return to the
Old World of reivers, spearmen, claymores, goblin, ghost, and fairy.
The Border ballads lulled his cradle and were the joy of his childhood
and manhood. All tradition murmured to him her charms of Border and
Highland legend; every ruined abbey and castle had its tale for him; to
Ettrick and Yarrow he needed not to say, like Lady John Scott, “Have
you no message for me?” He never had a touch of the Augustan horror
of mountain and torrent, never a touch of the Augustan contempt of
“Barbarism.” Walpole’s _Castle of Otranto_ and Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels
of terror went to the molding of his genius, as the novels of Miss
Edgeworth (born 1767) suggested fiction about the lives and manners of
his own people. In his return to the past he came, like Lamb, on the
Elizabethan drama, and, unlike Lamb, on the unpublished documents of
the Tudor age, the age of desperate resistance to England. But Scott
would never have been exactly the poet that he was if he had not heard
“Christabel” recited. “Christabel,” the entirely original utterance
of a genius which, at first, was a child of the enlightenment of the
eighteenth century. The early ideas of Coleridge were the ideas of
Rousseau and of Bernardin de Saint Pierre, who was, like Coleridge,
but more energetically, a seeker for an ideal land where pantisocracy
might flourish and a clown might be the poet’s “brother.”
In poetry, in poetic form, Coleridge was the real and daring innovator,
inspired by the eighteenth century reaction against convention, and
played on like an æolian harp by every wind of his mystic spirit. His
reaction was too violent even for Lamb; his originality too extreme
even for Wordsworth. In him, of all our later poets, the “unconscious
self” was the strongest and the most free, and of all our poets he had
the hardest battle with the dull Augustan survival in such critics as
Jeffrey. To them all the ripened fruit of the blossoming time of the
late eighteenth century, the poetry of Scott and of Wordsworth, was but
dimly intelligible, but Coleridge was the most unintelligible of all.
From the Germany of the late eighteenth century came one of Scott’s
springs of poetic action; from the _Lenore_ of Bürger (a popular ballad
rewritten) and from the _Götz von Berlichingen_ of Goethe. These were
the days when Scott longed to possess a skull and cross-bones, and
in a love-letter dilated on his choice of a sepulchre. But what came
to Coleridge from Germany was the late eighteenth century’s reaction
against the truly “common-sense” ideas of Hume, the philosophy of Kant,
Schelling, and Fichte. In this field, too, he was unintelligible (and
no wonder), but he was but adapting the ideas of 1770–1800, and the
neo-Hegelians of Oxford are doing the same thing. A reaction against
the materialism of common-sense was inevitable; Mesmer, Swedenborg, and
Kant began what survives in the hands of the Master of Balliol and of
Professor William James.
In a more recent generation Byron prolonged the Wertherism of Werther,
Byron being thus a grandson of Rousseau, while he borrowed his form,
and borrowed it very ill, from what Scott borrowed of Coleridge. The
genius of Byron is not contested by the sane, but except in satire it
seldom found clear and adequate, because it sought hurried, heedless,
and tumultuous, expression. Scott had a better ear and was not so
reckless an _improvisatore_. Poems that can endure are not written
like Byron’s, in the brief leisure of fashionable industry. We admire
the native impetus of Byron, his gift of satire, his sensitiveness
to elemental force in nature and in man, but we cannot understand
the furore which was so much the child of his title, his beauty,
his recklessness, and his studiously cultivated air of mystery. Mr.
Lenville, as reported by Mr. Folair, said that Nicholas Nickleby was
“a regular stick of an actor, and it’s only the mystery about him that
has caused him to go down with the people here, though Lenville says
he don’t believe there’s anything at all in it.” A later age must
partly adopt the same theory of Byron’s original and unparalleled
success in Europe as well as in England. He was mysterious Manfred,
he was Childe Harold, he was the Corsair; a hero of Mrs. Radcliffe’s,
with an Oriental air and a gloomy secret and a heart burning with
indignation against the unworthy species of men. What had Byron done?
Even Goethe was curious, believing wild anecdotes; now we really do not
care what Byron did, recognizing in him, his genius, and his pose, not
so much the “Satanic,” as the result of hysteria and madness in his
race. Satanism, from of old, has been mainly hysteria. The element of
personal _reclame_ in Byron has faded, and with it fades his reputation
as an earth-shaking poet. Attempts to revive that fame in our day,
attempts to bring us back to “the noble poet,” are respectable,
being based on loyalty to the taste of our great-grandfathers and
grandmothers in all civilized countries. But the efforts are futile.
“Byron,” says Mr. Saintsbury, “seems to me a poet distinctly of the
second class, and not even of the best kind of second, inasmuch as
his greatness is chiefly derived from a sort of parody, a sort of
imitation of the qualities of the first. His verse is to the greatest
poetry what melodrama is to tragedy, what plaster is to marble, what
pinchbeck is to gold.” Such, however unpopular they may be, are my own
candid sentiments, for though from childhood I could and did read all
our great poets with pleasure, it was not with the kind of pleasure
which Byron in his satire and his declamation could occasionally give
me. He is monotonous, he is rhetorical, his versification is often
incredibly bad, and he is more obscure, mainly by dint of hurry, bad
printing, and bad grammar, than Mr. Browning. Thus Byron leaves us
impressed as with a vast, even volcanic, yet dandified force, untrained
and often misdirected. Either by nature, or in reaction, he professed
sympathy with the Augustan school of Queen Anne’s reign, and sided with
Pope in the long quarrel as to whether Pope is a poet.
Even the modern opponents of Byron must recognize in him qualities
which won the admiration and affection of Scott and Shelley. In Shelley
we had a true child of the revolution, the _Aufklarung_, and the later
eighteenth century. His boyhood trifled with chemical science (probably
not then popular with the human boy); his adolescence was given to
converting school-girls into “dear little atheists.” His social ideas,
like those of some advanced moderns, aimed at the absolute destruction
of the family; and the moral of _Laon and Cythna_ went far behind the
morals of the most backward savages, who make incest a capital offence.
Shelley, a boy all his life, was more boyishly devoted to destruction
than even the newest writers on the relations of the sexes. In “making
all things new” both he and they are, in fact, relapsing on a condition
of society which, if it ever existed, is so old that it may be called
“pre-human,” and is contrary to nature, as far as we can study human
nature in the least developed of tribes. His ideas conducted Shelley
to the tragedy and farce of his career: his desertion of one young
wife, followed by her suicide, and his marriage with another, in entire
opposition to his own opinions. In literature he began at school
with a devout following of Mrs. Radcliffe; while, in _Queen Mab_ and
_Alastor_, vigorous but vague and misty _Childe Harold_, wandering in
No Man’s Land, he first displayed his originality in poetical form.
His personal character being noble and generous in the highest degree,
his sympathy with the poor and the oppressed being a true passion,
Shelley’s errors arose from the fixed idea that almost every human
ordinance must, being old, be necessarily bad. He would recognize that
there is, after all, something right in the sixth commandment, but
did not draw the inference that a gleam of reason might also be found
in most of the rest of the Decalogue. The state of society then, as
always, provoked revolt, but the state of society was grievous, not
because its moral laws were bad, but because its laws were not obeyed.
Shelley had no turn for narrative, and, in such poems as _The Revolt
of Islam_, it is the splendid meteoric genius, the unexcelled music
that captivate. In lyrics he was probably the most original force since
the Elizabethan age: his verse is a singing and soaring flame. In
_Adonis_ his righteous indignation carries him forward like an angel
with a sword of fire; and _The Witch of Atlas_ is a triumph in a new
“fairy way of writing.” His is the Muse of clouds and stars, of sea and
tempest, of all the aspects, and, in appearance, most capricious forces
of the world, yet his is also the Muse of flowers and peaceful woods,
of dejection and of delight. What the born rebel, Milton, might have
been without the foundation and trammels of Puritanism, that Shelley
was, though his wild and tender lyric note was even more exquisite than
Milton’s. Neither was, in the full sense, human, for both were without
humor, as may be seen in their humorous pieces.
Keats, but three years younger than Shelley (1795), was more a true
child of the nineteenth century. His social ideas, though of course
liberal, were more in abeyance; he was more exclusively an artist; and
his art was more controlled by the revived Elizabethanism of Leigh Hunt
(1784). That singular man, who had so much taste, and so much of it
bad; so intense a theory of social benevolence, and so keen a belief
that it was more blessed to receive than to give, “owed little” (in the
way of literature) “to any but the old masters, and many contemporaries
owed not a little to him.” Few owed more, for good and bad, than
Keats. Virgil he had found out for himself, and had translated when a
schoolboy. Spenser, too, he found for himself, and Greece he discovered
afresh in Lemprière’s _Dictionary_ and in Chapman’s _Homer_. But this
superficial euphuism and elaborate verbal quaintness he partly derived
at second hand from Leigh Hunt.
That something in Leigh Hunt which suggested Harold Skimpole to
Dickens, and his violent conception of _The Cockney School_ to
Lockhart, was not hidden from Keats, and inspired him with some bitter
words. It was what he derived from Hunt that gave occasion to Keats’s
assailants, who were more of political than of literary partisans.
Lockhart, or Wilson, or both, with the _Quarterly_ reviewer, in
attacking _Endymion_ were attacking, they thought, a member of an
affected, effeminate, and radical coterie. Keats himself, maturing
with the suddenness of genius, looked on _Endymion_ as thoroughly
immature. But killed, or even discouraged, by his critics he was
not, and on a page of a copy of _Lamia_ where his publishers spoke
of his discouragment he wrote “This is a lie.” (The copy is in the
possession of Canon Ainger.) Keats, like Burns, whom he so intensely
admired and so unerringly judged as a man and a poet, was his own
best critic. Despite his boyish lusciousness of taste, and the
fever of letters written when dying, there was no manlier or more
chivalrous soul in England than that of the poet of the odes to the
nightingale and to autumn. Keats at his best attained sheer perfection
of language, of emotion, and of thought. As he advised Shelley to be,
he was not content with less than filling all the rifts with pure
gold. “Untaught,” like the minstrel of Odysseus, he combined a Greek
clarity and largeness of manner with that romance which Greece does not
lack, but which he possessed in a degree more conspicuous, at least
to readers who are not Greeks. Though he has not been and cannot be
imitated, he has supplied to Tennyson and the best moderns a standard
and an ideal. That the Shakespearian copiousness of humanity and humor
and dramatic genius would ever have been his nothing indicates, but
what writer of the nineteenth century, except Scott, has possessed
a large share of these qualities? In poetry, not one, and it was in
prose that Scott wore his fragment of the cloak of Shakespeare. For the
century has not produced, in England or America, a great dramatic poet.
It is to fiction, to Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Stevenson, Meredith,
Hawthorne, George Eliot, that we must look for the humor and humanity
and passion which, earlier, found their vehicle in the drama.
Ours is a reading rather than a seeing century, though this does not
explain the reason which made the great novelists incapable of writing
for the stage. Of the other poets of the early century, Campbell,
Rogers, Moore, Landor, Hogg, and the ladies, Mrs. Hemans, and L. E. L.,
and Beddoes, space does not permit us to treat. Landor’s audience
has not increased; Rogers has none; Campbell is best remembered for
war songs which I fear are overrated; Hogg, despite some exquisite
passages in _Kilmeny_, and some admirable songs, suffers from his
countrymen’s exclusive devotion to Robbie Burns. When Scott turned to
fiction (1814) the current of popular taste at once changed into that
channel. Byron had still his vogue; Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge then
sang only to the few initiated; Wordsworth was past his prime; and
with the general public nothing was really popular but fiction, and
that fiction was Scott’s. Miss Austen is probably much more widely
appreciated to-day than when she died, little noted by the world, in
1817. A criticism of Scott’s novels, which first made fiction supreme
and far above poetry in the estimation of “the reading public,” cannot
be attempted in this place. The best estimate of Scott, if far from
most favorable, is his own, in the introduction to _The Fortunes of
Nigel_. His faults of prolixity, haste, indifference to delicacy of
style, and even to grammar; his “big bow-wow” vein (as he calls it);
the stilted theatrical language of his Catherine Glovers and Helen
Macgregors—all these defects, with his hasty denouéments (as of
Shakespeare and Molière), are patent, are confessed, and probably deter
many readers from making profit of his humor, his rich knowledge of and
sympathy with all human nature, his infrequent but exquisite touches of
passion, his tragedy and comedy. None the less, Scott is the main stock
of the fiction of the century. Men may now have more minute knowledge,
though so wide a knowledge has none; may have more wit, if less humor;
may eagerly hunt for all that Scott loathed and avoided in our animal
nature; may, indeed must, practise a more careful style, but all the
novelists are, willy-nilly, children of Scott and Miss Austen. Dickens,
indeed, owed more to Smollett (one of Scott’s chief favorites),
Thackeray owed more to Fielding, the “Kailyard School” owed more to
Galt (1779—1839). But Scott is “the father of the rest,” above all,
of Dumas; and Miss Austen is the mother. Lord Lytton and Mr. Disraeli
had, especially at first, a tinge of Byronism, later developing on
their own lines: Mr. Disraeli’s political; Lord Lytton’s multifarious,
including the line of modern mysticism, now often worked. Scott lived
to be interested in Lytton, and might have seen (though probably he did
not see them) the little-noted beginnings of Browning and Tennyson,
about 1830.
What he did see, and admire, was the performance of Cooper, with whom
actual and living American fiction may perhaps be said to take its
rise. In England, Cooper was regarded as the Scott of America; and it
is to be regretted that Lockhart did not excise a splenetic personal
reference to Cooper in Sir Walter’s _Journal_. He was old, tired, and
fatigued with the pressure of society in Paris when he wrote. Cooper
had the genius to appropriate the unworked fields of American patriotic
seafaring life, and of the manners of the Red Man; he is “Cooper of the
wood and wave.” Eagerly were his works read by boys, when Thackeray was
a boy, and when I was a boy. Never shall his readers forget the “Long
Carabine,” to whom Thackeray was devoted, and Uncas, and Chingachgook.
“Still we love the Delaware,
And still we hate the Mingos.”
Doubtless Cooper’s Indians are not “realistically” treated, though
there is infinitely more of truth in his dignified hunters and warriors
than people conversant only with the Red Man of to-day are ready to
believe. But Cooper, probably, does not live with the immortality of
his first renowned successor, Hawthorne, who, for secure perfection of
form, is to modern fiction what Keats is to modern poetry. Like Scott,
Hawthorne is the unforced fruit of his ancestry and the society into
which he was born—a Puritan, not a Cavalier artist, with a background
of austere faith and of old superstition, differentiated from that of
the Covenanters by the shadow of deep forests and of struggles with
the Indians and the wild things of the woods. These had passed into
mellow memories, as, for Scott, had passed the age of witches, fairies,
reivers, and claymores. Entirely, in the _Scarlet Letter_, as by way
of hereditary influence in the _House of Seven Gables_, Hawthorne
reproduced what was old, making it poetically enduring. _His Mosses
from an Old Manse_, and other brief tales set the fashion, except by
Poe, long unfollowed, of the _conte_. Neither author has been excelled
in his own portion of this field. Hawthorne’s haunted consciences,
Poe’s treasure tale, his detective stories, and his tales of terror
remain unequalled, though so profusely imitated. This epoch, say from
1830 to 1855, was a kind of classical interspace in the literature of
the century. France, preoccupied by war in the first thirty years of
the age, now awoke to her own famous romantic era, with Hugo, Dumas,
Musset, Gautier, George Sand, Sainte-Beuve, Mérimée—names of the
highest. Germany, to the non-Teutonic world, is, in poetry, represented
by Heine, and, in science, philosophy, philology, and history by a
galaxy of innovators ingenious and industrious. America saw Hawthorne,
Poe, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, Ticknor, Prescott, Motley, Longfellow,
Bryant, Emerson, in their prime; while England had Carlyle, Tennyson,
Newman, Browning, the Brontës, Kingsley, Thackeray, Dickens, and
Ruskin, all recognized and flourishing.
We look around and see, as Mr. Stevenson says in a letter, that “the
suns have set,” while we are scarcely conscious of new dawns. Who can
explain, by circumstances of social evolution and historical event,
the rising and the setting of such constellations of genius? It is
not enough to speak of the democratic demand, naturally indifferent
to style, for never was style the object of such anxious research,
except in other ages of euphuism. Encouragement is even overabundant;
“masterpieces” are announced every week, and forgotten every year. It
may be the prejudice of hoary eld, but I must confess that our new
literature does not seem to me to show such promise of permanence as
the literature of 1830–1860 gave, and, so far, has fulfilled. Has
fulfilled in spite of our sneers at the “early Victorian,” which
was not socialistic, or evolutionist and Darwin-ridden, and was
“respectable,” and did avert its eyes from all that most people in
real life don’t care to stare at. This “prudery” was no new thing. The
Greeks, in except some late decadents and in the old comedy, have a
“prudish” literature. The Latin classics are not in the taste of M.
Zola. The age of Chaucer, the age of Elizabeth, were grossly frank,
that of the Restoration was frankly lewd, but we have sought out
many inventions over which Sedley and Rochester would not have cared
to linger. Their grossness was gay; ours is morbidly squalid. Such
things are absent from the work of Hawthorne and Holmes, Longfellow,
Dickens, Thackeray, and the rest. Such things we now treat of, greatly
daring, and somehow our elders appear apt to outlaugh and outlive us as
humorists, novelists, and poets. It is strange.
Into the merits of that remarkable middle age of the century we cannot
enter in much detail. Tennyson holds unimperilled the throne of the
poet of the time. That his thought is not especially penetrating,
whether he deals with the intricacies of human character, or with the
problems of the universe, may be readily admitted. But I am unaware
that any poet has yet “got the absolute into a corner,” or solved
the problems of the universe. Tennyson, more than people suppose,
was, personally, a mystic, with his own mystic experiences; and his
philosophy was influenced by them. He “followed the Gleam.” Neither
in the _Idylls of the King_ nor in plays, was dramatic rendering
of character his forte. His forte was charm, and music, and the
interpretation of nature. In these he is the equal of the Mantuan, is
the Virgil of the modern world, “golden branch among the shadows.”
Moreover, he has infinite variety: from _Mariana_ to _Fatima_ and
_Rizpah_; from the _Lotos-Eaters_, which “adds a new charm” after the
_Faërie Queene_, to the _Northern Farmer_, from _Ulysses_ to _Crossing
the Bar_. The early _Morte d’Arthur_ is of unsurpassed nobility and
magic; the last poem, _Crossing the Bar_, is no less pre-eminent in
these qualities. Tennyson, in short, had genius; new, as all genius
is new, and no occasional defects of taste or temper can impair the
splendor and richness of his gift to the world, nor the immortality of
his fame.
His contemporary, Browning, had the misfortune to attract, by his
faults, the people who wish to believe themselves clever, because
they labor at appreciating passages which the poet had made obscure.
Darkness is not depth, nor is obscurity a merit. From his letters it
is plain that Mr. Browning had not the gift of lucid expression; from
his poems it is manifest that he had not, in a high degree, the gift of
verbal music and of charms. His gift of the grotesque, very real and
original, was also his snare. In _Christmas Eve_ and _Easter Day_, with
_Men and Women_, we have the true essence of Browning at his best; we
have his dramatic lyrics, with their amazing abundance of character and
variety of measure. After the first fascinating volume _The Ring and
the Book_ became monotonous. One song in _Paracelsus_, to myself, seems
worth all the dissection of character in the blank verse. There are
many who find a kind of spiritual help in such pieces as _Prospice_.
There are thousands who find in _Men and Women_ a sort of intellectual
enjoyment (or entertainment) which they can derive from no other poet
who ever lived. An energy, life, and sympathy, breaking forth in
fresh, unheard-of ways; vocal in strange, piercing, untried measures:
these are the imperishable qualities of Browning. Look at his rendering
of the Agamemnon: such is his version of life. The poetry of Æschylus
is not there: “_carmina desunt_”; but there is a new, odd, unexpected
rendering of the tragedy. So poignant and broken, sad, glad, grotesque,
and pitiful, was Browning’s rendering of life. He was “ever a fighter”:
no poet is more exempt from whining and despair. Destiny linked him
with Mrs. Browning, whose genius, sincere and original, is apt to be
obscured by palpable faults of manner, emotion, and even rhyme, on
which it is superfluous to dwell. Her merits, and some of her defects,
made Mrs. Browning the most popular of women poets in England, except,
perhaps, Miss Ingelow. Both, in the crowd of accomplished versifiers,
appear as true poets, though both, no doubt, fail to reach the place of
Miss Christina Rossetti, who never can be popular.
The matter of popularity is full of puzzles and paradoxes. Tennyson
was popular, yet great because he is popular. There was a moment when
popularity without permanence might have been expected for Longfellow.
The excellence of his moral intentions was then more obvious than the
poetry. Such early pieces as _Excelsior_ and _The Psalm of Life_ yield
odd results on analysis. But not much better can be said for the _Queen
of the May_, and for parts of _The Miller’s Daughter_. In these is a
marvellous dexterity in sinking. But sink, and remain sunk, was as
little characteristic of Longfellow as of Tennyson. He was a true poet,
in his lyrics, even in his translations, as well as in _Evangeline_,
and that excellent experiment _Hiawatha_, where the measure of the
Finnish popular poems is applied to the not dissimilar legends of
another woodland race. But Longfellow lacked that undefinable quality
of the rare, the strange, the hitherto unheard yet delightful note
which now and again is heard in the verse of Edgar Poe. He was an
Ishmaelite in literature, his hand against every man’s hand, and
hence seems to be less admired where he was personally known than in
France and England. It is not the famous _Raven_, but such pieces
as _To Helen_, _the Sleeper_, and at most a dozen others which give
Poe his high place in the judgment of his admirers. Not his ideas,
but the beauty of his haunting lines, confers on him the laurel. Of
Bryant, as a rule, and of Whittier almost always, the reverse is the
truth. The acceptability of their ideas, the refined simplicity, not
the natural magic, of their form, are their claims to renown. Except
in a few places, as in such as his _Commemoration Ode_, Mr. Lowell
is better remembered for the wit and vigor of his Biglow poems than
for his serious verse, at least in England; while Emerson’s prose has
precedence here over his poetry. The wisdom of the East and West,
blended with his happy, courageous temper, made Emerson a corrective
Carlyle, while Thoreau is the complement of Emerson.
Concerning the great Victorian novelists, Thackeray and Dickens,
so much is daily written that remark is superfluous. A master of
observation of all that had rarely been observed, a generous heart,
an original and abundant humorist, the greatest source of mirth
in our century, Dickens appears to wear less well than his rival.
The unapproached merits of Thackeray’s style must preserve him in
literature; his pathos is rare and unforced; his form of humor is as
permanent as that of Fielding, and as successfully matched by his
phrasing. Even his verse, mirthful or melancholy, does not fade, and
has its own place on the borderland of poetry. George Eliot’s fame,
too, must revive the success of her earlier and more humorous novels,
before she became too fond of the Spencerian philosophy, and took
herself too seriously, a natural result of adulation. Charlotte
Brontë, in the same way, has been, as it were, rediscovered amid
a chorus of fresh applauses, and with perhaps rather too curious
investigations. In America, after Hawthorne, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes
and Mrs. Beecher Stowe were the novelists most generally admired in
England, when Thackeray and Dickens were verging to their decline. It
is, indeed, to be regretted that Dr. Holmes did not write more fiction
when in his prime. His excellent and original _Elsie Venner_, and
_Guardian Angel_, with their humorous pictures of real life and their
thread of phantasy, half mystical, half scientific, border (as often
in the _Poet_ and _Professor at the Breakfast Table_) on the ground of
“psychical research.” Dr. Holmes was not merely, in verse and prose,
an exquisite wit, but a man of rare knowledge, a man of science, and a
sturdy defender of the purity of the language. Mrs. Beecher Stowe, on
the other hand, took the world by storm with a vivid tract in the form
of fiction; a book now not easy to criticise, but which can still move
to laughter and tears. It is my “insular ignorance” which prevents me
from appreciating other American fictions of that age, before the days
of writers still happily living and working: Mark Twain, Bret Harte,
W. D. Howells, Henry James, and scores of others, who, being here
to speak for themselves, shall not be commented upon in this place.
With Mr. Howells, as a critic, I have tried to break lances, while
ready to admit one of his main contentions, that the art of Scott,
Thackeray, Dickens, and others of our fathers would have profited much
by being a finer art, by condensation, by omission, by avoidance of the
superfluous. But that our modern fiction is a greater art, that romance
and story-telling and adventure are obsolete, or ought to be obsolete,
that I can never admit while human nature is human nature. Mankind
will never be content, in fiction, with tales of the psychology of
the ordinary person; ordinary as we are, we desire to be, like Homer’s
Heracles, conversant with great adventures. Mr. Howells perhaps may
think Aristotle a Greek snob when he maintains that tragedy must find
its theme in the sorrows of the god-descended kings. Are not the griefs
of the poor or of the middle classes as poignant? They are; but they
do not involve such heights and depths of fortune, raising or wrecking
whole states, as do the woes “of Thebes, or Atreus’s line.” The fall
of Prince Charles from an hour even of shadowy royalty, from the
leadership of an army, from the wondering admiration of Europe and the
applause of Voltaire into the subject and dependent sot is an example
of modern historical tragedy; in its elevation and its decline more apt
to move “pity and terror” than the circumstance that a journalist has
taken to drink.
As in the case of America, so in that of England, I cannot enter into
the merits of living novelists in so wide a task as the brief review of
a century. Mr. Meredith, as a veteran of the 60’s, has shown, perhaps,
fully what is the nature of his achievement; he shines as a creator
of character (the highest praise) and as a writer with a thoroughly
original view of the world, as a poet and as a wit. That his manner is
entirely fortunate, and not rather tinged with wilful eccentricities
like those of Browning and Carlyle, can scarcely be disputed. An
accomplished young novelist has admitted to me that his manner is
“catching,” and that he has to struggle against half-conscious efforts
at imitation. Others do not struggle; and most grow older before they
are able to write like themselves, with their own voices. Even Mr.
Stevenson was caught now and then, his own voice being original indeed,
but yet full of memories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
and even of the Cameronian writers. To my mind Mr. Stevenson was the
greatest, or, at least, the most enjoyable, of our novelists since
George Eliot, excelling in matter and form, though probably always
prevented by thwarting circumstances from doing himself complete
justice. He practically revived in England the novel historical, now so
abundantly practised, and practised with spirit, by Mr. Stanley Weyman,
Mr. Anthony Hope, Dr. Conan Doyle, Mr. A. E. W. Mason, and a regiment
of followers. The novel scientific, as in the hands of Mr. Wells, and
the novel of adventure, “beyond the bounds of known romanticism,” as in
Mr. Rider Haggard’s works, with the detective novel and the Oriental
and imperialistic romances of Mr. Kipling, prove that man will not be
satisfied with domestic realism alone. I never thought he would! Mr.
Kipling’s astonishing powers of vision, his habit of ruthlessly cutting
the superfluous, and his amazing command of technicalities, help to
account for his world-wide fame. But the greatest of these is vision,
not an acquired result of thought, but a gift of Heaven. The age has
also produced a wealth of novels with a purpose. Would that the authors
could be induced to state their purposes squarely, in undecorative
treatises! But I confess that the treatises would not be read. The
specialism of modern science has also invaded fiction, and some authors
find a county or a parish wide enough for the work of a lifetime. The
district has its dialect, and who can reprove it when spoken by the
creatures of Mr. Barrie and Mr. Crockett? This kind of fiction is the
result of our desire to learn (through novels) about the lives of
all sorts and conditions of men. _Enfin_, the whole scope of mortal
existence is now the _farrage libelli_ of the novelists who range from
prehistoric man to Bethnal Green; from Thrums to Central Africa. There
is not the same eagerness to read history, which James II. regarded as
“more instructive, and quite as amusing.” My heart is here with King
James, and I confess to gaining more entertainment from Carlyle’s
_Frederick the Great_ than from most novels.
The earlier historians, from Scott to Carlyle, Macaulay and Froude,
placed the human interest in the front rank. They conceived that
history had to do with human beings of passions, caprices, moods,
loves, and hates, dwelling in a world of interesting costumes, arms,
architecture, ideas, and beliefs. Thus Carlyle, with much research,
created his Cromwell or his Frederick, as Scott created his Queen
Mary, his Louis XI., his James VI., or his Cromwell in _Woodstock_,
who is not too remote from Carlyle’s. For these reasons Scott, Froude,
Carlyle, and Macaulay really are “amusing” as well as instructive
historians. When institutions and constitutions had to be described
they were placed in separate compartments, as in the works of Hallam
and Bishop Stubbs. Historians studied manuscripts, of course, but it
was not held that only the unprinted was the valuable, that a new
survey of known matter was absolutely valueless.
In the end of the century we have history which is not “as interesting
as a novel” (like that of Prescott, Motley, Froude, and Macaulay), but
very far from gay. Novelty of research is, quite justly, insisted upon
(though research is as old as Hemingburgh, and was much advanced by
Gibbon, Carter, Rymer, Walpole, Tytler, and so on) till, by a natural
error, every scrap won from a wilderness of charters is valued beyond
its deserts. The human interest is frowned upon; movements of forces,
political and social, are treated in preference to personal character
and adventure. Meticulous accuracy is insisted upon, till nervous
students are actually afraid to publish. Even Mommsen, greatest of
original students, is regarded as frivolous, even Curtius as “popular”
by the modern school. It is natural to man to run into these excesses
of reaction. Froude is not often accurate, Macaulay has prejudices,
even Mr. Freeman was not sound about Knights’ Fees and about a certain
palisade. Now the public does not care about Knights’ Fees or about
the Manor, much; nor even about the obscure early history of civic
institutions. In fact, even references to authorities frighten away
part of the public, whose timidity I do not applaud. The results of our
frivolity and of the portentous gravity of some modern historians is
that, since Mr. Green, scarcely any writer of history is read except
for examinations. As long as historians declare (often with perfect
truth) that their own works are not literature, but something far more
awful and solemn, namely science, history must be unpopular. But we are
only waiting for a man of genius as accurate as the most meticulous,
and as interesting as the agreeably irresponsible Froude. Of science
I am not to treat, so I am dispensed from remarks on our scientific
modern historians. It is certain that in collecting and printing and
calendaring documents the age in all countries has shown praiseworthy
industry, while Mr. Parkman in America, like our mid-century
historians, was not too scientific to be readable.
Of theology, except when recommended by the art of a Newman or
a Jowett, nothing is here to be said; though I could cheerfully
say a good deal, especially about Biblical criticism. But that is
science, though scarcely the sort of science which has been defined
as “organized common-sense.” The poetry of the late century in
England boasts the names of Rossetti, William Morris, Matthew Arnold,
and Mr. Swinburne. It is tinged, in the former with mediævalism
derived from the Italians and Chaucer; while in Mr. Swinburne every
conceivable literary influence, from the Greeks to Baudelaire, from
the Elizabethans to Victor Hugo, makes itself abundantly conspicuous.
These poets, younger than Matthew Arnold, are not much influenced by
Wordsworth, though by Shelley Mr. Swinburne was influenced. On the
other hand, Mr. Arnold was a modern, academic, heterodox Wordsworth,
and often a truly delightful poet.
He stood much aloof from the contemporary literature of his day, and
his letters prove that he was no fervent admirer even of Tennyson
or Browning. His own poetry has been to many, as to myself, full of
delightful passages, whether he wrote of the Oxford country-side, or
of Wordsworth’s hills, of “the shorn and parcelled Oxus,” or of the
moaning sea that Sophocles long ago heard as he heard it on Dover
beach. He was our greatest modern elegiac poet; a master of the Dirge.
Of the living, again, no criticism can be offered; we only note the
names, and real if very various merits, of Mr. Robert Bridges, Mr.
Watson, Mr. Davidson, Mr. Dobson, Mr. Benson, Mr. Thompson, Mr. Henley,
Mr. Gosse, Mr. Stephen Philips, Mrs. Marriott Watson, Mrs. Maynell,
Mr. Kipling, “a nest of singing birds.” It would be impertinent, and
indeed perilous, to “draw invidious distinctions,” as the undergraduate
said about the major and minor prophets: nor is it for this century to
sift the poetic sheep from the goats, who, in an age that reads little
poetry, are greatly guilty of much verse.
The unassuming and decried art of criticism remains. Essays are of no
one age; there are similar excellences in every good essayist since
Montaigne. We have no Hazlitt, Lamb, or Leigh Hunt, but we had Mr.
Stephenson and Mr. Pater, so unlike in all but conscious interest in
style, and reminiscence of the best models. Indeed, essay writing is
almost an unpractised art, as the public “has no use for it,” any more
than for the letter H on the Sandwich boards. A fairly bad novelist
can live; to an appallingly bad novelist the workhouse unfolds its
awful valves. In literary criticism Mr. Arnold stood alone in his
age, and Mr. Arnold’s literary income, it is known, surprised, when
stated, the Commissioners of Income Tax: not by its affluence. Of
living critics it would be in the highest degree dangerous to say a
word, though many words, both of praise and dispraise, might be said
of a person of reckless character. That (with obvious exceptions) most
critics are men intimately familiar with what is best, from Homer
to Mr. Stephen Philips, few students would venture to aver. That we
(for am I not the least of all critics, and not worthy to be called
a critic?) are entirely devoid of ignorance, personal bias, likes,
dislikes, prejudices, pet aversions, indolence, we are not so blindly
conceited as to maintain. We have been taught by many centuries of
creative geniuses, from Theocritus to the latest protesting popular
novelists, to know our proper place, and we take refuge in “confession
and avoidance.” The new century will not know our names when we pass
where Dennis and where Cibber are, unless Mr. Robert Buchanan writes a
new _Dunciad_.
The century, even if we are in full decadence (of which we are not
the best judges), has been glorious in literature, and holds its own
well with any in modern history. English itself has passed from the
occasionally stilted Augustan survival, through the novelties of
Macaulay, De Quincey, and Carlyle, and the early decorated of Mr.
Ruskin, into slipshod slang in one extreme, and euphuism in the other.
But the main stream keeps its course, and English may be written with
perfect purity, and with new fluency and variety, by the men for whom
the task is reserved by fate. But what does the century bequeath by way
of intellectual motive? Little but the more or less transformed forces
of the eighteenth century. There is science, but science, happily, is
beginning to be aware that she is not really omniscient. Conceivably
her foot is on the border of a new region, often surmised, never
explored, full of light on the problems of spirit and matter. Hence,
indeed, might come a new force in letters. Again, the social ideas of
1750–1800 may take practical shapes of incalculable momentousness, but
these would not for long be favorable to literature. Or, less probably,
the return on the past may assume practical shape, though this element
of the later eighteenth century may seem, as far as letters go, to be
exhausted. In brief, as I began by saying, the division of literary
periods by measures of time is a cross-division. This peculiarity the
last hundred years possess: that literature now blossoms on a far
wider field. English-speaking America had, indeed, a literature long
before the War of Independence; but it was not a literature for every
reader of to-day. Now, and for long, the States have taken their own
part in history, fiction, poetry, and all other branches of letters.
Germany came back into world literature again just at the ending of the
eighteenth century, after unregarded ages of neglect. Russia and the
Scandinavian North awoke about the same time, and daily widen their
influence, as does Belgium in the sunshine of Maeterlinck. France, of
course, has in all time been in the foremost rank; while to balance
America, Russia, and the North, Italy and Spain have scarcely held
the place which through so many centuries was their own. Such changes
in national literatures resemble the political waxings and wanings
of national fortunes. The English-speaking peoples may have their
eclipse; perhaps it is heralded by a modern comparative deficiency in
humor which, if England and America cease to laugh, will die out of a
profoundly solemn world.
In the foregoing remarks little has been said about the literature
of the century except among English-speaking peoples. Not being a
Mezzofanti, I am not personally acquainted with the literature of all
languages, and it is a vain thing to speak of books at second hand.
It was not the nineteenth but the eighteenth century that saw Germany
re-enter the field of pure literature, as distinguished from that of
scholarship and science. Since the end of the Middle Ages, with their
poets, German writers had mainly been devoted to theology and classical
criticism. Latin was the language of the learned. Many ascertainable
causes, in the middle and end of the eighteenth century, and doubtless
many causes which cannot be ascertained, awoke again the Teutonic
genius. The victories of Frederick the Great gave Germans patriotism
and confidence in their own tongue.
The philosophic and social works which preluded to the French
Revolution stirred the German mind and required popular expression.
Thus Kant wrote in his own native speech in reaction against the
sceptical philosophy of David Hume, and Kant became the father of
the long array of German metaphysicians from Hegel and Fichte to
Schopenhauer and Hartmann. Their philosophy “cannot be briefly stated,
especially in French,” as one of them said, but its general effect
has been rather to counteract materialism by making it pretty plain
that human nature is not so simple and easily to be explained as the
Scottish philosophers were apt to suppose. In England, Coleridge gave
an Anglican heart to the new German philosophy, which also influenced
Hamilton, and still affects the philosophical teaching of Oxford.
“It is nonsense, but is it _the right sort_ of nonsense?” asked the
late Professor Sidgwick (a Cambridge man) when struggling with the
examination papers of a Hegelian undergraduate.
More important as literature were the double influences of return on
the mediæval past and of inspiration by the new political and social
ideas which gave the impulse to the genius of Goethe, Schiller,
Bürger, and others. Goethe began as the child of Rousseau, but as a
child who had read Kant, and drunk deep of the romance of the Middle
Ages. Doubtless his is the greatest name of modern Germany, both as
a student of life, of nature, of history, and of thought. He was the
spiritual parent of Scott, with his _Götz von Berlichingen_, and,
with Richter, of Carlyle. Through himself and his English or Scottish
disciples, Goethe has been the most fertile source of change in the
literature of the nineteenth century. In extreme old age, curious
to say, he gave the first impulse to the study of early religion as
displayed in the obscure rites and beliefs of the Australian natives:
a theme remote enough from his effect on the poetry of Matthew Arnold.
Probably the two parts of his _Faust_ and his _Roman Lyrics_ are the
most popular, and, as literature, the most permanent parts of his work,
with _Werther_, _Wilhelm Meister_, and _Elective Affinities_, in prose.
Schiller, beginning with the boyish romanticism of _The Robbers_,
became a kind of classic in his later dramas. Lessing and Winckelmann
were the most sound and fertile influences in criticism. _The Laocoon_
remains indispensable. The patriotic lyrists resurrected the national
spirit of the Teutonic race, and Heine, Hebrew by race and half French
in character, combined the characteristics of Lucian, Burns, and
Voltaire.
Wolf, writing in Latin (and I believe that his work on Homer has never
attained a third edition, and has never been translated into English),
became the parent, for good or evil, of what is called the Higher
Criticism, Lachmann introducing the painfully conjectural tendencies
of that intellectual exercise. Its application to scriptural texts is
notorious, but not precisely as part of literature. Like other European
countries, the Germany of the close of the century is not remarkable
for resplendent genius in poetry or fiction, though novels abound. The
scientific, historical, and scholarly literature is of vast profusion.
In thoroughness and tireless patience, Germany is the teacher of the
world, while in curious contrast to her practical genius is the love
of some of her scholars for baseless conjecture. The “insularity”
with which the English are charged is a matter of reproach by French
scholars against Germany. Some sets of ideas, long familiar in America,
England, and the Latin nations, are only now beginning to reach German
classical scholars.
To write an account of the changes in French literature during the
century is impossible within moderate space. The revolutionary and
Napoleonic wars were unfavorable to the literary art, and the head
of so great a poet as André Chénier fell under the guillotine. Till
about 1825–1830 the Restoration was accompanied by literature in the
old classic style of Boileau and of the Augustan age, only enlivened
by the romantic if somewhat affected style of that great rhetorician,
Châteaubriand. The year 1830 is the sacred year of French romanticism,
drawing its ideals partly from the German romantic movement, partly
from Scott and Shakespeare, read, of course, only in translations.
Everything was now to be mediæval, Spanish, and passionate: the drama
was to be emancipated from Aristotle, also read in translations. As
far as classicism went the young adventurers had no more Greek than
Shakespeare or Scott. But they had the colossal and Titanic genius
of Hugo, exquisitely sweet, rapid, strange, and versatile in lyric:
potent, if inflated, in the drama and the novel. They had the charming
humor and exquisite taste of Théophile Gautier; the feverish passion
and mastery in verse of Alfred de Musset; the delicate, dreamy, and
wandering spirit of Gérard de Nerval; and the manly, courageous,
humorous, and unwearied vigor, in drama and in fiction, of Alexandre
Dumas.
This was, indeed, an extraordinary generation, by far the greatest
since that of Corneille, Racine, and Molière. Many others might be
named: the reserved force and incisive irony of Mérimée; the learned
and genial criticism of Sainte-Beuve; the inexhaustible talent of
George Sand, and the mighty Balzac, the maker and founder of the modern
work of introspection. Probably, of all these writers, Dumas and Balzac
have exercised most influence on later fiction in England and America.
Flaubert continued, with painful elaboration, the traditions of Balzac;
from Flaubert, and round him, grew up Daudet and M. Zola, and the
Goncourts. Poetry, after Lamartine, dwindled into the prettinesses of
the Parnasse and the eccentricities, too obviously intentional, of
Baudelaire, Verlaine, and the Symbolistes. Literary art, at the end
of the century, became too self-conscious, too fond of argument about
ideals and methods, the tattle of the studio. Great men have not thus
dissipated their energy; they have done what they could do; they have
not talked about how they did it. What English literature was borrowed
from France, at this time, is more in the nature of words than work.
Criticism has been a _chimaera bombinans in vacuo_, chattering about
realism, naturalism, symbolism, the use of documents, and so forth.
The defects, rather than the merits, of France have been imitated; a
squalid pessimism is easily affected.
The closing century has seen Russia awake, as the close of the
eighteenth century beheld the literary revival of Germany. Russian
poetry has only reached the learned among us: the novels of
Turguenieff, Dustoiefsky, and Tolstoï are read in translation, with
curiosity, antipathy, enthusiasm, and an absence of that emotion. It
is very long since Terentianus Maurus remarked that the fortunes of
a book depended on the taste of the reader. Often he is favorably
impressed, not by the actual merit of the story as a story or as a work
of literary art, but by its appeal to his private sentiments, as of
socialism, pessimism, toryism, or whatever they may be. Possibly the
vehement admirers of some Russian writers have been thus misguided.
In any case, no qualified critic thinks that his opinion of works
which he cannot read in the original language is of any value. For
this reason I need not offend or please the reader by offering any
uninstructed sentiments about the great Scandinavian dramatist, Dr.
Ibsen; or concerning the work of Signor d’Annunzio, or the plays of
M. Maeterlinck. To pronounce each of these gentlemen a Shakespeare
or Æschylus is not unusual in cultivated circles; it remains for the
new century to ratify or quash the verdict. In the mean time, have
the approving critics taken the precaution of reading Æschylus and
Shakespeare?
ANDREW LANG.
ENGINEERING
The material prosperity of the last century is due to the co-operation
of three classes of men: the man of science, who lives only for truth
and the discovery of nature’s laws; the inventor, eager to apply these
discoveries to money-making machines and processes, and the engineer,
trained in mathematical investigation and in knowledge of the physical
conditions which govern his profession, which is the mechanical
application of the laws of nature.
Engineering is sometimes divided into civil, military, and naval
engineering. The term civil engineering, which will be here described,
is often used by writers as covering structural engineering only, but
it has a much wider meaning.
The logical classification is: statical engineering, including that of
all fixed bodies, and dynamical, covering the movement of all bodies by
the development and application of power.
Statical engineering can be again subdivided into structural
engineering, or that of railways, highways, bridges, foundations,
tunnels, buildings, etc.; also, into hydraulic engineering, which
governs the application of water to canals, river improvements,
harbors, the supply of water to towns and for irrigation, disposal of
sewage, etc.
Dynamical engineering can be divided into mechanical engineering,
which covers the construction of all prime motors, the transmission of
power, and the use of machines and machine tools. Closely allied is
electrical engineering, the art of the transformation and transmission
of energy for traction, lighting, telegraphy, telephoning, operating
machinery, and many other uses, such as its electrolytic application to
ores and metals.
Then we have the combined application of statical, mechanical, and
electrical engineering to what is now called industrial engineering,
or the production of articles useful to man. This may be divided into
agricultural, mining, metallurgical, and chemical engineering.
Surely this is a vast field, and can only be hastily described in the
sketch which we are about to give.
STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING
This is the oldest of all. We have not been able to surpass the works
of the past in grandeur or durability. The pyramids of Egypt still
stand, and will stand for thousands of years. Roman bridges, aqueducts,
and sewers still perform their duties. Joseph’s canal still irrigates
Lower Egypt. The great wall of China, running for fifteen hundred miles
over mountains and plains, contains one hundred and fifty millions of
cubic yards of materials and is the greatest of artificial works. No
modern building compares in grandeur with St. Peter’s, and the mediæval
cathedrals shame our puny imitations.
These mighty works were built to show the piety of the Church or to
gratify the pride of kings. Time and money were of no account. All
this has now been changed. Capital controls, and the question of time,
money, and usefulness rules everything. Hence come scientific design
and labor-saving machinery.
The engineer of our modern works first calculates the stresses on
all their parts, and proportions them accordingly, so that there is
no waste of material. Hand labor has given place to steam machinery.
All parts are interchangeable, so that they can be made and fitted
together in the least possible time, as is seen every day in the
construction of a steel-framed office building. Our workmen receive
much higher wages than in the past, while time and cost have been
diminished.
RAILWAYS
The greatest engineering work of the nineteenth century was the
development of the railway system which has changed the face of the
world. Beginning in 1829 with the locomotive of George Stephenson, it
has extended with such strides that, after seventy years, there are
466,000 miles of railways in the world, of which 190,000 miles are in
the United States. Their cost is estimated at forty thousand millions
of dollars, of which ten thousand millions belong to the United States.
The rapidity with which railways are built in the United States and
Canada contrasts strongly with what has been done in other countries.
Much has been written of the energy of Russia in building 3000 miles of
Siberian railway in five or six years. In the United States an average
of 6147 miles was completed every year during ten successive years,
and in 1887 there were built 12,982 miles. The physical difficulties
overcome in Siberia are no greater than have been overcome here.
This rapid construction is due to several causes, the most potent of
which has been the need of extending railways over great distances
with little money. Hence they were built economically, and at first
in not as solid a manner as those of Europe. Steeper gradients,
sharper curves, and lighter rails were used. This rendered necessary
a different kind of rolling-stock suitable to such construction. The
swivelling-truck and equalizing-beam enabled our engines to run safely
on tracks where the rigid European engines would soon have been in the
ditch.
Our cars were made longer, and by the use of longitudinal framing much
stronger. A great economy came from the use of annealed cast-iron
wheels, with hardened tires, all in one piece, instead of being
built up of spokes, hubs, and tires in separate parts. These wheels
now seldom break, and cost much less than European wheels. As there
are some eleven million car-wheels in use in the United States the
resulting economy is great.
It was soon seen that longer cars would carry a greater proportion of
paying load, and the more cars that one engine could draw in a train,
the less would be the cost. It was not until the invention by Bessemer
in 1864 of a steel of quality and cost that made it available for rails
that much heavier cars and locomotives could be used. Then came a rapid
increase. As soon as Bessemer rails were made in this country, the cost
fell from $175 per ton to $50, and now to $26.
Before that time a wooden car weighed sixteen tons, and could carry a
paying load of fifteen tons. The thirty-ton engines of those days could
not draw on a level over thirty cars weighing 900 tons.
The pressed steel car of to-day weighs no more than the wooden car,
but carries a paying load of fifty tons. The heaviest engines have now
drawn on a level fifty steel cars, weighing 3750 tons. In the one case
the paying load of an engine was 450 tons; now it is 2500 tons.
Steep grades soon developed a better brake system, and these heavier
trains have led to the invention of the automatic brake worked from
the engine, and also automatic couplers, saving time and many lives.
The capacity of our railways has been greatly increased by the use of
electric block-signals.
The perfecting of both the railway and its rolling-stock has led to
remarkable results.
We have no accurate statistics of the early operation of American
railways. In 1867 Poor’s Manual estimated their total freight tonnage
at 75,000,000 and the total freight receipts at $400,000,000. This was
an average rate per ton of $5.33.
In 1899 Poor gives the total freight tonnage at 975,789,941 tons, and
the freight receipts at $922,436,314, or an average rate per ton of
ninety-five cents. Had the rates of 1867 prevailed, the additional
yearly cost to the public would have been $4,275,000,000, or sufficient
to replace the whole railway system in two and a half years.
This is an illustration only, but a very striking one. Everybody knows
that such high rates of freight as those of 1867 would have checked
traffic. This much can surely be said: the reduction in cost of
operating our railways, and the consequent fall in freight rates, have
been potent factors in enabling the United States to send abroad last
year $1,456,000,000 worth of exports and flood the world with our food
and manufactured products.
BRIDGE BUILDING
In early days the building of a bridge was a matter of great
ceremony, and it was consecrated to protect it from evil spirits. Its
construction was controlled by priests, as the title of the Pope of
Rome, “Pontifex Maximus,” indicates.
Railways changed all this. Instead of the picturesque stone bridge,
whose long line of low arches harmonized with the landscape, there came
the straight girder or high truss, ugly indeed, but quickly built, and
costing much less.
Bridge construction has made greater progress in the United States than
abroad. The heavy trains that we have described called for stronger
bridges. The large American rolling-stock is not used in England, and
but little on the continent of Europe, as the width of tunnels and
other obstacles will not allow of it. It is said that there is an
average of one bridge for every three miles of railway in the United
States, making 63,000 bridges, most of which have been replaced by new
and stronger ones during the last twenty years.
This demand has brought into existence many bridge-building companies,
some of whom make the whole bridge, from the ore to the finished
product.
Before the advent of railways, highway bridges in America were made
of wood, and called trusses. Few of them existed before railways.
The large rivers and estuaries were crossed in horse-boats, a trip
more dangerous than an Atlantic voyage now is. A few smaller rivers
had wooden truss bridges. Although originally invented by Leonardo
da Vinci, in the sixteenth century, they were reinvented by American
carpenters. Some of Burr’s bridges are still standing after more
than one hundred years’ use. This shows what wood can do when not
overstrained and protected from weather and fire.
The coming of railways required a stronger type of bridge to carry
concentrated loads, and the Howe truss, with vertical iron rods, was
invented, capable of 150-foot spans.
About 1868 iron bridges began to take the place of wooden bridges.
Die-forged eyebars and pin connections allowed of longer panels and
longer spans. One of the first long-span bridges was a single-track
railway bridge of 400-foot span over the Ohio at Cincinnati, which was
considered to be a great achievement in 1870.
The Kinzua viaduct, 310 feet high and over half a mile long, belongs to
this era. It is the type of the numerous high viaducts now so common.
About 1885 a new material was given to engineers, having greater
strength and tenacity than iron, and commercially available from its
low cost. This is basic steel. After many experiments, the proper
proportions of carbon, phosphorus, sulphur, and manganese were
ascertained, and uniformity resulted. The open-hearth process is now
generally used. This new chemical metal, for such it is, is fifty per
cent. stronger than iron, and can be tied in a knot when cold.
The effect of improved devices and the use of steel is shown by the
weights of the 400-foot Ohio River iron bridge, built in 1870, and a
bridge at the same place, built in 1886.
The bridge of 1870 was of iron, had panels twelve feet long, and its
height was forty-five feet, and span 400 feet.
The bridge of 1886 was of steel, had panels thirty feet long, and its
height was eighty feet. Its span was 550 feet. The weights of the two
were nearly alike.
The cantilever design, which is a revival of a very ancient type,
came into use. The great Forth Bridge, in Scotland, 1600-foot span,
is of this style, as are the 500-foot spans at Poughkeepsie, and now
a new one is being designed to cross the St. Lawrence near Quebec, of
1800-foot span.
This is probably near the economic limit of cantilever construction,
but the suspension bridge can be extended much farther, as it carries
no dead weight of compression members.
The Niagara Suspension Bridge, of 810-foot span, built by Roebling, in
1852, and the Brooklyn Bridge, of 1600 feet, built by Roebling and his
son, twenty years after, marked a wonderful advance in bridge design.
Thirty years later, when a new bridge of 1600 feet was wanted to
cross another part of the East River at New York, the same lines of
construction were followed, and they will be followed in the 2700-foot
span, designed to cross the North River some time in the present
century. The only radical advance is the use of a better steel than
could be had in earlier days.
Steel-arched bridges are now scientifically designed. Such are the new
Niagara Bridge, of 840-foot span, and the Alexandra Bridge at Paris.
It is curious to see how little is said about these beautiful bridges,
which the public takes as a matter of course. If they had been built
fifty years ago, their engineers would have received the same praise
as Robert Stephenson or Roebling, and justly so, as they would have
been men of exceptional genius. When these bridges were built, in 1898,
the path had been made so clear by mathematical investigation and the
command of a better steel, that the task seemed easy.
That which marks more clearly than anything else the great advance
in American bridge building, during the last forty years, is the
reconstruction of the famous Victoria Bridge, over the St. Lawrence,
above Montreal. This bridge was designed by Robert Stephenson, and the
stone piers are a monument to his engineering skill. For forty winters
they have resisted the great fields of ice borne by a rapid current.
Their dimensions were so liberal that the new bridge was put upon them,
although four times as wide as the old one.
The superstructure was originally made of plate-iron tubes, reinforced
by tees and angles, similar to Stephenson’s Menai Straits Bridge. There
are twenty-two spans of 240 feet each, and a central one of 330 feet.
Perhaps these tubes were the best that could be had at the time, but
they had outlived their usefulness. Their interiors had become greatly
corroded by the confined gases from the engines and the drippings from
the chemicals used in cold-storage cars. Their height was insufficient
for modern large cars, and the confined smoke made them so dark that
the number of trains was greatly limited.
It was decided to build a new bridge of open-work construction and of
open-hearth steel. This was done, and the comparison is as follows:
Old bridge, sixteen feet wide, single track, live load of one ton per
foot; new bridge, sixty-seven feet wide, two railway tracks and two
carriage-ways, live load five tons per foot.
The old iron tubes weighed 10,000 tons, cost $2,713,000, and took two
seasons to erect. The new truss bridge weighs 22,000 tons, has cost
between $1,300,000 and $1,400,000, and the time of construction was one
year.
During his experience the writer has seen the rolling-load of bridges
increase from 2000 to 4000 pounds per lineal foot of track, with an
extra allowance for concentrated loads.
The modern high office building is an interesting example of the
evolution of a high-viaduct pier. Such a pier of the required
dimensions, strengthened by more columns strong enough to carry many
floors, is the skeleton frame. Enclose the sides with brick, stone, or
terra-cotta, add windows, and doors, and elevators, and it is complete.
Fortunately for the stability of these high buildings, the effect of
wind pressures had been studied in this country in the designs of the
Kinzua, Pecos, and other high viaducts.
All this had been thoroughly worked out and known to our engineers
before the fall of the Tay Bridge in Scotland. That disastrous event
led to very careful experiments on wind pressures by Sir Benjamin
Baker, the very eminent engineer of the Forth Bridge. His experiments
showed that a wind gauge of 300 square feet area showed a maximum
pressure of thirty-five pounds per square foot, while a small one of
one foot and a half square area registered gusts of forty-one pounds
per square foot.
The modern elevated railway of cities is simply a very long railway
viaduct. Some idea may be gained of the life of a modern riveted-iron
structure from the experience of the Manhattan Elevated Railway of New
York. These roads were built in 1878–79 to carry uniform loads of 1600
pounds per lineal foot, except Second Avenue, which was made to carry
2000. The stresses were below 10,000 pounds per square inch.
These viaducts have carried in twenty-two years over 25,000,000 trains,
weighing over 3,000,000,000 tons, at a maximum speed of twenty-five
miles an hour, and are still in good order.
Bridge engineers of the present day are free from the difficulties
which confronted the early designers of iron bridges. The mathematics
of bridge design was understood in 1870, but the proportioning of
details had to be worked out individually. Every new span was a new
problem. Now the engineer tells his draughtsman to design a span of a
given length, height, and width, and to carry such a load. By the light
of experience he does this at once.
Connections have become standardized so that the duplication of parts
can be carried to its fullest extent.
Machine tools are used to make every part of a bridge, and power
riveters to fasten them together. Great accuracy can now be had, and
the sizes of parts have increased in a remarkable degree.
We have now great bridge companies, which are so completely equipped
with appliances for both shop drawings and construction that the old
joke becomes almost true that they can make bridges and sell them by
the mile.
All improvements of design are now public property. All that the bridge
companies do is done in the fierce light of competition. Mistakes mean
ruin, and the fittest only survives.
Having such powerful aids, the American bridge engineer of to-day has
advantages over his predecessors and over his European brethren, where
the American system has not yet been adopted.
The American system gives the greatest possible rapidity of erection of
the bridge on its piers. A span of 518 feet, weighing 1000 tons, was
erected at Cairo on the Mississippi in six days. The parts were not
assembled until they were put upon the false works. European engineers
have sometimes ordered a bridge to be riveted together complete in the
maker’s yard, and then taken apart.
The adoption of American work in such bridges as the Atbara in South
Africa, the Gokteik viaduct in Burmah, 320 feet high, and others, was
due to low cost, quick delivery and erection, as well as excellence of
material and construction.
FOUNDATIONS, ETC.
Bridges must have foundations for their piers. Up to the middle of the
nineteenth century engineers knew no better way of making them than
by laying bare the bed of the river by a pumped-out cofferdam, or by
driving piles into the sand, as Julius Cæsar did. About the middle of
the century, M. Triger, a French engineer, conceived the first plan of
a pneumatic foundation, which led to the present system of compressing
air by pumping it into an inverted box, called a caisson, with air
locks on top to enable men and materials to go in and out. After the
soft materials were removed, and the caisson sunk by its own weight to
the proper depth, it was filled with concrete. The limit of depth is
that in which men can work in compressed air without injury, and this
is not much over one hundred feet.
The foundations of the Brooklyn and St. Louis bridges were put down in
this manner.
In the construction of the Poughkeepsie bridge over the Hudson in
1887–88, it became necessary to go down 135 feet below tide-level
before hard bottom was reached. Another process was invented to take
the place of compressed air. Timber caissons were built, having double
sides, and the spaces between them filled with stone to give weight.
Their tops were left open and the American single-bucket dredge was
used. This bucket was lowered and lifted by a very long wire rope
worked by the engine, and with it the soft material was removed. By
moving this bucket to different parts of the caisson its sinking was
perfectly controlled, and the caisson finally placed in its exact
position, and perfectly vertical. The internal space was then filled
with concrete laid under water by the same bucket, and levelled by
divers when necessary.
While this work was going on, the government of New South Wales, in
Australia, called for both designs and tenders for a bridge over an
estuary of the sea called Hawkesbury. The conditions were the same as
at Poughkeepsie, except that the soft mud reached to a depth of 160
feet below tide-level.
The designs of the engineers of the Poughkeepsie bridge were accepted,
and the same method of sinking open caissons (in this case made of
iron) was carried out with perfect success.
The erection of this bridge involved another difficult problem. The mud
was too soft and deep for piles and staging, and the cantilever system
in this site would have increased the cost.
A staging was built on a large pontoon at the shore, and the span
erected upon it. The whole was then towed out to the bridge site at
high tide. As the tide fell, the pontoon was lowered and the steel
girder was placed gently on its piers. The whole operation was
completed within six hours. The other five spans were placed in the
same manner.
The same system was followed afterwards by the engineer of the Canadian
Pacific Railway in placing the spans of a bridge over the St. Lawrence,
in a very rapid current. It is now used in replacing old spans by new
ones, as it interrupts traffic for the least possible time.
The solution of the problems presented at Hawkesbury gave the second
introduction of American engineers to bridge building outside of
America. The first was in 1786, when an American carpenter or
shipwright built a bridge over Charles River at Boston, 1470 feet long
by forty-six feet wide. This bridge was of wood supported on piles. His
work gained for him such renown that he was called to Ireland and built
a similar bridge at Belfast.
Tunnelling by compressed air is a horizontal application of
compressed-air foundations. The earth is supported by an iron tube,
which is added to in rings, which are pushed forward by hydraulic jacks.
A tunnel is now being made under an arm of the sea between Boston and
East Boston, some 1400 feet long and sixty-five feet below tide. The
interior lining of iron tubing is not used. The tunnel is built of
concrete, reinforced by steel rods. This will effect a considerable
economy. Success in modern engineering means doing a thing in the most
economical way consistent with safety.
The Saint Clair tunnel, which carries the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada
under the outlet of Lake Huron, is a successful example of such work.
Had the North River tunnel, at New York, been designed on equally
scientific principles, it would probably have been finished, which now
seems problematical.
The construction of rapid-transit railways in cities is another branch
of engineering, covering structural, mechanical, and electrical
engineering. Some of these railways are elevated, and are merely
railway viaducts, but the favorite type now is that of subways. There
are two kinds, those near the surface, like the District railways of
London, the subways in Paris, Berlin, and Boston, and that now building
in New York. The South London and Central London, and other London
projects, are tubes sunk fifty to eighty feet below the surface and
requiring elevators for access. These are made on a plan devised by
Greathead, and consist of cast-iron tubes pushed forward by hydraulic
rams, and having the space outside of the tube filled with liquid
cement pumped into place.
The construction of the Boston subway was difficult on account of the
small width of the streets, their great traffic, and the necessity of
underpinning the foundations of buildings. All of this was successfully
done without disturbing the traffic for a single day, and reflects
great credit on the engineer. Owing to the great width of New York
streets, the problem is simpler in that respect, but requires skill in
design and organization to complete the work in a short time. Although
many times as long as the Boston subway, it will be built in nearly the
same time. The design, where in earth, may be compared to that of a
steel office building twenty miles long, laid flat on one of its sides.
The reduplication of parts saves time and labor, and is the key to the
anticipated rapid progress. Near the surface this subway is built in
open excavation, and tunnelling is confined to rock.
The construction of power-houses for developing energy from coal and
from falling water requires much structural besides electrical and
mechanical engineering ability. The Niagara power-house is intended to
develop 100,000 horse-power; that at the Sault Ste. Marie as much; that
on the St. Lawrence, at Massena, 70,000 horse-power. These are huge
works, requiring tunnels, rock-cut chambers, and masonry and concrete
in walls and dams. They cover large extents of territory.
The contrast in size of the coal-using power-houses is interesting.
The new power-house now building by the Manhattan Elevated Railway,
in New York, develops in the small space of 200 by 400 feet 100,000
horse-power, or as much power as that utilized at Niagara Falls.
One of the most useful materials which modern engineers now make use
of is concrete, which can be put into confined spaces and laid under
water. It costs less than masonry, while as strong. This is the revival
of the use of a material used by the Romans. The writer was once
allowed to climb a ladder and look at the construction of a dome of the
Pantheon, at Rome. He found it a monolithic mass of concrete, and hence
without thrust. It is a better piece of engineering construction than
the dome of St. Peter’s, built fifteen hundred years later. The dome of
Columbia College Library, in New York, is built of concrete.
Concrete is a mixture of broken stone or gravel, sand, and Portland
cement. Its virtue depends upon the uniform good quality of the cement.
The use of the rotary kiln, which exposes all the contained material to
a uniform and constant intense heat, has revolutionized the manufacture
of Portland cement. The engineer can now depend upon its uniformity of
strength.
Wheels, axles, bridges, and rails have all been strengthened to carry
their increased loads; but, strange to say, the splices which hold in
place the ends of the rails, and which are really short-span bridges,
are now the weakest part of a railway. The angle-bar splice has but
one-third of the strength of the rail, and its strength cannot be
increased, owing to its want of depth. Joints go down under every
passing wheel, and the ends of the rails wear out long before the rest.
This is not an insignificant detail. It has been estimated by the
officers of one of the trunk lines that a splice of proper design
and strength would save yearly enough in track labor (most of which
is expended in tamping up low joints) to buy all the new rails and
fastenings required in some time. It would save much more than that
in the wear of rolling-stock. A perfect joint would be an economic
device next in value to the Bessemer steel rail. Here is a place for
scientific and practical skill.
HYDRAULIC ENGINEERING
This is one of the oldest branches of engineering, and was developed
before the last century. The irrigation works of Asia, Africa, Spain,
Italy, the Roman aqueducts, and the canals of Europe, are examples.
Hydraulic works cannot be constructed in ignorance of the laws which
govern the flow of water. The action of water is relentless, as ruined
canals, obstructed rivers, and washed-out dams testify.
The principal additions of the nineteenth century to hydraulic
engineering are the collection of larger statistics of the flow of
water in pipes and channels, of rainfall, run-off, and available
supply. It is now known that the germs of disease can be retained by
ordinary sand filters, and it is now an established fact that pure
drinking water and proper drainage are a sure preventive of typhoid and
similar fevers. Very foul water can be made potable. Experiments show
that the water of the Schuylkill River at Philadelphia, which contains
400,000 germs in the space of less than a cubic inch, was so much
purified by filtering that only sixty remained. This is a discovery
of sanitary science, but the application of it is through structural
engineering, which designs and executes the filter beds with great
economy.
The removal of sewage, after having been done by the Etruscans
before the foundation of Rome, became a lost art during the dirty
Dark Ages, when filth and piety were deemed to be connected in some
mysterious way. It was reserved for good John Wesley to point out that
“Cleanliness is next to godliness.” Now sewage works are as common as
those for water supply. Some of them have been of great size and cost.
Such are the drainage works of London, Paris, Berlin, Boston, Chicago,
and New Orleans. A very difficult work was the drainage of the City of
Mexico, which is in a valley surrounded by mountains, and elevated only
four to five feet above a lake having no outlet. Attempts to drain the
lake had been made in vain for six hundred years. It has lately been
accomplished by a tunnel six miles long through the mountains, and a
canal of over thirty miles, the whole work costing some $20,000,000.
The drainage of Chicago by locks and canal into the Illinois River has
cost some $35,000,000, and is well worth its cost.
Scientific research has been applied to the designing of high masonry
and concrete dams, and we know now that no well-designed dam on a good
foundation should fail. The dams now building across the Nile by order
of the British government will create the largest artificial lakes
in the world. The water thus stored will be of inestimable value in
irrigating the crops of Lower Egypt. Their cost, although great, will
not exceed the sums spent by the lavish Khedive Ismail on useless
palaces, now falling to decay.
The Suez Canal is one of the largest hydraulic works of the last
century, and is a notable instance of the displacement of hand labor
by the use of machinery. Ismail began by impressing a large part of
the peasant population of Egypt, just as Rameses had done over 3000
years before. These unfortunate people were set to dig the sand with
rude hoes, and carry it away in baskets on their heads. They died
by thousands for want of water and proper food. At last the French
engineers persuaded the Khedive to let them introduce steam dredging
machinery. A light railway was laid to supply provisions, and a small
ditch dug to bring pure water. The number of men employed fell to
one-fourth. Machinery did the rest. But for this the canal would never
have been finished.
The Panama Canal now uses the best modern machinery, and the Nicaragua
Canal, if built, will apply still better methods, developed on the
Chicago drainage canal, where material was handled at a less cost than
has ever been done before.
Russia is better supplied with internal waterways than any other
country. Her rivers rise near each other, and have long been connected
by canals. It is stated that she has over 60,000 miles of internal
navigation, and is now preparing the construction of canals to connect
the Caspian with the Baltic Sea.
The Erie Canal was one of very small cost, but its influence has been
surpassed by none. The “winning of the West” was hastened many years
by the construction of this work in the first quarter of the century.
Two horses were just able to draw a ton of goods at the speed of two
miles an hour over the wretched roads of those days. When the canal
was made these two horses could draw a boat carrying 150 tons four
miles an hour. Mud, or, in other words, friction, is the great enemy
of civilization, and canals were the first things to diminish it, and
after that railways.
The Erie Canal was made by engineers, but it had to make its own
engineers first, as there were none available in this country at that
time. These self-taught men, some of them land surveyors and others
lawyers, showed themselves the equals of the Englishmen Brindley and
Smeaton, when they located a water route through the wilderness, having
a uniform descent from Lake Erie to the Hudson, and which would have
been so built if there had been enough money.
The question now is whether to enlarge the capacity of this canal by
enlarging its prism and locks, or to increase speed and move more boats
in a season by electrical appliances. The last method seems more in
line with those of the present day.
There should be a waterway from the Hudson to Lake Erie large enough
for vessels able to navigate the lakes and the ocean. A draft of
twenty-one feet can be had at a cost estimated at $200,000,000.
The deepening of the Chicago drainage canal to the Mississippi River,
and the deepening of the Mississippi itself to the Gulf of Mexico, is a
logical sequence of the first project. The Nicaragua Canal would then
form one part of a great line of navigation, by which the products
of the interior of the continent could reach either the Atlantic or
Pacific Ocean.
The cost would be small compared with the resulting benefits, and some
day this navigation will be built by the government of the United
States.
The deepening of the Southwest Pass of the Mississippi River from six
to thirty feet by James B. Eads was a great engineering achievement. It
was the first application of the jetty system on a large scale. This is
merely confining the flow of a river, and thus increasing its velocity
so that it secures a deeper channel for itself.
The improvement of harbors follows closely the increased size of ocean
and lake vessels. The approach to New York harbor is now being deepened
to forty feet, a thing impossible to be done without the largest
application of steam machinery in a suction dredge boat.
The great increase of urban population, due to steam and electric
railways, has made works of water supply and drainage necessary
everywhere. Some of these are on a very grand scale. An illustration of
this is the Croton Aqueduct of New York as it now is, and as it will be
hereafter.
This work was thought by its designers to be on a scale large enough
to last for all time. It is now less than sixty years old, and the
population of New York will soon be too large to be supplied by it.
It is able to supply 250,000,000 to 300,000,000 gallons daily, and its
cost, when the Cornell dam and Jerome Park reservoir are finished, will
be a little over $92,000,000.
It is now suggested to store water in the Adirondack Mountains, 203
miles away, by dams built at the outlet of ten or twelve lakes.
This will equalize the flow of the Hudson River so as to give
3,000,000,000 to 4,000,000,000 gallons daily. It is then proposed to
pump 1,000,000,000 gallons daily from the Hudson River at Poughkeepsie,
sixty miles away, to a height sufficient to supply the city by gravity
through an aqueduct. This water would be filtered at Poughkeepsie, and
we now know that all impurities can be removed.
If this scheme is carried out, the total supply will be about
1,300,000,000 gallons daily, or enough for a population of from
12,000,000 to 13,000,000 persons. By putting in more pumps,
filter-beds, and conduits, this supply can be increased forty per
cent., or to 1,800,000,000 gallons daily. This water would fill every
day a lake one mile square by ten feet deep. This is a fair example
of the scale of the engineering works of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.
By the application of modern labor-saving machinery, the cost of this
work can be so far controlled that the cost to the city of New York per
1,000,000 gallons would be no greater than that of the present Croton
supply.
All works of hydraulic engineers depend on water. But what will happen
if the water all dries up? India, China, Spain, Turkey, and Syria have
suffered from droughts, caused clearly by the destruction of their
forests. The demand for paper to print books and newspapers upon, and
for other purposes, is fast converting our forests into pulp. We cannot
even say, “After us the deluge,” for it will seldom rain in those evil
days. When the rains do come, the sponge-like vegetation of the forests
being gone, the streams will be torrents at one time of the year and
dried up during the rest, as we now see in the arid regions of the West.
MECHANICAL ENGINEERING
This is employed in all dynamical engineering. It covers the designs
of prime motors of all sorts, steam, gas, and gasoline reciprocating
engines; also steam and water turbines, wind-mills, and wave-motors.
It comprises all means of transmitting power, as by shafting, ropes,
pneumatic pressure, and compressed air, all of which seem likely to be
superseded by electricity.
It covers the construction of machine tools and machinery of all kinds.
It enters into all the processes of structural, hydraulic, electrical,
and industrial engineering. The special improvements are: The almost
universal use of rotary motion, and of the reduplication of parts.
The steam-engine is a machine of reciprocating, converted into rotary,
motion by the crank. The progress of mechanical engineering during the
nineteenth century is measured by the improvements of the steam-engine,
principally in the direction of saving fuel, by the invention of
internal combustion or gas-engines, the application of electrical
transmission, and, latest, the practical development of steam turbines
by Parsons, Westinghouse, Delaval, Curtis, and others. In these a jet
of steam impinges upon buckets set upon the circumference of a wheel.
It was clearly indicated by the Italian engineer Bronca, in 1629,
but he was too early. The time was not ripe, and there were then no
machine tools giving the perfection of workmanship required.
Their advantages are that their motion is rotary and not reciprocal.
They can develop speed of from 5000 to 30,000 revolutions per minute,
while the highest ever attained by a reciprocating engine is not over
1000. Their thermodynamic losses are less, hence they consume less
steam and less fuel.
It is a very interesting fact that the basic invention upon which not
only steam turbines and electric dynamos, but, indeed, all other parts
of mechanical engineering, depend, is of such remote antiquity that we
know nothing of its origin. This is the wheel which Gladstone said was
the greatest of man’s mechanical inventions, as there is nothing in
nature to suggest it.
Duplication of parts has lowered the cost of all products. Clothing is
one of these. The parts of ready-made garments and shoes are now cut
into shape in numbers at a time, by sharp-edged templates, and then
fastened together by sewing-machines.
Mechanical engineering is a good example of the survival of the
fittest. Millions of dollars are expended on machinery, when suddenly
a new discovery or invention casts them all into the scrap heap, to be
replaced by those of greater earning capacity.
Prime motors derive their energy either from coal or other combinations
of carbon, such as petroleum, or from gravity. This may come from
falling water, and the old-fashioned water-wheels of the eighteenth
century were superseded in the nineteenth by turbines, first invented
in France and since greatly perfected. These are used in the electrical
transmission of water-power at Niagara of 5000 horse-power, and form a
very important part of the plant.
The other gravity motors are wind-mills and wave-motors. Wind-mills are
an old invention, but have been greatly improved in the United States
by the use of the self-reefing wheel. The great plains of the West are
subject to sudden, violent gales of wind, and unless the wheel was
automatically self-reefing it would often be destroyed. Little has been
written about these wheels, but their use is very widely extended, and
they perform a most useful function in industrial engineering.
There have been vast numbers of patents taken out for wave-motors. One
was invented in Chili, South America, which furnished a constant power
for four months, and was utilized in sawing planks. The action of waves
is more constant on the Pacific coast of America than elsewhere, and
some auxiliary power, such as a gasoline engine, which can be quickly
started and stopped, must be provided for use during calm days. The
prime cost of such a machine need not exceed that of a steam plant,
and the cost of operating is much less than that of any fuel-burning
engine. The saving of coal is a very important problem. In a wider
sense, we may say that the saving of all the great stores which nature
has laid up for us during the past, and which have remained almost
untouched until the nineteenth century, is _the_ great problem of
to-day.
Petroleum and natural gas may disappear. The ores of gold, silver, and
platinum will not last forever. Trees will grow, and iron ores seem
to be practically inexhaustible. Chemistry has added a new metal in
aluminum, which replaces copper for many purposes. One of the greatest
problems of the twentieth century is to discover some chemical process
for treating iron, by which oxidation will not take place.
Coal, next to grain, is the most important of nature’s gifts; it can
be exhausted, or the cost of mining it become so great that it cannot
be obtained in the countries where it is most needed; water, wind, and
wave power may take its place to a limited extent, and greater use may
be made of the waste gases coming from blast or smelter furnaces, but
as nearly all energy comes from coal, its use must be economized, and
the greatest economy will come from pulverizing coal and using it in
the shape of a fine powder. Inventions have been made trying to deliver
this powder into the fire-box as fast as made, for it is as explosive
as gunpowder, and as dangerous to store or handle. If this can be done,
there will be a saving of coal due to perfect and smokeless combustion,
as the admission of air can be entirely regulated, the same blast
which throws in the powder furnishing oxygen. Some investigators have
estimated that the saving of coal will be as great as twenty per cent.
This means 100,000,000 tons of coal annually.
Bituminous coal will then be as smokeless as anthracite, and can
be burned in locomotives. Cities will be free from the nuisance of
wasted coal, which we call soot. This process will be the best kind
of mechanical stoking, and will prevent the necessity of opening the
doors of fire-boxes. The boiler-rooms of steamships will no longer be
“floating hells,” and the firing of large locomotives will become easy.
Another problem of mechanical engineering is to determine whether it
will be found more economical to transform the energy of coal, at the
mines, into electric current and send it by wire to cities and other
places where it is wanted, or to carry the coal by rail and water, as
we now do, to such places, and convert it there by the steam or gas
engine.
In favor of the first method it can be said that hills of refuse coal
now representing locked-up capital can be burned, and the cost of
transportation and handling be saved. Electric energy can now transport
power in high voltage economically between coal-mines and most large
cities.
The second method has the advantage of not depending on one single
source of supply, that may break down, but in having the energy stored
in coal-pockets near by the place of use, where it can be applied to
separate units of power with no fear of failure.
It seems probable that a combination of the two systems will produce
the best results. Where power can be sent electrically from the mines
for less cost than the coal can be transported, that method will be
used.
To prevent stoppage of works, the separate motors and a store of coal,
to be used in cases of emergency, will still be needed, just as has
been described as necessary to the commercial success of wave-motors.
ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING
Any attempt by the writer of this article to trace the progress of
electricity would be but a vain repetition, after the admirable manner
in which the subject has been treated in a former paper of this series
by Professor Elihu Thomson.
We can only once more emphasize the fact that it is by the union of
four separate classes of minds—scientific discoverers, inventors,
engineers, and capitalists—that this vast new industry has been
created, which gives direct employment to thousands, and, as Bacon said
300 years ago, has “endowed the human race with new powers.”
METALLURGY AND MINING
All the processes of metallurgy and mining employ statical, hydraulic,
mechanical, and electrical engineering. Coal, without railways and
canals, would be of little use, unless electrical engineering came to
its aid.
It was estimated by the late Lord Armstrong that of the 450,000,000 to
500,000,000 tons of coal annually produced in the world, one-third is
used for steam production, one-third in metallurgical processes, and
one-third for domestic consumption. This last item seems large. It is
the most important manufacturing industry in the world, as may be seen
by comparing the coalless condition of the eighteenth century with the
coal-using condition of the nineteenth century.
Next in importance comes the production of iron and steel. Steel, on
account of its great cost and brittleness, was only used for tools and
special purposes until past the middle of the last century. This has
been all changed by the invention of his steel by Bessemer in 1864,
and open-hearth steel in the furnace of Siemens, perfected some twenty
years since by Gilchrist & Thomas.
The United States have taken the lead in steel manufacture. In 1873
Great Britain made three times as much steel as the United States. Now
the United States makes twice as much as Great Britain, or forty per
cent. of all the steel made in the world.
Mr. Carnegie has explained the reason why, in epigrammatic phrase:
“Three pounds of steel billets can be sold for two cents.”
This stimulates rail and water traffic and other industries, as he
tells us one pound of steel requires two pounds of ore, one and
one-third pounds of coal, and one-third of a pound of limestone.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the States bordering on the lakes
have created a traffic of 25,000,000 tons yearly through the Sault
Ste. Marie Canal, while the Suez, which supplies the wants of half the
population of the world, has only 7,000,000, or less than the tonnage
of the little Harlem River at New York.
INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING
This leads us to our last topic, for which too little room has been
left. Industrial engineering covers statical, hydraulic, mechanical,
and electrical engineering, and adds a new branch which we may call
chemical engineering. This is pre-eminently a child of the nineteenth
century, and is the conversion of one thing into another by a knowledge
of their chemical constituents.
When Dalton first applied mathematics to chemistry and made it
quantitative, he gave the key which led to the discoveries of
Cavendish, Gay-Lussac, Berzelius, Liebig, and others. This new
knowledge was not locked up, but at once given to the world, and made
use of. Its first application on a large scale was made by Napoleon in
encouraging the manufacture of sugar from beets.
The new products were generally made from what were called “waste
material.” We now have the manufacture of soda, bleaching powders,
aniline dyes, and other products of the distillation of coal, also
coal-oil from petroleum (known fifty or sixty years ago only as a horse
medicine), acetylene gas, celluloid, rubber goods in all their numerous
varieties, high explosives, cement, artificial manures, artificial ice,
beet-sugar, and even beer may now be included.
Through many ages, the alchemists, groping in the dark, and in
ignorance of nature’s laws, wasted their time in trying to find what
they called the philosopher’s stone, which they hoped would transform
the baser metals into gold.
If such a thing could be found it would be a curse, as it would take
away one of the most useful instruments we have—a fixed standard of
value.
In a little over one hundred years, those working by the light of
science have found the true philosopher’s stone in modern chemistry.
The value of only a part of these new products exceeds the nominal
value of all the gold in the world.
The value of our mechanical and chemical products is great, but it is
surpassed by that of food products. If these did not keep pace with
the increase of population, the theories of Malthus would be true—but
he never saw a modern reaper.
The steam-plough was invented in England some fifty years since, but
the great use of agricultural machinery dates from our Civil War, when
so many men were taken from agriculture. It became necessary to fill
their places with machinery. Without tracing the steps which have led
to it, we may say that the common type is what is called “the binder,”
and is a machine drawn chiefly by animals, and in some cases by a field
locomotive.
It cuts, rakes, and binds sheaves of grain at one operation. Sometimes
threshing and winnowing machines are combined with it, and the grain is
delivered into bags ready for the market.
Different machines are used for cutting and binding corn, and
for mowing and raking hay, but the most important of all is the
grain-binder. The extent of their use may be known from the fact that
75,000 tons of twine are used by these machines annually.
It is estimated that there are in the United States 1,500,000 of
these machines, but as the harvest is earlier in the South, there are
probably not over 1,000,000 in use at one time. As each machine takes
the place of sixteen men, this means that 16,000,000 men are released
from farming for other pursuits.
The “man with the hoe” has disappeared from the real world, and is only
to be found in the dreams of poets.
It is fair to assume that a large part of these 16,000,000 men have
gone into manufacturing, the operating of railways, and other pursuits.
The use of agricultural machinery, therefore, is one explanation of why
the United States produces eight-tenths of the world’s cotton and corn,
one-quarter of its wheat, one-third of its meat and iron, two-fifths of
its steel, and one-third of its coal, and a large part of the world’s
manufactured goods.
CONCLUSION
It is a very interesting question, why was this great development
of material prosperity delayed so late? Why did it wait until the
nineteenth century, and then all at once increase with such rapid
strides?
It was not until modern times that the reign of law was greatly
extended, and men were insured the product of their labors.
Then came the union of scientists, inventors, and engineers.
So long as these three classes worked separately but little was done.
There was an antagonism between them. Ancient writers went so far as
to say that the invention of the arch and of the potter’s wheel were
beneath the dignity of a philosopher.
One of the first great men to take a different view was Francis Bacon.
Macaulay, in his famous essay, quotes him as saying: “Philosophy is the
relief of man’s estate, and the endowment of the human race with new
powers; increasing their pleasures and mitigating their sufferings.”
These noble words seem to anticipate the famous definition of civil
engineering, embodied by Telford in the charter of the British
Institution of Civil Engineers: “Engineering is the art of controlling
the great powers of nature for the use and convenience of man.”
The seed sown by Bacon was long in producing fruit. Until the laws of
nature were better known, there could be no practical application of
them. Towards the end of the eighteenth century a great intellectual
revival took place. In literature appeared Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant,
Hume, and Goethe. In pure science there came Laplace, Cavendish,
Lavoisier, Linnæus, Berzelius, Priestley, Count Rumford, James Watt,
and Dr. Franklin. The last three were among the earliest to bring
about a union of pure and applied science. Franklin immediately applied
his discovery that frictional electricity and lightning were the same
to the protection of buildings by lightning-rods. Count Rumford (whose
experiments on the conversion of power into heat led to the discovery
of the conservatism of energy) spent a long life in contriving useful
inventions.
James Watt, one of the few men who have united in themselves knowledge
of abstract science, great inventive faculties, and rare mechanical
skill, changed the steam-engine from a worthless rattletrap into
the most useful machine ever invented by man. To do this he first
discovered the science of thermodynamics, then invented the necessary
appliances, and finally constructed them with his own hands. He was a
very exceptional man. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there
were few engineers who had received any scientific education. Most of
them worked by their constructive instincts, like beavers, or from
experience only. It took a lifetime to educate such an engineer, and
few became eminent until they were old men.
Now there is in the profession a great army of young men, most of them
graduates of technical schools, good mathematicians, and well versed
in the art of experimenting. The experiments of undergraduates on
cements, concrete, the flow of water, the impact of metals, and the
steam-engine, have added much to the general stock of knowledge.
One of the present causes of progress is that all discoveries are
published at once in technical journals and in the daily press. The
publication of descriptive indexes of all scientific and engineering
articles as fast as they appear is another modern contrivance.
Formerly scientific discoveries were concealed by cryptograms, printed
in a dead language, and hidden in the archives of learned societies.
Even so late as 1821 Oersted published his discovery of the uniformity
of electricity and magnetism in Latin.
Engineering works could have been designed and useful inventions
made, but they could not have been carried out without combination.
Corporate organization collects the small savings of many into great
sums through savings-banks, life insurance companies, etc., and uses
this concentrated capital to construct the vast works of our days.
This could not continue unless fair dividends were paid. Everything
now has to be designed so as to pay. Time, labor, and material must
be saved, and he ranks highest who can best do this. Invention has
been encouraged by liberal patent laws, which secure to the inventor
property in his ideas at a moderate cost.
Combination, organization, and scientific discovery, inventive ability,
and engineering skill are now united.
It may be said that we have gathered together all the inventions of
the nineteenth century and called them works of engineering. This
is not so. Engineering covers much more than invention. It includes
all works of sufficient size and intricacy to require men trained in
the knowledge of the physical conditions which govern the mechanical
application of the laws of nature. First comes scientific discovery,
then invention, and lastly engineering. Faraday and Henry discovered
the electrical laws which led to the invention of the dynamo, which
was perfected by many minds. Engineering built such works as those at
Niagara Falls to make it useful.
An ignorant man may invent a safety-pin, but he cannot build the
Brooklyn Bridge.
The engineer-in-chief commands an army of experts, as without
specialization little can be done. His is the comprehensive design, for
which he alone is responsible.
Such is the evolution of engineering, which began as a craft and has
ended as a profession.
In past times, civilization depended upon military engineering.
Warriors at first used only the weapons of the hand. Then came military
engineering, applied both to attack and defence, and culminating in the
invention of gunpowder. The civilization of to-day depends greatly upon
civil engineering, as we have tried to show. It has changed the face
of the world and brought all men nearer together. It has improved the
condition of man by sanitary appliances and lowering the cost of food.
It has shown that through machinery the workman is better educated,
and his wages are increased, while the profits of capital increase
also. It has made representative government possible over vast areas of
territory, and is democratizing the world.
Thoughtful persons have asked, will this new civilization last, or will
it go the way of its predecessors? Surely the answer is: all depends
on good government, on the stability of law, order, and justice,
protecting the rights of all classes. It will continue to grow with the
growth of good government, prosper with its prosperity, and perish with
its decay.
THOMAS C. CLARKE.
RELIGION
CATHOLICISM
It is no unnatural curiosity that tempts us to recollect ourselves
at the end of a century and consider the gains and losses of three
generations, our inheritance from the past, our own administration of
the same, and the prospects of our descendants. Religion can only gain
from such a survey, for she is a world teacher on so large a scale that
all ordinary human methods of comparison and summary are too dwarfed
and insufficient for her. Her message is to all humanity; hence only
the most universal criteria are rightly applicable to her. It seems
to me that that is especially true of the oldest historical form of
Christianity, which is Roman Catholicism.
The Roman Church has had a message for all humanity in every age ever
since Saint Clement penned his famous epistle to the Corinthians, or
Saint Victor caused the Christian world to meet in special councils for
the solution of a universal difficulty. It is no mere coincidence that,
at the opening of the last century of this mystical and wonderful cycle
of two thousand years, the Bishop of Rome should again address the
world in tones whose moderation and sympathy recall the temper and the
arguments of Saint Clement, his far-away predecessor and disciple of
Saint Peter.
The year 1800 was a very disheartening one for Catholicism. It still
stood erect and hopeful, but in the midst of a political and social
wreckage, the result of a century of scepticism and destructive
criticism that acted at last as sparks for an ungovernable popular
frenzy, during which the old order appeared to pass away forever
and a new one was inaugurated with every manifestation of joy. The
tree of political liberty was everywhere planted, and the peoples of
Europe promised themselves a life of unalloyed comfort for all future
time. Catholicism was the religion of the majority of these people,
and was cunningly obliged to bear the brunt of all their complaints,
justified and unjustifiable; although the authorities of Catholicism
had long protested against many of the gravest abuses of the period,
sustained in formal defiance of the principles and institutions of the
Catholic religion. The new Cæsar threatened to be more terrible to the
independence of religion than any ancient one, and the revenues and
establishments by which Catholicism had kept up its public standing
and earned the esteem and gratitude of the people were swept away or
_quasi_ ruined.
All the acquired charges and duties of the past were left to the
Catholic religion; yet the means to carry them on were taken away,
sometimes by open violence, sometimes by insidious measures, but always
by gross injustice. The final incidence of this injustice was on the
common people, since the Church was, after all, only the administrator
of very much that she was thus dispossessed of.
With this overturning of all the conditions of Catholic life came
new problems, new trials, and a period of indefinite, uncertain
circumstances that were finally set at rest only at the Congress of
Vienna in 1815, by which an end was put to the political changes that
began with the Revolution of 1789.
The _modus vivendi_ then reached, and soon consecrated by a series of
concordats, has remained substantially the basis of the dealings of
Catholicism with the governments of the Old World. Only one formal
and permanent violation of this legal situation has taken place, the
violent and unjust dispossession of the Holy See by the government of
the House of Savoy, in flagrant violation of every title that could
be invoked by a legitimate civil power. Elsewhere Catholicism has
undergone much suffering, both in the states of the Old World and in
the republics of South America. But, the above vital conflict apart,
the old century closed with no very acute or intolerable condition of
things, although there is much that does not reply to our ideas of
fairness and justice.
THE VATICAN COUNCIL
The chief event of the century, from the point of view of Roman
Catholicism, is undoubtedly the holding of the Vatican Council. Since
the Council of Trent the bishops of the Catholic world had not met in
common under the guidance of the Bishop of Rome. The gravest interests
of religion seemed at stake after more than a century of public
infidelity and the overthrow of all former safeguards of faith. The
character of doctrinal authority and its visible tangible possessor
were declared by the dogma of Papal infallibility. The genuine
relations of reason and revelation were set forth in unmistakable
language.
The troubles that followed the close of the Council in some parts of
Europe were neither serious nor long-lived, since its teachings were in
keeping with the general sense of Catholicism. It promoted, notably,
mutual respect and concord among the bishops and gave to the multitudes
of Catholics in the Old and New Worlds a new sign of the unity and
internal vigor of the Church. The scenes of the Council are indelibly
fixed in my memory, for I was the youngest and humblest of the six
hundred and sixty-seven bishops who composed it.
A General Council is the very highest act of the life of the Church,
since it presents within a small compass, and at once, all the
movements that have been developing in the course of centuries,
and offers to all the faithful and to all outside the Church
straightforward answers to all the great ecclesiastical problems that
come up for settlement. Had the Vatican Council been finished it would
have taken up the grave subject of ecclesiastical discipline. That is
reserved for the reopening of the Council at some future date.
THE MISSIONS OF CATHOLICISM
It is incumbent on the Catholic Church to spread the teachings of Jesus
Christ, and this by His own divine command: “Going, therefore, teach
all nations.”
In this last century she has not been unfaithful, any more than in
others. No portion of the vineyard has been neglected; the martyr’s
blood has watered some parts more abundantly, but in all the missionary
has toiled without ceasing, has spent himself. In the Far East Catholic
missions have been carried on in India, China, Thibet, Tonkin. In
every part of Africa, northern, central, and southern, the priests and
nuns of the Catholic Church have preceded the explorer or followed the
trader and the miner with the blessings of religion. In the still pagan
parts of North and South America her missionaries are found all through
the century. They have kept up their vigils in the Holy Land, and in
general have made a notable progress.
The inventions of the age have been beneficial by opening up new lands
and by making transit easy and rapid, thus recalling some of the
conditions which conduced to the original spread of the religion of
Jesus. A multitude of noble souls have devoted all to the enlightenment
of the barbarian and pagan world. And while I disparage no land, and
do not undervalue the good intentions and efforts of those outside our
pale, I cannot pass over in silence the French nation, which has given
more abundantly than any, perhaps more abundantly than all others, of
priests, sisters, and funds for the essential duty of Catholicism.
The work of the Propagation of the Faith and the Seminary of Foreign
Missions at Paris deserve a special souvenir as often as Catholic
missions are mentioned.
THE POPES OF THE CENTURY
Six Popes ruled the Church in the nineteenth century: Pius VII., Leo
XII., Pius VIII., Gregory XVI., Pius IX., and the present venerable
pontiff, Leo XIII. In the person of Pius VII. they have known what
martyrdom was like, also the shame and humiliation of being subject
to a civil power absolute in its character and prone to unwarrantable
interference with the ecclesiastical power, even to contempt of its
most ancient and venerable rights. In Gregory XVI. and Pius IX.
they learned the purposes and the power of those who in Europe have
succeeded to the men of the French Revolution. In Leo XIII. their line,
the oldest line of rulers on the earth, can boast of a most enlightened
mind and a very sympathetic heart. Long time a bishop of an important
see before he was made Pope, he has been at the level of every task
imposed upon the Papacy.
In a particular manner he has been the patron of ecclesiastical
studies, by his scholarly encyclicals on philosophy, Scripture,
history, and other branches of learning. A noble specimen of this
activity is his late letter to the bishops of France on the studies
of the clergy. His spirit is the Christian spirit of reconciliation
and concord, yet without sacrifice of the immemorial rights and the
solemn obligations of the Apostolic See. He may not live to see the
restoration of his independence, and the reparation of the wrong
inflicted upon the Holy See, but he can maintain a protest that will
forever invalidate among Catholics the claim of the actual government
and keep open the Roman question until it is rightly settled.
Catholics cannot forget that the Pope for the time being is, according
to Catholic doctrine, the successor of Saint Peter in all his rights
and privileges as the visible head of the Church, appointed by Jesus
Himself. Hence, among other duties, he has to safeguard the approved
traditions and the general legislation of the past, to protect the
status of the Church as given over to him, and to hand it down
undiminished to his own successor. Precisely because he is the head
of the Church he may not licitly alter its organic and regular life,
or arbitrarily abandon the almost sacrosanct ways along which his
predecessors have moved, or give up lightly the institutions in which
religion has gradually found a setting for itself.
I venture to say that this element of fixity in the attitude of
the Apostolic See will be more appreciated in another age, more
constructive and architectonic than the past, less querulous and
destructive, even if less daring and brilliant. Forever to pull down
and scatter, and never to build up and perfect, cannot be the final
purpose of human society. It is perhaps worth remarking that the
average reign of the Popes was much longer in the nineteenth century
than in any other, being over sixteen years, and that two successive
reigns, those of Pius IX. and Leo XIII., represent fifty-four
continuous years of Church government at Rome, a phenomenon not
witnessed since the foundation of that Church by Saint Peter and Saint
Paul.
THE CATHOLIC HIERARCHY
During this century the Holy Father has been able to restore the
Catholic hierarchy in England, Scotland, Holland, and to create it
anew in India. This means the orderly management of the works and
the purposes of the Catholic religion, since the episcopate is the
divinely instituted organ for its spread and its administration. In
many lands a numerous episcopate has sprung up. In our own beloved
country it has grown almost at the rate of one see for every year
of the century. The apostolic activity of the episcopate has been
usually beyond reproach. The care of souls, the creation of parishes,
building of churches, convents, schools, and charitable institutions
has gone on in every diocese of the Catholic world. Some bishops have
distinguished themselves by their sanctity of life and their love for
the poor; others by their learning and their skill in their writing
works of utility for the faithful; others by their holy martyrdoms,
both in pagan and Christian lands; others by devotion to great works of
common charity and utility—nearly all by their exemplary lives and the
conscientious performance of their duties.
No nation has a monopoly of this outpouring of the highest sacerdotal
devotion; and no nation or people, as far as I can learn, has been
without a steady succession of remarkable bishops, men who would have
done honor to any age of Christian history. I believe that it is the
constant and edifying service of the episcopal body which is chiefly
responsible for the improvement in learning, morality, and laborious
enlightened zeal on the part of the clergy, diocesan and monastic,
which it seems just to claim for the nineteenth century. In some
lands the episcopal office is freer than in others, and its beneficent
activity is more immediate and visible. In all the bishops have kept
the bond of unity, often at no inconsiderable sacrifice of personal
comfort. Neither schism nor heresy of any formal and noteworthy nature
has been connected with the episcopal office. It would ill become me
to discriminate where the merits are so equal. I may, however, be
permitted to rejoice with my countrymen at the end of the century that
the life and the teachings of a Carroll, a Cheverus, a Bruté a Neumann,
a Dubois, have not been without salutary effect, and have set a shining
mark for the imitation of all coming generations. Particularly have
such men inculcated habitual courtesy and charity in dealing with all
those who did not share the faith of Catholics. They were fresh from
the storms of foreign religious hatred and infidel intolerance, and
knew by personal experience the benefit of mutual good understanding
and personal respect.
In the United States, particularly, the Catholic episcopate has been
very active in providing for the most fundamental spiritual needs
of their flocks—churches for religious services, priests for the
administration of sacraments, schools for the preservation of the
revealed Christian faith, orphanages for the little waifs and castaways
of society. Whether short or long, the periods of government of these
Church rulers have never been idle nor marked by self-indulgence.
Almost every one has left some monument of faith as a contribution
to the general good of Catholicism. I would neither exaggerate nor
boast, yet it occurs to me, after many years of service, travel, and
observation, that few ages of Christianity can show a more laborious
and elevated episcopate than the nineteenth century.
The recruiting of the diocesan clergy has been the gravest duty of
this episcopate, for religion lives by and for men. It can get along
without wealth or monuments, but not without intelligent teachers of
its tenets and faithful observers of its precepts. In keeping with
the decrees of the Council of Trent diocesan seminaries have been
opened where it was possible, and elsewhere provincial institutions
of a similar character. Both flourish in the United States, and grow
more numerous with every decade. The older clergy, long drawn from
the venerable schools of Europe, have left a sweet odor among us,
the purest odor of self-sacrificing lives, of devotion to poor and
scattered flocks, of patient, uncomplaining contentment with the
circumstances of poverty and humility. There is no diocese in the
United States where there cannot be heard tales of the hardships and
brave lives of the ecclesiastics who laid the foundations of religion.
We remember them always, and hold their names in benediction. The
younger generation of our clergy enjoys advantages denied to their
predecessors; but we consider that they owe it to those predecessors if
they have a degree of leisure to perfect the culture of their minds,
and a faithful Catholic people to ask for the benefits which must
accrue from greater learning, if it be solid and well directed.
Yet I cannot admit that our older clergy were deficient in the learning
of the schools. The names of England and Corcoran are at once on our
lips, not to speak of a long array of others almost equally entitled
to distinguished mention. If the external conditions of the diocesan
clergy have improved, their relations to the Church authority have
been safeguarded with even greater earnestness and efficiency. The
dispositions of synods, provincial councils, and the three plenary
councils of Baltimore have, we are happy to say, had little to do with
questions of doctrine. They have all been held for the improvement
of discipline and notably for the welfare of the clergy. In the same
direction, also, have tended the numerous decisions and instructions
from the Roman congregations, whose wisdom has never been invoked
by us in vain, and whose sympathy for our conditions we gratefully
acknowledge.
THE CONGREGATION OF THE PROPAGANDA
Any account of the good influence of the Holy See on our ecclesiastical
conditions would be unjust and incomplete if the Congregation of the
Propaganda Fide were omitted. To it we owe an unceasing surveillance,
full of prudence and intelligence. From its offices have come to the
bishops regularly counsel, warning, encouragement, co-operation. It
has been eminently just and fair, also fearless in the application of
the principles, the spirit, and the letter of canonical discipline.
Its action is a calm and grave one, marked by reticence and patience
and that composure which belongs to the highest judicial decisions.
But the Catholic Church in the United States and in Canada owes it an
undisputed debt of gratitude. The most learned cardinals of the century
and the best ecclesiastical talent have co-operated in the creation of
its legislation, which need not fear the criticism of any learned and
honest judicial body of men.
RELIGIOUS ORDERS AND COMMUNITIES
In the religious orders and communities the Catholic Church possesses a
very ancient auxiliary force that has rendered incalculable help during
the century. By their numbers, their strong inherited traditions, their
central government, their willing obedience, and their other resources
they have come everywhere to the aid of the bishops and the diocesan
clergy. Often they bore alone and for a long time, and at great
sacrifices, the whole burden of religion. Their praise is rightly
on all sides, and their works speak for them, when their modesty and
humility forbid them to praise themselves. The missions of Catholicism
in this century, as in others, have largely fallen to them. They stood
in the breach for the cause of education when the churches were too
poor and few to open colleges. They have given countless missions and
retreats, and in general have not spared themselves when called upon
for works of general utility. They and their works are of the essence
of Catholicism, and they ought rightly to flourish in any land where
they are free to live according to the precepts and the spirit of their
founders, who are often canonized saints of the Catholic Church.
I shall not be saying too much when I assert that among the invaluable
services rendered to the Church by Catholic women of all conditions of
life—no unique thing in the history of Catholicism—those rendered
by the women of religious communities are of the first rank of merit.
Primary Catholic education, in the United States, at least, would have
been almost impossible without their devotion. It is owing to them that
the orphans have been collected and cared for, the sick housed and
sheltered, the poor and helpless and aged, the crippled and the blind,
looked after regularly and lovingly. They surely walk in the footsteps
of Jesus, doing good wherever they go. The perennial note of sanctity
in the Catholic Church shines especially in them. Content with food and
clothing and shelter, they devote their lives, often in the very flower
of youth and health and beauty, to the weak and needful members of
Christian society. He must needs be a Divine Master who can so steadily
charm into His service the purest and the most affectionate of hearts,
and cause them to put aside deliberately for love of Him even the most
justifiable of human attachments. This argument for Christianity is
not new; it was urged by Saint Justin the Martyr on the libertine world
of the Antonines.
THE UNITY OF CHRISTENDOM
Throughout this century the Roman Church has desired and sought by all
practical means the restoration of the former unity of Christendom.
Each succeeding Pope has appealed to the ancient but separated Churches
of the Orient, reminding them of the past oneness and the need of union
with that see which all their records proclaim the rock and centre of
unity. Similarly, appeals have been issued to the divided Christian
communities of the West, as when Pius IX. wrote to the members of
the Protestant world before the Vatican Council, and when Leo XIII.
lately addressed his famous encyclical on the Unity of the Church to
all men of good will within the Anglican pale. Such efforts may seem
perfunctory; but they have in our eyes a deep meaning. They proclaim
the doctrine of unity that is clearer than the noonday sun from the
teachings of Jesus; they make a first step in the direction of its
restoration; they keep alive the spirit of charity in many hearts, and
they stir up countless prayers for the consummation of an end that
few believing Christians any longer consider unnecessary. Already
the canker-worms of doubt and indifference are gnawing at those last
foundations of the old inherited Christian religious beliefs that still
worked beneficently outside the pale of Catholic unity, but are now
disappearing from the public consciousness because, too often, they
are no longer elements of private conviction. In the realm of faith,
as in that of nature, there is an after-glow, when the central sun has
spent its force; but in both that glow is the herald of coldness and
darkness. To those who no longer allow in their hearts any Christian
belief, Catholicism has strongly appealed in the nineteenth century
by its teachings on the right use of reason in matters of faith, the
claims of religion on the mind and the heart of man, the benefits of
Christianity, and its superiority over all other forms of religion—in
a word, by the constant exposé of all the motives of credibility
which could affect a sane and right mind that had divested itself of
prejudice and passion.
CONVERSIONS TO CATHOLICISM
Not the least remarkable share of the history of Catholicism is seen in
the stream of conversions that began in the very stress of the French
Revolution and has not ceased to flow since then. From every land of
the Old and New Worlds hundreds of thousands have returned of their
own volition to the ancient fold wherein we firmly believe is kept the
sacred deposit of saving truth. They have come to us from the pulpits
of opposing religions and from the workshops of an unbelieving science.
Every condition of life, and both sexes, have sent us numerous souls.
Very many of these conversions have been unsolicited and unexpected.
Some of them meant an accession of wealth or social prestige or
high rank. Others brought with them the beloved tribute of uncommon
intelligence, experience of life and men, acquired erudition, the
highest gifts of style and oratory. Very many have come from the middle
walks of life, and signified no more than a great weariness of pursuing
shadows for the reality of divine truth, and the excessive goodness of
the Holy Spirit of God which bloweth where it listeth. Of this army of
converts some have been drawn by the conviction that the Bible alone,
without an interpreter and a witness divinely guaranteed, could not
suffice as a rule of faith. Others have been moved by the incarnation
in the Church of the spirit and functions of authority without which
no society can exist. Still others have come back to the Mother of all
churches, through a deep heart-weariness at the endless dilapidation
of divine truth outside the Roman Church. Some have sought and found
through the study of history the open door to the truth. Others again
through the study of art and its functions in the Christian Church. In
whatever way they returned to the unity of the original sheepfold, they
are an eloquent witness to the innate vigor and the immortal charm of
the Christian truth as preserved in Catholicism. For they have come in
unconditionally. Their return has worked beneficially, not only for
themselves, but for those of the Catholic faith, whom it has consoled
and encouraged for their steadfastness, while the non-Catholic world
cannot but feel that that religion is worthy of respect, even of study,
which can forever draw so many men and women out of the ranks of its
adversaries, even at the sacrifice of many things which are usually
held dear by society.
THE RELATIONS WITH CIVIL AUTHORITY
Being a genuine and world-wide religion, Catholicism could not but come
into contact with the powers in which rests the social authority.
In many cases the fundamental relations of both have been settled by
documents of a _quasi_ constitutional character known as concordats.
They are binding on both parties, yet in more than one case the supreme
authority of Catholicism has had reason to complain of their violation
either in letter or in spirit.
Important points like the freedom of episcopal elections, the
management of ecclesiastical revenues, the freedom of access to and
communication with the Holy See, have been tampered with or openly
abolished. In a general way Catholics are far from being content
with the actual administration of these _quasi_ treaties between
the civil and the ecclesiastical powers in the Old World and in
South America—yet they respect them and desire to live up to their
requirements. It is to be hoped that in the new century there will
be less suspicion of the truly beneficent intentions of the Church,
and less hampering of the common organs of her existence and work.
In a century filled with revolutions as no other the Catholic Church
has comported herself with dignity and equity, and managed to find
the correct _via media_ in this great tangle of opposing and mutually
destructive forms and theories of government.
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE UNITED STATES
In our own beloved country we have every reason to be thankful that
the liberty to worship God according to the dictates of conscience
is guaranteed by the Constitution, and has entered deeply into the
convictions of our fellow-citizens. The Catholic Church, by her own
constitution, is deeply sympathetic with our national life and all
that it stands for. She has thrived in the atmosphere of liberty,
and seeks only the protection of the common law, that equal justice
which is dealt out to all. She is the oldest historical and continuous
government on the earth, and it is no small index of the value of our
institutions and their durability that they make provision for the life
and the work of so vast and so aged a society. It would also seem to
show that, through a long course of centuries, Catholicism held as its
own genuine political teachings only such as were finally compatible
with the most perfect and universal citizenship known to history.
When this nation was forming, the first Catholic bishop in the United
States, and my first predecessor in the see of Baltimore, John
Carroll, accepted and performed satisfactorily the gravest public duty
of a citizen, an embassy to another people for the benefit of his own
country. Thereby he left to us all an example and a teaching that we
shall ever cherish, the example of self-sacrifice as the prime duty of
every citizen, and the teaching that patriotism is a holy conviction
to which no Catholic, priest or layman, can hold himself foreign or
apathetic.
A Catholic layman of the same distinguished family, Charles Carroll
of Carrollton, threw in his lot with the patriots from the beginning,
and by word and deed served the cause of American liberty, while he
lived to see it flourish and inform more and more the minds and hearts
of the first generation of American citizens. In future centuries, as
in this, his name will be held in honor and benediction as a signer
of the Declaration of Independence. His Catholic belief and conduct
will forever be a potent encouragement to the children of his own
faith. He was the first layman to contribute notably to the cause of
Catholic education, and the native formation of the priesthood, by the
establishment of a college for that purpose.
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND EDUCATION
We have done our best in these ten decades to provide the best
education for our people and our priests. Intimately convinced that
general education without religion is destined to be an evil rather
than a blessing, we have created all over the United States a system of
primary education in parochial schools that has cost us and yet costs
us the gravest sacrifices and entails the heaviest solicitudes. Yet we
feel that we are serving the cause of God and country by indoctrinating
our Catholic youth with persuasions of the existence of God and His
holy attributes, of the true nature of vice and virtue, of conscience
and sin, of the spiritual and the temporal, of the proper purposes
of life, of punishment and reward in an immortal life. We believe
that Christianity is better than paganism; also that Christianity
is something simple, positive, historical, that can and ought to be
taught from the cradle to the grave, good for all conditions, for both
sexes, and for every situation in life this side of the common grave.
Believing this, we have shaped our conduct accordingly, and trust to
God for the issue. In such matters it imports more to be right in
principle than to be successful. Our secondary system of education
has gone on from the founding of the Republic. Colleges for boys and
academies for girls have risen up in every State and Territory, have
been supported by the faithful people, and are doing an incalculable
good. As our means increase and other advantages offer, we hope
to improve them; Catholicism is no stagnant pool, but a field for
every good private initiative that respects right and truth. In the
Catholic University of America, founded in the last decade of the
century by Pope Leo XIII. and the Catholic hierarchy, after due and
lengthy deliberation, and made possible by the magnificent generosity
of a Catholic woman, we have centred our hopes of a system of higher
education that shall embody the best traditions of our ancient Church
and the approved gains of our own times. American Catholics have not
disposed in the past of great wealth, inherited or earned; hence all
these works mean an incredible devotion and intensity of good will and
sustained sacrifices. Wherever the Catholic Church has been strong and
successful, schools of every kind flourish. I need only recall the
fact that the idea, the constitution, the functions, the influences of
a university were unknown in the world until she created the type in
the Middle Ages, and gave over to mankind a new factor in civil and
religious life—the power of organized learning.
THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT
Through the whole century one line of thought and action has been
gradually disengaging itself from all others and dominating them.
That is the social movement, or the tendency towards a more evenly
just and natural conception of all the relations that arise from the
common dwelling of mankind in organized society. It has long taken the
form of institutions and plans for the betterment of the conditions
of the people, of woman, of all who suffer or think they suffer from
the actual organization of society. If there is something Utopian in
certain plans or hopes, there is too much that is justifiable at the
root of other attempts to reorganize our social conditions. Not to
speak of the undesirable inheritances of the past, the new conditions
created for the common man by the spread of industrialism and
commercialism have often been painful in the extreme, and have aroused
both violent protests and deep sympathy. By the help of God we have
abolished the reproach of slavery in every civilized land, but we hear
from the laboring multitudes a vague cry that they are already in the
throes of a return to that accursed institution.
Here the doctrines of Catholicism are eminently in accord with the
right conception of human nature, the functions of authority and mutual
help or charity, the duty to live, and the right to all the necessary
means for that end. She is sympathetic, historically and naturally, to
the toiling masses, who, after all, form everywhere the bulk of her
adherents, and have been always the most docile and affectionate of her
members. It is she who created in the world the practical working idea
of a common humanity, the basis of all genuine social improvement. The
trials of Catholicism have come more often from the luxury and the
sin of those in high places than from the disaffection of its great
masses. As this movement has gathered force, and passed from theories
into the domain of action, the Catholic Church, through her head, has
followed it with attention and respect. The whole pontificate of Leo
XIII. is remarkable for acts and documents which have passed into the
history of social endeavor in the nineteenth century. His personal
charities, large and enlightened, are as nothing in comparison with
the far-reaching acts like the refusal to condemn the association of
the Knights of Labor. His encyclical on the Condition of Workingmen
recalls the only possible lines of a final concord between labor and
capital—the spirit and teachings of Jesus Christ, the best Friend our
common humanity ever had. In the same way, his latest encyclical on
Jesus Christ, with which the religious history of the century closes,
emphasizes the true basis for the restoration of peace and harmony
and justice between the poor and the rich, between the producers of
capital and the capital that stimulates and regulates production. We
may be confident that the papacy of the future will not show less
enlightenment and sympathy in its attempts to solve these delicate and
grave problems with the least injustice and the greatest charity.
LIGHTS AND SHADOWS
It would be idle to deny or to palliate the many shadows that fall
across the history of Catholicism in the century that has elapsed. I
scarcely need refer to the weaknesses and errors of her individual
children: such acts she repudiates, and when she can chastises
remedially. But the Church has not recovered that vast inherited
moral power over the public life which it enjoyed before the French
Revolution. In many ways the consequences of atheism, materialism, and
even of deism, have been deduced into manners and institutions, to
the detriment of the ancient Christian morality. The sterner Christian
virtue of previous centuries, founded on the Christian revelation,
has been forced out of the public life of whole peoples. Expediency,
opportunism, moral cowardice have often triumphed over the plain right
and the fair truth. The principle has been established that God is on
the side of the great battalions, is ever with the strong men of blood
and iron. Ancient and venerable sovereignties have been hypocritically
dispossessed. Small nationalities have been erased from the world’s
political map, and the history of the near past almost justifies the
rumors of impending steps in the same direction. With the increase of
greatness in states comes an increase of warlike perils, not only from
commercial rivalry, but from that root of ambition and domination which
grows in every heart, unless checked and subdued in time, and which
in the past has been too often the source of violent injustice on the
greatest scale.
These deeds and principles we believe to be a necessary result of
naturalism, of the exclusion of the supernatural and revealed elements
of Christianity from our public life, and not only these, but others
of a graver character, that must one day follow from their logical and
unchecked evolution. Divorce, a cause of ruin in every land, grows
with rapidity in many civilized nations, so much so that not only
Catholicism, its inveterate enemy, is shocked, but Christian men of
every persuasion believe that some public and authoritative steps ought
to be taken to prevent the pollution of the family life, that fixed and
natural source of public morality. Religion has been officially thrust
out of the systems of education, in every grade, and the young mind
taught that it is quite a private and unimportant thing. Thus, under
the plea of indifference, many States have practically made themselves
the champions of that agnosticism which is the arch-enemy not only of
religion, but also of patriotism from time immemorial connected with
religion. The average man soon ceases to make great sacrifices, above
all to die for the public good, when he is satisfied that there is no
other life, or that it is not worth while living for the uncertainties
of approval and reward by an eternal God, who is just and true and holy.
REASONS FOR ENCOURAGEMENT
On the other hand, the Catholic man or woman knows that there are great
spiritual forces at work in the world, however unhappily its public
life may be developing from the view-point of Christian morality. There
are innumerable lives guided by the principles of Christian virtue,
some of them even culminating in the highest sanctity. Though not
all such are known to men, yet not a few become public examples and
incitements to virtue. Even outside of the Catholic faith there are
not a few who regulate their lives by the natural virtues and also by
inherited Christian virtues that work sometimes unconsciously, but
whose practice can only be pleasing to our common Father. Sweet Charity
is yet a queen in Christian lands; her services and utility are too
great to permit her dethronement. Great misfortunes of any kind still
touch the hearts of men that are Christian yet when their minds have
become clouded by indifference to, or dislike of, the supernatural
verities. Luxury and wealth, greater perhaps than the world has yet
seen, are still conscious of duties to the common weal. Educational
institutions of every character and philanthropical enterprises of
every variety have flourished on the means thus provided. But from our
point of view it is better that all such phenomena, to be lasting,
should have their root and origin in Christian purposes and belief. It
is yet true, as it was of old on the hill-sides of Judæa: “Except the
Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. Except the Lord
keepeth the city, he watcheth in vain that keepeth it.” (Psalm 126.)
THE FUTURE OF CATHOLICISM
We entertain no doubt that the organization which has weathered the
storms and stress of so many centuries will continue to do so in the
future. The Catholic Church has the promises of her Divine Founder
that the gates of hell shall not prevail against her. How could she
doubt of her future? It does not seem likely that any vicissitudes can
arise which have not their counterpart or analogy in the past, so old
is she on this earth, and so many are the forms of government and the
kinds of human culture with which she has lived. We are confident that
she will be equal to all the emergencies of the future, for while the
Church is always identical with and present to herself in a conscious
way, her children and her agents may grow in experience and wisdom,
as they undoubtedly do, and may bring both of these factors to bear
upon the future problems of our common humanity. Of one thing we may
feel certain: she will never cease to desire and to work for that
efficacious unity of all Christendom, which is the permanent wish of
its Holy Founder, and for which her bishops and priests have never
ceased to pray in those opening words of the Roman Canon of the Mass
that we repeat daily: “Therefore, O Most Clement Father, we suppliantly
pray to Thee through Jesus Christ Our Lord... especially for Thy Holy
Catholic Church, which mayst Thou vouchsafe to pacify, keep, unite, and
govern throughout the world.”
JAMES, CARD. GIBBONS.
PROTESTANTISM
The motives which have acted upon religion in the nineteenth century,
either by way of directly enhancing its power or by restricting its
influence, are these: (1) Humanitarianism; (2) The Historical Spirit;
(3) Science; (4) Nationalism. Although the course of religious history
has varied somewhat in different countries as well as in the different
Churches, yet it is possible to form an approximate picture of the
resultant of these forces which will reveal the progress of the Kingdom
of God in the world.
I
The first of these motives—humanitarianism—has powerfully influenced
the Christian world by asserting the rights of man, liberty, equality
and the spirit of fraternity, the sense of human brotherhood. The germs
of the humanitarian movement may be traced in the eighteenth century,
as in the teaching of Lessing and Herder and Rousseau; in religious
movements like the Great Awakening in the United States, the revival
in England under Wesley and Whitefield, in tentative efforts for the
abolition of slavery (Hopkins and Clarkson), and prison reform (John
Howard). But the nineteenth century has been distinguished above all
the other Christian centuries in the results achieved by the sentiment
of humanity. It has led to the abolition of slavery under English rule,
in the United States, and in Russia; to many reform movements of every
kind and degree, wherever there existed actual or latent tyranny,
which robbed humanity of its inherent privileges.
The humanitarian sentiment is Christian in its origin, derived
primarily from the conviction of the incarnation of God in Christ.
Christ appears in history as the leader of humanity in the struggle for
freedom. Slowly but surely ever since His advent, the world of man has
been moving forward to the attainment of the ideal of humanity revealed
in Him. “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.
And if the Son of God shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.”
The progress towards freedom inspired by Him who taught the fatherhood
of God and the brotherhood of men has been accomplished in the face
of great hinderances and long reverses, overcoming obstacles which
would have been insuperable without Christian faith. In the nineteenth
century the movement towards human freedom seems almost to have reached
its culmination. Within the sphere of religion the progress is most
manifest in the spread of Christian missions, which stand out in any
review of the century as one of its most extraordinary achievements.
It might be justly designated as a missionary age. So intense and
persistent has been its devotion to the gospel of Christ as essential
for man that when the century closed it might be truly said that the
round world had been girdled with Christian missions, whose results
are more significant for civilization, as well as for religion, than
any statistics can reveal. The missionary has been the pioneer, it is
becoming increasingly evident, of momentous changes yet to appear.
The sentiment of humanity has operated as a motive in the study of
human history, giving to historical inquiry a new interest and impetus.
No age has been so fruitful in the results of historical research,
with conclusions of vital importance for every department of life,
but chiefly this, that an independent place has been vindicated for
humanity, as having a life of its own distinct from and above the
natural order of the physical world. The study of man as he appears
in history has tended to strengthen faith in the essential truths of
religion, opening up as it has done the deeper knowledge of the nature
of man to which the religion of Christ appeals; for the modern method
of studying history, as compared with earlier methods, consists in
seeking for those inward subjective moods of the human soul which
lie beneath creeds or institutions, and not solely in the accurate
description of the objective fact. The facts of human life call for
interpretation, and for this the historian must search. Thus has been
born what is almost a new department of inquiry—the philosophy of
history (Hegel and many others). Differ as do these attempts at a
philosophy of history, they yet possess one ruling idea—the conviction
of a development in the life of humanity when viewed as a whole. The
idea of development controlled the higher intellectual life of the
first half of the century. It was applied with important results to the
study of ecclesiastical history, by Schleiermacher, Neander, Gieseler,
Baur, Rothe, Bunsen, and many others, by the Roman Catholic Möhler,
in his _Symbolik_, and by John Henry Newman, in however one-sided and
imperfect manner. The doctrine of development found its classic formula
in the lines of Tennyson:
“Yet, I doubt not through the ages
One increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened
With the process of the suns.”
The influence of the doctrine of development has been felt in the
study of Scripture, leading to a recognition of progressiveness in
the divine revelation, whose record has been preserved in the Old and
New Testaments (Mozley, _Ruling Ideas in the Early Ages_). By means
of this truth have been overcome, till they now seem unworthy, the
objections to the Old Testament on the ground that it gave sanction
to cruelty, deceit, or an imperfect morality. But the inference has
also followed that the revelation of God to humanity must be searched
for in the sacred records, and even by the light of close critical
scrutiny, if the divine utterance is to be distinguished from crude
misapprehensions or misapplications. Forms of literary expression,
current usages, the historical environment of the time—for these
allowance must be made as their influence is recognized. The science
of biblical criticism has gained from the study of general history a
larger knowledge of the nature of man, which, in turn, has made the
study of the Bible more profound and thorough, because more real and
human than were the biblical studies of the eighteenth century. The
primary question which it has been found necessary to ask in regard to
any doctrine or institution is not whether it is true—for the canons
of truth may vary with the relative position of the inquirer; but,
rather, what does it mean? When the meaning of the record is seen, the
question of its truth has answered itself.
The effect of these studies, even of what is called the “higher
criticism,” has not lessened the authority of the Bible or changed
the character of Christianity as “a religion of the book”; but their
tendency has been to vindicate the unique and essential place of the
Bible in literature as containing the veritable record of a divine
revelation. Some things, indeed, have been changed: the order in which
the books of the Bible were written is not the order in which they
stand; some of them are of composite authorship, whose various parts
were written at different times; the traditional chronology, known as
Ussher’s (1656), has been abandoned, nor is there anything in the Bible
which places it in opposition to the teachings of geology relative
to the length of time during which man has occupied the earth; the
historical order of priest and prophet has been reversed, so that the
voice of prophecy comes before the decline into ritual (Wellhausen
and others). Popular misapprehensions tend to vanish in the light of
a true insight and interpretation, such as that the first chapter of
Genesis was intended to be an infallible record of the divine order in
the creation of the world. That a similar account of the creation is
found in Babylonian literature only shows that the Bible writer was
illustrating by the best scientific knowledge of the time the vastly
higher spiritual truth with which the Bible opens, that the creation is
the work of God, thus leading man to the worship of God and away from
the lower worships of sun and moon and all the hosts of Heaven.
The mechanical conceptions as to the mode of inspiration and revelation
tend to give way before a larger and truer conception of the process
by which the revelation is made—that God speaks to man actually and
authoritatively through the experience of the events of life. Thus
revelation becomes a living process, and all later history may become
a commentary on sacred history, renewing and confirming the primal
utterance of God to the soul of man. Much, it is true, yet remains
to be done in bridging the gulf between the learned and scientific
interpretation of the sacred record and the popular apprehension,
which, formed in the uncritical moments of youth, often persists to
mature years and constitutes a source of confusion and weakness. A
similar situation was seen in the Middle Ages in the wide breach which
existed between the scholastic theologians and the popular mind.
A new department has been added to religious inquiry in Comparative
Religion, which aims at an impartial investigation and free from
prejudice, and is also moved by the sentiment of a common humanity
to respect all utterances of religious feeling in the soul of man.
How widely the nineteenth century has advanced in this respect is
seen by recalling a statement of Dr. Johnson: “There are two objects
of curiosity—the Christian world and the Mohammedan world. All the
rest may be considered as barbarous.” One of the most representative
monuments of religious scholarship in the last century is Professor
Max Müller’s _Sacred Books of the East_. Some inquirers in this
unfamiliar department have worked under the impression that these
ancient religions were equal in value to the Christian revelation;
others even have thought them to be in some respects superior. And,
in general, the first effect of the discovery that there was truth in
other religions had a tendency to weaken the claim of Christianity to
be the absolute religion. But as the results of the study have been
placed in their normal perspective, it becomes evident that they only
confirm the words of St. Paul, that God has at no time left Himself
without witnesses in the world. Revelation also is seen to have been a
universal process; and profound spiritual motives are to be discerned
beneath the diverse manifestations of the religious instincts. Yet, on
the whole, the preponderating judgment leads to the conclusion that
Christianity contains the larger, even the absolute, truth; that while
it confirms some features in these religions as true, it condemns
others as false; that Christianity also has for one of its essential
characteristics an assimilative power, which not only enables, but
forces, it to appropriate as its own any aspects of truth contained
in other religions, which have not hitherto been illustrated in the
history of the Christian Church. Nor is the familiar test applied to
religions wholly indefensible which judges them by their historical
fruits or associations. In accordance with this test, Confucianism is
represented by China, Hinduism by India, Buddhism by Ceylon and Siam,
Mohammedanism by Turkey, Christianity by Europe and America.
The influence of the humanitarian sentiment may be further traced in
softening the asperities of some forms of traditional theology, as, for
example, the Calvinistic doctrine of election with its alternatives
of reprobation or preterition. These certainly have not been the
favorite doctrines which have commended themselves to the spirit of the
age. The effort has been made to bring the doctrine of the atonement
within the limits of human experience. It has been found impossible
to present the doctrine of endless punishment after the manner of an
earlier age. Many causes have combined to deepen the sense of mystery
in which is enveloped the destiny of man, and there has been begotten
in consequence an unwillingness to dogmatize where in earlier times
such a reluctance was not felt. In this connection may be mentioned
two religious bodies, which took their rise about the beginning of the
century—Universalism, proclaiming ultimate salvation for all men; and
Unitarianism, asserting the dignity of man and his divine endowment.
But in all the Churches alike has the same humanizing force been felt,
leading to efforts in theological reconstruction in order to make
it apparent that the primary truths of Christianity are not merely
arbitrary principles or arrangements unrelated to life and to the needs
of the soul, but that in their essential quality there is conformity
with the larger reason of humanity, with that feeling for the inherent
worth of things out of which reason proceeds, and with which its
conclusions must conform.
II
Thus far the humanitarian sentiment has been regarded in its
combination with Christian faith, and as giving new force and
distinction to Christian life and thought. But, on the other hand, it
must now be noted that the same force working apart from the Church,
and often in opposition to it, has been a limitation to Christian
progress. In the French Revolution humanitarianism was associated with
a negative, destructive tendency, which overthrew the Church, disowned
God and immortality, and set up in the place of deity a so-called
Goddess of Reason. This negative tendency has continued to exist and
has found influential manifestation. It has attempted the deification
of humanity, as though the human race were worthy in itself of being
an object of worship. It has exalted man at the expense of God,
conceiving of humanity as alone immortal, as competent to steer its own
course without supernatural direction. It has weakened the sense of
nationality, has injured and endangered family life, has taken away the
highest sanctions from morality, and has reduced religion from being a
revelation from God to a purely subjective process in the soul of man,
worthy of respect, but without authority. It has created an abnormal
sensitiveness in many directions. It has swayed socialistic movements
aiming at the rights of man and seeking to achieve universal happiness,
but with an antagonism sometimes latent, sometimes expressed, to God
and Christ and the Christian Church. The prejudice remains which
had its birth in the French Revolution, that religion is a creation
of priests for their own selfish ends, and the Church an agency for
robbing humanity of its rights, liberty, equality, and fraternity.
Principles and convictions like these found utterance in the philosophy
of Comte (1789–1857), who called himself the “founder of the religion
of humanity,” and who proposed the scheme of a humanitarian Church,
limited by no national boundaries, whose only deity was man, whose
ritual found a place only for great men who had been the benefactors
of the race. Theology and metaphysics were discarded as outgrown
methods of explaining the phenomena of the universe, and in the place
they vacated stood the so-called “Positive philosophy” which rejected
all supernatural influence. The Church of humanity had, indeed, no
history and was a failure from its birth. But the combination, first
seen in Comte, of humanitarianism with the methods and principles of
natural science, has been the most formidable opponent against which
Christianity was ever called to struggle. It has been represented in
England by John Stuart Mill and by Herbert Spencer and many others. To
the influential writings of this school of thinkers is due in great
measure the widespread, deep-seated scepticism since the middle of
the century. To the same cause, by way of reaction, are owing the
spiritualistic movement, the so-called “Christian Science” and other
kindred tendencies towards a crude supernaturalism.
Those who entered the controversy in behalf of Christianity and against
the adherents of the Positive philosophy suffered at first for the
lack of any adequate philosophical method on which to rest in the
effort to overcome this stupendous alliance between a humanitarianism
working for the improvement of social conditions in combination with
natural science, whose postulates involved the denial of the miracle,
and indeed of all supernatural agency (agnosticism). It seemed for a
time as though the philosophy of Hegel would serve the purpose of a
stronghold to which Christian warriors might resort while in the stress
of a conflict which involved not only the readjustment of Christian
doctrines to their new environment, but also the maintenance of the
idea of God, of the kingdom of God in this world and of a future life
for the immortal soul. In Germany systems of theology were worked
out on the basis of Hegelian principles, which, as interpreted by
orthodox theologians, stood for a principle of surpassing value if
it could be maintained—that the life of humanity, while dependent in
the present order on physical conditions, was yet above the life in
external nature with which the natural sciences deal; that the very
definition of humanity implies the power of rising to the knowledge of
God. Nature has no knowledge or consciousness of God, or intimation
of immortality. It is in bondage to natural law and without freedom.
The life of humanity must not be studied from the point of view of
natural science, but is seen in the records of human history. The
influence of Hegel deepened the interest in historical inquiry at a
moment when the absorption in the natural sciences threatened to gain
the ascendency. But the Hegelian philosophy, for reasons which it is
not possible here to render, failed to accomplish the service expected
from it. It may be that the failure was temporary only, and because
it was not fully understood. There arose a school of thinkers—the
Hegelian left wing—who, while retaining their interest in history,
yet fell under the influence of the presuppositions of the natural
sciences. Thus Strauss, in his _Leben Jesu_, conceived of the person of
Christ as a casual product of the human imagination, while Feuerbach,
in his _Essence of Christianity_, reached the conclusion that religion
begins and ends in a subjective process in the soul. Thus, instead of
overcoming the Positive philosophy, German thought gravitated to the
same result, with this difference perhaps, that it assumed the form
of pantheism rather than of atheism. In the Tübingen school, led by
F. C. Baur, whose contributions to the study of Church history are yet
of high value, there was reserve about the miracle, if not its tacit
denial, and a conception of the Christian Church as a product of human
origin rather than the purpose of Christ.
But the effect of Strauss was beneficial in that it sent inquirers
back to the study of the person of Christ and of His age. Never before
was attention so concentrated upon the life of Jesus, as illustrated in
a large number of biographical works, too large to be enumerated here.
As a result of these studies, the conviction grows that while there
is a local aspect of the person of Christ, so that He reflected the
peculiar opinions and living interests of His age, and availed Himself
of current beliefs, yet He was also infinitely above His time. What He
was and did and said in Palestine nineteen hundred years ago must be
supplemented by what He has been to the world in subsequent ages, or
what He is and is doing in the present age.
While Christian thinkers were struggling with the problems raised by
the Positive philosophy, the natural sciences were commanding in an
increasing degree the world’s attention, until Darwin made his great
discovery of a law of evolution, when it seemed as though natural
science had become the arbiter and final tribunal before whose
judgments the world must bow. Then there followed the sharp, even
bitter conflict between science and theology, when scientific men whose
lives had been spent in devotion to the study of natural phenomena
were tempted to write expositions of religious history in order to
show the fallaciousness of the religious attitude, and theologians,
accustomed only to the postulates of the spiritual sphere, ventured
into the domain of science to put a spiritual interpretation on its
conclusions and discoveries. It was a confusing and painful moment
when a subtle scepticism pervaded the Churches and haunted even the
minds of Christian believers. Now that the smoke of the battle has
cleared away, while many tragedies are disclosed, it does not appear
that the Churches have been weakened by the strife or have yielded any
essential truth or conviction. The belief in God, and in his creation
and government of the world, the incarnation of God in Christ, the
miracle for which Christ stands, and pre-eminently the miracle of His
resurrection—in a word, the supernatural interpretation of life,
remains unshaken. It is unjust to charge, as has sometimes been done,
dishonesty and a spirit of evasion against those who, while the fierce
battle was in progress, kept silence, unable to defend by cogent
argument what yet they cherished still as true.
In the latter part of the century there came efforts at the
reconstruction of theology in order to a better adjustment of the
increase of knowledge regarding the nature of God and His relation
to the world. The doctrine of God as immanent in the world, and not
only transcendent or above and apart from it, has proved valuable in
reconciling many of the discoveries of history and of natural science
with the Christian faith. Efforts have also been made to simplify
theology by the reduction of the large and complex, even conflicting,
mass of Christian tenets and beliefs, given in history or represented
in various Christian sects, to a few simple principles in which all
must agree, resting for their confirmation not on metaphysics, but on
the genuine Christian instincts as revealed in the New Testament. There
has been attained also a better philosophical method for meeting the
difficulties and perplexities of the age.
But these attempts at the better interpretation of revealed religion,
and the formation of more consistent theological systems, have found
a temporary rival in efforts to create, first of all, a better system
of “natural theology,” as it may be called, which shall take account
of the doctrine of evolution and other discoveries of natural science
since Paley’s time and the day of the Bridgewater Treatises. Those
who aim at a reconciliation of religion with science treat the idea
of evolution as a mediating principle by which the conflict between
science and religion may be overcome. This effort is the more
significant, in view of the popular interest in evolution—a word
which has become almost the watchword of the age. From this point of
view the invasion of religious territory by scientific men (Huxley,
Tyndale, Haeckel, and others), and the counter-invasion of scientific
territory by philosophers and theologians, give promise of some mutual
understanding in the future.
III
It remains now to turn to another most potent motive which has
affected the fortunes of religion in the nineteenth century. It may
be called Nationalism, meaning by the term that higher conception of
the life of the state or nation, slowly but most effectively asserting
itself throughout the nineteenth century, never apart from religious
convictions, always indeed in their support and furtherance. In
illustration of this point, we turn again to the French Revolution,
as giving the momentum, both directly and by way of reaction, to
the conception of the sacredness of the state, as an ultimate fact
in God’s government of the world. In that fearful outburst of the
French people, their long pent-up indignation was vented no less
against the state than against the Church—the one a device of kings
and lawgivers for holding mankind in subjection, as the other was a
scheme for the same end by a designing priesthood. The humanitarian
sentiment received in consequence at this impressive moment a direction
of antipathy to nationality as an evil to be overcome, or at least
to be kept in subjection to some higher principle, if the rights of
man were to be secured. Something even of this negative mood entered
into the formation of the American Constitution, where there is to
be noted a singular omission of any reference to Deity as the author
and preserver of the national life. On the continent of Europe there
was the phenomenon of Napoleon building on the ruins of the French
Revolution, while yet preserving the destructive motives which inspired
it. Napoleon revived the dream of empire, in whose expansive embrace
the nations of Europe were to be subordinated, if not suppressed
altogether. He proposed to reconstruct the map of Europe, as though
nationalities and crowns were purely human artificial arrangements to
be disposed of at his sovereign pleasure.
The failure of the French nation, its demonstrated inability to do
the proper work of a state, as well as the fact that the career of a
Napoleon was possible, indicates inherent weakness in all the nations
of Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They existed
either in repose, and even stagnation, after the long turmoil of the
age of the Protestant Reformation, averse to change, distrustful of
enthusiasm, or were content to strive for purely selfish aims. In
accordance with the principle that the people existed for the state,
rulers followed their personal whims, indifferent to moral sanctions,
heedless of the growing evils calling aloud for redress. Such in
particular was the condition in France. It was better in England, but
even there the same tendency existed, manifested in the unnecessary
alienation of the American colonies. However this may be, there has
been a reaction against nationality during the nineteenth century.
The nations have been forced to struggle against this opposition,
and through the struggle they have attained their rebirth, their
purification.
The subject is connected with the fortunes of religion in many ways.
The indifference to nationality, the distrust of the nation as
incompetent for the exigencies of life, the placing of an abstract
humanity as an ideal above nationality, so that to labor directly for
the interests of humanity apart from the well-being of the nation,
and even in its defiance, became the motive of reformers—these
characteristics, when seen in the religious sphere, have led to a
reaction against the various forms of Protestantism, and especially as
represented in the state Churches. The Roman Catholic Church, which in
all its history has subordinated national distinctions to the higher
interests of a common Christendom, had fallen into inefficiency in
the eighteenth century, and was no longer reckoned a force worthy of
consideration, either by religious thinkers or by statesmen. But in the
first third of the nineteenth century there came a change, when the
Roman Church arose from its lethargy to meet the demand imposed upon
it by the timid fears of statesmen and ecclesiastics, as the safeguard
of religion and morality, where national Churches or particular
Churches were thought to have failed. The Napoleonic aspiration after
universal empire and the frantic effort to realize it by rearranging
or suppressing nationalities has its counterpart in the religious
world in the effort to restore a Christian empire with the Papacy at
its head, as in the Middle Ages. The effect of this ambition may be
seen in Germany and other countries, but is most clearly manifest in
England, where the Oxford Movement (1833) appears as an unnational, if
not anti-national, uprising in behalf of some imperfectly conceived
cosmopolitan Church designated as “Catholicity.” The date of the
“Movement,” as Newman fixed it, was Keble’s sermon on the “Apostacy of
the National Church.” This same feeling, that national existence is
inferior in importance to humanitarian reforms or to the expression of
religion in some other shape than in any particular or national Church,
has been shown in the break with the Established Church in Scotland, or
in the difficulties experienced in Germany in consolidating the forms
of Protestantism in a strong state Church, or in the aspirations after
some universal form of religion to be accomplished by a parliament of
religions. Beneath these various schemes there is the common principle
that humanity is a worthier object of devotion than the state, and
constitutes a higher ideal in whose cause to labor. This conviction, it
may be added, has been strengthened vastly by the extraordinary way in
which, during the nineteenth century, the whole world has been brought
together by the material forces of steam and electricity.
That there is here a great truth no one can deny, but the point to
be noticed now is that nationality has been at a disadvantage in the
competition with humanity. Out of the necessities of the situation
there has been born the spirit of a deeper inquiry into the place and
significance of the nation as the indispensable medium by which the
highest result can be secured for the world at large. Thus we have
the studies in this direction of German students, Hegel and Stahl,
Trendelenburg and Bluntschli, Maurice in England, and in America
Mulford in his book _The Nation_, all of them combating the motive of
Comte and setting forth the essential, even the eternal, significance
of nationality. The ancient doctrine is still preserved that the people
exist for the state, but it is justified on the ground that the state
also exists for the people, for the freedom of the individual man, so
that through the state the rights of man are better subserved and more
securely guaranteed than by an exclusive one-sided devotion to the
cause of an abstract humanity.
As the nineteenth century drew to its close, it became increasingly
apparent that the nations had emerged from the depression in which
they were found when the century opened. America may be said to
have attained the consciousness of nationality in its highest form
in consequence of the Civil War, and to have entered from that time
upon a new career. In that awful conflict, whose origin dates back to
the rise of the anti-slavery movement, may be discerned the issue of
the century—humanitarianism, on the one hand, contending for the
rights of man, careless, if need be, for the national unity if only
a great reform could be secured; and on the other hand, the nation,
slowly realizing that slavery was a force hostile to national unity
and integrity, and on this ground demanding its suppression. The two
attitudes in this instance appear organically related, while yet
they spring from distinct and separate motives. In 1870 Germany and
Italy took their places in the family of nations. Nor should there be
omission to mention Greece, which, after its subsidence for hundreds of
years, again attained its national independence.
It has become further apparent that it is to the Protestant nations,
America, England, and Germany, that the leading place must be conceded,
together with the determination of the world’s fortunes. And to
these must be added Russia, which is also outside the pale of Latin
Christianity. Those nations remaining in alliance with the Papacy are,
for the present at least, in an inferior position.
The triumphant assertion of the spiritual significance of nationality
in the latter part of the nineteenth century has made it further
apparent that the forces working for religion, and especially for
its Protestant forms, were stronger than the forces in opposition.
The nation enters the arena of the controversy as a spiritual force,
assuming as a first principle the existence of God and His supernatural
government of the world. Never was this truth more impressively
illustrated than in the experience of Lincoln, who, when he became
President of the United States in the supreme crisis of its history,
ceased to be indifferent to religion and passed into a devout belief
in the mysterious control of the destiny of the nation by a sovereign,
omnipotent hand. As the indifference to nationality was among the
causes of religious doubt and of the weakness in the Churches in the
middle of the century, so the triumphant assertion of nationality has
contributed to turn the tide towards theistic belief and the Christian
faith.
To give a full exposition of the inner relationship of the nation to
religion and the Churches is not possible here, but some remarks may be
offered which will tend to illustrate their organic connection.
(1) In any large historical survey the nation appears as guided by
religious leaders. Religion is seen to have flourished in proportion
as the nation is conscious of its strength and destiny. When the
Roman Empire broke down the nationalities and merged them in a large
composite unity, it broke down also religious faiths, and its own
religion as well, till scepticism was the result and a consequent
immorality. All attempts to build up religion on the basis of empire,
as distinct from nationality, ended in failure.
(2) The Christian religion tended from the first to break up the empire
and to restore nationality. Ultimately it became manifest that the
cause which undermined the Roman Empire and accomplished its downfall
was the Christian Church. In its Eastern half the empire was resolved
into nationalities. In the West a Church, Latin Christendom, rose upon
its ruins, but within this Latin Christendom the spirit of nationality
began at once to work, forcing its way against the opposition of
the Papacy, till, in the age of the Protestant Reformation, when
nationality was felt as a conscious motive, it sundered Latin
Christendom into fragments.
(3) The Old Testament in its form as a whole is simply the history of
a nation from its birth through all its fortunes. Never did religion
rise to a diviner and fuller expression than under the realization of
the conviction that God was protecting the nation and determining its
career. The Hebrew prophets were primarily statesmen, devoted to the
nationality, as the incarnation of the divine will, in whose fortunes
were revealed the divine purpose. Any nation which has not the similar
conviction that it is the chosen people of God, and called to some
important task, cannot maintain its independence and integrity, and has
no future. This conviction to-day inspires the leading nations of the
world.
(4) The nation mediates between humanitarianism and individualism. In
serving its own ends and seeking to accomplish its mission, it works
for the good of all, and also for the freedom of the individual man.
The tendency of humanitarianism as a motive apart from the higher life
of the state, or apart from its impersonation in Christ as its head and
leader, is to weaken individualism and to defeat the very end it wishes
to subserve, the achievement of the rights of man. Humanity as a whole
lacks the visible, tangible embodiment of the nation. It has not yet
the consciousness of itself nor of its unity. It cannot respond to the
needs it awakens. It does not, as a whole, realize its relationship to
God, nor is it placed in such a position as to make it feel the need
of God. It is in danger of becoming an abstraction in so far as it
exists without relationships. But the nation is close at hand, near,
and felt as a moral personality or being, seeking ideal ends which are
also within the bounds of possibility. Humanity as a whole undertakes
no enterprises which make it tremble as it comes to unknown, trackless
seas. But when the nation comes to great crises, where human wisdom
is powerless to direct its course, it falls back instinctively and by
necessity upon the belief in the guidance of God. Thus the nation as a
whole appears in a higher form of personality than individual men can
achieve, even the greatest men, and so prepares the way for the belief
in the still higher, the invisible, infinite personality of God.
(5) The nation as a moral personality and depending upon God becomes
the safeguard of morals. If there has been a decline in morality in the
nineteenth century, as some maintain, shown in the general weakening
of moral sanctions, or by the increase of divorce and indifference to
the sacredness of family life, it must be attributed in some measure
to the indifference to nationality from the time that political
liberalism resting on an abstract humanitarianism, or in combination
with a scientific naturalism, gained the ascendency. So far as this
tendency has in any degree invaded the Christian Church it has been
powerless to effect a change for the better. The great men whom
humanity is directed to worship do not constitute a moral standard,
nor can scientific postulates be made a basis for moral culture; for
nature is at least unmoral, if not, as some assert, immoral, and it is
only as acted upon by man that nature gives response to the increasing
purpose of the world. Religious truths—the personality of God, His
creation and government of the world, immortality, and the freedom
of the will—these are shattered, we are told, “by the great eternal
iron laws of the universe,” or “are in hopeless contradiction with the
most solid truths of empirical science.” And so, it must be added,
are the sanctions of ethics and moral law. It is when we turn to the
state, to the moral personality of the nation, that we encounter other
laws and living forces which restore what an empirical science or a
transcendental humanitarianism has broken down. Here the supreme test
is spiritual—the well-being of the nationality. The state must build
upon the family as its corner-stone; it must enforce those moral laws
which the history of nations, as well as human experience in its best
estate, reveal to be the inmost expression of the normal life of man.
The beginning of a new century may seem like an artificial division
of time, but the self-consciousness with which the nineteenth century
closed, the efforts at introversive estimates of its place in history
and of the work it had accomplished, indicate something more than a
conventional barrier to be passed. Prophecies in regard to the new
age may be futile, for God reserves to Himself the knowledge of the
future. But it is much if we can to any extent read the meaning of the
past and detect the sources of its strength and weakness. And for the
rest, Christian faith and hope are inextinguishable, looking forward to
the fulfilment of the Christian ideal—that higher unity where Christ
appears as the embodiment of humanity and the voice of its yearning for
a perfect brotherhood; where the nation also acknowledges Him as its
overlord, so that, in the words of Christian prophecy, the kingdoms of
this world shall become the kingdom of our God and of His Christ. In
that ideal conception, the _dominium_ belongs to the state, and the
_ministerium_ to the Christian Church.
ALEXANDER V. G. ALLEN.
THE JEWS AND JUDAISM
The opening years of the nineteenth century found the Jew blinded
by the light of a new sun, the rays of which were beating upon the
Ghetto and were forcing him to take off, one by one, the many garments
with which he had clothed himself during the hostile Middle Ages. For
the Jew these Middle Ages did not end with the Reformation and the
Renaissance; but only disappeared in the transformation brought about
gradually by the French Revolution. The beginning of the twentieth
century sees him putting on some of these garments again, and trying
to save his own warmth from being lost in the coldness of the outside
world. During this period the Jew has passed through more upheavals
than many nations have during three or four times the number of years.
What outward struggles has he not been called upon to experience;
through what alternating seasons of joy and sorrow has he not passed!
What changes even within his own body has he not sustained! The modern
European and American world has had a hard fight to find its way into
its present changed condition; but much harder by far was the task
laid upon the Jew; and, whether he has succeeded or not, he has made
an honest fight. Evidences of the struggle abound on every hand, and
the road is strewn with many a dead hope and many a lost opportunity.
The Jew was bound more firmly to ancient traditions; and so interwoven
were these ancient traditions with his whole being that the new life
into which he came had of necessity to be blended with the old. The
tale of the Jew of the nineteenth century is a record of his endeavor
to do justice to the two demands which were made upon him: the one from
the outside world—to fit himself to take his place worthily and do
his work side by side with the other citizens of the state in which he
lived; the other from within his own ranks—to harmonize his religious
belief with his new point of view and to adapt his religious exercises
to modern social conditions.
EMANCIPATION OF THE JEWS
The struggle of the Jews in the various European countries for civil
rights and for equality before the law was long drawn out, and was
marked by varying fortunes dependent upon the political conditions of
these countries. More than seventy years of the century had passed
before this struggle had been fought out. Though it is true that a
beginning was made in Germany and Austria (1750 and 1781), to France
belongs the honor of having been the first to really do away with
the mass of anti-Jewish legislation which the centuries preceding
had piled up. On the 27th of September, 1791, the National Assembly
at one stroke removed all the disabilities under which the Jews
had been living—distinctive dress, special Jew’s oath, Jew’s tax,
forced residence in certain localities, etc. From France, and under
the influence which that country then exercised, the emancipation of
the Jews spread to Belgium and Holland, and to some of the states
of Germany; but the rest of Europe was not yet ready for this
emancipation. The reaction which marks the period between 1814 and
1848 made itself felt upon the Jews, restoring, in many places, the
disabilities under which they had formerly lived. The “Judengassen”
became once more inhabited, and the principles of freedom and
liberty for all members of the state seemed to have been wellnigh
forgotten. The Revolution of 1830 stayed the downward course in some
of the German states; but it was not until 1848 that the second great
period in Jewish emancipation came about. In the breaking down of old
institutions it was natural that the exceptional laws against the Jews
should go also. The German Parliament of 1848, at Frankfort, forcefully
proclaimed the doctrine of religious liberty; and of this parliament
a Jew, Gabriel Riesser, was vice-president. But it was not until the
formation of the German Empire, in 1871, that the emancipation of the
Jews, which had gradually made its way in the various states, was
carried through for the whole of that empire. In 1867, a decree was
issued in Austria by virtue of which all citizens were declared equal
before the law, and in 1870 the walls of the Ghetto fell in Rome. In
1874, Jews were admitted to the rank of citizens in Switzerland. In
1878, the Congress of Berlin, the leading spirit of which (Disraeli)
was of the Jewish race, demanded equal rights for the Jews living in
the Balkan Peninsula. These rights were accorded by the various states
there, with the exception of Roumania; which, in spite of the treaty
and in spite of the promises made at the time, still continues to
refuse to allow the Jews living within its borders to become citizens
or to treat them as an integral part of the population. In Turkey the
laws which put certain restrictions upon non-Mohammedan citizens were
sensibly changed in 1839; so that the Jews living in the dominions of
the Sultan suffer from no exceptional legislation.
The cause of Jewish emancipation in England suffered no such sudden
changes as it did on the continent. It proceeded by regular stages
through the abrogation of the Act of Test in 1828, the admission
of Jews as citizens of London in 1830, as sheriffs in 1835, as
magistrates in 1845, and in 1858 as members of Parliament by the
removal of the words “upon the faith of a Christian” in the oath taken
by the members. There can be no doubt that the emancipation in England,
though long drawn out and fiercely contested, was more effective than
anywhere else, owing to the fact that it was progressive in character
and based upon the idea of rights demanded and not upon that of favors
granted. Nothing was asked of the Jews in England other than that they
be good citizens of the state; while the whole continental legislation
regarding them, from the time of Napoleon on, had on the part of the
legislators only one object in view—to break up the cohesion of
the Jews as a body and to pave the way for their disappearance as a
distinctive group. The idea that emancipation was a favor and not a
right brought it about that the Jews themselves aided in their own
disintegration. They believed that it was their duty to show themselves
more patriotic than were the other citizens of the state in which they
lived, as they were receiving greater favors. And so, even though Jews
have sat in the parliaments of various continental states, they have
with few exceptions steadfastly refused to acknowledge themselves to
be in any way representatives of their brethren, and in some cases
(notably in France) during the last few years have either remained
supinely indifferent when Jewish questions were before their several
parliaments, or have even aided those whose agitation was directed
against their fellow-Jews. In England, on the contrary, the Jewish
members of Parliament have never forgotten that, in addition to
their interests as citizens of England, they have a duty to perform
to the Jews, whom they also represent, and they have therefore been
able, while giving their best services to the state, to be also
useful to their co-religionists. It may be due to this cause that the
emancipation of Jews on the continent has in no way been able to stem
the recrudescence of anti-Semitism; while it has undoubtedly done this
in England. The opposite effect is most clearly seen in Algiers, where
the wholesale emancipation of the Jews in 1870, through the efforts
of Crémieux, that bold champion of his people, has in a large measure
contributed to make the riots possible which have in late years been
witnessed in that French colony. Neither the population of Algeria nor
the Jews there were at that time ready for such a measure; it did not
therefore come as the result of a development among the people, but as
something imposed upon them by the government.
In addition to Roumania, Russia is practically the only country which
has refused to enter the European concert, and which by means of laws
and ordinances represents still the dark period of the Middle Ages.
It has turned the provinces on its western borders into a tremendous
Ghetto, and driven the Jews to exile by making life within that pale
practically impossible. Even Portugal in 1821, and Spain in 1868 (the
two countries from which the Jews had been banished for a great number
of years), opened their doors to them once more; though few Jews have
ventured to return to the Peninsula, despite the fact that in 1886 a
committee was formed in Madrid for the promotion of Jewish immigration
into Spain.
THE WANDERING JEW
The Wandering Jew is not the Jew of legend, but the Jewish people
of history. The dislocation of large Jewish bodies, which was
characteristic of the Middle Ages, has been kept up during the
nineteenth century; and this dislocation has, as in former times,
profoundly modified Judaism in the various countries. From the
fifteenth century on to the nineteenth, hostile legislation on the
part of Western Europe had been continually driving the Jews to
the East. The expulsion from Spain and Portugal, at the end of the
fifteenth century, forced several hundred thousand into Turkey; while
the hardships which they had to suffer in the smaller German states
and in Austria caused large numbers to seek a refuge in Poland and
Russia. The tide commenced to turn westward about the middle of
the eighteenth century, though bands of Jews from Poland had been
driven into Germany, Italy, and Holland in the terrible years of the
Chmelnicki persecutions (1648–1651). The readmission of Jews into
England, the relative kindness of Frederick William of Prussia and of
Frederick the Great, aided a certain slow but continuous infiltration
from Poland, so that at the end of the eighteenth or the first half
of the nineteenth century these Polish Jews were to be found in all
parts of Germany, Holland, and England. This slow migration back again
to Western Europe took on, however, much larger proportions in the
latter part of the nineteenth century; but before this could happen a
strong movement still farther westward had already taken place. Jews
were among the earliest settlers on the American continent. They were
in nearly every case of Spanish or Portuguese descent, having come
from Holland and England to the possessions which these powers held on
the new continent. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when the
tide of immigration from Germany was at its height, a large number of
Jews from the southern states and the Rhine region found their way to
these shores. The Russian atrocities of 1882 and the following years
caused a greater shifting of the Jewish population westward than can be
paralleled at any previous time. It has been estimated that between the
years 1882 and 1900 fully one million Russian Jews left their homes
in the pale of settlement, finding new dwelling-places in England,
Germany, and France. The largest number (probably half a million) came
to the United States and Canada. Untoward economic conditions existing
in Galicia, and the frequent outbreaks of anti-Semitism there, forced
out during the 90’s a large number of Galician Jews; and in 1899 and
1900 the hostility of the Roumanian government has made it impossible
for thousands of Jews to remain in a country in which most of them had
been born; and, under circumstances the like of which has hardly ever
before been seen, bands of the Roumanian Jews have been wandering over
Europe, seeking the means by which to come to the American continent
in order there to establish themselves anew. There are between ten and
eleven million Jews to-day in the world: of these, about nine million
live in Europe; one million in the United States and Canada; three
hundred and fifty thousand in Africa; three hundred and fifty thousand
in Asia; and sixteen thousand in Australasia.
COMMUNAL ORGANIZATION
All these changed circumstances variously modified the organization
of the Jewish communities. Napoleon’s attempt in 1807, as the result
of the Sanhedrin which he had convened in Paris, to found this
organization upon a modern basis, dividing the Jews of France into
certain consistories and arrondissements, had an effect not only upon
France, but also upon those countries which for a time were under his
influence (Holland, Belgium, etc.), and even upon many of the German
states. In 1808 such consistories were established in Westphalia and
Cassel; in 1809, an Oberrath was created in Baden; and in 1828 and 1831
an Oberkirchenbehoerde in Würtemberg. It was due also to Napoleon that
in France and Germany the Jews were obliged to adopt family names,
they having, in most cases, still retained the Oriental custom of
simply adding to their own prænomen that of their father. Prussia was
the only one of the German states which was not so affected. There the
state exercises a supervisory influence, compelling all the Jews to be
members of the Jewish community, but in no way further regulating the
communal life. When the Reform tendencies commenced to make themselves
felt in the larger Jewish communities, the Orthodox members safeguarded
their own interests by making use of the law passed in 1873, mainly
through the efforts of the Jew Lasker, which enabled the people to
declare themselves “confessionslos” and form their own synagogues,
thus nearing in a measure the system followed in English-speaking
countries. In England and America no such organization was effected,
as the state does not there take cognizance of the religious belief of
the people. In both these countries attempts have been made by the Jews
themselves to organize under one head upon a purely religious basis,
but without much success. In France there is a Chief Rabbi of the
Jews who is recognized by the state as their rabbi and head. But the
Chief Rabbi of the Jews in the British Empire, though he is nominally
the head of the Jews in the kingdom, has no actual position as such,
and is even not recognized by certain schools of Jews themselves. The
Sefardim, or descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews, have always
kept themselves distinct, and have their own Chief Rabbi, or Haham. In
the year 1840, the more liberal-minded element among the London Jews
cut themselves loose from the United Synagogue and formed a Reform
party, their example being followed in Manchester and Bradford. Neither
they nor the recent immigrants from Russia, who have formed their own
“Federation of Synagogues” recognize the authority of the Chief Rabbi.
This more congregational system has been carried to its utmost limits
in the United States, where each congregation is a law unto itself and
absolutely rejects any interference on the part of any larger body.
From time to time a desire has been manifested to supersede this purely
congregational system by some form of union. The late Dr. Isaac M.
Wise, of Cincinnati, had at various times attempted to bring the Jews
of the United States together with an authoritative synod at their
head. Out of this and other attempts have come the Central Conference
of American Rabbis and The Union of American Congregations (founded
in 1873), which now comprises about ninety-one congregations. These
organizations, however, do not by any means represent either all of
the Jewish ministers or all of the Jewish congregations, and the Union
itself is merely a deliberative body having no power to do anything in
the internal affairs of one of its constituent synagogues. Since the
union of American Jewish congregations comprises only such as stand
upon a Reform platform, a union of Orthodox congregations was formed in
New York two or three years ago, and it is hoped that this organization
will do much towards binding together the very many congregations of
those who adhere strictly to traditional Judaism.
But the organization of Jews as a church has not been found sufficient.
Spread over so large a portion of the earth and coming under such
varying influences, it was inevitable that the theological differences
which already existed should grow apace, and a great cleavage be made
between the Orthodox and the Reform wing of the synagogue. It was early
felt that some more secular bond must be found which should unite the
Jews of various persuasions for common and concerted action. The first
attempt in this direction was nobly made by Narcisse Leven, Eugene
Emanuel, Charles Netter, and a few others, in founding (1880) the
“Alliance Israélite Universelle” in Paris, whose object it was to aid
in removing Jewish disabilities wherever they might exist, and to raise
the spiritual condition of their coreligionists in Northern Africa,
Eastern Europe, and Western Asia by the founding of schools. From these
small beginnings the Alliance has grown to be an important factor in
the conservation of Jewish interests. Faithful to its programme, it has
established a large number of elementary and technical schools, and
has intervened actively in Algeria, Morocco, the Turkish Empire, and
Persia whenever Jews or Jewish interests were in any way threatened.
Its attempt, however, to represent the whole Jewish people has not
been successful; for the reason that it has been allied too closely
with French national interests; and side by side with the “Alliance
Française” it has been an active propagandist of the French language
and of French culture in the East. This one-sidedness of its work is
best seen in the fact that by its side similar organizations have
been created in other countries, “The Board of Delegates of American
Israelites” in the United States, “The Anglo-Jewish Association” in
England, “The Israeli-tisch Alliance” in Austria, and the “Deutsche
Gemeindebund” in Germany. At one time it was hoped that the B’nai
B’rith, established in this country in 1843, by Isidor Busch,
Julius Bien, and others, would form such a union of Jews, where the
theological differences would be eliminated. But though this order,
which has 315 lodges in, the United States and Canada, has established
itself in such countries as Germany, Roumania, Austria, Algeria,
Bulgaria, and Egypt, and despite the good work it has so far done, the
mere fact that it is a secret organization prevents it from standing
forth as the representative of international Jewry. Where, then, and
in what manner is such a body to be found?
ECONOMIC CONDITIONS
The economic condition of the Jews in the large Eastern European
Ghettos is, naturally, extremely bad. Huddled together, either in
certain districts of large towns or in villages where they form the
greater part of the population, they are compelled to live off and
on each other. Crowded into certain walks of life by anti-Jewish
legislation or anti-Jewish sentiment, few of them can gain more than
sufficient to keep body and soul together. In Galicia it has been
estimated that five thousand Jews perish every year from typhus-fever.
The Jewish wax-miners in Boryslav, to take but one instance, were
forced out of the mines and reduced to utter starvation, for no other
reason but because they were Jews. The failure of the harvests in
Southern Russia during the last few years has reduced the wage-earners
in that part of the country to the position of dependants upon the
charity of others; but the Jews who live there in such large numbers do
not even benefit from the assistance sent by the government. Similar
conditions prevail almost continually in the rest of the Russian pale
and in Roumania. The standard of life has naturally been lowered among
these people and their general _morale_ has not come out of the trial
unscathed.
Nor must it be forgotten that the violent dislocation of hundreds of
thousands of people, such as has taken place among the Jews during
the last quarter of the nineteenth century, has naturally disturbed
existing economic conditions, not only among the Jews themselves,
but also among those into whose midst they came. These outcasts from
Eastern Europe did not come to virgin soil as did the Pilgrim Fathers,
but to cities and towns which were already filled with a proletariat
engaged in the eager fight for life. The Jews of Berlin, Paris, London,
and New York, had their hands full with the proper care of the needy
ones already in their midst.
It is a mistake to suppose that the Jews as a people are rich. The
proletariat among them is proportionately much larger than it is among
other people; and thus it came about that the Jewish quarters in all
the large cities were already well filled when they were (almost at a
moment’s notice) called upon to receive double or triple the number
they already held. The actual number of the Jewish poor was thereby
greatly increased; for many a family that had been wealthy or in easy
circumstances in Russia, Galicia, or Roumania, had been reduced to want
and been compelled to take its place among those who needed the help
of their brethren. This help was freely and cheerfully given all the
world over. Great sacrifices were made by the richer Jews to meet the
pressing needs of the hour, and, with no help from the outside world,
excepting the London Mansion House Fund in 1882, the thousands and
tens of thousands of immigrants were cared for. The Jewish charitable
organizations, the development of which has been during the latter
half of the nineteenth century the brightest spot in Jewish communal
life, rose to the demands of the occasion, and the more than princely
munificence of Baron and Baroness Maurice de Hirsch, in regard to the
Russian Jews, may justly be looked upon with pride.
New Ghettos, however, were formed in nearly all the cities to which
these immigrants came; and this name for the habitat of the poorer
Jews became again familiar, aided by the popularity which some modern
novelists had given to it. In the Middle Ages and down to our own
time the Jews had been forced by the state to live apart in such
Ghettos; sometimes for their own protection, sometimes to preserve
the outside world from contact with them. The modern Ghetto is a
voluntary gathering of the Jews for the purpose of mutual help and
from a feeling of reciprocal obligations. To the outside observer it
presents an unsightly appearance; it is the abode of poor people, and
its population is usually strange in dress, manners, and speech. The
sweating system (which in one form or another is to be found in all
these Ghettos) has been a dreadful incentive towards grinding the face
of the poor; and the results of too great a hoarding are often quite
apparent; so that the general morality of the Jews in these Ghettos
has suffered in consequence. A people ignorant of the language of
their new home are a prey to the evil-intended, who make use of their
ignorance for their own commercial and political advancement. This has
been notably seen in the city of New York, where a lax city government
has permitted the vampires of society to fasten their fangs upon the
Ghetto and to produce conditions which call for the active interference
of all those forces which seek to stamp out crime and vice. But, on
the other hand, to one who is acquainted with the inner life of the
Ghetto the virtues which have hitherto characterized the Jews—industry
and sobriety—are still to be found there; much more frequently than
in those parts where the richer classes congregate, and whose wealth
enables them to withdraw their doings from the public gaze. Its members
are as industrious as bees in a hive; and though extremely litigatious,
drunkenness is unknown and actual crime is comparatively rare.
In order to correct the abuses of the Ghetto, two things are absolutely
necessary—the increase of the actual number of Jews there must be
stopped, and the crowding into certain distinct fields of work must
be brought to an end. A determined effort has already been made to
force the new immigrants into less crowded parts of the land to which
they come. In this country this is being done by the United Hebrew
Charities, and notably by the B’nai B’rith. A distinct clannish feeling
has, however, to be overcome, and a fear of venturing into an unknown
country where the immigrant will be surrounded by people who do not
understand his peculiar social and religious customs.
That the Jew has taken by preference to certain branches of trade
and work is due to the fact that anti-Jewish legislation has for
centuries closed many walks of life to him, and the guild organization
excluded him rigorously from many spheres of activity. Then, too,
his richly developed home life has induced a certain distaste for
occupations which take the wage-earner out of his home and away from
his family. That, however, these inherited instincts can easily
be overcome is clearly seen whenever the occasion offers. Even in
Amsterdam, where three-fourths of the diamond industry is in the
hands of Jews, there are to be found Jewish cobblers, cigar-makers,
plumbers, carpet-weavers, mattress-makers, watch-makers, etc. In
the East End of London there are, it is true, ten thousand Jews who
are engaged in the clothes-making trades, but the rest of the forty
thousand Jewish wage-earners of this quarter are scattered over all
possible branches of work—masonry, metal-working, textile industries,
furniture-making, cap-making, and the like. The same is true of New
York, where, although the number of Jews employed in the tailoring
industries is disproportionately large, the following list of Hebrew
unions shows how far afield the Jewish workman has gone: Cap-Makers,
Cap-Blockers, Shirt-Makers, Mattress-Makers, Purse-Makers, Liberty
Musical Union, Jewish Chorus Union, Jewellers’ Union, Tin-Smithers’
Union, Bill-Posters, Waiters’ Alliance, Architectural Ironworkers,
Hebrew Typographical Union, Tobacco Cutters, Paper-Makers, Bookbinders.
The same is relatively true of all other countries where Jews live in
large numbers.
It is a popular misconception that the Jew has an innate distaste for
agriculture. His continued commercial life, forced upon him for many
centuries, has, it is true, disaccustomed the Jew to the life of a
tiller of the soil. But the Jewish state was largely an agricultural
one; the legislation of the Bible and the later Law Books was clearly
intended for an agricultural people; and Jews have never shown an
unwillingness to return again to the soil. In Southern Russia there are
to-day 225 Jewish colonies with a population of 100,000. In Palestine
there are now more than twenty colonies with a population of more
than 5000, and similar agricultural colonies have been established
at various times in the United States, Canada, and the Argentine
Republic. In many cases, it is true, these colonies have not yet
become self-supporting, but this has been due in a large measure to
maladministration and to the peculiar conditions under which the
colonies were founded.
It cannot be denied that a goodly part of the Jewish proletariat
belongs to the Socialist party. The whole Biblical system is in itself
not without a Socialist tinge; and the two great founders of the modern
system, Lasalle and Marx, were Jews. It is no wonder that in Russia
many of the leading anarchists were of the Jewish race, for the Jew
suffered there from the evils which Nihilism was intended to correct
ten times more than did his fellow-Russian. But the Jew is by nature
peace-loving; and under more favorable circumstances, and with the
opportunity of a greater development of his faculties, Socialism in his
midst has no very active life; the Jew very soon becoming an ardent
partisan of the existing state of affairs.
INTERNAL RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT
The facility with which the Jews attach themselves to changed
circumstances stands out characteristically through their whole
history. It might, indeed, be said with some show of truth that this
pliability is the weak side in the Jewish character. The readiness of
the Jew to be almost anything and not simply his own self has been one
of the factors producing a certain ill will against him. Disraeli was
the most jingo of all imperialists in England; Lasker, the most ardent
advocate of the newly constituted German Empire. This pliability is the
result of the wandering life he has led and the various civilizations
of which he has been a part. He had to find his way into Hellenism
in Alexandria, into Moorish culture in Spain, into Slavism in Russia
and Poland. When the first wave of the modern spirit commenced to
break from France eastward over the whole of Europe, it reached the
Jew also. While in France the new spirit was largely political, in
Germany it was more spiritual. In its political form as well as in
its spiritual form it reacted not only upon the political condition
of the Jew, but especially upon his mental attitude. The new spirit
was intensely modern, intensely cosmopolitan, intensely Occidental,
and intensely inductive. The Jew had preserved to a great degree his
deductive, Oriental, particularistic, and ancient mode of thought and
aspect of life. The two forces were bound to meet. As a great oak is
met by the storm, so was Israel set upon by the fury of this terrible
onslaught. It is of interest to see in what manner he emerged from this
storm—whether he has been able to bend to its fury, to lose perhaps
some of his leaves and even some of his branches, but to change only
in such a way as to be able to stand upright again when the storm is
past.
This great clash of ideas has produced what is known as the Reform
movement. It had its origin in Germany under the spiritual influences
of the regeneration of German letters produced by such men as Goethe,
Schiller, Herder, Lessing, and Mendelssohn. It was aided in a large
measure by the fact that the government in Germany, although distinctly
opposed to anything which militates against the established order of
things, mixes itself very seldom in the internal affairs of the Jewish
communities. This Reform movement has colored the religious development
of Judaism during the three-quarters of the century which is past. The
heat of the controversy is now wellnigh spent. Many of those who stood
in the front ranks have passed away, so that a more just estimate of
its value can be reached. It was a period of tremendous upheavals, of
great physical as well as mental pain. Many a congregation was split
in twain, many a family disrupted. At one time it looked as if two
distinct bodies of Jews would emerge from the struggle, and the union
of Israel be destroyed forever. A common enemy—anti-Semitism—joined
the two forces together for a common defence; and the danger of such a
split is now fairly a thing of the past.
The latter half of the eighteenth century found the Jews of Middle
Europe at the lowest intellectual and social point they had up till
then reached. The effect of the long Jewish Middle Ages was plainly
visible. Few great minds lit up the darkness, and an intellectual
torpor seems to have spread its pall over everything. A passive
uniformity of practice prevailed in all the communities, whether
Sefardic (Spanish and Portuguese) or Ashkenazic (German and Polish); a
uniformity, because actual intellectual life had been made to run in
one single groove. The Talmud had been the great saving of Judaism in
the past. In the intellectual exercise which its study necessitated,
the mind of the Jew had been given a field in which it could rove at
will. Living apart from the rest of the world, with a wide jurisdiction
over his own affairs, Talmudic law in its latest development was still
the law supreme for the Jew. The Jewish Ghetto had everywhere the
same aspect; the language in common use was, in all the Ashkenazic
communities, the Judæo-German in one of its various forms. A certain
severity in evaluating those things which were part of the outside
world made itself felt. There was ample time and ample occasion for the
practice of all those forms and ceremonies with which the Judaism of
the Middle Ages had willingly and gladly fenced in the law. There had
been little occasion for the practice of the beautiful arts or for the
cultivation of letters. Life in the Ghetto was not necessarily gloomy,
but it was solemn. The law was not felt as a burden, but it required
the whole individual attention of those who bound themselves by it,
from early morn till late at night, from the cradle to the grave. There
was no place for things that come from outside, because there was no
time to devote to them.
But the new European spirit in its French political form was knocking
hard at the gates of the Ghetto. Little by little it made its way
here and there, into all sorts of nooks and corners. It was bound in
time to be heard by some of those living behind these gates. The name
of Moses Mendelssohn is indissolubly connected with the history of
German Judaism during the latter part of the eighteenth century. It
was due to him that a vehicle was found which the new spirit could
use. Himself a strictly observant Jew, he felt the pulse of the new
era. The friend of Lessing and of Nicolai, he entered fully into the
revival which was then making itself felt. Through his translation of
the Pentateuch (1778, etc.) into High-German, he prepared the way for
the further introduction of German writings to the Jewish masses. This
was bound to bring with it a larger culture and a greater freedom of
thought. Many of his friends, such as Wessely, Hertz-Homberg, and David
Friedlander, stood by his side in this work. With the introduction
of the German language and German literature, better and more modern
schools were needed in which secular education should go hand in hand
with the former one-sided religious training. David Friedlander was the
first to found a school in the modern sense of the term; and he was
followed by Jacobson in 1801, at Seesen, Westphalia, and at Cassel,
and by Johlson, at Frankfort, in 1814. Between the years 1783 and 1807
such modern Jewish schools arose in Germany, Austria, Denmark, France,
and even in Poland. Literature was cultivated, and the first Jewish
journal (though still in Hebrew) was published in Königsberg, 1783
(_Hameassef_—the Collector). The _Gesellschaft der Freunde_, founded
in Berlin in 1792, was distinctly intended for the spread of this
modern culture; yet Mendelssohn’s own position was quite an untenable
one. He was a thoroughly Orthodox Jew in practice, but his mental
attitude was that of a modern German. He was and he was not a reformer.
He held that it mattered little what philosophical position a Jew held,
the Jew must observe all the ceremonies connected with the faith; these
were binding upon him by the mere fact of his having been born into the
Covenant. It is therefore no wonder that his translation was put under
the bann in Hamburg, Altona, Fuerth, Posen, etc. His friend Friedlander
wished to make of the synagogue a sort of Ethical Culture Society;
and Jacobson’s preaching in Berlin contained very little of what was
distinctly Jewish. The salons of Berlin, Königsberg, and Vienna,
which were presided over by brilliant women, who were more or less
immediate disciples of Mendelssohn, nurtured the cosmopolitan spirit
which was bound to be destructive of practical Judaism. That this fruit
on the Tree of Knowledge ripened too quickly is seen from the fact
that all the descendants of Mendelssohn, Friedlander, and others, led
astray by this cosmopolitan spirit and the philosophic presentation of
Christianity by Schleiermacher, have all become devoted members of the
Lutheran Church and have been completely lost to Judaism.
It was natural that these new influences should influence also the
training of the modern rabbis. Secular education had been introduced
into primary schools, and in some places—as, for instance, Lombardy,
in 1820—the government demanded a certain amount of secular knowledge
from the candidates for rabbinical positions. The Jew also desired that
his leaders should have the same training as he gave his children, that
they should be educated in the same atmosphere in which he himself
had grown up. The old rabbinical seminaries, or Yeshibot, in which
the instruction was entirely on Talmudic lines, had already run their
course; the study had been found insufficient by the pupils themselves,
and the schools of Frankfort, Fuerth, Metz, Hamburg, and Halberstadt
had all been closed for want of students. The need of a modern seminary
was felt quite early during the century; and in 1809, a Lehrer-Seminar
was founded in Cassel. The earliest regular seminary for the training
of rabbis, however, was founded in Padua in 1829. In Germany attempts
had been made in the year 1840, but these attempts were unsuccessful.
The first modern seminary was not founded in Germany until the year
1854 (Breslau). Then followed Berlin, in 1872; Cincinnati, in 1873;
Budapest, in 1876. Similar institutions exist now in London, Paris, and
Vienna.
In the first convulsions of the Mendelssohn period the way was paved
for the second period of the Reform movement which covers the first
quarter of the nineteenth century. The real issues touched the central
point of Jewish life, the synagogue. It is interesting to note that
during this period the chief questions were not so much theological as
æsthetic. The æsthetic side of life could not be largely cultivated in
the Ghetto; and the form of the service had greatly degenerated. In the
course of centuries, so many additional prayers and songs and hymns had
been added that the ritual was largely overburdened, and often tended
rather to stifle than bring out the religious sense they were intended
to conserve. Contact with the outside world created and fostered this
æsthetic sense, and the influences of the writings of such men as
Lessing and Mendelssohn was largely in this direction. As this æsthetic
sense made its way into the homes, so also did it carve out its way
into the synagogue. Demands were heard for a shorter service; for the
organ to accompany the chanting of the reader; for the German language
in some of the prayers and for the German sermon. Each point was
bitterly contested; for the Orthodox wing had before it the wholesale
apostasy of the Salon Jews. In order to introduce the vernacular into
the service and into the sermon, private synagogues were opened by
small coteries in Cassel (1809), Seesen (1810), Dessau (1812), and
Berlin (1815). In Southern Germany the use of the vernacular was
introduced between the years 1817 and 1818, also in Hungary through
the influence of Abraham Chorin. In some countries the government gave
its active aid. In Vienna, in 1820, German was made obligatory, and
as early as 1814 Danish in Copenhagen. The greatest changes, however,
were made in the Hamburg temple (under Kley and Salomon, 1818), where
not only the service was made more æsthetic and the German language
introduced, but certain prayers referring to the Messianic time were
either omitted or altered. No wonder, then, that the Orthodox rabbis
in Germany, with the support of the rabbis in various other countries,
protested against such a course. The government even looked askance
at these Reform proceedings, and in 1817 and 1823 ordered a number of
these private synagogues to be closed. A further cause for displeasure
was the introduction in 1814 of the confirmation of children in German,
to replace or supplement the old Barmitzvah, a clear imitation of the
ceremony in the Protestant Church of Germany. Despite opposition,
however, the confirmation found its way into Berlin, Hamburg,
Frankfort, Cassel, Copenhagen, etc.
This æsthetic revolution in the synagogue could not, however, long
remain the only outward sign of the new life. The great weakness of
the Reform movement has been that it has lacked a philosophic basis;
and, as in its first beginnings, with the exception of Hamburg, it took
little note of the changed point of view from which those who fought
for reform looked at the old theological ideas. Æsthetic reform was the
work largely of individual persons and individual congregations. No
attempt had been made either to formulate the philosophic basis upon
which the reform stood, or to provide a body which should regulate the
form which the new order of things was to take on. Two attempts were
made to remedy these evils, both closely related one to the other.
The first was crystallized in what is now known as the “Science of
Judaism”; by which is meant the untrammelled, scientific investigation
of the past history of the Jews. The want of this was severely felt
just in those centres where reform had taken up its abode; and those
who assisted at its birth did so with the avowed purpose of getting
at the real kernel of Judaism by such investigation, and of freeing
that kernel from the accretions of ages. They saw also that some means
had to be found by which the result of these researches could be
brought before the people. The Mendelssohn period had also felt this;
but its organ had been written in Hebrew, and could not, therefore,
appeal to those who wished for the intellectual advancement of the
Jews upon modern lines. The Society for Culture and the Science of
Judaism in Berlin (founded 1819) started a journal, with L. Zunz as
editor. Though it only lived during the years 1822 and 1823, it was the
forerunner and the model for many of its kind that followed after. In
1835 appeared Geiger’s _Scientific Journal for Jewish Theology_, and in
1837 a regular weekly was established by L. Philippson, the _Allgemeine
Zeitung des Judenthums_. Around these and other journals which quickly
sprang up there gathered a coterie of historians, philologists, and
students of literature which in the fifty years between 1830 and 1880
has built up a science which has extended its investigations into every
corner of Jewish life in the past, and has followed to their sources
the various lines of development which have appeared from time to
time. A full estimate of what has been done will be apparent only when
the great Jewish Encyclopædia will be ready which is now in course of
publication in New York. Zunz, Geiger, Krochmal, Rapoport, Frankel,
Löw, Steinschneider, Graetz, Luzzatto, and Reggio are only a few of
the names of those who gave up their lives to this work. Most of the
early labor of these men was not dry-as-dust investigation pure and
simple, but was intended to have a bearing upon the actual life, upon
the burning questions which were then agitating Jewish thought. This
is clearly seen in the journal of which Zunz was editor, and in his
_Gottesdienstliche Vortraege_, the basis of nearly all the work done
after him, but which was evidently written to give the history of
preaching in the synagogue in order to justify the shortening of the
ritual and the introduction of the German sermon.
The second attempt was to found or create some central body which
would remove the purely personal element out of the Reform movement.
In 1837 Geiger had called his friends to a conference at Wiesbaden
for the purpose of formulating what they considered to be the essence
of Judaism. In 1844 a second such rabbinical conference was held
in Brunswick, largely at the suggestion of L. Philippson. Similar
conferences were held at Frankfort in 1845, and at Breslau in 1846;
for in the mean time the Reform Genossenschaft had been created at
Berlin, which went beyond all previous attempts and demanded some
positive statement of the theological position which it and its friends
occupied. The Frankfort assembly not proving satisfactory, the Berlin
society went ahead to establish its own synagogue; added a Sunday
service (which in a short while became the only service), and under
the guidance of S. Holdheim definitely broke with traditional Judaism,
removing nearly all the Hebrew from its service, abbreviating the
prayer-book still further, and diminishing the number of observances.
In Europe this Reform synagogue in Berlin has gone to the furthest
extreme; and though it has in a measure kept its members within the
pale of Judaism, it has neither been a great power nor has it found
imitators. The hope was generally expressed that a more general synod
would be held, to which the previous conferences were looked upon as
simply preparatory. The year 1848, however, put a stop to all normal
development; and it was only after a number of years that the question
was again taken up. In 1869 a synod was, indeed, held at Leipsic,
attended by eighty-one members; and in 1871 at Augsburg, attended
by fifty-two, both under the presidency of Prof. M. Lazarus. These
synods dealt, in a spirit of moderate reform, with questions relating
to the ritual, synagogue observance, the admission of proselytes,
etc. The general stand there taken would to-day be looked upon as
conservative; dogmatic questions were hardly touched upon excepting
so far as they recognized the principle of development in Judaism
both as a religious belief and as a form of religious exercise. It
was fondly hoped that these synods would become a court, which would
define and regulate whatever questions might arise. But it was not
to be. The synod represented only a part of the Jewish world even in
Germany. Not only did the large body of the Orthodox stand aside, but
even the so-called Conservatives left the conferences, as they could
not agree with some of the resolutions accepted there. In addition to
this, the Franco-Prussian war diverted the attention of all German
citizens; and ten years later the anti-Semitic movement succeeded in
driving the Jew back into himself. Jewish religious life in Germany
has therefore remained stationary since that time, the Orthodox and
Conservative parties being largely in the ascendant, leaving to another
land—America—the task of carrying further the work which it had
commenced. Yet, in spite of this arrested development, the Reform
movement has had a great influence also upon Orthodox Jews in Germany.
It produced the so-called historical school, which has the Breslau
Theological Seminary for its centre; and it called forth by way of
opposition the neo-orthodoxy of S. R. Hirsch, of Frankfort, which seeks
rather to understand the depths of the law than simply to follow it in
compliant obedience.
The æsthetic movement of the earlier period has also left its traces,
and especially in the Conservative congregation has succeeded in
introducing a service more in consonance with our modern ideas of
worship.
In 1840, under the influence of the movement in Germany, the attempt
was made to introduce a certain reform in the service of some of the
London synagogues. The measure demanded was exceedingly small—the
shortening of a few prayers and the omission of others, which were not
supposed to be in consonance with present ideas. The Orthodox party
did not, however, see its way to grant these requests; and, when the
Reformers protested, established their own synagogue, and issued their
own prayer-book, they were immediately placed under the bann both by
the Sefardim and the Ashkenazim. This congregation has not been of
much importance, and since its inception has made no further changes.
Compared with the Reform in America, the English movement would still
be classed as thoroughly conservative.
It was in the United States that the Reform movement developed its full
capacity and bore its most perfect fruit. In a new land, which was
untrammelled by traditions of the past, and where the congregational
system became the basis of Jewish communal life, the ideas which the
German Reformers had sown had a most fruitful ground in which to grow.
It cannot be said that the Reform movement here was actually started
by the Germans, for already, in 1825, one of the congregations in
Charleston, South Carolina, made up almost entirely of Sefardic Jews,
had developed “The Reformed Society of Israelites”; and the formation
of the society seems to have been due, not only to the demand for
an æsthetic service, but to an attempt to formulate a creed which
should omit all reference to the coming of the Messiah, the return to
Palestine, and the bodily resurrection. This attempt at formulating
a Theistic Church, however, was unsuccessful; and it was not until
the advent from Germany in the 50’s and 60’s of rabbis who had been
influenced by the movement in Germany that reform commenced to make
itself felt here. Merzbacher in New York, Isaac M. Wise in Albany and
Cincinnati, S. Hirsch in Philadelphia, David Einhorn in Baltimore,
are only a few of the names of those who fought in the thick of
the fight. About the year 1843 the first real Reform congregations
were established, the Temple Emanu-el in New York and Har Sinai in
Baltimore. It cannot be my purpose here to trace the history of the
movement in this country; suffice it to say that the untrammelled
freedom which existed here very soon played havoc with most of the
institutions of the Jewish religion. Each congregation and each
minister being a law to itself, shortened the service, excised prayers,
and did away with observances as it thought best. Not that the leaders
did not try, from time to time, to regulate the measure of reform to
be introduced, and to evolve a platform upon which the movement should
stand. Rabbinical conferences were held for that purpose in Cleveland
(1856), Philadelphia (1869), Cincinnati (1871), and Pittsburg (1885).
While in the earlier conferences the attempt was made to find some
authoritative statement upon which all parties could agree, in the
subsequent ones the attempt was given up. They became more and more
meeting-places simply for the advanced Reform wing of the Jewish
Church. The position of this wing of the Reformed synagogue may best
be seen in the declaration of principles which was published by the
Pittsburg conference. It declared that Judaism presents the highest
conception of the God idea; that the Bible contains the record of the
consecration of the Jewish people; that it is a potent instrument
of religious and moral instruction; that it reveals, however, the
primitive ideas of its own age; that its moral laws only are binding;
and that all ceremonies therein ordained which are not adapted to
the views and habits of modern civilization are to be rejected; that
all Mosaic and rabbinical laws regulating diet, priestly functions
and dress, are foreign to our present mental state; that the Jews
are no longer a nation, and therefore do not expect a return to
Palestine; that Judaism is a progressive religion, always striving to
be in accord with the postulates of reason; that the belief in bodily
resurrection, in the existence of a hell and a paradise, are to be
rejected; and that it is the duty of Jews to participate in the great
task of modern times to solve on the basis of justice and righteousness
the problems presented by the transitions and evils of the present
organization of society. Such a platform as this could not fail to
arouse intense opposition on the part of the Orthodox Jews, and to
lose for the conference even some of its more conservative adherents.
As in Charleston, in 1825, a platform of Theism was here postulated,
which was bereft of all distinctively Jewish characteristics, and which
practically meant a breaking away from historic Judaism. This position
of the advanced Reformers is also manifested in the stand which they
have taken in regard to the necessity of the Abrahamic covenant. At a
meeting of the Central Conference of American (Reformed) Rabbis, held
at Baltimore in 1881, a resolution was passed to the effect that no
initiatory rite or ceremony was necessary in the case of one desiring
to enter the Covenant of Israel, and that such a one had merely to
declare his or her intention to worship the one sole and eternal God,
to be conscientiously governed in life by God’s laws, and to adhere to
the sacred cause and mission of Israel as marked out in Holy Writ.
The service in Reform synagogues in the United States has kept pace
with this development of doctrine, or rather with this sloughing-off of
so much that is distinctively Jewish. The observance of the second-day
festivals has been entirely abolished, as well as the separation of
the sexes and the covering of the head in prayer. The ritual has
been gradually shortened, the ancient language of prayer (Hebrew)
has been pushed further and further into the background, so that in
some congregations the service is altogether English; and in a few
congregations an additional service on Sunday, intended for those who
cannot attend upon the regular Sabbath-day, has been introduced. Only
one congregation, Sinai in Chicago, has followed the old Berlin Reform
synagogue and has entirely abolished the service on Friday night and
Saturday morning. But whatever criticism one might like to offer on
the Reform movement in the United States, it deserves great praise
for the serious attempt it has made to understand its own position
and to square its observance with that position. It has also been
most active in its modern institutional development. It has certainly
beautified and spiritualized the synagogue service; it has founded a
Union of American Hebrew Congregations, and a seminary (Hebrew Union
College in Cincinnati). It has published a Union Prayer-book and a
Union Hymn-book, and has given great care to the development of the
Confirmation and the bettering of the Sunday-school. It has tried to
make the synagogue a centre for the religious and spiritual development
of its members; and it cannot be denied that the very large mass of
educated Jews in this country, in so far as they have any affiliation
with the synagogue, belong to the Reform wing. But at the same time,
it must not be forgotten that there is a very large body of Orthodox
and Conservative Jews, whose number has been greatly increased during
the last twenty years through the influx of Russian, Galician, and
Roumanian Jews. It would be outside of my province were I to attempt
to criticise either the work or the results of Reform Judaism in
this country. But it is a question in the minds even of some of the
leading Reformers themselves how far success has been attained in
developing the religious sentiment of their people in the direction of
a pure Theism uncolored by any Jewish, or, as they call it, Oriental
observances. They themselves confess that the Sunday-service movement
has not developed as they had hoped it would, and a number of them
feel that in weakening the hold which specific Jewish observances have
always had on the Jewish people, they are doing away with one of the
most powerful incentives to the rekindling of the religious flame among
the Reformed Jews.
Reform Judaism without some centrifugal force is bound to continue
on the road it has once taken. The logical outcome of the principles
formulated at the Pittsburg conference is a gradual development into an
ethical Theism without any distinctive Jewish coloring. The leader of
advanced Reform Judaism in this country has recently said that Judaism
must be recast along the lines of a universal ethical religion; that
then all distinctive Jewish elements of the synagogue symbolism will
pass away, and that such a denationalized Jewish temple will seek a
closer alliance with Unitarianism and Theism, and with them, perhaps
in a few decades, will form a new Church and a new religion for united
humanity. That such a tendency is inherent in Reform Judaism is seen
also in the formation of the Society of Ethical Culture in New York.
The leader of this movement is the son of a former prominent rabbi of
the leading Reform congregation in this country. In seeking to bring
out the underlying ethical principles of Judaism, he has gone entirely
outside the pale of the ancient faith; and the movement would not
concern us here were it not that nearly all the members (at least of
the parent society in New York) are Jews, whose evident desire it is
not to be recognized as such, at least so far as religious ceremonies
and social affiliations are concerned. The society does not even
bear the name Jewish, but with a certain leaning towards liberal
Christianity tries to find a basis for the morality and ethics of
the old synagogue outside the sphere of supernatural religion. While
the Ethical Culture Society has been quite a power in certain lines
of charitable and educational work, it may reasonably be questioned
whether it has any future as a form of Church organization. The inborn
longing of man for some hold upon things which are supernatural will
lead many of its members to seek satisfaction elsewhere. That they will
seek it in the Jewish synagogue is hardly probable, seeing how the
racial and other ties have been broken or at least greatly loosened.
They or their children will glide rather into some form of the dominant
Church, possibly, in the swinging of the pendulum, into some orthodox
form of that Church. I cannot help quoting the words of an intelligent
outside observer of the Jewish question, the Right Hon. James Bryce,
M. P.: “If Judaism becomes merely Theism, there will be little to
distinguish its professors from the persons, now pretty numerous, who,
while Christian in name, sit loose to Christian doctrine. The children
of Jewish theists will be almost as apt as the children of other
theists to be caught up by the movement which carries the sons and
daughters of evangelical Anglicans and of Nonconformists towards, or
all the way to, the Church of Rome.”
Where, then, is this centrifugal force to be found, which will
hold together the various elements in Israel, no matter what their
theological opinions may be?
ANTI-SEMITISM
Before attempting to answer this question, a word must be said in
regard to the anti-Semitic movement, the recrudescence of which has
so profoundly affected the Jewish people during the last twenty years
of the nineteenth century. A word only, because the facts are of too
recent date to need a detailed statement here. The great master-mind,
Zunz, writing in Germany in 1832, believed that persecution for
religious belief could not withstand the onslaughts of the new era.
Theodore Reinach, some fifty years later, asserted that anti-Semitism
was impossible in France. How sadly has a _démenti_ been given to the
hopes thus expressed, especially in these two countries!
I pass over the outbreaks against the Jews during the early years of
the nineteenth century, even the Damascus blood-accusation in 1840,
and the forcible baptism of little Edgar Mortara in 1858; they were
believed to belong to the old order of things, with which the new,
at least in that direction, had nothing in common. I confine myself
simply to the modern form of anti-Judaism, which has been dignified
with the name of anti-Semitism. It is hard for a Jew to speak of these
things with composure or with the judicial mind of a mere chronicler
of events. Neither emancipation from without nor Reform from within
has been able to stay the hand of the destroyer of Israel’s peace.
It has been contended that in most countries the Jews were not ready
to be emancipated; that in some the non-Jewish population was not
sufficiently advanced to make emancipation effective. The first may
be true in regard to the Algerian Jews; the second, in regard to
those in Roumania; but it is not true of the other nations on the
European continent. Starting in Germany, perhaps as a political move
on the part of Bismarck, it spread into Russia, Galicia, Austria,
Roumania, and France. In most of these countries it not only found
expression in the exclusion of the Jews from all social intercourse
with their fellows, but in Russia produced the riots of 1881 and 1882;
in Austria and Bohemia the turbulent scene in the Reichstag, and even
the pillaging of Jewish houses and Jewish synagogues; in Roumania
it received the active support of the government and reduced the
Jews there to practical penury; while in France it showed itself in
accusations against the Jews which for barbarity could match any that
were brought against them in the Middle Ages. The charges against the
Jews are varied in their character. In Germany they have been blamed
for exploiting the agricultural class and for serving the interests
of the Liberal party, forgetting that Leo and Stahl, the founders of
the Orthodox party in Prussia, were themselves Jews, and that Disraeli
in England was born of the same race. The most foolish accusations
on almost every conceivable subject have been lodged against them by
such men as Ahlwart, Stöcker, Lueger, and Drumont; and in late years
the old and foolish charge that the Jews use the blood of Christian
children in the making of Passover bread has been revived, in order to
infuriate the populace; despite the fact that popes, ecclesiastics,
and hosts of Christian professors have declared the accusation to be
purely imaginary and malignant. The false charge that a Jewish officer
in France had betrayed secrets of his government was sufficient to
unloosen the most savage attacks upon the Jews which the modern world
has seen.
The fact which stands out in the whole agitation is not that the
charges have been made, in most cases by men who sought in some way
or other to fish in troubled waters, but that these charges find
a ready echo and a ready response among the people at large. It
emphasizes so clearly that the Jews are a defenceless people, with
no means of effectually warding off attacks; and though in Germany
and Austria societies of Christians have been formed for the purpose
of combating anti-Semitism, there is no power which can effectually
enter the lists in their behalf. This was notably seen in the great
London demonstration of 1882, when the petition signed by the foremost
members of Church and state never even reached the Czar, to whom it was
addressed.
Among the few bright spots on the world’s chart are those countries
inhabited by the Anglo-Saxon race. Anti-Semitism is unknown in England
(though the attempt has been made to fix the blame for the Boer war on
the Jews); and the institutions of the United States have up till now
prevented the entrance here of the disease, though in the mild form of
social anti-Semitism which debars Jewish children from private schools
and Jewish people from clubs and summer hotels, it has insinuated
itself into some of the Eastern cities, notably into New York.
ZIONISM
There can be no doubt that next to the Reform movement the profoundest
modification of the forces within Judaism has come about during the
last years of the century through the rise and progress of the Zionist
movement. It has been said by some that Zionism is the expression of
Jewish pessimism, by others that it is the highest form of Jewish
optimism. I venture to say that it is both. The emancipation of the
Jews has not been able to do away with anti-Semitism; history has
repeated itself time and time again. When the Jews of a country were
few in number and of little influence, they led a tolerably secure
existence; but as soon as their number increased and their influence
commenced to be felt, anti-Semitism was the effective weapon in the
hands of their opponents. In so far, then, as Zionism takes account
of this fact, it is pessimistic; for conditions in the future will
hardly differ from those in the past. It sees the Wandering Jew of
history continuing still his dreary march through the ages, never at
rest and never able to effect a quiet and even development of his own
forces. It explains this phenomenon from the fact that Israel has in
all the changed circumstances striven to maintain its racial identity,
and as this racial identity has a religious side as well, that the
two combined may well be called a separate national existence; that a
people holding tenaciously to this separate existence, but having no
home of its own, must become, when occasion demands, the scape-goat
and the play-ball of other forces. It recognizes anti-Semitism as
continually existent, and in so far the opponents of Zionism may
be right in saying that its rise is the result of the anti-Jewish
movement. It is the Jewish answer from the Jewish point of view. On
the other hand, Zionism is optimistic in believing that real help for
the Jews can only come from within their own body; and that the Jewish
question will only be solved when the Jews return to that point in
their history whence they set out on their wanderings, and again found
a permanent home to which all the persecuted can flee and from which a
light will go forth to every nook and corner of Jewry. It does not hope
that all Jews will return to Palestine, but it believes that only in a
national centre can the centrifugal force be found which will hold the
Jews together in the various countries of their sojourn.
When Theodore Herzl, a _littérateur_ in Vienna, published in 1897 his
pamphlet on the Jewish state, he little imagined that it would call
forth an echo in every country in which the Jews were scattered. He
was not the first to attempt this solution of the problem. Far-seeing
Russian Jews before him had, many years previous to that, propounded
this method of dealing with the question, and it had been practically
the assumption upon which the Judaism of the past had been built up.
Reform Judaism, in relinquishing the hope of a return, and in cutting
out from the prayer-book all mention of Palestine and the restoration,
broke one of the strongest links which bound the Judaism of to-day with
that of the past, and cast aside a great ideal, the realization of
which had been a light to the feet of the Jews since the destruction of
the Temple. The idea of a “Mission” has taken its place, the preaching
of a pure Monotheism.
The Zionist congresses (which have now been held during four successive
years) have found the platform, so often sought for in vain during the
nineteenth century, upon which all Jews, regardless of theological
opinions and of economic theories, can stand. They represent the old
unity of Israel; for Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and even the
purely racial Jew are to be found there as well as in the Zionist
societies which have grown up in every Jewish community, whether in
Europe or in Africa, in North or in South America, even in the distant
Philippines. The Orthodox Jew must be, by his very profession, a
Zionist; but he often doubts whether the plan as formulated by Dr.
Herzl is feasible, and holds himself aloof, waiting for the realization
of his hopes at the hands of others, or for some supernatural sign of
divine assistance. The very fact that the Jewish opponents of Zionism
(and they are the only opponents it has) come from various parts of the
Jewish camp is in itself a proof of the above statement. The Orthodox
complain that some of the leaders of the movement are not sufficiently
Jewish; the Reform, that some are too Jewish. That this opposition
is exceedingly strong cannot be denied. The demand made that the Jew
should assert himself first and foremost as a Jew has been distasteful
to many who were soaring in the mystic hazes of Universalism, or who
had hoped to get out of Judaism as it were by the back door, without
being seen by the world at large.
But even in those circles which do not formally affiliate with
Zionism, or who at times even oppose it, there has of late years been a
very strong revival of Jewish feeling and a movement towards a stronger
expression of that feeling. Germany is honeycombed with societies for
the study of Jewish literature; the Hebrew language has been revived,
notably in Russia, not only as a form of literary expression, but also
as a vehicle of social intercourse; France has its Society of Jewish
Studies; America and England have their Jewish Historical Societies,
and their Jewish Chautauqua movements; Jewish national societies have
sprung up among the students of German and Austrian universities—all
influences—tending in this one direction.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
As we look ahead into the century which is now opening and cast our eye
over the forces which the Jews will bring into its life, we can easily
see that these forces tend in various directions.
We have first the Orthodox wing of the Jewish Church, which stands
upon the broad basis of what the past has evolved. It holds firmly
to the inspiration of the biblical word and the divine character
of its interpretation as handed down in the oral law; it tries to
regulate its life by Talmudic ordinances as evolved in the latest
law books, and is unwilling to make any but æsthetic concessions to
changed circumstances, believing that we must adhere strictly to all
the time-honored ceremonies of the synagogue. At its side stand the
Conservatives, who are willing to make some concession to present
demands, but believe that these concessions should be most sparingly
and grudgingly made, and who theologically, at least in theory,
occupy the same position as do the Orthodox. It is safe to say that
the greater number of Jews in the Western European states belong to
this wing of the synagogue. Between the Conservatives and the Ethical
Culturists stands the Reform party, more numerous in the United States
than anywhere else, whose position it is hard to define and in whose
midst there are various shades of opinion and of practice. All the
Reformers have openly or tacitly broken with Talmudic Judaism—the
more conservative among them seem to believe that a new Judaism can be
built up upon the Bible, only without its traditional interpretation;
while the advanced body do not even look upon the Bible as binding,
but merely as a starting-point for a further development. They do not
consider the Bible as inspired in the old accepted sense of the term;
they welcome biblical criticism as an aid to the understanding of the
early history of their people; they do not believe in the special
election of Israel, and have a well-defined abhorrence of anything
like a creed. They are practically Theists with a Jewish racial
coloring. Nor do they believe in the coming of a personal Messiah;
rather, in the advent of a Messianic time in which righteousness and
good-will shall prevail and all the earth acknowledge the one God.
To bring about this time is, according to them, the Mission of the
Jew—a phrase very current in these latter days, the fulfilling of
which has been made the pretext for dejudaizing Judaism, so as to
make it acceptable to non-Jews. Mr. Oswald John Simon, of London, has
even gone further. He believes that if the Reform party is earnest in
its pretensions, it ought—as it did once before in its history—to
become an active missionary power. A few years ago he attempted to
found a Jewish Theistic Church, which should in no way be colored by
Jewish ceremonial. The movement was, of course, a failure. The original
attempt, some nineteen hundred years ago, led to the founding of the
Christian Church, and Jews themselves have suffered too much from
missionaries of other faiths to take to this work with pleasure.
But, in addition to these, there is also a large body of Jews whose
connection with the synagogue is purely nominal, and who know of it
only when they need the services of its sanction or the respectability
of its connections. The hold which the Jewish Church has upon them is
small indeed, and many of them hope, in the twentieth century, to doff
their Jewish gaberdine. The open or concealed pressure of anti-Semitism
(particularly on the continent of Europe) which makes it impossible for
the Jew as such to attain to social distinction or political position
will drive most of these into the arms of the dominant Church of the
country in which they live. In a remarkable article published in the
_Deutsche Jahrbücher_ of October, 1900, a writer who uses the _nom
de plume_ of Benedictus Levita openly urges those of his fellow-Jews
who have become estranged from the synagogue to have their children
baptized, in order that they may not suffer as their parents have,
but may become really believing Christians, since their affiliation
with the Christian Church has become necessary in the modern Christian
state. Another German Jew at about the same time advises his brethren
to declare themselves “Confessionslos,” so as to become lost, not in
Christianity, but in “Deutschtum.” A similar request was made to the
Jews of Roumania, in 1900, by the historian Xenopol of Bucharest. There
is little fear that this advice of wholesale apostasy will find many
adherents, notwithstanding the fact that an unusually large number
of conversions have taken place in Germany and Austria, due wholly
to pressure from without rather than to conviction from within. The
defection even of comparatively large numbers can, however, hardly
affect the Jewish cause as a whole; for these numbers living on the
periphery, or even beyond it, have been of little service to the Jewish
cause; and all through the ages Jews have made just such contributions
as these to the general society in which they lived.
There can be no doubt that Zionism is a strong protest against these
weaklings, and that the coming century will witness the Jews divided
into two camps not necessarily hostile to each other, the Zionists and
the Non-Zionists—those who plead for a conservation of the old energy
and the old ideals, and those who look forward to the disintegration of
Judaism and its gradual passing away into other forces. That Judaism
can only conserve its force if that force is attached to a racial
and national basis is seen clearly in the fact that just those Jews
in Germany who have been most loudly clamorous against the Zionists
propose to have now what they call a German “Judentag,” which can
certainly mean nothing unless it become Zionist in its tendency.
Confident in this hope, we of the House of Israel look calmly into
the future. The message of the prophet of old is full of meaning for
us: “Thus saith the Lord God: behold I, even I, will both search my
sheep and seek them out, as a shepherd seeketh out his flock in the
day that he is among his flock which is scattered, and I will deliver
them out of all places where they have been scattered in the cloudy
and dark day.” We can echo the sentiments expressed by a Christian
Zionist, George Eliot, many years ago: “Revive the organic centre;
let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its
religion be an outward reality. Looking towards a land and a polity,
our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity
of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East
and the West—which will plant the wisdom and skill of our race so
that it may be, as of old, a medium of transmission and understanding.
Let that come to pass, and the living warmth will spread to the
weak extremities of Israel, and superstition will vanish, not in the
lawlessness of the renegade, but in the illumination of great facts
which widen feeling and make all knowledge alive as the young offspring
of beloved memories.”
RICHARD J. H. GOTTHEIL.
FREE-THOUGHT
The history of religion during the past century may be described as the
sequel of that dissolution of the mediæval faith which commenced at the
Reformation. The vast process of disintegration proceeds by degrees, is
varied by reactionary effort, and gives birth to new theories in its
course. In our day the completion of the process and a new departure
seem to be at hand. A sharp line cannot be drawn at the beginning of
the last century, the leaders of religious thought in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries having been to a great extent the leaders, and
their works the text-books, of the nineteenth.
At the Reformation Protestantism threw off the yoke of Pope and priest,
priestly control over conscience through the confessional, priestly
absolution for sin, and belief in the magical power of the priest as
consecrator of the Host, besides the worship of the Virgin and the
saints, purgatory, relics, pilgrimages, and other incidents of the
mediæval system. Ostensibly, Protestantism was founded on freedom of
conscience and the right of private judgment. In reality, it retained
Church authority over conscience in the shape of dogmatic creeds and
ordination tests. It besides enforced belief in the plenary inspiration
of the Bible, by which the exercise of private judgment was narrowly
confined. Not for some time did it even renounce persecution. In grimly
Calvinistic Scotland a boy was hanged for impugning the doctrine of the
Trinity at the end of the seventeenth century. The Anglican Church,
suspended by the will of the Tudor sovereigns between Catholicism and
Protestantism, oscillated from side to side, producing by one of its
oscillations the great civil war. It burned heretics in the reign of
James I. All the Protestant Churches except the Baptists, who at first
were objects of persecution, fell under the dominion of the state,
which repaid them for their submission and support by endowments,
temporal privileges, and persecution of dissent.
Though Protestantism produced a multitude of sects, especially in
England at the time of the Commonwealth, hardly any of them were
free-thinking or sceptical; those of any importance, at all events,
were in some sense dogmatic and were anchored to the inspiration of the
Bible. Nor is it easy to convict Hobbes, bugbear of the orthodox as he
was, of scepticism or even of heterodoxy. The expression of heterodox
opinions, indeed, would have been a violation of his own principle,
which makes religion absolutely an affair of the state, to be regulated
by a despotic government, and confines liberty to the recesses of
thought. It is true that in making religion a political institution,
variable at a despot’s will, he covertly denied that it was divine.
Under the Restoration religious thought and controversy slept. The
nation was weary of those subjects. The liberty for which men then
struggled was political, though with political liberty was bound up
religious toleration, which achieved a partial triumph under William
III.
The Church of Rome, to meet the storm, reorganized herself at the
Council of Trent on lines practically traced for her by the Jesuit. A
comparison of Suarez with Thomas Aquinas shows the change which took
place in spirit as plainly as a comparison of the Jesuit’s meretricious
fane with the Gothic churches shows the change in religious taste.
Papal autocracy was strengthened at the expense of the episcopate,
and furnished at once with a guard and a propagandist machinery
of extraordinary power in the Order of Loyola. That the plenary
inspiration of the Bible in the Vulgate version, and including the
Apocrypha, should be reaffirmed was a secondary matter, inasmuch as the
Church of Rome holds that it is not she who derives her credentials
from Scripture, but Scripture which depends for the attestation of
its authority upon her. She now allied herself more closely than
before with the Catholic kings, with Philip II., and afterwards with
Louis XIV., who paid her for her support of political absolutism
by sanguinary persecution of heretics. She hereby parted with her
Hildebrandic supremacy over the powers of the world, though she did
not, like the Anglican Church, recognize the divine right of kings.
The liberal and peace-making movements which had been set on foot, or
were afterwards set on foot, within her pale, such as the Oratory of
Divine Love, which held justification by faith and wished to compromise
with the Protestants, were effectually put down. Jansenism, when it
appeared, with its half-Calvinistic theory of Grace, shared the same
fate. Gallicanism afterwards, having nationality to back it, was more
successful. But it brought no freedom of conscience; it was merely a
repartition of the despotic power over conscience between the King and
the Pope.
In Spain, and for the most part in Italy, Rome, by the aid of
the Jesuit and the Inquisition, completely succeeded in killing
free-thought. In France, where there was no Inquisition, her triumph
was not so complete. She succeeded only in driving scepticism into
disguise and subterfuge. The Commonwealth of Holland did France and the
world in general the immense service of affording a printing house for
free-thought which was on the confines of France, but beyond the reach
of the French government. Descartes, without directly assailing the
faith of the Church, planted in her face the standard of thorough-going
reason and entitled himself to a place in the Index. Growing sensuality
and love of pleasure brought with them laxity of belief and impatience
of priestly control. The authority of the clergy was impaired by
their scandalous wealth and vice, which at the same time enhanced the
odium of their persecuting tyranny. At last came Voltaire, Diderot,
the _Encyclopædia_, and Rousseau. With literary cleverness unmatched
and an incomparable genius for subtle attack, combined with a winning
philanthropy, Voltaire converted and drew into the work of demolition,
to them suicidal, the thrones of Louis XV., or rather of the Pompadour,
of Catherine, and Frederick. The influence extended even to Spain,
where Aranda, and to Portugal, where Pombal reigned. The Pope was
constrained to dissolve the Order of Jesus. As Voltaire demolished in
the name of Reason, Rousseau demolished in the name of Nature, taking
an artificial society by storm. Helvétius went to the length of extreme
materialism; but Voltaire, the master-spirit of the movement, remained
a theist, and Rousseau was even for compulsory theism as the foundation
of the state. The Revolution also, when it came, though violently and
profanely anti-Christian, was in the main theist, and in the midst
of the Terror held its Feast of the Supreme Being, with Robespierre
for high priest. Atheism, in the persons of Chaumette and Anacharsis
Clootz, went to the guillotine.
One hardly knows what to say about the _Last Will and Testament_
of Jean Meslier, the priest who after thirty years’ service as a
country curé bequeathed to his parishioners a profession of atheism.
The work appears to have passed through the hands of Voltaire. It
urges the arguments against natural theology in a very forcible as
well as thorough-going way. But it seems, when it appeared, to have
made little impression and can be mentioned historically only as an
indication of the masked ferment of the time.
England had a series of deists, Toland, Tindal, Collins, Chubb,
and the rest, not men of much mark, though seekers of truth after
their measure and in their day. The ecclesiastical polity of England
was comparatively mild, and there was nothing to provoke indignant
resistance to clerical tyranny like that which was provoked by the
cases of Calas and LaBarre. Shaftesbury, a deist of a higher stamp,
was, with his “moral taste,” a philosopher for men of taste, and could
little stir the common world. In defence of orthodoxy came forth
Bishop Butler, with a work which will be memorable forever as a model
of earnest and solemn inquiry into the deepest questions, though
its fundamental assumption is unwarrantable, since we should expect
the difficulties of natural theology not to be reproduced but to be
dispelled by revelation. Butler’s tone in discussion was an effective
rebuke to those who had treated Christianity with levity as an obsolete
interference with the pleasures of the world. His profound analysis of
the moral nature of man in like manner rebuked the shallow and cynical
theories which resolved everything into self-love; though here again
his assumption of the authority of conscience as a divinely implanted
monitor has by modern investigation been disallowed. Butler, however,
with all his piety and his orthodox conclusions, must essentially be
reckoned among rationalists. He frankly admits that the use of our
reason is the only means we have of arriving at truth, never appealing
from it to Church authority. He who recognizes reason as supreme must
be deemed rationalist, let his own reason lead him or mislead him as it
may. This is the vital line of cleavage which runs through the whole
religious history and divides the religious world at the present day.
Butler had a popular shield-bearer in Paley, an extremely acute and
effective though not profound writer. Paley’s supposed proof of the
existence of an intelligent Creator from the design visible in creation
told greatly at the time and long continued to tell; though we now
see that the universe, unlike the watch, presents terrible proofs of
undesign as well as apparent proofs of design; not to mention that in
the case of the universe, though adaptation is visible, the aim is not
revealed. Paley’s _Horae Paulinae_, however, is about the only piece of
historical apologetics which has in any degree survived the destructive
influence of modern criticism.
Warburton hardly calls for mention. In his _Divine Legation_ he is
right enough in saying that Moses did not teach the immortality of the
soul; but the notion that the Mosaic dispensation must have had divine
support because it could afford to dispense with that doctrine would
now only provoke a smile.
Among literary apologists we can scarcely reckon Johnson. Yet he was a
living defence, intellectual as well as moral, of his religion. That
he speculated, we cannot doubt, and we know that he was not satisfied
with the proofs of the immortality of the soul; but he suppressed
doubt in himself and frowned it down in others. He was well justified
in treating with contempt the posthumous works of Bolingbroke, which
have not the slightest force or value beyond their literary form.
Bolingbroke’s scepticism, however, had a certain effect if it inspired
Pope’s _Universal Prayer_.
In Hume, on the other hand, we have the mightiest of all sceptics in
the literal sense of the term, inasmuch as he was purely a doubter
and seems hardly to have felt the desire of arriving at any positive
result. He who has given rise to so much controversy was himself
uncontroversial. His writings, considered as the vehicle of his
opinions, are the perfection of literary art. Over common minds the
teacher who merely suspends judgment, seeming not to be in quest of
positive truth, can never have much influence; but Hume had great
influence over cultivated men of the world. His argument against the
credibility of miracles, though it became as standard on one side
as Paley’s apologue of the watch upon the other, will hardly bear
examination. Assuming the existence of God and His care for man as His
work, which Hume does not openly deny, there is no presumption against
His revelation of Himself in the only conceivable way, which is by
an interruption of the general course of things; there is rather a
presumption that He would so reveal Himself. Nor can it be maintained
that no degree of evidence, say that of a multitude of scientific
men, after providing all possible safeguards against deception, would
satisfy us of the fact.
Gibbon’s great work is instinct with the tendency of men of the world
in the generation of Voltaire, Horace Walpole, and Hume. Its spirit
is identical with that of Hume’s philosophy and history. It is of
first-rate importance in the religious controversy as having opened
the trenches historically against revealed religion in undertaking to
account for the success of Christianity by natural causes. But its
cynical treatment of that which, on any hypothesis, was the prevailing
and formative force is unphilosophical and detracts largely from the
value of the work. He who could imagine that man had been happiest in
the Roman Empire under the Antonines was an apt partisan of Lord North.
Gibbon no doubt imagined himself a rich patrician of his golden era.
Would he have liked to be a Roman slave? Conyers Middleton in his _Free
Inquiry_ into the ecclesiastical miracles glanced at the credibility of
the Gospel miracles and had thus partly paved the way for Gibbon.
Among the disintegrating forces may be counted Unitarianism, which was
growing among thinkers, and probably before very long became the mask
for profounder scepticism in Protestant Europe as it did afterwards in
New England. We find it in England on the eve of the French Revolution,
combined with science in Priestley and with mathematics and philosophy
in Price.
Among the apologetic and defensive forces may be numbered the
practical vindication of Christianity by a certain revival of piety
in the Anglican Church which produced Wilberforce, Cowper, and the
Evangelicals, and still more by the religious crusade of John Wesley.
Wesley’s achievements, however, were among the poor and illiterate, and
were consequently demonstrations of the power of Christianity rather
than of its truth. His Church had the advantage of being born, not like
other Protestant Churches in doctrinal controversy, but in evangelical
reaction against the impiety and vice of the age. It was, however,
not undogmatic; besides what might be called the dogma of sudden
conversion, it implicitly accepted not only the literal inspiration
of Scripture, but the bulk of the Anglican Articles, to which was
afterwards added, as an ordination test, general agreement with the
more important of Wesley’s sermons.
The French Revolution brought on a strong reaction against the
free-thought which had been hideously travestied in the blasphemous
follies, and sullied by the crimes, of the Jacobins. In England the
Tory mob, with true instinct, sacked the library and laboratory of
Priestley. Coleridge, who, like other young men of intellect, had
hailed the revolutionary dawn, shared the reaction, and combining
in a curious way German metaphysic with English orthodoxy and
Establishmentarianism, produced a religious system which perhaps
entitles him to high place among English theologians in the proper
sense of that term, as denoting a philosophic inquirer into the nature
of the Deity and the relations between the Deity and man; though, as
his guiding light was philosophy, not authority or tradition, he may
in that respect be numbered among the promoters of free-thought and
of the results to which it was ultimately to lead. Such free-thinking
as there was naturally took a turn answering in violence to the
repression. Tom Paine assailed orthodoxy, not with freedom only, but
with enmity the most virulent. Though far from an attractive, he is
by no means an unimportant figure. His criticisms of the credibility
and morality of Scripture, unlearned and coarse as they were, went,
not over the heads of the people like the high-flying and metaphysical
speculations, but straight to their understandings and their hearts.
It was difficult for apologetic fencers to parry such home thrusts.
The same sort of effect has been produced by the irreverent frankness
of Ingersoll in our own day. Shelley rushed from the religion of Eldon
into what he took for Satanism; though his Satan is really the power of
good, while the God of Eldon, as viewed by him, is the Devil.
Wrecked, body and soul, by the Thirty Years’ war, and afterwards
stifled under a group of petty despotisms, Germany was for a time lost
to intellectual progress. Her churches and their clergy, the Lutheran
clergy at least, were in a very low condition. When her intellect began
to work again, it was in a recluse and highly speculative way, the
natural consequence of its exclusion from politics and other fields of
action, together with the complete severance of the academical element
from the people. Hence, from Leibnitz and Lessing onward, there was a
train of metaphysical philosophies, each of them professing to find
in our consciousness a key to the mystery of Being and an account of
God, of His counsels, and of the relation between Him and man. In
derision of such speculations it was said that to the French belonged
the land, to the English the sea, to the Germans the air. Essentially
incapable of verification, these theories went on shifting in
nebulous succession and, with the exception of that of Kant, may now
be said to have vanished, leaving scarce a rack behind. Even of the
great Hegel little remains. Leibnitz, with his “best of all possible
worlds,” hardly survived _Candide_. Still, we must speak with respect
and gratitude of these efforts of minds, powerful in their way and
devoted to truth, to solve for us the great mystery. Speculation so
free could not fail to promote general freedom of thought, and the
treatment by these thinkers of the popular and established religion was
as philosophic as possible, though, with the exception of Feuerbach,
they were theists. By Lessing much was done for the recognition of all
religions and the promotion of universal toleration.
Presently, however, came direct criticism of the Bible, the way to
which, long before, had been lighted by Spinoza. It assumed a strange
form in the work of Paulus, who applied to the Gospel miracles a
solvent something like that which Euhemerus had applied to the Pagan
Pantheon, reducing them to natural occurrences turned into miracles by
a devout imagination. The miraculous fish with the coin in its mouth
was a fish which would sell for the coin. The miraculous feeding of the
five thousand was brought within the compass of belief by supposing
that they were not fasting, but had only gone without a regular meal.
Christ’s walking on the water was his holding out a hand from the shore
to Peter who had leaped into the water to ascertain whether it was
really Christ that was walking on the shore.
Far more serious, and a startling blow to orthodoxy, was the _Life
of Jesus_, by Strauss, who undertook to explain the Gospels on the
mythical theory, showing that the reputed incidents of the life of
Jesus and his miracles were mythical fulfilments of Old Testament
prophecies and aspirations. From this, his first theory, Strauss
afterwards partly receded, and in his second _Life of Jesus_,
after a critical examination of the authorities, he comes to the
conclusion that “few great men have existed of whose history we have
so unsatisfactory a knowledge as that we have of Jesus.” The figure
of Socrates, he thinks, though four hundred years older, is beyond
all comparison more distinct. The momentous step, however, had been
taken. Jesus had become the subject of a biography founded on critical
examination of the materials, and Strauss is right in saying, as he
does in his second _Life_, that when the biography was seriously taken
up the doom of the theological conception was sealed. Lives of Christ,
including even the most popular of them, however they may pretend and
struggle to be orthodox, are really, as Strauss says, destructive of
the theological conception, while they do not help to confirm our
loyalty to historical truth. Ferdinand Christian Baur and his Tübingen
school applied historical criticism to the early Christian Church,
showing the conflict in it of the Pauline with the Petrine tendency,
and bringing it altogether, as well as its source, within the pale of
human history. Historical criticism of the Gospels was furthered by
the progress of historical criticism in general, shown by such a work
as Niebuhr’s _History of Rome_. Wolf’s treatment of the Homeric poems
had already marked the birth of a critical spirit, which was aided
by historical and archæological discoveries of all kinds, as well as
by the growing influence of science on the methods of religious and
anthropological speculation.
There was an evangelical reaction against rationalism in Germany with
a train of controversialists and commentators reputed as orthodox. Yet
even in these, more or less of a rationalist undertone is perceived.
There is a tendency more or less apparent to minimize the supernatural,
to throw the miracles into the background, and dwell rather on the
spiritual significance of Christ’s character and words. This is very
conspicuous in Neander, the head of the line. An orthodox English
divine such as Mr. Rose might well, after a survey of German theology,
make a rather mournful report.
In Holland, ever the land of free speculation, criticism advanced
without fear, and at last by the pen of Kuenen arraigns the
authenticity, antiquity, and authority of the historical books of
the Old Testament to an extent totally subversive of their character
as records of a primeval history, much more as organs of a divine
revelation.
German philosophy had mingled with English theology through Coleridge.
German criticism of the Bible did not lag much behind. Milman’s
_History of the Jews_, dealing with the subject in the spirit of an
ordinary history, treating patriarchs as Arab sheiks and minimizing
miracles, gave a serious shock to orthodox sentiment in England. Even
what was deemed orthodox in Germany appeared rationalistic to the
Anglican divines. To the evangelicals especially, whose leader was
Simeon, and who occupied many of the fashionable pulpits, anything like
critical treatment of the sacred history seemed impiety. Yet they,
with their inward persuasion of conversion and spiritual union with
the Saviour, as well as the Quaker with his inner light, or the Roman
Catholic with his implicit faith in the Church, were really beyond the
critic’s reach.
A long line of British leaders of thought and controversialists
succeeds. Rationalist and heterodox in different degrees were Thomas
Arnold, Frederick Maurice, Stanley, Jowett, the writers of _Essays
and Reviews_, and Robertson, of Brighton. Decidedly sceptical were
Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, and James Anthony Froude. Reaction on the
High Church side found leaders in Pusey, Newman, and Hurrell Froude.
The evangelical pulpit combated at once rationalism and High Church.
The state Church was awakened from its long torpor, and under
the inspiration of its High Church party strove to reanimate its
Convocation.
Frederick Maurice impressed more by his character than by his writings,
which were fatally obscure. He was rationalist enough to be deprived
of his professorship in an Anglican college. At the same time he could
persuade himself that subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles was no
bondage but a security for free thought. To his yoke-fellow, Kingsley,
is to be traced “muscular Christianity,” a rather suspicious adaptation
of the Sermon on the Mount to our times. But the pair exercised more
influence as social missionaries, striving, in conjunction with Thomas
Hughes, to give the labor movement a religious turn, than as religious
philosophers or critics.
Thomas Arnold, the head-master of Rugby, was a man of noble character,
powerful mind, and intense earnestness of purpose. He was a firm
believer in Christianity as a revealed religion. But he held a
most liberal view of the Church. He would have admitted to it all
the sects of dissenters and have identified it as far as possible
with the nation. His theory of the identity of the Church with the
nation probably came to him from his passionate study of the ancient
commonwealths. He forgot that the philosophers of Greece, though they
might sacrifice a cock to Æsculapius, were really outside the state
religion, and that the state religion made the chief of them drink
hemlock. Prince of educators as he was, he sometimes laid too heavy
a strain on his pupils, and prematurely developed their speculative
tendencies. In the case of Clough especially, mental health and vigor
seem to have been impaired by premature development.
With Thomas Arnold may be coupled his friend Whately, who, though, as
Primate of the state Church of Ireland, he held the most equivocal of
prelacies, was, by reason of his strong understanding, his fearless
character, and his shrewd wit, essentially an iconoclast and a rebuker
of ecclesiastical pretensions, as well as a vigorous promoter of
education. His keen sayings flew abroad, but his personal influence was
greater than his influence as a divine. His _Historic Doubts_ was an
apologetic _jeu d’esprit_ which told greatly in its day.
Bishop Connop Thirlwall was a man of first-rate power. At Cambridge
he had set out as a rationalist, translating German theology of a
heterodox cast and Niebuhr’s _History of Rome_. But his intellect was
curbed by a bishopric, and though he delivered liberal charges and
personally exerted a liberal influence, he was lost to the direct
service of reason.
Arthur Stanley was Arnold’s best boy, his most devoted adherent, and
his model biographer. He embraced Arnold’s theory of the Church as
coextensive with the nation and carried his theory of the supremacy
of the state so far as to feel a certain sympathy with “Bluidie
Mackenzie” as the defender of a state Church against the independence
of the Covenanters of Scotland. His name was for a time a terror to
all the orthodox, High Church or Low. Yet there was little that was
terrible about him. The sweetness of his character was remarkable. His
liberality of religious sentiment was boundless. But he had little of
the logical or critical faculty, and showed scarcely the desire, still
less the ability, to make his way to definite truth. His passion was
history, and the historical picturesque was his forte. In a haze of
this to the last he floated, coming to no determinate conclusion. His
best works, apart from biography, are not his commentaries or sermons,
but his lectures on the history of the Russian Church and his _Sinai
and Palestine_; although we cannot help smiling when, in his _Sinai and
Palestine_, we see him hunting with passionate interest and implicit
faith for the imaginary scenes of mythical events.
Stanley’s yoke-fellow, Jowett, was a man of a different cast of mind
and of higher calibre, as all the world now knows. But in him also,
though from different causes, there was the same want of inclination
to grasp or capacity for grasping definite truth. These two men were
eminently typical of an age of religious dissolution, when people felt
the ground of faith giving way under their feet and were striving,
by some sort of compromise, to save themselves from falling into the
abyss. That Jowett had drifted very far away, not only from orthodoxy,
but from his belief in Christianity as a miraculous revelation,
and even from belief in our knowledge of the historical character
of Christ, the posthumous publication of his letters has plainly
shown. How he could have reconciled it to his conscience to remain a
clergyman, to hold the clerical headship of an Anglican college, to
perform the service and administer the sacrament, it is not easy to
see. We can only say that the position was found tenable by one of the
most upright and disinterested of mankind. Jowett’s defence probably
was and is the defence of others, and the indication of spreading
doubt. Clergymen are educated men and can hardly be proof against that
which is carrying conviction to other minds.
Robertson, of Brighton, as an eloquent preacher and spiritual leader,
rather on the rationalist side, is not to be forgotten. In his sermons
there is an evident tendency to liberalize Christianity and to present
it ethically as a religion of purity and love rather than as a
miraculous revelation which did not escape the keen scent of alarmed
orthodoxy and exposed the preacher to some social persecution.
By this time a strong current in an opposite direction had begun to
flow. The religious movement was closely connected with the political
movement, especially where there was a state Church. Alarmed by the
progress of liberalism, which had carried the Parliamentary Reform
bill and threatened to withdraw from the Church of England the
support of the state, some of the clergy began to look about for a
new foundation of their authority, and thought that they found it in
apostolical succession and the sacerdotal theory of the sacraments.
The leaders of the movement were Pusey, professor of Hebrew at Oxford;
Henry Newman, a Fellow of Oriel College; and, in its opening, Hurrell
Froude, in whose _Life of Becket_ its spirit and aims are plainly
revealed. It took practically the shape of an attempt to return to
the priestly Middle Ages. Oxford, with its mediæval colleges, the
Fellows of which were then clerical and celibate, formed the natural
scene of such an attempt. Pusey, who, by his academical rank, gave his
name to the movement, was a man of monastic character and mind, with
a piety intense but austere and gloomy enough almost to cling to such
a doctrine as the irremissibility of post-baptismal sin. Henry Newman
was a man of genius, a writer with a most charming and persuasive
style, great personal fascination, and extraordinary subtlety of mind.
What he lacked was the love of truth; system, not truth, was his
aspiration; and as a reasoner he was extremely sophistical, however
honest he might be as a man. In this respect he presented a singular
contrast to his brother, Francis Newman, in whom the love of truth was
the ruling passion, intense and uncompromising, while he was totally
devoid of the gifts of imagination with which Henry was endowed.
Henry Newman’s attempt to revive mediæval doctrines presently landed
him, with his immediate following, in the mediæval Church. Pusey was
illogical enough to refuse the leap. He was also believed to be rather
strongly attached to the leadership and spiritual directorship which,
as a magnate of the Church of England, he enjoyed. He went so near to
the brink as, in his _Irenicon_, to avow that nothing separated him
from Rome but the unmeasured autocracy of the Pope and the excessive
worship of the Virgin, both of them mere questions of degree. Manning
in time followed: an aspiring hierarch who would probably have stayed
in the Church of England if they had made him a bishop. Passing into
the Church of Rome, he became a Cardinal, an active intriguer of the
Vatican, and an extreme Ultramontane, outvying Newman, who, when the
convert’s first ecstasy was over, might be said to be converted rather
than changed.
The mediævalizing movement owed much to the fascinations of mediæval
art. The Gothic churches and cathedrals and the Gothic ruins of abbeys
have been very powerful conservators and propagators of the faith of
their builders. It is curious that this talisman should have been
renounced by the Church of Rome in favor of the heathen style, of which
St. Peter’s is the paragon, magnificent but, in a religious sense,
unimpressive.
By the progress of Tractarianism British Protestantism was alarmed and
incensed. The Oxford Convocation was the scene of a pitched battle
brought on by a bold deliverance of Ward, a disciple of Newman, more
logical and daring than his master, who exultingly proclaimed that
English clergymen were embracing “the whole cycle of Roman doctrine.”
Ward, after a struggle which was a sort of Armageddon of High and Low
Church, was condemned and deprived of his degree. Newman’s conversion
speedily followed. The rationalists, such as Stanley and Jowett, voted
on liberal grounds against the condemnation of Ward.
A storm from the other quarter was raised by _Essays and Reviews_, a
collection of seven essays written by clergymen of the rationalistic
school, having for its object the liberalizing of inquiry in the
Church. The manifesto at the time created an immense sensation,
though in the present advanced state of doctrinal disintegration it
would almost pass unnoticed. One of the essays, the most innocent,
it is true, which nevertheless committed the author to the general
object of the combination, was written by the present Archbishop of
Canterbury, and caused the High Church clergy to protest against his
appointment as a bishop. The glove thus thrown down was taken up by
the High Churchmen. The writers were arraigned for heresy before the
Privy Council, and, as Carlyle said, you had a bench of old British
judges, “like Roman augurs, debating with iron gravity questions of
prevenient grace, supervenient moonshine, and the color of the bishop’s
nightmare if that happened to turn up.” Before the same tribunal was
arraigned Colenso, a missionary bishop of South Africa and an eminent
mathematician, whose arithmetical instincts had led him to examine the
numerical statements of the Pentateuch, with highly heretical results.
Both the essayists and Bishop Colenso escaped conviction. The Committee
of Privy Council, if it was judicial, was also political, and it was
resolved, if possible, to avert a rupture in the state Church. Veteran
lawyers had little difficulty in finding grounds for acquittal when
they did not choose to convict. The language of the impugned writings
was seldom so precise as to defy the power of interpretation. “Either
the passage means what I say, or it has no meaning,” thundered the
counsel for the prosecution. “Is it not possible, Mr. Blank, that the
passage may have no meaning?” was the reply of the judge. The Rev. Mr.
Voysey, however, succeeded in obtaining the honor of a conviction.
Tendered a week to retract, he thanked the court for the opportunity
they had given him of rejecting the offer of repurchasing his once
cherished position in the Established Church by proclaiming himself a
hypocrite.
Hampden, Regius Professor of Theology at Oxford, formed another object
of High Church attack. He had been condemned by the university
on account of doctrines alleged to be anti-Trinitarian, and his
appointment by a Whig ministry to a bishopric caused a renewal of the
onslaught, which, however, only served by its failure to emphasize
the fact that the Church of England was in complete subjection to
the state. In this, as in the general commotion, prominently figured
Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, son of the great evangelical and
philanthropist, a man gifted, dexterous, and versatile, who would have
made a first-rate advocate or politician, balancing himself with one
foot on his hereditary Evangelicism, the other on High Churchmanship,
to which, in his heart, as a hierarch, he inclined. A character so
ambiguous could make little impression, however great his abilities
might be.
James Anthony Froude had been a follower and fellow-worker of Newman.
But on Newman’s secession he not only hung back, but violently recoiled
and produced a highly sceptical work, _The Nemesis of Faith_, which
entailed his resignation of a clerical fellowship in an Oxford college.
Then he exemplified the strange variations of the age by coming out as
an historian in the colors of Carlyle.
Carlyle himself is not to be left out of sight in an account of the
progress of religious thought; for his Scotch Calvinism, transmuted
into hero worship, has taken a strong hold, if not on the distinct
convictions, on the sentiment and temper of the nation. If he has
administered wholesome rebuke to the self-complacency of democracy with
its ballot-box, he has also set up a worship of force and kindled a
spirit of violence totally subversive of the Sermon on the Mount.
Matthew Arnold, with his silver shafts, was rather a connoisseur in
all lines than a serious philosopher or theologian; but he also,
with his conversion of God into the “not ourselves which makes for
righteousness,” did something in his light but insinuating and
charming way to forward disintegration.
But in 1874–77 appeared _Supernatural Religion_, a searching and
uncompromising inquiry into the historical evidences of supernatural
Christianity. The book, though attacked on secondary points with
perhaps superior learning by Bishop Lightfoot, Bishop Westcott,
and others, cannot be said to have met with any general answer.
Supplemented in some respects by Dr. Martineau’s _Seat of Authority in
Religion_ and other works on the same side, it sets forth the sceptic’s
case against the supernatural.
Miracles, says criticism, belong to an age of ignorance. With the dawn
of knowledge they diminish. In its meridian light they disappear. The
Jews were eminently addicted to belief in miracles. There was Satanic
miracle as well as divine; nor can any distinction be drawn as a matter
of evidence between the two. As little can any distinction be drawn in
point of evidence between the Gospel miracles and the ecclesiastical
miracles, which nevertheless Protestants reject. The miracles of one
sort, the demoniac, are bound up with the Jewish belief in possession
by personal devils, from which all efforts to disentangle them so as
to resolve them into cures of lunacy by moral influence are vain. The
four Gospels and the Acts, which comprise the historic evidences, are
all anonymous, all of uncertain authorship. The first three Gospels
are evident incrustations upon an older document which is lost and
about which nothing is known. In not one of the five cases can the
existence of the book be traced to the time of the events or a time
so near the events as to preclude the growth of fable in a highly
superstitious and totally uncritical age. The presentation of Christ’s
character and teaching in the fourth Gospel, which is Alexandrian, is
far from identical with the presentation in the first three Gospels,
which are Jewish. There are irreconcilable discrepancies between the
Gospels as to matters of fact, notably in regard to the genealogy of
Christ, the length of his mission, the Last Supper, the day of the
Crucifixion, the details of the Resurrection and the Ascension. Such
miracles as the miraculous darkness, the earthquake, the rending of
the veil of the Temple, the opening of the tombs and the apparition
of the dead in the streets of Jerusalem, being totally unconfirmed by
history or by any recorded effect, stagger belief. Such testimony as
St. Paul bears to the Resurrection is second hand, is that of a convert
in the ecstasy of conversion, and is manifestly uncritical. His own
enthusiasm is intelligible on merely human grounds. We may be sure that
had God become incarnate to save man, absolutely conclusive proof of
that fact would have been vouchsafed. But the proof is not sufficient
to establish anything not otherwise perfectly credible, far less to
establish the miraculous Birth, the Resurrection, and the Incarnation.
Such in broad outline is the case of Rationalism against Supernatural
Religion presented by the work just mentioned and its allies. The
effects are visible even in High Church writings. In the writings of
liberals, of course, they are still more visible. Jowett had come to
the conclusion that our sources of knowledge about Christ had been
reduced to a single document, no longer in existence, which formed the
basis of the first three Gospels.
The desire to minimize the supernatural and throw it into the
background, bringing the personal character of Christ and his ethical
teaching into the foreground, is now manifest in English, as it has
long been in German, divines. It is conspicuous in the very popular
and colorably orthodox works of Dr. Farrar. In his _Life of Lives_
the supernatural has little place. There is an evident tendency
throughout to disentangle from it the character and moral teaching.
Responsibility for belief in the Godhead of Christ seems to rest on
the Nicene Council. In the _Life of Christ_ we see reduced to a natural
occurrence the miracle of Gadara, where the devils cast out of the
men enter into the herd of swine. It is needless to say that with the
miraculous element of these occurrences their value as evidence for the
supernatural disappears.
Scotland generally remained fast bound by her Westminster Confession.
There had been a period of liberalism marked by the appearance of
“Jupiter” Carlyle; Robertson, the historian; Dugald Stewart, and
other philosophers and men of mind. But the Church of Scotland being
democratic, its faith was in the keeping of the people, who were
impervious to criticism and naturally opposed to innovation. At last,
however, the thaw came, hastened perhaps by the collision between
the state Church of Scotland and the Free Church. The Westminster
Confession, it seems, has now been tacitly laid aside, and Scotch
theology has had its Robertson Smith, whose critical views on the Old
Testament earned him removal from his professorial chair.
Another book which in its day startled the world and awakened all
the echoes of orthodox alarm was Buckle’s _History of Civilization_,
in which the characters of nations and the progress of humanity were
traced to physical influences, excluding the moral and by implication
the theistic element. Its thesis was supported by an overwhelming
display of learning. Though not expressly, it was in its tenor hostile
to religious belief. Of Buckle’s work less is now heard, but it had an
influence in its day, perhaps more in America than in its native land.
Americans, it seems, were captured both by the boldness of the theory
and by the imposing display of erudition.
In the line of learned and dispassionate research France has produced
Renan, whose _Life of Jesus_ especially made a vast impression on
Europe, and still probably exercises an influence by virtue not only
of the boldness of the speculation and the intense interest of the
subject, but of the extreme beauty of the style. The work, however, is
one in which imagination acts strongly on history. It lacks critical
basis; not that the author fails fully to set out his authorities, but
that in his narrative he fails to discriminate among them. One incident
is treated as real, another as mythical, to suit the requirements of
poetical conception, without reason assigned for the distinction. There
seems no reason, for example, why the miracle of the raising of Lazarus
should be treated as historical, though in the sense of imposture or
illusion, while other miracles are treated as totally unhistoric. Nor
is the portrait free from a French and slightly sensuous cast. From the
whole body of Renan’s histories of Israel, of Christ, and of the early
Church the supernatural is entirely excluded.
The Roman Catholic Church has not suffered from criticism—historical,
literary, or scientific—in the same way as the Protestant Churches,
that is, internally, because it depends not so much on intellectual
conviction as on ecclesiastical organization, and rests comparatively
little on the authority of the Bible. Its priesthood has not been
affected like the clergy of the Church of England or the ministries of
the Protestant Churches. But it has everywhere been losing the educated
classes, or retained a part of them, not so much from conviction—still
less from speculative conviction—as because its alliance is congenial
to political and social reaction. Its inability to come to terms
with science has been shown by the recent case of St. George Mivart,
and scientific eminence among Roman Catholics is rare. In Italy, the
centre of the system, while the poorer classes still flock to the
liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius at Naples or the exudation
of the bones of St. Andrew at Amalfi, still climb the Holy Staircase on
their knees or make pilgrimages to the House of Loretto, the general
tone of intelligence is described as sceptical, though aristocratic
families, more especially those of Papal creation, adhere to the Papacy
on political and social rather than on religious grounds. Near to the
shrine of Ignatius Loyola stands the statue of Giordano Bruno, on the
spot of his martyrdom by fire, “dedicated to him by the age which he
foresaw.” Attempts have been made to liberalize the Church of Rome
and enable it to float with the current of the day, but they have
failed. Pio Nono for a time put himself at the head of the popular and
liberal movement in Italy. But he soon found, as Carlyle said, that
it was an alarming undertaking. Lamennais’s attempt at liberalization
ended, after a long intellectual agony, in his own secession. The
combined attempt of Lacordaire to liberalize ecclesiastically, and of
Montalembert to liberalize politically, had a scarcely less melancholy
result; both of them died under the shadow of Papal displeasure or
of that of the Jesuit party, by which the Papacy was controlled.
The defiantly reactionary spirit of Ultramontanism de Maistre has
prevailed. The Jesuit has ruled at the Vatican. Under his guidance the
Papacy has proclaimed the infallibility of the Pope and the Immaculate
Conception of the Virgin, thus breaking completely and finally with
reason and with all who, like the “Old Catholics” in Germany, remained
in some degree within that pale. It has gained in its own despite in
respectability and influence by deprivation of its temporal power,
against which the Prisoner of the Vatican still hopelessly protests.
In France the national religion, abolished and persecuted by the
Jacobins, was restored for a political purpose by Napoleon. The new
Charlemagne was requited with the degradation of the Pope, who came to
Paris to crown him on the morrow of the murder of the Duc d’Enghien
and broke the best traditions of the Holy See by failing to veto the
divorce from Josephine. Identified with political reaction under the
restored Bourbons, the Church nearly suffered wreck in the revolution
by which they were overthrown. She remained the object of intense
and persecuting hatred to the revolutionary and republican party.
Plaintively, when the Orleans monarchy fell, she chanted _Domine salvum
fac populum_. Joyously, when the Empire succeeded, she chanted _Domine
salvum fac Imperatorem_. But the Empire in its turn fell. The Church
has continued to ally herself with political reaction and aristocratic
hostility to the Republic, though she has latterly been receiving hints
from the Vatican that the Republic is strong, that the monarchical
and imperial pretenders both are weak. The consequence is a violence
of hostility on the part of the Radicals and Socialists which assails
not only monastic fraternities, but educational institutions and
even charitable institutions in clerical hands, and has produced an
infidel literature carrying blasphemy to the height almost of frenzy
and culminating in a comic _Life of Christ_. The official world of
France is almost formally infidel, and a religious expression would be
very injurious to a politician. On the other hand, the Church braves
and exasperates public reason with apparitions of the Virgin and the
miracles of Lourdes. Over most of the women, the priest still holds
sway. Of the men, not many are seen in churches. The general attitude
of the educated towards religion seems to be not so much that of
hostility as that of total indifference, a state of estrangement more
hopeless than hostility itself.
There is in France a Protestant Church, of which Guizot was an
eminent member, and which in his time was renewing its life. But
there was a schism in it between an evangelical party and a party
which was entirely rationalist, Guizot belonging to the first, his
son-in-law to the second; and rationalism seems to have prevailed.
With the Protestant party of France was allied an evangelical party
in Switzerland, of which Vinet was the most eloquent divine. But in
Vinet, as in liberal divines generally, we find an inclination to rest
on the spiritual rather than on the supernatural. In the city of Calvin
generally opinions appear to reign more opposed to the religion of
Calvin than those for which he burned Servetus.
But of the disintegrating forces criticism—the Higher Criticism as
it is the fashion to call it—has by no means been the only one.
Another, and perhaps in recent times the more powerful, has been
science, from which Voltaire and the earlier sceptics received little
or no assistance in their attacks; for they were unable to meet even
the supposed testimony of fossils to the Flood. It is curious that
the bearing of the Newtonian astronomy on the Biblical cosmography
should not have been before perceived; most curious that it should
have escaped Newton himself. His system plainly contravened the idea
which made the earth the centre of the universe, with heaven above
and hell below it, and by which the cosmography alike of the Old and
the New Testament is pervaded. Yet the Star of Bethlehem remained
little disturbed as an article of faith. The first destructive blow
from the region of science was perhaps dealt by geology, which showed
that the earth had been gradually formed, not suddenly created, that
its antiquity immeasurably transcended the orthodox chronology, and
that death had come into the world long before man. Geologists, scared
by the echoes of their own teaching, were fain to shelter themselves
under allegorical interpretations of Genesis totally foreign to the
intentions of the writer; making out the “days” of Creation to be æons,
a version which, even if accepted, would not have accounted for the
entrance of death into the world before the creation of man. Those
who attended the lectures of Buckland and other geologists of that
generation well recollect the shifts to which science had recourse in
its efforts to avoid collision with the cosmogony supposed to have
been dictated by the Creator to the reputed author of the Pentateuch.
That the narrative of Genesis could hold its ground so long against
science was due at once to its dignity, which earned for it the praise
of Longinus, and to its approximation to scientific truth in describing
the universe as the work of a single mind. These characteristics
have even in the day of geology and Darwin raised up for it such an
apologist as Mr. Gladstone, whose defence, however, amounts to this,
that the Creator, in giving an account of his own work to Moses, came
remarkably near the truth.
The grand catastrophe, however, was the discovery of Darwin. This
assailed the belief that man was a distinct creation, apart from all
other animals, with an immortal soul specially breathed into him by
the author of his being. It showed that he had been developed by a
natural process out of lower forms of life. It showed that instead of
a fall of man there had been a gradual rise, thus cutting away the
ground of the Redemption and the Incarnation, the fundamental doctrines
of the orthodox creed. For the hypothesis of creation generally was
substituted that of evolution by some unknown but natural force.
Not only to revealed or supernatural but to natural religion a heavy
blow was dealt by the disclosure of wasted æons and abortive species
which seem to preclude the idea of an intelligent and omnipotent
designer.
The chief interpreters of science in its bearing on religion were,
in England, Tyndall and Huxley. Tyndall always declared himself a
materialist, though no one could less deserve the name if it implied
anything like grossness or disregard of the higher sentiments. He
startled the world by his declaration that matter contained the
potentiality of all life, an assertion which, though it has been found
difficult to prove experimentally, there can be less difficulty in
accepting, since we see life in rudimentary forms and in different
stages of development. Huxley wielded a trenchant pen and was an
uncompromising servant of truth. A bitter controversy between him and
Owen arose out of Owen’s tendency to compromise. He came at one time
to the extreme conclusion that man was an automaton, which would have
settled all religious and moral questions out of hand; but in this
he seemed afterwards to feel that he had gone too far. An automaton
automatically reflecting on its automatic character is a being which
seems to defy conception. The connection of action with motive, of
motive with character and circumstance, is what nobody doubts; but the
precise nature of the connection, as it is not subject, like a physical
connection, to our inspection, defies scrutiny, and our consciousness,
which is our only informant, tells us that our agency in some qualified
sense is free.
Materialists or physicists such as Tyndall and Huxley, or their
counterparts on the Continent, would console us for the loss of
religion by substituting the majesty of law. But the idea of law
implies a law-giver or an intelligent and authoritative imponent of
some kind. There is no majesty in a mere sequence, even the most
invariable and on the largest scale, the existence of which alone
physical science can prove.
The all-embracing philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer excludes not only
the supernatural but theism in its ordinary form. Yet theism in a
subtle form may be thought to lurk in it. “By continually seeking,”
he says, “to know, and being continually thrown back with a deepened
conviction of the impossibility of knowing, we may keep alive the
consciousness that it is alike our highest wisdom and our highest duty
to regard that through which all things exist as the Unknowable.” In
this and subsequent passages he evidently looks upon the Unknowable as
an object of reverence, otherwise it would hardly be our highest duty
to regard it as that through which all things exist, or to maintain any
particular attitude towards it. But Unknowableness in itself excites
no reverence, even though it be supposed infinite and eternal. Nothing
excites our reverence but a person, or at least a Moral Being. There
lingers in Mr. Spencer’s mind the belief that the present limit of our
knowledge is the veil of the Deity.
Had the Darwinian discoveries been known to Schopenhauer they would
have conspired with the earlier discoveries of science and with his
pitiless survey of the human lot to confirm him in the belief that this
was the worst of all possible worlds. Amid the general distraction
even pessimism has found adherents, and a European version of Buddhism
promising final relief from the miseries of conscious existence has
been accepted as an anodyne by troubled minds.
Positivism, the work of Comte, totally discards belief in God and
treats theism in all its forms as merely a mode of contemplating
phenomena and a step in the course of human progress. Yet the
Positivist feels the need of a religion, and for the worship of God he
substitutes the worship of Humanity. Humanity is an abstraction and
an imperfect abstraction, the course of the human race having not yet
been run. It cannot hear prayer or respond in any way to adoration. The
adherents of Comte’s religion, therefore, are few, though those of his
philosophy are more numerous, and the religious Comtists appear to be
rather enthusiasts of Humanity than worshippers of the abstraction.
A conspicuous though equivocal place among the defenders of revealed
religion in England was held by Mansel, professor of moral and
metaphysical philosophy at Oxford and afterwards dean of St. Paul’s.
Attempting in his Bampton lectures to make philosophy fall on its own
sword, he fell on his own sword in the attempt. He maintained that God,
being absolute, could not be apprehended by the finite intelligence
of man, and that the finite morality of man was not the same as the
absolute morality of God. Hence the passages of the Bible which seemed
to conflict with human morality really transcended it and were moral
miracles. In this Mansel was reviving the theory of Archbishop King
and Bishop Browne, who had maintained that our knowledge of God was
not actual, but merely analogous. The inference was promptly drawn by
Mansel’s opponents that what could not be apprehended could not be
matter of belief, and that he had therefore cut away the possibility
of belief in God. They even contended that he was too anti-theistic,
since he did away with all possibility of reverence for the Unknown. To
deny the identity of human with divine morality and assert that what
was immoral with man was moral with God was to sever the moral relation
between God and man, and, in effect, to destroy morality altogether.
We could conceive of only one morality, and acts ascribed to God which
violated that morality must be to us immoral. “If,” said John Stuart
Mill in the fervor of ethical protest, “an Almighty Being tells me that
I shall call that righteous which is wicked or go to hell, to hell I
will go.”
To meet the inroads of science on Biblical cosmogony and cosmography
recourse was had to allegorical interpretation. But allegorical
interpretation cannot be forced upon a writer when it manifestly is not
in his mind. The writer or writers of Genesis undeniably intended his
or their statements to be taken literally. They meant that the earth
was really created in six days, as the Fourth Commandment assumes; that
the formation of Eve out of a rib of Adam, the temptation of Eve by the
serpent, and all the actions of the anthropomorphic God, who walks in
the garden at evening and makes garments for Adam and Eve, were actual
events. To foist upon them allegorical interpretation is to falsify
their testimony. Besides, instead of having the facts of the creation
revealed to us we are left to interpret allegory at a venture.
Recourse has been had to the theory of partial inspiration, admitting
historical and even moral errors in Scripture, but setting them down
to the human element in the composition, which has to be recognized
without prejudice to that element which remains divine. Such a
collaboration of infallibility with fallibility, both historical and
moral, is a desperate hypothesis, especially when the object was to
reveal vital truths to man. Nor could man distinguish the human element
from the divine without being himself inspired and thus above the
need of revelation. A condescension of the divine to the primitive
shortcomings and aberrations of humanity is a solution surely opposed
to any conceivable purpose of revelation.
Another line of defence has been the hypothesis, which may be called
quasi-inspiration, reducing the inspiration of the Scriptures to a
supreme degree of the same sort of inspiration which we recognize in
a great poet or a great author of any kind. This is mere playing with
the term “inspiration,” and little better than an equivoque. It may be,
and we hope it is, true that the Author of our being manifests Himself
in whatever is morally grand and elevating. But this belief is very
different from a belief in the special inspiration of the Bible.
Evolution, again, which at first was repelled as atheistic, is now
adopted by some as the key to revelation and the solution of all
difficulties connected with it. This would make God in His revelation
of Himself to man, without apparent motive, subject Himself to a
physical or quasi-physical law, the knowledge of which has been
withheld from man till the present time. An imperfect revelation of
the divine character, one for example which should exhibit the justice
of God without His mercy, would be a deception of man instead of a
revelation. Besides, evolution repels finality, and we could have no
assurance that the manifestation of the divine nature in Christ and the
Gospel would be final.
It is needless to say how manifestly all these theories have their
origin in controversial necessity, how totally alien they are to the
view taken hitherto by the Christian Churches of the Scriptures, and
how unlikely it is that God, in revealing Himself to man for the
purpose of human salvation, should have chosen a method such as would
entail inevitable misconstruction for many centuries and postpone the
true interpretation of His character and dealings to an age of human
criticism and science.
The ethics of Christianity have hitherto comparatively escaped
systematic criticism and are still generally and officially professed.
An appeal to the principles of the Sermon on the Mount continues to
command formal respect. But Christ’s view of this world as evil and
his renunciation of it for the Kingdom of God have been practically
laid aside by all but specially religious men. Christ’s moral code
was, in its direct bearing, only personal or social, politics and
commerce not having come within the view of the teacher of Galilee.
In regard to public and international concerns, the abjuration of his
principles is most striking. In that sphere Christian meekness, mercy,
and self-sacrifice are being openly superseded by maxims drawn from
the Darwinian Struggle for Existence and by avowals of the right of
the strong. Even professed ministers of Christ have been pandering
to Imperialism and the lust of war. In truth, by a strange turn of
events, Christian ethics, in questions between nation and nation and in
questions concerning humanity at large, have been passing out of the
hands of the orthodox teachers of supernatural Christianity into those
of men who recognize only the human character and ethical teachings of
life.
Professor Seeley in his earlier days had made a great impression
with his _Ecce Homo_, an attempt to bring the character of Christ
nearer to the heart of humanity. The work was decidedly pietist; yet
a rationalizing tendency was scented in it by the Evangelicals, whose
leader, Lord Shaftesbury, denounced it. Its author promised a theology.
But when, after years of reflection and subjection to the influences
of a moving time, the theology came, under the title of _Natural
Religion_, it was a total disappointment. Religion was reduced by it
to enthusiasm, not exclusively Christian or even theistic, but of any
kind, such as enthusiastic love of country or of art.
Minds of the finer cast have preserved the religious spirit, while
they have thrown off the shackles of creed and even regarded the whole
religious question as matter of doubt and suspense.
“There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.”
This is the pervading spirit of Tennyson’s poems, and of such a work
as Amiel’s diary, but it must manifestly be confined to a circle of
minds such as those of Tennyson and Amiel. Agnosticism is the condition
into which a large number of educated minds have been more or less
consciously passing or drifting. But while in some of them a religious
spirit still prevails and the hope is cherished of a new religious
dawn, others seem to have finally settled in the conviction that
theological inquiry is hopeless and that our knowledge must forever be
bounded by that which our senses and science tell us about the laws or
forces of our own world.
Reluctance to give up belief in the unseen world and perhaps still
more unwillingness to think that the loved ones who are lost by death
are lost forever have given birth to Spiritualism. It will hardly be
thought necessary to comment on an illusion which has been so often
and so decisively exposed. Its very name is belied when the spirits
have to materialize before they can make their existence known or hold
converse with those who evoke them. The alleged communications from the
spirit world through such a medium as Planchette have been trivial,
almost fatuous. It is now forgotten that the movement began with
table-turning, as though spirits had a special affinity for tables.
Among the anti-theistic, or at least the anti-ecclesiastical,
influences and the solvents of our religious system may be reckoned the
foundation of systems of morality independent of the divine sanction.
Paley’s definition of virtue is “the doing good to mankind in obedience
to the will of God and for the sake of everlasting happiness.” This is
the theistic view. Opposed to it is the Utilitarian system, generally
connected with Bentham’s name, which finds the sole and sufficient
motive and reward of virtue in the promotion of our well-being here.
So long as a system aims at perfection and beauty of character which
transcend temporal happiness there is in the philosophy a theistic
element, patent or latent. But of perfection and beauty of character
the Utilitarian philosophy in its thorough-going form takes no account.
The weakening of religious belief as a social influence on the
conservative side is very marked and excites the fears of statesmen,
some of whom, even if they are Protestants, are inclined to look with
complacency on the Papacy as a bulwark against social revolution. The
drudge rested in dull contentment with his lot while he could believe
that hereafter the parts of Dives and Lazarus would be reversed and
full amends would be made to him for his privations in this life. This
hope having vanished, he is resolved, if he can, to have a share of
the good things of the present world. That this sentiment helps to set
seething the caldron of socialistic and communistic agitation, all who
are familiar with labor literature must be aware. It would probably be
found that anarchism and atheism generally went together.
As the natural consequence of the loosened hold of religion over
the nations, there has been a general tendency in Europe towards
disestablishment. In Italy, the seat of the Papacy, disestablishment
is complete. In Spain, while Catholicism is still recognized as the
exclusive religion of the nation, the immense revenues of the clergy
have been secularized, monasteries have been dissolved, and religion
has been almost reduced to a department of the state. In France the
process has gone still further than in Spain, and religion may almost
be said to be not only a department, but a despised department, of the
state. In Ireland the state Church has been disestablished. A bill
has been brought in for the disestablishment of the Church in Wales,
and in England disestablishment seems to be approaching, its advent
being hastened by the collision of ritualism with the anti-Roman and
anti-sacerdotal spirit of the nation. Popular education has everywhere
been largely secularized, and that process is still going on.
Sunday-schools or other secondary influences can scarcely countervail
the general banishment of religion from the training of the child.
Religion passed from old to New England in the form of a refugee
Protestantism of the most intensely Biblical and the most austere kind.
It had, notably in Connecticut, a code of moral and social law which,
if fully carried into effect, must have fearfully darkened life. It
produced in Jonathan Edwards the philosopher of Calvinism, from the
meshes of whose predestinarian logic it has been found difficult to
escape, though all such reasonings are practically rebutted by our
indefeasible consciousness of freedom of choice and of responsibility
as attendant thereon. New England Puritanism was intolerant, even
persecuting; but the religious founder and prophet of Rhode Island
proclaimed the principles of perfect toleration and of the entire
separation of the Church from the state. The ice of New England
Puritanism was gradually thawed by commerce, non-Puritan immigration
from the old country, and social influences, as much as by the force of
intellectual emancipation; though in founding universities and schools
it had in fact prepared for its own ultimate subversion. Unitarianism
was a half-way house through which Massachusetts passed into
thorough-going liberalism such as we find in Emerson, Thoreau, and the
circle of Brook Farm; and afterwards into the iconoclasm of Ingersoll.
The only Protestant Church of much importance to which the New World
has given birth is the Universalist, a natural offspring of democratic
humanity revolting against the belief in eternal fire. Enthusiasm
unilluminated may still hold its camp-meetings and sing “Rock of Ages”
in the grove under the stars.
The main support of orthodox Protestantism in the United States now
is an off-shoot from the old country. It is Methodism, which, by the
perfection of its organization, combining strong ministerial authority
with a democratic participation of all members in the active service of
the Church, has so far not only held its own but enlarged its borders
and increased its power; its power, perhaps, rather than its spiritual
influence, for the time comes when the fire of enthusiasm grows cold
and class meetings lose their fervor. The membership is mostly drawn
from a class little exposed to the disturbing influences of criticism
or science; nor has the education of the ministers hitherto been
generally such as to bring them into contact with the arguments of the
sceptic.
The character and intensity of the movement in Europe have been greatly
influenced by the existence of state Churches and the degrees of
obnoxious privilege which the state Churches severally have possessed.
Where the yoke of the establishment was heavy, as in France under
the Bourbons, free-thought has been lashed into fury; where, as in
England, the ecclesiastical polity has been comparatively mild, it
has taken the gentler form of evangelical dissent. In the United
States at the beginning of the last century there were faint relics of
state Churches, Churches, that is, recognized and protected, though
not endowed, by the state. But there has been little to irritate
scepticism or provoke it to violence of any kind, and the transition
has accordingly been tranquil. Speculation, however, has now arrived
at a point at which its results in the minds of the more inquiring
clergy come into collision with the dogmatic creeds of their Churches
and their ordination tests. Especially does awakened conscience rebel
against the ironclad Calvinism of the Westminster Confession. Hence
attempts, hitherto baffled, to revise the creeds; hence heresy trials,
scandalous and ineffective.
Who can undertake to say how far religion now influences the inner
life of the American people? Outwardly life in the United States, in
the Eastern States at least, is still religious. Churches are well
maintained, congregations are full, offertories are liberal. It is
still respectable to be a church-goer. Anglicanism, partly from its
connection with the English hierarchy, is fashionable among the wealthy
in cities. We note, however, that in all pulpits there is a tendency
to glide from the spiritual into the social, if not into the material;
to edge away from the pessimistic view of the present world with which
the Gospels are instinct; to attend less exclusively to our future, and
more to our present state. Social reunions, picnics, and side-shows are
growing in importance as parts of the Church system. Jonathan Edwards,
if he could now come among his people, would hardly find himself at
home.
The Catholic Church had come out to America in evil companionship with
Spanish conquest. Together with the Spanish colonies she decayed, and
her history during the past century in South America appears to have
been that of a miserable decline which could add nothing to religious
thought or history. Mexican liberalism, under the presidency of Juarez,
cast off allegiance to her, and a priest dared not show himself in
the dress of his order on the street. In French Canada the Catholic
Church has reigned over a simple peasantry, her own from the beginning,
thoroughly submissive to the priesthood, willing to give freely of its
little store for the building of churches which tower over the hamlet,
and sufficiently firm in its faith to throng to the fane of St. Anne
Beaupré for miracles of healing. She has kept the _habitant_ ignorant
and unprogressive, but made him, after her rule, moral, insisting on
early marriage, on remarriage, controlling his habits and amusements
with an almost Puritan strictness. Probably French Canada has been as
good and as happy as anything the Catholic Church had to show. The
priesthood was of the Gallican school. It lived on good terms with
the state, though in French Canada the state was a conqueror. From
fear of New England Puritanism it had kept its people loyal to Great
Britain during the Revolutionary war. From fear of French atheism it
kept its people loyal to Great Britain during the war with France.
It sang _Te Deum_ for Trafalgar. So things were till the other day.
But then came the Jesuit. He got back, from the subserviency of the
Canadian politicians, the lands which he had lost after the conquest
and the suppression of his Order. He supplanted the Gallicans, captured
the hierarchy and prevailed over the great Sulpician Monastery in
a struggle for the pastorate of Montreal. Other influences have of
late been working for change in a direction neither Gallican nor
Jesuit. Railroads have broken into the rural seclusion which favored
the ascendency of the priest. Popular education has made some way.
Newspapers have increased in number and are more read. The peasant
has been growing restive under the burden of tithe and _fabrique_.
Many of the _habitants_ go into the Northern States of the Union for
work, and return to their own country bringing with them republican
ideas. Americans who have been shunning continental union from dread of
French-Canadian popery may lay aside their fears.
It was a critical moment for the Catholic Church when she undertook to
extend her domain to the American Republic. She had there to encounter
a genius radically opposed to her own. The remnant of Catholic Maryland
could do little to help her on her landing. But she came in force with
the flood of Irish, and afterwards of South German, emigration. How
far she has been successful in holding these her lieges would be a
question difficult to decide, as it would involve a rather impalpable
distinction between formal membership and zealous attachment. That she
loses the zealous attachment of a great part of them in two or three
generations, and that of the South Germans more quickly than that
of the Irish, is what you are commonly told. Conversions of native
Americans flying from the distractions of controversy to the repose
of unity under authority there have been, but the number probably has
not been large. In America, as in England, Ritualism has served Roman
Catholicism as a tender. The critical question was how the religion of
the Middle Ages could succeed in making itself at home under the roof
of a democratic republic, the animating spirit of which was freedom,
intellectual and spiritual as well as political, while the wit of
its people was proverbially keen and their nationality was jealous as
well as strong. The Papacy may call itself universal; in reality, it
is Italian. During its sojourn in the French dominions the Popes were
French; otherwise they have been Italians, native or domiciled, with
the single exception of the Flemish Adrian VI., thrust into the chair
of St. Peter by his pupil, Charles V., and by the Italians treated with
contumely as an alien intruder. The great majority of the Cardinals
always has been and still is Italian. National susceptibilities,
therefore, were pretty sure to be aroused. In meeting the difficulties
of her new situation Rome has shown a certain measure of pliability.
She has not thrust the intolerance and obscurantism of the encyclical
in the face of the disciples of Jefferson. She has paid all due homage
to republican institutions, alien though they are to her own spirit,
as her uniform action in European politics hitherto has proved. She
has made little show of relics. She has abstained from miracles. The
adoration of Mary and the saints, though of course fully maintained,
appears to be less prominent. Compared with the mediæval cathedral and
its multiplicity of side chapels, altars, and images, the cathedral
at New York strikes one as the temple of a somewhat rationalized
version. Against Puritan intolerance of Popery, if any remnant of it
remained, the Catholic vote has been a sufficient safeguard. To part
of the American people, especially to wealthy New York, the purple of
the cardinalate and the pomp of Catholic worship have of late been by
no means uncongenial. Yet between the spirit of American nationality,
even in the most devout Catholic, and that of the Jesuit or the native
liegeman of Rome, there cannot fail to be an opposition more or less
acute, though it may be hidden as far as possible under a decent veil.
This was seen in the case of Father Hecker, who had begun his career as
a Socialist at Brook Farm, and, as a convert to Catholicism, founded
a missionary order, the keynote of which was that “man’s life in the
natural and secular order of things is marching towards freedom and
personal independence.” This he described as a radical change, and a
radical change it undoubtedly was from the sentiments and the system
of Loyola. Condemnation by Rome could not fail to follow. Education
has evidently been the scene of a subterranean conflict between the
Jesuit and the more liberal, or, what is much the same thing, the
more American section. The American and liberal head of a college
has been deposed, under decorous pretences, it is true, but still
deposed. Envoys have come out from Rome to arbitrate and compose.
Some of the Catholic prelates, it appears, are very willing to show
their liberality by co-operating in charitable work with the clergy
of Protestant churches; others decline that association. One prelate,
at all events, is an active politician and a conspicuous worshipper
of the flag. Others strictly confine themselves to the ecclesiastical
sphere. The laity in general seem to take little account of these
variations, regarding them rather as personal peculiarities than as
divisions of the Church. In the American or any other branch of the
Roman Catholic Church freedom of inquiry and advance in thought are of
course impossible. Nothing is possible but immobility, or reaction such
as that of the Syllabus. Dr. Brownson, like Hecker, a convert, showed
after his conversion something of the spirit of free inquiry belonging
to his former state, though rather in the line of philosophy than in
that of theology, properly speaking. But if he ever departed from
orthodoxy he returned to it and made a perfectly edifying end.
In our survey of the religious world we are apt to leave out of sight
a fourth part or more of Christendom. When the Anglican Bishops some
years ago were challenged to say whether they were or were not in
communion with the Eastern Church, that is with the Church of Russia,
their answer was in effect that the Eastern Church was so remote that
they could not tell. The Russian Church has been and is, in truth,
remote from the life, the progress, the thought, and the controversies
of the other members of Christendom. It has passed through no crisis,
undergone no change analogous either to the Reformation or to the Roman
Catholic reaction. Such conflicts or controversies as it has had have
been ceremonial, not doctrinal or spiritual. Its great reformer, if
he can be so called, Nicon, was a thorough-going ceremonialist and
initiated no doctrinal innovation. The movement of its non-conformists,
the Starovers, is not a counterpart of that of Protestant
non-conformists, but a ritualistic reaction. It differs theologically
from the Roman Catholic and the Anglican churches on the article in
the Creed respecting the procession of the Holy Ghost. But its more
practical grounds of difference probably are its abhorrence of images
and of instrumental music and its practice of baptism by immersion.
It is more sacramental than the Roman Catholic Church, administering
the Eucharist as well as baptism to infants. While it abhors images,
it adores pictures, provided they are archaic and not works of art,
having an instinctive perception of the tendency of art to open the
door for humanity. But it is less sacerdotal, compulsory marriage of
the clergy, instead of celibacy, being its rule. Monastic it is, but
its monachism is of the Eastern and eremitic type, not like the active
monachism of the Franciscan, the Dominican, or the Jesuit. The Russian
Church is intensely national, a character stamped upon it by the long
struggle for independence against the Mohammedan Tartars. The head of
the nation is the head of the Church. The Czar is Pope, as the Emperor
practically was of that Byzantine Church of which the Russian Church
is the daughter. He presides over the ecclesiastical councils. The
abolition of the Patriarchate removed the last rival of his power.
Peter the Great, when asked to restore the office, exclaimed, “I am
your Patriarch,” flung down his hunting knife on the table, and said,
“There is your Patriarch.”
Attempts have been made both by Gallicans and Anglicans to negotiate a
union with the Eastern Church as a counterpoise to the Papacy. But they
have been baffled by the intense nationality and antiquated ritualism
rather than by the difference about an article in the Athanasian Creed.
The upshot has been the intellectual immobility of the Russian Church,
whose compartment in the theological history of the last century is a
blank.
Such is the position in which at the close of the last century
Christendom seems to have stood. Outside the pale of reason—of
reason; we do not say of truth—were the Roman Catholic and Eastern
Churches; the Roman Catholic Church resting on tradition, sacerdotal
authority, and belief in present miracles; the Eastern Church supported
by tradition, sacerdotal authority, nationality, and the power of
the Czar. Scepticism had not eaten into a Church, preserved, like
that of Russia, by its isolation and intellectual torpor; though
some wild sects had been generated, and Nihilism, threatening with
destruction the Church as well as the state, had appeared on the scene.
Into the Roman Catholic Church scepticism had eaten deeply, and had
detached from her, or was rapidly detaching, the intellect of educated
nations, while she seemed resolutely to bid defiance to reason by her
Syllabus, her declaration of Papal infallibility, her proclamation of
the Immaculate Conception of Mary. Outside the pale of traditional
authority and amenable to reason stood the Protestant Churches,
urgently pressed by a question as to the sufficiency of the evidences
of supernatural Christianity, above all, of its vital and fundamental
doctrines: the Fall of Man, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection.
The Anglican Church, a fabric of policy compounded of Catholicism
without a Pope and Biblical Protestantism, was in the throes of a
struggle between those two elements, largely antiquarian and of little
importance compared with the vital question as to the evidences of
revelation and the divinity of Christ.
In the Protestant churches generally æstheticism had prevailed. Even
the most austere of them had introduced Church art, flowers, and
tasteful music; a tendency which, with the increased craving for
rhetorical novelty in the pulpit, seemed to show that the simple Word
of God and the glad tidings of salvation were losing their power and
that human attractions were needed to bring congregations together.
The last proposal had been that dogma, including the belief in the
divinity of Christ, having become untenable should be abandoned, and
that there should be formed a Christian Church with a ritual and
sacraments, but without the Christian creed, though still looking up
to Christ as its founder and teacher; an organization which, having no
definite object and being held together only by individual fancy, would
not be likely to last long.
The task now imposed on the liegemen of reason seems to be that of
reviewing reverently, but freely and impartially, the evidences both
of supernatural Christianity and of theism, frankly rejecting what
is untenable, and if possible laying new and sounder foundations in
its place. To estimate the gravity of the crisis we have only to
consider to how great an extent our civilization has hitherto rested
on religion. It may be found that after all our being is an insoluble
mystery. If it is, we can only acquiesce and make the best of our
present habitation; but who can say what the advance of knowledge may
bring forth? Effort seems to be the law of our nature, and if continued
it may lead to heights beyond our present ken. In any event, unless
our inmost nature lies to us, to cling to the untenable is worse than
useless; there can be no salvation for us but in truth.
GOLDWIN SMITH.
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation 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; occurrences of
inconsistent hyphenation have not been changed.
Redundant chapter titles have been removed.
The name “Van ’t Hoff” always was misprinted as “Van’t Hoff” in the
original book. That misprint has been retained here.
Page 40 of the Chemistry chapter uses Dalton’s symbols for the four
atoms in five molecules: a circle with horizontal lines (hl), a circle
with vertical lines (vl), a circle with a dot in its center (cd), and a
hollow circle (hc). If your text viewer cannot display those symbols,
the five molecules, in sequence, are: hl-cd, cd-vl-cd, vl-hc, hc-vl-hc,
and cd-hc.
Other pages in the Chemistry chapter contain diagrams of molecular
structures. Those diagrams only display properly when a fixed-width
font is used.
Subscripts in the Chemistry chapter are shown full-height, e.g., H2O.
Text sometimes expresses fractions with a dash instead of a slash. That
notation has been retained here.
Page 46: The original book used “Zu” as the symbol for zinc.
Page 122: “entirely changed by” was printed as “charged”; changed here.
Page 139: “barometric” was printed as “barometic”; changed here.
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