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Title: From an Easy Chair
Author: Lankester, E. Ray (Edwin Ray), Sir
Language: English
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Transcriber’s Notes:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_), and text
enclosed by equal signs is in bold (=bold=).
Additional Transcriber’s Notes are at the end.
* * * * *
FROM AN EASY CHAIR
* * * * *
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
EXTINCT ANIMALS
By SIR E. RAY LANKESTER, F.R.S. With a Portrait of the Author, and 218
other Illustrations. Demy 8vo. Second Edition, Price =7s. 6d.= net.
_NATURE._--“We give the book a hearty welcome, feeling sure that its
perusal will draw many young recruits to the army of naturalists, and
many readers to its pages.”
THE KINGDOM OF MAN
By SIR E. RAY LANKESTER, F.R.S. With about 60 Illustrations. Demy 8vo.
Second Edition. Price =3s. 6d.= net.
_DAILY NEWS._--“Forms one of the most stimulating and suggestive
books of recent times. We feel that we cannot praise it too highly.”
_OUTLOOK._--“This fascinating and inexpensive book ... in which much
knowledge is imparted in a manner that attracts.”
* * * * *
FROM AN EASY CHAIR
BY SIR RAY LANKESTER, K.C.B., F.R.S.
“_The world is so full of a number of things,
I am sure we should all be as happy as kings._”
R. L. STEVENSON
[Illustration]
LONDON
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO., LTD.
1909
* * * * *
RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED
BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
_Published October, 1908._
_Reprinted January, 1909._
PREFACE
This little book is a reproduction, with some emendations, of articles
which appeared in the _Daily Telegraph_ in the six months between the
beginning of last October and the end of April. If it should meet with
success, further collections of the same kind will be published from
time to time.
E. R. L.
_August, 1908._
CONTENTS
PAGE
1. Science and the Study of Nature 1
2. The Desire to Know the World of Nature 3
3. Scares and Wonders 5
4. Work at the Pasteur Institute 9
5. The Sea Serpent 10
6. Giraffes and the Okapi 11
7. The Great Geologists of Last Century 14
8. Experiments with Precious Stones 19
9. Diamonds 23
10. Science and Fisheries 27
11. Discoveries as to Malaria 29
12. Malta Fever 34
13. A Cure for Sleeping Sickness 36
14. Tsetse-Flies and Disease 38
15. Monkeys and Fleas 41
16. The Jigger Flea 42
17. Public Estimate of the Value of Science 43
18. The Common House-fly and Others 45
19. Cerebral Inhibition 48
20. Colour-photography and Photographs of Mars 49
21. Origin of Names by Errors in Copying 50
22. False News as to Extinct Monsters 51
23. Mistletoe and Holly 52
24. The Cattle Show 55
25. The Experimental Method 59
26. Hypnotism and an Experiment on the Influence
of the Magnet 60
27. Luminous Owls and Other Luminous Animals
and Plants 65
28. Reminiscences of Lord Kelvin 68
29. The So-called Jargon of Science 70
30. Rats and the Plague 73
31. Ancient Temples and Astronomy 78
32. Alchemists of To-day and Yesterday 84
33. A Story of Sham Diamonds and Pearls 88
34. The Nature of Pearls 89
35. A King Who was a Zoologist 93
36. The Transmission to Offspring of Acquired
Qualities 97
37. Variation and Selection Among Living Things 103
38. The Movement, Growth, and Dwindling of Glaciers 108
39. Votes for Women 117
40. Tobacco and the History of Smoking 124
41. Cruelty, Pain, and Knowledge 131
* * * * *
FROM AN EASY CHAIR
1. _Science and the Study of Nature_
This volume consists of brief notes in plain language on a variety of
scientific matters. I speak of new discoveries, real or so-called by
mistake; of old well-established facts and explanations of strange
occurrences which are more familiar to men of science than to people
who have not had the time and opportunity to ascertain what is, and
what is not proved and known about Nature and her ways. I do not
address my reader from the professor’s chair, but from an easy chair.
Just as in the club or my friend’s smoking-room, I might talk of these
things, so do I propose to talk here. My hope is that what I have to
say will interest those who are not experts in science, and yet have
a desire for trustworthy information and opinion on the vast variety
of topics which come up day by day for consideration and discussion,
and can only be explained or rightly understood by the aid of that
systematised knowledge which is called science.
* * * * *
Science and the scientific point of view have a very wide, indeed, an
unlimited range. Though the making of discoveries of real importance
and the full understanding of the steps by which they are made
involves, as a rule, long study and special training, yet there is
a vast deal of healthy excitement and pleasure connected with the
progress of science, in which all can share by receiving, as it were,
messages from the front. By contributing true records and observations
of fact which serve, in however small a way, as ammunition and material
of war for the use of the fighting line, we can all help and take part
in the advance of science.
A great feature of what is called science is that it is true. The
actual result achieved by science is the record of “that which is”--it
can be examined, tested, and proved. But science does not merely
collect accurate records of fact. In order to discover new things,
new relations, and hidden causes she has to make use of guesses and
flights of imagination. The “hypotheses” or guesses are not wild ones,
but reasonable suppositions based on careful consideration of existing
knowledge. They are never mistaken by trained workers in science for
“facts,” nor put forward as such. On the contrary, they are tested and
so confirmed or rejected by experiment or trial. Hence the necessity
of accuracy in observation for the purposes of science; hence the
proverbial “scientific accuracy.” It is of no use to form a guess based
upon erroneous statements. It is mere waste of time to accept and build
theories upon loose wonder-mongers’ gossip. And, further, the evidence
which you obtain in order to confirm or dismiss your “guess” must be
equally beyond suspicion as to its accuracy. It must be an observation
of fact free from prejudice and illusion.
Your guess, if proved to be true, adds to the solid record of
science new facts and new proofs of relationships, which again lead
on the imagination of men of science to new guesses, and so to new
confirmation or rejection, and to the growth of the vast record of
accurate knowledge. To seek out in the endless whirling complexity
of things which surround us in earth, sky, and sea, the truth, the
knowledge of “that which is,” of the relation of these things to
one another as cause and effect and their action and influence on
ourselves--this is the aim of science. To substitute real understanding
and the power of control of the surrounding world for the misleading
and cruelly harmful conceptions existing in the minds of simple
unskilled mankind--this is the daily achievement of science.
2. _The Desire to Know the World of Nature_
The practical value of science in securing the happiness of human
communities is not, however, the reason which operates most strongly
in exciting men and women to give themselves to the cultivation and
improvement of this or that branch of it. A rich banker one day was
looking round the Natural History Museum with me. It was his first
visit. After a time he said, “It’s very fine! wonderful! But what’s it
all for? Where does the money come in? That’s what I can’t understand.
Why does the Government spend money on this if it don’t lead to
making money?” I tried to convince him that there exists in us all a
divine “curiosity,” a desire to know regardless of profit or loss, a
thirst which we may cultivate and satisfy, in the full assurance that
whilst its satisfaction is a delight in itself, we are all the while
fulfilling the destiny of man, helping in the conquest of Nature. My
friend had apparently lost that instinctive thirst which is the primary
impulse to the pursuit of science, that capacity for pleasure which
Robert Louis Stevenson truly notes in the words of the child of his
“Garland of Verse”:
“The world is so full of a number of things,
I am sure we should all be as happy as kings!”
The existence of that little child and of numberless “grown-ups” who
have become or have never ceased to be, in this matter, even as he, is
the reason why science has its helpers and workers of all ranks, and it
is of them that I chiefly think in writing these notes.
At a dinner of the Savage Club a year or so ago my friend Dr. Nansen,
the Norwegian Minister, quoted some lines from a Scandinavian poet,
which he translated somewhat as follows: “As you journey through
life do not go too fast, do not press on blindly; there are so many
beautiful things by the way. Turn your head, stay a few minutes. Leave
the dusty road. Take in and enjoy the wonders and delights which are at
your feet.” Motorists, please take note!
For those who can enter more thoroughly into the pursuit of science
there are even greater joys. To the very few there is the privilege not
merely of realising well-established truths, and of perhaps assisting
in securing their foundations or extending their application, but of
discovering vast unexplored regions, new possibilities, new revelations
of the unfathomed depths of Nature’s workings. Though few can hope to
be leaders in these enthralling adventures, yet we can be close to
those who are, and, holding their hands, sympathise with their soul’s
vision.
“Then felt I like some watcher from the skies,
Or the stout Cortes, when, with eagle eyes,
He stared at the Pacific....
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”
Such a one need have none of the conventional setting of romantic
enterprise. He may be standing before a much-stained table, covered
with bottles, in an atmosphere of acrid fumes, with a test-tube in his
hand, or he may be just raising his head with a far-off gaze, as he
sits, bent o’er a microscope, in London.
3. _Scares and Wonders_
There are certain subjects which come within my ken upon which
paragraphs are published in the papers nearly every other day of
a wildly romantic and misleading character. These subjects may be
classified as: (1) Living and extinct monsters. (2) Cures for cancer
and tubercle. (3) Unsuspected dangers of infection by disease-germs. It
would hardly be pleasant for me to quote these paragraphs in order to
deny their statements. They are often headed, “For the Little Ones,” or
“From a Foreign Correspondent.” The old-established and better title
for such announcements is “For the Marines.” I shall endeavour to
mention as they occur to me, among other things, new and duly-certified
facts relating to monsters, and to the investigation of disease. With
reference to reports which have been seriously put forward during the
past year, I may say that the alleged discovery of a mammoth in North
America 71ft. long and 40ft. tall is nonsense. In the announcement to
which I allude, the measurements have been altered from some original
and more correct statement and made to appear astonishing by error or
design.
No new facts of importance bearing upon the treatment of either cancer
or tubercle have been lately discovered which can be explained to
the general public. Work is proceeding nevertheless. No new source
of danger from disease-germs has been detected since this time last
year. It is true that the dust in railway carriages, and especially
in sleeping-cars, which are not properly cleaned every day after
occupation by travellers, is full of microbes, and, like the dust of
rooms which have been crowded by human beings, may be a source of
disease infection. The remedy for this is careful cleansing after
each journey, and a special construction of the cars like a tiled
bath-room, so as to avoid the accumulation of dirt. At present this is,
and long has been, neglected.
Another serious and more recent danger is that arising from the
crowding of passengers in underground railway tubes. Both in
Paris and London this has been recognised as a real and pressing
danger. Trouble has been given by the dust raised in the Paris
Tube, but the danger caused by dust has been avoided in London.
It is a definitely-ascertained fact that many bacteria, including
disease-producing kinds, are rapidly killed by exposure to strong
sunlight. Hence underground tubes and the chinks and recesses of
railway carriages are more liable to harbour disease-germs than
the open-air roadways and the carriages which ply on them. Great
cleanliness and the use of germicide washing fluids are the obvious
precautions to be taken in the absence of sunlight.
As to mammoths and elephants--the former is a misspelling of the word
“mammont,” the name given by the natives of Northern Siberia to the
extinct elephant, hairy, but otherwise closely similar to the Indian
elephant, which within the period of prehistoric man (50,000 to 150,000
years) was abundant over the whole of the northern part of the Northern
Hemisphere. Mammoths’ tusks (ivory) are still largely imported from
Siberia. The biggest African elephant may, perhaps, stand 13ft. at the
shoulder. No mammoth or other extinct elephant seems to have exceeded
this. The stuffed African elephant in Cromwell road measures 11ft. 2in.
at the shoulder. Mr. Carnegie’s great extinct reptile Diplodocus is
only 12ft. 9in. from the ground at the highest part of its back. The
biggest tusk of a recent elephant ever seen was bought by me for the
Natural History Museum seven years ago. It weighs 228lb., and measures
10ft. 2in. along the curve. It was recognised three years ago by Mr.
Jephson (one of Stanley’s companions) as one of a pair which he had
weighed in Central Africa. It was in the possession of Emin Pasha when
that unfortunate gentleman was “rescued” by Stanley and Jephson. After
the subsequent assassination of Emin, his ivory treasure found its way
to Zanzibar, and this tusk being part of it, was sold and brought to
London.
A real new monster of great size is the carnivorous reptile described
by Professor Osborne, of New York, as Tyrannosaurus. There is no
mistake or exaggeration about this report. The specimen is in the New
York Museum, and has been described in detail and drawn to scale by
Professor Osborne. The skeleton stands up like that of a huge bird or a
kangaroo on the two hind legs--as does that of the vegetarian reptile
Iguanodon. The Iguanodon and the Tyrannosaurus are of about the same
height, namely 17ft. But the new monster has enormous tiger-like teeth,
twelve on each side of the jaw, above and below, and the jaws are three
feet long, whilst the whole head is broad and short. Iguanodon, on the
other hand, has been long known from English and Belgian rocks, and
can be seen in Cromwell Road. It has a beak like a tortoise, and the
small teeth of a vegetable-feeder. Both animals had very short front
limbs or arms, but in Tyrannosaurus these are really ridiculously out
of proportion, according to more familiar standards, for the whole arm
is not bigger than one of the toes of the hind foot. This new giant
carnivorous reptile is found in rocks of the same age as our greensand
and chalk in Wyoming, U.S.A. It preyed upon huge vegetable-eating
reptiles, the remains of which are found in the same strata, and have
been reconstructed.
The mere size of these extinct reptiles is a very natural cause of
wonder and admiration. At the same time, it is well to remember that
the body of the largest African elephant is as big, or very nearly as
big, as the body of the biggest of these extinct reptiles. Some of
these giant extinct reptiles had very long tails and necks, which the
elephant cannot boast. No extinct animal is known which approaches in
bulk the great whales of various kinds at present inhabiting the sea.
The striking thing about many huge extinct animals is that they are
represented to-day by similarly constructed animals of much smaller
size. Thus we know giant extinct sloths, which contrast strangely with
the small living sloths of to-day, giant extinct rat-like animals
and giant extinct kangaroos far exceeding the bulk of living rats
and kangaroos. But it is distinctly not true that all recent animals
are degenerate and small as compared with extinct related kinds. The
modern horse is far larger than its extinct ancestors, which we can
trace back in a gradual diminishing series to a little beast no bigger
than a spaniel. So, too, the earliest elephants known are quite small
creatures.
The interesting point about extinct animals is really not so much
that they were often large of their kind, but that they are often of
kinds quite unknown at the present day among living animals. On the
other hand sometimes (but by no means always) they can be shown to be
connected as ancestors to living animals by a series of intermediate
forms. The remains of the connecting forms are found embedded in
successive rock-strata, intermediate in age between the present day and
the remote period when the earliest members of the series were alive
and flourishing--and we can follow out in many instances (for example,
in the pedigree of the horse, and again of the elephant) the gradual
but very extensive changes by which the descendants of a long extinct
kind of animal have been “transformed” into modern recent animals,
familiar to us.
4. _Work at the Pasteur Institute_
Professor Elias Metschnikoff was busy, when I saw him at the Institut
Pasteur in Paris last September, with an experimental investigation of
“appendicitis.” He finds that chimpanzees can exhibit this disease,
and he is led by experiments on those animals to believe that a
gas-producing micro-organism--the bacillus aërogenicus--already known
as occurring in the human intestine--is especially active in exciting
the disease. Parasitic worms or other foreign bodies must first wound
the delicate lining of the appendix before the virulent gas-forming
bacillus can penetrate and start inflammation and abscess. Metschnikoff
was also investigating a disease of tropical regions, known as “the
Yaws.” Most people would imagine that this name refers to a disease
like the gapes, but it is quite different, being an ulceration of the
skin caused by a spirillum.
Spirilla--corkscrew-like threads of excessive minuteness--are
parasitic organisms, like bacteria, bacilli, and micrococci. They are
of different kinds--some harmless, some deadly. One is common in the
mouth of the healthiest of us--another causes one of our most terrible
diseases. They can be distinguished by the microscope, though much
alike. What microscopists call “dark-ground illumination”--that is,
illumination by horizontal rays of light, obtained by a prism attached
below the glass slip on which the object is placed for examination
with the microscope, has been found at the Institut Pasteur to be
a very ready way of showing the spirilla in fresh blood or sputum.
The spirilla are alive, and are seen when highly magnified, shooting
rapidly across the field of view with a corkscrew action, like
brilliant silver threads. The detection of the microbe which causes
an infective disease, is often the first step to the control of
the disease, or to knowledge which enables man to avoid the disease
altogether. Some striking examples of this have occurred of late years.
5. _The Sea Serpent_
The sea-serpent rarely puts in an appearance now, though a Cornish
“manifestation” was reported last year. A recent account of a strange
marine monster, declared by some to be, of course, the sea-serpent,
seen but to disappear, was that given by Lord Crawford’s companions
two years ago. In that case, and in others in which a huge fin-like
structure, supported by fin-rays, has been seen projecting from the
mysterious animal, it is not improbable that what was seen was a large
seal of the “eared” kind, raising one of its long, webbed hind-feet
from the water, a trick which some of them are known to have. Other
reputed sea-serpents have been, in reality, a school of porpoises, or
a line-like flight of sea-birds, or a mass of seaweed, or a whale in
association with one or other of these--or, again, a real marine snake
5ft. long (such are well known and very poisonous), or a ribbon-fish
12ft. long. There is “no reason why there should not be” a huge and
seldom-seen kind of animal living in the sea--like a serpent in
appearance. No one can say, as the result of observation, that there is
not, since no one has thoroughly explored the dark, unfathomed depths
of ocean. Yet we gain very little when we have admitted our ignorance,
and agreed that there is no reason why something should not be. The
real question is, “Does the thing in question exist?” not “Could it
possibly exist?” Does the great sea-serpent exist? The answer to that
is, There is not much evidence to show that it does. Most persons
who have looked into the matter would be willing to bet 100,000 to 1
against its being captured, dead or alive, and brought before the
Royal Society within ten years’ time. Unless it be so captured and
“tabled” it matters very little whether it exists or not. It must be
“discovered” in order to become really interesting.
6. _Giraffes and the Okapi_
The baby giraffe at the gardens in the Regent’s Park is a most
interesting and beautiful creature. In that respect she only resembles
on a small scale her grown-up relatives. Next to elephants, giraffes
take precedence for strangeness, beauty, and imposing size. Certainly
they have done so with me ever since I turned one Sunday afternoon long
ago from the great novelty of the day, the first hippopotamus sent from
Egypt, round whom the world of fashion was crowding, and gazed into the
beautiful eyes that hung over me, supported by a gracefully-curving
neck. My tender regard for the beautiful creature was not shaken even
when I felt a sudden jerk to the elastic band passing under my chin and
saw my new Leghorn straw hat, with its ornamental bunch of Egyptian
wheat and broad pink ribbon, disappear between the lips of the beauty.
A slow right and left movement of the jaw followed, accompanied by a
tranquil kindly look suggestive of a desire for more. That was one of
the old stock of Regent’s Park giraffes, who bred freely at the gardens
and made money for the society. They died out thirty years ago or more.
From time to time since then there have been one or two mis-shapen
giraffes in London, but they did not eat children’s hats nor produce
young of their own. A new dynasty of Kordofan giraffes has now arrived,
and a better spirit prevails.
The most interesting thing about the giraffe is the okapi. The
remark sounds absurd, but it is true. The okapi is the new animal
from the Congo forest of Central Africa, discovered in 1901 by Sir
Harry Johnston. It is as big as a very large stag, has a neck like a
deer, and is striped on the haunches and legs, not spotted as is the
giraffe. Yet its teeth and its horns prove it to be a close ally,
not of deer, but of the giraffe. Any points of agreement between
giraffes and the okapi are, therefore, important. I have examined the
baby giraffe at the Zoo, and find that she has stripe-like bands of
hair on the face and on other parts of the head. Both her father and
mother are from Kordofan, and have some six or seven strongly-marked
bands of dark hair over the eyes and on the muzzle. It is important to
note any colour-striping in the giraffe’s skin, since the giraffe’s
colour-markings are mostly in the form of great spots, whilst the okapi
is only marked by stripes or bands something like those of a zebra,
but confined to the haunches and the legs, the rest of the body being
dark brown. The tendency to develop colour stripes in the giraffe is
important, since it shows us that the stripes do not separate the
okapi absolutely from the camelopard; they are a common possession or
possibility of the two animals. It was my examination of a half-brother
of the little giraffe now alive at the Gardens which led to the
discovery of striping on the head and face of giraffes. The mother in
that case had died before the birth of her young one, and the dead calf
was given to me by the secretary of the Zoological Society. Sixty-eight
years ago Sir Richard (then Professor) Owen received a new-born giraffe
from the Gardens, and reported on it to the Zoological Society. No one
had examined one since that date; none were obtainable from the Zoo,
and I could get none from African travellers and sportsmen, in spite
of urgent requests. I was accordingly greatly pleased to secure one
from the London Gardens. A great peculiarity of the young giraffe is
that it is born with a pair of well-grown horns, nearly an inch long,
and covered with coarse black hair. No other horn-bearing mammal--no
antelope, buffalo, ox, sheep, goat, stag, or other deer--is born with
horns, so far as we know, and we know a good many of these animals
well. Before birth the young giraffe’s horns are flat from back to
front, and quite soft and flexible. They can be pressed backwards, so
as to be made to lie flat on the head. Directly after birth a hard,
bony deposit commences inside the horn, and after some years’ growth it
becomes firmly fused to the skull. But the hard bony core never breaks
through the hairy skin which covers it. The bony core of the okapi’s
pair of horns, on the contrary, does “cut” or break through the skin,
exposing a sharp, hard point, a quarter of an inch in length. In the
deer tribe, as everyone knows, the point of the bony horn-core spreads
out as a large, branching growth from which all covering is shed, and
forms the “antler.” The deer tribe shed the antlers every year from the
top of the horn-core, and grow a new and larger pair to take the place
of the old ones. Moreover, in them the horn-core itself is a stem-like
upgrowth of the bone of the skull (of the frontal bone). In the okapi
and the giraffe the horn-core is a separate bone, free at first and
fusing with the skull only when the adult condition is reached. The
little antlers or bare-points of the okapi’s horn-cones or cores seem
to be shed in segments as growth goes on, and are only minute things
compared with the antlers of stags. The giraffe’s horns, on the other
hand, always remain covered by skin and hair and have a broad, rounded
top, not a sharp point.
The real clinching feature in the okapi and giraffe which decides at
once their close affinity to one another is found in the outer tooth on
each side of the group of eight teeth placed in the front of the lower
jaw. In both this particular tooth has a broad, chisel-like crown,
divided into two portions by a deep vertical slit. None of the other
ungulate or hoofed animals have this very curious shape of tooth. It is
a sort of family “mark” or “feature” in okapis and giraffes, as may be
seen in specimens shown in the gallery of the Natural History Museum,
where we have now no less than three fine, well-stuffed okapis and
several varieties of giraffe.
7. _The Great Geologists of Last Century_
The centenary of the foundation of the Geological Society of London,
celebrated last year, was a genuine festival in the scientific world.
Though geology had its teachers and searchers before 1807 (Hutton and
Werner, and the Neptunian and Plutonic schools, with their theories
as to the origin of rocks on the one hand by marine deposit, or on
the other by igneous agency, flourished before that date), yet it is
true that the adequate conception of the problems of geology and the
proper use of accurate observations and of judicious theory based on
those observations, in relation to the problems of geology, coincided
with the foundation of the society. It was not the first “special”
scientific society founded in London; there was already the Linnean
Society (founded in 1788) for the cultivation of zoology and botany.
Yet it incurred the displeasure of the worthy president of the Royal
Society, Sir Joseph Banks, who at first joined it, and then withdrew
from it, when, in 1809, it ceased to be a dining-club, meeting at a
London tavern, and acquired rooms of its own at No. 4, Garden-court,
Temple. Apparently there was a notion in those days that the “Royal
Society for the promotion of Natural Knowledge,” founded in 1662,
should exercise a sort of paternal control over any society formed for
the special promotion of one branch of science. Independence has,
however, been found to be the healthiest condition, and we now have not
only the Linnean and the Geological, but the Zoological, the Chemical,
and the Physical Societies, vigorous and important corporations,
publishing their “Transactions,” and meeting for discussion. There is,
it is true, a danger that the Royal Society may be left eventually,
owing to these independent establishments, in the sole possession and
control of the doctors and the engineers. It is a curious fact that
the word “physiology,” which in Cicero’s time (he says “Physiologia
naturæ ratio”) and in the Middle Ages meant what we now call “natural
history,” has been abandoned by other sciences, and appropriated by
the medical men. In England, but not abroad, the doctors have even
usurped the words “physician” and “physic.” In France, on the contrary,
and more correctly, Lord Rayleigh and Sir William Crooks are called
distinguished “physicians,” and the theory of the luminiferous ether is
“physic.”
The Geological Society issued its first volume of Transactions in
1811. The origin of the society is there stated to be due to “the
desire of its founders to communicate to each other the results of
their observations, and to examine how far the opinions maintained by
the writers on geology are in conformity with the facts presented by
nature.” A more exact and intelligible statement of the attitude of
scientific men, then and now, could not be formulated.
There are few, if any, among us now who knew many of the original
members of the Geological Society, but I remember meeting, when I
was a youth, Leonard Horner, the first secretary of the society, and
father-in-law of Sir Charles Lyell. I also knew Dr. Peter Mark Roget,
an original member, who was the oldest fellow of the Royal Society
when he died in 1869. Sir Henry Holland, the father of the present
Lord Knutsford, became a member in 1809, and published a paper on
the rock-salt district in the first volume. He was an eminent medical
man, and a great traveller. He wrote, amongst other things, upon the
turquoise mines of Persia and upon longevity. He was a friend of my
father’s, and I had the advantage of talking the latter subject over
with him before I wrote a little book on “Comparative Longevity” in
1869.
It was not until 1825 that the Geological Society obtained a charter,
and was incorporated. Two great names appear in the first council of
the newly-incorporated society--Murchison and Lyell. Murchison became
the Director of the Geological Survey, and as “Sir Roderick” was a
familiar and picturesque figure in the scientific world of the second
and third quarters of last century. He wore an Inverness cape and a
tall hat with a large and much-curled brim, an old-fashioned stock, and
a tail-coat. In his hand he always grasped a large, handsome cane, with
which he expressed his applause during the discussions at the society,
or emphasised his own remarks. He was fond of alluding to himself
as “an old soldier of the hammer,” and almost always entered into a
discussion with these words, “It is now, sir, a quarter of a century
since, in company with my illustrious friend, Sir Somebody Something,
I had the privilege and pleasure of showing that”--whatever it might
be. Discussions at the Geological in the sixties and seventies were
real, animated, almost violent discussions. I need hardly say that they
were perfectly delightful. Godwin Austen was a fine, incisive speaker,
who seemed ready to back his statements and views with his fists, if
need be. Lyell, the greatest of all, was most modest, and almost timid
in pressing an opinion, but full of personal experience and minute
knowledge of facts. John Phillips, the nephew of the father of English
geology, William Smith, was mellifluous and persuasive; Jukes, robust
and defiant; Huxley (secretary and then president), clear, trenchant,
and uncompromising. I remember an occasion when Sir Roderick, with
tears in his voice, if not in his eyes, declared he would not stay in
the room to hear that fossil fishes were discovered in his own special
domain--the Silurian rocks, where he had long since shown that they did
not occur--and he left the meeting. Many Silurian fishes have now been
found, but we all loved Sir Roderick for the heart and feeling which he
threw into his work and his public utterances.
The aim of geology is to describe accurately the long succession of
changes in the crust of “this cooling cinder,” the earth, and to assign
them in an orderly way to their causes. Hence, it calls upon nearly
all other branches of science for help--astronomy, physics, chemistry,
mineralogy, botany, and zoology. At the same time, it is essentially a
recreative pursuit, for, as Mr. Horace Woodward says in his _History
of the Geological Society of London_--published by the society--“the
fulness of the science can never be attained without the vivifying
influence of mountain and moor, of valley and sea coast.” It is owing
to this that the soldiers of the hammer, from Murchison, Sedgwick,
Lyell, Ramsay, Etheridge, Salter, onwards to the present generation of
“stone-crackers,” are amongst the happiest, most genial, and mentally
alert of our men of science.
That word “stone-cracker” I take from a letter addressed to me
when I was a boy of twelve by the Rev. J. S. Henslow, Professor of
Mineralogy and later of Botany at Cambridge, founder, with Adam
Sedgwick, the great Woodwardian Professor of Geology, of the now
flourishing Cambridge Philosophical Society, and the teacher, guide,
and fateful friend of Charles Darwin. It was he who sent Darwin on
the voyage of the _Beagle_. I had met this wonderful old naturalist
at Felixstowe when exploring the marshes for rare plants and insects
with my father. My father was a first-rate man at a country walk,
and could tell you all the time about the flowers, flies, stones,
and bones you might encounter. But Henslow surpassed him. I remember
to this day nearly every word Henslow said, and everything he did on
that memorable afternoon nearly fifty years ago. Amongst other things
he explained how the rough flint implements recently discovered in
river gravels--proving man’s great antiquity--could be shown to owe
their shape to blows, each blow causing a “conchoidal” fracture. And
he struck with his hammer some very large flints which were lying
in a heap in the meadow, and produced the most perfect dome-like
broken surface or bulb of percussion. He promised to give me a real
palæolithic flint implement and also a geological hammer. The letter
which reached me later in London ran as follows: “Dear incipient
Stonecracker--Enclosed you will find a draft for 10_s._ with which,
at the shop in Newgate-street, you can obtain a geological hammer
identical in all respects with my own.... In a separate parcel I send
you a flint implement which I obtained myself in the gravel pit at St.
Acheuil....” The hammer, the flint-axe, and the letter are to this
day treasured with deep affection and reverence for the giver, by
the boy who was thus so kindly initiated in the “art and mystery” of
Stone-crackers. Henslow died in 1861 at the age of 65. His daughter was
the first wife of Sir Joseph Hooker, the great botanist and traveller,
who celebrated his ninetieth birthday in July, 1907, and is still in
full mental and bodily health and vigour.
8. _Experiments with Precious Stones_
A man of science cannot say a word about experiments with precious
stones nowadays, but he is liable to be misunderstood and represented
as having discovered how to make valuable gems out of dirt, or of
enormous size, and in vast quantity. Last year the production of a
few small crystals by the electrical decomposition of bisulphide of
carbon was announced as something to affect the stock market instead of
as a matter of interest to a few learned chemists. The crystals were
supposed--erroneously as it turned out--to be diamond. We were also
gravely told that a competent French chemist had discovered, and that
the distinguished geologist, Professor Lapparent, had communicated
the fact to the Academy of Sciences, that the radiation of radium
acting on “corindon,” or, as we should prefer to write it in England,
“corundum”--a base, dull, colourless crystal--converts that dull
substance into sapphires, rubies, emeralds, and topazes--and that the
dealers attest the value of the precious stones so produced. This is
really great nonsense, and arises from a little confusion in the use
of the names of precious stones, and ignorance of what the substances
indicated by those names are--defects which we cannot attribute
to the French chemist, but must suppose to have “crept in” to the
reports which crossed the Channel. Corundum is a colourless crystal,
opaque or translucent. In chemical composition it is the oxide of
aluminium--standing in the same relation to that light, white metal
as rust or hematite ore does to the metal iron. It would not be at
all astounding if by simple treatment we could convert corundum into
sapphire or into ruby, since sapphire and ruby have precisely the
same chemical constitution as corundum--are, in fact, only coloured
varieties of corundum. Sapphire is blue, transparent corundum; green
and yellow “sapphires” are also common. The Oriental ruby is similarly
only red, transparent corundum--like it only oxide of aluminium or
alumina.
Diamonds are pure crystalline transparent carbon. Commonly they are
colourless and transparent, but are sometimes black or white and
opaque. Transparent diamonds are often found of a straw colour, rarely
of a deep blue (the Hope Diamond), more rarely green (the Dresden
Diamond), and rarest of all red.
If radium were really able (as some people have wrongly inferred from
the French experiments) to change the chemical nature of corundum and
convert it into topaz and emerald, the case would be very different
from that of merely changing the colour of the corundum. What is to-day
called “topaz” is a sherry-yellow crystal consisting of silicate of
alumina and of fluoride of alumina. It turns pink when heated, and is
also known of a blue colour and colourless. The topaz of the ancients
from the coasts of the Red Sea is of a different chemical nature, and
is now called peridot. Yellow corundum is sometimes wrongly called
Oriental topaz, and the yellow-brown quartz crystals properly known as
cairngorms are sometimes wrongly called Scotch topaz. So that the word
“topaz” is used loosely as well as strictly, and confusion results.
Emerald is widely distinct from corundum, sapphire, and ruby. It is a
silicate of alumina and beryllium, and in its coarse and pale-coloured
variety is known as beryl.
From all this it appears that some names of precious stones indicate
substances quite distinct from one another chemically, built of
differing elements, and also _per contra_ that what is actually one
and the same kind of precious stone in chemical composition and native
crystalline form may present examples possessing various colours and
degrees of transparency, each variety being called by a distinct name,
and regarded popularly as a distinct kind of stone. Radium rays can
convert colourless alumina or corundum into blue alumina (sapphire) or
red alumina (ruby), but they cannot change alumina into beryllia (that
is into emerald), nor into fluoride (that is into topaz).
One naturally asks, “To what is the colour of these precious stones
due?” The answer is difficult, because very minute traces of chemical
impurity, such as iron, cobalt, manganese, or chromium may suffice to
tint an otherwise transparent, colourless crystal with the brightest
red, yellow, blue, violet, or green. Moreover, it is certain from
what we know of traces of metallic impurity in artificial glass that
it may exist in such a state of chemical combination as to give no
tint whatever to the glass, but after prolonged exposure to light
or other agencies, the minute impurity may combine chemically with
oxygen present in the glass and develop colour. Thus, for instance,
old window-glass often assumes a violet or amethystine tint after
long exposure. This varying colour of the combinations of metals
according to whether they are oxidised or not, and the degree of
oxidation, or the special salt which they may form, is in itself an
unexpected thing to those who are not chemists. The metal chromium, for
instance, gives rise to colourless, to yellow, red, green, and blue
combinations. Manganese, a metal commonly associated with iron, gives
rise to brilliant green, to violet, and to wine-red combinations, and
if scattered as microscopic particles of black oxide in glass would
produce no colour effect at all. From what we know of glass and the
ease with which it is coloured to every shade of the rainbow by the
admixture of traces of metallic impurities--so that “paste” or glass
gems of all colours can be manufactured--it is not surprising to find
that natural crystals, transparent and often devoid of colour (such
as corundum, diamond, quartz, and topaz), are yet also found more or
less frequently coloured in various tints. Nevertheless, it is the fact
that in very few cases have chemists been able to prove by analysis
what precisely is the cause of the colour in any given crystal or
precious stone, although they may strongly suspect this or that as the
colour-giving impurity. The actual quantity of a metallic impurity
sufficient to give a tint is so excessively minute that the chemist
finds it impossible to determine what it is by examining one small
precious stone. He has not a sufficient bulk of material to operate on.
Having reached this point, we can see that such potent disturbing
agents as the rays of radium--penetrating a colourless, or
faintly-coloured, crystal--may determine oxidation or other chemical
combination within the crystal of traces of metal (iron, cobalt,
manganese, chromium) already present there, and so give it an increased
colour or an altogether new tint. In 1905 (therefore long before the
recent French experiments had shown that the radium rays will act
in this way on corundum, the “base variety” of sapphire and ruby),
Sir William Crookes published an account of his experiments as to
the action of the radium rays on the diamond. “Some fine colourless
crystals of diamond,” writes Sir William Crookes in 1905, “were
embedded in radium bromide, and kept undisturbed for more than twelve
months. At the end of that time they were examined. The radium had
caused them to assume a beautiful bluish-green colour, and their value
as ‘fancy stones’ had been materially increased.” On another occasion
Sir William found that a yellowish “off colour” diamond had its tint
changed to a pale blue-green when embedded for six weeks in a tube
with radium bromide. (I have seen this stone.) He also has succeeded
in improving the clearness of diamonds by exposing them to radium
rays. Everyone who has experimented with radium knows that it causes
the glass which may be used to keep it covered to develop a brown or
purple tint. This, then, is the explanation of the results obtained
by the French observer with corundum, as reported a few months ago.
There was no “transformation” of one substance into another, nor did he
himself suggest that there was. The radium rays merely acted chemically
on minute impurities present in colourless or pale-coloured crystals,
and so produced colour as they do in diamonds or in glass.
9. _Diamonds_
His Majesty King Edward was presented with the great Cullinan diamond
from the Transvaal in November 1907. This diamond weighs one pound and
one-third (avoirdupois)--more than 21 oz. I have placed a good glass
model of it in the Central Hall of the Natural History Museum; in the
case with it is a glass model of another big diamond, the “Excelsior,”
as now cut, and also models of the “Pitt” diamond, in the rough and in
the cut condition. Diamonds lose enormously in the process of cutting.
The Excelsior, like the Cullinan, is a Cape diamond of fine quality,
and free from colour. It was the biggest diamond known until the giant
Cullinan was found: in the rough it weighed 7 oz., or less than a third
of the Cullinan. As now cut, it only weighs 1-3/4 oz. It is reduced to
a quarter of its original size.
In the same way, the Pitt diamond, an Indian one, named after General
Pitt, of Madras, weighed originally 3 oz., and is now (it is in
Paris, in the Louvre, and is called “The Regent”) less than an ounce
in weight. The biggest Indian diamond known--the Nizam--is not quite
twice this size, whilst the Kohinoor, which is probably a fragment (a
third) of the “Great Mogul”--a diamond which has disappeared, leaving
only tradition and surmises as to its history--weighs no more than
three-quarters of an ounce. This seems a small affair by the side of
the twenty-one ounces of the Cullinan.
No one can guess what will happen to the Cullinan in cutting it. At
the best, it may be reduced to something between four and five ounces
in weight, and it may “fly” into fragments. It would be necessary
deliberately to cut it up into smaller stones in order to obtain the
full result of flashing of light and colour which twenty-one ounces
of diamond can produce. And the operation of cutting and polishing is
enormously expensive. One would have hoped that Sir William Crookes and
other men of science would have been asked to examine this wonderful
mass of transparent carbon by means of polarised light, Röntgen rays,
and radium, and to determine exactly its specific gravity before it
was broken up. Indeed, it would probably have retained its greatest
interest and value if never cut at all.
Glass or “paste,” as it is called, is made which cannot when new be
distinguished from diamond by anyone but an expert, armed with the
necessary tests. And the same is true as to paste imitations of all
precious stones excepting the emerald (whose beautiful green tint
cannot be exactly obtained), the cat’s-eye, which has a peculiar
fibrous structure, and the opal. The real value and quality of precious
stones, as compared with glass, depends on their durability, their
hardness, their resistance to scratching, and “dulling” of face and
edge. Even our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, as may be seen in the fine
collection recently dug up at Ipswich by Miss Layard, and placed in the
old house serving as the municipal museum there, made gems of glass and
paste. In modern times the art of making artificial “precious stones”
has reached a degree of perfection which, so far as decorative purposes
are concerned, leaves the natural stones no claim to superiority.
Gigantic as the Cullinan diamond is, it represents only about half the
daily output of the De Beers mines. By the end of 1904 ten tons of
diamonds, valued at £60,000,000 sterling, had been removed from the
Kimberley mines. It is difficult to imagine what has become of them
all, and since they are, unlike paste, durable and permanent, how the
demand for additions to those in use, keeps up. Twelve years ago about
four million pounds was spent annually by the public on the purchase of
diamonds. It is stated that the annual demand and expenditure are now
even larger.
Diamond is a peculiar form or variety of the chemical element carbon--a
very peculiar form most people will say who remember that charcoal
and lamp-black are the common form of carbon. That one and the same
unchangeable chemical element can exist as an amorphous black lump or
powder, and also without addition or loss of chemical constituents, as
the clearest, hardest, and most brilliant of crystals, is a paradox.
The same strange capacity for existing in two totally different forms
is exhibited by other fairly familiar elements. Sulphur is found in
tertiary water-deposited clays in Sicily (it has nothing to do with
Etna or Vesuvius) in the form of clear, lemon-coloured crystals half
an inch or more in length. If you take some commercial stick-sulphur
and melt it in a porcelain spoon, and pour half the melted stuff like
treacle into a jar of water, you will find that it cools as translucent
threads which are pliable and soft. The other half which you leave in
the spoon to cool shoots out into the form of long brittle crystals
of a needle-like shape. These two varieties of sulphur are nearly as
different as lamp-black and diamond.
Diamonds are found at the Cape in a “blue ground” which is of volcanic
origin, formed by the action of steam under enormous pressure. The
blue volcanic mud has been thrust up from great depths in the earth’s
surface in the form of “pipes” 100 yards to half a mile in diameter.
It has long been known that at very high temperatures (4,000 deg.
Centigrade) the metal iron dissolves carbon. The late Professor
Moissan, of Paris, obtained artificial diamonds by suddenly cooling
the iron in which carbon was dissolved by plunging the crucible into
water. The outer shell of iron cools and forms a tightly closed shell
enclosing the still liquid core. As this core cools it tends to expand,
and thus produces an enormous pressure. The melted carbon cooling under
this pressure assumes the crystalline colourless form known as diamond.
There is good reason to believe that diamonds are formed, or have been
formed, in association with metallic iron in a similar way, on a large
scale, in great depths of the earth’s crust, and are shot up to the
surface with other débris in the volcanic steam mud which is the “blue
ground.”
A few diamonds of small size have been found in the Ural Mountains,
otherwise they are not natural products of the northern hemisphere. It
is in India, Australia, South America, and South Africa that they are
picked up, either in beds of streams, or in peculiar volcanic mud, or
embedded in even harder rock. Many are in a condition of severe strain
when found, and contain minute cavities filled with liquid carbonic
acid. They are liable, in consequence, to break or even fly into
powder when warmed by the hand or struck. Though usually colourless,
diamonds may be yellow, green, blue, or red, and the rays of radium
cause colourless diamonds to become coloured. Some diamonds, but not
all, are phosphorescent--that is to say, like the well-known luminous
paint--after exposure to strong light they acquire the power of shining
themselves for a certain time when removed to a dark chamber. And the
curious thing is that, though themselves colourless, some give out
blue, some green, some yellow, and some red light. The most wonderful,
however, in this respect are the rare diamonds which become luminous
merely by rubbing, and leave phosphorescent streaks on the cloth with
which they are rubbed. This property is similar to the phosphorescence
shown by other kinds of crystals when heated or when simply fractured.
Diamonds are readily distinguished from paste by the Röntgen rays,
since they are transparent to those rays, whilst paste (or glass)
is opaque to them. Radium also causes diamonds, but not paste, to
phosphoresce. All diamonds are not equally hard, though they are the
hardest of stones, and harder than steel, but not harder than the metal
tantalum. Some Australian diamonds are known (from Inverel, New South
Wales) which are so hard that at one time they could not be cut and
polished; but only four years ago the rapidity of the wheels used in
these processes was greatly increased, and these terribly hard diamonds
were brought into subjection.
Thus it is clear that there are many extraordinary features of interest
about the diamond, and that its brilliance and high price constitute
only a small part of its fascination.
10. _Science and Fisheries_
Science, the knowledge of the vast system of orderly, inexorable
activities under which we exist, and of which we, and all that we
can apprehend, are but more or less significant parts, is not only
to be regarded as a gratification of our curiosity, as food for our
imagination, and the basis of our philosophical theories. It is, in
addition to these, a thing of unparalleled importance to the immediate
daily welfare of every man, woman, and child, and upon its due
cultivation and use depend the future welfare, even the existence, of
whole races of mankind. It is a startling fact that so few of those
who undertake to lead and to legislate for the people of this country
have any real conviction, or even a dim understanding of this truth.
In November 1906 a Committee appointed by the Government took evidence
as to the desirability of continuing the international investigation
of the North Sea, upon which Great Britain entered five years ago
in conjunction with other Northern States. Only a few weeks before,
a number of scientific experts engaged in this study of the North
Sea, with a view to gaining such knowledge of that great “waste of
waters” as may help the nations of adjacent lands to draw from it
stores of food without destroying the source or recklessly injuring
the supply, were entertained at dinner, at the Guildhall, by the City
Fathers, and treated to speeches by hereditary legislators. The view
expressed by these speakers was that the interests of the great fishing
industry and of the fish trade were best understood by the practical
fisherman. Science was a “handmaid,” useful in her place, but not to
be permitted to undermine established interests and the hoary wisdom
of the practical man, her employer. A German expert of high official
position, one of the guests, took a different line. He was astonished,
even shocked, that Great Britain, the State most largely concerned in
the North Sea fisheries, should be hesitating about continuing to take
part in the international investigation. In Germany, he said, they
took a different course in such matters. Men of business and practical
legislators, when called upon to deal with an important problem, sought
first of all for scientific knowledge of the conditions in question,
as complete and thorough as possible, and then proceeded to act upon
the sure foundation gained. More knowledge, much more knowledge as to
the causes and conditions at work in regard to the life and movements
of fishes in the North Sea was needed. The work of the International
Committee must be continued, and his (the German) Government would
certainly continue to do its share of the work.
The contrast in the British and the German attitude towards science is
what is interesting in this episode. It is true that men of science
in this country have to be content to take a very modest part in
public affairs, and to allow politicians and self-styled “practical”
men to treat science as “a handmaiden”--thankful when science is
not regarded as an enemy. But they know well enough, and those who
are really “practical men” know, that science is no handmaiden, but
in reality the master--the master who must be obeyed; who alone can
give true guidance; who alone can save the State. The sooner and
the more thoroughly the people of this country have recognised this
fact, and insist upon its unqualified acceptance in practice by their
representatives and governors, the better for them and their posterity.
11. _Discoveries as to Malaria_
Recent scientific work, discovery, and application to practical affairs
of the results of discovery, in regard to three great obstacles to
human life and prosperity illustrate the vital importance to the state
of scientific research. The obstacles in question are the diseases
known as malaria, yellow fever, and Mediterranean, or Malta fever.
It is now twenty-five years since Dr. Laveran, of Paris, discovered
that malaria, or ague, is caused by a very minute parasite which
exists in the red blood corpuscles of those stricken with the fever,
and suggested that it is probably carried from victim to victim by
blood-sucking mosquitoes (gnats). Major Ross, of the Indian Army, who
has been rewarded for his discovery by the Nobel prize, determined to
find out what gnat it is which carries the malaria-germ from man to
man, and by most persevering experiment and microscopic examination
showed that it is not the commoner gnat or mosquito (Culex), but the
spot-winged kind (Anopheles), which alone can spread the malarial
infection. But Major Ross is, before everything else, a medical man,
and his great purpose has been to apply his discovery to the prevention
of disease.
Whole regions of the earth’s surface are rendered dangerous, or even
uninhabitable, for civilised men by malaria; in other words, by
the Anopheles mosquito. Accordingly, Ross set to work to find the
best means of destroying these agents of disease. He found that the
Anopheles gnat breeds in natural collections of water lying upon
the surface of the ground in open country, and not as many common
varieties of gnats do, in vessels and cisterns in houses. The pools
frequented by the malaria-carrying gnat are small and easily drained.
The obvious direction of science, therefore, was to remove or to cover
up these pools wherever they were found in the neighbourhood of human
habitations. Although Major Ross made his discoveries in India, and
although he opened a campaign against malaria by removal of surface
pools in the Colonies of West Africa--“the white man’s grave”--twice
visiting the chief British settlements--only half-hearted, incomplete
measures have been taken, insufficient funds have been expended, and
a supine executive and half-incredulous officials have failed to do
more than partially reduce the prevalence of malaria in those regions.
On the other hand, where intelligent officials have understood and
accepted the clear results of science in regard to malaria, the most
striking and satisfactory consequences have followed.
At Ismailia, on the Suez Canal, malaria was almost universal; in 1866
there were in a population of eight thousand, 2,300 cases. In 1897
there were over 2,000, and in 1902, when Ross was asked by the Prince
d’Arenberg to visit the place and advise as to measures to be taken,
there were 1,551 cases. Ross directed the filling up of the breeding
pools. The marshes were filled up with sand, the irrigation channels
were deepened or treated with kerosene oil (which spreads as a fine
film, and chokes the gnat larvæ), and the cess-pits were rendered
uninhabitable by chemical treatment. In one year the cases of malaria
fell to 214, in 1905 they were only thirty-seven, and now the Suez
Canal Company officially reports, “all trace of malaria has disappeared
from Ismailia.” The same satisfactory results have been obtained in
Port Said, in Khartoum, in Port Swettenham of the Federated Malay
States, in Havannah City, in Panama, and, in fact, wherever intelligent
conviction has led to the active and complete employment of the
methods necessary for the destruction of the gnats. Under the British
Government of India and the African and West India Colonies, little has
been done. Why? Because of the handmaiden theory and the ostrich-like
refusal of our officials to face and accept the master.
An even more wonderful and beneficent result has been obtained in the
case of that terrible disease “Yellow Jack,” or “Black Vomit”--the
yellow fever. Owing to the discoveries and definite proof by Ross as
to the part played by gnats in malaria, the able medical men in the
public service of the United States of America have thoroughly examined
experimentally the mode of infection of human beings with the germ of
yellow fever, and have conclusively proved that infection is solely
and entirely due to the bite of one species of gnat--the Stegomyia
fasciata. They have proved to absolute certainty that yellow fever
is not carried through the air, nor by food or drink, nor by contact
with infected persons or their cloths or emanations, but only by the
fasciate gnat, a house-frequenting species, which sucks the blood of
a yellow fever patient, and after twelve days, and not till then,
becomes capable of imparting the infection to those whom it may stab or
“bite.” The firm demonstration of this fact was not made without great
devotion, courage, and self-sacrifice. In the ardour of their pursuit
not a few of the experimenters risked and lost their lives. Among these
the name of Dr. Lazear, of the United States Army, is prominent. He
deliberately permitted himself to be bitten by a stray mosquito in a
yellow fever hospital, in order to show that the insect could convey
the infection. He was bitten on Sept. 13, 1900, and died on Sept. 25,
having proved his point.
The actual germ, microbe, or minute parasitic organism which causes
yellow fever, and is carried by the fasciate gnat, has not yet been
detected. Nevertheless, without seeing and isolating the microbe, the
medical men of America (Sternberg, Finlay, Carroll, and others) have,
by destroying the gnat and preventing its access to men--especially to
patients already infected, and, therefore, certain to infect the gnats
and cause them to spread the disease--practically made an end of yellow
fever in many great cities of the New World, where it was only six
years ago an ever-present horror, striking men down with a suddenness
and with a deadliness which paralysed human activity. Here, as in other
cases, intelligent appreciation of the results of science by a governor
or a municipality has saved thousands of lives. On the other hand, in
Rio de Janeiro, “the opposition encountered by the sanitary authorities
of the city from political factions and the ridicule to which they
were subjected by the local Press” were insuperable (I quote from an
official report), and so a few more thousand lives were sacrificed
before the master was recognised and the proffered safety accepted. In
Vera Cruz, in New Orleans, and in Panama yellow fever has been reduced
to a vanishing quantity by removing the pools and tanks in which the
fasciate gnat can breed, and by making use of wire-gauze to prevent
the access of mosquitoes to houses, bed-chambers, drains, and baths,
and especially to prevent not only their access to, but their egress
from, the rooms and beds of patients already infected with disease.
In the city of Havannah, during the American occupation of Cuba
(1900-1903), Colonel Gorgas reduced the death-rate due to yellow fever
from an annual average of 751 to so small a figure as six. The same
energetic and faithful administrator has been at work, with even more
remarkable results, in the canal zone of the Isthmus of Panama since
1904. The attempt of the French to cut the canal was foiled chiefly by
yellow fever and malaria. It is estimated that their effort cost quite
50,000 lives. Assisted by an able and enthusiastic staff, and charged
with the task by a Government which comprehends the fact that the
really “practical men” are the men who recognise science as the master
(not as the negligible eccentric handmaid), Colonel Gorgas has banished
the mosquito from his zone of occupation. As a consequence there is
neither malaria nor yellow fever on the Panama works. In 1906 the total
death-rate amongst 5,000 white employés on the Panama Canal works was
only seven in the thousand. Further, in last April the daily sick-rate
of the total force of about 40,000 people was only seventeen in the
thousand. Colonel Gorgas declares that there is but little sickness of
any kind among the Americans in the employ of the Panama Commission,
and that they and their wives and children are fully as vigorous
and robust in appearance and in fact, as the same number of people
in the United States. There is no reason why the centres of wealth,
civilisation, and population should not again be in the tropics, as
they were in the dawn of man’s history.
12. _Malta Fever_
Mediterranean or Malta fever was for long confused with typhoid and
other fevers. Our soldiers and sailors at Malta, Gibraltar, and
Cyprus, as well as many frequenters of the African and Asiatic shore,
were subject to this disease, and often incapacitated by it. In 1887
Colonel David Bruce discovered in the blood of patients the minute
Micrococcus melitensis, which is its cause, and established the fact
that it is a definite independent disease. The hospital at Malta has
received as many as 624 patients in a year suffering from Malta fever
from among the 8,000 soldiers on the island and the 12,000 sailors on
the Mediterranean Station. And as they stay in hospital on an average
for four months, this means 74,880 days of illness. This means a
considerable loss to the State, as well as a large amount of personal
suffering terminated, in some cases after two years’ sickness, by death.
The War Office, Admiralty, and Colonial Office applied in 1904 to
the Royal Society of London to undertake a further investigation of
this disease. The society sent out a small commission, which has
been at work for three years, and has published seven volumes of
reports. The problem before the commission was to discover the mode of
infection by the Malta-fever germ (the Micrococcus melitensis), and
thus, if possible, to arrive at a means of arresting the infection.
Various hypotheses, guesses as to probable and possible methods of
dissemination, were entertained and examined. As the germ occurs in the
blood, it was naturally considered possible that gnats or other insects
were the carrying agent. But negative results followed all experiments
in this direction. Then it was found that the “germ” passes out of the
body in large quantities by the renal secretion, and it was thought
that it might be conveyed in a dried form with dust in the air. This
also proved to be an incorrect supposition.
Next a very important discovery was made. The germ was found in the
blood and the excretions of 10 per cent. of the goats which are kept in
Malta as the sole source of milk, and are driven through the streets to
supply customers, whilst 50 per cent. of the goats were found to have
been infected at some time. Then the germ was found in the milk itself,
and it only remained to prove by experiment that it was from the goats’
milk that human beings acquire the infection. A monkey fed with the
milk of an infected goat acquired the fever.
The next step was to stop the consumption of goats’ milk by the
soldiers and sailors in the hospital and barrack. Actually we were
carefully feeding our invalid soldiers and sailors in the great
hospital at Valetta with a highly poisonous infected fluid--the milk
of the Maltese goat! The preventive measure--the stoppage of goats’
milk--only came into operation in July, 1906. In the first six months
of that year there were thirty-one cases of Malta fever in every
thousand of the garrison (numbering about 8,000 men). In the preceding
six months there had been forty-seven cases per thousand. Now when the
goats’ milk was stopped after July, 1906, what was the result? From
July to December, 1906, there were only ten cases per thousand of the
garrison. In actual numbers there were in July, August, and September
in 1905 as many as 258 cases, whilst in the same months in 1906, after
removal of goats’ milk from the dietary of the troops, there were
only twenty-six cases, and these were probably due to the independent
purchase of goats’ milk by soldiers outside the barracks. In the naval
hospital until 1906 almost every patient who remained in the hospital
a few weeks took the disease. Since the exclusion of goats’ milk not a
single case has occurred.
The Director-General of the Medical Department of the Navy reports
that there has been no case of Malta fever during the year among the
sailors, and only seven cases among the soldiers up to the end of
September, 1907.
Gibraltar had a fever of its own, identical with Malta fever. It has
now been shown that it was probably introduced by the importation of
goats from Malta for the supply of milk. This is likely, because the
importation of Maltese goats ceased in 1883, and the fever began to
disappear from Gibraltar in 1885, and finally vanished altogether in
1905.
In South Africa Malta-fever is common amongst the white population.
It is probable, according to Colonel Birt, that it was introduced by
means of infected goats imported from the Mediterranean. The soldiers,
however, in South Africa are free from this disease, excepting those
who have already contracted it in the Mediterranean, since in South
Africa goats’ milk does not enter into the dietary of the soldier. It
is the civilian population which suffers.
13. _A Cure for Sleeping Sickness_
Diamonds and sleeping sickness are both special African problems. It
was owing to the proposal to employ natives from Uganda in the South
African diamond mines that the Colonial Secretary (Mr. Chamberlain
at that date) asked the Royal Society to say whether the sleeping
sickness which had broken out with terrible violence in Central Africa
constituted an obstacle to that employment, on account of the danger of
introducing the disease into South Africa. The Royal Society advised
the Government not to allow the transport of natives from the infected
districts of Uganda, and sent out a commission to Central Africa to
study the disease. The result was the discovery by Colonel Bruce of
the parasite of sleeping sickness called Trypanosoma--a kind previously
known in some other diseases--and of the fact that it is a tsetse-fly
which carries it. A quarter of a million natives have died in Central
Africa within the last six years from sleeping sickness. The Tropical
Diseases Committee of the Royal Society has started an inquiry into the
action of drugs on the parasites (known as trypanosomes) which cause
sleeping sickness and the horse and cattle disease of the “fly-belts”
of South Africa.
The minute parasites which cause Malta, yellow, and malarial fever,
and other infections, are no doubt best dealt with by excluding them
from access to the human body when that is possible. But once they
have effected a lodgment and commenced to multiply in the blood or
tissues, it is still possible to get at them by means of drugs, which
poison them without injuring their human victim. Thus quinine has been
of enormous service in checking the ravages of the malaria parasite,
and really in Great Britain has exterminated “ague,” which is the
English name for malaria. Many experiments have been made during the
last two years, with the view of finding some drug which will, in like
manner, destroy the trypanosomes which have established themselves in
the blood and lymph-passages of the human body, and are slowly killing
their victim with sleeping sickness. An arsenic compound, “atoxyl,”
has been found effective when injected into the patient’s body, and
according to Dr. Koch, who returned last year from Uganda, he has
found nothing better than this treatment, discovered by Dr. Thomas
and Dr. Breinl, of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, three
years ago. Dr. Plimmer and Dr. Thomson, who have been experimenting
in London for the Royal Society, have found a drug which is more
effective than atoxyl in destroying certain trypanosomes which attack
rats, and is now being tried in the treatment of sleeping sickness.
This is the tartrate of sodium and antimony--a salt corresponding to
the well-known tartar emetic, with this difference, that it contains
sodium instead of potassium. It seems that this sodium variety of
tartar emetic is very destructive to trypanosomes in the blood and
lymph, and has no injurious effect of a lowering nature, such as occurs
when the potassium salt is used. As the antimony drug is far cheaper
than atoxyl, it will be possible to apply it freely to horses and
cattle suffering from “nagana” and “surra,” which are diseases due to
trypanosomes of a special kind. Two white men who had become infected
by the trypanosome of sleeping sickness in West Africa have been
treated with the new drug in London, and the parasites have completely
disappeared from their blood in consequence, though it remains to be
seen whether a permanent cure has been effected. One cannot imagine a
situation of more thrilling interest than that existing in the nursing
home where those two victims were given a strong hope of escape from
what seemed to be certain death, whilst the fate of thousands of
African natives, similarly infected, was hanging in the balance! After
six months from the date of treatment the report is satisfactory. The
parasites have not yet re-appeared (July, 1908) in the two patients
treated in November.
14. _Tsetse-Flies and Disease_
Dr. Koch appears to have been questioned on his return to Europe by
some journalists as to the results of his study of sleeping sickness
during the past year and a half in Uganda. It was already known (three
years ago), from the observations of Professor Minchin, Dr. Gray,
and Dr. Tulloch (the Royal Society’s observers in Uganda), that the
tsetse-fly in Uganda sucks the blood of crocodiles, also of fishes
and of hippopotami. Dr. Koch confirms this observation. Minchin also
observed a trypanosome in the blood of the crocodile differing from
that of sleeping sickness. Whether crocodiles help, in an important
degree, to keep tsetse-flies alive in the regions where they occur,
by offering them a ready meal of blood, is uncertain. So far as the
facts are known, they do not lead to the belief that the crocodile is a
“reservoir host” for the trypanosome of sleeping sickness.
“Reservoir-host” is a very useful and expressive name for animals
which can tolerate or support a parasite in their blood which is
deadly to other animals. The parasite flourishes in abundance in the
reservoir-host with entire satisfaction to both host and guest. But
a blood-sucking fly or gnat, of promiscuous tastes in the matter
of blood, comes along, sucks the reservoir-host a bit, and then
goes off for another meal to a susceptible animal, into which it
introduces the parasite now adhering to its already blood-smeared
proboscis or beak. Such a history was first established by Bruce in
regard to the trypanosome parasite which causes the deadly nagana
disease in the “fly-belts” of South Africa. The big game animals are
reservoir-hosts to this parasite, from which they are carried by the
tsetse-fly to horses, mules, and dogs, which, being of foreign origin,
are not tolerant of it, but are killed by the poison to which its
multiplication in their blood gives rise. Thus, too, native children,
both in Africa and the East Indies, appear to be tolerant of the
malaria parasite, and act as reservoir-hosts from which the spot-winged
gnats suck and distribute the parasite to the non-tolerant, susceptible
adult natives and white men.
The tsetse-flies are little bigger than the common house-fly, and
bite, or rather stab, very rapidly after alighting on the skin. The
study of flies and gnats, and other blood-sucking insects, has
become extremely important, and has been carried on with great energy
by many specialists since it became known that these insects play
such a terribly important part in the causation of disease. At the
Natural History Museum I received (in response to a circular issued
at my request by H.M. Government) thousands of specimens of gnats
(mosquitoes) from all parts of the world, and some hundreds of new
species have been described in a series of volumes by Professor F. V.
Theobald, published by the trustees. Other volumes are in preparation
illustrating the blood-sucking flies of various regions of the world,
and one concerning those of the British Islands has already appeared.
The common gnat, the spot-winged gnat, and the tsetse-fly--as well as
the microscopic parasites causing malaria and sleeping sickness--are
illustrated by greatly enlarged models--very carefully executed under
my direction, which are exhibited in the central hall of the museum.
It is a curious fact that the coloured races of men--especially those
of Africa--have little or no objection to being bitten by flies. They
seem to accept the attention of flies and ticks with indifference.
The men sleep in the day under trees, and are willing food-supply to
the insects. The eyelids of children are literally inhabited by flies
in some countries, and the folds of the skin of fat adults hide whole
rows of fast-holding ticks. But the white man does not willingly permit
either fly, flea, or gnat to settle on him. He is (or has been),
nevertheless, unwisely tolerant of house-flies in his habitations, and
the poorer and less cleanly population are in large proportion infested
with wingless insects. The newly established knowledge that certain
flies (glossina or tsetse-fly) are the carriers of sleeping sickness,
that gnats are the carriers of malaria and of yellow fever, that fleas
are the carriers of the plague, and that certain kinds of ticks are the
carriers of cattle-fevers and dog-fevers, and probably of some obscure
fevers of man, must make us all more anxious than we were about contact
with insect life. For ages popular tradition has ascribed diseases of
one kind and another in various parts of the world to the bites of
flies. But actually it is little more than fifty years ago since it
was really shown that deadly germs or parasites existed which could
be, and actually are, carried by flies from one animal to another, and
introduced into the blood by the flies’ stab. This was first shown in
regard to the bacterium of splenic fever (or anthrax, or wool-sorters’
disease), a blood-disease of cattle which is transferred by the big,
fiercely-biting “horse-flies” (tabanus), from animals to man, and is
invariably fatal. Another bacterial disease, “pernicious œdema,” is
inflicted on man in the same way. These cases were exceptional, and
it is only quite recently that the agency of flies and fleas in great
epidemics, and in diseases causing thousands of deaths every year in
well-known regions, has been discovered.
15. _Monkeys and Fleas_
The wingless parasites known as pediculi are not known as active
agents in spreading disease germs, probably because they do not
readily transfer themselves from one animal to another. It is in this
connection a really remarkable fact that monkeys are not infested by
fleas, and that only in few cases and not in many kinds have pediculi
or acari been observed. In this respect the lower races of men (and
even the higher) seem to have fallen away from a grade of excellence
attained by their despised quadrumanous cousins. When this fact as
to the freedom of monkeys from insect parasites is mentioned, those
who have watched monkeys in captivity will immediately say, “Surely I
have seen monkeys carefully picking insects from one another’s fur.”
The fact is that it is this very habit of “picking” which prevents
monkeys from harbouring fleas. Whereas a dog or a cat can only scratch,
the monkey has an opposible thumb and delicately sensitive fingers.
That which has become the hand of man, with all its marvellous skill
and efficiency, has been elaborated in its early stages as a means
for keeping the hair clean. When monkeys are seen carefully removing
something with finger and thumb from their own or their companion’s
hair, it is not an insect but a little piece of fatty secretion and
scurf which is thus removed. The habit, which seems to be general in
all kinds of monkeys, even with the anthropoids, such as the chimpanzee
and the orang, has of course been efficient in removing any parasitic
insects which may at one time have infested monkeys--all other furry
animals are liberally supplied with them, as also are birds--but is
now preventive of any re-establishment of such visitors. The popular
judgment of the monkey’s habit is similar to that of the Japanese Aino,
who remarked to a traveller who arranged to have a bath in his room
every day that he must be a very dirty man to require it.
16. _The Jigger Flea_
One flea is recorded as having been once taken on an anthropoid ape (a
gorilla), and is the “jigger,” Pulex penetrans. This is a very serious
pest, the history of which shows how man himself opens up the path
by which dangerous diseases spread. The jigger-flea was originally
known only in the South American tropics. It spread from there to the
West Indies in the last century. It burrows into the skin, usually
between the toes, but elsewhere also, and causes an abscess and sore
as big and deep as a hazel-nut. Several such cavities at a time are
dangerous, and often lead to blood-poisoning and death. Europeans avoid
the burrowing of the jigger by having their toes carefully examined
every morning, but black men are less careful. From the West Indies,
about thirty years ago, the jigger was carried in ships to West Africa.
There it flourished and spread from village to village across Central
Africa, decimating the population. It appears to have been carried to
a large extent by dogs, in whose skin it flourishes. It has now passed
through Africa to India, and we shall no doubt soon hear of its having
completed the circuit of the globe.
A great many kinds of fleas are known, many furry animals having their
own special species, which does not leave them to take up its dwelling
on other kinds of animal. The common rat has a large flea of its own,
which apparently is not the flea which carries the plague from rats
to men. It is a “wandering” flea which does this, namely, the Cheops
flea. This flea, common in the East but unknown in colder regions, does
not stay as one could wish it to do--on the rat; but travels about
visiting human beings and dogs, and so carries the plague bacillus
from rats to men. In the absence of these fleas plague would be a
rat-disease unknown in men. It is probable that we do not nowadays live
so thoroughly cheek-by-jowl with rats in Western Europe as formerly,
so that even if rats infected with plague and harbouring the Eastern
Cheops flea arrive in our docks, the wandering flea is too far off to
reach us in our modern houses.
17. _Public Estimate of the Value of Science_
The Royal Society, the full title of which is The Royal Society of
London for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge, has its anniversary
meeting and dinner on St. Andrew’s Day. The health of the medallists
of the year 1907 was given from the chair by Lord Rayleigh, and they
replied one by one to the toast. Professor Michelsen, of Chicago,
received what is considered the greatest honour the society has to
bestow--the Copley Medal (founded more than two hundred years ago) for
his researches on light. He related in his speech how he had tried
to interest a wealthy business man in the experiments going on in
his laboratory, in the hope that his friend might be moved to give
pecuniary aid for the provision of new apparatus. One by one, he showed
his delicate instruments and explained their uses; no impression was
produced. At last he explained how the bright lines of the spectrum of
flame, coloured by incandescent elements (such as theatre-goers know
as red fire, green fire, blue fire, &c.), can be recognised by means
of the spectroscope in the light of the sun--proving the presence of
the metals and other elements of this earth in that remote body. He
especially explained and showed his friend the experiments by which
sodium, the metal of which caustic soda is the “rust,” is thus proved
to be present in the sun. At last his friend spoke. He said: “Who the
---- cares if there is sodium in the sun?” Professor Michelsen did not
tell the fellows of the Royal Society how he replied to that abrupt
inquiry.
A more encouraging speech was that of Lord Fitzmaurice, the
Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, who replied to the toast
of the guests. He declared, in so many words, “It is every day becoming
more and more certain that science is the master.” He said that in
his own business as a diplomatist he found that the chief matters
which he had to discuss and decide depended on scientific knowledge
and the information and guidance given to him and his colleagues by
scientific men. In the beginning of the eighteenth century the British
Government had sent a bishop and a poet to negotiate the Treaty of
Utrecht. But neither would be of any use in modern diplomacy. What they
always had to seek at the present day was the aid of the scientific
departments of the Navy or the Army, or of the Royal Society. Such
matters as the relative merits of a Channel tunnel or a Channel ferry,
the limitations of territory by land, by sea, or above the land in
the air, the international agreements as to measures for checking the
spread of disease or of insect pests, and, indeed, most matters which
had come before him since he had been in office, had to be decided by
the scientific experts. He did not propose that diplomatists should at
once vacate their posts and endeavour to secure the occupation of them
by men of science, but he thought that at no distant date such a course
would be considered not only reasonable, but necessary!
18. _The Common House-fly and Others_
The common house-fly is not so innocent as he looks, but really a dirty
little thing. He has not a sharp beak-like proboscis, and cannot stab,
but he has a soft, dabbing proboscis, which he pushes on to every kind
of filth as well as walking with his six legs on such matter. Then he
comes and wipes off minute particles and germs on to our food, our
lips, our fingers, and faces. It is quite certain that he, and others
allied to him, are thus the means of spreading typhoid fever in camps
where there are open latrines and open larders and mess tables. The
house-fly breeds from a maggot, just as the blue-bottle or blow-fly
does, but very few people have ever seen or recognised the maggot of
the house-fly. The reason is that it lays its eggs in horse dung, and
the grubs are hatched in the muck-heaps of stables. That is also the
reason why it is much less numerous in London than it used to be,
since stables and mews are now fewer and cleaner than they were. It is
also the reason why the house-fly abounds in ill-kept country inns and
farmhouses. Its breeding ground is just outside the window.
There is not only one common house-fly in this country: there are
three kinds, in addition to the blue-bottle or blow-fly, which is
distinguished at once by its great size and blue colour, and lays its
eggs in carrion. Late in the year you may often see what would pass for
young or starveling house-flies going about among the others. This is
a distinct species, the Homalomyia canicularis of entomologists. The
third kind only to be distinguished by careful examination with the aid
of a magnifying glass, is Anthomyia radicum. Both these are much less
abundant than the common house-fly (Musca domestica), with which they
almost always occur. Their breeding habits are similar to those of the
common house-fly.
A fourth kind of fly is invariably mistaken for the common house-fly
when it is noticed, as it sometimes is, in consequence of the sharp
stab which it inflicts. As recently as the beginning of November last
year I was “bitten” or pricked by one of this fourth kind in a London
club. They are common enough on the sea shore in autumn, and may be
a severe nuisance. People generally take them for common house-flies
which have lost their temper in the hot weather and give way to the
bad habit of “biting” out of sheer exasperation. Really, of course,
a house-fly could not stab or prick with its broad-ended proboscis.
The fly in question, which looks almost exactly like a well-grown
house-fly, but possesses a sharp and business-like beak or proboscis,
is known to scientific men as Stomoxys calcitrans. There are many
kinds of Stomoxys scattered all over the world, and it is probable,
though not actually proved, that they carry parasites such as the
trypanosomes of horse and cattle diseases from one animal to another,
as do the species of Glossina or tsetse-fly.
But we have yet to learn more about these flies and the parasites
they transfer. In the case of the gnat, it has been discovered that
the malaria parasite is swallowed by the gnat, and multiplies in
it, producing thousands of spores in its blood, and it is these
spores which the gnat hands or rather “mouths” on to man. No such
multiplication of the trypanosome in the tsetse-fly (Glossina) is
known. The tsetse-fly passes on the trypanosome as it received it, and
yet it seems as though it is not any and every biting fly which can
pass on the trypanosome of nagana, or of sleeping sickness, but only
the particular species of tsetse-fly. Perhaps it is a case of greater
abundance, the tsetse-flies being the obvious and dangerous carriers of
trypanosome disease where they occur, on account of their abundance and
the fierceness and celerity of their attack. It is almost certain that
in India, Burma, and South America some other flies must transfer the
trypanosomes from animal to animal, causing the diseases known as surra
and mal de caderas, because no tsetse-flies--that is to say, no flies
of the genus Glossina--occur in those countries, and no other mode of
transference, except by some blood-sucking insect, seems probable.
Ants in Africa are carriers of infection, and possibly also in London
kitchens, where a little red ant sometimes abounds. The black beetle or
cockroach is a creature to be got rid of, as it is very probable that
it spreads certain kinds of infection over food and dishes during the
hours of “revelry by night” which kind-hearted people allow it to enjoy
in their kitchens.
19. _Cerebral Inhibition_
The best golf-player does not think, as he plays his stroke, of the
hundred-and-one muscular contractions which, accurately co-ordinated,
result in his making a fine drive or a perfect approach; nor does the
pianist examine the order of movement of his fingers. His “sub-liminal
self,” his “unconscious cerebration,” attends to these details without
his conscious intervention, and all the better for the absence of
what the nerve-physiologists call “cerebral inhibition”--that is to
say, the delay or arrest due to the sending round of the message or
order to the muscles by way of the higher brain-centres, instead of
letting it go directly from a lower centre without the intervention
of the seats of attention and consciousness. The sneezing caused in
most people by a pinch of ordinary snuff can be rendered impossible by
“cerebral inhibition,” set up by a wager with the snuff-taking victim
that he will fail to sneeze in three minutes, however much snuff he
may take. His attention to the mechanism of the anticipated sneeze,
and his desire for it, inhibit the whole apparatus. So long as you can
make him anxious to sneeze and fix his attention on the effort to do
so, by a judicious exhortation at intervals, he will not succeed in
sneezing. When the three minutes are up, and you both have ceased to
be interested in the matter, he will probably sneeze unexpectedly and
sharply. I was set on to this train of thought by a recent visit to an
exhibition of photographs.
There were many very interesting illustrations of the application of
photography to scientific investigation. Among others I saw a fine
enlarged photograph of the common millipede (Julus terrestris), and my
desire was renewed to have a bioscopic film-series of the movements
of this creature’s legs. Some years ago I attempted to analyse, and
published an account of, the regular rhythmic movement of the legs
of millipedes. I found that the “phases” of forward and backward
swing are presented in groups of twelve pairs of legs, each pair of
legs being in the same phase of movement as the twelfth pair beyond
it. But instantaneous photography would give complete certainty about
the movement in this case, and in the case of the even more beautiful
“rippling” movement of the legs of some of the marine worms. Some
kindly photographer might take up the investigation and prepare a
series of films. The problem is raised and the effects of “cerebral
inhibition” described in a little poem which I am told we owe to the
author of “Lorna Doone.” As it is not widely known, I give it here as a
record of “cerebral inhibition”:
“A centipede was happy ’til
One day a toad in fun
Said, ‘Pray which leg moves after which?’
This raised her doubts to such a pitch
She fell exhausted in the ditch,
Not knowing how to run.”
The point, of course, is that she could execute the complex movement of
her legs well enough until her brain was set to work and her conscious
attention given to the matter. Then “cerebral inhibition” took place
and she broke down.
20. _Colour-photography and Photographs of Mars_
There were admirable photographs of wild birds and their nests, and of
insects and plants in this exhibition. I saw the new Lumière coloured
transparent photographs thrown by a lantern on the screen, and could
distinguish the dots of red, green, and violet colour on what, at
a little distance, appeared to be a brilliantly white part of the
picture (the shirt collar of a “sitter”), just as one sees a mosaic of
coloured dots in the blazing sunlight of the pictures painted by the
French school of so-called “vibristes” (Monod and others). Perhaps the
most remarkable of these photographs was a set of prints from untouched
photographs of the planet Mars, executed in July 1907 by Professor
Perceval Lowell at his observatory in Arizona.
The Mars photographs are each about as big as a dried pea (that is
the biggest size possible with the feeble light reflected by Mars),
but “several of the canals,” says Mr. Lowell, “are distinctly visible
on the photographs, and one has been photographed double.” I should
have liked to examine these photographs in a good light with a lens.
The statement quoted means that the canals in Mars can no longer
be regarded as due to errors of eyesight and imagination, and that
the annual doubling or formation of a second canal parallel to what
was earlier in the year a single canal, is actually recorded by a
disinterested, impartial photographic plate. Are these canals the work
of intelligent inhabitants of Mars? I will not venture to say in reply
more than this, that I have never heard any other explanation of their
occurrence. But that, of course, still leaves the matter open.
21. _Origin of Names by Errors in Copying_
A curious illustration of a mistake perpetuated by a clerical error is
the title of Viscount Glerawly. The title was intended to have been
Glenawly, but the bad writing of a clerk converted the “n” into an “r,”
and the name having been so entered in the patent of nobility, or some
such document, could not be altered. The same thing has happened to
the mammoth. His proper native name is “mammont,” but “mont” became
“mout,” and then “moth.” A similar clerical error is responsible for
the name Gavial, which is applied to the long, narrow-nosed crocodile
of India, both as a scientific name (Gavialis) and colloquially.
Really the “v” is due to a misreading of an “r,” the creature’s native
name being Garial. It was so written down and sent home by an early
explorer, but his handwriting being wanting in clearness, the word was
copied as Gavial and the scientific patent issued in that name.
22. _False News as to Extinct Monsters_
The tendency of English newspapers to bedeck themselves every now
and again with rank absurdities copied from American rubbish-sheets
is a disease. On no subject outside the field of natural history and
medicine would any editor dream of printing the stuff which does duty
as “news” in regard to these departments--stuff which has not even the
semblance of being carefully concocted, but yet is found “good enough”
to circulate as serious information.
Another antediluvian monster, much larger than the mammoth, was
reported in a London evening paper at the end of November 1907. The
article devoted to it is a mass of absurdity, a burlesque of a genuine
note on the subject. It appears that the most ordinary thing happened
at Los Angeles, California, namely, that some workmen, in driving a
tunnel, unearthed some fossil bones. We are not surprised to learn
(though it is announced as a marvel) that the bones were those of a
mastodon (of which you may see a whole skeleton in Cromwell-road),
and those of the extinct American elephant called Elephas columbi.
This very commonplace occurrence was certainly not worth recording in
a London daily paper. So it is elaborately dressed up with details
intended to “fetch” the innocent reader. The writer says Elephas
columbi is as much larger than the Siberian mammoth as that is larger
than the horse of to-day. The truth is that Elephas columbi and the
mammoth are as nearly as possible of the same size. To writer goes on
to tell of a “fossil horse,” found at the same place, “a wonderful
two-toed animal marked by his cloven hoof.” That is cool impudence; it
is precisely “the double hoof” which none of the horse tribe possess,
but all the deer, cattle, and sheep do. He next tells us that elephants
and mastodons were never found together before, but supposed to have
shunned each other’s company. This is an invention; their remains
are found side by side all over Europe. Then suddenly the surprising
statement is made, like a bolt from the blue, “England ceases to be the
Mother Country and Germany the Fatherland to us,” and the pre-eminence
of America in providing the biggest thing on earth is declared to
have been already manifest “when the world rose out of chaos.” It is
satisfactory to be told that England is not the Mother Country of this
silliness; but whether the world which solemnly prints and reads it can
be said to have yet “risen out of chaos” must be regarded as doubtful.
23. _Mistletoe and Holly_
Christmas things and customs comprise much that has great interest
from a scientific point of view. Our modern celebration of Christmas
in England is a combination of the Christian festival of the Nativity
with that of the Epiphany, and that of St. Nicholas, who long ago
was substituted for the sea god Neptune, of classical mythology, by
sea-faring folk. Santa Claus--or Saint Nicholas--has his festival at
the beginning of December, but he has been carried over to Christmas
Day, and appears as “Father Christmas” in modern celebrations. There
is no great antiquity about this part of the tradition which we try to
keep alive at Christmas. The making of Christmas Day and Christmastide
into a special children’s festival is, on the other hand, a moving back
of the festival of the Epiphany, when gifts were brought to the child
Christ by wise men of the East. In Rome I have assisted in celebrating
our Twelfth Night under the name “Befani,” at a great illuminated
public fair, near the Pantheon, where children are taken to buy toys.
There has been in England also a similar moving back of the very
ancient--even prehistoric--celebrations of the New Year to Christmas,
and hence it is that the mysterious and sacred “mistletoe” of the
Druids is mingled in our houses with the less significant but beautiful
holly as a decoration. The Christian Church, however, did not, and does
not, sanction the introduction of mistletoe into the sacred edifice,
and not many years ago those who loved and truly understood tradition
would not permit mistletoe to be mixed with holly even in the private
house at Christmastide. Mistletoe, it was held, could not be rightly
introduced until the new year. The new year, however, of the Druids
differed in date from that of the later calendar, and fell in what is
to us the second week of March.
The holly tree, with its splendid red berries and shining, prickly
leaves, is a beautiful decorative plant, very hardy and abundant: it
was used by the old Romans in their “Saturnalia,” a feast which nearly
coincided with the Christmas of the new religion. There is a species
of holly in South America the leaves of which are made into tea by the
Indians, the Paraguay tea or matté. This tea is an unpleasant, bitter
decoction, devoid of aroma, if I may judge from samples which I have
tasted in London. “Ilex” is the botanical name of the genus to which
both our holly-tree and the Paraguay tea belong, but it must not be
confused with the evergreen oak to which the name Quercus ilex is given
on account of the resemblance of its leaves to those of a holly.
The mistletoe (or mistil-tan, the pale branch, in Anglo-Saxon) is a
pale-coloured, small-flowered member of a great family of parasitic
plants, the Loranthaceæ. They all live upon trees, and draw a part
of their nourishment from the juices of the tree into which their
rootlets penetrate. The tropical allies of the mistletoe are very
beautiful plants, with fine bunches of brilliantly-coloured flowers
and broad handsome green leaves. Our mistletoe is most commonly found
parasitic on apple trees and poplar trees. It occurs on nearly all our
trees, but is very rare on the oak. A careful inquiry some time ago
resulted in the discovery of only seven oaks in all England on which
mistletoe was growing. The Druids took their sacred mistletoe from
the sacred oak tree on account of its rarity. To them it was a charm
against infertility and sterility, and, according to Pliny, was cut and
distributed at the new year with great ceremony and the sacrifice of
heifers. Its paired white berries contain a viscid fluid which gives it
its botanical name Viscum album--and causes the seeds to adhere to the
beaks of birds--and thus to be transported to a distance and introduced
by the birds’ attempts to wipe their beaks into the cracks of the bark
of trees, in which the seeds germinate.
The white-berried mistletoe is the only English kind, and red mistletoe
seems altogether out of character. But a red-berried species (Viscum
cruciatum) is parasitic on the olive tree in Spain, North Africa,
and Syria. Curiously enough, though the white-berried mistletoe is
excommunicated by the Western Christian Church on account of its use in
pagan worship, the red-berried mistletoe was gathered from olive trees
in the Garden of Gethsemane and in the enclosure of the Holy Sepulchre
at Jerusalem by Sir Joseph Hooker, the great botanist. The red-berried
mistletoe was successfully raised from seed on young olive trees six
years ago in this country by the Hon. Charles Ellis, of Frensham, near
Haslemere, and was figured at that time by Hooker.
The mistletoe has an evil name in Scandinavian mythology. Baldur, the
beautiful, the Sun-god, was made, like Achilles, invulnerable to spears
and arrows cut from whatever tree grows on earth. All things had taken
an oath not to hurt him, and the gods of Walhalla amused themselves by
throwing all sorts of darts and clubs at him--none could hurt him. At
last the blind god Höder, who loved the beautiful Baldur none the less
because he himself was weakly and sightless, also ventured to throw a
dart at his invulnerable friend. It sped home, pierced Baldur’s heart,
and killed him. The dart was made of mistletoe, a tree that does not
grow on earth, but lives as a parasite high up on other trees, and had
taken no oath to spare Baldur. It had been put into the blind god’s
hand in a friendly helpful sort of way by a designing female, who was
really the evil spirit Loki in disguise. What is the allegory? Does
the mistletoe dart stand for calumny? Is the mistletoe associated with
calumny because it is a parasite in high places? If one must choose
between the mistletoe myth of Norsemen and Briton--the latter, which
survives in the power accorded to the mistletoe to license, even to
command, by its mere overhead existence, the giving and taking of
unexpected kisses and of expected ones, too, is certainly the more
cheerful and suitable to the hopeful enterprise of New Year.
24. _The Cattle Show_
I always look upon the Christmas Cattle Show of the Smithfield Club
as a scientific delight. Breeding is a most serious branch of
scientific knowledge, held by many people (of whom I am one) to be
of more importance to statesmen, politicians, and philanthropists
than any other kind of knowledge, and yet almost absolutely neglected
and completely ignored except by our farmers and horticulturists.
When examining in turn the splendid animals at Islington I have felt
indignant that it should be not improbable that, owing to ignorance
and neglect in official quarters, the long matured traditions and
built-up skill of our cattle-breeders will be destroyed, crushed out of
existence by huge, devastating capitalist “combines.” Soon we shall not
get the beef we wish for, but we shall have to take whatever inferior
stuff the giant monopolist chooses to force on us--or go without! Our
wonderful stock, so patiently and happily bred, the envy of the world,
will disappear, and our breeders forget their art. We shall none of us
in Britain know more about prime beef, roasts, grills, and marrow-bones
than do the people of Europe or the eaters of terrapin and soft-shelled
crabs.
It is wonderful that man, by deliberate choice in selecting the sires
and dams, has been able to produce such widely-different races as the
short-horn, the Highland and the Sussex breed, and not only to produce
them, but to keep them there generation after generation. In Nature,
no such deviations are allowed--her motto is “One species, one shape,”
which is only relaxed so as to allow a few geographical varieties. It
is man who makes all these strange breeds, just as he has made such
a queer, irregular, varied lot of creatures from the human stock.
Withdraw once and for all man’s guiding “intelligence,” or perversity,
if you choose so to call it, and all these cattle would in a few
hundred years revert to one form, nearly (but not quite) the same as
that they came from. So, too, the Sheep; so, too, the Pigs. And man
himself, if one could poison him universally with a mind-destroying
microbe, would become a beautiful, healthy, silly creature, dying
at first by millions annually, and at last represented by a hundred
thousand unvarying specimens, inhabiting the warm but healthy corners
of the earth, aimlessly happy, free from disease, neither increasing
nor decreasing in number. It is legitimate, and is a means of examining
the whole problem of man’s history, to inquire whether we have reason
or not to suppose that, were intelligent man thus removed arbitrarily
and completely from the scene, a new “lord of the world” would arise,
by normal evolutionary process. A bird, an elephant, a rat, might give
rise to the new line of progressive development, and, unchecked by man,
once jealous and repressive, but now down-fallen, this new stock might
acquire such brains and wits as we men now boast of, and people the
earth. You never can tell! But it is not the business of science to
expatiate on such possibilities.
The domesticated cattle of Europe are of very ancient prehistoric
origin. They are for convenience called “Bos taurus,” and seem to be
derived from the huge Bos primigenius or Aurochs, the Urus of Cæsar,
which was wild in Central Europe in his time, and from the Indian
Bos indicus--which is represented by the Indian and African native
breeds of “humped” cattle. It is, however, very difficult to trace
most of man’s domesticated animals or his cultivated plants to their
original wild forms and original habitation. At the Cattle Show we
only see British and Irish breeds, and only those cattle bred as
meat-makers--the Highland, the Welsh, the Shorthorns, the polled Angus,
the South Devons, the Hereford, the Sussex, the Galloway, the Dexter.
But there are other British breeds famous for their milk-producing
quality, such as the Guernseys and Jerseys, whilst in Hungary, Italy,
and Spain they have magnificent breeds of great size, and often with
truly splendid spirally-turned horns (e.g. the Spanish), which are
used for ploughing and carting, and are fattened, killed, and eaten
after doing ten years’ good work. These fine creatures are not seen in
England. They come nearest to the extinct Aurochs, which was, however,
bigger than any of them. It, too, existed in prehistoric times in
England, and we find its bones in the gravel of the Thames Valley. The
last aurochs, or wild bull of Europe, was killed in Poland near the
end of the seventeenth century. The wild Chillingham cattle are Roman
cattle run wild. Many of these breeds and the bones of the aurochs to
compare as to size may be seen in the north hall of the Natural History
Museum, where I commenced a collection of domesticated breeds of
cattle, sheep, horses, dogs, &c., eight years ago. Chillingham cattle
are to be seen in the Zoological Gardens.
An interesting fact in this connection is that the splendid bull which
is kept in half-wild herds in Spain for the purpose of “bull-fights,”
is of a totally different race from that of the big, long-horned
agricultural cattle. It may be seen at Cromwell-road, a specimen
killed in the ring having been procured at my request and presented
to the museum through the kindness of the British Consul at Seville.
The Spanish fighting bull is, curiously enough, more like our Channel
Island milk-producing cattle than any other. It probably came to
Spain from North Africa--but there seems to be no record or history
concerning it--and if there were it would probably be a fantastic
invention. It seems that only the bulls of this special breed can be
played with and dazzled by the matador’s red cloak. A Scotch bull was
once brought by sea to Seville and introduced to the arena. He paid no
attention to cloaks, red or otherwise, but always went straight for his
man. It is stated that he was soon left quite alone in the ring! The
native African cattle (of Indian origin) at Ujiji and in Damaraland
have the biggest horns of any true Bos--as much as 13-1/2 ft. along the
curve from point to point. We have to distinguish from our own cattle,
for which there is no name except “Bos taurus,” for neither ox, bull,
cow, heifer, nor steer will do--the other bovines--the buffaloes, the
yak, and the bison--besides those great beasts the gayal and the gaur
of India and the banting of Malay. All these may be seen and studied
either in the Museum or the Zoological Gardens.
25. _The Experimental Method_
The observations lately made by a Chancellor of the Exchequer about an
attempt to put salt on a bird’s tail remind me of my first attempt to
deal experimentally with a popular superstition. I was a very trustful
little boy, and I had been assured by various grown-up friends that if
you place salt on a bird’s tail the bird becomes as it were transfixed
and dazed, and that you can then pick it up and carry it off. On
several occasions I carried a packet of salt into the London park where
my sister and I were daily taken by our nurse. In vain I threw the salt
at the sparrows. They always flew away, and I came to the conclusion
that I had not succeeded in getting any salt or, at any rate, not
enough on to the tail of any one of them.
Then I devised a great experiment. There was a sort of creek eight feet
long and three feet broad at the west end of the ornamental water in
St. James’s Park. My sister attracted several ducks with offerings of
bread into this creek, and I, standing near its entrance, with a huge
paper bag of salt, trembled with excitement at the approaching success
of my scheme. I poured quantities--whole ounces of salt--on to the
tails of the doomed birds as they passed me on their way back from the
creek to the open water. Their tails were covered with salt. But, to
my surprise and horror, they did not stop! They gaily swam forward,
shaking their feathers and uttering derisive “quacks.” I was profoundly
troubled and distressed. I had clearly proved one thing, namely, that
my nursemaid, uncle, and several other trusted friends--but not, I am
still glad to remember, my father--were either deliberate deceivers or
themselves the victims of illusion. I was confirmed in my youthful wish
to try whether things are as people say they are or not. Somewhat early
perhaps, I adopted the motto of the Royal Society, “Nullius in verba.”
And a very good motto it is, too, in spite of the worthy Todhunter
and other toiling pedagogues, who have declared that it is outrageous
to encourage a youth to seek demonstration rather than accept the
statement of his teacher, especially if the latter be a clergyman.
My experiment was on closely similar lines to that made by the Royal
Society on July 24, 1660--in regard to the alleged property of powdered
rhinoceros horn--which was reputed to paralyse poisonous creatures such
as snakes, scorpions, and spiders. We read in the journal-book, still
preserved by the society, under this date: “A circle was made with
powder of unicorne’s horn, and a spider set in the middle of it, but it
immediately ran out several times repeated. The spider once made some
stay upon the powder.”
26. _Hypnotism and an Experiment on the Influence of the Magnet_
A more interesting result followed from an experiment made in the same
spirit twenty-five years later. I was in Paris, and went with a medical
friend to visit the celebrated physician Charcot, to whom at that time
I was a stranger, at the Salpêtrière Hospital. He and his assistants
were making very interesting experiments on hypnotism. Charcot allowed
great latitude to the young doctors who worked with him. They initiated
and carried through very wild “exploratory” experiments on this
difficult subject. Charcot did not discourage them, but did not accept
their results unless established by unassailable evidence, although his
views were absurdly misrepresented by the newspapers and wondermongers
of the day.
At this time there had been a revival of the ancient and fanciful
doctrine of “metallic sympathies,” which flourished a hundred years
ago, and was even then but a revival of the strange fancies as to
“sympathetic powders,” which were brought before the Royal Society
by Sir Kenelm Digby at one of its first meetings, in 1660. In the
journal-book of the Royal Society of June 5 of that year, we read,
“Magnetical cures were then discoursed of. Sir Gilbert Talbot promised
to bring in what he knew of sympatheticall cures. Those that had
any powder of sympathy were desired to bring some of it at the next
meeting. Sir Kenelm Digby related that the calcined powder of toades
reverberated, applyed in bagges upon the stomach of a pestiferate
body, cures it by several applications.” The belief in sympathetic
powders and metals was a last survival of the mediæval doctrine of
“signatures,” itself a form of the fetish still practised by African
witch-doctors, and directly connected with the universal system of
magic and witchcraft of European as well as of more remote populations.
To this day, such beliefs lie close beneath the thin crust of modern
knowledge and civilisation, even in England, treasured in obscure
tradition and ready to burst forth in grotesque revivals in all classes
of society. The Royal Society put many of these reputed mechanisms
of witchcraft and magic to the test, and by showing their failure
to produce the effects attributed to them, helped greatly to cause
witches, wizards, and their followers to draw in their horns and
disappear. The germ, however, remained, and reappears in various forms
to-day.
Thirty years ago some of the doctors in Paris believed that a small
disc of gold, or copper, or of silver, laid flat on the arm could
produce an absence of sensation in the arm, and that whilst one person
could be thus affected by one metal another person would respond
only to another metal, according to a supposed “sympathy” or special
affinity of the nervous system for this or that metal. This astonishing
doctrine was thought to be proved by certain experiments made with the
curiously “nervous” (hysterical) women who frequent the Salpêtrière
Hospital as out-patients. That the loss of sensation, which was real
enough, was due to what is called “suggestion”--that is to say, a
belief on the part of the patient that such would be the case, because
the doctor said it would--and had nothing to do with one metal or
another, was subsequently proved by making use of wooden discs in
place of metallic ones, the patient being led to suppose that a disc
of metal of the kind with which she believed herself “sympathetic” was
being applied. Sensation disappeared just as readily as when a special
metallic disc was used.
The old hypothesis of the influence of a magnet on the human body
was at this time revived, and Charcot’s pupils found that when a
susceptible female patient held in the hand a bar of iron surrounded by
a coil of copper wire leading to a chemical electric cell or battery
nothing happened so long as the connection was broken. But as soon as
the wire was connected so as to set up an electric current and to make
the bar of iron into a magnet, the hand and arm (up to the shoulder)
of the young woman holding the bar, lost all sensation. She was not
allowed to see her hand and arm, and was apparently quite unconscious
of the thrusting of large carpet-needles into, and even through, them,
though as long as the bar of iron was not magnetised she shrunk from a
pin-prick applied to the same part. I saw this experiment with Charcot
and some others present, and I noticed that the order to an assistant
to “make contact,” that is to say, to convert the bar of iron into a
magnet, was given very emphatically by Charcot, and that there was an
attitude of expectation on the part of all present--which was followed
by the demonstration by means of needle-pricking that the young woman’s
arm had lost sensation, or, as they say, “was in a state of anæsthesia.”
Charcot went away saying he should repeat the experiment before some
medical friends in an hour or two. In the meantime, being left alone
in the laboratory with my companion as witness, I emptied the chemical
fluid (potassium bichromate) from the electric battery and substituted
pure water. It was now incapable of setting up an electric current
and converting the bar into a magnet. When Charcot returned with his
visitors, the patient was brought in, and the whole ritual repeated.
There was no effect on sensation when the bar was held in the hand so
long as the order to set the current going, and so magnetise the bar,
had not been given. At last the word was given, “Make!” and at once
the patient’s arm became anæsthetised, as earlier in the day. We ran
large carpet-needles into the hand without the smallest evidence of the
patient’s knowledge. The order was given to break the current (that is,
to cease magnetising the bar), and at once the young woman exhibited
signs of discomfort, and remonstrated with Charcot for allowing
such big needles to be thrust into her hand when she was devoid of
sensation! My experiment had succeeded perfectly.
It would not have done to let Charcot, or anyone else (except my
witness) know that when the order “Make” was given, there was no
“making,” but that the bar remained as before un-magnetised. The
conviction of everyone, including Charcot himself, that the bar became
a magnet, and that loss of sensation would follow, was a necessary
condition of the “suggestion” or control of the patient. It was thus
demonstrated that the state of the iron bar as magnet or not magnet had
nothing to do with the result, but that the important thing was that
the patient should believe that the bar became a magnet, and that she
should be influenced by her expectation, and that of all those around
her, that the bar, being now a magnet, sensation would disappear from
her arm. With appropriate apologies I explained to Charcot that the
electric battery had been emptied by me, and that no current had been
produced. The assistants rushed to verify the fact, and I was expecting
that I should be frigidly requested to take my leave, when my hand was
grasped, and my shoulder held by the great physician, who said, “Mais
que vous avez bien fait, mon cher Monsieur!” I had many delightful
hours with him in after years, both at the Salpêtrière and in his
beautiful old house and garden in the Boulevard St. Germain.
There are few “subjects” in this country for the student of hypnotism
to equal the patients of the Salpêtrière and other hospitals in
France--and very few amongst those who read, and even write, about
“occultism” and “super-normal phenomena” know the leading facts which
have been established in regard to this important branch of psychology.
The study of the natural history of the mind, its modes of activity,
and its defects and diseases is of fundamental importance--but its
results are often either unknown or greatly misunderstood by those
who have most need of such knowledge, namely those who, mistaking the
attitude of an ignorant child for that of “a candid inquirer,” try
to form a judgment as to the truth or untruth of stories of ghosts,
thought-transference, spirit-controls, crystal-gazing, divining-rods,
amulets, and the evil eye.
27. _Luminous Owls and Other Luminous Animals and Plants_
A correspondent lately described in a letter to a London newspaper
what he believed to have been “a luminous owl,” which was seen flying
about at night in Norfolk. He mentioned the well-known fact that the
dense greasy patch of feathers on the breast of the heron is said to
be luminous by many trustworthy observers. It is very probable that
it was some carnivorous or fish-eating bird, which was thus seen in a
luminous condition at night. The occurrence is much more in accordance
with known facts than most people would suppose to be the case.
Light, even strong light, is produced by many natural objects without
the accompaniment of heat. We usually expect not merely fire where
there is smoke, but heat--in fact, great heat, where there is light
or flame. Yet there are many instances to the contrary, and the word
“phosphorescence” is used to indicate a production of light without
heat in reference to the fact that phosphorus is luminous, even when
covered with water, although no appreciable heat accompanies the light
such as we are accustomed to observe in ordinary “combustion” or
burning.
There is more than one kind of phosphorescence. We separate the
phosphorescence which is due to the oxidation of peculiar fatty matters
in the bodies of plants and of animals (such as glow-worms) from that
which is caused by the breaking or heating of crystals (white arsenic
and apatite), or by longer or shorter exposure to the sun’s rays
(luminous paint), or by radio-activity, or by electrical discharges in
vacuum tubes.
The “luminous owl” of the above-mentioned correspondent and the
luminous breast of the heron probably owe their strange appearance
to the birds having smeared themselves with phosphorescent carrion or
dead fish, the luminosity of which is due to bacteria. The simplest
case of phosphorescence in living things is that of the almost
ubiquitous phosphorescent bacteria, minute microbes like those which
cause putrefaction. They can be obtained and cultivated from almost
any sample of sea water. A thin slice of meat placed in a shallow dish
of salt water, so as to be barely covered by the liquid, will in cool,
damp weather, almost certainly become covered with the growth of this
phosphorescent germ and appear brilliantly luminous. The populations
of seaside towns have often been terrified by all the meat in the
butchers’ shops suddenly becoming thus phosphorescent. The growth may
be cultivated in flasks of salt broth. I have prepared such flasks,
which, when shaken so as to introduce oxygen, give out a heatless
blaze of light of a greenish colour, brilliant enough to light up a
room. I once found a bone in a dog’s kennel which was brilliantly
phosphorescent owing to this bacterium. I kept it for several days
and showed it to Huxley as well as to other friends. A certain kind
of phosphorescent bacteria are parasitic in the blood of sandhoppers,
causing a disease which kills them. The diseased sandhoppers shine like
glow-worms. I have found them abundantly on the sea shore near Boulogne
and near Trouville, but not yet on the English coast. The bacteria
can be seen with the microscope and inoculated from diseased luminous
sandhoppers into healthy ones by using a needle to prick first the
diseased and then the healthy creature.
The animals of the sea are often provided with secreting organs,
producing a fatty body which can be oxidised and made luminous at the
pleasure of the animal. Thus many marine worms and minute sea-shrimps
give out brilliant flashes of light. Jelly-fish of many kinds, and the
minute noctiluca, no bigger than a pin’s head, and the three-horned
animalcule Ceratium tripos are the usual cause of the phosphorescence
of the sea on our own coast. Deep-sea fishes are provided with large
phosphorescent discs or plates on the surface of the body, which are
sometimes furnished with lenses like a bull’s-eye lantern. Glow-worms
and fire-flies and some tropical beetles are examples of insects which
have fatty phosphorescent organs which they can illuminate (oxidise)
at pleasure, under the control of the nervous system. Some of the West
Indian phosphorescent beetles are remarkable for having “lights” of
two different colours. In the marshes around Mantua the fire-flies
are so abundant at the end of June that the air for miles is full of
them, and the sight so extraordinary and beautiful as to be worth a
long journey to see. I have seen fire-flies as far north as Bonn on
the Rhine. Once I was nearly upset by a horse shying at a glow-worm on
a bank in Worcestershire. Some moulds and well-grown toadstools are
phosphorescent, and a phosphorescent earthworm, a peculiar species,
now well known, was first of all discovered in the South of Ireland
by the late Professor Allman. In the autumn I have often picked up
the phosphorescent centipede, which is remarkable for the fact that
the phosphorescent material is a kind of slime which exudes from the
body--the creature leaving thus a luminous trail behind it as it
crawls. The piddock, or pholas--a boring sort of mussel--has brilliant
phosphorescent glands, and the boys at Naples love to munch these
shell-fish at night, and then to alarm the passer-by by opening their
mouths, and showing a brilliant green light within. Cases are recorded,
but not recently, of persons suffering from tuberculosis becoming
phosphorescent; a possible, but certainly a rare, occurrence. Animal
and vegetable phosphorescence is varied in colour. The light emitted
is blue-green, green, yellow, orange, and even red in different cases.
It is always due to the oxidation of a separate fatty chemical body,
which can in many instances be extracted, then dried, and subsequently
made luminous by moistening with ether, in consequence of which
oxidation by the oxygen of the atmosphere is facilitated.
28. _Reminiscences of Lord Kelvin_
The late Lord Kelvin was one of the most fascinating personalities
in the learned world. He uttered with a delightful simplicity the
thoughts, however romantic and fanciful, which bubbled up in his
wonderful brain. It was because he was so much of a poet that he was
so great a man of science. Atoms and molecules and vortices, and the
vibrations and gyrations of ether, and “sorting demons” were all
pictured in his mind’s eye, and used as counters of thought to give
shape and the equivalent of tangible reality to his conceptions. By
such conceptions he was able to present to himself and his listeners
the complex mechanisms of crystals, of liquids, of gases, of electrical
and magnetic currents, and the endless astounding proceedings of rays
of light unsuspected by the ordinary man.
I think the last occasion on which he spoke in public was after Sir
David Gill’s brilliant address to the British Association at Leicester
last August. Lord Kelvin was sitting close to me on that occasion, and
I noticed that he never moved his gaze from the speaker. He followed
Sir David’s account of stars, whose distance is stated by the number
of years it takes for their light to travel to this earth, like an
enraptured schoolboy, and cheered when the evidence for the existence
of two great streams of movement of the heavenly bodies, in opposite
directions, going no one knows whither, coming no one knows whence,
was sketched to us by the lecturer. In proposing a vote of thanks to
Sir David Gill, Lord Kelvin burst into a sort of rhapsody, in which,
with unaffected enthusiasm, he declared that we had been taken on
a journey far more wonderful than that of Aladdin on the enchanted
carpet; we had been carried to the remotest stars and well-nigh round
the universe, and brought back safely to Leicester on the wings of
science, and the most marvellous thing about it all was that it is true!
A few weeks before this Lord Kelvin was at the dinner in celebration of
the jubilee of the foundation of the Chemical Society. In the speech
which he then made he referred to the painful accident of a year or
so ago which we had all so much regretted, when he had burnt his hand
accidentally in some experiments with phosphorus, and had had to carry
his arm in a sling for some weeks. “Lord Rayleigh, the president of
the Royal Society,” he said, “has just told us how, as a boy, he gave
proof of his devotion to chemical science by burning his fingers with
phosphorus--but I think my devotion must be considered greater than
his, for I burnt my fingers very badly with phosphorus only last year,
when I was 83 years old. It was at the end of April. My friends said
I was old enough to know better, and it should have happened, not at
the end of April, but on the first day, of that month.” Lord Kelvin
was associated in work in the sixties and seventies with another
splendid man, Tait, of Edinburgh, who, besides being a great professor
of “Natural Philosophy,” and joint author of the celebrated treatise
known as _Thomson and Tait_, was a great athlete--a golfer of the first
class, a first-rate billiard player, and a wise lover of good ale,
which he drank and gave to his friends to drink, whilst he discoursed
as few, if any, to my knowledge, can now do, of things philosophical,
mathematical, and humane.
29. _The So-called Jargon of Science_
It is often discussed as to whether science fails to obtain the
attention of the public and to excite intelligent interest, owing to
the obscure language which lecturers and writers use when attempting
to expound scientific views and discoveries to “the ordinary man,” or
whether the fault lies with the “ordinary man” himself, who is too
frivolous to bother about following carefully the words addressed to
him, and, moreover, has never learnt even the A B C of science at
school. It is certainly the case, as Professor Turner, the Oxford
professor of astronomy, has pointed out, that a popular lecturer could
tell his auditors a good deal more in an hour if they already had the
elements of his subject at their fingers’ ends than he can under the
existing state of neglect of school education in the natural sciences.
That, however, seems to be obvious enough, and does not touch the real
question.
I have had a long experience, both in lecturing myself and in
assisting in the training of others to lecture and also to inform
the uninstructed public by means of museum-labels and popular notes.
It seems to me that there are a large number of men who, even though
capable of expressing themselves clearly under usual circumstances,
yet fail to do so when trying to expound or to teach, in consequence
of three distinct faults, any one of which is enough to render their
discourse or writing hopelessly obscure to “the man in the street.”
These are, first, a kind of pride in using special terms and modes of
expression which infatuates the lecturer or writer, and leads him,
without reflection, to an attitude of mind expressed by saying, “That
is the correct statement about this matter, short and true. If you
don’t understand it, there are others who can. You can leave it alone;
it is not worth my while to spend time and trouble to explain further;
it is for you to give yourselves the trouble to find out what I mean.”
The second fault is a real incapacity (which occurs in many learned
men) to realise the state of mind of the uninstructed man, woman or
child who eagerly desires to be instructed: this is want of imagination
and want of sympathy. There is no cure for those who fail as teachers
for either of these two reasons.
The third fault is much more widely at work, and the most kindly
sympathetic lecturers and writers--but more especially lecturers--often
suffer from it and could easily amend their practice. It consists
in the attempt to tell the audience or reader too much--vastly
too much--in the limit of one hour, or within the space of a few
lines or pages. This failure is well-nigh universal. I have heard
a distinguished discoverer, an eloquent and able man, try to tell
a completely ignorant audience in one hour the results of years of
experiment and work by many men on the electrical currents observed
in nerves. The audience did not know what is meant by an electrical
current, nor anything about nerves, nor a single one of the technical
terms necessarily used by the lecturer. The task was an impossible one.
In six lectures it might have been accomplished, and great delight
and increase of understanding afforded to the listeners instead of
perplexity and a sense of their own incapacity and the hopeless
obscurity of science. That, I am convinced, is the real trouble, viz.,
the attempt to tell too much in a short time, the failure by the
lecturer to arrange his exposition in a series of well-considered,
definite steps, each exciting the desire to know more, and each
given sufficient time and experimental illustration or pictorial
demonstration to lodge its meaning and value safely and soundly in
the tender brain of the ignorant but willing listener. I am convinced
that there is in very many lecturers a tendency to try to crowd and
compress into one lecture what should occupy ten--if the willing and
intelligent but ignorant listener is to feel happy and is really
to understand what is said and done for his instruction. A special
difficulty also arises from the fact that the lecturer often feels
himself called upon to address and to say something to those among the
audience who already know a good deal about his subject, as well as to
make things clear to those who are absolute novices.
Some people have made this discussion the opportunity for attacking
on the one hand the English language, and on the other the use of
special names applied by men of science to special things and special
processes. We cannot at once change the English language, even did we
wish to do so. But the creation of special names to distinguish things
not distinguished from one another in common speech is a necessity. It
cannot be avoided. It is mere impatience and temper to call the names
and terms which are necessary as counters of thought “jargon.” No doubt
there may be in some lecturers and writers a tendency to excessive use
of special terms and names, but the real trouble in the matter arises
from the too rapid thrusting of a large number of such unfamiliar words
upon an untrained audience. If new words are introduced in moderation
they can be assimilated. They cannot be dispensed with altogether.
A correspondent lately complained to me that I wrote of the minute
creature which causes the sleeping sickness as a Trypanosome, whereas,
had I called it “a blood-parasite” he would have known what I meant,
and been able to follow my statement more easily. I am sorry to say
that I cannot agree with him. There are many kinds of blood-parasites;
there are the worms known as Filariæ, there are the vegetable microbes
known as bacteria and bacilli and spirilla, and there are minute
creatures of an animal nature called pyroplasma and trypanosoma
(beside some others). These must be distinguished from one another
if we are to understand anything about the causation of disease by
microbes. It would be mere muddling and confusion to simply call them
all by the same name, simply “blood parasite.” That would cause the
same sort of confusion as would occur if the Smiths or Browns of our
acquaintance had no Christian names by which we can separate each
member of the class from the others and assign to him his own special
qualities, opinions, and property. What some people call “scientific
jargon” is assuredly not a thing to be proud of or to mouth with a
sense of superiority. Nevertheless, it is absolutely necessary, and
must be introduced gently and considerately to the stranger who can
and will, if reasonably handled, appreciate the immeasurable advantage
of having distinct words to signify distinct things. That, after all,
is an elementary feature in all language. And just as the “jargon” of
a game, a sport, or a profession has a fascination for those who use
it, and forms a bond of union or special understanding between them,
so inevitably does the jargon of a branch of science flourish in the
thought and on the lips of those who devote themselves to that branch,
and bind them in a sort of freemasonry. We do not expect cricketers
or golfers to talk in plain English; why should we expect chemists or
naturalists to do so? After all, it is a question of moderation and of
gradually increasing the dose. The beginner must not be terrified by an
array of outlandish words.
30. _Rats and the Plague_
Rats! Who said rats? That is an important question, because the word
means different things to different people. To some persons “rats”
means simply “nonsense”! To Sir James Crichton Browne it means the
devastator of stores and the dread carrier of bubonic plague. To the
naturalist it means a group or natural cohort of small mammals similar
to our common rat and mouse, representatives of which are found in
every quarter of the globe and in almost every island of the sea. The
distinct “kinds” or “species” are numbered by the hundred. They are
extraordinarily alike, and can only be distinguished and classified
into proper “species” by careful examination and measurement. Mr.
Oldfield Thomas, of the Natural History Museum, has made a special
study of them. To give an idea of his work, it may be mentioned that
ninety different names had been given by previous writers to as many
apparently distinct kinds of rat occurring in India. But by careful
measurement and study of the relations to one another of these rats,
Mr. Thomas has reduced the number of really distinct Indian species of
rats and mice (for a mouse is only a smaller rat) to nineteen. What
we call in English water-rats, or water-voles, field-voles, and such
little foreign beasts as the lemming and the hamster, are very close to
rats in appearance, but are separated on account of clear differences
of structure from true rats and mice.
At a meeting in London the total destruction of “rats” was advocated.
Whether it was affirmed at the meeting, or was merely an error of
those who wrote and commented on the matter afterwards, I do not
know, but it was very generally stated in this connection that the
old Black rat (known to naturalists as Mus rattus) is quite extinct
in England, and that its place has been taken by the Norwegian, or
Grey rat (Mus decumanus), also called the Hanoverian rat, because it
became noticeable by its abundance in this country at the time of the
accession of the Hanoverian kings. The Black rat is not extinct in
England, not even very rare. Mr. Stendall lately sent me specimens
caught in his warehouse in the City of London, where they are
abundant. In many localities, _e.g._ Great Yarmouth, and in isolated
dwelling-places they occur, and even outnumber the Norwegian rat. A
most important and remarkable fact is that the rats which infest ships
are often all Black rats. The Black rat, or Alexandrine rat (as Mr.
Thomas calls it), lives in our houses, in the roof, in recesses of
woodwork. It is a house rat, whereas the Grey, or Norwegian rat, lives
in the sewers and the banks of ditches, and only comes up into the
basement of houses through defective building. The Grey rat has driven
out the water-voles from many river banks near towns, just as he has
to a great extent taken the place of the Black rat in houses where the
kitchen and food stores are close to and in communication with the
sewer!
The Black rat cannot be really distinguished by his blackness. That is
why some naturalists call him the Alexandrine rat, so as to avoid a
misleading implication. He is often of a bright yellowish-brown colour
along the back--with longer dark-brown hairs and a good deal of grey
elsewhere--quite like the Norwegian or Grey rat in colour. At the same
time he is often blackish, and frequently very black. The colour of
all these kinds of rats and mice can vary, according to the conditions
and colour surroundings in which they live. Black, white, sandy-brown,
or a mixture of spots of all three colours, or a uniform “mouse-brown”
tint, are (as most boys know) the possibilities revealed by allowing
them to breed in captivity. Nature selects accordingly the particular
tint which affords protection from observation by enemies in a given
locality.
The real distinction between the Black (Alexandrine) rat and the Grey
(Norwegian) rat is that the Black rat is smaller, has a tail longer
than its body (125 per cent.), and long and wide ears, which stand out
from the head. The Grey (Norwegian) rat is a larger, heavy-bodied rat,
with a tail shorter than its body (90 per cent.), and short ears. Both
these rats are common in India, but there is a third kind, which is
the commonest of the three in Calcutta, and is probably the one most
concerned in the dissemination of plague. It differs in some definite
features from both the Black rat and the Grey rat, although it is
very much like the latter in general appearance. It is called Nesokia
Bengalensis, or Mole-rat. It is a big rat--its tail is only 70 per
cent. the length of its body; the pads on the soles of its feet differ
from those of the two other rats; its fur is thin and bristly, and when
it is put into a cage it erects its bristles and spits! It is, like
the Black rat, a stable and granary rat, and makes burrows in which it
stores grain.
The rats of Calcutta have been carefully studied lately by Dr. Hossack,
in consequence of their connection with the bubonic plague. In the
older native parts of Calcutta, the Mole rat is twice as common as the
Norwegian Grey rat, and the Black rat not so abundant as the latter.
In the central European part of the town the Grey rat is commoner than
the Mole rat--because, apparently, the better-built houses do not
afford such facilities for burrowing. The Black rat is here also by a
good deal the most uncommon of the three. All these rats suffer from
the plague, die from it, and the fleas which lived in their fur leave
them as they get cold, and make their way on to human beings, whom
they consequently infect with the plague bacillus. This has now been
quite conclusively proved by the Indian doctors charged by Government
with the study of the causes of the plague. The plague bacillus--a
minute, rod-like organism, which grows in the blood and lymph, once
it has effected a lodgment, and there produces deadly poison--was
discovered some fourteen years ago, but it is only recently that the
plague bacillus has been shown to live in the intestine of the flea,
which sucks it up with the blood or other fluids of the rat on which it
lives. The flea, which readily goes to man, does not suffer from the
plague bacilli which it has gorged, but conveys them to man either by
its bite or by its excrement.
This being so, it becomes important to know all about the fleas of
rats. Quite unexpected facts have been discovered in regard to them.
In Europe a very large flea is found on the grey and the black rat.
This kind has not, I believe, ever been found on human beings or been
known to bite them. But in India, in the Philippines, and in the ports
of the Mediterranean, this northern rat-flea is rare, and its place is
taken by a smaller and more actively vagrant flea, which Mr. Charles
Rothschild (who is the great authority on fleas) found upon several
different kinds of small animals in Egypt. He named it “Pulex cheopis.”
This is the flea (and not our big northern rat-flea) which acts as
the carrier of plague-germs from rats to man in India. It appears
from experiments that the common flea of man (Pulex irritans) and the
cat-and-dog flea (Pulex felis), as well as the big northern rat-flea
(Ceratophyllus fasciatus), can harbour the plague-bacillus if fed on
plague-stricken animals, but there are no observations to show (as
there are about the “Cheops flea”) that they pass habitually from man
to rats and rats to men.
It is happily so long (200 years) since we had a real outbreak of
plague in Europe that we are still in doubt as to whether the Grey
rat or the Black rat is the more susceptible to the disease--and what
flea, if any, acts, or has acted, as the carrier from rat to man in
this part of the world. The suggestion has been made that the Grey
Norwegian rat takes plague less easily than the Black rat, or than
the Indian Mole-rat (Nesokia), and that the multiplication of the
Grey rat in England and France and consequent decrease in Black rats,
is, therefore, an advantage, so far as plague is concerned. Possibly
with the Grey rat has come the big rat-flea, which does not attack
man as does the Cheops flea. The disappearance of plague in Western
Europe seems to correspond in date with the arrival of the Grey rat.
But, on the other hand, an alteration in the character of our houses
and their greater “accommodation” for the new rat rather than the old
black species may account both for the increase of the latter and for
the absence of dirt and vermin in the dwelling-rooms and bed-chambers
which formerly enabled the plague-bacillus to flourish amongst us,
and to reach the human population--as it does now in India and China.
All this shows how necessary it is to have accurate true knowledge of
such despised creatures as rats and fleas, if we are to live in great
crowded cities closely packed together. And it should also make us try
to gain further knowledge as to these creatures, so that we may form
a reasonable anticipation of the consequences we are bringing down on
our heads when we set about exterminating this or that race of animals.
We are not yet sure that the Norwegian Grey rat is not a blessing in
disguise.
31. _Ancient Temples and Astronomy_
Janssen, the French astronomer, who died about the same time as Lord
Kelvin, acquired celebrity by his discovery of a method for seeing
and studying the great flames or prominences which surround the sun.
The glare of the great fiery ball is such that the eye is blinded in
ordinary circumstances to the light of these prominences. They were
only known from their coming into view during the total eclipse of
the sun’s disc by the moon. Then they were seen as a great fringe of
pointed, tongue-like flames around the darkened disc. But at other
times no use of smoked glass or telescope could bring them into view.
Janssen went to India in 1868 to study these prominences of the sun
during the total eclipse of that year. His purpose was to examine with
a spectroscope the light given out by the prominences. The day after
the eclipse Janssen found that he could still examine the prominences
and make out their shape and the chemical elements present in them by
looking at them through the spectroscope, although the sun’s disc was
now uncovered, and it was impossible to see the prominences with the
unaided eye or with the telescope.
A young English astronomer, hundreds of miles apart from Janssen, on
the same day, Aug. 18, 1868, made the same discovery in the same way,
independently. The English astronomer was Norman Lockyer, and the
French Academy of Sciences caused a medal to be struck in commemoration
of this discovery. The medal is before me as I write. It shows the
heads of Janssen and of Lockyer side by side, as they were forty years
ago.
Each has carried on his researches and discoveries with unabated
vigour since that happy conjunction. Sir Norman Lockyer has for many
years added to his constant study of the sun, fixed stars, and nebulæ
by means of the spectroscope and photographic record of spectra, an
inquiry into the evidence afforded by astronomical facts first as to
the age of Greek and Egyptian temples, and latterly as to that of the
mysterious avenues and circles of stones (such as Stonehenge) scattered
about the British Islands, of the history and use of which we have
only vague traditions and no actual records. These stone circles and
avenues are very numerous in Great Britain. The chief are Stonehenge,
Avebury, and Stanton Drew in the middle South of England; the Hurlers,
Boscawen-Un, Tregaseal, the Merry Maidens, and the Nine Maidens in
Cornwall; Merrivale Avenue and Fernworthy Avenue in Devon; many circles
in Aberdeenshire, in Cumberland, Derbyshire, and Oxfordshire, as well
as monuments of the same kind in Wales. Sir Norman Lockyer has obtained
measurements of most of these and plans showing the relations of the
principal lines of their ground plan to the points of the compass, and
so to the position occupied by the sun and by certain stars on given
days of the year at the rising or setting of those heavenly bodies. It
may well be asked what is Sir Norman’s object in doing this?
The explanation is as follows: The builders of Christian churches in
Europe have, as a rule, set out the ground plan of the church shaped
like a Latin cross, so that the arms of the cross run north and
south--the head points to the east, or Orient, and the base to the
west. In consequence of this custom the word “orientation” has come
into use, to signify the direction purposely given to the main length
of a temple or church. Now it appears that many, if not all, ancient
temples (including the ancient stone circles and avenues of Britain)
were purposely so “oriented” by their builders that a particular
star, or the sun itself, should at a fixed day and hour in the year
be seen during its movement across the heavens through an opening in
the building especially designed for this purpose, so as to allow the
light of the star to fall into the most sacred part of the temple, the
“Naon,” or Holy of Holies. At the moment of its appearance special
ceremonies were performed by the priests and worshippers in the temple.
The temple was dedicated to and carefully “oriented to” that particular
star. Thus, in ancient Greece, the Pleiades, Sirius (the dog star),
Spica, and other stars were thus used; in Egypt, Capella, Canopus, and
Alpha Centauri; in Britain, Arcturus, as well as those used by the
Greeks.
These temples were really astronomical observatories, and were meant
always to remain “oriented” to their special star, which must, if the
earth were steady in its position, although spinning like a top, and
also circling round the sun, duly appear each year at the expected
day and minute in the special “window” or aperture designed so as to
allow the star--then, and then only--to shine into the temple. But the
astronomers have discovered that the earth is not steady! It “wobbles”
very slowly and regularly as a top wobbles. The position of the axis
of rotation--corresponding in position to the stem of a top--does not
remain one and the same, but is pulled aside by the attraction of the
sun and moon, and moves round as one may often see in the spinning of
a top. The earth takes about 26,000 years for its poles to complete
the cycle of its wobble. Moreover, in addition to this, there is the
fact that the earth’s axis (stem of the top) is not nearly upright,
but inclined at a considerable angle (23 deg.) to the horizontal or
plane of its orbit round the sun, and that this inclination very slowly
changes, in addition to the wobbling movement. The amount and rate of
these changes in the inclination of the axis of the earth have been
definitely ascertained by astronomers.
I mention the nature of these movements because they clearly enough
must upset altogether the desired result of the orientation of temples.
The last-mentioned slow increase of obliquity affects solar temples
chiefly, and the more rapid wobbling affects the star temples--both to
such a degree that temples oriented two or three thousand years ago
are now quite out of line, and no longer “catch,” so to speak, their
particular star or the sun on the appointed day. They no longer point
truly, because the “pitch” of the earth has altered since they were set.
The next point is that astronomers are able to calculate with
surprising accuracy from other observations how much exactly at this
moment the “pointing,” or “alignment,” must be “out” as compared with
a thousand, fifteen hundred, two, three, four, or more thousand
years ago. Accordingly, if you know the star to which an ancient
temple was set or aligned, the day of the solar year which was the
festival or critical moment of the appearance of the star in the sacred
aperture--and how much the temple is to-day out in its pointing, that
is to say, the exact amount of swinging which would bring the temple
back into its original relation to the star--you have a means of
measuring the age of the temple; you have a measure of the time which
has elapsed since it acquired this amount of departure from correct
orientation. Astronomy tells you how much it must get out of line in
every hundred years.
Mr. F. C. Penrose, F.R.S., investigated this matter in regard to
several Greek temples; others besides Sir Norman Lockyer have written
on the aberration and calculable age of Egyptian temples. It has, for
instance, actually been found that the temple of Ptah was aligned to
the sun in the year 5200 B.C. The alignment is no longer correct, and
it appears that the Egyptians themselves discovered that some of their
most ancient temples had lost correct alignment, and erected new and
corrected buildings in connection with them, and re-dedicated them.
Now Sir Norman is making a vigorous effort to procure all the possible
measurements and indications concerning the prehistoric circles and
avenues of Britain before it is too late. They are being more and more
rapidly destroyed. Stonehenge has been carefully measured and its
present alignment determined by various surveyors. Its age is discussed
by Sir Norman Lockyer in an interesting book, but we may soon expect a
further discussion of the whole subject of these prehistoric British
monuments from his pen. In some cases, as in that of Stonehenge, the
relation of the temple to the sun is obvious and confirmed by tradition
and existing custom. But in many cases investigation is rendered very
difficult by the absence of any immediate indication of what precisely
is the heavenly body to which the temple was at its foundation oriented.
In the case of Stonehenge, the conclusion at which Sir Norman Lockyer
arrives is that there was an earlier circle of small stones (still
represented), but that the temple was rededicated, and the larger
trilithons (each consisting of two uprights and a cross-piece) erected,
and the main opening of the circle aligned to the midsummer rising sun
about 1700 B.C., with a possible error of 200 years, more or less. This
is arrived at by measurements showing the exact amount by which the
alignment is “out” at the present day. This date is confirmed by the
recent discovery of numerous stone hammers when one of the big stones
was dug under and restored to the upright position from which it had
slipped. The stone age is believed to have given place in Britain to
the use of metal before 1700 B.C., and no metal tools were found at
Stonehenge.
Stonehenge--the most wonderful, mysterious, and complete of the great
astronomical temples of Western Europe--has come down to us from the
absolute darkness of prehistoric ages. Its secrets are still buried in
the ground around and under its huge monoliths. This prodigious relic
of the past is actually the private possession of one happy man, Sir
Edmund Antrobus. Only two years ago he earned the gratitude of all men
by employing workmen and machinery, at considerable expense, to restore
one of the great stones to its upright position. The extraordinary
thing is that whatever money is needed for the purpose is not at once
offered to enable him to examine and replace with scrupulous care every
stone, big and small, every scrap of soil, within an area of many
hundred yards, embracing Stonehenge and all around it. I understand
that he is willing to sell this great possession to the nation. It
surely ought to be acquired as national property, and reverently
excavated and preserved, whilst every fragment of significance found
in the excavations should be placed in a special museum at Amesbury
or Salisbury, under unassailable guardianship. Year by year it has
crumbled away. We owe the sincerest thanks to Sir Edmund Antrobus
for having placed a light wire fence around the venerated relics,
and for putting a guardian in charge so as to arrest, even at this
latest moment, the final desecration and destruction of this splendid
thing by heedless ruffians. The protection afforded is, nevertheless,
insufficient. The delay in examining everything on the spot and in
making all that remains absolutely secure is a national disgrace.
32. _Alchemists of To-day and Yesterday_
The claim to have devised a secret process in virtue of which sugar
or charcoal placed in an iron crucible and heated to a tremendous
temperature is found on subsequent cooling to contain large marketable
diamonds has a close similarity to the pretensions of the alchemists.
It differs in the fact that very minute diamonds have actually been
formed by a scientific chemist (M. Moissan) in such a way, whilst the
alchemists’ search was for a substance--the “philosopher’s stone,” as
it was called, which was never discovered, but was supposed to have
the property, if mixed and heated in a crucible with a base metal,
of converting the latter into gold. From time to time those engaged
in this search honestly thought that they had succeeded; others were
impostors, and others laboured year after year, led on by elusive
results and dazzling possibilities.
In England, after the true scientific spirit had been brought to bear
on such inquiries by Robert Boyle and the founders of the Royal
Society in the later years of the seventeenth century, little was heard
of “alchemy,” and the word “chemistry” took its place, signifying
a new method of study in which the actual properties of bodies,
their combinations and decompositions, were carefully ascertained
and recorded without any prepossessions as to either the mythical
philosopher’s stone or the elixir of life. But as late as 1783--only a
hundred and twenty-five years ago--we come across a strange and tragic
history in the records of the Royal Society associated with the name
of James Price, who was a gentleman commoner of Magdalen Hall, Oxford.
After graduating as M.A., in 1777 he was, at the age of twenty-nine,
elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. In the following
year the University of Oxford conferred on him the degree of M.D. in
recognition of his discoveries in natural science, and especially for
his chemical labours. Price was born in London in 1752, and his name
was originally Higginbotham, but he changed it on receiving a fortune
from a relative.
This fortunate young man, whose abilities and character impressed
and interested the learned men of the day, provided himself with a
laboratory at his country house at Stoke, near Guildford. Here he
carried on his researches, and the year after that in which honours
were conferred on him by his university and the great scientific
society in London, he invited a number of noblemen and gentlemen to his
laboratory to witness the performance of seven experiments, similar to
those of the alchemists--namely, the transmutation of baser metals into
silver and into gold. The Lords Onslow, Palmerston, and King of that
date were amongst the company. Price produced a white powder, which
he declared to be capable of converting fifty times its own weight of
mercury into silver, and a red powder, which, he said, was capable
of converting sixty times its own weight of mercury into gold. The
preparation of these powders was a secret, and it was the discovery
of them for which Price claimed attention. The experiments were made.
In seven successive trials the powders were mixed in a crucible with
mercury, first four crucibles, with weighed quantities of the white
powder, and then three other crucibles with weighed quantities of the
red powder. Silver and gold appeared in the crucibles after heating
in a furnace, as predicted by Price. The precious metal produced was
examined by assayers and pronounced genuine. Specimens of the gold
were exhibited to his Majesty King George III., and Price published a
pamphlet entitled “An Account of Some Experiments, &c.,” in which he
repudiated the doctrine of the philosopher’s stone, but claimed that he
had, by laborious experiment, discovered how to prepare these composite
powders, which were the practical realisation of that long-sought
marvel. He did not, however, reveal the secret of their preparation.
The greatest excitement was caused by this publication appearing under
the name of James Price, M.D. (Oxon.), F.R.S. It was translated into
foreign languages, and caused a tremendous commotion in the scientific
world.
Some of the older Fellows of the Royal Society, friends of Price, now
urged him privately to make known his mode of preparing the powders,
and pointed out the propriety of his bringing his discovery before the
society. But this Price refused to do. To one of his friends he wrote
that he feared he might have been deceived by the dealers who had sold
mercury to him, and that apparently it already contained gold. He was
urged by two leading Fellows of the society to repeat his experiments
in their presence, and he thereupon wrote that the powders were
exhausted, and that the expense of making more was too great for him
to bear, whilst the labour involved had already affected his health,
and he feared to submit it to a further strain. The Royal Society now
interfered, and the president (Sir Joseph Banks) and officers insisted
that, “for the honour of the society,” he must repeat the experiments
before delegates of the society, and show that his statements were
truthful and his experiments without fraud.
Under this pressure the unhappy Dr. Price consented to repeat the
experiments. He undertook to prepare in six weeks ten powders similar
to those which he had used in his public demonstration. He appears
to have been in a desperate state of mind, knowing that he could not
expect to deceive the experts of the society. He hastily studied the
works of some of the German alchemists as a forlorn hope, trusting
that he might chance upon a successful method in their writings. He
also prepared a bottle of laurel water, a deadly poison. Three Fellows
of the Royal Society came on the appointed day, in August, 1783, to
the laboratory, near Guildford. It is related (I hope it is not true)
that one of them visited the laboratory the day before the trial, and,
having obtained entrance by bribing the housekeeper in Price’s absence,
discovered that his crucibles had false bottoms and recesses in which
gold or silver could be hidden before the quicksilver and powder were
introduced. Dr. Price appears to have received his visitors, but
whether he commenced the test experiments in their presence or not
does not appear. When they were solemnly assembled in the laboratory
he quietly drank a tumblerful of the laurel water (hydrocyanic acid),
which he had prepared, and fell dead before them. He left a fortune
of £12,000 in the Funds. It has been discussed whether Dr. Price was
a madman or an impostor. Probably vanity led him on to the course of
deception which ended in this tragic way. He could not bring himself to
confess failure or deception, nor to abscond. He ended his trouble by
suicide. He was only thirty-one years of age! Not inappropriately he
has been called the “Last of the Alchemists,” though a long interval
of time separates him from the last but one and the days when the old
traditions of the Arabians’ al-chemy were really treasured and the
mystic art still practised.
33. _A Story of Sham Diamonds and Pearls_
It has been recently declared by a dealer in precious stones that
though diamonds and other stones can be very well imitated, yet pearls
cannot be. This is hardly correct, as artificial pearls so well made
as to defy detection by the casual glance of any but a professional
expert are common enough. Who does not know the pathetic story by the
greatest of French writers, Guy de Maupassant, of the wife of a poor
Government clerk, who borrowed a necklace from another lady to wear at
a reception at the “Ministry”? She lost the necklace (I forget whether
it was of pearls or of diamonds, or both); but she and her husband
were too proud to confess the fact, and purchased another necklace
exactly like the lost one, for a sum the outlay of which reduced them
for the rest of their lives to a state of penury and social exile. They
returned the new necklace in place of the lost one without a word,
and accepted their fate. By chance, the poor ruined lady, fifteen
years afterwards, met her old friend, who had long since passed from
her acquaintance, together with other prosperous people. Moved by her
former friend’s kind reception, she related the true history of the
pearl necklace of long ago. “Great heavens!” exclaimed the prosperous
lady. “The necklace I lent you was made with imitation gems! It was
not worth five pounds!” Too late! Nothing now could give back to the
high-minded, self-respecting little couple the lost years of youth
passed in privation and bitterness.
34. _The Nature of Pearls_
Pearls have been lately studied by zoologists, and their true history
made known. They are a disease, caused, like so many other diseases,
by an infecting parasite. It is common knowledge that they are found
much as we see them in jewellery, as little lustrous spheres embedded
in the soft bodies of various shellfish, such as mussels, oysters, and
even some kinds of whelks. They are not found in the shellfish like
crabs and lobsters, called Crustacea, but only in those like snails,
clams and oysters, called Mollusca. Pink pearls are found in some kinds
of pink-shelled whelks. A pearl-mussel or pearl-oyster has a pearly
lining to its shell, which is always being laid down layer by layer by
the surface of the mussel’s or oyster’s body, where it rests in contact
with the shell, which consequently increases in thickness. If a grain
of sand or a little fish gets in between the shell and the soft body
of its maker, it rapidly is coated over with a layer of pearl, and so
a pearly boss or lump is produced, projecting on the inner face of the
shell, and forming part of it. These are called “blister-pearls,” and
are very beautiful, though of little value, since they are not complete
all round, but merely knobs of the general “mother-of-pearl” surface.
These blister-pearls can be produced artificially by introducing a hard
body between the shell and the living oyster or mussel.
It used to be thought that the true spherical pearls were caused by a
hard granule of some kind pressing its way into the soft substance of
the shell-fish, pushing a layer of the pearl-producing surface like
a pocket in front of it. But it is now known that this “pushing in”
is the work, not of an inanimate granule, but of a minute parasitic
worm, which becomes thus enclosed by a pocket of the outer skin. The
pocket closes up at its neck, and lays down layer after layer of pearl
substance around the intrusive parasite, the dead remains of which can
be detected with the microscope in sections of the pearl forming there
a central kernel or nucleus. These parasitic worms were first detected
in the small pearls formed by the common edible sea-mussel.
Though they are very small, sea-mussel pearls are collected for the
market at Conway, in North Wales, and also on the coast of France. The
parasitic worm is the young of a worm which, when adult, lives in the
intestine of carnivorous fishes. It appears that it has to pass from
and with the mussel into shellfish-eating sea fishes, where, although
the mussel is digested, the parasite is not, but grows in size and
alters its shape considerably. Then after a time the worm is swallowed,
with the fish in which it has fixed itself, by sharks, dogfish, and
such fish-eating fishes. In these at last it becomes adult and of some
size, an inch or so long, varying according to the particular kind, and
produces many thousands of eggs, which hatch out as minute creatures
swimming in the sea-water, and fortunate if they fall upon a bed of
mussels. They enter the mussel’s shell and make their way into its
soft substance. A certain number (very few) get encased in the skin
and covered up by pearl-layers, which is the mussel’s way of killing
them and putting them out of mischief. The others which have entered
other regions of the mussel’s body thrive, and have a chance of being
swallowed by a mussel-eating fish, and then a further chance of that
fish being eaten by a shark. If this happens the lucky worm--like the
Italian who gets a winning number in three successive drawings of a
lottery--gains the big prize. He becomes adult and produces innumerable
young, who in their turn enter upon the chanceful career of a mussel
parasite.
Thus we see that a pearl is not only a disease or abnormal growth
caused by a parasite, but is actually an elaborately formed tomb
or sarcophagus, in which the parasite is enclosed layer upon layer.
This mode of disposing of parasites and other intrusive bodies is not
unusual in animals. The terrible little flesh-worm--the Trichina--which
causes the death of rats, pigs, and men who eat raw meat, is sometimes
conquered in this way. It is found in the muscles (flesh) of man
and animals enclosed in little pearl-like sacs, half the size of a
hempseed, and it dies there, unless the invaded animal should die, and
its flesh be eaten (as raw ham for instance) by another animal. The
burying of inconvenient corpses in plaster of paris, corresponding
to pearls as we now know them, has been a method of concealment
occasionally adopted by criminals. On the whole, pearls have not very
pleasant associations.
The history of the special parasitic worm which invades the beautiful
little pearl-oyster of Ceylon has recently been followed out by skilful
naturalists. There, too, a smaller oyster-eating fish of a peculiar
kind, and a larger fish which eats the first fish, are necessary for
the reproduction and multiplication of the pearl-producing parasites.
The new Ceylon Pearl-Fishing Company has, therefore, to see to it that
both these kinds of fish are encouraged to live in the sea near where
the pearl oysters are found, and it is their object to increase the
parasitic disease by which pearls are formed, and ensure an abundance
of parasites.
An interesting new method has been recently applied to the examination
of pearl oysters for pearls. The Rontgen rays are used to produce a
skiagraph (such as surgeons use in searching for a bullet) of the pearl
oysters when brought into harbour. They are thus rapidly examined one
by one, without injury, and the shadow-picture shows the pearl or
pearls inside those oysters which are infected. The pearlless oysters
are returned to the depths of the sea, whence they came--those with
small pearls only are kept in special reserves or sea-lakes, in order
that the pearl may grow in size, whilst only those with good-sized
pearls are opened at once, in order that the pearl may be extracted and
sent to market.
There were great findings of pearls in the fresh-water pearl mussels
of the Scotch rivers in former days. In the last forty years of the
eighteenth century these pearls were exported from Scotland to France
to the value of £100,000.
In the eighteenth century not only did they get their pearls from
European rivers instead of from the East; but, instead of being
excited about the artificial production of diamonds, they were driven
wild with astonishment by the demonstration of the volatilisation of
these stones--the disappearance of diamonds into invisible vapour
when sufficiently heated. That the hardest stone in nature could be
thus dissipated into thin air seemed incredible. On Aug. 10, 1771, a
chemist named Rouelle invited to his laboratory to witness this wonder
a company comprising the Margrave of Baden and the Princess his wife,
the Dukes of Chaulne and of Nivernois, the Marchionesses of Nesle and
of Pons, the Countess of Polignac, and some members of the Academy of
Sciences, including the great chemist Lavoisier. Four diamonds--the
largest belonging to the Count Lauraguais--were submitted before the
eyes of all to the heat of a furnace, and in three hours had completely
evaporated. There was, no doubt, room here for a mystification and for
the abstraction of the diamonds with a view to dishonest appropriation.
But no such purpose existed. The experiment was a genuine one, and
Rouelle and his brother were honest investigators. They established the
fact, now demonstrated as a lecture experiment, that the diamond is
volatilised at very high temperatures. A more celebrated “evaporation”
of diamonds--that which is known as “the affair of the Queen’s
necklace”--took place a few years later in Paris, when no scientific
investigation was connected with the embarrassing disappearance of the
Royal trinket.
35. _A King Who was a Zoologist_
The King of Portugal, Carlos di Braganza, who was assassinated in the
spring of 1908, was one of the most gifted and vigorous men of his age,
fearless and intelligent to a rare degree, good-hearted, and devoted to
the welfare of his people. If any man were justified in having no fear
of outrage because he was conscious that his uprightness was proved and
known to all men, his benevolence experienced by all, his ability and
vast knowledge recognised by all, Dom Carlos was that man. Fanaticism,
however, takes no account of the virtues of its victims. Until society
has invented a method for keeping instruments of destruction out of
the reach of dangerous, more or less maniacal individuals, all those
who excite the fanatic’s brain, even by the excellence and nobility of
their lives, risk death whenever they trust themselves to the tender
mercies of a crowd. Psychology may one day enable us to detect, and
improved supervision of children enable us to segregate before it is
too late, the latent assassins in our midst. If they have not a king as
their quarry their reason is palsied by a president, and were there no
presidents, they would become homicidal in the presence of a prefect or
a policeman--even of a professor.
Some four years ago I had the honour of conducting Dom Carlos round the
Natural History Museum in Cromwell Road. He arrived without attendant
or escort, and I passed two hours alone with him. I had been told that
he was a great shot and fond of natural history, that he played every
athletic game, rode, and swam better than the best, that he was a
fine water-colour painter, a real artist--and a first-rate musician
and singer. I was astonished at his knowledge and personal experience
in natural history. His burly form and bright, honest face gave me a
most agreeable impression, and when he said (as I had been told he
would) to each explanation of a specimen upon which I ventured for
his edification, “I know! I know!” felt that it was true, and that
he really did know. “I have shot thirty of them in the south of my
country,” he said of some rare bird. “I know! I know! I have described
a new species like that in my book on the birds of Portugal. I shall
send it to you!” was his comment on another. When we came to some
wonderful coral-like specimens--sea-pens and sea-feathers, dredged in
the deep sea and preserved in spirits, for exhibition in the Museum--he
said, to my astonishment, “Those are very bad. I get much better than
those in my yacht off the Portuguese coast. I preserve them myself;
it is a real art. I shall send you some.” I said they would be a very
welcome addition. “Yes, I know! I know!” he said. “Would you like some
fishes, too? The Prince of Monaco has some fine things, and he led
me to collect also myself. I have now many things better than his. I
shall send you some fishes, too.” And he did. A few months after his
return to Portugal he sent to the Museum a large collection, preserved
in spirit, which included many very fine and interesting specimens of
deep-water Atlantic fishes; also his work, with coloured plates, on
the Birds of Portugal, and a most remarkable publication on the tunny
fisheries of the South Coast of Portugal--giving a careful survey of
the waters, sea bottom, currents, fauna, and flora in correct, expert
form, such as might issue from a Government Fisheries Board, but in
this case done, as modestly indicated on the title-page, by the Head
of the State himself, “Dom Carlos di Braganza.” He went into the
work-rooms of the Museum, where some new fishes were being drawn, and
conversed with the naturalist in charge, and criticised the drawings.
He saw everything, appreciated everything, and then looking at his
watch, said, “I have only five minutes to get to a lunch party. Thank
you very much for the most delightful time. I should like to stay all
the day; it is a splendid place,” and was off in his brougham.
I exhibited the specimens and books sent by his Majesty for some weeks
in the Central Hall of the museum, before they were incorporated in
the great collection, for I felt that it was a rare and interesting
thing that a king should not merely take a sportsman’s pleasure in
birds, beasts, and fishes, but actually be, so to speak, “one of us”--a
zoologist who discovers, describes, and names new things. The Prince of
Monaco is the only other head of a State who is a serious scientific
naturalist. He has built and endowed a magnificent museum and
laboratory at Monaco, where his skilled assistants carry on researches
and look after the extremely valuable and important collections which
he has himself made in a series of cruises in the Atlantic extending
over many years. He has not only employed capable naturalists to help
him, but is himself the chief authority and an original discoverer in
“oceanography,” the science of the great oceans.
A year or so ago, when Dom Carlos visited Paris, a special fête and
reception was organised in his honour at the “Muséum d’Histoire
Naturelle,” in the Jardin des Plantes. The “Museum” of the Jardin des
Plantes is a very remarkable institution, including a zoological and
botanical garden, laboratories of chemistry, physics, and physiology,
besides the great collections of minerals, fossils, skeletons, and
preserved specimens of animals and plants. It is governed by the
professors and the director who are in charge of the garden, the
laboratories, and the collections, and owes its dignity and its
celebrity to the distinguished men of science who for a century and a
half have made discoveries and taught there. They are not subject to a
board of eminent and wealthy persons, nor is the administration of the
antiquities at the Louvre and of the National Library muddled up with
that of the great scientific workshop of Natural History.
When the President of the Republic conceived the plan of entertaining
the King of Portugal at the Museum of Natural History there were
those who supposed that the Minister of Education would, as a great
State official, be called upon to arrange the proceedings. Nothing of
the sort was done. It was found that the Minister had no authority
in regard to the Museum, which, as an independent State institution,
organised and carried out the reception through its own officers. The
director and professors received President Fallières and the King,
escorted by the troops of the Republic. The garden and buildings
were ablaze with light and colour, and a large company assembled to
take part in the fête. In the great hall of the museum Becquerel,
Moissan, and others showed their most recent discoveries as to radium,
artificial diamonds, and such matters to the King; others exhibited
new birds and fishes, the okapi and newly-discovered fossils, and
briefly explained their history and significance. The King conferred
decorations on the scientific staff, and gave friendly acknowledgments
to all who had thus sought to gratify his special tastes, and prepared
for him a really exceptional gala-demonstration of scientific
discovery. The official “middle-men,” who in other countries contrive
to divert the honour and emoluments due to men of science, to their own
profit, were on this occasion happily kept at a distance.
36. _The Transmission to Offspring of Acquired Qualities_
The cruel fate of Dom Carlos of Portugal naturally enough produced
philosophic and thoughtful articles in some of the journals of the
day. An able writer told his readers that the “kingly caste” has
characteristics peculiar to itself, “which illustrate the Darwinian
law.” He does not say what Darwinian law, and I am afraid he would find
it difficult to do so. He says that people who for centuries have had
their own way (how many kingly families have done so?), who have always
lived on good food and never tasted bad wine, and have constantly
conversed with interesting people (not usually the chance of princes!)
must certainly, if subject to “the laws which govern animal and plant
life,” produce well-marked characteristics in their offspring--and he
goes on to speak of a fine appetite for food (what he describes is
really a morbid condition connected with indigestion) as indigenous
to Royalty, and declares that the gift of recognising faces and
remembering names is “a faculty cultivated by generations of practice.”
One must recognise with satisfaction the desire to explain the facts
and varieties of human life and character by reference to “the laws
which govern animal and plant life.” It is by faithfully and truly
carrying out the inquiries suggested by that desire that the knowledge
which is the sole and absolutely essential condition for the safe
conduct of human life and the increased happiness of human communities,
can be obtained, and by such inquiries only; and, further, only
upon the condition that the investigation is conducted in the true
scientific spirit with accuracy and without prejudice. The remarks upon
the kingly caste which I have quoted above show with what “legerity
and temerity” a clever and respected writer will formulate phrases and
conclusions which are, in face of what Darwin and his successors have
demonstrated, absurdly erroneous, in fact, topsy-turvy as compared with
the reality.
The main doctrine which Darwin and his followers have established is
that neither castes nor families of higher or lower living things,
including man, acquire any new characteristics by exposure to special
circumstances or by consuming finer or coarser food, which can or do
become innate or fixed in the race. The individual may be improved or
depraved, enlarged or enfeebled, by the conditions of his individual
life, but he cannot transmit the qualities--the improvement, the
depravity, the enlargement, or the dwindling--which have been thus
attained by him to his offspring. The race cannot be changed in this
way. All the parents can transmit is the quality which they themselves
have inherited of resisting or of collapsing, of becoming enfeebled,
or of showing strength and vigour, under certain given conditions. The
characteristics of Royalty are not characteristics brought about by the
Royal state, any more than the characteristics of English race-horses
are brought about by the racing state or by life in a breeder’s
stable. The characteristics of Royalty are like those of other living
things, the characteristics of a certain family or blend of families
or strains. Whatever characteristics distinct Royal families have in
common with one another are not due to the existence of a natural law
in virtue of which the occupations and opportunities of the Royal state
produce “faculties” or “characteristics” in the “blood” or “stock.”
Such similarity of characteristics is due either to the similarity of
the demands and conditions of Court life in all parts of Europe, acting
as an educating force on the individual, or to the intermarrying and
consequent blending of family characteristics among a large proportion
of the Royal Houses at present existing.
It is very difficult--indeed impossible until much more is written
and read on the subjects of breeding and of psychology--to persuade
people to abandon the notion that a man who has drunk good wine and
conversed with interesting people will, as a direct result, transmit
something which he has “taken up” or absorbed from the good wine and
the clever people to his offspring, and that a faculty for this or
that art or accomplishment cultivated by generation after generation
is increased thereby, and transferred as it were into the very vitals
of the race--the reproductive germs which each individual has within
him. There is no truth whatever in these fancies. They are popular and
very natural delusions, which are not only devoid of direct proof by
simple observation and experiment, such as that made by all breeders of
stock and by medical men, but are also contrary to the great general
principles which have been found to explain the varied and most
important facts known as to breeding, inheritance, and variation. The
same erroneous theory of inheritance now applied to royalty has been
put forward in regard to the feeble-minded, the ill-grown, and the
incapable at the other end of the social scale.
The only way in which a quality, good or bad, desirable or undesirable,
is intensified, made inherent and dominant in a race or strain or
family, is by selective breeding--selection due to natural rejection
of those individuals not possessing the quality, or to artificial
rejection of such individuals by the stock owner and breeder. No human
maker of breeds--whether of cattle, horses, birds, or plants--ever yet
proceeded by exercising, feeding, educating, or otherwise manipulating
his sires and dams; he simply selects those as parents which by natural
variation have the quality, more or less, which he desires, and he
destroys or sterilises those which fail to satisfy his requirements.
He is perfectly confident that in this way he can ensure the
reproduction and exaggeration or dominance of the characteristics which
he desires; he knows that he cannot obtain a “strain” or “breed” by any
treatment, any feeding, or education of those which are born without
the natural, innate possession of the desired quality, in a more or
less marked degree. Once the characteristic turns up as a congenital
variation, it can be intensified by coupling its possessor with a mate
of like quality; but both sire and dam have to be rigidly selected with
this purpose in view. Such methods are not adopted in human families,
even royal ones.
In considering these questions as to characteristic qualities or want
of qualities in groups and classes of human communities, we see then
that we have in the first instance to distinguish very broadly between
the body or structure of the individual, and the “stirps” or germ of
the race which he carries within him. The former may be vastly changed
for the better or worse as compared with average individuals, without
affecting in any way the latter. The germ is carried by the individual
member of the race in an almost complete state of isolation or safety
from the influences which affect the individual’s structure generally
(his body as distinct from his germinal or reproductive substance)
injuriously or beneficially. The germ varies also, but independently.
That is a matter of primary importance. Equally important in the case
of man is a peculiarity which affects his manifestation of qualities in
a way unknown in any other living thing.
Human society, in more marked and dominating form, in proportion as
it is what we call “civilised,” has created for itself an inheritance
which is not dependent on the variations of strains and the laws
of actual breeding. Over and above--very much above--what each man
inherits in the form of qualities and characteristics of his special
family and stock--is the enormous mass of accumulated experience,
knowledge, tradition, custom, and law--which pervades and envelops,
as it were, the mere physical generations of this or that pullulating
crowd of human individuals. Tradition, at first conveyed by gesture and
imitativeness from parents to offspring, then by word of mouth, then
by writing, and finally by printed record, sanctioned and enforced by
all kinds of persuasion and compulsion--has culminated in an educative
discipline which affects every individual in the community in the
most powerful way--and constitutes an inheritance of a significance
and activity altogether transcending, and independent of that due
to the physical transmission of bodily and mental qualities. Public
opinion, law, knowledge, belief, custom, and habit exist, and pursue
their own course of change, as it were, outside the successive
bodily generations of a population. Yet they determine in very large
measure the characteristics which each class, and the community as a
whole, exhibit. We have to distinguish those results which are due to
physical heredity, similar in man and in animals--from results due
to this all-powerful education peculiar to man--education, which for
civilised man proceeds from almost innumerable sources--from parents,
nurses, playfellows, companions, social, professional, and political
organisations, as well as from the professed teacher, and from the
local peculiarities of the simplest conditions of life. Hence it is
that man inherits very little in the way of ready-made instincts,
tricks of his nervous mechanism--but, on the contrary, has an
enormously long period of individual growth and education, and inherits
“educability” to a degree which varies in every family and race.
To estimate correctly, and so to deal with these various factors
in human life, we require to know in detail the laws of breeding,
heredity, variation, and selection in animals, and, further, the
laws or formulated results of enquiry as to the “educability” of the
human being, the range and the limits of “education,” the relation of
hereditary quality to education, the causes of mental aberration and
defect, of mental qualities of all kinds, the value and the dangers
of all kinds of educational influences, whether physical, social, or
intellectual. These are matters in regard to which there must be in the
future more and more of common knowledge and agreement; at present they
are lightly touched by politicians and journalists in a way which is
inconsistent with a knowledge of the facts or of their importance.
When publicists airily declare that the virtues of kings and the vices
of paupers are both due to the hereditary transmission of characters
acquired by the peculiarities of diet and exercise of the progenitors
of these classes it is time to protest. To cite the name of Darwin
and “the laws which govern animal and plant life,” in support instead
of in condemnation of such baseless fancies, is, one must suppose, an
evidence, not of a desire to mislead, but of a regrettable indifference
to the conclusions of that branch of human knowledge which is of more
importance than any other to the statesman and the philanthropist.
“Selection,” whether due to survival in the struggle for existence or
exercised by man as a “breeder” or “fancier,” is the only way in which
new characteristics, good or bad, can be implanted in a race or stock,
and become part of the hereditary quality of that race or stock. This
applies equally to man and to animals and plants. And this selection is
no temporary or casual thing. It means “the selection for breeding” of
those individuals which spontaneously by the innate variability which
all living things show (so that no two individuals are exactly alike)
have exhibited from birth onwards, more or less clearly, indications
of the characteristic which is to be selected. Nothing done to them
after birth, and not done to others of their family or race, causes the
desired characteristic; it appears unexpectedly, almost unaccountably
as an in-born quality. It may be a slight difference only, not easy
to take note of; but if it enables those who possess it to get the
better of their competitors in the struggle for life, they will survive
and mate and so transmit their characteristic to the next generation,
whilst those who do not possess it and are beaten in life and fail to
obtain food, safety, and mates, will perish and disappear, and their
defective strain will perish with them.
37. _Variation and Selection Among Living Things_
Selection is not a thing once done and then dropped--natural
selection is continuous and never-ending, except in rare and special
circumstances, such as man may bring about by his interference,
and then it does not really cease but only changes its demand. The
characteristics of a race or species are maintained by natural
selection, just as much as they are produced by it. Cessation of a
previously active selection (which is sometimes brought about by
exceptional conditions) results in a departure of the individuals of
the race, no longer subject to that selection, from the standard of
form and characteristics previously maintained. To understand this, we
must consider for a moment the great property of living things, which
is called “variation.”
No two animals, or plants even, when born of the same parents, are
ever exactly alike. Not only that, but if we look at a great number of
individuals of a race or stock, we find that some are very different
from the others, in colour, in proportion of parts, in character, and
other qualities. As a rule it is difficult to look at such a number,
because in Nature only two on the average out of many hundreds,
sometimes thousands, born from a single pair of parents, grow up to
take their parents’ place, and these two are those “selected” by
natural survival on account of their close resemblance to the parents.
But if we experimentally rear all the offspring of a plant or animal to
full growth--not allowing them to perish by competition for food, or
place, or by inability to escape enemies--then we see more clearly how
great is the in-born variation, how many and wide are the departures
from the favoured standard form which are naturally born and owe their
peculiarities to this birth-quality--called innate or congenital
variation--and not to anything which happens to them afterwards
differing from what happens to their brothers and sisters.
Of course, we are all familiar with this “congenital or innate
variation,” as shown by brothers and sisters in human families. How and
why do innate variations arise? They arise from chemical and mechanical
action upon the “germs” or reproductive cells contained in the body of
the parents, and also sometimes from the mating in reproduction of two
strains or races which are already different from one another. When
an animal or plant is given unaccustomed food or brought up in new
surroundings (as, for instance, in captivity) its germs are affected,
and they produce variations in the next generation more abundantly. The
best analogy for what occurs is that of a “shaking up” or disturbance
of the particles of the germ or reproductive material, somewhat as
the beads and bits of glass in a kaleidoscope are shaken and change
from one well-balanced arrangement to another. And the same analogy
applies to the crossing or fertilising of “strain” or “race” by another
differing from it. A disturbance is the consequence, and a departure
in the form and character of the young from anything arrived at
before often takes place. These variations have no necessary fitness
or correspondence to the changed conditions which have produced them.
They are, so to speak, departures in all and every direction--not
very great, but still great enough to be selected by survival if
occurring in wild extra-human nature, and obvious enough when produced
in cultivated animals and plants to be seen and selected by man, the
stock-breeder or fancier.
Indeed the stock-breeder and horticulturist go to work in this way
deliberately. Though when they have fattened an animal or fed up a
plant they cannot make it transmit its fatness or increased size
to its offspring, yet they can, by special feeding and change of
conditions of life--or by cross-breeding--break up the fixed tendency
or quality of the germs within the parents so treated. Thus they get
offspring produced which show strange and unexpected variations of
many kinds--new feathers, new colours, new shapes of leaf, increased
size of root, length of limb--all kinds of variations. From the
congenital varieties thus produced by “stirring up,” “breaking down,”
or disturbing the germ-matter (germ-plasm) of the parents, the breeder
next proceeds to select and mate those which show the character which
suits his fancy, whilst he destroys or rejects the others. Thus he
establishes, and by repeated selection in every generation maintains,
and if he desires increases, the characteristics which he values.
Birth-variation is then an inherent property of living things
(including man) as much as heredity, which is the name for the
property expressed in the resemblance of offspring to parent. And
birth-variation, or congenital variation--that is to say, the being
born with a power to grow into something different (not greatly, but
still obviously, different) from their parents or ancestry, and from
their brethren and cousins, though not subjected after birth to any
treatment or conditions differing from those common to all of them--is
a quality of living things which must be distinguished altogether from
the power of the individual itself, though not born with qualities
differing from those of its brothers and sisters, to vary or change in
some respects as compared with other individuals when it is specially
fed or exposed to special treatment. The first is change, or variation,
of the “stirps,” or germ plasm; the second is change, or variation, of
the transient body of the individual. The first is indefinite and may
be of almost any kind or form; once it has appeared, it is a permanent
possession of the race descended from its owner. The second is definite
and a direct reaction to the environment. Such an individually induced
or stimulated change is often called an “acquired character.” It does
not affect the stirps, the inner reproductive germs, and cannot be
handed on by inheritance to a new generation.
What happens, then, when there is a cessation of selection? All
sorts of birth-variations appear and grow up. The fine adjustment of
form--maintained by natural selection carried on unceasingly--no longer
obtains. The characteristics of the race become less emphasised. All
sorts of birth-variations have an equal chance, and the tendency must
be for those characteristics which have most recently been established
and maintained by severe selection to dwindle and then to disappear
altogether. The majority of birth-variations will--when selection is
prevented--always tend to present a lessened, rather than an increased,
development of any one characteristic--the excelling minority will
no longer be selected, but all will have an equal chance in mating
and reproducing. Hence, bit by bit, all salient features, all the
characteristics of the race previously maintained by selection, will,
as a result of survival of all variations and general crossing and
interbreeding--dwindle and disappear. It is to this process that the
term “degeneration” has been applied by biologists. How far it may go,
and what are its limits and various outcomes, I cannot now discuss.
It is sometimes spoken of as “retrogression”--which implies wrongly a
return to a previous state. From some points of view it might be called
“simplification.”
The point to which I have been making is this--that civilised mankind
appears to be very nearly in regard to most points of structure
and quality in a condition of “cessation of selection.” It is the
better-provided and well-fed, well-clothed, protected classes of the
community, in which this cessation of selection is most complete.
Racial degeneration is, therefore, to be looked for in those classes
quite as much as in the half-starved, ill-clad, struggling poor,
if, indeed, it should not be expected to be more strongly marked in
them. There are facts which tend to show that such anticipations are
well-founded.
This is a matter requiring further discussion. It is probable, I may
say in anticipation, that whilst natural selection in the struggle for
existence is only obscurely operative (except as to alcoholism and
some diseases) in civilised man, yet what Mr. Darwin called sexual
selection--the influence of preference in mating--has an important
scope, and it may be that hereafter it will be of enormous importance
in maintaining the quality of the race.
Meanwhile, it seems that the unregulated increase of the population,
the indiscriminate, unquestioning protection of infant life and
of adult life also--without selection or limitation--must lead to
results which can only be described as general degeneration. How
far such a conclusion is justified, and what are possible modifying
or counteracting influences at work which may affect the future of
mankind, are questions of surpassing interest. In any case, it is
interesting to note that the cessation of selection is more complete,
and the consequent degeneration of the race would, therefore, seem
to be more probable in the higher propertied classes than in the
bare-footed toilers, whose ranks are thinned by starvation and early
death. One may well ask, “Is this really so?”
38. _The Movement, Growth, and Dwindling of Glaciers_
Last summer we were watching the gradual change of the brilliant
sunlight on the snows of Mont Blanc as the shadows crept up the
pine-covered sides of the valley of Chamonix. We noted how the highest
peak--the true summit of Mont Blanc--remained almost white and
brilliant when the somewhat lower and nearer Dome de Gouter (so often,
when clouds are about, mistaken for the true summit by tourists) had
assumed a marvellous shade of saffron-rose colour. The crevasses of
the glaciers were marked by an unearthly pale-green tint and delicate
purple hues of weird beauty were spreading over the evanescent forms
of the great snow-field, when one of the hotel guests--a citizen of
Geneva--said, “Ah, yes! Look at them whilst you may, and wonder at
them, those glaciers of the Alps. They are but the remnants, the
roots, as it were, of the vast glacier which once filled the whole of
this vale of Chamonix and spread down into the valley of the Rhone,
and ploughed out with the slow movement of its huge mass the deep
rock basin of the Lake Leman. Every year they dwindle, as they have
dwindled for ages past, and soon--perhaps not more than another 100
years hence--they will have disappeared utterly from human sight and
knowledge.” I continued to gaze at the scene, and as the night fell
and the distant details were lost to view I felt as though a venerable,
but decrepit, friend had passed from my sight, never to return. I was
rejoiced to see the glaciers still there when the morning sun showed
forth their strange opaque white and faintly green masses on the
mountain sides--stupendous outpourings, as it were, of whipped cream
tinted with pistachio-nut.
But was it true, that lament of the Genevese savant? Undoubtedly the
glaciers in many parts of the Alps have been shrinking for the last
thirty years. It is longer than that since I first saw the glaciers of
the Chamonix valley, and there is no doubt that they have shrunk up
since then, leaving acres of boulders and bare polished rock where was
the ice I formerly climbed. The glacier of Argentière, near the upper
end of the valley, is a mile or more shorter than it was; the ice caves
which we used to visit at the foot of the Mer de Glace have melted
away, and the end of the glacier is now high up above a precipitous
surface of polished rock far from the site of the little pavilion, with
its gay flag and amiable guardian, who used to exhibit the marvellous
ice cavern.
I find on looking into the matter that it is true that there has,
during the latter half of the past century, been a great dwindling
of the lower end or “snout,” a drawing back, as it were, not only of
Swiss glaciers, but of glaciers in other parts of the world--as, for
instance, in Alaska and in the Himalayas. But I cannot avoid a feeling
of satisfaction in recording the opinion of geological authorities
that, contrary to the assertion of the Swiss pessimist, there is not
any ground for believing that the present noticeable shrinking is
due to a continuous process by which the enormous glaciers of remote
ages have been incessantly reduced until now they are but rootlets or
stumps of the former masses, destined to evaporate completely under
the continued remorseless operation of increasing temperature. On the
contrary, it appears that, though there are not accurate records and
measurements as to past centuries as there will be as to present and
future years, yet there is abundant evidence that Alpine glaciers
have grown longer in some centuries and retreated in others. The
period of alternate extension and retraction has not been ascertained
with accuracy, but by some geologists it is supposed to be about
fifty years. The retraction or shrinking is not due to a continuous
increase of the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere--or of this
hemisphere--but to contending causes which operate alternately towards
increase and towards decrease when one or two hundred years are
considered. Such are the greater or less rainfall and snowfall over a
very large area, and the formation and persistence of clouds, concerned
with which are probably those varying quantities--the spots on the sun.
The simple proof that glaciers have extended and again retreated within
historic times is furnished by the fact that in some parts of the
Alpine range the retreat of a glacier has uncovered ancient miners’
excavations, which must have been worked when the glacier did not
reach the spot excavated. Subsequently the glacier advanced, and now
after some hundreds of years it has again retreated and exposed the
ice-covered borings and workings. The tradition of a glacier-enclosed
village in the Zermatt mountains, shut off from the world by the
advance of glaciers, lost and mysterious, is evidence that such advance
has been observed by the native population.
The natives who live near glaciers know that they advance and retreat,
but the fact that the whole glacier is really a slowly flowing viscous
mass--a sort of frozen but not immobile river--was only established
by scientific observation in the last century. The frozen river is
fed by the snow which falls on the higher mountain ridges, and is
squeezed into the form of ice instead of snow powder by its own weight
as it slips down the inclines, warmed by the unclouded sunshine. The
big glaciers move much more rapidly (or perhaps one should say less
slowly) in the middle than at the sides. The measurements which have
been made differ in different glaciers and in different parts of the
same glacier, and show smaller movement in winter than in summer. The
advance of the sides is retarded, as in the case of an ordinary river
of flowing water, by friction against the rocks, which enclose the
glacier as its banks enclose a river. A good average case shows a flow
downwards in summer of half a foot a day at the sides and a foot and
a half in the middle. The distance below the snow-line to which the
flowing glacier descends down a mountain gorge--before it melts away
and becomes a river of liquid water--depends, as does the rate at which
it moves, in the first place, on the temperature of the region and on
the sharpness of the slope. A glacier will flow downwards (as will a
lump of pitch) along a scarcely perceptible incline, but more slowly
than down a steeper incline, and it will, consequently, get further
down into the warm valley without altogether melting away when the
slope is steep.
But apart from these considerations, the bigger and thicker (or deeper)
the glacier, that is to say, the more snow which each year falls at
its starting-place and goes to making it, the further down will it
flow before melting away; and it is the heavy snowfall of many years
ago or of a series of years long past which has to-day reached in the
form of ice the lower end of the glacier. So, though the lower end of
the glacier may melt more quickly if the valley has become hotter,
yet the heavy snowfalls of fifty years ago may only now have reached
the valley, and may quite counterbalance the melting action of the
warmer summers. Or reverse conditions, namely, less snow and lower or
unchanged temperature in the valley, may prevail.
The Government of India has lately established a definite survey
and record of the movement of several Himalayan glaciers and of the
variation in the distance to which their “snouts” descend into the
valleys. Twelve glaciers were examined last year, and will be properly
watched in future. The Yengutsa glacier has gained about two miles in
length since Sir Martin Conway visited it in 1892; the great Hispar
glacier has slightly retreated. The Hassanabad glacier three years
ago increased its length by a rapid progress of the free “snout” of
as much as six miles in three months, and is now no longer increasing
or advancing! Many years ago it had reached its present position, and
then retreated. The rock masses carried on the ice and left in great
heaps at the point where the glacier melted away are known as terminal
“moraines,” and often serve to show the position to which the snout of
a glacier once extended--far below its present limit. A curious fact as
to the increase and shrinkage of glaciers is that of two neighbouring
glaciers, as in the case of the glacier Blanc and the glacier Noir in
Dauphiné (France), one may be advancing whilst the other is in retreat.
Further study and knowledge of the causes of these variations will
throw important light on questions of general meteorology.
Although there is no evidence to lead us to suppose that existing
glaciers are now actually in a condition of general retreat, leading
to their ultimate disappearance, yet it is one of the most certain and
interesting results of geological study that some hundred and fifty
thousand years ago the northern hemisphere was far colder than it is
now, owing partly to the same change in the inclination of the earth’s
axis to which I alluded on a former page (p. 81) as affecting the
orientation of ancient astronomical temples--a change which diminished,
when at its extreme, the effective amount of heat received from the
sun in these regions of the earth. The peculiar scratching, polishing,
and erosion of rocks, the existence of moraines, and other evidence,
prove that enormous glaciers covered the north of Europe, that England
and Scotland were in large part covered by a great ice-sheet or
glacier, and that the great valleys of Switzerland such as the Rhone
Valley and the basin of the Lake of Geneva, were filled by enormous
glaciers, which helped to mould and deepen the valleys. The present
glaciers are truly the remnants or rootlets of those enormous masses of
the glacial epoch. On such of the land surface as was not then covered
by ice, existed the hairy elephant or Siberian mammoth, the woolly
rhinoceros, wild cattle, lions, bears, hyenas, and other animals now
extinct in this part of the world. Man had made his appearance, hunted
these animals, and lived in caves. His weapons and carvings and their
bones tell us the story in no uncertain terms.
The biggest Swiss glaciers of to-day, compared to the great glacier of
the Rhone Valley, of which they are but the highest tributaries, still
surviving unmelted among the mountain-tops, are in size as a mountain
freshet is to the great stream of Loch Lomond, or as the Serpentine in
Hyde Park to the neighbouring Thames. Vast as was the great glacier of
the Rhone Valley, and immense as has been the work done by water and
ice in carving the great highway in the mountain-mass of Switzerland,
it has all been effected since the date of the formation on the
sea-bottom and the subsequent elevation of the strata which we call
“the chalk”--a deposit which comes not very far down in the series
of strata of the earth’s crust. Only 3,000ft. of deposit exist above
it, whilst below it are more than 60,000ft. of water-deposited or
“sedimentary” rocks. The huge Alps have risen since the date of the
“chalk,” for we find strata containing marine shells of the Tertiary
period at a height of 10,000ft. in those mountains. Where those shells
now are was the bottom of the sea at a comparatively recent date,
probably not more than fifty million years ago! And not only have the
Alps been raised since then from the sea level to 15,000ft. (the height
of Mont Blanc), but the huge mountain valleys and the great chasm of
the Rhone Valley many miles wide, with its floor thousands of feet
below the mountain ridges, have been scoured out. Deeper and wider it
has gradually become as it has taken shape, whilst the mountain sides
have been removed first by water and later by ice--by the great glacier
consisting of solid ice, miles wide and a thousand and more feet in
thickness. The water no longer fills the valley in solid form, but once
again rushes along as an irresistible torrent, tearing and wearing the
rock without rest or mercy, carrying it off by thousands of tons day by
day, year by year, to the plains of Provence and the deep floor of the
Mediterranean Sea.
The blue colour of the glacier ice--like that of pure water--is now
known to be due to no impurity or admixture of other substances. It
does not, as was supposed by Tyndall, owe its blueness to a dust of
finest colourless particles as do blue smoke, the blue sky, and as
do the blue eyes which have attracted the observation of naturalists
(and others) in Ireland and the North of Europe. Water, whether liquid
or solid, is blue, just as “blue copperas” is, or as “Prussian blue”
is; but light must pass through some ten or twenty feet thickness of
it to make the colour evident to our eyes. The green tint is due to
an admixture of yellow, the exact cause of which is not quite easy to
discover. Probably it is due to minute quantities of earthy matter
mixed with the surface snow.
The pressing of the high-lying snow, so as to form solid ice or
“glacier,” is concerned with the same property of snow as that
which enables us to make snow “bind” into a snowball. You cannot
make snowballs during very hard frost--the snow must be in air of a
thawing temperature at the moment it is squeezed by the hand. The hand
itself will not be warm enough to produce that temperature when the
thermometer is below freezing-point. The snow commences to melt in
the hand when one squeezes it, and then when the squeezing is stopped
the water formed quickly freezes again and cements the snow particles
together to form ice, enclosing innumerable minute bubbles. The heat
of the sun and the pressure of the weight of the snow itself take the
place in the mountains of the warmth and pressure of the human hand.
The minute air bubbles make the newest glacier-ice white and opaque,
especially when seen in a great mass; but gradually they get squeezed
together, and the glacier ice becomes first “fibrous” in appearance,
and then, after long years of pressure by its own weight, fairly clear.
Ice in great masses has the properties of a viscous body, like pitch
or soft sealing-wax, owing to the fact that wherever the solid mass
breaks its particles melt a very little and then freeze again. Under
increased pressure ice melts at a lower temperature than when it is not
subjected to pressure. When the pressure is removed the water freezes
again. Thus crushed ice or snow can be put into a “squeeze-mould” and
pressed, so as to form a solid mass of ice of any shape you may choose.
Four or five slabs of ice, placed one over the other, very soon become,
owing to this property, one continuous solid mass. White glacier ice
is so full of air bubbles as to be comparable in structure to sponge,
or, more closely, to cork. A cube of such ice exposes, owing to its
rough air-hole pitted surface, a much larger surface of contact to the
atmosphere than does a cube of perfectly smooth clear ice. Consequently
in a warm room or chamber the white ice melts much more quickly than
does the clear, and hence you should choose clear ice rather than
white ice if you wish for a block which will last.
Before leaving the glaciers, let me briefly relate an incident arising
from their slow but regular downward flow to the region where they
melt away and deposit, as a terminal moraine, the burden of rocks
they have received years before in regions far above. A young man of
five-and-twenty, on his honeymoon, visited the Alps, and ventured
alone on to a glacier. He fell into a deep “crevasse,” or ice-fissure,
and his body was not recovered. The exact spot where he fell into the
ice-chasm was recognised, and the mountain-folk, who knew their glacier
and its rate of movement well, told the broken-hearted young widow that
it would take thirty years before that region of the glacier would
have moved so far downwards as to reach the lowest limit, and in due
course melt away. She haunted the glacier in which her young husband
was entombed year after year, and at last, when she was now grey-headed
and withered by time, that special tract of ice had descended so far,
and was so near the thawing, thinned-out margin of the glacier that
they were able to break into it with axe and pole. Then she, an old
woman, had a wonderful experience. They led her to the glacier’s edge.
Her young husband, preserved these thirty years in the ice, which had
melted around him and re-frozen, lay there unchanged. His features were
not marred by the lapse of years, nor was his clothing rent or injured.
He seemed as one asleep, resting after a long day’s climb, and she,
poor soul, had, during a blissful interval, the conviction that all
those weary years of waiting were but a long, bad dream, that she, too,
still was young, and was waking, as she had loved to do long years ago,
in time to see him lift his lids and smile.
39. _Votes for Women_
Now that so many people placidly accept the notion that women are to
have votes in the election of members of Parliament, one is tempted
to ask whether science has any facts to put forward which should be
considered before so great a change in our national organisation is
made. There are various interesting facts as to the relations of males
and females in the animal world and as to the relative strength and
activity of the sexes--which are sometimes cited as arguments in the
matter. Speaking generally, it is clear enough that among animals
the female is endowed with qualities which bear exclusively upon her
function as the guardian of the eggs or germs of a new generation. She
nourishes those germs at the expense of her own substance before birth,
feeds them, tends them and protects them--after birth. The male in
many cases contributes to the feeding and protection of the young, but
is as often as not quite unconcerned with such matters. In the higher
animals the male is far more powerful than the female, and fights with
other males both for the possession of a mate or a harem, and for the
undisturbed occupation of feeding grounds for himself and family.
Among lower animals there are curious cases of the greater strength and
size of the female. Thus, among spiders, the female is nearly twice
as bulky as the male. She makes, in many cases, a nest ready for her
young, and is visited there by the wandering irresponsible male, who,
in spite of great danger to himself, is irresistibly attracted to seek
a brief caress from the terrible spideress. She is terrible, not only
on account of her bulk, but because she makes a rule of killing, and
sucking the blood of, her infatuated admirer unless he is sufficiently
alert and agile to escape from her side more quickly than he came
to it. The courtship of spiders is a very interesting bit of natural
history. The males execute a sort of dance, and are strangely excited
by the vibrating note of a tuning fork. Two American naturalists, Mr.
and Mrs. Peckham, and also Dr. McCook, have studied this subject in
great detail.
A strange-looking, dark green worm, as big as a walnut, with a
ribbon-like trunk six or eight inches in length attached to its mouth,
lives in holes in the rocks in the Mediterranean. A similar worm
has been found off the Norwegian coast. Fanciful names are given by
zoologists to these two worms--the first is called Bonellia, the second
Hamingia. It does no harm to cite their names, and I do so with an
apology to those who do not like names. These goodly sized worms are
females, only females. For years the corresponding male was unknown.
At last a minute creature one-eighth of an inch in length, like a
tiny fragment of green thread, was found crawling about on and into
these big green Bonellias. Its structure when it was examined with
the microscope proved it to be the adult male of the worm on which
it was crawling. It was so insignificant and minute as to escape all
observation except that of a trained naturalist searching for it with
a magnifying glass. Some seven or eight of these diminutive males are
found on one female, infesting her as fleas infest a mouse, and of
about the same relative size. The microscopic husband of the Norwegian
Hamingia it was my good fortune to discover many years ago, when I was
dredging marine animals in the deep waters of the Stavanger Fjord.
So there is nothing in the eternal fitness of things proclaiming the
male as the necessary superior of the female throughout Nature. The
fact is that the question of equality and of general superiority
and inferiority has no place in regard to male and female from a
naturalist’s point of view. It is true that women are so very much
less endowed with muscular strength than men that practically every
woman is inferior to every man in this respect. It is also true that
woman’s brain is smaller than man’s, and that apart from mere size,
the intellectual activity and capacity of women, by whatever test
you examine it, is less than that of man. When exceptional cases on
both sides are excluded, the definite intellectual inferiority of the
average woman, as compared with the average man, is established as a
fact. The observations of those concerned in the education of young
men and young women side by side confirm this, and it is further
demonstrated by a consideration of the intellectual performances of
average men and average women. That, at any rate, is my own experience
as a University teacher. But women, on the other hand, fill a place in
human life as mothers, and administrators of detail, and as companions,
in which man, by the nature of things, cannot compete with them at all.
At the house of the late Sir James Knowles, some twenty-five years ago,
when discussing the relative value of the physical and intellectual
capacities of the men as compared with the women of the English working
class, Mr. Gladstone (at that time the head of the Government) said to
me, “I am of opinion that the relative value of a man and a woman is
in all classes of society about the same as it was in my grandfather’s
time in Jamaica when they purchased slaves. They gave £120 for a man
and £80 for a woman, and that is a fair measure of their relative value
all the world over.” It is necessary to remember that Mr. Gladstone
was not estimating the ultimate value of woman in human life when he
said this. He would, I think, have considered, as I do, that it is
absurd to attempt to estimate that or to raise a discussion as to
general superiority and inferiority in reference to the male and the
female of the human species. They are creatures as necessary one as
the other, differing from one another profoundly and excelling one
another in diverse qualities and capacities. Without this complementary
division of fitness and quality our life would be a monotone robbed
of the infinite variety which characterises humanity. What Mr.
Gladstone estimated as being less by one-third in women than in men
is power--work-value--whether physical or intellectual. I think Mr.
Gladstone’s estimate must be admitted as true.
But I do not for a moment say that when this inferior intellectual
and physical capacity of woman is admitted the question is settled
as to whether women should vote for the election of representatives
to carry on the affairs of the country. The affairs of the country!
They are, in the first place, the protection of person and property
by the law, which must be upheld by force if necessary; then defence
against foreign aggression, also a matter of force; and, further, the
education and training not only of children but of the ripe youth of
the country--a matter of intellect--which also has a weighty influence
in the making of wise laws. Then there is the devising of weapons and
means of defence by land and by sea, as well as the discovery and
application of knowledge in regard to disease, both of mind and body,
for the benefit of the community. And there will soon be a good deal
more!
It does not necessarily follow, because women cannot themselves do some
of these things at all, and for the others are less able than men, that
they should not give a vote in electing the men who are to attend to
them. The only question is, Would it make life better for both women
and men were they allowed to do so?
The argument that the paying of taxes on men’s property qualifies men
to give a vote, and therefore the paying of taxes on women’s property
should, _ipso facto_, entitle women to give a vote, is fallacious,
because the paying of taxes is not the reason or determining cause of
men having a vote, but only a subsidiary test or qualification which
might be abolished or modified. The property of minors pays the tax,
but it is not proposed on that account that children should vote. The
property qualifications in use at present are merely a method for
excluding certain men, and we might have an intellectual qualification
or a muscular qualification for the same purpose. Indeed, we do at
present exclude male imbeciles and those who are immature. The reason
for extending the Parliamentary vote to a larger and larger body of
the male population has been to secure the assent of the strength and
manhood of the country to the laws and public acts of the Government,
and to ensure its willing participation in that maintenance of the
central Government’s decisions by physical force, which is the ultimate
and by no means very remote method by which they are maintained. It
does not seem to be likely to be an improvement on our present system
that women, who must always be regarded as specially privileged because
of their physical weakness, should nevertheless be allowed to influence
by the mere number of their votes the decision of questions in which
the employment of the physical strength of men acting as defenders of
our territory, guardians of the peace, or ministers of the law, is the
essential condition of an effective result following on such decision.
To a naturalist human population does not appear as a number of units
of which a few more are female than male--but rather as a series of
families, consisting of men, women, and children, bound together by a
variety of reciprocal services, dependent one on another, ordered and
disciplined to a distribution of functions and duties by the tradition
and experience of ages. The notion that the paterfamilias is the
rightful chief of his wife and children, and that through him they are
represented, and should be content to be represented, in the local and
greater State Government--is one of long standing in civilised Europe.
The powers of the paterfamilias have been gradually limited in the
course of the development of social life since the young men and the
old bachelors, too, have been given a share of power in the State: but
the recent proposal to break the fabric of his household by giving the
Parliamentary franchise to women is so sudden and strange a notion that
he seems not to have realised what it means.
The apathy which many men exhibit in regard to this proposal is as
remarkable as the amiable courtesy with which others assent to it
rather than “disoblige a lady.” Looking at the proposal not as a
question of justice, which really has nothing to do with it, but in
reference to the inquiry as to whether it is likely, if carried, to
increase the happiness and prosperity of the community, I must say
that, so far as the natural history of man gives indications, it seems
to me that if women acquired the Parliamentary franchise and made
active use of it, they would be led into a new attitude of independence
and separation from the men and from the family group to which they are
by birth or alliance attached. I fear that the great business of making
the nest beautiful, producing and tending the young, nursing the sick,
helping the aged, consoling the afflicted, rewarding the brave, of
dancing and singing and creating gaiety within the charmed circle where
political contests and affairs of State are of no account, would be
neglected and without honour. In the end these amenities of life would
probably fall into the hands of commercial companies and be sent out at
so much a head--imported from Germany. Woman would not be the gainer,
for she can only gain by continuing to astonish man by all she does for
his enchantment and delight, to serve him and to crown his life--she
will only suffer by becoming “independent.” The movement which is
supposed to lead to a higher development of womanhood, and consists in
women mobbing people on their doorsteps, waving flags and shouting
at other people’s meetings, and struggling in the arms of policemen,
seems to be inconsistent with a development in the direction which
has hitherto been popular and successful in the progress of man from
savagery to decency. It is difficult to suppose that men will really be
so blind to the facts of the real importance and true value of women
as to allow this movement to succeed whilst they look on with vague
incredulity as to its being anything more than a huge joke.
There is, too, finally, one serious warning to be derived from the
ascertained facts of human physiology and psychology. The immutable
task, the sacred destiny, of women is to become the mothers of new
generations. Nothing which is likely to interfere with or lessen the
respect and veneration due to women in view of this tremendous natural
determination of their instincts and aspirations should be lightly
sanctioned by men so long as they have the power of deciding the
matter. There is good and sufficient ground for fearing that the new
status of women which would be established by their entry on an equal
footing with man into the arena of political struggle and public life,
would injuriously affect in a majority or large minority of cases that
mode of life and economy of strength which is necessary for those who
must give so much to the great and exacting demands of maternity.
The gratification of the whim of a few earnest but injudicious women
would be an altogether insufficient justification for the injury of
the “physique” of women in general by the strain of public competition
with men, and for the widespread development in women of an increased
habit of self-assertion and self-sufficiency--habits which must make
them unwilling to accept their natural duties as wives and mothers--and
must make men equally unwilling to promote them to these honours and
privileges.
40. _Tobacco and the History of Smoking_
A proposal is before Parliament to prevent little boys from “smoking”
in public places. Little girls are, as the bill at present stands, not
to be interfered with. Perhaps this is because they are not to have
votes when they grow up, and so they may do as they like.
Apart from the question as to whether the smoking of tobacco is
injurious to the health or not, there are many curious questions which
arise from time to time as to the history and use of tobacco. I have
no doubt that for children the use of tobacco is injurious, and I am
inclined to think that it is only free from objection in the case of
strong, healthy men, and that even they should avoid any excess, and
should only smoke after meals, and never late at night. The strongest
man, who can tolerate a cigar or a pipe after breakfast, lunch, and
dinner, may easily get into a condition of “nerves” when even one
cigarette acts as a poison and causes a slowing of the heart’s action.
A curious mistake, almost universally made, is that of supposing that
the oily juice which forms in a pipe or at the end of a cigar is
“nicotine,” the chief nerve-poison of tobacco. As a matter of fact,
this juice, though it contains injurious substances, contains little
or no “nicotine.” Nicotine is a colourless volatile liquid, which is
vapourised and carried along with the smoke; it is not deposited in the
pipe or cigar-end except in very small quantity. It is the chief agent
by which tobacco acts on the nervous system, and through that on the
heart--the agent whose effects are sought and enjoyed by the lover of
tobacco. A single drop of pure nicotine will kill a dog. Nicotine has
no aroma, and has nothing to do with the flavour of tobacco, which is
due to very minute quantities of special volatile bodies similar to
those which give a scent to hay.
Most people are acquainted with the three ways of “taking
tobacco”--that of taking its smoke into the mouth, and more or less
into the lungs, that of chewing the prepared leaf, and that of snuffing
up the powdered leaf into the nose, whence it ultimately passes to the
stomach. A fourth modification of the snuffing and chewing methods
exists in what is called the “snuff stick.” According to the novelist,
Mrs. Hodgson Burnett, the country women in Kentucky use a short stick,
like a brush, which they dip into a paperfull of snuff; they then
rub the powder on to the gums. Snuff-taking has almost disappeared
in “polite society” in this country within the past twenty years,
but snuffing and chewing are still largely practised by those whose
occupation renders it impossible or dangerous for them to carry a
lighted pipe or cigar--such as sailors and fishermen and workers in
many kinds of factories and engine-rooms.
One of the most curious questions in regard to the history of tobacco
is that as to whether its use originated independently in Asia or was
introduced there by Europeans. It is largely cultivated and used for
smoking throughout the East from Turkey to China--including Persia
and India on the way--and special varieties of tobacco, the Turkish,
the Persian, and the Manilla are well known, and only produced in the
East, whilst special forms of pipe, such as the “hukah” or “hooka,” the
“hubble-bubble,” and the small Chinese pipe are distinctively Oriental.
Not only that, but the islanders of the Far East are inveterate smokers
of tobacco, and some of them have peculiar methods of obtaining
the smoke, as, for instance, certain North Australians who employ
“a smoke-box” made of a joint of bamboo. Smoke is blown into this
receptacle by a faithful spouse, who closes its opening with her hand
and presents the boxful of smoke to her husband. He inhales the smoke
and hands the bamboo joint back to his wife for refilling. The Asiatic
peoples are great lovers of tobacco, and it is certain that in Java
they had tobacco as early as 1601, and in India in 1605. The hookah
(a pipe, with water-jar attached, through which the smoke is drawn in
bubbles) was seen and described by a European traveller in 1614. Should
we not, therefore, suppose that in Asia they had tobacco and practised
smoking before it was introduced from America into the West of Europe?
It seems unlikely that Western nations should have given this luxury
to the East when practically everything else of the kind has come from
the East to Europe--the grape and wine made from it, the orange, lemon,
peach, fig, spices of all kinds, pepper and incense. Yet it is certain
that the Orientals got the habit of smoking tobacco from us, and not we
from them.
Incredible as it seems, the investigations of the Swiss botanist,
De Candolle (see his delightful History of Cultivated Plants--a
wonderful volume, published for 5s., in the International Scientific
Series) and of Colonel Prain, formerly in India, now Director of Kew,
have rendered it quite certain that the Orientals owe tobacco and
the habit of smoking entirely to the Europeans, who brought it from
America, as early as 1558. In the year 1560 Jean Nicot, the French
Ambassador, saw the plant in Portugal, and sent seeds to France to
Catherine de’ Medici. It was named Nicotiana in his honour. But the
introduction into Europe of the practice of smoking is chiefly due to
the English. In 1586 Ralph Lane, the first Governor of Virginia, and
Sir Francis Drake brought over the pipes of the North American Indians
and the tobacco prepared by them. The English enthusiasm for tobacco
smoking, “drinking a pipe of tobacco,” as it was at first called, was
extraordinary both for its sudden development, its somewhat excessive
character, and the violent antagonism which it aroused, and, as we
learn from Mr. Frederic Harrison, still arouses. It was at once called
“divine tobacco” by the poet Spenser, and “our holy herb nicotian” by
William Lilly, and not long afterwards denounced as a devilish poison
by King James. The reason why the English had most to do with the
introduction of smoking is that the inhabitants of South America did
not smoke pipes, but chewed the tobacco, or took it as snuff, and less
frequently smoked it as a cigar. From the Isthmus of Panama as far as
Canada and California, on the other hand, the custom of smoking pipes
was universal, and wonderful carved pipes of great variety were found
in use by the natives of these regions, and also dug up in very ancient
burial grounds. Hence the English colonists of Virginia were the first
to introduce pipe-smoking to Europe.
The Portuguese had discovered the coasts of Brazil as early as 1500,
and it is they who carried tobacco to their possessions and trading
ports in the Far East--to India, Java, China, and Japan, so that in
less than a hundred years it was well established in those countries.
Probably it went about the same time from Spain and England to Turkey,
and from there to Persia, and rapidly developed not only special new
forms of pipe (the hookah) for its consumption, but also within a few
years special varieties of the plant itself. These were raised by
cultivation, and have formerly been erroneously regarded as native
Asiatic species of tobacco plant.
The definite proof of the fact that tobacco was in this way introduced
from Western Europe to the Oriental nations is, first, that Asiatics
have no word for it excepting a corruption of the original American
name tabaco, tobacco, or tambuco: it is certain that it is not
mentioned in Chinese writings nor represented in their pottery before
the year 1680. In the next place, it appears that careful examination
of old herbariums and of the records of early travellers who knew
plants well and recorded all they saw, proves that no species of
tobacco is a native of Asia. There are fifty species of tobacco, but
all are American excepting the Nicotiana suaveolens, which is a native
of the Australian continent, and the Nicotiana fragrans, which is a
native of the Isle of Pines, near New Caledonia.
Forty-eight different species of tobacco (that is to say, of the genus
Nicotiana) are found in America. Of these Nicotiana tabacum is the only
one which has been extensively cultivated. It has been found wild in
the State of Ecuador, but was cultivated by the natives both of North
and South America before the advent of Europeans. It seems probable
that all the tobaccos grown in the Old World for smoking or snuffing
are only cultivated varieties--often with very special qualities--of
the N. tabacum, with the exception of the Shiraz tobacco plant, which,
though called N. persica, is of Brazilian origin, and the N. rustica,
of Linnæus, a native of Mexico, which has a yellow flower, and yields
a coarse kind of tobacco. This has been cultivated in South America
and also in Asia Minor. But tobaccos so different as the Havannah, the
Maryland and Virginian, the incomparable Latakia, the Manilla, and the
Roumelian or Turkish--all come from culture-varieties of the one great
species, Nicotiana tabacum.
The treatment of tobacco-leaf to prepare it for use in smoking,
snuffing, and chewing requires great skill and care, and is directed
by the tradition and experience of centuries. As is the case with
“hay,” the dried tobacco-leaf undergoes a kind of fermentation, and,
in fact, more than one such change. The cause of the fermentation is a
micro-organism which multiplies in the dead leaf and causes chemical
changes, just as the yeast organism grows in “wort” and changes it
to “beer.” It is said that the flavour and aroma of special tobaccos
is due to special kinds of ferment, and that by introducing the
Havannah ferment or micro-organism to tobacco-leaves grown away from
Cuba, you can give them much of the character of Havannah tobacco! A
very valuable kind of tobacco is the Roumelian, from which the best
Turkish cigarettes are made. It has a very delicate flavour, and very
small quantities of an aromatic kind prepared from a distinct variety
of tobacco plant grown near Ephesus and on the Black Sea (probably
a cultivated variety of Nicotiana rustica) are judiciously blended
with it. This blending, and the use of the very finest qualities of
tobacco-leaf, are essential points in the production of the best
Turkish cigarettes. The so-called “Egyptian” cigarettes are made from
less valuable Turkish tobacco, with the addition of an excess of the
aromatic kind. It is a mistake to suppose that opium or other matters
are used to adulterate tobacco. The only proceeding of the kind which
occurs is the mixing of inferior, cheap, and coarse-flavoured tobaccos
with better kinds. Water and also starch are used fraudulently to
increase the weight of leaf-tobacco. But skilful “blending” is a
legitimate and most important feature in the manufacture of cigars,
cigarettes, and smoking mixtures.
The first “smoking” of tobacco seen by Europeans was that of the Caribs
or Indians of San Domingo. They used a very curious sort of tubular
pipe, shaped like the letter Y. The diverging arms were placed one up
each nostril, and the end of the stem held in the smoke of burning
tobacco-leaves, which was thus “sniffed up” into the nose. The North
American Indians, on the other hand, had pipes very similar to those
still in use. The natives of South America smoked the rolled leaf
(cigars), chewed it, and took it as snuff.
It has been suggested that in Asia smoking of some kind of dried
herbs may have been a habit before tobacco was introduced--since even
Herodotus states that the Scythians were accustomed to inhale the
smoke of burning weeds, and showed their enjoyment of it by howling
like dogs! But investigation does not support the view that anything
corresponding to individual or personal “smoking” existed. “Bang” or
“hashish” (the Indian hemp) was not “smoked,” but swallowed as a kind
of paste before the introduction of tobacco-smoking in the East--as
we may gather from the stories of the “Arabian Nights”--although the
practice of smoking hemp (which is the chief constituent of “bang”) and
also of smoking the narcotic herb “henbane,” has now been established.
Opium was, and is, eaten in India, not “smoked.” The “smoking” of opium
is a Chinese invention of the eighteenth century.
The Oriental hookah suggests a history anterior to the use of tobacco,
but nothing is known of it. The word signifies a cocoanut-shell, and is
applied to the jar (sometimes actually a cocoanut) containing perfumed
water, through which smoke from a pipe, fixed so as to dip into the
water, is drawn by a long tube with mouthpiece. It seems possible that
this apparatus was in use for inhaling perfume by means of bubbles of
air drawn through rose-water or such liquids, before tobacco-smoking
was introduced, and that the tobacco-pipe and the perfume-jar were
then combined. But travellers before the year 1600 do not mention
the existence of the hookah in Persia or in India, though as soon as
tobacco came into use this apparatus is described by Floris, in 1614,
and by Olearius, in 1633, and by all subsequent travellers.
The conclusion to which careful inquiry has led is that though various
Asiatic races have appreciated the smoke of various herbs and enjoyed
inhaling it from time immemorial, yet there was no definite “smoking”
in earlier times. No pipes or rolled-up packets of dried leaves--to
be placed in the mouth and sucked whilst slowly burning--were in use
before the introduction of tobacco by Europeans, who brought the
tobacco-plant from America and the mode of enjoying its smoke, and
passed on its seeds to the people of Turkey, Persia, India, China, and
Japan.
41. _Cruelty, Pain and Knowledge_
It is difficult to write or to read or even to think about “cruelty”
and preserve one’s sober judgment and reason. Most people are upset
by emotion when torture and the details of the infliction of pain are
discussed. All the more must we remember that emotion is a powerful
driving force, but a bad guide. Only true knowledge and sound reasoning
can guide us aright.
An awful fact about the emotional state produced by witnessing or
hearing about the agonies of human beings or of sentient animals is
that to some people (actually very few and diminishing in number
among civilised races) it is distinctly a source of pleasure, though
to most of us it is intolerably painful. This fact forms one of the
most difficult problems of psychology. It seems that just as there
are people who enjoy seeing dangerous acrobatic performances or
climbing themselves among ice and rocks at the risk of their lives,
or reading of hairbreadth escapes, of bloody murders, of ghosts,
and other horrors--all of which are repulsive to the majority--so
there are some people who experience delicious shudderings--“des
frissons exquis”--when they see a man or an animal in torture or read
a description of such things. In the eighteenth century it was not
unusual for a country cousin on a visit to London to be taken as a
treat to see half a dozen men and boys hanged at Newgate, and then
to complete the happy day by a visit to Bedlam to see the madmen
flogged! Fortunately, public opinion and education seem to have been
able actually to alter the operation of the emotions excited by these
brutalities--so that to-day practically everyone in the Western States
of Europe regards the unnecessary infliction of pain with horror and
indignation, and is anxious to avoid witnessing pain, even in cases
where it is a necessary evil.
It is a mistake to suppose that there is any tendency on the part of
scientific men or medical men to be callous or indifferent to the
infliction of pain. The surgeon sometimes has to inflict pain in order
to prevent greater future pain or death--but he is not indifferent to
the pain he causes. He is not even “cruel only to be kind”--but appears
cruel to the unthinking because he has to give pain which he knows will
save his patient from far greater pain, and he has to maintain a calm
and determined attitude in order to help those around him to exercise
self-control. The medical art is, above all things, an art of removing
and abolishing pain, and its practitioners are all the more sensitive
concerning pain because they know more and see more of it than other
people, and make it their chief business to alleviate suffering.
Charles Darwin took a prominent part twenty-five years ago in urging
the Government of the day not to make a law which would prevent
physiologists and medical men from obtaining knowledge as to animal
life and disease by experiment. The great naturalist was a great lover
of animals and a most gentle and tender-hearted man. He wrote to me
in 1870: “Experiment must, of course, be allowed for the progress of
physiology and medicine, but not for damnable and detestable curiosity.
I will write no more about it, or I shall not sleep to-night.” Mr.
Darwin was alluding to horrible so-called “experiments” which in former
days--especially in the latter part of the eighteenth century--were
made by utterly irresponsible and ignorant amateurs, witnessed by
fashionable ladies, and reported in the newspapers and letters of the
day. It is these reckless and useless “experiments” which rightly
excited horror and opposition a century ago, and were described by the
name “vivisection.” We have to thank these blundering philosophers
of the salons of a past age for the mistaken feeling with which some
people regard the really valuable and careful investigations which
are made by medical men at the present day, with the use of every
precaution to prevent pain to the animals used.
The testing of drugs, the inoculation of parasitic disease, and the
trial of different modes of removing or controlling the disease
so inoculated, carried on by highly trained and learned men, who
thoroughly know what they are about, and who communicate with one
another from all parts of the world as to the progress they are making
in curing or even abolishing diseases, such as diphtheria, cholera,
sleeping sickness, and phthisis are very different from the impudent
unscientific “experiments” of the days of Horace Walpole. The inquiries
carried on in the modern laboratories of our great universities should
not for a moment be confused with the horrors performed to glorify
and show the superior cold-bloodedness of drawing-room pretenders to
science, in those strange times.
I believe that most sensible people feel as Mr. Darwin felt, and I
myself would certainly subscribe to what he wrote to me in the letter
which I have quoted above. Amongst those who feel thus strongly on
the subject there are some who can control their emotion and calmly
consider whether the pain inflicted under any given circumstances is
justifiable as leading to a great ultimate diminution of pain by the
knowledge obtained. There are others who are constitutionally incapable
of controlling their emotion in this matter. They hear dreadful stories
of cruelty, and are so upset that they are incapable of ascertaining
whether the stories are true or not. They are quite unfit to weigh the
question as to whether the pain given in the case they hear of may or
may not be a necessary step towards avoiding far greater pain in the
future for thousands of human beings and sentient animals. Far be it
from me to think harshly of these tender-hearted people, though their
mistaken outcry may tend to stop the discovery of pain-saving and
life-saving knowledge. I feel more sympathy with them than with those
(happily rare) individuals who are really indifferent to seeing or
giving bodily pain to men or to animals.
There is reason to hope that careful and well-considered statement
of the facts will eventually enable many of those who are mentally
unhinged by descriptions of pain and bloodshed to recognise that they
have been deceived, partly by their own fancies and partly by the false
statements of professional agitators. Unfortunately, there are always
present in human society individuals who find it to their advantage
to excite the minds of their more emotional fellow-citizens by tales
of horror. The lust of such power--the power to lead or urge a large
body of men driven by emotional excitement into violent action--has led
from time to time to exaggeration, misrepresentation, and elaborate
plot and perjury directed against a group of innocent or worthy people,
whose proceedings were mysterious or misunderstood by the community
at large. Thus, from time to time, the crowd has been infuriated and
led to the murder of the Jews by agitators, who started the baseless
story that the Jews had slain a Christian child, and used its blood at
their feast of the Passover. Titus Oates and Lord George Gordon made
use of the unreasoning emotion of the crowd in the same way. To a less
serious extent the emotional unreasonableness of a number of men and
women is being played upon at the present day by quite a large variety
of agitators, would-be leaders of crusades and campaigns against the
beneficent work of the physiological and medical laboratories of our
universities and medical schools.
There are one or two other features about “cruelty” and the mental
conditions leading to and arising from it, which, however uncanny and
troubling, should be carefully considered when public opinion is roused
in regard to its repression. Among these is the fact that the word is
freely applied to the mere infliction of pain without consideration
of the question as to whether there is a guilty mind determining it.
Storms and frosts are called “cruel” by poetic license; but it is
probably quite wrong to call a cat or a tiger cruel. These animals take
pleasure in playing with their prey, as they would with an inanimate
ball or mechanical toy. There is no reason to suppose that they are
conscious of the infliction of pain or take pleasure in pain as pain.
And so it must happen sometimes with thoughtless human beings who
disregard the pain which they cause, when eagerly engaged in “sport” or
in the pursuit of some all-absorbing and consuming purpose. The whole
subject of cruelty is a distressing one, but should not on that account
be misapprehended or dealt with wildly and blindly.
Twenty-five years ago a Royal Commission sat which was appointed to
inquire as to what restrictions, if any, it was desirable to place upon
the practice of making experiments on animals for physiological and
medical purposes. As a result of its labours an Act of Parliament was
passed which made definite regulations for the purpose of preventing
unqualified persons from indulging in reckless experiments on animals.
There were stories circulated by the agitators then--as there are
now--to the effect that medical students perform horrible and painful
operations (vivisections, as the agitators term them,) on live animals
in secret or with the connivance of their teachers. It was proved
twenty-five years ago that these stories were false. At the same time
an elaborate law was passed to satisfy the emotional persons misled
by the agitators, which made it necessary for an experimenter (1) to
have a licence (dependent on a certificate as to his competency); (2)
that he should use anæsthetics; and (3) that experiments should only be
carried out in licensed laboratories.
The agitators of the present day have by heart-rending stories, similar
to those told twenty-five years ago, produced a similar excitement and
a similar result, namely, a Royal Commission on Vivisection, which has
been occupied for a year and a half in listening to the statements and
delusions of those who declare that the law made twenty-five years
ago is insufficient, and that all sorts of cruelties are committed by
the physiologists and doctors. The Commission has also questioned the
leading physiologists and medical men in the country, and listened to
their voluntary statements. I have seen the very voluminous report of
the evidence thus given on both sides. The various accusations made
against the medical men in the conduct of their laboratories have been
carefully gone into. It is contended, on their side, that these charges
are based on misunderstanding--the misunderstanding which one would
expect from an ignorant person with a strong feeling or prejudice in
the direction of the misunderstanding. For instance, the fact that
chloroform is administered and the animal rendered insensible when
operated on, has been overlooked in some of the accounts which excited
the so-called “antivivisectors”--notably in the misleading account of
“the brown dog.” The whole of the evidence should be read by those who
are really in doubt on the matter. Probably it will not be long before
the Commission reports, and its conclusions will command the very
greatest respect, not only because its members include eminent lawyers,
medical men and independent representatives who were ready to give an
impartial mind to the inquiry, but also because it is obvious that the
very greatest care has been taken to obtain the fullest evidence from
both sides.
Sir James Fletcher Moulton, one of the Lords Justices of the Court of
Appeal, has made a statement to the Commission in defence of scientific
experiment which is a masterpiece of persuasive reasoning and lucid
exposition. It is somewhat remarkable that there have been and are
persons in high judicial office who have shown active hostility to the
cause of science and knowledge in this matter owing to their want of
acquaintance with the facts and their readiness to be carried away by
blind emotion. Lord Justice Moulton, on the other hand, is a scientific
man by education and early training, and has come forward to state in a
plain and reasonable way what is the view of the matter which commends
itself to him. There is reason to hope that his view will be approved
by those who read what he says calmly and without bias. His chief point
is that many people are willing to admit that it is right to destroy
animals (even by methods which inflict great pain on them) when an
immediate result of a good and useful kind is to be obtained--as when
we kill animals to serve as food or in order to prevent them from
injuring us or destroying our crops and stores. Yet these same persons,
he points out, by some defect of imagination are unable to see that the
gaining of pain-saving or disease-preventing knowledge as the result
of inflicting pain and death on a small number of animals justifies
us in permitting that pain and death. They are unable to admit the
justification because the knowledge and its practical application
does not directly and at once follow upon the first commencement of
the search for it, and they have not sufficient acquaintance with
the matter to enable them to realise and confidently believe that the
beneficent result will ensue. The knowledge has to be built up step
by step, and the infliction of pain on the animals is separated by an
appreciable lapse of time from the beneficent result--which is none the
less the result which was aimed at, and the true consequence of the
pain inflicted. Putting aside for the moment the fact that in these
inquiries the pain is reduced to a minimum by the use of anæsthetics,
it would seem that we ought to be able to recognise that the causing of
a certain amount of pain to many hundreds of rabbits, and even dogs,
is justified by the consequent removal of a far greater amount of pain
from thousands of men and animals who are saved from suffering at a
later date by the knowledge so gained.
Lord Justice Moulton suggests two cases of the infliction of pain on
animals for comparison. Suppose, he says, a ship to arrive in port
which (as might easily happen to-day) is infested by plague-stricken
rats; there are, perhaps, ten or twenty thousand rats on board. If
the rats escaped and landed they might (not certainly, but probably)
infect a whole city, even a much larger area, with plague, and cause
death and disaster to thousands of human beings. Everyone will agree
that the owner of the ship would be justified in destroying all the
rats on the ship by sulphur fumes, or whatever other painful method
might be necessary to prevent even one from escaping. A vast amount
of suffering would be inflicted on the rats in order to prevent a far
greater contingent amount of suffering. Now suppose that a man, by
infecting some hundreds of rats and other animals with plague, and by
trying various experiments on these animals with curative drugs, and
by other operations upon them, can in all probability arrive at such
a knowledge of plague and how to check it as to enable us to arrest
its propagation, and so to save thousands, or even millions, of human
beings from this painful and deadly disease, are we to say that this
investigator must not carry on his studies, must not find out how
to stop plague in future because to do so he will have to give some
amount of pain to a hundred or more animals? Clearly, if we justify
the shipowner we must justify the inquiries and experiments of the
medical discoverer. In both cases we must hold--every sane man really
does hold--that it is right to inflict pain with the expectation (not
a certainty in either case, but only a reasonable probability) of
preventing a far larger and more serious amount of pain in the future.
It is the choice of the lesser of two evils.
And thus we are led to admit that it is right that experiments and
studies attended with some pain to animals should be carried on, on
condition that competent and serious persons make them, for the purpose
of gaining increased knowledge of the processes of life and disease.
Such studies have already yielded great results--the pain in the wards
of hospitals and in sick rooms is not a tenth of what it was a hundred
years ago. The death-rate of great cities is a third less than it was
fifty years ago. Modern medicine and modern surgery are really and
demonstrably immense agencies for preventing pain and the anguish and
misery which is caused by untimely death.
A Society for the Defence of Research has been established this year
(1908) with the Earl of Cromer as its president. The Society has
issued some valuable pamphlets showing what improvements in medical
knowledge have been recently effected by means of inoculations and
other experiments in which animals have been used though subjected to
as little pain and discomfort as consistent with the enquiries made.
Ignorant opponents of medical research assert that the scientific
study of the processes of life and disease in laboratories has not
helped in the great progress in medical practice which marks the
last fifty years. But the medical men who are the leaders of their
profession unanimously assert, and prove by detailed accounts of the
discoveries made, that such study has been essential to the progress
established, and is essential for further progress. Lord Lister, who
by his antiseptic method of treating surgical wounds has saved more
pain to present and future generations of men than all the torturers
of the Inquisition ever inflicted or dreamed of inflicting, has been
the leader in declaring the inestimable value to humanity--in fact,
the absolute necessity--of physiological experiments on animals. Whose
judgment on this question can be considered of greater value than his?
The anti-vivisection agitators, for the purpose of exciting the
emotions of those who listen to them, use the word “torture” as
describing the action of such men as Pasteur and Lord Lister. To
torture is to inflict an ever-increasing amount of pain, with the view
of “extorting” a submission, a confession, or treasure from a victim.
To suggest that scientific and medical men apply pain in this way, and
to spread the word “torture” among the ignorant, emotional public, in
connection with their inquiries, is dishonest as well as ungrateful.
One valuable result of the work of the present Royal Commission on what
is called “Vivisection,” but should be called “the use of animals in
the discovery of means of controlling disease and alleviating pain,”
is that it is made quite clear that there is very little pain at all
inflicted in this beneficent work, owing to the fact that anæsthetics
and narcotics are administered to the animals when anything which might
cause pain is done. I do not hesitate to say that there is in this
country less pain caused in a whole year in all the laboratories where
this great work for the public good is carried on than in a single
day’s rabbit-shooting.
It is important to correct, if possible, the misunderstanding which
very naturally exists as to what physiologists and doctors mean by
“experiment.” In ordinary language an “experiment” suggests a haphazard
venture, the doing of something blindly and in ignorance, just “to see
what will happen.” It is true that long ago in the eighteenth century
there were men callous enough and ignorant enough to make such “fool’s
experiments” on living animals. But when scientific men speak of “the
experimental method” and the acquisition of knowledge by experiment,
they do not allude to haphazard attempts to see what will happen when
something extraordinary is done. The experiment of the experimental
method is arranged so as to provide a definite answer to a definite
question, and the question has been thought out by a man who knows the
whole record of previous experiment and knowledge in regard to the
subject which is under investigation.
Thus in the inquiry as to the possible prevention of the deadly effect
of snake poison introduced into the human body by the bite of snakes,
the first question asked was, “Is it true, as sometimes stated, that a
poisonous snake is not poisoned by having its own poison injected into
its flesh?” The experiment was tried. The answer was, “It is true.”
Next it was asked, “Is this due to the action of very small doses of
the poison which pass constantly from the poison gland into the snake’s
blood, and so render the snake ‘immune,’ as happens in the case of
other poisons?” The experiment was tried. Snakes without poison glands
were found to be killed by the introduction of snake’s poison in a
full dose into their blood. Then it was found that a horse could be
injected with a dose of snake poison, or half the quantity necessary
to cause death, and that it recovered in a few days. The question was
now put, “Is the horse so treated rendered immune to snake poison,
as the snake is which receives small doses of poison into its blood
from its own poison gland?” Accordingly the experiment was made.
The horse was given a full dose of snake poison, and did not suffer
any inconvenience. At intervals of two days it was given increasing
injections of snake poison without suffering in any way, until at last
an injection in one dose of thirty times the deadly quantity of snake
poison--that is, enough to kill thirty unprepared horses--was made into
the same horse, and it did not show the smallest inconvenience. The
question was thus answered: Immunity to snake-bite can be conferred by
the absorption of small quantities (non-lethal doses) of snake poison.
The next question was this: “If something has been formed in the
horse’s blood by this process, which is an antidote to snake poison,
should it not be possible, by removing some of the horse’s blood and
injecting a small quantity of it into a smaller animal, to protect
that animal from snake bite?” The experiment was accordingly made.
Rabbits and dogs received injections of the blood of the immune horse.
An hour after they received full doses of snake poison. They suffered
no inconvenience at all; they were “protected,” or “rendered immune.”
The next question was, “Will the antidote act on an animal after it has
already been bitten by a snake?” The experiment was made. Rabbits were
injected with snake poison. After a quarter of an hour they were on the
point of death. A dose of the immune horse’s blood was now injected
into each--in ten minutes they had completely recovered and were
feeding. The means was thus found of preventing death from snake-bite.
The protective horse-blood was properly prepared, and sent out at once
to Cochin China and to India. It was there tried upon human beings who
had been accidentally bitten by deadly snakes, and it proved absolutely
effective; it saved the men’s lives. It is now used (wherever it can be
obtained in time) as the sure antidote to snake-bite, though it is not
at present possible to supply it whenever and wherever it is needed.
That is an example, briefly told, of the experimental questioning of
Nature--such as is pursued in the laboratories of medical men and
physiologists. They do not perform haphazard experiments; but each
experiment is so arranged as to give a definite answer to a definite
question, leading to a large result. By no other process can knowledge
of many things, which it is urgent for us to have, be obtained. We
should have to wait centuries if we merely watched Nature, and hoped
for some accidental circumstance to reveal the facts.
What, after all, do we understand and mean by “pain”? It is not
merely the sharp sting, and consequent shrinking caused by wounds and
violence. That, we know well enough, is a beneficent arrangement by
which men as well as animals are prevented from knocking themselves
to pieces, and are driven into avoiding danger to life and limb. But
“pain” includes, besides this, the anguish arising from the weary,
fruitless struggle against disease and starvation, from the disaster to
the household caused by the untimely death of its mainstay, from the
slaughter of children by poisonous foods, and from the neglect of the
laws of health of body and mind.
Ignorance, the “curse of Hell,” is the cause of all suffering.
Knowledge is the wing which takes us heavenward, and frees us from
misery. I cannot put it better than in Shakespeare’s words. It is
man’s destiny to diminish pain on this earth, and that not by timidly
shrinking from and emotionally raving about the horrors of pain, but by
facing them and deliberately accepting the responsibility of producing
a small and brief suffering to a few animals as the price of the
salvation of his fellow-creatures from the far greater pain which is
the assured and fatal companion of ignorance--accursed ignorance!
A recent writer has told us that he cannot believe that good will
follow from the wilful destruction by man of Nature’s greatest and most
beautiful production--a living thing. He poses as a sentimentalist and
seems to regard it as the indication of a superior and gentle mind to
refuse to sanction the removal or even the temporary discomfort of what
Nature has called into life. I, too, claim to be a sentimentalist,
but the sentiment which thrills me is one of revolt against the
needless and remediable suffering of all humanity--suffering which man
has brought on himself by his stumbling, half-hearted resistance to
Nature’s drastic method of purifying and strengthening the race, her
remorseless slaughter of the unfit. It is this suffering which some
would allow their fellow-men still to endure, now and for generations
to come, rather than have their own tranquillity disturbed by the
record of that modicum of immediate pain and sacrifice of animal
life which is the price of freedom for mankind from far greater pain
hereafter. We have to learn to mitigate and to minimise pain, not
to run away from it. It is childish to weep over the distortion and
destruction of Nature’s products by man’s violence and ignorance. What
we can and should do is to see that our dealings with this fair earth
and its living freight are guided not by vain regret, but by knowledge
and foresight.
THE END
R. CLAY AND SONS, LTD., BREAD ST. HILL, E.C., AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
Punctuation has been made consistent.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation were retained as they appear in
the original publication, except that obvious typographical errors have
been corrected.
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