The Popular Science Monthly 1874-09: Vol 5

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. SEPTEMBER, 1874. NATURAL HISTORY OF MAN. By A. DE QUATREFAGES. TRANSLATED BY ELIZA A. YOUMANS. V.—ZJTntellectual Characters. ENTLEMEN: I resume my discourse for the fifth time on the same subject. You have already, on four different occasions, studied man; and, again, man is the subject of this lecture. On the preceding occasions I ran over some of the general ques- tions that arise concerning the history of the human race. Depending always and exclusively upon science, I have shown that this species is unique; that all men are of the same species; and that, in conse- quence of this fact, they ought to regard each other as brothers, what- ever the color of the skin, whatever language they speak, whatever country they inhabit. This species at first occupied a very limited part of the globe. It spread all over the globe at an earlier epoch than was formerly be- lieved ; more recent researches have demonstrated that man existed in France along with the hyena, the elephant, the rhinoceros—that is to say, along with animals seen, in our day, only in distant countries. As man appeared at first on a restricted point of the globe, and is found to-day everywhere, it is evident that he has traveled in all directions from his centre of creation, and peopled the earth by migra- tion much as do the Europeans at the present time. These journey- ings have exposed him to all the influences which can be encountered on the surface of our planet, and he has become acclimated every- where as we see him to-day. In the study of general questions relative to the history of our species, we had to ask what was the origin of man. On this point I have been obliged to confess the insufficiency of actual knowledge. But, if I was not able to say whence man came, I VoL. v.—33

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514 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. could say, in the name of science, whence he did not come; I could affirm that our ancestor was not an animal—neither a monkey, nor a seal, nor any other animal whatever. At our last meeting we commenced the study of the general char- acters presented by the human species, and we examined its physical churacters ; that is, those which may be drawn from the body studied in a state of health and of disease. We were led also to pass in re- view its exterior characters, its anatomic characters, physiological and pathological. We thus obtained an idea of the general nature of man, considered exclusively from an organic point of view. Well, this study of man, in his material relations, led us to the conclusion that there is but one human species, so that it confirmed the results at which we arrived in our first lectures. But is the body all of man? And, after studying the material being that strikes our senses, is there nothing more to study? Science will answer. When a naturalist studies ants, he is not content with describing the thorax, the abdomen, the jaws, and the legs. He shows also how they construct their ant-hill, and to what use its chambers are des- tined ; its galleries, where so many and such divers things are stored ; he shows, further, how they raise their larve and their young ones; how they hold in captivity the plant-lice destined to furnish an ali- ment which they secrete, as do the cows and sheep we keep in our stables. When a naturalist gives the history of bees, he does not limit him- self to a description of their body and wings; he is careful to show how they build their hives, gather and knead the wax to construct the comb in which they deposit honey, the first sweet known to man. He calls the attention of the reader or listener to that unique female, always alone in each hive; he shows the respect and care that all the bee-workers have for this female, who is at once their queen and their mother, In other words, the naturalist studies the instincts of the ants and the bees. When he attempts the history of man, shall he put aside that which in him represents these instincts? Evidently not. Consequently he must not stop with the body. He must consider the intelligence which is in us, and which, up to a certain point, we have in common with animals; he must show that it is this element of our being which recognizes the outer world, which judges, which aspires. His work will be very imperfect, if he neglects this some- thing of which the nature escapes us, but of which the power is such, that through it man has not only vanquished all animals, whatever their defenses, their size, or their strength, but he has overcome and made to work, as his servants, even the immutable forces of the inani- mate world, achieving all distances, thanks to the railroad! outstrip-

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NATURAL HISTORY OF MAN. 515 ping time, thanks to the telegraph! and even annihilating pain, thanks to chloroform ! Then, along with the material characters which we studied at our last lecture, we now take up intellectual characters. It is our distinct intention, in taking up characters of a nature so new, still to remain exclusively on the ground of science. We know the existence of faculties, and we shall point out their most general manifestations; but we shall have no concern with the nature of these faculties. In a word, we are not philosophers. Here, as in preceding lectures, we shall remain a man of science—a natural- ist, and nothing else. It will be impossible for me to examine these characters in detail. I shall neglect several, and limit myself to saying something on lan- guage, on writing, on the fundamental forms of society, on industry, and on dress. I, Language.—It will not be denied that the most essential of all the manifestations of intelligence is language. ** Animals have voice, man alone has speech.” This phrase is from an ancient philosophic naturalist—from the great Aristotle, who lived some four centuries before our era; it is as true to-day as it was more than two thousand years ago. In fact, man alone possesses articulate speech. But, you all know that the manifestations of speech vary from peo- ple to people. Each of these manifestations—the languages, as we call them—constitutes one of the most essential characters of the dif- ferent human groups. You all know a German, a Spaniard, an Eng- lishman, by his language. But this is not the limit of the scientific importance of this character. Unhappily, I cannot here enter into details. I shall only attempt to show you, in a few words, how the study of language throws light on the history of human groups, even in the case of those who have lost all historic data. You know that in France other languages than French are spoken, and that, on all sides of us, we find the Gascon in the south, the bas- Breton in Brittany, the Alsatian in Alsace, etc. Whence comes this diversity of language among a people at present so remarkably homo- geneous ? History answers this question. It teaches us that, until a certain epoch, Languedoc, Alsace, Brittany, formed so many separate states, having each its own language. From this fact we are enabled to draw important consequences, When we encounter a group actually designated by a single name, and when we find in this group secondary groups speaking diverse languages, we may almost to a certainty conclude that formerly all these secondary groups had their individual life, their political inde- pendence. The study of language conducts us still further.

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516 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. When, in place of mere juxtaposition, each remaining in the place it has occupied for an indefinite time, the different nations, from any cause whatever, come to be mixed together, they each bring their lan- guage; and, in consequence of the fusion, each brings his part of the language that becomes common. A language so formed is a mixed language, which consists of words and turns of phrases recalling the mother-languages which gave it birth. Here, again, history shows us that this thing has actually been done. The English language, for example, has words and expressions which bring to mind the languages of all the races that have been mixed and confounded in that isle. Consequently, when we enter for the first time a country of which we know not the history, and find a population presenting in its lan- guage words and phrases borrowed from other languages, on the right and on the left, we are authorized to conclude that this population results from the mixture of anthropological elements, which imply the linguistic elements themselves, We may go still further. Language, you know, changes—is transformed with time. The French language of our day is not the French of five centuries ago ; the Frenchman of to-day must study specially and with dictionaries before he can read the French of the past. So, language alters, changes, even when there has been no dis- placement of population. And all the more when immigration inter- venes; if mixtures occur, the language will be altered, and a new lan- guage will arise. This new language may differ so much from the primitive one as to appear at first to have no resemblance to it. This may happen not only for one people and for one language, but for many. A language may also become the mother of many different languages. But these daughter languages always preserve something in common with that from which they descended ; and men who have made these questions the object of continued study, the linguists, know very well how to discover the filiation. They know how to rise from derivative languages to their primitive tongues. In this way they attach together people that were thought to be very distinct because they spoke languages that at first seemed very different. It is by this study, wholly recent, but which for some years has advanced with the stride of a giant, that we are able to unite in one source most of the people who now cover almost the whole of Europe; such as, on the one hand, the French, the Germans, the Swedes, and the Spanish; and, on the other, the people who inhabit Persia and the valley of the Ganges. These people constitute what is called the Aryan race, More marvelous still, thanks to the comparison of languages, a philosopher. of Geneva, M. Adolph Pictet, was able to trace a sort of history of the primitive Aryans, the common parents of Europeans, | a

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NATURAL HISTORY OF MAN. 517 Persians, and Indians. He retraced their manner of life, and, although they left no historical data, he has shown almost in detail the point of civilization at which they had arrived, I cannot, you know, enter into details relative to this science, at once so recent and already so immense that it has been called com- parative linguistic science, I can only indicate the great divisions, because, perhaps I shall, by-and-by, have to refer to them. All the languages spoken on the surface of the earth have been divided into three fundamental groups; these are the monosyllabic languages, the agglutinative languages, and the flexible languages. The monosyllabic languages are the most imperfect. Each of their words consists of one syllable. As an example, I will name the Chi- nese, which is a monosyllabic language, par excellence. In this lan- guage each word presents itself with a sense perfectly absolute, and the delicacies of our language, even the distinctions of time, of place, of going, of coming, etc., can be translated only by a kind of para- phrase. The agglutinative tongues form the second stage of language ; here there are words, placed after the fundamental conception, which serve to modify the primitive sense—roots, to employ the expression in use. As examples of agglutinative languages, I will name the negro languages, and those spoken by yellow people, and also by very small numbers of white people. Finally, the highest development of language is that of flexible language, so named because, by simple changes in the termination of a word, we can change and modify the absolute sense, and make it ex- press divers shades of meaning, thus: J speak now; J shall speak to-morrow. Almost all the white races speak flexible languages. II. Writing.—Speech is evidently the first element in the forma- tion of societies ; writing is the most essential element of the progress of these societies. It is speech fixed. This alone permits the trans- mission of the results of our efforts to the most distant descendants— of the accumulation of the treasures that each generation has sepa- rately acquired, I should like to dwell upon its history; but I should be drawn too far, and so, for writing as for language, I can only indi- cate a few facts. Almost with the lowest savages we find means to aid the memory, and serve as souvenirs of events to which more or less importance is attached. These are called mnemonic signs. They are sometimes stones, sometimes pieces of wood shaped in divers ways. A mode of appeal to the memory, found in both the Old and the New World, con- sists in uniting packages of strings of different colors, on which are made knots of divers forms. These are called guippus. You make, so to speak, a quippu every time you tie a knot in your handkerchief to enable you to recall something. Picturing objects, men, events, in a more or less faithful manner,

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518 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

is not writing; it is what is called pictography. Such are those gross representations employed even to-day by the Indians of North Amer- ica to transmit information (Figs. 1 and 2.)

Fre. 1.

a ae bile PULL =G I> ><he keyg. fa |

AWW, InpIAN BARK-LETTER. InDIAN BARE-LETTER. EXPLANATION OF Fia. 1.—On one occasion a party of explorers, with two Indian guides, saw one morning, just as they were about to start, a pole stuck in the direction they were going, and hold- ing at the top a piece of bark, covered with drawings, which were intended for the information of any other Indians who might pass that way. This is represented in Fig. 1. No. 1 represents the subaltern officer in command of the party. He is drawn with a sword, to denote his rank. No. 2 denotes the secretary. He is represented as holding a book, the Indians having understood him to be an attorney. No.3 represents the geologist, appropriately indicated by a hammer. Nos. 4and 5 are attachés ; No.6 the interpreter. The group of figures marked 9 represents seven infantry soldiers, each of whom, as shown in group No. 10. was armed with a musket. No. 15 denotes that they had a separate fire, and constituted a separate mess. Nos. 7 and 8 represent the two epee guides. These are the only human figures drawn without the distinguish- ing symbol of a hat. This was the characteristic seized on by them, and generally employed by the Indians, to distinguish the red from the white race. Nos. 11 and 12 represent a prairie- hen and a green tortoise, which constituted the sum of the preceding day’s chase, and were eaten at the encampment. The inclination of the pole was designed to show the course pur- sued; and there were three hacks in it below the scroll of bark, to indicate the estimated length of this part of the journey, computing from water to water. EXPLANATION oF FiG. 2.—This figure gives the biography of Wingemund, a noted chief of the Delawares. No. 1 shows that it belonged to the oldest branch of the tribe, which use the tor- toise on their symbol. No. 2 is his totem, or symbol; No. 3 is the sun, and the ten strokes repre sent ten —— in which he was engaged. Those figures on the left represent the captives which he made in each of his excursions, the men being distinguished from the women, and the captives being denoted by having heads, while a man without his head is of course a dead man. The central figures represent three forts which he attacked; No. 8, one on Lake Erie; No. 9, that of Detroit; and No. 10, Fort Pitt, at the junction of the Alleghany and the Monon- gahela. The sloping strokes denote the number of his followers.

When the object figured has a conventional signification, we may say that writing has begun. For example, the idea of prudence would be represented by a serpent, that of force by a lion. This manner of translating thought is symbolic, ideographic writing. It presents many stages. The hieroglyphics seen on Egyptian and Mexican monuments belong here. But all these signs do not constitute veri- table writing. In reality, this appears only when the signs employed represent the sounds of the language. After reaching this point, writing again presents two very different stages. Each syllable may have its par- ticular character; or, better still, the elements of the syllable may be represented. This last form constitutes writing, properly speaking. It is this that we employ. The collection of signs we call an alpha-

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NATURAL HISTORY OF MAN. 519 bet ; and this alphabet, which constitutes the first step of elementary instruction, is certainly one of the most marvelous inventions of the human mind, So almost all the ancients attributed to it a divine origin. Ill. Primitive Forms of Society.—As I just said to you, it is by language that societies begin, and by writing that they make the greatest progress in civilization. But, before they attain civilization, they have long halting-places to get over, and, regarding the ensem- bles of the human races, we see three very distinct kinds of primitive society. The lowest degree of human association is people that hunt and fish ; and this inferiority is easily explained. A society composed entirely of hunters cannot be numerous, because it must live on the game it kills, Therefore, a great space is needed to nourish a sparse population. Besides, the hunter’s chances are for the day; he is never sure of a living for to-morrow. This incessant uncertainty prevents him from directing his intelligence toward more elevated subjects, Ilunters, besides, have incessantly to watch their hunting-grounds to prevent encroachments. In other words, the hunter is the image of war. Wars easily arise between neighboring populations placed in identical conditions. These wars are without mercy, for each prisoner is one more mouth to feed; kill him, then. Hence, hunting-tribes are almost inevitably courageous, sometimes heroic, but warlike and cruel. As soon as man domesticates certain animals—cattle, sheep, or llamas—as soon as he becomes pastoral, his to-morrow is assured. He can at once begin to occupy himself with something besides his food ; and we see societies of this kind begin to make progress. However, pastoral people need vast spaces for their animals; these promptly ex- haust the herbage of a canton; it becomes needful to go elsewhere after food for the animals which supply milk and flesh, the nourish- ment of the master, and so a pastoral population cannot exist in great numbers. They easily become nomadic, In their migrations the hordes meet and dispute by force of arms for the precious pasturage. War breaks them up; but prisoners may be utilized by the con- queror, and their food will not be a great sacrifice. They are spared, and slavery is born. Society takes its third form, when man finds that the vegetable kingdom furnishes more abundant and reliable food than that ob- tained from animals—when he becomes an agriculturist. Besides, agriculture gives him leisure. His manners soften, War, when it breaks out, becomes less cruel, Prisoners employed to work in the field can render services more and more considerable. Slavery be- comes serfdom. Relieved from imperious material necessities, the intelligence of the master awakens and enlarges. A true civilization may arise and grow among agriculturists. Centuries ago Europeans attained a social state permitting the de-

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§20 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. gree of civilization of which we are so proud, and this leads me to make an observation. Too often, under the influence of our actual superiority, we disdain the people who are behind, whether in the pastoral state or in the state of hunters. We proclaim them incapable of reaching our level. This opinion is nowhere justified. Forget not that we have passed by the same halting-places. Forget not, above all, that many civili- zations have preceded our own. Two thousand years before our era the Chinese raised monuments that still excite the admiration of trav- elers, cultivated the mulberry, raised the silk-worm, and possessed notions of astronomy. Egyptian civilization ‘is still more ancient. You saw proof of this at the Universal Exposition, In the temple raised under the direction of N. Mariette you must have admired, among other things, that magnificent statue of Chefren placed at the bottom of the hall, and which dates 4,000 years before our era. At this time we were true savages, covered with the skins of beasts, and carrying on our persons, under the pretext of embellishing ourselves, paints and tattooing like those of the most backward races of our own day. The effect of this should be, on the one hand, to awaken our modesty, and on the other to render us indulgent to people who are yet at the point which we have escaped. Fie. 8. IV. JIndustries.—It is in the midst of primitive societies that indus- tries are born and flourish. However low a people may be, it always has its own proper industries, Man is essentially an industrious being.

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NATURAL HISTORY OF MAN. 521 All industries suppose utensils; and the matter of which these utensils are made furnishes the means of determining to a certain ex- tent the degree of civilization attained by people whom we know only by traces they have left. In the beginning we see stone alone used to fabricate utensils and weapons; for these two things proceed together. Everywhere, man is at first content to shape more or less perfectly matter furnished him by the soil. Look at these samples of stones (Fig. 3) which have served as hatchets, whether for domestic use or war. You see they are fashioned very simply. These objects came from our soil; they served our first ancestors and attest the truth I have just stated. In proportion as man progresses, he is not content simply to shape the stone; he polishes it. His first attempts in this way are coarse enough. At first the edge of the hatchet alone is polished. Later the entire hatchet, and sometimes in a remarkable manner (Fig. 4). The hatchets as well as the knives are generally of silex, that is, of that species of stone which formerly served as flint in striking fire. Its hardness explains why it was chosen for these purposes, When it

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522 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. began to fail they could employ others, Finally they fell back on shells, and it is impossible not to admire some of their works executed with such imperfect instruments, with fragments of stone less hard than our silex, and the débris of marine shells, After stone, appeared the metals; but not iron, of which we know so well the uses and which alone has made possible the miracles of our modern industry. Copper and bronze preceded iron; in America copper, in our Europe bronze, came after stone. Finally, iron made its appearance, and many evidences prove that from its first discovery its value was understood. Inthe gymnastic plays celebrated by Achilles on the tomb of his friend Patroclus, at the epoch of the Trojan War, twelve centuries before our era, a mass of iron is proposed as a prize, and Achilles himself speaks of its importance. The diversity of material employed in uten- sils marks the true stages in the history of an- cient peoples. At this time we generally ad- mit as distinct periods the age of stone, the age of bronze, the age of iron. The age of stone is divided into two periods, according as the utensils and weapons were polished or only shaped. It is to this most ancient period that the population belonged which lived in Europe with the elephant and rhinoceros, I must refer you to the special history of the several races for further details of their in- dustries. But I will add a few facts to the preceding. Let us speak a word about the warlike industries. Wherever human society exists, we find in- struments of war. After the need of food, it seems the most pressing want of man is to kill or enslave his kind. We may say that man is a warlike being. Among the lowest people of the globe we find offensive and defen- sive arms; and everywhere those at the bottom of the scale astonish us by the ingenuity of these arms, The Australians, certainly a most inferior people, use a not very large but very thick shield. Their skill in parrying strokes is most remarkable, as all travelers admit. The same people use curious weapons ; one, called the boomerang (Fig. 5), is a bit of hard wood, very flat, sharp, and more or less curved. The inhabitants know how to throw this little piece of wood so that, after it has struck the enemy or the game, it rises in the air, turns, and falls into the hand of the thrower. The boomerang realizes, then, the en- Fra. 5. BooMERANG.

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NATURAL HISTORY OF MAN. 523 chanted arms spoken of in the old fables—arms which, after having struck the mark, come back themselves to their possessor. V. Dress.—If I point out some facts relative to dress, it is to show you how much of connection, of real resemblance, there is between the most savage and the most civilized people. Everywhere and always man has sought to embellish himself. Sometimes by acting on himself, sometimes by borrowing the elements of his dress from without. In the tombs discovered from time to time which inclose the remains of men with their stone hatchets, used in France against the elephant and rhinoceros, in those tombs, I say, we find collars (Fig. 6) made of morsels of shells or small corals Fie. 6. NECKLACE. which had not, in the eyes of their possessors, a less value than the precious stones have for us. We might almost define man as a being who ornaments himself; and certainly here is a great difference sepa- rating him from the animals. I shall not dwell on the different ma- terials taken from the exterior world to cover our bodies and embel- lish us. Were you to see a woman of Tahiti in grand costume, you would remark that when our grandmothers had contrived the pan- niers, and the women of our day the crinoline, they only borrowed from the children of the South Sea a part of their attire. It is worthy of attention that, under the pretext of embellishing him- self, man has almost always sought to modify his own body. So the Chinese women, in order to make their feet very small, cripple them- selves in so grave a manner that often the little children succumb in the operation, The bones of the heel, in place of elongating behind, are violently displaced and directed downward, so that the women walk on their own heels as on the heels of their shoes. The toes are likewise turned under, the big toe alone being in place. Our women do not go so far; but you know women who, to make the feet small, fear not to give themselves corns, and many men do the same. At the Philippines, the group of isles that you see at the east of Asia, is a people whose women attach great importance to having the

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524 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. largest possible fist. To make it large, they swaddle the arms, which consequently remain slender, while the fist enlarges in a fashion very repulsive to our European eyes. But the head seems to have been, by preference, the object of these strange caprices, probably because it is the part of the body most evident and most important. Some people seek to change completely the form of the cranium, For this purpose they place on the heads of children, immediately after birth, contrivances which project them forward or backward, and then, by pressing tightly behind and before, the head is made flat. There is a people on the western side of America which surrounds the head of the infant with a bandage so as to give it the form of a sugar-loaf. I'must remind you that among ourselves the ears are still pierced to suspend ornaments from them. If men have generally renounced this fashion, women remain very faithful to it. But all the other parts of the visage have been submitted to the same mutilations, the nose, the lips, the cheeks themselves have been pierced, always to suspend or introduce into the openings some morsel of wood, of stone, of bone, as ornament. Fig. 7. Fig. 8. Heap or NEw-ZEALANDER. Heap or New-ZEALANDER. The face and the forehead are frequently decorated with divers tat- tooings (Figs. 7 and 8), made sometimes by pricking, sometimes by cutting the skin. At the Marquesas Isles, not only the countenance, but the entire body, is tattooed. You see here a warrior (Fig. 9) of that country, and perhaps you think him covered with a motley cos- tume; no, it is simply tattooing. Jest not too much at these ornaments of savages. Our ancestors wore the same, and the fashion is not wholly effaced with us. More

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NATURAL HISTORY OF MAN. 525 than one of you, doubtless, has on the arm or on the breast some red or blue figure representing a heart pierced, two swords crossed, an anchor, or a hammer, symbols of your profession. Along with these tattooings incrusted in the skin by various pro- cesses, we may place also the paintings. Here, again, is a means of embellishing that every people has practiced and practices still. Some- Fra. 9. CanoLine ISLANDER. times these paintings have precise significations; there are the paint- ings of war, the paintings of peace, the paintings of fetes, etc. We do not go so far; but we must not forget that the most civilized Enu- ropeans have painted and still paint the countenance. Our grand- mothers habitually used white, and, above all, red; they put on patches, that is to say, small rounds of court-plaster to give beauty to the skin by contrast. And to-day, you know, our fashionable women tint themselves so well that a word has been invented on this subject. So

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526 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. we find, in our most elevated classes, that which seems so strange in savages. The head of hair offers the same considerations. With savages as with us, it is an object of no less special care. Negroes, Hottentots, Polynesians, etc., stiffen their hair with grease, and color it with pow- Fre. 10. Fusan MopDEs OF DRESSING THE Harr. ders, red, yellow, white, etc. (Fig. 10.) Everywhere they decorate it with flowers, feathers of all sorts, brilliant crystals, grains of glass, Well, our fathers pomaded and powdered themselves; our women pomade themselves, and put flowers, feathers, and diamonds, in their

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NATURAL HISTORY OF MAN. $27 hair, which are, after all, only crystals, more or less dear. And as to our pomades, whatever name we give them, they always have, for foundation, the oil of almonds, or the fat of pork. You see that, be tween the article used by savages and that we make ourselves, there is no great difference. Ill. Moral and Religious Characters.—We pass to another order of characters. By his body, I repeat, man is an animal, nothing more, nothing less; by his intelligence he is infinitely superior to animals. But, to judge by fundamental phenomena, the nature of our intelli- gence does not differ from that which they manifest. Are we, then, only a more intelligent kind of animal? I have al- ready answered this question. No; we are not animals, we are something else; for, besides the phenomena which we have in common with them, we have our special character, connected with faculties, of which we find not the least trace in the most elevated animals. These faculties are morality and religion. I. Morality.—Among all people, in all races, there are expressions which mean good and bad, honest man and scoundrel; consequently, all men have the abstract notion of good and evil. Objections have been made to this idea that morality was an attri- bute of man; or, rather, difficulties have been raised on the subject. Some say, for example, that animals know also what is good and what is bad. This is true for our most perfect domestic animals, as the dog. Thanks to our superior intelligence, we have accustomed them to that which is good and bad for us. But leave them in a savage state, and you will never find them doing any thing to which you can attach the notion here implied. Man is certainly the only being that we see war against pain—physical evil—that he may reach moral good. It has been said again that morals differ from people to people, and the attempt has been made to draw from this an inference that morality is not characteristic of man. The faculty itself is here con- founded with its manifestations. We forget that the same sentiment can be expressed by very different and sometimes opposite acts. I will take, for example, those which testify to politeness and the re- spect we pay to superiors. In the same case, the European rises and uncovers his head; the Turk, on the contrary, remains with the head covered, and the Polynesian sits. These contrary acts are not less, the one than the other, acts of deference. We must place ourselves at this point of view to judge of morality. We must, in such cases, and, above all, when it is a question of inferior peoples, forget our own notions on this subject, and seek after the general ideas of the people we are studying. We must recur to what has taken place with us at certain epochs, and then we shall find that there is not as much difference as we imagined between the most civil- ized and the most savage people. We shall return to the subject in treating the history of races. To-day I can only say a few words rela-

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528 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. tive to three chief principles: Respect for property, respect for the life of others, and respect for one’s self. I. Respect for Property.—It has been said that the notion of prop- erty does not exist among savage people. This is an error, With them, arms, utensils, instruments, are strictly personal property, as with us; but some travelers have been deceived by the existence, among hunting-tribes, of another kind of property, communal property, if I may so speak. Among these people the ground does not belong to the individual but to the entire tribe. Under this relation the prop- erty is so well known that war is the consequence of the least violation of the hunting limits. Certain races have been accused of being essentially thievish. This reproach is brought particularly upon the negroes of the Gulf of Guinea, and upon the Polynesians. They have been accused of stealing even the nails of the ship. But let me remind you what iron is for people who do not have it. It is more precious to them than gold. Well, suppose there should arrive among us a ship, gold clad and nailed with diamonds and rubies. Do you believe it would go out intact from our ports? Remark further, that, among the negroes of Guinea and Polynesia, those who steal of their comrade are dishonored and punished as they would be with us. They have the idea of respect tor property the same as ourselves. II. Respect for Life.—Everywhere the life of man is sacred ; every- where the murderer is punished; but, with ourselves, circumstances determine the nature of the act. Nobody would treat as an assassin him who beats fairly in a duel; the soldier who has killed with his hand a great number of enemies is decorated; very far from being punished, he is reeompensed. With savages the formula is still more elastic. For him the stranger is always an enemy; besides, vengeance is in his eyes a virtue, and when he has a murder to avenge he cares little to strike the murderer himself. Provided he furnishes a member of his family or his tribe, his vengeance is satisfied; whence results the dad blood between European travelers and the Polynesians in par- ticular. These people have too often complained of violence exercised by Europeans, who have left without being punished. The savage watches for those who come after the really guilty, sets a trap for them, and massacres the innocents. He applies his moral law, and we find the theory horrible. But forget not our middle age; we have got the start a little, but, in our day, if the vendetta were not abolished in Corsica, it would be the same, as it was the same in Scotland between clan and- clan. For the rest, gentlemen, the question of respect for the life of others is one of those that I least like to enter upon, because I cannot speak without blushing for the white race. You know that it rules every- where, but some of you do not know, perhaps, that everywhere devas- tation and massacre have marked its steps round the world. It seems

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NATURAL HISTORY OF MAN. 529 that it has used its superiority to annihilate its sister races, and reign on their tombs. III. Respect for Self.—I have shown you that the evils of which we accuse the savages exist with us. Permit me to show you among them the good of which civilized people pretend to have the monop- oly. The sentiments of honor and of modesty are certainly two of the most noble and most delicate of the.respect due to one’s self. We find these two sentiments developed sometimes in a high degree in the most savage peoples. It is evident that the idea of modesty must vary from one region to another; it cannot be the same among people forced by the climate to go naked, and among those who are compelled, by the rigors of climate, to wear clothes. We ought, in this respect, to look for marked differences, and to take account of these exigencies; besides, from the nature of the subject, I cannot enter into details, and I will only say that more than one traveler has expressed his astonishment to find more of true modesty among naked savages than among civilized and well-clothed people. Honor is, perhaps, the sentiment which is most uniformly mani- fested among these people. To obey the sense of honor, they hesitate not to provoke torments, to brave, and even to solicit, death. A young Kaffre chief is condemned to death; he may be pardoned on the con- dition of losing his ostrich-feather, which for him represents epaulets ; he demands, as a favor, to be thrown to the crocodiles rather than be dishonored. The red-skin made a prisoner, attached to the post of torture, defies his enemies to extract from him the least sign of suf- fering. That which we call chivalric generosity exists among the most savage peoples. Two Irishmen quarreled one day with some Austra- lians; they were without arms. Instead of profiting by this advan- tage, the savages gave them arms, that they might defend themselves. In our war at Tahiti, Admiral Bruet, commander of the French forces, took a bath one day in a river of the interior of the isle, while a well-armed chief belonging to the enemy was concealed near by. When peace was gained, this chief came to see the admiral, and easily showed him that for nearly two hours his life had been in his power. “Why did you not draw?” said the admiral. “I should have been dishonored in the eyes of my people,” replied the native, “if I had killed by surprise a chief such as thou.” See how the people called savages often conduct themselves, Would we do better ? You see, gentlemen, and you may fearlessly say, to the honor of our species, that morality, in its more serious as well as in its more delicate aspects, is found among all men; and, decisively, man is a moral being. II. Religion.—I come now to another order of considerations, that VOL, v.—34

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530 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. it will perhaps surprise you to hear me discuss. I have said, at differ- ent times, that 1 wished to be a man of science, that I did not wish to enter here upon either philosophy or theology, and yet I am going to speak of religion. I shall continue faithful to my programme. It is as a naturalist that I shall take up the subject. As for morality, I showed the existence of the faculty; then I pointed out some general facts, reserving the special facts for the history of races. To-day, as heretofore, I shall avoid with care the dogmatic and the theologic side of the discussion, The first fact to establish is the universality of the manifestations which belong to religion, In every country, with all peoples, in all races, we find the belief in beings superior to man, and influencing his destiny for good or evil. Everywhere we find the belief in another life succeeding to the actual life. These two notions lie at the foun- dation of all religions, and whoever admits them is religious. We can say, then, of man generally, that he is certainly religious, Objections have been made to the generality of this character. Let us rapidly examine the case, Some authors affirm that there exist atheistic people. They have cited in proof the Australians of whom I have already spoken, and the Bushmen. These are mistaken assertions ; but this error may be ex- plained. Three causes, acting together or separately, have contrib- uted to a misunderstanding of the religious beliefs of the inferior races of humanity. The first is the beliefs of travelers. When these travelers are mis- sionaries, having an ardent faith but a narrow intelligence, they are easily led not to accept, as true, religious beliefs so different from their own, Often, in their eyes, these beliefs are a work of the devil; they put them aside, or do not take the trouble to discover them, and they offer us, as atheistic, people who certainly are not. Ignorance of the language often leads to regarding a people as atheistic. A traveler encounters a savage tribe; he puts questions, well or ill, often by signs alone, on the Deity, or on the soul; the na- tives do not understand, and reply by some gesture of negation, and the traveler concludes that they believe neither in God nor immor- tality. But, the great cause which has often led to the conclusion I am opposing, is the disdain of Europeans for savages. Generally, the European, proud of his knowledge, and overrating his superiority, judges in advance their incapacity to attain to notions a little elevated. He takes no great pains to discover what he believes does not exist. At the first failure he thinks himself right in concluding that these inferior races are incapable of attaining to the notion of God and of a future life. Happily there are some tolerant missionaries who have studied them more closely, and laymen who have been able to see brothers in

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NATURAL HISTORY OF MAN, 531 these inferior representatives of the human family. _Thanks to the intelligence of these patient, clear-headed men, we now know that these Australians, that were said to have no idea of God, have in re- ality a rudimentary mythology, which sometimes recalls our own European superstitions. We now know that the Bushmen deify their great men, and address prayers to them. As to the Bushmen, they have a remarkable idea of the Divinity. They regard him as a great chief, who resides in heaven. They say of him: “ We see him not with the eyes ; we feel him in the heart.” This last phrase, which I quote literally, was obtained by travelers who lived in the midst of these people. They show that sometimes the people justly placed in the lowest rank of the human races may have, along with the strangest superstitions, religious notions remark- ably elevated. This fact is often presented when we examine the religion of different peoples. We find, it is true, much that is bizarre, many strange and shocking things, but we find also behind these ab- surdities ideas and beliefs which astonish us by their seriousness, by their elevation, by the resemblance they offer to that which is believed by more advanced people. The negroes of Guinea may serve to illustrate this subject. All travelers have spoken of their absurd beliefs, all have spoken of their fetishes. They tell us how these people prostrate themselves before serpents, trees, bits of wood, bone, etc., carefully wrapped up, and on which their priests have performed certain ceremonies. There are few who would seek that which might be found at the bottom of all this. Those who have made the search have found religious ideas, very superior to these appearances; the belief in divinities of different or- ders, living in the skies, and presided over by a sovereign creator who made every thing. When we look still further, as M. d’Avezac has done, we find prayers conceived in terms such as a European, a Chris- tian, might repeat without blushing. In the case of these negroes, as in our own, we must distinguish between religion and superstition, two extremely different things, which are too often confounded. I will add but a few words. Gentlemen, I close to-day the first part of the lectures that I have undertaken to give you. Let me formulate the last conclusions. We have asked only general questions, those which bear on the entire human race, and which may consequently conduct us to the foundation of the nature of man. We have asked them exclusively from the point of view of natural science; we have studied man as we study an animal ora plant. The result of this examination is to show in man a résumé of the entire creation. In him we find phenomena exactly parallel to those encountered in minerals, in plants ; consequently, all the forces acting in minerals and plants we find in man. By his body, from an anatomical and physical point of view, man

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532 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. is an animal, nothing more, nothing less; hence all the animal forces act in him. But is it by his body that man has acquired that empire that we have seen he possesses? You know very well it is not; you know very well that, if he reigns over all around him, over inanimate Nature as over organized Nature, he owes it to his intelligence, of like nature, but immensely superior to that of animals. Finally, man has his own attributes—faculties that belong exclu- sively to him—morality and religion. Well, these exclusively human faculties seem admirably to complete this exceptional being. It is these that ennoble him, and justify the incontestable empire that he claims over the globe ; for it is these which, along with the sentiment of punishment, give birth to the idea of duty, the thought of respon- sibility. Here, gentlemen, is the summing up that one is led to make of man when he is studied exclusively from knowledge by the naturalist. I hope you will find that you have lost nothing. THE PHOTOSPHERE AND SUN-SPOTS. By Pror. 8. P. LANGLEY, DIRECTOR: OF THE ALLEGHANY OBSERVATORY. HY is it that almost any one who was offered the opportunity of witnessing an eruption of Etna, or the effects of a tropical cyclone, would embrace such an occasion with eagerness, while phe nomena so similar in kind, and on so far grander a scale, visible daily on the surface of the sun, excite a comparatively feeble interest in al] but those devoted to their study ? It is doubtless, in part, because we have a more intimate and awe- inspired interest in disturbances which happen so near us, and which we do not extend to others with which we conceive we have less per- sonal concern; but the difference of the kind, as well as the degree of our interest in solar phenomena, from that which we take in those which occur, as it were, at home, is due in part perhaps to a remote cause, and forms a portion of the unconscious bias which the modern mind has inherited from ancient modes of thought. Deeply impressed by the fact that the sun had warmed and lighted the world from unknown time, with a fire which never seemed to be fed, yet which never burned low like a terrestrial flame, ancient phi- losophy concluded that the sun was formed of something quite other than any gross earthly elements—of an element of pure fire, which shone and warmed forever without fuel, because it was its “ nature” to; just as it is the “nature” of a fire on the hearth to burn only

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THE PHOTOSPHERE AND SUN-SPOTS. 533 when fuel is supplied to it. The sun was, then, to the ancient world, a kind of supernatural phenomenon, interest in which partook more of the uninquiring awe due to an immediate miracle of Deity, than of the curiosity excited by a fact of the natural world; and whatever we may think of such a way of regarding the matter, the view of the ancient philosophy, that the sun was an immaculate orb of pure fire, self-sustained, continued to be accepted almost as a dogma of the faith down to times subsequent to the dawn of the modern philosophy. When one of the first, possibly the first, of the observers of sun- spots, Christopher Scheiner, a Jesuit, communicated his discovery to his provincial, the latter, Mr. Proctor relates, answered: “I have read Aristotle’s writings from beginning to end, many times, and I can as- sure you I have nowhere found in them any thing similar to what you mention; go, therefore, my son, tranquillize yourself, be assured that what you take for spots in the sun are the faults of your glasses or your eyes.” Perhaps we are, however unconsciously, ourselves in some degree Aristotelians in such matters, and it is at least certain that the un- recognized influence of ancient modes of thought has delayed progress in solar physics, by preparing astronomers to admit theories which they could not have accepted with a clear recognition of the fact that physi- cal Jaws are the same in the sun as here, however erroneously we learn them from our limited terrestrial experience. In the hypothesis of Wilson, for instance, that exhaustless flow of solar light and heat is made to come from a shallow stratum of brilliant cloud, surrounding a dark and presumably cold and solid globe. The elder Herschel adopts this hypothesis, with slight modification (it is not yet quite dislodged from the text-books), and even his eminent son appears to feel nothing like an imperious demand for a sustaining cause of the almost infinite flood of heat his own researches showed that these clouds must be giving. It seems mow extraordinary that men justly eminent as the Her- schels could rest satisfied with an hypothesis which so evaded the consideration of the fundamental problem of the equality of the solar radiation, by tacitly assuming the suspension there of the most famil- iar laws of terrestrial experience. The views now generally accepted contemplate the sun ag hot throughout its mass, and in such a mass as containing indubitably an enormous though finite reservoir of heat. And, if, so far at least, there is an agreement even among those who differ as to the way in which this heat originated and is maintained, much is due to astrono- mers like Faye, who have insisted on this recognition of the need of accounting for the equable emission of heat with a success which may make us underrate our obligations to them, as this need, once enun- ciated, is so clear as to seem a truism, though it was far from being such till a very recent period.

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534 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. We must, then, look at the sun with no more idea of witnessing any thing without the sphere of natural laws, than in looking at a fire across the street. It need not follow that we shall find the operation of those laws exactly the same that our limited experience has pre- sented, and we shall still find abundant cause for admiration and won- der without introducing mysteries of our own creation. When we telescopically examine that brilliant surface which we see daily with the naked eye (the photosphere), to study such of its phenomena as are here described, we do not need the spectroscope, but some means of protecting the eye from the blinding light and heat, and this should not involve the use of any colored shades. If we look into an unsilvered glass, as, for instance, into the panes of a shop-window from the street, we observe that it acts as a mirror, sending back a feeble reflection of ourselves, or other objects without ; most of the rays from which have gone altogether through the glass, while a comparative few are returned to form the image. It may occur to us, then, instead of looking directly at the solar image formed by our telescope, to let it fall on a piece of plain glass, placed diag- onally, through which about nineteen parts in twenty of the light will pass and be thrown away, the remaining twentieth being reflected and forming an exact though enfeebled image. When this has been done, if the reflected image be still too bright, we may reflect it again, this time only a twentieth of the first twen- tieth reaching the eye, and so on to any degree; but it is strikingly illustrative of the intensity of the solar splendor that, when, by three such reflections, the sunlight has been enfeebled 8,000 times, we yet find it intolerably bright. Instead of more mirrors, it is better to now arrange that the third mirror may rotate, so as to polarize the light. When this is done, the image of the sun appears distinct (if the optician have done his work well), colorless, and of any brightness desired. The instrument just described in general terms is known as the polarizing eye-piece. All danger and discomfort in studying the sun disappear with its use, and we may look at its unclouded face as though the eye had been strengthened to bear its light; in fact, many hours of scrutiny of the solar disk with this instrument wearies the eye less than a few minutes’ telescopic examination of the moon does without it. What we shall see with it is far from being that sphere of dazzling light, everywhere equally brilliant, which we have been accustomed to consider the sun. The eye ranges over a vast surface, presenting at one view over five thousand times the entire area of our globe, to find everywhere diversity of shade. It is not only darker near the edges than at the centre, but the whole (apart from any consideration of the spots) presents an appearance somewhat like that very peculiar one which the ocean has when we obtain a bird’s-eye view of it from some great height.

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THE PHOTOSPHERE AND SUN-SPOTS., 535 Any one, for instance, who has looked down upon the Mediter- ranean from the summit of Gibraltar or Capri, and can recall its curi- ous unlikeness to its familiar aspect—its apparent stillness, the faint intricate bands of white and gray, which, thus seen, overlap it like a net-work of broad veins, and the strangely permanent patterns left by the foam, which are entirely lost to us as we approach its tossing sur- face—will have a not wholly inadequate idea of the first impression made by the sight of the photosphere. If we bring ourselves nearer, as it were, by an increase of magnifying power, we lose sight of the larger masses of light and shade, whose place is filled by a curious mottling of faint, inextricably confused, and intermingled moss-like patterns, With the best optical aid, and in those rarer moments when our own atmosphere is comparatively tranquil, we discern that the whole of these cloud-like mottlings are composed of very minute definite oval forms, which have been compared to grains of rice. Minute as they appear, their real size is very great ; for, though in a large telescope they seem mere dots, the average area of each is cer- tainly much over 100,000 square miles. Since we see them at all, it must be owing to some inequality of brightness which distinguishes them, and, in fact, they do not seem to be in absolute contact, but present rather the appearance of numberless little white clouds, ar- ranged with a sort of order upon a background of darker sky, or, if we compare them to rice-grains, we may suppose the grains arranged in rude tesselated patterns upon a gray cloth. The most extraordinary conjectures have been hazarded as to the real nature of these objects, -which are of somewhat recent discovery, and which are so difficult of observation that few have distinctly seen them. Whatever these things may be, they are the principal source of the sun’s light, and presumably of its heat, and this adds to the in- terest of their study. The writer has given a considerable time to their observation, which can only be carried on successfully by patient waiting, and the employment of those scattered moments when the ever-perturbed at- mosphere of the earth is relatively still. He has been led to conclude that these bodies are composed of still smaller forms, and that their total area is inconsiderable compared with that of the whole sun, for, though it is almost impossible to determine the aggregate space occu- pied by such minute things, the writer has been led to conclude that it can hardly exceed one-fifth of the solar surface, and may be much less. An inconsiderable part only of the solar light comes from the relatively dark background on which they appear, and, in reference to these still mysterious things, we may, then, partly adopt an expression which Huyghens used with regard to the faculm, and say that there is indeed in the sun “something brighter than the sun itself.’ The expression will not appear a forced or exaggerated one if we reflect

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536 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. that (if we rely on the correctness of the observations ‘ust alluded to) the average brilliancy of each of these bodies cannot be much less than five times that of full sunlight, “sunlight” itself being, in fact, caused by a dilution of their brilliance with that of the gray back- ground which has been just compared to the cloth on which white grains are grouped. There are inequalities in the brightness of these bodies, some of which fall below, while others as certainly exceed, the average. If we remember that each of them occupies an area larger than Great Brit- ain, that this area is, throughout, brighter than the sun (in fact, not in metaphor), and that such enormous bodies, whatever they may be, exist inthe sun in numbers which are almost incalculable, we reach up to some idea, but doubtless an inadequate one, of the incomprehensi- ble vastness of the solar sphere, and of the interest of the problems it offers for our study. In order to examine these bodies under other conditions, we must look at a sun-spot. Here, again, we find it difficult to conceive the vastness of the field of operations, for, including both branches, the “spot” represented in our engraving covers over 1,000,000,000 square miles. If we fail utterly to “realize” the extent this repre- sents, we may, perhaps, derive aid from its comparison with some familiar terrestrial object. In the small circle, accordingly, the conti- nents of North and South America have been drawn on the same scale as the spot, as they would appear; that is, if they were actually transported to the Solar surface, placed beside the spot, and viewed, together with it, from the distance at which the earth is from the sun, The engraving is from a drawing by the writer. This drawing, while representing the general outline of a particular spot, seen in March, 1873, embodies the result of many previous studies on similar ones, and it has been made much less with an attempt to gain pictorial effect than to truthfully present such features as will help to give some idea of the constitution of the solar surface. We see that each branch of the spot consists of two main parts, an outer (the penumbra) and an inner (the wmbra), and beyond this rude division little seems to have been observed till recent years. The knowledge of the real complexity of spot-structure and the fullness of detail needed to represent it are of such recent origin that Sir John Herschel, who, in the Cape-of-Good-Hope observations, has given a number of sun-spot drawings, points out, in one of them, the tendency to a radial structure, as something remarkable and nearly unnoticed ; and the fact that so.eminent an observer should have made the spots his careful study without detecting more of the structure since dis- covered, will illustrate the difficulties attendant on such an investiga- tion. If we look at this, not merely as at a picture, but in the way in which we should examine a geological map, with the purpose, that is,

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as ai hee Sa . x a s Jats at > * “* > =e go oS we een, “2% av * A “eo, J 7 *r Me i tb. a = Ate oy . £4 6 ANS : oat, Yo. ea I; MU ¥ st “ ty, vy, ; ; Fini —s : Se chet.” |) PAUSES . & * - ‘- ¢ | ‘ - » 54 ee it ake gf” ha" Pee £ ms ee. ES . 5 : eo - tre a ¥ q hm F fs 4 “G * . At oe ¥, va " \ - F oe? gceeeentt iy Tits SP rk Doh do snk yes oe hs 7 é ~~ res Sees § THE PHOTOSPHERE AND SUN-SPOTS. 537 ~~ Fatal Aer : c 5 > ‘ s' Situn N of studying the superficial details as indices of the real nature of the structure, we are naturally led to inquire whether the surface before us is a solid like one of our continents, or a fluid like our seas, or a vapor like our clouds, We know, at the outset, from abundant evi- dence, that the temperature of the sun, whatever it may be, is far Tue PHoTosPHErEe AND SUN-SPOTS

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538 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, above that at which the materials chiefly composing the earth’s crust would become fluid. It is, then, at the outset, an unlikely supposition that the surface of the sun should be solid; but, independently of such considerations, the behavior of this, or any other spot, is decisive as against this alternative. It was formed and grew to its present size in a comparatively short time, and, according to past experience, it will shortly break up and disappear. Besides its rotation with the sun, the spot has an absolute motion on it, advancing, as a whole, at a greater angular velocity round the solar axis than spots nearer its poles, besides having a slight oscillat- ing movement, which carries it alternately nearer to and farther from the sun’s equator; all this going on simultaneously with changes in its form and size. The spot then moves about on the sun as a ship on the ocean, or, to employ a less inaccurate simile, like a rent in the clouds of our sky, which, while turning with the earth, both shifts its place and alters its appearance from hour to hour, the spot not being something above the sun’s surface, but a gap in and belowit. We seem irresistibly led to the conclusion, then, that the surface of the sun is not a solid, and, considering this freedom of motion, we are led to question if it can even be a liquid, and whether we must not look upon it as wholly vapor-like. But we may approach the spot and look within it for answers to these questions, though, as we do so, the reader should distinguish between the facts stated and the inferences drawn from them. As to the former, observers may be said to agree with little exception; as to the latter, astronomers are, in some cases, at variance, and what fol- lows is chiefly confined to a statement of fact, since a review of oppos- ing hypotheses would not be at present in place, The approach to the spot is scarcely marked in the engraving by any variation of the surface; though there is, in reality, a very slight blurring of the luminous masses (rice-grains) which makes these look less distinct as we draw near the edge. Here, all at once, the appear- ance changes. We are approaching what is really the outer rim of an enormous shallow funnel (that shown is 20,000 miles across) ; shal- low, that is, in the outer portion only which is saucer-shaped, while the spout of the funnel is indefinitely deep. The first or gentle slope is the penumbra. It does not shade off into the photosphere, but be- gins, as has just been said, abruptly; and this sudden transition is a thing to be noted. We also observe that the edge is extremely irreg- ular—full of indentations and subdivisions, patches of the photosphere pushing out here and there over it, and at times apparently hanging suspended above the abyss. The sides of the slope are filled with what seem at first sight like long white threads, radially disposed, so that a circular penumbra, looked at casually, has somewhat the appearance of the iris surround- ing the pupil. A closer look shows that these threads are not ar-

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THE PHOTOSPHERE AND SUN-SPOTS. 539 ranged exactly radially (in some spots not at all so). They are often contorted and thrown over each other, and evince a tendency to curl into sickle-shaped curves as they approach their inner extremities ; while, if we examine them at the penumbral circumference, we find them to be apparent prolongations of*those minute white objects to which the light of the sun has just been referred. These “threads” or “filaments” are difficult of observation, for their average thickness is probably not over 200 miles, a width quite invisible at the sun’s distance, in any thing but a very good telescope. Some appearances make it probable, however, that they are composed of filaments still finer, just as the finest silk thread is made up of numerous fibres, and they have a certain disposition to unite in fascicles, which are often mistaken for them. The dimension of 200 miles, then, is somewhat an arbitrary one, marking perhaps rather the present limit of vision of our telescopes than any real limit of the actual size; but, however this may be, the extraordinary length of these filaments is not open to question; they are quite commonly met with three or four thousand miles long, and the writer has occasion- ally distinctly traced one of these attenuated forms uninterruptedly through a much greater distance. What they are is still unknown, What are the forces which cause the spot to move as a whole upon the solar surface, and what are the nature and direction of those which modify its form, and so completely change in a few days, or even hours, the disposition of its parts over its so vast area? To the first question there is, as yet, no satisfactory answer, though our knowl- edge, such as it is, seems to point to a constant interchange of matter between the surface of the sun and its interior, far within which seem to be impressed on the ascending currents velocities of rotation which so modify those which obtain at the surface. As to the second, the spectroscope, if appealed to, offers but very partial help, and we here restrict ourselves to a description of methods which do not involve its use. How may we determine the directions of the currents which we cannot doubt exist within the spot ? It has happened to the writer to be lost in one of the shallow, laby- rinthine lakes, in the interior of our Northern wilderness, on whose still waters the canoe was left to drift aimlessly with the wind, while the guide sought, at first vainly, the traces of some current which would indicate the direction of the outlet; till, looking below the sur- face, the common direction of the extremities of the water-grasses, rooted at the bottom, showed the existence and direction of a current otherwise unperccived, and gave the question its solution. The long filaments of the penumbra may be used in a similar way, flexible as they are, and rooted, as it were, at one end, while the other sways in the currents of the solar atmosphere, yielding to it as freely as the grasses to the water, or a streamer to the air; and the analogy is noteworthy in this: that one end of the filament is commonly made

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540 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

fast, while the other is left free. This is so very generally the case that we see that, if these filaments be clouds, they differ from ours in other circumstances than their shape. Those we are studying are bent into curves, which shaw that the solar winds frequently move in cir- cular sweeps, and are, to a considerable degree, comparable with our cyclones. Long, twisted ropes are sometimes formed by them, one being thrown over another; and, in cloud-like masses, they at times move over and conceal lower portions of the penumbra—the abrupt changes in the directions of motion showing us that these are super- posed strata of what, for want of a better word, we must call solar clouds, which drift across each other’s course occasionally, nearly at right angles, while the ever-moving whirlwinds leave an unmistakable record of their action on these pliant forms. In one part of the spot, one of these has been bent into a complete loop, or closed curve, the extremity showing a fringe of ragged strands, like that of a broken rope. The immensely more extended scale of the action here being kept in view, and the fact that the whole spot is being changed in all its parts—even while we are looking at it—by alterations which, though apparently gradual, are really the indications of an immense energy, it will be seen that, considered merely as a spectacle of the play of natural forces, we have before us something almost incomparably greater than any which the terrestrial volcano, earthquake, or cyclone, can offer. The entire surface of the earth, were it spread out into a plain, would be, in fact, of inconsiderable size as compared with either branch of the spot we are examining. The quickness of the transformations that the observer sometimes notes here is wonderful. Lockyer, Young, and other observers, have demonstrated the existence of chromospheric movements, in some in- stances, at the rate of over 100 miles a second; and the velocities in the photosphere are, occasionally, of a similar order of magni- tude. As an instance, it may be mentioned that the loop in question, which inclosed an area of about 3,000,000 square miles (not far from that of the United States), broke up, and seemingly melted away, like a snow-wreath before a fire, in little over a quarter of an hour, How vain the attempt must be to adequately realize to ourselves the features of such a cataclysm seen close at hand! It is quite impracticable to convey,an adequate idea of the com- plexity, strangeness, and beauty of these penumbral forms by an en- graving; and the description is likely to fail equally, both on account of the unlikeness of the appearances to any thing with which we are familiar, and the difficulty of using any descriptive terms which, drawn from terrestrial analogies, will not here prove inaccurate. <A plume- like form, in the upper portion of the spot, is necessarily but an im- perfect memorandum of an appearance, in reality all hut impossible to render with the pencil, even on a scale which depicted it a hundred times this size. It might be likened to a sheet of glass, covered with

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THE PHOTOSPHERE AND SUN-SPOTS,. 541 the most intricate and capricious patterns the frost ever traces on our window-panes in winter; but, together with this, there was something flame-like in the graceful terminal curves, and something strangely sug- gestive of fern-like vegetation about the whole. This double and ap- parently incompatible impression of something at once crystalline and plant-like is strikingly conveyed by many of the penumbral forms, and yet the description will doubtless appear incongruous to any but the few who have seen for themselves. The comparison of the frost- figures is the least inapt, perhaps, to be found, but it is really impos- sible to obtain an accurate one, when we have no single thing on earth which we can exactly liken it to. When we consider that this extraor- dinary shape occupied a greater area than the North and South Amer- ican Continents united, while that, over the whole, obtained a temper- ature far above that of the white flame which plays about the mouth of a furnace, and that its parts turned, as the observer looked, from one evanescent beautiful form to another, with a rapidity of change which indicated the existence of inconceivable force, we need feel less surprise that any metaphor, necessarily drawn from our limited terres- trial analogies, should so fail to convey an adequate idea of what the writer is certain he has seen, but confesses he cannot properly describe. The wmbra, or dark inner shade, commences as abruptly as the penumbra, but the contrast between it and the penumbral edge is far greater than between that and the photosphere. We possess no very accurate photometric determinations of the relative light of these por- tions of the spot, and nothing seems practicable beyond a rough aver- aging where the umbre are themselves of such various tints. If we adopt the somewhat crude determinations of the elder Herschel, we may assume that the penumbra is, as a whole, rather less than half as bright as the photosphere, and the umbra about one-seventieth of the brightness of the penumbra. More accurately, if we represent the average brightness of the photosphere by 1,000, that of the penumbra will be denoted by 469, and that of the umbra by only 7. The umbra appears, at first sight, to be black, but this is only from contrast with the superior brightness around it, It is certain, for instance, that sun- light is at least 200,000 times brighter than moonlight (probably more). The umbra, then, if it be but seven thousandths of the bright- ness of the surface, is still 1,400 times (at least) as bright as the moon, or far brighter than the calcium-light. The absolute depth of the inner edge of the penumbra, below the surface, is not very great, ac- cording to M. Faye, and probably not over from 2,000 to 4,000 miles. (Every thing is relative; and, on the sun, 2,000 miles is little for the depth of a cavity which may be from ten to twenty times this widtb.) Somewhere about this lower level commences the umbra, which has been already compared to the spout of the funnel, of which the penumbra formed the upper shallow cone; and, through these umbral shades, the eye looks down to quite unknown depths,

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542 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, The darkest parts are far from being black, however they may ap- pear by contrast, the very “ blackest” part being radiant with a light which would appear intolerable to the unshielded eye. Brown and reddish tints are occasionally seen here with the polarizing eye-piece. These, the spectroscope shows, are due to incandescent hydrogen; but a common tint, which is particularly that of the nuclei or deeper um- bral shades, is a very pure violet. It is impossible to do more, in such an article as this, than to out- line, in the briefest way, a few of the more prominent appearances of the spots and solar surface, without attempting any description of the laws which regulate their respective motions, and the emission of their light and heat, and without alluding to the numerous other topics of interest to the student. The reader will not, it may be hoped, on this account derive the impression that his attention has been invited to a description of superficial solar phenomena, merely as spectacles. In this point of view alone, certainly, we cannot contemplate them with- out lively wonder, but their deeper interest will lie in the light they shed on the nature of the sun itself, and the laws which govern that flow of light and heat through which alone we ourselves live and move. Experience seems to indicate that, according as these wonderful phe- nomena are studied with or without the spectroscope, they are assimi- lated more, in the observer’s mind, with such terrestrial motions as those we call eruptions in the first instance, or cyclones in the second. It would be generalizing from a partial view, therefore, to present the reader with any single hypothesis at present, especially while those versed in the study find so much that, on any hypothesis, is still mys- terious. FERMENTS, FERMENTATIONS, AND LIFE. Br FERNAND PAPILLON. TRANSLATED BY A. R. MACDONOUGH., L NTIL very lately, all fermentations were supposed to be pro- duced by the spontaneous decomposition of organic matter with. in a fermentable liquid. It was said that on contact with air this organic matter undergoes a special change which gives it the character of leaven, and this was regarded as an agent having the power of spreading decomposing movement. It is true, brewer’s yeast had long been well known; the facts of its cellular composition and its organization were familiar; but no relation was recognized between this organized condition and those phenomena of fermentation pro- duced by yeast in saccharine liquids, such as grape-juice or the wort of

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FERMENTS, FERMENTATIONS, AND LIFE. 543 ale. In the first few years of this century Turpin, and afterward Cagni- ard-Latour, attempted in vain to prove that such a relation existed; it was always denied that any thing else could be observed in alcoholic fermentation than an operation resembling all those slow decomposi- tions that were classed among fermentations. We have admitted, in our time, that alcoholic fermentation, instead of being an exception, is on the contrary the very type of the phenomena we are treating of; that the yeast-cells, far from being unimportant, take an essential part in it, and that in all fermentations whatever there occur low organiza- tions, microscopic corpuscles, more or less analogous to those of yeast. At least this is the first result of investigations carried on in the past fif- teen years by several men of science, among whom in the first rank M. Pasteur is to be cited. M. Pasteur began the course of his labors in 1858, by the study of alcoholic fermentation. He placed it beyond a doubt that, in the case of grape-juice or beer-wort, as in that of any other saccharine liquid ex- posed to the air, the more or less rapid production of alcohol is always connected with the production of a microscopic fungus, consisting of rounded globules, a few thousandths of a millimetre in diameter. These globules, known under the name of brewer’s yeast, multiply in the fermenting liquid at the expense of the organic matters it contains, and, by the exchanges of growth they give rise to, produce decompo- sition of the sugar into alcohol and carbonic, succinic, and glyceric acids. These are the four invariable products of alcoholic fermenta- tion. Sugar is the food of the yeast-fungus; these products are its ex- cretions. The laws of the inner mechanism that elaborates them are yet unknown. But every thing leads us to believe that the yeast-cells secrete a substance more or less resembling those that work out the phenomena of digestion in the higher animals. Alcoholic fermentation would thus be a kind of digestion of sugar within the globule. M. Dumas, who signalized his entrance upon the career of studies in natural science half a century ago, by memorable discoveries in microscopic physiology, has lately returned to researches of the same kind, precisely, in respect to fermentations. In M. Pasteur’s labora- tory at the Normal School he has taken up investigations on this sub- ject, the results of which, quite lately published, show that the distin- guished savant in question has lost neither his cautious diligence in experimental processes, nor his lucid conception in the grasp of princi- ples. He has attempted among other things to determine the decom- posing force, the amount of activity, possessed by each cell of the alco- holic ferment. To ascertain this, he measured the quantity of sugar decomposed in a given time by a fixed weight of yeast, and he found —after first establishing that a cubic millimetre of yeast contains about 2,772,000 cells—that the power of a million of cells represents the force capable of decomposing four grains of sugar in an hour. If we attempt- ed according to this estimate to express in figures the number of cells

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| 544 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. employed in producing the wine, beer, and cider, consumed every year, as M. Dumas says, even astronomers would shrink from the task. This active property of decomposing sugar, and forming alcohol in consequence, does not belong to the cells of brewer’s yeast exclusively. Several chemical agents possess the same power, and certain vegetable cells also are adapted to use it. When fruits are placed in a medium filled with oxygen, they absorb this gas, and occasion the release of carbonic acid; if, on the contrary, they are left in carbonic acid or any other inert gas, they effect the production of alcohol. The fruits re- main firm and hard, without suffering any external change, but the sugar they contain is transformed in part into alcohol. How is this phenomenon to be explained? In common air, the cell of the fruit is fed by oxygen; if this gas is withheld, it is forced to borrow the ma- terials of nutrition from the fluids that moisten it, that is, from the saccharine juice, and then the latter is decomposed. M. Pasteur has noted that a similar alcoholic fermentation takes place in other vegeta- ble organs, in leaves, for instance, and in every case he has proved that the phenomenon is due to the cells of the vegetables alone, and not to yeast-globules. Far from throwing any doubt on the physiological doctrine of fermentation, these singular facts agree in lending it sup- port, by giving it deeper and more general application. We have seen that the fermentation of sugar yields alcohol. The latter, brought in contact with certain porous substances, as, for in- stance, platinum sponge, can absorb the oxygen of the air and trans- form itself, by oxidation, into acetic acid, A phenomenon of this kind occurs in wine when it sours, the alcohol contained in it being changed into acetic acid; only, the agent in the transformation is in this case a microscopic plant, made up of little elongated globules, some thou- sandths of a millimetre in diameter. These globules, these myco- derms, develop on the surface of wine exposed to the air, and forma scum which plays the part of storing away a certain stock of oxygen, afterward used to produce acetification in the liquid. This scum, which is called mother of vinegar, only acts while in communication with the air. As soon as it is below the surface, it loses its efficacy, and the production of acetic acid is checked. Thus the development of vinegar in the acetic fermentation is reduced to an oxidation of alcohol, in which microscopic cells are the vehicles of the oxygen. When milk turns and sours, that phenomenon also is due to the formation of an acid—lactic acid. This substance proceeds from the decomposition of sugar contained in the milk, and this decomposition, again, is a fermentation. The microscopic being that effects it assumes several forms; sometimes it is made up of cells presenting much re- semblance to the cells of yeast, sometimes it consists of straight and exceedingly fine rods. Milk also contains casein, which is the sub- stance that composes cheese, and, when the fermentation of the sugar in milk is over, that of the casein begins; after lactic acid, butyric

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FERMENTS, FERMENTATIONS, AND LIFE. 545 acid is produced. Examining with a microscope the casein trans- forming into butyric acid, we observe in it little rods, two thousandths of a millimetre in diameter, and of a length from two to five times as great; this is the butyric ferment, which, concurrently with other mi- croscopic vegetable growths, determines in various cheeses the slow production of butyric acid and several analogous acids, equally strong in smell, To cite a last illustration, the decomposition of urine, giving rise to an abundant release of ammoniacal gases, is also the result of a fermentation ; under the action of cells smaller than those of brewer’s yeast, the contained urea changes to carbonate of ammonia, rendering the liquid highly alkaline and strongly odorous. In short, the fermen- tations we have just described, and many others of the same kind, par- ticipate in the nutrition and development of microscopic beings, of an average size not exceeding some thousandths of a millimetre, and pre- senting the form sometimes of spheroidal or of egg-shaped globules (as mycoderms, torulacea), sometimes of straight, bent, or curving rods (as vibrios and bacteria). These diminutive beings engender the ferment within the fermenting liquid itself, in the degree and rate of their propagation in it. There is another class of fermentations in which the immediate presence of definitely-shaped corpuscles cannot be traced, Thus di- astasic fermentation consists in the transformation of starch into sugar under the action of a formless yellowish matter, called “diastase.” Amygdalic fermentation is that in which amygdaline becomes the es- sence of bitter almonds, by the action of a like ferment, known as “syraptase.” The former takes place in the vegetable embryo when the amylaceous matter of the seed is converted into a soluble sugar, which permeates the growing tissues of the plant. The latter occurs when bitter almonds are crushed in water; on contact with the liquid, the mixture of these odorless kernels takes the characteristic smell of the essence of bitter almonds, which results from the fermentation of amygdaline, We regard as fermentations, moreover, a certain number of similar phenomena which can be produced with the implements of a laboratory, and which are constantly taking place in living organisms, of which the cause is a zymotic substance. There exists, for instance, in the saliva a principle called ptyaline, which, like diastase, converts amylaceous matter into sugar. The gastric juice contains another principle, pepsin, which has the effect of liquefying albuminous sub- stances, so that they may be prepared for absorption. The pancreatic fluid contains another principle which acts in a similar way. Digestion is thus reduced to a series of fermentations, as the ancient chemists had rightly conjectured in regard to it. These different phenomena, as well as those in which organisms take part, have the two general characteristics of fermentation; they occur only within certain limits of temperature, and the weight of the fermentable matter is always much greater than that of the ferment which suffices to decompose it. VOL, V.— 35

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h i i 546 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. To conclude, fermentations occasioned in certain media, by the act of development and nutrition of ascertained microscopic animal or vegetable existences, present a group of well-defined characéeristics. They follow obediently all the variations that may occur in the physio- logical activity of the microscopic beings contained in the liquid. This does not go into fermentation all at once; it delays more or less, and molecular movement makes itself perceptible in it by degrees. The phenomenon is one of evolyement. This appears to be the char- acteristic of alcoholic, lactic, acetic, butyric, glyceric, and putrid fer- mentations—all of those, in short, which M. Pasteur has studied with so convincing accuracy. Is it the same with the conversion of amyla- ceous substances into sugar, under the influence of diastase or ptya- line, with the dissolving of proteic substances by pepsin, with the change of amygdaline into the essence of bitter almonds, by contact with synaptase? Evidently not. These phenomena present another aspect ; they show no stages of evolvement. Doubtless they require a certain time for their completion; but they take place all at once, and without any relation to the surrounding air. These differences between the two kinds of fermentation clearly depend on this: that, in the former, the phenomenon is subjected to the conditions and vital progress of those organized corpuscles which elaborate the ferment within the substance of the fermentable liquids, while, in the latter, the phenomenon is brought about by a ferment already formed and prepared. But this latter ferment is no less of - organic origin; it, too, arises from living beings, animal or vegetable. Whether it emanates, like diastase, from the young cells of the seed, or results, like pepsin, from work done in the digestive apparatus, it is the labor of life, just as much as if it had been completed by globules of yeast or bundles of bacteria. Thus the efficient sources of all fer- mentations are the same. All ferments are at bottom alike, whether procured directly for the fermentable liquid by microscopic bodies in- habiting it, or emanating from corpuscles that inhabit elsewhere. The true doctrine of fermentations consists in this point. Henceforth, then, we may consider ferments as products of a fecun- dation taking place in cells, as secretions elaborated by those myriads of infinitely little corpuscles, some crowded, squeezed, condensed, into the palpable organs of animals and plants—others free and moving, disseminated, as we shall see, into vast, intangible space. The energy which distinguishes these microscopic animal and vegetable growths also belongs to the microscopic elements making up the living tissues in the higher animals. We must give to this property, hitherto con- sidered as special, the high dignity of a fundamental and universal attribute of organized cells. We must detect, in the most complex conversions and processes of nutrition in superior beings, the same untiring and primitive force that marks the subtile action of invisible and insignificant monads,

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FERMENTS, FERMENTATIONS, AND LIFE. 547 No doubt, the corpuscles of different species—to which, in the last analysis, we reduce animals and plants of every kind and degree—are not identical, Each species has its own structure, its specific energy, its mode of nutrition, its fixed secretions—characteristics, moreover, which vary with circumstances and media, Yet we can point out more than one interesting similarity between certain ones of these species, which seem to discharge quite distinct functions, and hold very unlike stations, in the vast harmony of vital monads. The cells of fruits, when placed in certain conditions, behave, as has been seen, like the cells of brewer’s yeast; they both decompose sugar and yield alcohol, We may trace resemblances not less close, as M. Blondeau and M. Pasteur have done, between acetic mycoderms and blood- globules. Both alike serve as carriers of oxygen—the first, for the slow combustion of alcohol; the last, for the slow combustion of the albuminoid matters in animal tissues. It is even likely that there is a principle in mycoderms similar to hemoglobine in the blood. globule, and provided with a special affinity for oxygen. However this may be, comparisons of this kind open a new path for physiology. As that science is definitely summed up in the explanation of existences and processes in the microscopic elements of organs, it is plain that nothing can be more useful to it than the study of these one-celled organisms in which the phenomena are extremely simple, and life is reduced, in a manner, to its primitive factors. It becomes more and more evident that progress in the comprehension of the superior ani- mals is bound, with the very closest ties, to advance in the compre- hension of the mechanism of nutrition in the rudimentary units of life, in the smallest beings that it is given us to study. IL. Now, whence come those organized microscopic corpuscles to which, as we have seen, very many of the alterations of organic mat- ter must be attributed? Upon this great problem, opinions at this day are still very contradictory. Neither patient observations, nor minute experiments, nor profound reasonings, have been wanting; yet some still believe that these little bodies grow, by spontaneous generation, within fermentable liquids, while others assert, and profess to have proved, that they come from germs contained in the air. Certainly, the former opinion involves nothing contradictory nor impossible. Those who reject it by begging the question, in the name of some un- known, mystical doctrine of life, do not even deserve to be listened to in the investigation. It might possibly have occurred that organized beings should be produced, complete at all points, in a medium de- prived of organization; yet experiment proves that this does not occur. We must, then, accept the other opinion—the panspermist doc- trine—that is to say, we must concede that the germs of microscopic animals and vegetables, with which so many fermentations and putre-

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548 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, factions are connected, exist in the air. This is one of the conclusions, and perhaps the most legitimate and most fertile one, of M. Pasteur’s striking studies. He deserves the glory of it precisely because he has not priority in it. In truth, the originator of this idea only had, and could only have, a dim intuition of it. He could measure neither its importance nor its consequences. The importance and the results of a great idea, whatever it may be, only become apparent when, after undergoing a certain evolution, it has gained the precision, certitude, and establish- ment, that nothing but long experience can confer upon it. A concep- tion must have acquired some age in science to wear a fixed authority, and bestow fame on those who comprehend, and cause to be compre- hended, all its grandeurand power, The circulation of the blood had long been seen by glimpses, in the schools of physiology, when Har- vey gave it complete and vigorous demonstration. Gravitation had long invited research, and suggested presentiment, before Newton _drew its perfect system. So, too, the panspermist theory, neglected and ignored since the time of its earliest authors—among whom As- tier, in 1813, deserves particular mention—hbas only been definitely established in our time, through the experiments made by M. Pasteur. These experiments, repeated and varied in a thousand ways, all refer to the investigation, by comparison of what takes place in the same fermentable liquid, under the different conditions of exposure to com- mon air, filled with dust, and of contact with purified air. For in- stance, M, Pasteur puts a certain quantity of a liquid, that readily undergoes change, into glass balls through which a current of air may be made to pass. Fermentation and the development of small organ- isms take place very soon in the balls through which common air cir- culates; but, if the air, before entering them, passes through a plug of cotton, no change in the liquid is observed. When the volume of air, thus filtered through cotton, is considerable, the plug is so filled with dust as to turn black. Now, this dust, in addition to a quantity of mineral particles, and fluff of many kinds, contains spores and germs of fermenting substance, as is proved by the fact that the smallest quantity of it, sprinkled in pure liquid, will produce fermentation in it. An experiment of another kind is this: M. Pasteur, by an ingenious arrangement, inserts and withdraws from a glass jar, filled with pure air, the juice from the inside of a single grape, so that, during the ex- periment, the juice communicates neither with the surface of the grape nor with the atmospheric air. The juice, thus obtained, shows no trace of fermentation, remaining unchanged as long as the jar is closed ; but, if it is opened, or if its contents are mixed with a few drops of water in which the surface of the grape has been washed, fer- mentation is set up in it at once. This is because the outside of grapes is always covered with yeast-germs, even when the bunches have been subjected to constant rains. In this case, plainly, fermentation is due

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FERMENTS, FERMENTATIONS, AND LIFE. 549 to the germs suspended int! air, or deposited on the surface of the grapes and stems. M. Pasteur draws blood from an animal’s veins by a similar process, and introduces it into a glass vessel in contact with pure air. The blood continues fresh for years. M. Pasteur asserts and proves by experiment that grape-juice, milk, blood, and all liquids that most readily undergo change in ordinary conditions, are incapa- ble of fermentation in air which is pure, that is to say, deprived of the corpuscles it contained. M. Pasteur has made still another set of experiments. He has ob- tained development of fermentation in liquids freed- from albuminoid substances. It was supposed, before his researches, that the cells re- marked in the fermentation of grape-juice proceed from the conversion of the albuminoid substances which this fluid contains in its natural state. M. Pasteur prepares a solution of sugar, tartrate of ammonia, and some other salts, and sprinkles a few yeast-globules in it. They swell, develop, and propagate in this artificial medium quite as well as in the grape-juice. So it was supposed that in the acid fermenta- tion of milk the ferment is a product of the conversion of casein. M., Pasteur proves that supposition to be unfounded, by artificially pro- ducing the lactic ferment in a compounded liquid containing not a trace of casein. These very delicate experiments have not only in- creased the vogue of the panspermic thecry, but they have been of great value also to vegetable physiology. Many objections have been raised to these theories on the origin of ferments, to which M. Pasteur has almost always replied by unques- tionable facts and solid reasonings, though he has sometimes done himself the injustice to be rough and contemptuous in discussion tow- ard his opponents. Truth is strong enough to indulge charity for error. The gravest of these objections, it must be said, have applied to problems which do not concern the very foundation of the dispute between the panspermist system and its opposite. For instance, M. Trécul, the skillful and noted micrographer, M. Béchamp, and others, have proved that M. Pasteur mistakes with regard to the evolutions and transformations undergone by microscopic beings in fermenting media. M. Pasteur has certainly made more than one mistake on this subject, and there probably does exist between certain ferment-corpus- cles a closer relationship than is supposed at the laboratory of the Normal School; but that does not in the least alter the fundamental character of the theory. Attention is also called to the fact that cor- puscles with a determinate structure can be produced complete, with- out germs, in some liquids. No doubt this is true, but only on condi- tion that the liquids are living ones. No doubt the cambium of vege- tables, the blastema of animals, and generally all protoplasmic fluids, are fertile hatching-fields for the spontaneous development of the cells and fibres of living tissues. It is thus that the first elements of the embryo show themselves in the animal ovule. And in this respect the

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 55° labors of Robin, Trécul, Onimus, Legros, and a great number of other observers, are decisive; but lite is the property of these protoplasms ; they depend upon an organized system. In the depths of the organ- ism, and shielded from the air, they toil at the creation of microscopic corpuscles, Place them in contact with purified air, in M. Pasteur’s glass globes, and then they would be barren, The last objection M. Pasteur has to meet is, that, if the germs of all these microscopic vegetable and animal lives are in the atmosphere, they should be discovered and recognized there. But, in examining the dust of the air microscopically, we do not by any means detect all the rudiments of that infinitely minute flora and fauna whose existence is attested by the fermentations and putrefactions of organic matter. M. Pasteur has thus far met this argument only by the evidence of his experiments which prove that, in contact with purified air, neither fer- mentations nor putrefactions are possible. That is strictly sufficient, but we can go farther. It is by no means a sure conclusion that these germs do not exist, because many of them are invisible under the lens, To begin with, we do note with certainty a certain number of species in atmospheric dust. It is therefore an admissible presumption that, if the remaining ones elude our eyes and our microscopes, that merely proves them to be smaller than the observed ones. But, perhaps, the problem ought to be viewed in a different way. We believe that these visible germs are the exceptions, that is, that they are beings already arrived at a certain degree of development, and that, in reality, all true germs are of dimensions forever beyond the reach of microscopic observation, even conceiving lenses to be immensely more powerful than they now are. The microscope barely brings within our range of vision points that measure at least a ten thousandth part of a milli- metre. The primitive germs of life cannot even approach the millionth part of a millimetre. Physics and metaphysics both assure us that we must here give up the hope of measuring and estimating things accord- ing to the powers of our limited senses. An effort is needed to pursue with the mind’s eye these perpetually-dwindling dimensions, still to go on though the imagination fails in the task, and to realize at last how far removed are the bounds of the microcosm. If the faculty of reaching out beyond the limits of our nature, which is one of the no- blest prerogatives of our intelligence, does not desert us, we attain to the idea of the vital monads of Leibnitz, the organic molecules of Buf- fon, the comprehension of existence for primal organisms diffused throughout the world by myriads of myriads, and the conception of the infinitely minute within the infinitely minute. Thus, just as the infinite universe through which the spheres roll is filled with invisible particles of a subtile matter to which physicists and astronomers give the name of ether, and which supplies the only key to cosmic phenomena, the finite universe in which organization unfolds itself is thronged with corpuscles no less invisible, forming

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FERMENTS, FERMENTATIONS, AND LIFE. 551 what the illustrious Ehrenberg calls the milky-way of lower organ- isms, and no less essential for explanation of the processes of which we have traced the general course. As there is an ether wanting in life, so there is an ether endowed with life—a vital ether. Both are above denial; they surpass our reason, yet reason cannot but demand them. They elude the close grasp of experiment, yet experiment does not permit them to be avoided; they are unseen, and without them there could be nothing seen, The mind clings to them with the stress of all its power to embrace, perhaps because it feels a secret, mysteri- ous affinity with them, perhaps because it is in substance of the same essence with them. It, Ovr atmosphere, then, is the receptacle for myriads of germs of mi- croscopic beings, which play an important part in the organized world. Penetrating agents of decay, baneful toilers for disease, they lie ever in wait for the chance to pierce the internal machinery of animals and plants, and create slight or grave disturbances within it. Life often resists or escapes them, but nothing can contest with them its deserted vesture. The corpse is their natural aliment, and death their chosen laboratory. There these lowest of created things work out their lofty destiny in the eternal drama of renewal of organic existences. When the thin pellicle covering sweet fruits is torn at any point, an opening is made for atmospheric germs. Fermenting cells pierce the interior of the fruit, and produce within it fermentation of the su- gar, that is to say, the formation of a little alcohol; and this in its turn is susceptible of the passage into acctic fermentation, giving the pulp an acid taste. At last the pulp itself is destroyed by various fungous growths. When a fruit decays and takes a more or less un- pleasant flavor, this depends on the intervention of ferment-cells of at- mospheric origin, and on the production of acid or alcoholic substances, An able micrographist, M. Engel, who has lately studied these phe- nomena minutely, discovers that the yeast-cells which thus produce alcoholic fermentation in the juices of fruits present some slight differ- ences in various fruits, neither do they have the same morphological character as those of grape-must or beer-wort. Varieties occur in these cases, corresponding to the different media in which the nutri- tion of the little fungus takes place. The microscopic fungi of the atmosphere play as interesting a part in the alteration of wines. These grow acid, change, become filmy or oily, or take on besides a decided bitterness. All these sicknesses depend on the development of different little plants recognized and described by M. Pasteur; and this scientist, not stopping at the solu- tion of the nature of these disorders, has sought the means of prevent- ing them. Resting on some former observations by D’Appert, he con- ceived the idea of subjecting wines to the action of a very high degree

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$52 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, of heat, so as to destroy the yeast-germs. There was no possibility of doubt as to the destruction of these germs and the prevention of any further change, but it might well be asked whether the delicacy and bouquet of certain wines would not be endangered by the effects of heating. Long-continued experiments prove not only that heating is an excellent method for preventing sickness in wines, but also that, in- stead of impairing their exquisite qualities, it ripens and strengthens them. The recorded minutes of tastings officially performed during the past year by several members of the syndical wine commission, at the suggestion of M. Pasteur, contain decisive testimony on this point. Fine Burgundy wines, heated in bottle seven years ago to temperatures varying between 131° and 149°, appeared, at the end of that time, su- perior to the same wines not so treated. Persons who spoke with some authority, M. Pasteur says, declared that heating would in time de- prive the wine of its color. The contrary is the case, when the air is excluded during the process; the color grows livelier by heating. It was said that heating would in time alter the bouquet of fine wines, giving them dryness and too great age. On the contrary, the bouquet seems to be heightened with the lapse of time, more positively than with wines not heated. In the case of chambertin and volnay partic- ularly, the tasters noticed this fact. M. Pasteur was led by these studies to investigate the cause of the aging of wines, and he discov- ered that the phenomenon was due to slow oxidation. Wine kept in glass tubes completely filled and closely sealed does not age. By in- creasing and regulating the aération of wine, and particularly combin- ing it with heating, he succeeded in manufacturing in one month ex- cellent old wine. In short, oxygen and heat, acting on wine in certain proportions, promote instead of hindering the development of those volatile principles to which the liquid owes its perfume and part of its flavor; but this discovery is additional to those sought. What M. Pasteur did chiefly look for and did find, in giving exact and methodi- cal rules for heating wines, is a process, applicable on a great scale, for preventing the diseases from which the common vineyard products so often suffer, and that fortunate application is a result from his re- searches on fermentation generally. In the same way, in consequence of the examinations he undertook as to the share of microscopic organ- isms in the diseases of silk-worms, he was led to prescribe a practical way of hindering the development of these organisms, and thus pre- venting the malady, When we inject into the subcutaneous cellular tissue of a living animal a putrefied or septic liquid, that is, one containing those thread- like corpuscles known by the name of vibrios and bacteria, it some- times happens that the animal experiences no inconvenience. Dogs particularly resist with vigor the poisonous influence of such a fluid, but the case is different with other species, and notably with rabbits. The system becomes the seat of grave phenomena, almost always mor-

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FERMENTS, FERMENTATIONS, AND LIFE, 553 tal, of which the general group composes the affection known by the term septicemia, The microscopic organisms in such a case poison the animal, not only by the mere fact of their presence in the blood, but besides and especially because they develop and propagate in it with astonishing rapidity, in the same way that yeast reproduces itself in barley-wort. But the most singular thing in these pathological fer- mentations is the fact noted some years ago for the first time by MM. Coze and Feltz, and the study of which M. Davaine took up last year. Davaine demonstrates, by experiments made on rabbits and Guinea- pigs, that one drop of blood, from an animal affected with septicemia, has the power of imparting the infection to another animal inoculated with it, that a drop taken from the second can transmit the disease to a third, and so on. Still more, very wonderfully, the poisoning power of the blood of these animals increases with the degree of advance in the series of inoculations, The culture of the virus heightens its ma- leficent properties, This gradual increase of the virulent force is such that, if we take a drop of blood from an animal representing the twenty-fifth term in a series of successive inoculations, and. so dilute this drop with water that a drop of the dilution corresponds to one trillionth of the original drop, we get a liquid of which the smallest quantity still displays mortal activity. These experiments of M. Da- vaine, which exhibit the degree of venom as increasing in an inverse ratio to the apparent quantity of the poison, have been repeated and ~ confirmed by several eminent physiologists, among others by M. Bou- ley, and have produced a sensation which still continues in the schools of physiology and medicine. Apart from the inherent difficulty of forming a notion as to the influence of those infinitesimal doses, they seemed to yield an argument of a kind to support the assertions of homeopathy. If the difficulty is real, though it may be got over, the argument, we take leave to say, is worthless. Let us look at the diffi- culty first. This drop which is still mortal, though representing only - an infinitely small fraction of the original quantity of poisonous mat- ter to which it is distantly related, permits no corpuscle to be detected. That is true, yet it contains the germs of them, and germs such in number, size, and reproductive power, that nothing prevents them from breeding again indefinitely, in spite of all efforts tried to get rid of them. The discussions that have just occurred in the Academy of Medicine on this grave subject, almost at the same time that the ques- tion of ferments was under debate in the Academy of Sciences, leave no doubt as to the reality of this progressive breeding of virulent germs by culture. But is this any argument for the home@opathists? None whatever. They attribute curative effects to extremely small doses of certain inorganic substances most evidently inert, which can in no way reproduce themselves, If the virulent elements occasion disturb- ances so profound in animal organisms, it is not by reason of their extreme minuteness, but it is because they multiply with prodigious

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554 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. rapidity in the depths of the tissues and humors, where they labor in a manner opposed to the harmonious life of the body. However this may be, the vibrios and bacteria have an undeniable share in the production of human maladies. They are found in the blood of persons attacked by infectious disorders, and if in many cases their relation to these disorders is only that of concomitants, in others, their relation of causality is very clearly ascertained. Thus M. Da- vaine’s investigations prove that the maladies called carbuncular, so formidable in men and animals, are due to the excessive development of a species of bacteria in the blood. Typhoid fever also seems to ac- knowledge a cause of the same kind. Rabbits die from inoculation with blood taken from men attacked by this disease. Our knowledge upon this difficult subject, it must be owned, is very little advanced, in spite of the ardent labors devoted to its extension in the past few years. The illusions of the microscope and the exaggerations of a spirit of routine too often impair the value of studies undertaken in this direction. Without going so far as does the opinion of those who attribute 4ll these disorders to microscopic corpuscles, and regard all morbid phenomena as fermentations, it must at any rate be admitted that these corpuscles, diffused throughout the air, take an important place among the eternal enemies of health. At all times surgeons and physicians have recognized the danger from penetration of common air into the interior of the organism, by the way of wounds or otherwise. We now understand the explanation of the danger, It is not the gases of the air that are dangerous; but the proto-organisms contained in that fluid must be charged with the fatal influence it exerts in trau- matic cases, and putrid infection has no other origin: Thus the anxi- ety of practitioners now is to protect wounds from access by the germs in the air, by means either of impermeable coating, or of antiseptic dressings, containing alcohol or phenic acid, or by pneumatic closing up, or by filtration of the air itself through cotton. Under the influ- ence of ideas distinctly introduced into science by the researches we have just‘reviewed, several practices in surgery have undergone great modifications. After examining the alterations produced in the living, we have to consider those occasioned by fermentations in the dead. When life has retreated by slow degrees from all the parts of an organized being; when, after all partial deaths have occurred, total death has possessed the depths of the subject, and broken all the springs of its activity, the work of putrefaction begins. Its task is to unmake this body, to de- stroy its forms, and dissever its materials. The work to be done is to disorganize it, to reduce it into solids, liquids, and gases, fit to go back again into the vast reservoir whence new life is incessantly issuing. This is the task that heat, moisture, air, and germs, will undertake in unison. It is all performed with steady diligence. Nature knows no delays; as soon as the body is cold, the protecting coating that covers

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FERMENTS, FERMENTATIONS, AND LIFE. 555 all its surface, the epithelium, decays in places, particularly in the moister parts. The agents of disorganization, vibrios and bacteria, or rather the germs of these thread-like corpuscles, penetrate through the skin, wind into the small ducts, invade the whole blood, and by degrees all the organs. Soon they swarm everywhere, almost as nu- merous as the chemical molecules in the midst of which they stir and circle. The albuminoid matters are decomposed into fetid gases, es- caping into the air, The fixed salts, alkaline and earthy-alkaline, slowly release themselves from the organic matters with which they combined to form the tissues, The fats oxidize, and grow acrid; the moisture dries away. Every thing volatile vanishes, and, at the end of a certain time, nothing remains save the skeleton, but a formless min- gling of mineral principles, a sort of humus, ready to manure the earth, Now, all these complex operations absolutely required the intervention of the infusoria of putrefaction. In pure air, deprived of living germs, they could not have been accomplished. To check putrid fermenta- tious, to insure the conservation of animal or vegetable substances in a state of perfect integrity, only one means avails, but that is an in- fallible one—that of thoroughly precluding the access to them of the aérial germs of vibrios and bacteria. Whether we adopt D’Appert’s method and begin by subjecting these substances to the action of high temperature, preserving them after that in hermetically-closed vessels ; or whether, as we have seen very lately practised by M. Boussingault, we introduce them into an extremely cold medium ; or whether we sat- urate them with such salts as have antiseptic properties, in every case they are protected from putrefaction by paralyzing the effect of the lower organisms, The corruption of animals is not more possible than the fermentation of grape-juice, barley-wort, milk, etc., when it is made impossible for the germs to act. This is another fact demonstrated by M. Pasteur. We have just used the term antiseptic, that is, capable of destroy- ing germs, and preventing the action of ferments, The interest con- nected with such substances is easily understood, In truth, they are at the present time the chief objective point of therapeutic researches. At the same time that chemists and physiologists are engaged with persevering zeal in studying the functions of microscopic corpuscles in living Nature, physicians, perceiving their manifold and baneful activ- ity in the production of disease, are seeking the means of reaching and destroying them, Every one knows those principles, like phenic acid, which are extracted from pitch, and are also found in smoke, to which they impart antiseptic properties that have been utilized from time im- memorial. Other substances have been lately discovered, not less re- markable for their energetic resistance to fermentation and virus, Among the number are the alkaline sulphites and hyposulphites, which have been the object of very interesting examination on the part of an Italian physician, M. Polli; the borates and silicates of potassa and

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556 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. soda, to which M. Dumas invited the attention of physiologists a year ago; the acetate of potassa, and others. Hitherto the physiological virtues of active principles have been studied only with respect to the higher order of animals: M, Dumas pointed out’ the great interest there would be in examining the influence they exert over the lower organisms charged with the elaboration of ferments, and over ferments themselves. Such researches not only contribute to a better knowl- edge of the mechanism itself according to which these principles affect the system of vital phenomena, but they also gain the most useful indi- cations for the healing art. Indeed, beginning with the moment at which M. Dumas and other chemists made known the result of their examinations on this subject, coincident also in time with the experi- ments of M. Davaine on septicemia, a vast number of attempts were entered upon, in hospitals and in laboratories, to discover to what ex- tent these anti-fermenting substances hinder morbid fermentations, These attempts are still proceeding ; we cannot foretell their success, but we are authorized even now to say that they will not be barren of advantage to the healing art. In this, as in all other departments of scientific activity, we see abstract studies result in useful discoveries. As a general statement of the subject, all this immense work of fermentations, putrefactions, and corruptions of organic matter, is effect- ed in the world by a small number of species of microscopic cells and filaments, by fungi and spores of the lowest order, of which the germs fill our atmosphere, This is one of the most certain acquisitions of modern science, one of the most important from the point of view of natural philosophy, one of the most productive for those arts that are concerned in improving the condition of mankind. We may now re- gard it as firmly established ; but let us not forget that its establish- ment has cost two centuries of investigations and labors. Leuwenhoek, in the middle of the seventeenth century, was the first to reveal the microscopic world of the air, and to conjecture its momentous func- tions. What severe toil, what struggles and tedious trials, since the observations of the Dutch micrograph, to the time of the experimental studies of our contemporary and compatriot, M. Pasteur! BIRDS-OF-PARADISE. By JAMES H. PARTRIDGE. HE Birds-of-Paradise are a small, but renowned family. They received their name from the idea, entertained at one time, that they inhabited the region of the Mosaic paradise. They live in a small locality in Australasia, including Papua or New Guinea, and a few adjacent islands. They are not easily tamed and kept confined ; and few have been brought alive from their native locality. Mr. Beale

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BIRDS-OF-PARADISE. 557 had one at Macao, China, that had been in captivity nine years; sev- eral have been kept at Amboyna, but very few have ever been carried to Europe, although specimens of the skins and prepared birds were taken there more than 300 years ago. Anthony Pigafetta, one of the companions of Magellan, first imported them into Europe in 1522. In form and size they somewhat resemble our crow, or blue-jay ; but some are smaller. They are usually included in the tribe of cone- bills, though their bills are quite slender for that group, and a little compressed. The bills are covered at the base with downy or vel- vety feathers, which extend over the nostrils: their wings are long and round ; the tail consists of ten feathers, two of them, in some spe- cies, very long; legs and feet very long, large, and strong; outer toe longer than ‘inner, and joined to the middle one toward the base; hind- toe very long; claws long and curved, But they are chiefly re- markable for the wonderful development of various parts of their plu- mage, and for the metallic splendor of its rich hues, The sides of the - body, and sometimes of the head, neck, breast, or tail, are ornamented with lengthened, peculiarly developed, and showy feathers. Says Wood: “In all the species, the feathers glow with resplendent radi- ance ; in nearly all there is some strange and altogether unique ar- rangement of the plumage; and, in many, the feathers are modified into plumes, ribbons, and streamers, that produce the most surprising and lovely effects.” The plumage of the face, breast, and throat, is usually the richest in metallic tints, while other parts frequently have very beautiful and brilliant colors. Their food consists of grasshoppers, butterflies, moths, and other insects ; figs, the berries of various trees and shrubs; seeds, rice, and other kinds of grain. During the heat of the day they remain con- cealed in the woods, but, in the morning and evening, come forth to seek their food. Furious storms frequently bring them to the ground, when they are easily taken by the natives, who also shoot them with blunt arrows, or take them with a noose, likewise with bird-lime, or other glutinous substance, placed on the branches which they frequent. They sometimes stupefy them with cocculus indicus, Europeans shoot them with shot-guns, The natives formerly skinned the birds, cut off the legs and wings, and dried the skin on a stick. Later they took out the interior organs of the bird, cut off the legs, and smoked the birds with sulphur, or seared them inside with a hot iron; and, after being thoroughly dried, they put them in the hollow of a bamboo, to secure the plumage from injury. They are used by the natives, the Japan- ese, Chinese, East Indians, and Persians, for adorning the turbans of the men, the head-dresses of the women, and for various other pur- poses of ornament. The Chinese make imitations of these birds from the feathers of parrots and paroquets, to sell to strangers. The feath- ers were formerly, and are still, used very much as ostrich-feathers are. By their lightness and lustre, they are extremely well suited for the

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558 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. ornaments of dress, and are very highly prized. In Europe and America, at the present time, they are sought for with avidity, to adorn ladies’ hats, etc. The birds and feathers for the European market are principally obtained at Batavia and Singapore, whither the natives of Celebes, and others, bring them from Papua and the GREATER PaRapisE-Brrp (Paradisea apoda). Arroo Islands. In India they derive much of their value from the miraculous virtues which the priests have ascribed to them, causing the creature that produced them to receive the title “ Bird of God,” Manuco-Dewata ; from which Buffon coined the modern French name, Manucode, Dr. Forster suggests, but perhaps without reason, that this bird may have been the phenix of antiquity.

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BIRDS-OF-PARADISE. 559 During the dry weather of the northwestern monsoon, in our autumn and winter, many of the birds leave Papua and go west to the Arroo group; but, upon the commencement of the wet weather of the southeastern monsoon, in our spring, they immediately return to Papua. They usually fly, on these occasions, in flocks of thirty or forty, with a reputed leader. Their moulting-time is from May to August, during the southeastern monsoon. On account of the diffi- culty of managing their enormously-lengthened, gossamer-like plu- mage, they usually face the wind, whether flying or sitting. In pro- ceeding from one place to another, they are often distressed by sudden shiftings of the wind; and, being unable to proceed in their flight against it, or go with safety before it, they are sometimes thrown to. the ground, In tempestuous weather they seck the most sheltered retreats of the thickest woods, Although very active and sprightly, they are exceedingly shy and retiring in their habits, The false ideas that they were footless, lived ever on the wing, or occasionally rested suspended by the tail; fed on the dew; reared their young on the shoulders of the male, and came from the terrestrial paradise, have all had their day, but are too absurd to be more than alluded to now. The Greater Paradise-Bird (Paradisea apoda), frequently called the Emerald Bird of Paradise, is smaller than the crow. Linnzus gave the specific name apoda to this bird, which was generally and erroneously called footless, to designate the species, not to perpetuate the error. This bird seeks the thickest foliage of the loftiest trees, in which to remain concealed during the day. The feathers on the head, throat, and neck, are very short and dense. Those round the base of the bill, and on the face, are velvety and black, changing their color to green, as the direction of the light changes; those on the throat, the front half of the neck, and the upper part of the breast, are of a bright, deep, emerald green ; those on the head, back of the neck, and the shoulders, are of a light, golden yellow. The eye is at the com- mon point between these colors. If lines were drawn from it to the throat, to the forehead, and down the sides of the neck, and curved to a point on the breast, they would indicate very well the limits of the colors. The back, wings, tail, and belly, are of a bright, red- dish chestnut, the breast being a little darker, and inclining to pur- ple. From each side beneath the wings proceed a large number of long, floating, graceful plumes, some eighteen inches in length, of ex- ceeding delicacy of texture and appearance, These extend far beyond the tail-feathers, which are about six inches long, and “ their translu- cent golden-white vanelets produce a most superb effect, as they cross and recross each other, forming every imaginable shade of white, gold, and orange, and then deepening toward their extremities into a soft, purplish red.” From the upper part of the tail proceed two black shafts or filaments, some eighteen inches long, appearing like small wires, about one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter. The female has no SSeS Se

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560 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. floating plumes, no gem-like feathers, and no brilliant colors. The head is dark-brown; the neck, light-brown; the upper parts of the body, wings, and tail, reddish chestnut ; the breast and belly, white. In Bennett’s “ Wanderings” is an interesting description of Mr. Beale’s bird, at Macao. The writer says: “ This elegant creature has NATIVES OF ARROO SHOOTING THE GREAT Brnp-OF-PARADISE. a light, playful, and graceful manner, with an arch and impudent look ; dances about when a visitor approaches the cage, and seems de- lighted at being made an object of admiration. Its notes are very peculiar, resembling the cawing of a raven; but its tones are, by far, more varied. It washes itself regularly, twice daily, and, after hav- ing performed its ablutions, throws its delicate feathers up, nearly over the head, the quills of which feathers have a peculiar structure,

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LIRDS-OF-PARADISE. 561 so as to enable the bird to effect this object. Its food, during confine- ment, is boiled rice, mixed up with soft eggs, together with plantains, and living insects of the grasshopper tribe ; these insects, when thrown to him, the bird contrives to catch in his beak with great celerity ; but, if, through failure to catch them, they should fall to the floor, he will not descend to them, appearing to be fearful that, in so doing, he would soil his delicate plumage ; he will eat insects in a living state, but will not touch them when dead. One of the best opportunities of seeing this splendid bird, in all its beauty of actions, as well as dis- play of plumage, is early in the morning, when he makes his toilet ; the beautiful sub-alar plumage is then thrown out and cleaned from any spot that may sully its purity, by being passed gently through Rep Brrp-or-Parapise (Paradisea rubra). the bill; the short, chocolate-colored wings are extended to the ut- most, and he keeps them in a steady, flapping motion, as if in imita- tion of their use in flight, at the same time raising up the delicate, long feathers over the back, which are spread in a chaste and elegant manner, floating like films in the ambient air. In this position the bird would remain for a short time, seemingly proud of its heavenly beauty, and in raptures of delight with its most enchanting self; it VOL. v.— 36

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562 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. will then assume various attitudes, so as to regard its plumage in every direction, Having completed his toilet, he utters the usual cawing notes, at the same time looking archly at the spectators, as if ready to receive all the admiration that it considers its elegant form and display of plumage demand, It then takes exercise by hopping in a rapid but graceful manner from one end of the upper perch to the other, and descends suddenly upon the second perch, close to the bars of the cage, looking out for the grasshoppers, which it is accus- tomed to receive about this time.” Vanity and egotism, as usually developed, are exceedingly offen- sive and distasteful ; but when we see a delicate creature, so richly embellished, so neat and cleanly in its habits, so fastidious in its tastes, so scrupulously exact in its observances, and so winning in all its ways, as to etherealize the commonest actions, they become not only endurable, but amusing, and even enjoyable. And if a bird, in a state of hopeless captivity, exhibits such marked traits of character, acts out so truthfully the promptings of its nature, shows so evidently its desire to please, and possesses so nice an appreciation of being ad- mired, how perfect must be all its ways and actions, as developed in the pure, bright air, fragrant groves, and luxuriant surroundings of its native haunts! The Red Bird-of-Paradise (Paradisea rubra, Vieillot) is about as large as tke preceding, and in many respects resembles it. The feathers on the head and neck are short and dense. Those around the bill, on the face, and top of the head, including the two crests, are velvety and black, appearing green when viewed in a different direc- tion ; those on the throat and front half of the neck are of a bright, deep green; those on the shoulders, upper wing-coverts, back of the neck, and across the upper part of the breast, are of a golden yellow. Lines drawn from the eye to the throat, to the back of the head, and down the sides of the neck, and curved to a point at its lower part in front, would nearly coincide with the limits of the colors. The wings, tail, and belly, are of a deep chocolate-brown ; the breast being of a little darker color. From each side below the shoulder proceeds a tuft of loose, plumy feathers, about a foot long, of a beautiful, deep carmine color, slightly tipped with white. From the upper part of the tail arise two black, slender, ribbon-like shafts, about two feet long, and nearly one-fourth of an inch wide, without any web, and toward the end inclining to curl. The King Bird-of-Paradise (Cicinnurus regius, Linneus), called by the Papuans Saya, is about as large as the thrush; but the male bird has a tail so short as to give it a jaunty appearance. It is not fond of tall trees, but keeps mostly among the small bushes, seeking berries and other food. It is a solitary bird, and very beautiful. As it is sometimes found with other species of the same family, and yet keeps somewhat aloof from them, it was formerly supposed to be their

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BIRDS-OF-PARADISE. 563 leader. The head, neck, upper part of the breast, the back, wings, and tail, are all of a deep red or maroon color, the head inclining to orange, and the breast to a darker red. The belly is white. Across the chest there isa band of beautiful green feathers, that, in some directions, appear black, From each side beneath the shoulder arises a tuft of broad, truncated, light-gray feathers, or plumes, two or three inches Fie. 4. Kine Brrp-or-PaRaDIsE (Cicinnurus regius). long, tipped with bright metallic green. From the middle of the tail or upper-tail coverts proceed two shafts or filaments, appearing like wires, about one-sixteenth of an inch thick, naked for about six inches, then having a bright, golden-green web on the inner side of each shaft to the end, each of which is there coiled outward in a spiral curve, so as to form a beautiful flat disk; the shaft extending nearly twice round the curve. This peculiarity gives to the bird its generic name, cicinnurus, meaning a tail with curled feathers: its supposed leader- ship gave to it its specific name. Most parts of the bird have an ex- ceedingly brilliant, satin-like gloss. The female is of a dull-brown color above; gray, streaked with black, beneath ; tinged with red on the wings ; and has a tail about three inches long. The Gold-breasted Bird-of-Paradise (Parotia sexpennis, Vieillot) has three long, slender shafts, or feathers, proceeding from each side of the head near the ear; they being without web, except the part near the outer end. These can be raised or lowered at pleasure, so as to stand out horizontally on each side of the head, or left to hang loosely backward. It has also a small crest. From each side beneath the shoulders arise massive black plumes, with a loose web, like that of ostrich-feathers. The general color of the bird is a deep, velvety black; the head, throat, and back, having a violet gloss; the wings

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5 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. and tail, black. The neck and breast have scale-like feathers of a brill- iant, changeable green, edged with gold. The Superb Bird-of-Paradise (Lophorina atra, Vieillot) is distin- vuished for its black, velvety scapulary feathers, which are greatly developed so as to form a long, double tuft or plume, which it can raise at pleasure, so as to appear as a very large, double crest, or per- mit it to fall upon its back and sides. <A tuft of feathers, also, hangs Fie. 5. GOLD-BREASTED Brirp-oF-PARADISE (Parotia sexpennis). from the breast, which spreads “into a doubly-pointed form, being of the most brilliant steely green, and glittering with gem-like radiance in the sunbeams. The general color of the bird’s plumage is the deep- est imaginable violet, appearing of a velvety blackness from its very intensity, and only flashing forth in the brighter hues as the light falls upon the edge of each feather. The back, hind neck, and head, are of a greenish-gold color, with a velvety appearance ; the wings are a dull, deep black; the tail is black, with a blue gloss; the throat, changeable violet ; and the belly, bright golden green.” Wallace’s Bird-of-Paradise, or the standard-wing (Semioptera Wal- lacei, Gray) is a little larger than the American robin, The head, neck, back, wings, and tail, are all of a light brown or drab color; the belly, drab streaked or mottled with black. From the short feath- ers at the bend of each wing arise two white feathers or plumes, about six inches long, which the bird can raise and keep erect, or let fall upon the wing, at its pleasure. But the great beauty of the bird con- sists in its brilliant double tuft, proceeding from the breast and lower part of the neck, extending downward and obliquely outward, and terminating in two points about four inches apart. This tuft is of a bright, metallic green, changing into blue, violet, or black, according to the direction of the light; it is exquisitely beautiful in itself, and its beauty is increased, if possible, by the striking contrast with the otherwise dull color of the bird. The legs and feet are of a drab-

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BIRDS-OF-PARADISE. 565 color. The female is wholly of a drab-color, without tuft or wing- shafts. The Magnificent Bird-of-Paradise (Diphyllodes speciosa, Boddaert) is about as large as a thrush. The head, back, tail, and primary wing- feathers, are dark-brown; the other wing-feathers, yellowish-brown. The breast and belly are of a beautiful purplish green, A circular tuft extends over the hind-neck and shoulders, and is, in the upper part, light yellow, and in the lower parts brown; this double tuft, on account of its resemblance to leaves, gives to the bird its generic name. The tail is about two inches long, and from its upper part arise two thread-like feathers about ten inches in length, each coiled in a circle about three inches in diameter. The shafts of these feath- ers have, on one side, a narrow web about one-sixteenth of an inch wide, of a beautiful green or violet tint, according to the direction of the light. Fia. 6. Scrers Brrap-or-Paraprse (Lophorina atra). The Long-tailed Paradise-Bird (Epimachus magnus) has a tail more than two feet long. It is sometimes called the Superb Plume- Bird, and, with the next species, is included in the same family as the hoopoes, It is a native of New Guinea, and is a most beautiful and lovely creature. Lesson says: “To add to the singularity of this bird, Nature has placed above and below its wings feathers of an ex- traordinary form, and such as one does not see in other birds; she seems, moreover, to have pleased herself in painting this being, al- ready so singular, with her most brilliant colors. The head, neck, and belly, are glittering green; the feathers which cover these parts pos- sess the lustre and softness of velvet to the eye and touch; the back is changeable violet ; the wings are of the same color, and appear, ac- cording to the lights in which they are held, blue, violet, or deep black, always, however, imitating velvet. The tail is composed of

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566 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. twelve feathers; the two middle feathers are the longest, and the lateral feathers gradually diminish; it is violet or changeable blue above, and black beneath. The feathers which compose it are as wide in proportion as they are long, and shine both above and below with the brilliancy of polished metal. Above the wings, the scapularies are very long and singularly formed; their points being very short LONG-TAILED PaRApIsE-Brrp (Epimachus magnus). on one side, and very long on the other. These feathers are of the color of polished steel, changing into blue, terminated by a large spot of brilliant green. From each side beneath the shoulders spring long, curved feathers, directed upward ; these are black on the inside, and brilliant green on the outside. The bill and feet are black.” The Twelve-wired Paradise-Bird, sometimes called the Twelve-

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BIRDS-OF-PARADISE. 567 thread Epimachus, or Plume-Bird (Seleucides alba, Lesson), is a little larger than the jay. It has an elongated body, ample, concave wings, a black beak about two inches, and a tail three inches long; the legs and feet are of a pink-color. it is a native of New Guinea, and is fully as beautiful and lovely as the preceding species, All its plu- mage has a soft, velvety appearance. The head, neck, and breast, appear black. Across the breast, and on the shoulders, is a circular tuft of black feathers, two or three inches long; those on the sides TWELVE-WIRED PARADISE-BIRD (Seleucides alba). of the neck being, at the end, of a metallic green. The wings are of a rich violet, with a brilliant lustre, in some directions appearing in- tensely black. From each side beneath the wings proceed a number of silken, snow-white plumes, whose loose, downy vanelets, are grace- fully waved by the gentlest breeze. The contrast between the gen- eral velvety or lustrous blackness of the bird and the snowy white- ness of these delicate plumes is exceedingly striking, and produces a most pleasing effect. These plumes are about six inches long; and six of the shafts, on each side, are prolonged about ten inches be- yond the extremity of the web, and there appear like black threads or wires, giving to the bird its common name. The parts of these shafts which bear the web are pure white, as well as the web. The feathers of the Plume-Birds are taken to Europe, and used as an orna- mental part of dress for ladies. On the upper floor of the old Arsenal Building (which is open to the public the last four days in the week), in Central Park, New York City, there are several prepared specimens of Birds-of-Paradise, in- cluding five Great Birds, three Red Birds, four King-Birds, four Wal- lace’s Birds, one Magnificent Bird, and one Twelve-wired Bird. These

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568 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. specimens will give, to any one who can examine them, a better idea of the size, form, color, and general appearance of the birds; the me- tallic lustre, change of color, and delicate structure of their plumage, than any words or engravings can convey. They would furnish a definite outline that would much assist and guide the imagination in giving life to their forms, spirit to their actions, and reality to their finer traits of character, as developed in their native islands. But still all lifeless forms fail to come up to the living birds in a state of freedom. And we need not be surprised at the enthusiasm of the amateur, who observes them in all their freshness and beauty, sitting in the aromatic trees, feeding among the bushes, floating in the breeze on their gossamer-like plumes, or glancing through the groves like streaming meteors, in the exhilarating atmosphere of their own genial clime. THE CHAIN OF SPECIES. By Hox. LAWRENCE JOHNSON. Part IIL.—TZhe Passage from Annulosa to Mollusca. NOTHER plan, however, is proposed, which seeks to connect Annulosa and Mollusca as successive stages in the progress of evolution from the simplest types and stages necessary to be taken in order to reach the highest development. This is the chain: Evolu- tion of Protozoa directly into Annulosa; or first into the celenter- ate type and these into the annulose, either of which routes seems feasible and easy; then Annulosa into Mollusca; and then Mollusca into Vertebrata, Pursuing this road, the only difficulty of importance is the passage from the articulate or annulose form to the mollusk. Enough has already been said to furnish the key to all the other tran- sitions, and the few brief minutes left us must be devoted to this really obscure problem, If the bridge erected here is practicable, it puts a different aspect upon the whole question, and reflects light backward and forward on every link of the chain. As remarked, the only real difficulty is to connect annulosa and mollusca, For from cephalopods it is easy to develop the vertebrate type, by elongating the ventral aspect of the creature; and bringing down therewith the ventral portion of the cephalic appendages, which subsequently assume, or rather return to, the place and functions of lateral limbs to the main trunk; the other cephalic appendages, prop- erly belonging to the neurohemal axis, easily taking the form and offices of esophagus, branchix, and even internal bronchial apparatus, Evolution of amphioxus, in this way, from some lost octopus, is easier to account for than from sa/pide, as proposed by recent authors; even

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THE CHAIN OF SPECIES. 569 if amphioxus is a vertebrate animal, which is exceedingly doubtful, But the difficulty is to get to cephalopods. It is confessedly easy to pass from the ce@lenterate type to the an- nulose—or, in the old style, from Radiata to Articulata., Nothing is more manifest in Nature than that she never loses the effect of a habit—never gives up a plan—never resigns the use of means and tools once adopted. When we have arrived at the involute cell as the type of the endothentic series—the animal kingdom—noth- ing is more obvious than the compounding of the simple form to con- stitute the rest of the kingdom. Nor is it necessary to suppose that the compounding takes place by any other means than that already observed in the case of exothentic creatures, If vegetal cells multiply and compound by a gemmating and fissiparous process, so also does the endothentic and celeenterate type. Mr. Spencer has shown, triumphantly, how this may take place even mechanically. A simple endothen becomes two by ordinary growth, until division is forced at some median point, exactly as in the case of a cell. When the separation is complete we say this is an in- crease by gemmation. When there is differentiation without separa- tion, we call it compounding—or, as Mr. Spencer has it, an aggrega- tion. The same two great laws of aggregation and segregation, which rule in all things else, present themselves here also in explanation of the phenomena of life. As presented in annulose and annuloid creat- ures, the compounding is a segmentation. For an annulose or articu- late segment is nothing else but one of the simple elements of a com- pound structure, of which the distinction of the parts is less pronounced, In sponges, in corals, in compound ascidians, the segregation is far advanced—the compounding is very evident. In these it is not denied any more than in the analogous compounding displayed in mosses, ferns, and trees, For, according to the laws of vegetal life already reviewed, every leaf, every node, is a distinet creature, and the bud of the node its progeny. But it is not at first sight so obvious that the real law of all creatures constituted of rings and joints is the law of compound association. It is difficult, without some reflection, to admit that every segment in these isa modification of the original unicellular creature—the mono-segmentarian from which the aggre- gation sprang. Yet the most casual anatomist cannot fail to perceive that each section in annulosa is but a repetition of the same structure with allits organs and appendages. Even where there are modification and differentiation of function, the structure is always and evidently identical—perfectly homologous. Fully comprehending the nature of segments, we may proceed to the further efforts of Nature to obtain higher combinations and greater concentrations of energy. For this seems to be the end and object aimed at, if we may be allowed in our own minds to clothe Nature with conscious impersonation, i. e., personality, From the organization

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570 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. of the first drop of protoplasm, and the vivification of the first cell, the tendency has been, as the necessary result of natural selection, to con- centrate force. In the history of evolution there is no passing from lower to higher forms—no foldings, no involutions, without an increase of power; and by the same law this development must continue until the highest point of physical energy is attained. Our ordinary discoveries teach us that force can be multiplied by a multiplication of the elements or organs evolving force. The sim- plest child knows how to obtain two pounds instead of one by putting another weight in the scale; and the electrician obtains more power by adding another jar, or another plate, or another cell to his battery. In like manner Nature has in various directions seized every means to increase and concentrate what for convenience is termed vital force. For there is the same tendency of the forces to aggregation that we see in matter. Watching the progress as we have ascended the scale from the first evolution of life, the greatest concentration of force yet reached in organic life is in articulate creatures—or, as we may call them, by a name of more general application, segmentarians, A segmentary such as a centipede, a bee, a lobster, or even the humblest worm, is as truly a compound zoary as any other collection of zooids, whether celente- rate or molluscoid; and no argument is needed to show a physicist that the closely-united segmentarian zoary evolves more force than the looser aggregation of a branch of ascidians, however highly organ- ized the individuals of the latter may be. There is more force evolved from the gigantic oak consisting of such a closely-united system as presented by the nodes, and which is capable of appropriating such volumes of inorganic matter, than in the loose sheets of ulva or pro- tococcus creeping upon damp walls and slimy pools. Again, in phys- ics, we may multiply force, not only by the number of our elements, but by their size and arrangement. In galvanism two large elements or cells may be made to exhibit greater energy than many’small ones in the aggregate of equal superficial extent, yet not precisely the same energy. It is modified as well as increased. Organic Nature presents us exactly as good illustrations of this law as the experiments of Mr, Grove and Dr. Faraday. The first experiment, so to speak, of Nature to multiply force from the celenterate or monosegmental creature, the last stage arrived at in our progress, is by multiplying the segments upon one or more axes, When upon more than one, as in annuloida, Nature seems to break down early, on account of the complication of the machinery, and soon seeks greater simplicity. This is attained, first, by selecting one lon- gitudinal axis, and multiplying the units or elements of organization and force indefinitely. In some worms the number of segments is in- credible. Instances of iulidw, according to Mr. Newport, have one hundred and fifty rings, at least during embryonic life; and, by the

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THE CHAIN OF SFECIES. 571 same rule, some geophilidw, mentioned by Dr. Carpenter, must reach to three hundred and twenty—each segment, remember, having a quasi-separate organization, separate circulation, separate nerves, and separate appendages for aération and locomotion. Their close and intimate connection does not prevent easy analysis into distinct sys- tems for each segment. Again, however, Nature soon discovers her mistake. The highest concentration of energy cannot be reached in this way, and she makes trial of a new plan. She seeks to modify and expand the elements, and to bring them into closer contiguity. Gathering up ker forces into a few central segments, the rest are lopped off. This is actually the history seen in some embryones. In insects, finally, the highest of the segmentarians, there are only about twenty well-pronounced seg- ments. Some of these, as in the cephalic and thoracic regions, are so intimately united that the divisions cannot be traced, except in the embryo. In adults the thoracic segments are further modified, for great extension and concentration of force, by expansions, primarily, of the aérating apparatus into legs, wings, or other appendages, In short, the thoracic region is evidently the concentration of the life of these creatures, Now to advance beyond this type. Nature never changes her tools —her means; and even her plans present but slight modifications. Her collection and concentration of energy in the thoracic region of polysegmental annulosa is a gathering of her strength at that point whence the next march will begin. Exactly as we may see an individual segmentarian zoary doubling itself up for its own comfort, increase of heat, or of force—exactly as we have seen in vegetal life, after a longitudinal or a superficial evolu- tion of the elements of the compound, energy concentrated by a fold- ing down of the compound upon itself, and an adhesion—so works Nature here. The concentration of life or force at any one point di- minishes its intensity in remoter segments; a more intimate union of a few segments causes atrophy in the more distant frontier provinces ; and this process continues, in fact, until the segments are reduced to two. The very fact of a closer folding and adhesion of two would have this result. This is a position we might, at this stage, compre- hend a priori. Now let us see if it has any foundation in fact. Again I repeat, this is not an imaginary process I am going to amuse you with—it is not speculation—but an irrefragable chain of facts and demonstrations, The entomostracous group of crustacea affords us : illustrations of every step of the progress. First, an excessive devel- opment of two segments of the thorax; then, atrophy or dwarfing of the cephalic and abdominal regions, in various degrees, In cypris, for instance, two segments are so enormously developed as to usurp the mass of its substance, if not yet all the functions of its life. The dor- sal scales of these two segments are actually so enlarged as to present

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572 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. a bivalve box, or case, to inclose the creature as snugly as you see effected for a clam or an oyster. Loss of head and tail would leave the little cypris as perfectly a testacean mollusk as any of these. But you say, if—if it should lose head and tail! The exaggerated fable of the fairy tale is actually the method adopted by the magician Nature to disenchant the fair princess Life from the thraldom of lar- val and infusorial forms. The cypris does lose head and tail, and so becomes molluscan, before proceeding to higher evolution. But not as a cypris—oh, no! she changes her name, as she changes her type; and we must advance to another group of the entomostracous class— one which has been divided from it, more on account of general supe- rior size than for any other reason—the cirrhipeds, In this group we find the most striking metamorphoses in the life of the same individual. Passed out of the mere embryo, the larval form resembles more an ordinary macrourous decapod than the ento- “mostracous its nearest relations. Take one generally known, the ge- nus lepas—the common goose-barnacle—in extreme youth, an exceed- ingly active little shrimp-like tenant of the deep. During the latter part of this stage, the hypertrophied segments of the thorax continu- ing to grow as the cephalic and abdominal parts dwindle, finally, by his jaws, he first seizes hold of some solid support, when the whole head and neck become entirely changed, and remain a mere stipe, for the support of the creature. Every part becomes metamorphosed. The head having disappeared, a new mouth is opened in the breast; and the abdominal portions, although not entirely lost in this genus, are differentiated to other functions. The most important change to notice, in this creature of change, is the change of axis. It is now ex- actly at right angles to the original axis of vitality in the young crus- tacean. Yet, mark well: this is only a return to the true axis of nerve- force in the segments, which, in all annudlosa, is at right angles to the longitudinal development of the sections, The interminable gemma- tions and addition of segments to the zoary being arrested, and life confined to one or two, most naturally the current of the dominant force remaining controls the direction or axis of all the rest. So completely have the method of vitality and the appearances of the little animal been changed, that earlier naturalists classed the young lepas as a crustacean, and the adult barnacle as a multivalve mollusk. And so, in- deed, it is a mollusk, with a few crustacean characteristics not yet lost. The steps from this to the perfect mollusk are too plain to be dwelt on here. Indeed, the difference is so small that, had not the larval cir- rhiped been discovered, the position of the group would never have ‘ been assailed, They should, like human aspirants to rank, have con- cealed their plebeian origin. If the observations of recent embryolo- gists are to be credited, many mollusks and molluscoidea exhibit a sim- ilar evolution, At any rate, even in undoubted mollusca, the elements of their segmentarian origin are abundantly visible.

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THE CHAIN OF SPECIES. 573 If we take the genus arca, for instance, as a typical mollusk, it is easy to follow the segments of which it is composed. Each half of this bivalve has its own organization, as complete as in any segment of any annulosa. Each has its own heart, its own nerve-ganglia and branches, its own aérating apparatus and systemic circulation, such as itis. You may even trace, still, the crossing of muscles and nerve- tibres, at the back or hinge, exactly as between the two articulate seg- ments from which they sprang. Here it may be remarked, again, how tenacious Nature is of her plans. This mysterious crossing and anastomosing of nerve-fibres, so unaccountable in the brain of the higher animals, and of such impor- tant consequences even in man himself, had its origin in the primal union of two annulose segments. Having overcome the principal difficulty by noticing the change of axis, nothing more remains but to pursue this bisegmental arrange- ment to its full development in the grand class of mollusks. Possi- bly not one of existing species bad any part in the chain of develop- ment. But this is of small interest at present, since we are looking for the method, the steps, the finger-boards of the road traveled, and care not now to count the milestones. The transition from the highest mollusca to vertebrata, as already remarked, is plain enough. Mollusca already have the internal struct- ure of vertebrata—the same digestive system—similar nerves— and identical circulatory machinery. The highest mollusks have as much brain as the lowest fishes, and decidedly more than the famous ampbioxus—a creature which just now is an obstruction instead of a help in the establishment of a sound biological theory of develop- ment; and this for the reason that it is leading us away from the true relations of these orders, and helping to keep up the old misconcep- tion of the nature, origin, and importance of a jointed spinal column. Unfortunately, it is this want of vertebra, of backbone in mollusks, that prevents us from seeing the near alliance of cephalopods to verte- brates. Had the latter been supplied with the more appropriate and distinctive title Cerebrata, these highest mollusks might better have claimed admission to the class than many species now found in its ranks, For, besides the homologues already mentioned, do but no- tice the optic and auditory apparatus of sepia, for instance. These are perfectly identical with the eyes and ears of vertebrates. Notice, again, the organization of the mouth. Only vertebrates have such. In annulosa the jaws have lateral motion, and are modifications of the feet. One other consideration must be mentioned—the size of these animals, Only vertebrata and mollusca seem to have unlimited powers of increase. They only have been distinguished for the mag- nitude of individuals. Among the latter especially are to be noted the cephalopods for furnishing giants. Did space permit, a thousand homologues might be pointed out.

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574, THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. From all of which results the general conclusion, worked out more fully in my paper on the “ Homologues of Organic Creatures,” that here is the true route of organic development; the vertebrates from the mollusks, and these from the articulates proceed; and that the basis of the history we are seeking must be searched for in the history of segmentation. All are familiar with the construction of an annulose ring or seg- ment. To the rest of the compound creature each segment is a mi- crocosm, precisly repeating similar parts, or their homologues. To each segment belongs a neural ganglion, or rather a pair of ganglia; a dorsal vessel swelling in the middle to a pulsating organ, or heart, bh or rudiments thereof; and each is furnished with stigmata, spiracles, or appendages, which are homologous of each other, or, as before, with rudiments thereof. And all these by sufficient analysis are to be traced as actually present in every true segment, however often the function of the homologous structure may be changed, or however it may be reduced to a rudiment, or atrophied, or absorbed and appar- ently lost. These homologues constitute the basis of biology, as they do of the life-functions of all creatures made of segments, which includes, as we have seen, mollusks and vertebrates, as well as annulosa —possibly, also, molluscoidea; unless the latter should be considered a modified celenterate, and then it would be the beginning and unit of the series. If, as sometimes contended (and these are unsettled questions), the molluscoid is an evolution of the annulose type, and its embryonic history tends to prove this, then all the segments have been lost but one. For the molluscoids are monosegmental. Nor is this proposition strange or improbable. Undoubtedly such a reduc- tion to one segment takes place in high orders of genuine mollusks, as in gasteropods (of which you have instances in common snails), in whom one segment has become atrophied, leaving generally a rudi- ment behind. In vertebrata, which more immediately concern us, two segments, and only two, are always present, and always bear with them their distinctive elements or appendages, however rudimentary some of the latter may sometimes appear. These segments really constitute the well-known bilateral arrangement of parts and organs so general in animals of this class. Here, again, it is necessary to go back a little in order that we may make the greater speed forward. It is neces- sary distinctly to understand what we are talking about, and what we mean by segments. In the discussion of the bisegmental organization of vertebrates, the question comes up whether any true homologues exist in the two great classes, vertebrata and annulosa. In the pres- ent advanced condition of biology, this question receives a decided affirmative. Until recently the contrary was generally supposed. When it is seen that two sides of a vertebrate, if it be split asun- / der down the backbone, present exact counterparts of each other,

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THE CHAIN OF SPECIES. 575 and also of two segments of any annulose animal—a crustacean or a centipede, for instance ; and when we have seen in the progress from unicellular and from monosegmental structures, to the multi-segmen- tal; and from these again to the bisegmental, by lopping off surplus machinery, and by modifying and enlarging what is left in order to increase and intensify the forces evolved; when we actually see these changes, with the attendant change of axis, taking place and becom- ing the normal conditions of some creatures—all mystery vanishes. First, let us notice that the so-called vertebrate segments or sec- tions—the vertebra of the spinal column, are not segments in the sense used here—are not segmenta, the biological bracelets, in any true sense; although their development takes place after the change of axis by a growth analogous to the original evolution of annulose segments. The vertebre are not homologues of the segments of the great segmentarian series. Having thus indicated what the segments are not, let us call to mind again what they are. This will be the best way to establish the chain we are seeking to comprehend, as it will also be the readiest plan of exhibiting the homologues of these classes, upon which de- pends all our knowledge of transcendental biology. It is best done, in the few moments left us, by tracing a few of these homologues. For this purpose let us select prominent and obvious organs, for in- stance, the heart, the brain, and the extremities or appendages. The first to be noted, being most obvious to popular inquiry, are the extremities or limbs—the true articule, Fins, wings, legs, and arms—can these truly be homologues of the arthritic appendages of annulosa? They are indeed. Not half so plain, when first announced, was that first wonderful revelation of comparative anatomy, which displayed the fin of a fish, the paddle of a whale, the wing of a bird, the leg of a horse, and the arm of a man, to be composed of the same organic elements, as is this which now proclaims that these so varied and beauteous limbs of vertebrate animals made the first essays of their evolution as the lateral appendages of aération or locomotion of the segments of the lowest orders of annulosa. The proofs of this are now obvious, but to appreciate them we have need to travel back again through all the grades of life, and weigh the homologues of every organic element. Yet some of the evidences are plain, and almost superficial, in the vertebrate class itself. Every anatomist, in order to comprehend the physiology and anatomy of this class, begins his analysis of the verte- brate skeleton by observing two distinct systems of organization— the dermal and the neurohemal, heretofore supposed to be peculiar to vertebrates. Now, to which system, the dermal or the neurohemal, do the extremities belong? No amount of ingenuity can satisfy the thoughtful student that the limbs are evolutions of the appendages of the neurohemal axis. They are dermal, Even in mammalia they

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; } ' Hi ' 570 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. have no proper union, no true articulation with the spinal column, Even in those cases where the bones of the pelvis and of the sternum are most securely fastened to the neural axis, it is by a mere anchy- losis completed only in the adult age. The dermal system is the counterpart and homologue of that won- drous external skeleton of articulata, as you must see if you have fol- lowed me through the metamorphoses of celenterata, entomostraca, and cirrhipeda to mollusca, and from mollusca to vertebrata. Com- parative anatomy will not hesitate now to point out every correspond- ence of every part, every organ, every articulation. Nota bone, nor a scale, nor a hair, is ever lost. In each limb there are so many joints and no more; and with a certain definite relation to each other, clear and true; to be seen in the contorted limbs of articulata, as well as in the arm of man. Our very limited amount of time compels me to make this address a mere introduction to the subject; compels us to be content with mere suggestions for studies in biology, to be pursued by after-inves- tigations. One of these suggestions is made to us by the manner of the fold- ing of vertebrate limbs. The difficulties of the question, as put by Dr. Wyman, for example, are well worth consideration, and by this transcendental history of evolution find solution. How is it that in all vertebrates the forward limbs fold one way, forward, and the hind- er limbs the reverse? But take you any two segments of an articu- late creature, a crab or a grasshopper, and observe how the append- ages extend away from the body, and the mystery is explained. For the effect of the magnetic and other forces causing polarity or arrange- ment is to be searched for and found first in the segments, always remembering that in articulates the axis of the neural system—the life of each segment—is transverse to the general axis of the com- pound organism. Now, separate two such segments of your articulate —fold them together in the manner indicated by the history of cypris and of lepas—revolve the involuted creature ninety degrees, stretch the limbs forward and backward as their organization fits them to move; and you cannot fail to perceive a perfect counterpart of the motions of vertebrate extremities. But this is not half the demonstration. Indeed, it is now so well settled, that Science can, dare make one of those predictions always re- garded as affording by their verification the highest order of certainty. After noticing the remarkable fact that all vertebrates having limbs have four, or the rudiments of them, and no more, Science predicts with the repose of conscious systematic truth, derived from this doctrine of segmental genesis, that no vertebrate animal, nor the remains of any, ever will be found, on the earth, or in the waters under the earth, or in its caverns or quarries, having more than these four homologous ap- pendages—and these always dermal.

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THE CHAIN OF SPECIES. 577 But, it may be objected, this is only of external matters, the limbs, the appendages; and these may be accidental correspondences, Very well! Select any other set of organs. Are there any more internal and peculiar to vertebrates than the brain and nerves? Let us take the neurohemal system itself, that which confessedly has no perfect counterpart in the articulate class. It is not suggested that any creature lower than cephalopod mollusks presents any thing exactly corresponding to the cerebral hemispheres, and the optic and auditory lobes of the vertebrate brain. But let us see if we cannot trace some homologues? Without this historical derivation from annulose seg- ments there will remain many things in cerebral anatomy entirely in- explicable. To pursue this theme no further at present, the approxi- mation of the vertebrate and the molluscan systems of nerves cannot be doubted. In higher cephalopods, as sepia, the principal ganglia are brought into near proximity—at least resembling a brain. They are even covered by a bony framework, rudimentary of a neural skel- eton—in all of which the great cephalopod is decidedly more cerebrate than some fishes, to say nothing of the doubtful amphioxus. But ifall else were wanting, the auditory lobes and the optical apparatus would establish this correspondence with the highest orders. The cuttle-fish has an eye with a retina, lens, iris, and cornea; and the optical ganglia are as truly lobes of the brain as they are in mammalia. Nothing like this is seen in acephalous mollusks, nor in articulata. Where articu- lata have a machinery for vision, it is not organized upon this plan. But we do see centres of nerve-force, or ganglia, appertaining to every segment; and we do see also that the nervous system of sepia is only an advance upon that of the inferior mollusca. Even in the oyster the ganglia are brought nearly to a common centre; and this arrangement does not differ essentially from that in the perfectly equilateral mol- lusks, as in areca, for instance, except in the nearer contiguity of the ganglia. Finally, comparing arca with lepas and cypris, it is mani- fest that we have essentially the same plan as in the nervous system of any two segments of articulata. For you will find in each segment two ganglia, one on each side of the median line; and these being brought together, as they generally are in annulosa, appear as one. Now, this one twofold ganglion is, if our explanation of the metamor- phoses of the segments be correct, the homologue of the ganglia of muscular motion, of the two principal valves of cypride, of cirrhipeds, and of bivalve mollusca; and finds its final evolution in the quadruple structure of a mammalian brain. In fact, the homology is complete, with the additions, or rather modifications, already explained, which endow vertebrates with olfactory, auditory, and optic lobes and sys- tems apparently peculiar. There is another branch of the internal structure of vertebrates in- explicable upon any other hypothesis than this chain of specific descent. I mean the hemal system—the system appropriated to the circulation VOL. V.—37

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578 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, of the blood. Comparative physiology, guided by the light of this metamorphosis of the segments, can have no difficulty in tracing the history of the heart back from mammals, and reptiles, and typical mol- lusks, to crustacea; and finding it at last reduced to its elementary form in the twofold pulsatile vesicle of the dorsal artery of each double segment of, for instance, iulide—lowest of the annulose series. The folding together and stricter union of these segments, as we have seen, bringing these pulsatile vesicles into juxtaposition, perfectly account for the two double hearts of bivalve mollusca, and of fishes; while the approximation and union on the median line of this double machinery of the mollusk explain the fourfold heart and the circulation of the highest types of life. If you have followed the chain of evolution here briefly sketched, although in mere suggestions, you can have no difficulty in perceiving the unbroken succession of allied links, all the way from the lowest cell-formations up to man. Many forms, doubtless, belong to subordi- nate systems, and take no part, directly, in the chain; yet the study of all will enable us more fully to comprehend the whole process. In fact, we have no right to expect to find, unless perhaps in fossil forms, the precise species—the very links of the chain—by which the trans- mission of form and life has been actually effected. It would be un- reasonable to require this of the advocates of evolution, since the exact contrary would follow, as an a priori conclusion, from the very terms of the proposition. It would be a wonder, indeed, in view of all the transitions and transmutations of matter, of force, of time, of place, of forms, if we could find, now living, a single species actually concerned in the long process of evolution—a single “ bark which brought us hither.” It is just as unreasonable as to demand of us to produce, alive, every individual through whom our descent has been accomplished—just as unreasonable as to demand the resurrection of all the members of our race, for the last thousand years, to prove our- selves Anglo-Saxons. Time necessarily devoured these when the pe- riod of life was finished. So has it done with species; for, as the spe- cies is continued through individuals, and always with variation, the distance of removal from any special form is only a question of time. The cosmos is always “Ein wechselnd Weben, Ein glihend Leben,” and, therefore, it takes but a few generations—a few thousands, or a few millions of years—to leave behind any specific type, as completely as the forgotten bones of our progenitors that lie hid in Batavian bogs. Why, with all the lights of human history, we cannot trace the line of any human family more than a few hundred years! And what is the historic period, upon which all doubts and objections are based, compared to the ages multitudinous that have passed away without recognition in human calendars? Take the simplest tree, a few years old. We see a crowning bud at the apex of its principal axis of

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THE CHAIN OF SPECIES. 579 growth; and we see long lateral branches, likewise, similarly tipped with leaf, bud, and bloom ; and we do not doubt their common origin, because there stands the common connecting trunk. Yet neither of these had any part in the-production of the others; nor remains there a single one of the individual buds and tender leaves which, in the years gone by, really did take part in the development, the consumma- tion whereof we now behold. Nor, in regarding man, whom we fondly believe the crowning glory of creation, should we expect to see the precise yearly growths which have finally lifted him to this elevation, The steps of the evo- lution may still be traced, but not a single individual of the lineal an- cestry remains. When, therefore, we speak of the chain of species— of the line of man’s descent—upon a priori grounds, we do not expect to find, extant in life, the very links of the chain. The loss of them is another proof of evolution. It is thus, according to the plan pro- posed, we would expect to find it exemplified. It is a rational concep- tion of creation we are attempting to reach, and no other rational hypothesis has ever been proposed. We do not find, then, the very species through which the ascent to man has been accomplished, and do not seek to find them; but, if this plan of derivation is well founded, as it is clearly rational, we must con- clude that the various races of man, now upon the earth, sprang from some common stock, of the order of primates; which, in turn, must have been derived from a lower simian form; and this, again, must have come of a trunk leading back to aplacental mammals ; and these lead on to amphibious reptiles; these to fishes; these to cephalopod mollusks; these to bivalve mollusks; these to cirrhiped crustacee ; which last, in feetal life, possess all the characteristics of the general articulate or annulose type; annulosa being derived directly from primordial eclenterata, whence probably issued, also, annuloids and molluscoids, If molluscoidea be the offspring of celenterata, then the part played in evolution by the molluscoid type was not to furnish a stage of transition, but to illustrate the power of a segment. In any case, we end with the celenterate type, whether fixed, as in actinia, or occasional only, as in rhizopods, This last, being the first animal form, causes us to remember that here branches off another great kingdom, of which the life is always exothentic ; and which, therefore, has no direct part in this chain, except that its first forms furnish the common stock whence has arisen all organic life. This wonderfully intimate relationship of the innumerable forms of living creatures, properly considered, is calculated to elevate our conception of the creation, and of man himself; while, to the glory of the Creator, it is held out to us as another “ bow of promise ”— another assurance of the certainty of the universal reign of law. Nor must it be forgotten that it does not exclude, but, contrariwise, encour- ages, moral reflections. While it tells man of his dignity, it tells him

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a - 580 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. also of his debasement—that he is sublime in being possessed of so much of his Maker’s image as enables him to contemplate all this glorious mechanism; but that he is also “a brother to the insensible clod, which the rude swain turns with his share, and treads upon.” It also enforces the reflection of the old poet: “. ,.. Except above himself he can Erect himself, how mean a thing is man!” THE ZUNI INDIANS OF NEW MEXICO. Br FRANCIS KLETT. NOTHER interesting branch of the aborigines of North Amer- ica is that of the Zuni, a thriving tribe, inhabiting a remote section of the Western United States. This people belongs to the Pueblos, a semi-civilized remnant of the Aztec Empire. Their home is in an uninviting portion of the desert district of New Mexico, about 200 miles southeast of the Moquis settlements, Leaving Fort Wingate, our route lay southwest across a luxuriant, well-timbered spur of the Zuni Mountain, and thence along the Rio Zuni, which was dry, excepting in spots. Passing Ojo de Pescado, a summer retreat of the Zuni, after a weary march through scorching sands, we came, on July 22d, to the suburbs of Zuni town, the outline of whose houses could be traced at a distance of more than a mile; even the characteristic ladder, extending far above the roof, being distinctly visible. As we approached, single dwellings here and there came into view, situated amid corn and water-melon fields. On coming nearer, an old church stood prominently forth, its two well-preserved bells hanging in an opening in the wall over the entrance. Unlike the Moquis, whose settlements are on lofty rocks, the Zuni town is located on a slight rise above the level of the surrounding plain. Its area is about half a square mile, with streets running here and there at right angles. Much rubbish and débris are encountered in entering the town. The houses are of adobe, terraced, well built, and principally of two—though some are of three, and not a few of even four—stories. As a means of entrance, ladders are used; al- though in a few cases there are ground-doors (see engraving), still the usual method of ingress is by ladder to the second story, thence inside by steps up and down. Some of the dwellings have isinglass windows, while the doors generally are hung on hinges. Each floor is divided into several apartments. On arriving at the town, our guide, Swzano, a Zuni, insisted on our first visit being made to himself. Climbing to the second story of his house by ladder, we scrambled in after a fashion, and were wel-

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THE ZUNI INDIANS OF NEW MEXICO. 581 comed by himself and wife, who at once seated us comfortably on sheep-skin rugs spread on the bare earthen floor; bread and water were forthwith handed us, these constituting the simple but recog- nized symbol of great hospitality among this people. After a pleasant hour in the company of our guide and his wife, we sallied forth to see the town. Coming to one of the larger houses, we gained ready admission, and were hospitably received. Our presence, however, was the occasion of much comment among the women, of whom we found six in one room. Their peculiar chattering, accom- panied by hearty laughter and strange gesticulation, though unintelli- gible to us, was construed into joking at our expense. The men were in the field at work, while the children were enjoying a bath in the Fre. 1. PUEBLO oF ZUNI. muddy waters of the Rio Zuni. The women were engaged in grind- ing corn and wheat, an operation effected by means of several pairs of large, flat stones, some of coarse and others of fine material. Be- tween the first set of stones the grain is merely mashed, each success- ive pair rendering the particles smaller and smaller, the last turning out fine flour. Two other women, in another room, were engaged in baking bread, which is made into thin cakes, or wafers, similar to the

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582 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, marros of the Jews, only the latter are the harder. On inspecting tho house, we found each apartment whitewashed, both walls and ceiling, well ventilated, and in every respect neat and clean; exceeding good order seemed to prevail in the domestic appointments throughout the establishment. The furniture consisted of but few articles, these being principally sheep-skins, Navajo blankets, and water-vessels, the latter used also for cooking-purposes. These vessels are of their own manu- facture, of burnt earth, and, in many instances, highly embellished with fanciful designs of neat pattern, the figures being either brown or black, on a ground-work of white. No beds are seen in the house, blankets alone serving as such; the occasional bird-skin, hanging by a string in some corner, serves as a charm. Live eagles and sparrow- hawks, tamed by these people, are seen about almost every house, Fre. 2. CaTHuoLic CuuRcH AT ZUNI. great veneration being had for these members of the feathered tribe, which are considered the sacred birds of Montezuma. Each dwelling is provided with a loom, which forms a conspicuous part of the furni- ture. It consists of two sticks, between which the threads, of the width of the blanket to be made, are spread, the whole arrangement being fastened to the floor and ceiling by raw-hide strings. The op-

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THE ZUNI INDIANS OF NEW MEXICO. 583 erator squats on the ground, using for a shuttle a stick to which the wool for the cross-threads is fastened. The operation of weaving is skillfully performed, although a long time is required in the manufact- ure of one of their blankets. The domestic animals of the Zuni are goats, fowl of all kinds, a few head of cattle and donkeys—every family owning several of the latter, which, while serving for transporting wood great distances, as well as for riding, are used chiefly in cultivating the fields. One specimen among the goats had four horns, as shown in the engraving, and was said to belong to the species formerly common among the Navajos, called cimeron. The sheep are raised for their wool. Fie. 3. Heap oF FouR-HORNED SHEEP. Outside the town there is a large farm, of which a sketch is pre- sented. It is cultivated in common by the Zuni, although divided into patches, or small gardens, one of which belongs to each family. No rains occurring for long periods, irrigation is resorted to, the water being supplied by the Rio Zuni, in the vicinity of the town; this water is salty. For drinking-purposes, wells are sunk at different points, good water being everywhere abundant at a moderate depth. The staple products are wheat and corn; vegetables are raised in abun- dance, chiefly onions, chile (Spanish pepper), and caraway. From close conversation with the people, however, one would suppose their par- tiality for the first-mentioned vegetable predominated. Melons and pumpkins are also considerably cultivated. Sauntering about the village, several underground courts were en- countered, as well as subterranean passages from one square to another, and to the old Catholic church. This church is of adobe, and at least 200 years old; it is 120 feet long, 40 feet wide, and, within, 130 feet in height. The altar is covered with a profusion of carving, which still shows in traces gilding and colors; it has a painted altar-piece of rude construction, representing the ascension of the Virgin Mary ; here and there are carved statues of saints, while on the walls are two illegible inscriptions in Latin. In this church, we were told, a zealous priest celebrated the rites of the Romish Church for a brief period ; but no Gloria or Te Deum has been heard within its wall for upward of a hundred years. The Zuni authorities are a governor and high priest; the latter is

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584 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. called the cacigue, who, besides being the oracle of the tribe, is their temporal as well as spiritual ruler, No outward personification of their Divine Being is made use of; but, entering their estufas (tem- ples) with a bueno corazon (good heart), they simply pray for some blessing, looking to no visible object as a medium of intercession be- tween themselves and their God, Although for a time they outward- ly observed the religious teachings of their conquerors, inwardly they maintained the belief of their race in the infallibility of their tradi- tions, and soon repudiated the creed pressed upon them, returning to the worship of the source of light—the sun—as their only true God. But not only here were the Jesuits expelled; they were also driven out from the pueblos of Jemez, Acoma, and Saguna, as the ruins of the churches testify. However, at a few points the Jesuits still hold sway, as, for instance, with the Isletta Pueblos on the Rio Grande, while with the Mexicans of New Mexico the Jesuits are everywhere in full power. In times of great drought, and during festivals, the cacique orders the celebration of the cachina, a sacred dance. For- tunately, it being a holiday with them at the time of our visit, the rare opportunity was afforded us of witnessing this unique, interest- ing, and most beautiful though heathenish custom, of which a sketch was made on the spot. Some twenty-seven persons were engaged in the ceremony. When first seen, the participants were standing in a row, their faces toward the sun; they were gayly dressed, as will be evident from the description of the three styles of costume worn on the occasion, and represented in the engraving. No. IL. represents a dancer—costume, light-blue mask, horse-hair beard, necklace of black wool and beads, wreath of hemlock as a waist- band; short white skirt, with fancy border, held at the waist by a green and black sash, to which was attached a bunch of long, white strings, hanging to the ground along the left leg; a land-turtle’s shell, pendent from the left garter below the knee, contained pebbles which served a purpose similar to the castanet of the Spanish dancer; hemlock around the ankles, yellow eagle-feathers in the hair, and a fox-skin suspended from the waistband, complete the make-up. No. II. represents the captain, who was attired thus: Yellow eagle- plumes in the hair; blue tunic, white under-garment, with fancy side- piece inserted, and blue stockings; in one hand a staff was carried, the other holding a vessel containing flour. No. III. represents a female dancer (character taken by male); cos- tume, a white serape, with black border interwoven with fancy colors, and a blue gown; otherwise, the attire was that of No. L The male dancers stand in a row, the female (males assuming the character) facing them and chanting a low, solemn strain, keeping time with the right foot. In the intervals between the songs, the leader scatters flour to the four winds to appease the anger of their Divine Being, and induce him to send water from heaven. December

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THE ZUNI INDIANS OF NEW MEXICO. 585 is the period of their greatest festivity and rejoicing. During this month their God sends his two sons, one to visit the living, the other the dead, of this “his chosen people.” Their estufas are also used as halls for public meetings. Fie. 4. CacHINA DANCERS. The executive authority of the Zuni is vested in an officer styled governor—one Pedro Pino—who, however, is but the mouth-piece of the spiritual ruler, the cacique; the orders of the latter are the laws - governing the tribe, their execution simply resting with the governor. In conversation, Pedro Pino informed us that he was the ruler of the country between the Neutrias and Colorado Chiquito, some sixty miles, and Agua Fria and the Moquis settlements, about one hundred miles apart. In appearance, he is perhaps sixty years old, of command- ing presence and affable manners; his hair is snow-white. He told us he had been governor of the Zuni people for many years, and that the tribe had always been friendly to the whites (Americans), from many of whom he had testimonials to the latter effect. Ordering his son, Patrizio, to bring him certain papers, he produced letters from offti- cers of our army and private citizens, which referred to the governor in the highest terms, and also spoke of the uniform kindness in their treatment of his people. “The Americans,” continued the governor, “ treat us well, but the Mexicans very badly; the latter have always maltreated us, and we want them neither to go through our country nor to reside among us. The heavens punish us by long drought for allowing them to remain on the Colorado Chiquito. My cacique, who prays for rain, and who is the spiritual and temporal ruler of this people, watches the sun daily, and is much distressed because no rain falls. He (the cacique) attributes the drought to the presence of the Mexican on our soil.”

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: i ! 586 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. Pedro Pino bade us tell the Great Father that he wanted a “ per- petual title to the Zuni country, which,” he said, “had been handed down to us by our forefathers, through all time.” Further, he re- marked: “ We are peaceable, and do not make war; if we have a title to our lands from the Great Father, we can show the document, and even the Mexican will respect it.” The cacique, who was present, nodded assent, but did not join in the conversation. The governor very cheerfully and politely accompanied us through the village. As the cachina dancers came in sight, and we halted to witness the ceremony, an elderly man approached and remonstrated with the governor for allowing us to look upon this form of worship. In reply to the remonstrance, Pedro Pino informed the intruder that he would allow us, “ but,” said he, “no Mexican shall ever look upon the performance of this holy and sacred rite. The Americans,” he continued, “have ever been our friends, and are good and excellent people. I have been in Washington, and have seen such men as Mon- roe and Calhoun, and have been in the halls of Congress. These men” (pointing to us) “ come from Washington, and I know they are good men.” ‘To the last remark we bowed assent. On returning with the governor, we were most cordially welcomed to his house, and, entering, were very agreeably and hospitably enter- tained. A pipe “all round,” and Pedro Pino entered into conversa- tion. He spoke of a single Mexican at Ojo de Benado, and another at the Colorado Chiquito, who were a sore grievance to his people. He said: “The cacique of my nation is very sorry on this account, and the rain will not fall while these wicked men inhabit our territory. I will deem it a special favor if you will intercede with the Great Father for a title for us to our country: this will satisfy us. You men are good, have seen the sacred dance of the cachina, and we shall have rain.” It may be a fact of importance to the superstitious to know that it did rain that evening, and most heavily, the storm lasting several hours ! The traditions of the Zuni are few and simple. They say their people came from the northwest on their march southward; that all Pueblo Indians belong to a common race, and are all members of the large families called Aztecs, or Montezumas; that some of their fore- fathers remained behind in the great migration of the nation, while the large body pursued a southerly course, ultimately forming the mighty empire of Mexico, as found by Cortez after its conquest ; that, long before the white man came, their people inhabited the mesa south of their town. They have traditions, also, of a flood; ef the founding of their present pueblo ;* of their war with the Spaniards, and their subjugation, by the latter, for a time; of the arrival of the first Ameri- can in New Mexico, and of the Mexican and Navajo War. But their knowledge of these events is merely outline, they being unable to give any details, ? Used for “town” as well as “ people.”

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THE ZUNI INDIANS OF NEW MEXICO. 587 The Zuni language is much like that of other Pueblo Indians, but the words are, apparently, rather indefinite, requiring much facial contortion and bodily gesticulation to make their sentences perfectly intelligible. They have no schools. Their hieroglyphical writings may be seen in many places, while all along the Cafions de Choca and de Chelle are traces of the ancient march of this people. At Mesa Pintada (Painted Rock), about 100 miles to the northward, we copied one of their hieroglyphical inscriptions, as seen in the engraving. This writing being in the Navajo region, is believed by some to be the Fia. 5. Zunr VEGETABLE-GARDENS. work of that tribe ; but this could hardly be, since the Navajoes are a nomadic people, and, besides, are not known to possess hieroglyphical writings. The Mesa Pintada is a vertical wall of sandstone, about 150 feet high. The inscription, as here given, was copied on the spot, and is a faithful representation. Commencing at a, the writing runs, with the mesa, westward ; the space from a to ¢ is 16 feet; the figures are reduced to one-fifth their original size. There are many ruins of stone-houses in the vicinity of Zuni, at Agua Fria, El Moro, Ojo de Benado, and Old Zuni, which were un- doubtedly towns inhabited at the time of the Spanish conquest, con-

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j H 588 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. stituting, with Zuni, Neutrias, and Ojo de Pescado, the Seven Cities of Cibola, mentioned frequently by Castaiiede in the description of his travels in 1540. The opinion of the chief officer of this expedition, Lieutenant Wheeler, is in accordance with the views of General Simp- son, Lieutenant Whipple, Mr. Gallatin, and other ethnologists. More- over, the governor of the Zuni informed us that all the ruins in ques- tion were once thriving towns of his people. In connection herewith it may be mentioned, that near Zuni is a rock with an old Spanish in- scription, which our party photographed. cA me N uate Ae fe ny ites whet} b. ba eh Willy Group or ZUNIS. The Zuni number about 2,000 souls. In summer, parts of the tribe resort to the smaller settlements—one at Neutrias, the other at Ojo de Pescado (respectively about twenty miles from Zuni town)—to culti- vate their farms in those sections. Their fields do not compare un- favorably with those of the Mexicans. In appearance, the Zuni are a mixture of Mongolian and Caucasian. The complexion is olive, rather than dark-brown; hair straight and jet black; eyes black; cheek-bones very high and prominent; their height and general physique correspond to the average among the

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THE ZUNI INDIANS OF NEW MEXICO, 589 whites. Their dress is simple, that of the men being merely cotton drawers and shirt, with blue woolen stockings of their own manufact- ure; a turban of wool or cotton completes the male attire. The fe- males wear a gown of wool, held at the waist by a sash of the same material ; the arms and shoulders are left bare; their stockings same as those worn by the men; for shoes, both males and females wear moccasins of buckskin. When in the street, the women cover the head and shoulders with a white cloth. Among the Zuni, as well as other Pueblo Indians, are many al- binos, and, as interesting to those inclined to the Darwinian theory, it may be stated that the production of this “ improved stock” is not due to any mixture of white blood. The skin, and sometimes the hair, of these singular specimens of humanity, is perfectly white, while their eyes are of a reddish hue. The mother of an albino being asked why, she being brown, her child was white, made no reply; her fierce look, however, expressed more, perhaps, than her language would have revealed. Fie. 7%. HIEROGLYPHICS AT MESA PINTADA. Several tribes of Pueblo Indians have been contaminated by con- tact with the Spaniards, but the Zuni are still pure, and free from taint through Spanish influence. They are simple, though ceremo- nious in manners—the latter trait undoubtedly acquired from occa- sional association with their Latin conquerors. They are extremely hospitable, and, after short acquaintance, are apt to prepossess the

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 59° stranger and to command his respect. The females are chaste, re- served, extremely modest and rather shy, avoiding, when possible, the gaze of the stranger. Many of them are quite pretty, of fine figure and regular features. Their want of personal cleanliness, however, was apparent, and is certainly singular, in view of the neatness which pervades their dwellings, One cannot but admire their regard for truth, their industry, unob- trusive disposition, hospitality and respect for strangers. Their hatred of the Mexican is intensely bitter, and is not concealed. On every favorable occasion they give vent to expressions indicative of outraged feelings by reason of the persecutions that have been inflicted upon them by their enemies; and these, together with the feeling manner in which they are made known, warrant the belief that the injuries they have suffered have been numerous and severe. Their love for and kindness toward the people of the States (or “ Americans,” as they call them) are in striking contrast with the hatred and revenge they bear the Mexican. Yet the benefits they have received from our Gov- ernment have been neither many nor great. Although perhaps these Indians, like all Pueblos, do not impress the stranger very favorably on first sight, on closer acquaintance one is forced to yield to the conviction that they are among Nature’s no- blemen—that they are the descendants of a race long freeholders of the soil of the North American Continent, and are every way worthy of confidence and respect. They are by no means to be compared to the nomadic tribes of red-skins, everywhere infesting the prairie, plain, and mountain of the far West, for murder and plunder. Like other Pueblo tribes, these people show marked and distinctive peculiarities, not that they differ essentially in type from the other branches of the great aboriginal families, but as regards their originality in costume, and their strong conservatism. Industrious and self-sustaining, they are temperate and quiet; though receiving but little aid from the General Government, they are well to do, and particularly in the line of farming. As evening drew near, we prepared to bid adieu to Zuni town and its inhabitants. On leaving, the governor, with his cacique and the prominent men of his tribe, followed us to the outskirts of the village, when, with uplifted hands, he gave us his benediction, imploring the God of the Zuni to give us safe return to our camp, and, at the close of the field season, to our homes and kindred in the distant East. A pleasant day with this isolated band of self-supporting, half- civilized people, was profitably spent, many facts being gained re- garding themselves, their ancestors, their peculiar manners and cus- toms, as well as respecting their language. These data, when properly discussed and elaborated, will constitute additional information of in- terest to the general reader, as well as of value to the student of eth- nology and philology, and may, moreover, throw new light on the

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FOOD, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF MAN. 591 history of the North American aborigines, of whom but a handful re- main to tell the story of their former greatness, or the extent of their ancient civilization. FOOD, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF MAN. By OTTO ULE. TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN, BY J. FITZGERALD, A. M. HE progress of science does not consist merely in the discovery of new facts and the enlargement of our knowledge, or even in the ingenious conclusions thence drawn, and which, from their universality, acquire the character of laws; its mightiest work is the change it brings about in our fundamental conceptions, and the consequent rev- olution in science itself. As science advances, it gains new principles, new arguments; its problems and its aims multiply incessantly. There is no branch of knowledge that has not experienced this, and even historical investigation is no exception. Time was when the earth used to be regarded as merely the temporary abode of man, or even as the place where he spent a brief term of banishment. The history of man used to consist of casual events, or of the free and arbitrary doings of individuals. Great men, great heroes, great rulers, great thinkers, determined the history of peoples and of states. Trifling causes—the walling up of a window, or the spilling of a glass of water—might occasion events that would convulse the world. By the aid of natural science we have come to look on the earth as some- thing more than the temporary abode, as the true home and school of mankind. Man has become a child of Nature; in Nature are all the conditions of his life and development. Climate and soil, the confor- mation of the land, and the distribution of water, determine the phys- ical and the mental development of nations. It has long been seen that peoples differ, that their history and their civilization are differ- ent, accordingly as they live in valleys or on mountains, in islands or in the interior of continents, in deserts and steppes or in forests, in an open, hilly country, or in sequestered valleys. Historical research, however, has but recently begun to concern itself with the natural causes of the development of civilization, and many an important aspect of this subject is still entirely overlooked. Of all the influences which determine the life of the individual, and on which his weal and woe depend, undoubtedly the nature of his food is one of the weightiest. Every one has for himself experienced how not only the strength of his muscles, but also the course of his thought and his whole mental tone, is affected by the nature of his food. And shall not that hold good for nations which holds good for individuals? Shall the sum of mankind be less affected in their physi-

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$92 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. cal and mental development by the food they take, than the individu- als of whom that sum is made up? This seems to be the decision of history. Philosophers (even the great thinker of Kénigsberg himself ) have not a word to say about the influence on human races and peo- ples of different food-supplies. The world heard at first with aston- ishment the saying of a famous scientific man, that, “ could man live on air and water alone, such notions as master and servant, prince and subject, friend and foe, hate and love, virtue and vice, right and wrong, etc., would have no existence, and political communities, social and family life, human intercourse, commerce, trade, and industry, art and science—in a word, whatever makes man what he is—depend entirely on the fact that man possesses a stomach and is subject to a law of Nature which compels him daily to take a certain amount of food.” As we start out with the principle, too late recognized in historical research, that the selection of articles of food is not only important for the personal well-being of the individual, but that it is a weighty, world-stirring question for countries and nations in its bearings on the history of civilization, we will, therefore, endeavor to look closely into it, and study the mode in which this influence is exerted. If nations are to flourish, they, no less than individuals, need wholesome, strong food. The only question is, How are we to deter- mine what food is strong and wholesome? Foods have been classed in different groups, according to the influence they have on the body, in virtue of their essential constituents; and though this classification, like every artificial classification we make in Nature, is only approxi- mately correct, still it gives us some ground tostand on. Blood- formers, or albuminates, are those albuminous materials which consti- tute the nutritive elements of the blood, and enter into the composi- tion of the muscles, bones, sinews, and ligaments, on which the exer- cise of force specially depends, The heat-producers or respiratory foods are those rich in carbon; these specially serve to support, with * the aid of inspired oxygen, the process of combustion so necessary for the purposes of the organism. Finally, there is a third group of nutritious substances—the nutritive salts—which are of an inorganic nature, and which, after combustion of the food, remain in the shape of ash. All these food-materials are essential, since with them the organ- ism is built up. Life is an unceasing process of waste and repair, and the food must make good the loss the organism suffers every instant. Even those substances which are contained in the living body only in small quantities must be supplied, for on this depends the activity of important organs. Such substances are common salt, potash, lime, magnesia, phosphoric acid, and, above all, iron, with- out which the blood-corpuscles would lose their vitality. But none of these groups is, by itself, sufficient for nutrition; they must all be

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FOOD, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF MAN. 593 combined. Blood-formers, heat-producers, and nutritive salts, are not ‘separately foods, but only factors of food, each as indispensable for the vital processes as air and water, but each incapable by itself of supporting life. One cannot live on albumen alone or on fat alone. Without lime-phosphate no bone would be formed, no matter how much pure albumen and fat we ate; and without albumen no muscular tissue would be formed, though we were to gorge ourselves with sugar and salt; finally, without fat, no brain. But we properly enough give the name of foods to meat, milk, and bread, for in them all the three conditions are present. Fortunately, these nutritive principles are found by no means sparingly distributed throughout Nature; under the most varied forms they occur in almost every food-stuff used by man. We not only find the blood-formers in the shape of fibrine in the blood and muscles of animals, of albumen in eggs, of casein in milk, of lime and areolar tissue in cartilage, sinew, and skin, but also in the vegetable kingdom; we discover them in the gluten of grains, in the legumine of pulse, in the vegetable albumen of sundry roots, leaves, and fruits. Heat-producers are furnished, not only by the animal kingdom in its fats, but by plants also. Sundry seeds give a small quantity of oil, but the principal supply of heat-producing elements derived from the vegetable world appears in the shape of starch, gum, and sugar—substances which, during the process of digestion, are trans- formed into fats, and therefore may replace the latter. Finally, we have salts in the water we drink, and more abundantly in nearly every animal and vegetable substance we consume. Hence, it might seem to be an easy thing to find wholesome food, as though one had only to seize blindly the store of food offered by Nature, in order to get all that our organism requires to keep it vigorous. But it is not to be forgotten that, while the nutritive elements make up the losses of the organism, and renew the body, as it were, still they must be taken in certain definite proportions. Now, in Nature they are not distributed in any such proportion. There the greatest diversity is found; one food-stuff consists princi- pally of blood-formers, another of heat-producers; this one contains only one of the nutritive salts, that one, another. If, then, we let chance decide in this matter, it might easily happen that we would take one element in excess, while we took none at all of another. If this were the case again and again, or permanently, the organism must suffer or perish utterly ; for, suppose only a single organ to be im- properly nourished, i. e., to receive food insufficient to make up its losses, the check given to this one will affect all the rest. Science can now pretty accurately determine the composition of every article of food, and hence its contents of the various nutritive principles, This is done by chemical analysis. Chemical analysis, however, is of little assistance to us in determining accurately the constituents of VoL. V.—38

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594 ‘THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. our daily food. For, if one, being over-anxious on this point, wished to avoid all danger by having all his food examined by a chemist, so as to apportion by weight the amount of this substance and of that which he should take, there is reason to fear that he would die of hun- ger long before the chemist had concluded the analysis. Fortunately, there is a better method of avoiding danger, and of this we wisely make use under other circumstances. When we would protect our- selves against the chance which gives up our houses to destruction by fire, or when we would secure our dependents against the accident which deprives us of life and them of a protector, we take out an in- surance policy on house or life. But this insurance is not a transac- tion between two or three, but between hundreds of thousands and millions. A mutual insurance transacted between three persons were a game of chance, between millions it is a sure calculation. We de- feat chance, when we share it with others. To apply all this to the matter in hand: we must. not restrict ourselves to a few articles of food, but must have a great variety of foods to select from; we must not partake of the same fare day after day, but must vary it as much as possible. Only with a varied and alternating dietary can we be sure that what is lacking in one food-stuff will be supplied in another, and that what we fail to get to-day we shall have to-morrow. What is commonly regarded as simply the result of a spoilt palate, viz., the repugnance excited by the steady recurrence of the same dish, is an uprising of the organism itself against a food which does not meet its requirements; or, rather, the consequence of a deficiency already estab- lished. Here we have an important rule for determining a wholesome diet. The foods we use must contain the indispensable elements of nutrition in due proportion; our food must be mixed, varied, and alternating. And what is here said with regard to individuals, holds good also for nations. The food-stuffs of an energetic population are up to the stand- ard only when they are multifariously blended, and when there is a due proportion of substances belonging to the three groups mentioned rabove. Now, this relation between the nutrition and the physical and \ mental development of a people must be apparent in the history of their civilization, Where the food is insufficient, fluctuating between want and excess, uniform and undiversified, the capacity of the people for work must be inferior ; their bodily strength and their mental cult- ure must be of a low grade. But, when we turn our eyes to the pages of history for a confirma- tion of this, we meet with our first real difficulty. History tells us much about deeds of heroism, bloody wars, conquests, and revolutions ; of politics, manners, and customs, and even of the thoughts that have occupied the minds of nations; but of their cuisine, their bill-of-fare, history tells us nothing. And yet a history of the foods of nations would be an addition of great value to the history of human civiliza-

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FOOD, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF MAN. 595 tion, From it we should learn by what means and in what way the men of prehistoric times came into possession of their food-stuffs ; and this would be a long story full of deeds and full of suffering. Fortu- nately, we possess other original documents besides the annals of his- tory; documents, too, that antedate all written history, and which are no less trustworthy and unambiguous. The ground under our feet has preserved them in its strata; they rest in barrows and in caves, and in the bottom of lakes and bogs, and these primitive documents are not silent as to the food of extinct nations. In the present status of research, the earliest authentic traces of man on earth go no further back than the age of ice, so called, and the accompanying or subsequent formation of the diluvium or drift. The relics of man dating from an earlier epoch, the upper Miocene forma- tion, that is, the middle of the Tertiary group, which are said to have been found in France, are at least very questionable. But there have been preserved for us in caverns remains dating from the Ice Age, which tell us of the food used by man in those times. Man then in- habited Central Europe in company with the reindeer, the cave-bear, and the mammoth. He was exclusively a hunter and fisher, as is shown by the bones of animals found in his cave-dwellings. The mio- cene vegetation, which abounded in arboreal fruits, had disappeared during the long period of the subsequent pliocene formations, the cli- mate of Central Europe, meanwhile, having gradually become colder. Nature supplied no fruits for the food of man. What food he got by hunting and fishing was precarious, and there were intervals of fam- ine; for fortune does not always smile on the hunter, and the beasts of the forest are not always equally numerous. The food, too, was uniform, and not altogether adapted for man, for the flesh of wild ani- mals lae&s fat. The man of those times had not enough of the heat- producers in his food; and that he felt this want, we learn from his taste for the marrow of bones. All the long bones of animals that are found in cave-dwellings are cracked open lengthwise, in order to get out the marrow. Now, this insufficient, uniform food has its counter- part, in the low grade of culture which then prevailed, as evidenced by the mode of life, the weapons, and the tools. Man then lived iso- lated, without social organization ; he dwelt in caverns, and his only protection against the cold was the skins of animals and the fire on the hearth. His tools were of stone, unpolished, unadorned; so rudely fashioned, that only the eye of the connoisseur can recognize in them man’s handiwork. Let us now advance a step further, and glance at a time a few thousand years nearer to our own, the period of the ancient pile-dwell- ings. Man then built up buts, and even villages, on piles, in the midst of lakes. These piles have been discovered, and between them, on the bed of the lake, oftentimes overlaid with peat several feet in depth, lie the monuments of those times—the waste of the house and

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596 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. of the kitchen. Some of these lake settlements, that near Roben- hausen, in the Pfiaffikonsee, for instance, were clearly destroyed by fire, and under their charred remains is buried every thing that had been contained in the eating-rooms. The lake-men, too, were hunters and fishers, and they still hunted some of the same animals as the cave-men—only the cave-bear, reindeer, and musk-ox had disappeared, They pursued fishing probably with greater success than their prede- cessors, for they not only employed harpoons made of bone and rein- deer horn, but had learned to make nets of flax-fibre. But they, fur- thermore, had begun to raise cattle; they had domesticated animals— goats, sheep, two species of swine, and two of oxen. Probably, too, they used the milk of cows, and even seem to have understood cheese- making, for twirling-sticks and perforated vessels have been found which can hardly have been used for any other process. The food- supply of the lake-men, therefore, was more assured than in the Ice Age, and also more varied; for they were, furthermore, agricult- urists. They grew wheat and barley, ground the grain with querns, made porridge and bread. Remains of this porridge, as it is sup- posed, have been met with in pots; and flat cakes, in a charred condi- tion, are found abundantly in the pile-dwellings of Wangen and Ro- benhausen, Sundry kinds of fruit, also, served for food. Dried ap- ples and pears—wild-apples and wild-pears, it is true—blackberries, and hazel-nuts, have been taken in great numbers out of the bogs. The food of the pile-villagers was thus very abundant and diversified, and to this better nutrition answers a considerable advance in culture. The lake-man did not inhabit caverns, nor did he clothe himself in skins, as did the man of the Ice Age, but built himself wooden cab- ins, and wore clothes of flax. Considerable stores of flax have been found, and it is even supposed that pieces of the simple fabric have been discovered. These people lived in populous villages, and hence undoubtedly had a social organization. Their tools and weapons are of stone, it is true, but nicely polished and ornamented. Their un- mistakable love of the beautiful testifies to their progress in culture.— Die Natur. MATERIALS OF THE SCIENCE OF LAW.’ Br SHELDON AMOS, A. M. i order to ascertain what are the materials of the Science of Law, it will be well to cast a glauce at the subject-matter, in its rudest and most inartificial shape, to which the science relates. For this purpose the case may be taken of a nation in what may be called the 1 From advance sheets of “ The Science of Law,” forming Vol. X. of the “ International Scientific Series.”

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MATERIALS OF THE SCIENCE OF LAW. 597 early manhood of its life, after all the early struggles for its self-con- scious existence, or for its independence, are over; and yet, before it has developed within itself all the complicated machinery of a highly- organized commercial and social life. In such a state there must, by the very hypothesis, be a more or less steadily fixed government, whether that government approach more to a monarchical, or an aris- tocratical, or a democratical type. The stability of the state, and its self-dependence, imply agriculture, and agriculture implies property or ownership. The division of labor, again, which this economical con- dition presupposes, involves the habit of making contracts, even though they be of the most elementary form, The social condition cannot but rest upon a previously-developed, though now strongly- fortified, domestic condition, and this implies the fact of marriage, and the relations of husband and wife, parent and child, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, nephew, niece, and the like, The still remaining anarchi- cal tendencies of certain individual members of the state, lagging be- hind the rest, will generate occasional acts of violence, threatening, directly or indirectly, the very life and existence of the state. These acts will excite the horror of all the more orderly members of the com- munity, and will be denominated by some such term as crimes. It is obvious that the characteristic classes of facts, which have just been alluded to, are so general and simple, that their necessary occurrence at a certain epoch, in the progress of every state, may be predicted as a certainty. These facts, however, in themselves, are of the utmost possible moment, and involve, by their permanence and universality, the elementary ingredients of a science of law. It will be seen that these facts, looked upon as a whole, imply, first, a certain number of definite relations of persons to one another, whether as governors or governed, husbands or wives, parents or chil- dren, or as otherwise allied by blood or marriage. Secondly, these facts involve certain determinate relations between the persons in the community, in respect of the things (or physical substances) appertain- ing to the community as a whole. These things, severally, are owned by one or another, and not by the rest. The ownership of these things is the subject-matter of private arrangements and contracts between different members of the community. The violent or fraudulent ab- straction of a thing owned from the owner may be one of the acts on the general prevention of which the very life of the community is held to depend, and as such is denominated a crime. Again, the classes of facts already enumerated have two distinct sides to them, one touching the outward lives of members of the com- munity, that is, their acts ; the other touching their inward lives, that is, their thoughts and feelings. Over the former of these sides the whole of the community can, by its aggregate pressure, exert a con- siderable amount of force, of a specifically ascertained quantity and quality. Over the latter side, that touching the thoughts and feelings

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598 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. of individual members, the utmost direct pressure, consciously exerted by the community, is of the feeblest efficacy, and, at the best, indefi- nite and precarious in the highest degree. The sphere of action of the community, with respect to the former, or the acts of men, is that of law. The sphere of action with respect to the latter, that is, the thoughts and feelings, though not exclusive of acts, is morality. The relations of these two spheres to each other will be investigated in the next chapter. In the mean time, the following conclusions have been reached: It appears that the characteristic energy of every state consists in the reciprocal influence upon each other of the corporate whole, and the constituent elements, in respect of certain definitely assignable classes of human action. These classes of action will either have reference to things or physical substances, as objects of ownership or use, or have no such reference. The actually subsisting relationship to each other of the corporate whole, and the constituent personal elements, depends upon the form of government which casually happens to prevail. The influence of the constituent personal elements of the state upon its governing authority, as representing, at any epoch, the cor- porate whole, is exhibited, first, in the selection (whether conscious or unconscious) of that governing authority according to its specific modifications; and, secondly, in the incessant control (conscious or unconscious) of that authority, by which the limits of its free action are, at every moment, defined. The influence of the governing au- thority, on the other hand, on the constituent personal elements of the state—that is, upon its so-called “subjects ”"—is exerted through two separate channels: one that of administration; the other that of law. In other words, the purposes of government are effected either through the medium of occasional and, as it were, spasmodic injunctions, or through general rules. The limits, within which any given governing authority can venture to issue occasional injunctions, must be determined, as has already been seen, by its actual relations to all the constituent personal ele- ments of the state. These limits will never be precisely determined in language, though they will be marked with tolerable exactness in fact, and instinctively appreciated by all persons concerned in either enlarging or protecting them. The determination of these limits of administrative authority might be looked upon as forming one great branch of the general rules which constitute the other field of the appropriate activity of the govern- ment. It composes a large portion of what is called “constitutional law.” The anomaly, however, attaching to this extension of the term “law” is obvious, inasmuch as, if the name “law” be given to the body of general rules through which a government exerts its appro- priate activity, the same term “law” cannot be simultaneously ap-

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MATERIALS OF THE SCIENCE OF LAW. 599 plied to the limits affixed to its freedom of action. But this objection, when once understood, is of little practical importance. It is sufficient to establish that there are certain definite limits which circumscribe the free action of every governing authority, and that these limita- tions admit of being formulated into more or less precisely articulated propositions. Such propositions, capable as they are of being handled, interpreted, and enforced, in courts of justice, have all the essential qualities that belong to the general rules framed by the governing authority itself, for the guidance of the conduct of all persons sub- mitted to its dominion. The topics of these general rules or laws will be those matters which have already been described as essentially inviting the direction of the corporate strength of the community. Such matters are the re- lations of family life, so far as outward actions and public decorum are involved, the security of property, the protection of individual liberty, the enforcement of contracts, and the prevention of those vio- lent and exceptional excesses denominated crimes. At a very early period in the history of the community, the inter- est that each citizen has in the wise and effectual regulation of such matters as these becomes conspicuous to all, and more especially to those usually, or, on the average, more advanced and intelligent mem- bers of the community who find themselves charged, through, it may be, a series of political vicissitudes, with the duties of government. It is probable that these several and various objects will attach to themselves, at different epochs, a very unequal and disproportionate share of attention, The security of property may alternate with security of the person as an object of governmental care; and the classification of crimes and civil injuries, or even of crimes and religious offenses or sins, may be, in the highest degree, irregular and unsystematic, The vices, the selfishness, the ignorance of individual rulers, will, from time to time, bring into relief some classes of laws to the disparagement or neglect of others. At one epoch a state will suffer from having too few laws, at another from having too many. Particular classes of persons may lose or gain at one period of legislation, and other classes may lose or gain at another. These eras and disasters are of none the lighter con- sequence that they have been universal. It is in spite of them, and not by means of them, that states have finally endured and fought their way to a climax of intelligent legislation and conscious political life. In the case of such states, the heart of the people, as estimated from generation to generation, has been sound, and the heads of their rulers wise. The laws have gradually been adapted to promote indi- vidual liberty, and not to impair it; and the province of government has been so mapped out as to make the government an institution conducive to the good of the people, and not a mere organ for the sacrifice of a nation to a class,

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600 ‘THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. It will have been seen, in the above description of universal phe- nomena, that a purely abstract mode of treatment has been adopted. So far as universally confessed historical facts are presupposed, the truth of such facts is boldly assumed, But the main basis of the arguments are the elements of human nature itself, as they are written, not only in the venerable documents of ancient history, but on the face of every traveler’s narrative, of every ancient body of laws, of every honored institution subsisting in the midst of the national life of the most advanced countries of Europe. It is obvious, then, that the generality and permanence of the momentous facts above described afford the groundwork of a great science, the Science of Law. This science is distinguishable from the Science of Ethics, to which it may be coérdinated, as well as from the Science of Politics, to which it is subordinated. The materials of the science are: a descrip- tion of—1. The essential institutions of human society, by the use of which the objects of that society are carried out through the medium of government; 2. The nature, conditions, and limits of daw as an expression of that side of governmental action which consists in the enumeration of general rules of action; 3. The accidents of law, such as language and interpretation, terminology, and devices for legis- lation. When these materials are carefully scrutinized, it will be found that they are composed of elements as permanent and universal as the elements of human nature itself. All that is arbitrary and idiosyncrat- ic for any particular state is banished from the inquiry. The surplus is as applicable to one state as to another; to the most immature sys- tem of law as to the most advanced; to an Eastern as to a Western community ; to the modern as to the ancient world. It is curious that this universality and permanence have been gen- erally conceded to ethical truths, and have latterly been more and more freely conceded even to political phenomena, modified indefinitely, as these must needs be, by the excessive complexity of the conditions which constitute them. But the region of law has, up to a recent time, been held to be the natural home of caprice and irregularity. Some writers, indeed, such as Montesquieu and M. Charles Comte, have quoted the varying laws in the different countries of the world with almost an ironical gladness at their bizarre and party-colored appear- ance. It has been very generally held that governments have been created by violence or accident, and have reflected the vices of their origin in the reckless selfishness of their legislation. It has been said again and again that force is the origin of all social institutions, and that the modes of directing that force have been determined in every state by the chance breath of political caprice or passion. It has been forgotten, or has escaped notice, that the caprice has been accidental and the order is essential. It will be noticed that there are two distinct conceptions of human

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MATERIALS OF THE SCIENCE OF LAW. 601 society which are both possible, if not both true, and that the existence of a Science of Law follows as a necessary consequence of the adop- tion of one conception, but does not follow from the adoption of the other. It may be said, on one theory, that the composition and action of human society, as exhibited in the state, are due to nothing else than the aggregation and mutual repulsion of a number of independent and self-conscious atoms which, by a gradual process of experience, have discovered that the largest measure of individual well-being is solely attainable through certain special modes of codperation, These modes of codperation take a variety of forms, but the most signal and impor- tant are those implied in the facts of government, ownership, the com- position of the family, and contract. According to the theory now under review, every one of these facts is merely a device for carrying out ends believed to be beneficial. The facts might be made to vary indefinitely, and it is alleged to be con- ceivable that any one of them, and perhaps every one, might be absent altogether and a new set of devices take their place. It is held to be possible that the devices themselves will, at no remote period, be dis- covered to be rude and insufficient, and that many superior substitutes could be found for them, even if they do not already exist in certain societies, the constitution of which is as yet unexplored. The nia- chinery by which each one of these classes of facts is called into being, and made to subserve its end, is physical force, taking the form of what is called law. The physically stronger part of the community compels the weaker to obey a certain form of governing authority, to recog- nize certain descriptions of ownership, to conform their lives to certain canons of domestic life, and to observe certain regulations of the mar- ket and the exchange. The rules, indeed, enforced by law are, for the most part, so transparently beneficial to all concerned that the press- ure of law becomes very slightly felt, and the physical force which supports it is comparatively seldom called into play. Nevertheless, in the theory now being enunciated, force is not only present, but the main originator and upholder of every portion of the fabric of social order. It is obvious that, according to this view, there can only be a Science of Law in a very restricted sense. In the largest sense of the expression there can be none. Instead of law having any precise and determined character impressed upon it and upon its operation, through the existence- of a certain number of immovable social institutions, which react back as effectually upon law as law acts upon them, these institutions are nothing more than the creations of law itself, or rather the accidental shadows which law happens to cast. The opposite theory of society starts with the conception that so- ciety is not developed through the conflicting passions of individual atoms striving to organize themselves after a fashion which shall best promote their own well-being, but is from first to last a subsisting organization made up of constituent groups reciprocally acting and

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602 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTALY., reacting upon one another. The elemental forms and tokens of this organism are family life, ownership, and government. Each of these presupposes codperation and contribution at all stages in the history of society, though under different forms; each of them implies the distribution of mankind into small groups rather than into large masses of individual atoms, It is difficult to say that any one of these original elements has precedence in point of time over any one of the others. It is more true to say that, when once they are all found to be in existence, the state has then and there come into being. A very short time passes before another element—that of contract— implied in all progressive industrial codperation, also comes to the surface. There are thus formed in the primitive state a certain number of elemental institutions which may be looked upon, not in any sense as the creation of law, but as existing independently of law; for the spontaneous arbitrary action of a primitive government resembles what is now called “ administration” rather than law. It is true, how ever, that law, in the immature form of regulated usage, will be found to be one of the earliest of all the ingredients of the state. It will be, indeed, even from the first, the regulator and the guide of the other institutions with which it is contemporary, but is in no sense their parent or solitary guardian, Nevertheless, as time goes on, the sup- port that law gives to the integrity of family life, to property, to in- dustrial and commercial relations, and to government, becomes impor- tant in the highest degree. Indeed, the prominence of the legal super- vision exercised in a highly-developed state over all these departments, affords an apology for the familiar notion that they are all the arbi- trary creation of law and depend for their continued subsistence upon no greater or deeper sanction than that of physical force. If it be true, then, as this last theory asserts, that in every state there are a limited number of great pivots, or turning-points, round which human society revolves, and the law only plays a subordinate part in regulating and protecting the grand mechanism, it is obvious that a permanent and universal body of facts relative to law may be at once anticipated to result from the permanence and universality of the great groups of facts with which it happens to be mainly convers- ant. Experience and observation confirm this anticipation, Every known system of law, both of ancient and modern times, in all parts of the world, and in all stages of national development, distributes itself into the main divisions of laws determining—1. The nature, functions, and limitations of the governing authority; 2. The forms and condi- tions of ownership, whether of land or other things; 3. The relations of family life; and 4. The binding force of voluntary promises or con- tracts. These several topics afford a natural method of distribution applicable to every legal system whatever; and each several topic, ac- cording to its peculiar nature and to the incidents by which it is inter-

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RAE ii rai MATERIALS OF THE SCIENCE OF LAW. 603 nally characterized, affords a distinct congeries of logical subdivisions which is invariably reproduced over and over again, It is, then, in this identity of structure of human society in every state, that law discovers for itself the basis of its constantly-recurrent methods of classification and its unchangeable conceptions, There are, however, certain other more obvious grounds for the permanence and invariability of legal ideas and methods which follow from the iden- tity of man’s physical, logical, and ethical structure in all times and in all parts of the world, within the limits to which observation bas hith- erto extended. Law in its outward character consists of a body of commands ad- dressed to individual members of the human race forming the compo- nent elements of a state. The issuing of commands involves the pos- sibility of obedience or of disobedience, and therein supposes the presence of will, of liberty of action, and of the amount of intelligence needed to understand the purport of the commands. Attention is thereby compelled to the exceptional cases in which the terms of the command cannot be understood, whether through temporary incapac- ity, as infancy, error, or passing disease; or through permanent inca- pacity, as life-long insanity ; or in which the terms cannot be complied with, through the pressure of external force, the interference of persons actuated by fraudulent motives, or the obstruction of physical facts creating the condition of impossibility. Supposing, however, that the command can be understood and can be obeyed, there will be nevertheless cases presented in which the question has to be decided whether, as a matter of fact, the command, in a given case, was obeyed or not. Here are let in all the obstacles inherent in human nature itself to acquiring a correct knowledge of facts. All the current imperfections of human observation, all the in- sufficiency of language and expression, all the chicanery and double- mindedness, all the dullness of intellect, by which it becomes so hard to pass truth on unimpaired from hand to hand, are present to hamper the effort to apply and execute a single law. The several forms of these obstacles, however, are not peculiar to any one state nor to any one period, however their magnitude may vary. They are universally present, and can be classified under a comprebensive scheme. But another and universal class of difficulties in executing a law has yet to be mentioned. It may be uncertain what are the form and intent of the law itself. If the law is written, the terms of the lan- guage in which it is written may admit of all sorts of ambiguity or vacillation in meaning, or, however certain the terms themselves, the opposed disputants may insist on different senses being put upon the whole text of the command. If the law is unwritten, and has to be gathered either from tradi- tional report or by reference to the rules which have been laid down on previous occasions in cases resembling the one now calling for de-

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i ' i ' 604 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. cision, opportunity is presented for all sorts of logical conflict as to the import of the previous cases cited in illustration, or as to the value of the analogies insisted upon. In other words, a series of logical processes is involved in the in- terpretation of every law, whether written or unwritten, and the cor- rectness of these processes may furnish ground for indefinite doubt and argument. But these logical processes are permanent and universal, and the application of them to the interpretation of law imparts their own permanence and universality to the Science of Law. It has thus been seen that the intellectual and the ethical nature of man in all nations tends to impart a scientific character to the study of the laws by which his social actions are regulated. The physical facts of his life and bodily constitution tend to the same end. His birth, his death, his age, his liability to diseases and accidents of all sorts, his capacity of locomotion, and his several relations to time, space, quantity, measurement, and the like, further discover fresh cate- gories into which portions of the laws which regulate his conduct, and describe his situation, under varying circumstances, in relation to his fellows, necessarily fall. Besides the elements of the Science of Law which are discoverable within tbe limits of a single state, and even of the most miniature one, there are others which are developed only in the course of time, as states multiply in number, and as their relations to one another become strictly defined. The relations of states to one another are twofold in character. Either the governments of the different states have relations to each other, or the individual citizens of the different states have relations to each other. The first class of relations gives occasion to what is called Public International Law, and the latter to what is sometimes called, with less precision, Private International Law. It is plain that, if the rules regulating the relations of states are true law in any sense, they are identical for all the states subject to them. The same ought to be the case with respect to the rules regulating the recognition of the laws of foreign states. But there are certain obsta- cles which have, in fact, prevented the uniformity of substance which might have been anticipated in this region of law. The rules of the species of law last indicated come into being through the moral claim that is presented either by persons who, not being citizens of a given country, come to the courts of justice of that country, while sojourning there, to have rights recognized and pro- tected which they have acquired in their own country; or by those who, being citizens of one country, but having acquired rights while sojourning in other countries, come to the courts of their own country to have those rights recognized and protected. On every occasion for inventing rules applicable to these cases, the

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MATERIALS OF THE SCIENCE OF LAW. 605 question is presented whether the courts of justice of a country shall recognize rights acquired either by their own citizens or by foreigners in other countries; or, in other words, whether the laws of other coun- tries giving validity to those rights shall or shall not be held to be effectual in the courts of justice which are invited to interfere. The cases are generally further complicated by the nature of the processes and transactions out of which the asserted rights spring. Part of the transactions may have taken place in one country, and part in another, and the remedy may be sought for in a third. Or the person seeking the remedy, or against whom the remedy is sought, may be the citizen of one country, have his permanent residence or domicile in another country, and be temporarily sojourning in the country in which the remedy is sought. It is obvious, from a mere enumeration and description of the cases which give rise to rules, that the purpose of the existence of these rules is always the facilitation of intercourse between the citizens of differ- ent states, and the prevention of practical injustice. These objects must be served in the highest degree, if the greatest possible uniform- ity of principle obtain in the courts of all nations in creating and ap- plying the rules, In this way reasonable expectations are likely to be best satisfied, and fraudulent evasions of the/law of any particular country are likely most effectually to be prevented. It happens, how- ever, that, owing to the political jealousies that have have hitherto kept apart the most considerable nations of Europe, and to the foolish pre- judice with which individual nations have fostered principles of law familiar in their own courts, however alien to the practice of all other countries, there have hitherto been made only very imperfect attempts at uniformity either of principle or practice in this respect. It is probable that an increasingly clear apprehension of the logical relations of the different branches of law, whether as touching upon ownership, contract, family life, or crime, will produce the effect of as- similating the substance as well as the form of the rules of law form- ing the so-called Private International Law of different countries. This end is perhaps one of the most practical and desirable that the Science of Law could set before itself, though it will need at every point the aid of the Science of Legislation. This subject will be recurred to again in the chapter on Laws of Procedure. It appears, then, from the above investigation, that there is a true Science of Law based upon the irrefragable, permanent, and invaria- ble facts of the constitution of human society, as exhibited in the state of the physical, logical, and ethical constitution of man. The objects of the cultivation of this science are, first, the ready understanding of every system of national law, through a firm hold being obtained upon its technical structure, its topics, its logical subdivisions, and the methods of its application; secondly, an orderly view of the whole sys- tem of law of any one country in order to its comprehensive amend-

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606 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. ment, reform, and intelligent reconstruction in obedience to the needs of a new political and social era; thirdly, the attainment of a clearly expressed, rational, and well-developed system of Public Interna- tional Law; and, fourthly, the reduction of the irregular, and sometimes chaotic, or arbitrary, rules of so-called Private International Law, as adopted in different states, to a uniform system, the same for all states. THE ALLEGED ANTAGONISM BETWEEN GROWTH AND REPRODUCTION. By Rev. ANTOINETTE BROWN BLACKWELL. ¢ iw: supposed law of inverse relations between growth and repro- duction was first announced, I think, by Dr. Carpenter; but adopted independently by Mr. Spencer, whose elaborate, forcible ar- guments have done much to convince many physiologists that a prin- ciple so well established may be accepted without further question. But the underlying facts are so various, complex, and unsolved, it is by no means impossible, or even improbable, that some new element yet to be introduced into the premises may partially modify or even reverse the necessary logical conclusion. The following are Mr. Spencer’s main points, gathered from his “Principles of Biology,” and stated in his own condensed language: “ Genesis, under every form, is a process of negative or positive disin- tegration, and is thus essentially opposed to that process of integra- tion which is one element of individual evolution.” * “When the excess of assimilative power is diminishing in such a way as to indicate its approaching disappearance, it becomes needful, for the maintenance of the species, that this excess shall be turned to the production of new individuals; since, did growth continue until this excess disappeared through the complete balancing of assimilation and expenditure, the production of new individuals would be either impossible or fatal to the parent.” * “ We cannot help admitting that the proportion between the aggre- gative and separative tendencies must in each case determine the relation between the increase in bulk of the individual and the increase of the race in numbers.” * Up to this point one may freely admit the antagonistic relations alleged; but, when, in his article on “The Psychology of the Sexes,” Mr. Spencer asserts that “a somewhat earlier arrest of individual development in women than in men is necessitated by the reservation of vital force to meet the cost of reproduction,” there are so many not yet discounted conditions to be considered that the position cannot 1 Vol. i., p. 216, 2 P, 237, 8 Vol. ii, p. 426.

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GROWTH AND REPRODUCTION. 607 be regarded as satisfactorily sustained. There is the “earlier arrest ” of physical growth; the “rather smaller growth of the nervo-muscular system ;” the much longer nutritive tax demanded for the nourish- ment of fetal and infant life; the “somewhat less of general power or massiveness” in feminine mental manifestations; there may be, “beyond this, a perceptible falling short in those two faculties, intel- lectual and emotional, which are the latest products of human evolu- tion—the power of abstract reasoning, and that most abstract of the emotions, the sentiment of justice.” It does not therefore follow that these results, any or all of them, are deductions made from the “ cost of reproduction.” Force modified and readjusted is not force sub- tracted or destroyed. The smaller nervo-muscular system, and the diminished power or massiveness of mental action, may be supposed to arise as direct re- sults of the larger nutritive cost of maternity. But the earlier arrest of physical growth may or may not be coupled with an earlier arrest of mental development; and one or both of these may offer to us very marked illustrations—not of process prematurely cut short to be handed over to offspring—but of process quickened by other related antecedents, and therefore more rapidly completed. This need not involve loss or transfer of individual force to offspring; but, rather, a modified system of the transfer of substance and force from the en- vironment to the reproductive functions and their products. If it could be shown that men or women who are the parents of many children have thereby lost something of individual power, we might then be forced to admit that the greater cost related to the reproductive system in women must be at their personal expense, not at the expense of the nutriment which they assimilate and eliminate. The weaknesses resulting from a too early or an excessive tax of functions belong to a distinct class of considerations. I assume that every balanced constitutional activity, though including loss of nutri- tive elements, is yet a normal aid to constitutional strength. Every action, physical or psychical, involves either integration or disintegra- tion; every use of faculty belongs to the latter class. There is no more antagonism between growth and reproduction than between growth and thought, growth and muscular activity, growth and breath- ing. The antagonism is only that of action and reaction, which are but two phases of the same process—opposing phases which exist everywhere, and which must exist, or action itself cease, and death reign universally. Growth and eating are antagonistic; yet, one must eat to live as assuredly as children must be reared at the expense of nutrition, and of still more elaborated parental force. Nor is it true that one who expends least has the most remaining. Other things being equal, the law seems to be directly reversed. One activity initiates another ;

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608 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. the largest individual force maintains those more active adjustments, “simultaneous and successive,” between the internal and external, which indicate the most vigorous life. We must look, then, to some- thing more than a direct antagonism, between growth and reproduc- tion, to account for unlikenesses of the sexes in plant or animal, “The minutest organisms multiply asexually in their millions ;” but “those which do not multiply asexually at all are a billion or a million times the size of those which thus multiply with the greatest rapidity ;” yet these comparative rates of growth and multiplication can offer no key to any of the problems of evolution. Mr. Spencer reasons that birds, as a class, are less in size than mammals, because they habitually expend more muscular energy in flight ; and that lions, having a digestive system not superior to men, yet attain to a larger size and are more prolific, because they have a less active nervous system to sustain. Then, if women normally have equal appropriative powers with men, the surplus nutriment not needed for their smaller physiques may be constitutionally handed over to reproduction. Natural selection has originated an admirably complete system of related provisions to this distinct end. This fact must lead us to the conclusion that the aggregate of feminine force is the full and fair equivalent of all masculine force, physical or psychical. The maternal constitution elaborates nutriment, from which it is itself to receive no direct benefit. But, do we forget the inexorable conditions which compel the human father to expend equivalent mus- cular or mental force to feed, not himself, but his dependents? When- ever man does not interfere, monogamy seems to be the general order of Nature with all higher organisms. Where the cost of obtaining food is great, the parents sustain commensurate burdens in rearing their young; and, with these claims, I think it will be found that monogamy is the primal condition of reproduction. The warlike duty of defense is also borne chiefly by males, and must often be an im- mense tax on the energies. Among the beings of a lower type, plant and animal, all the more recent observations indicate that Nature herself systematically favors the females—the mothers of the destined races. Nature’s sturdiest buds and her best-fed butterflies belong to this sex; her female spiders are large enough to eat up a score of her little males; some of her mother-fishes might parody the nursery-song, “I have a little husband no bigger than my thumb.” Natural selection, whether the working out of intelligent design or otherwise, would make this result inevi- table. We might expect that the neuter bee could be nourished into the queen-mother. If required to judge a rriori, we should decide, if there is no predetermination of sex, that the best-fed embryos would most readily become female; since the one special fact in the feminine organism is the innate tendency to manufacture, and, within certain limits, to store up reserved force for the future needs of offspring.

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GROWTH AND REPRODUCTION, 609 In women, if there is a greater arrest of individual growth than in men, the difference begins in the fetal life; their comparative weight and size at birth are the same as at maturity; and, if the former finish their growth earlier, it must be because relatively they grow more rapidly. The feminine circulation and respiration are both quicker; and so are the female mental processes. When the whole subject has been quantitatively investigated with sufficient exactness, I believe it will be found that, what man has gained in “ massiveness,” woman has gained in rapidity of action; and that all their powers of body and mind, mathematically computed, are, and will continue to be, real and true equivalents. The premises are already sufficiently known to com- pel me to this conclusion, One point more. Physical and psychical growth in man are not arrested simultaneously. After the body has ceased to grow, the brain-system still enlarging and compacting its highly-mobile struct- ure, mental power increases long after the more rigid, merely mechan- ical forces have reached their maximum, The same law applies, at least, in equal degrees to woman. If there is any proof that feminine psychical powers normally reach an earlier cessation of growth than the masculine, then, so far as I can learn, no scientist has yet collated the facts and put them before the world in evidence. On the con- trary, so far is the earlier physical maturity of woman from necessi- tating a corresponding earlier psychical maturity, that, in the light of physiological relations, we may deduce the exactly opposite hy- pothesis. In woman, maximum mental power should be reached at a consid- erably later period than in man, because the greater cost of reproduc- tion, though related chiefly to the physical economy, is indirectly psychical ; tending to diminish intellectual action also, and to retard its evolution. The cost of all reproductive provisions fully met, and the child-bearing age at an end, the special constitutional tendency to accumulate reserve force will not be immediately destroyed. Func- tions, active hitherto in the interest of posterity, go on now to accumu- late in the interest of the individual. Still further, the naturally less overtaxed intellectual faculties of woman now have this advantage also over those of man—an advantage at least as great as the previous disadvantage. When the vast weight of past social conditions is considered, that women thus far have failed to acquire large powers of abstract thinking and feeling, affords no reason for supposing that there is a correspond- ing constitutional lack of ability in this direction. They attain an earlier growth, but, that they reach the highest point even of physical vigor earlier than men, we have no evidence. Many facts indicate otherwise. Men and women live to equal ages, retain their vigor to equal ages—those using the greater force more slowly, those the lesser force more rapidly—thus with uneven steps keeping even pace in physi- VOL. v.—39

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610 THE ROPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. cal progress; the greater mobility of all womanly functions being less readily stiffened into inactivity. This principle, applied to the nervous system, should prolong the period of greatest mental activity, and hold the balance which measures the working value of the sexes with even justice. Is it true that average women to-day are less versed than average men in abstract thinking, feeling, or acting? Not in New England! Not in any locality where they have equal education. They have not become savants/ But circumstances have not yet impelled them to be- come such. In these days, philosopbers grow by steady accretions, like every thing else. No full-armed Minerva can be expected to spring by simple heredity from a paternal Jupiter; but the laws of mental in- heritance are too little known to enable us to decide that the daughters of the nineteenth century are less gifted than the sons. When women are convinced that the antagonisms between growth and reproduction, though embracing all personalities, must yet leave them all intact, every thing else may be left to adjust itself, with no solicitude for the ultimate results, THE NOBILITY OF KNOWLEDGE.’ By JOSIAH P. COOKE, Jr., ERVING PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY AYD MINERALOGY IN HARVARD COLLEGE, ITHIN a comparatively few years schools for the instruction of artisans have become a prominent feature in the educational systems both of this country and of Europe, and seem destined to supersede the old system of apprenticeships. The establishment of these schools has been an important step in human progress, not because any great advantage has been gained in the cultivation of mechanical skill, but because here the future mechanic acquires culture of the mind as well as skill of the hand. Indeed, it may be doubted whether our utilitarian age can ever successfully compete with those “elder days of art” when ‘Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part.” But, if our industrial schools do not make better mechanics than the workshops of the olden time, they certainly educate better men, and, by adding to skill, knowledge, they are elevating the mechanic and ennobling his calling. If, therefore, these schools are the representatives in our age of the workshops with their bands of apprentices in the days of yore, then 1 An address delivered before the Free Institute at Worcester, Mass., July 28, 1874.

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THE NOBILITY OF KNOWL@®DGE. 611 that by which the schools are distinguished, that which they have added to the old system, is not art but mental culture; and therefore, when asked to address you on this occasion, I could think of no more appropriate subject than the Nobility of Knowledge. Identified with an institution in which mental culture is the chief aim, I felt that I was asked to address a body of cultivated working-men with whom, though employed in the mechanic arts, the acquisition of knowledge was also a privilege and a pride. I felt, moreover, that a proper appreciation of the true dignity of knowledge, in itself considered, and apart from all economical considerations, is one of the great wants of our age and of our country. Knowledge is power. Knowledge is wealth, These trite maxims are sufficiently esteemed in our community, and need not that they be enforced by any one. So far as knowledge will yield immediate dis- tinction or gain, it is sought and fostered by multitudes. But when the aim is low the attainment is low, and too many of our students are satisfied with superficiality, if it only glitters, and with charlatanry, if it only brings gold. Let me not be understood to depreciate the material advantages of learning. I rejoice that in this world knowledge frequently yields wealth and fame, and I should have little hope for human progress were the prizes of scholarship less than they are. Power and wealth are noble aims, and when rightly used may be the means of conferring unmeasured blessings on mankind; but I desire at this time to impress upon you, my friends, the fact that knowledge has nobler fruits than these, and that the worth of your knowledge is to be measured not by the credits it will add to your account in the ledger or the position it may give you among men, but by the extent to which it educates your higher nature, and elevates you in the scale of manhood, I address young men who are just entering on life, who are at an age when the mystery of our being usually presses most closely upon the soul, and whose aspirations for higher culture and clearer vision have not been deadened by the sordid damps of the world. Trust no croakers who tell you that your youthful visions are illusions, which a little contact with the real business of the world will dispel. It is only too true that these visions will become fainter and fainter, if you allow the cares of the world to engross your thoughts; but, unless your higher nature becomes wholly deadened, you will look back to the time when the visions were brightest, as the golden period of your life, and let me assure you that, if you only are true to the aspirations of your youth, they will become clearer and clearer to the last, and, as we firmly believe, will prove to be the dawn of the perfect day. My friends, if you have seen these visions, “the nobility of knowl- edge” has been a reality of your experience. You know that there is a life lived in communion with the thoughts of great men or with the thoughts of God as we can read them in Nature and Revelation, which

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— — ee —— ee SSS SS 612 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, is purer and nobler than a life of money-making or political intrigue, and I would that I could so bring you to appreciate not only the nobil- ity, but also the happiness, of such a life as to induce you to try to live it. Do you tell me that it is only granted to a few men to become scholars, and that you have been educated for some industrial pursuit ? But remember, as I said before, that it is your special privilege to have been educated, to have added knowledge to your handicraft, and that this very knowledge, if kept alive so far as you are able, will ennoble your life. Knowledge, like the fairy’s wand, ennobles what- ever it touches. The humblest occupations are adorned by it, and without it the most exalted positions appear to true men mean and low. Nor is it the extent of the knowledge, alone, which ennobles, but much more the spirit and aim with which it is cultivated, and that spirit and aim you may carry into any occupation however engrossing, and into any condition of life however obscure. And let me add that what I have said is true not only of the indi- vidual, but also, and to an even greater degree, of the nation. Our peo- ple, for the most part, look upon universities and other higher institu- tions of learning as merely schools for recruiting the learned profes- sions, and estimate their efficiency solely by the amount of teaching- work which they perform. But, however important the teaching function of the university may be, I need not tell you that this is not its only or chief value to a community. The university should be the centre of scientific investigation and literary culture, the nursery of lofty aspirations and noble thoughts, and thus should become the soul of the higher life of the nation. For this and this chiefly it should be sustained and honored, and no cost and no sacrifice can be too great, which is required to maintain its efficiency. And its success should be measured by the amount of knowledge it produces rather than by the amount of instruction it imparts. Harvard College, by cherishing and honoring the great naturalist she has recently lost, has done more for Massachusetts than by edu- cating hosts of commonplace professional men. The simple title of teacher, which in his last will Louis Agassiz wrote after his name, was a nobler distinction than any earthly authority could confer; but re- member he was a teacher not of boys, but of men, and his influence depended not on the instruction in natural history which he gave in his lecture-room, but on his great discoveries, his far-reaching generali- zation, and his noble thoughts. Although that man died poor, as the world counts poverty, yet the bequest which he left to this people cannot be estimated in coin. It is a sorry confession to make, but it is nevertheless the truth, that, if we compare our American universities, in point of literary or scientific productiveness, with those of the Old World, they will appear lamentably deficient. Let me add, however, that this deficiency arises

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THE NOBILITY OF KNOWLEDGE. 613 not from any want of proper aims in our scholars, but simply from the circumstance that our people do not sufficiently appreciate the value of the higher forms of literary and scientific work to bear the burden which the production necessarily entails. Scholars must live, as well as other men, and in a style which is in harmony with their surround- ings and cultivated tastes, and their best efforts cannot be devoted to the extension of knowledge unless they are relieved from anxiety in regard to their daily bread. In our colleges the professors are paid for teaching and for teaching only, while in a foreign university the teaching is wholly secondary, and the professor is expected to announce in his lectures the results of his own study, and not the thoughts of other men. Until the whole status of the professors in our chief universities can be changed, very little original thought or investigation can be expected, and these in- stitutions cannot become what they should be, the soul of the higher life of the nation. It is in your power, however, to bring about this change, but the reform can be effected in only one way. You must give to your universities the means of supporting fully and generously those men of genius whe have shown themselves capable of extending the boundaries of human knowledge, and demand of them, only, that they devote their lives to study and research, and let me assure you that no money can be spent which will yield a larger or more valuable return. If you do not look beyond your material interests, the higher life of the nation, which you will thus serve to cherish and foster, will guard your honor, and protect your home; and, on the other hand, what can you expect in a nation whose highest ideal is the dollar, or what the dollar will buy, but venality, corruption, and ultimate ruin ? But, rising at once to the noblest considerations, and regarding only the welfare of your country and the education of your race, what higher service can you render than by sustaining and cherishing the grandest thought, the purest ideals, and the loftiest aspirations, which humanity has reached, and making your universities the altars where the holy fire shall be kept ever burning bright and warm ? Do you think me an enthusiast ? Look back through history, and see for yourselves what has made the nations great and glorious. Why is it that, after twenty centuries, the memory of ancient Greece is still enshrined among the most cherished traditions of our race? Is it not because Homer sang, Phidias wrought, and Plato, Aris- totle, Demosthenes, Thucydides, with a host of others, thought and wrote? Or, if for you the military exploits of that classic age have the greater charm, do not forget that, were it not for Grecian litera- ture, Thermopyle, Marathon, and Salamis, would have been long since forgotten, and that the bravery, self-devotion, and patriotism, which these names embalm, were the direct fruits of that higher life which those great thinkers illustrated and sustained. And, coming down to

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614 "THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. modern times, what are the shrines in our mother-country which we chiefly venerate, and to which the transatlantic pilgrim oftenest directs his steps? Is it her battle-field, her castles and baronial halls, or such spots as Stratford-on-Avon, Abbotsford, and Rydal Mount ? Why, then, will we not learn the lesson which history so plainly teaches, and strive for those achievements in knowledge and mental culture which will be remembered with gratitude when all local dis- tinctions and political differences shall have passed away and been for- gotten? While I was considering the line of discourse which I should fol- low on this occasion, an incident occurred suggesting an historical parallel, which will illustrate, better than any reflections of mine, the truth I would enforce. The ship Faraday arrived on our coast after laying over the bed of the Atlantic another of those electric nerves through which pulsate the thoughts of two continents, and, as I read the descriptivn of that noble ship, fitted out with all the appliances which modern science had created to insure the successful accomplish- ment of the enterprise, 1 remembered that not a century had elapsed since the first obscure phenomena were observed, whose conscientious study, pursued with the unselfish spirit of the scientific investigator, had led to these momentous results, and my imagination carried me back to an autumn day of the year 1786, in the old city of Bologna, in Italy, and I seemed to assist at the memorable experiment which has associated the name of Aloysius Galvani with that mode of electri- cal energy which flashes through the wire-cords that now unite the four quarters of the globe. Galvani is Professor of Anatomy in the University of Bologna, and there is hanging from the iron balcony of his house a small animal preparation, which is not an unfamiliar sight in Southern Europe, where it is regarded as a delicacy of the table. It is the hind-legs of a frog, from which the skin had been removed, and the great nerve of the back exposed. Six years before, his attention had been called to the fact that the muscles of the frog were convulsed by the indirect action of an electrical machine, under conditions which he had found very difficult to interpret. He had connected the phenomenon with a theory of his own: that electricity—that is, common friction -electri- city, the only mode of electrical action then known—was the medium of all nervous action; and this had led him into a protracted investi- gation of the subject, during which he had varied the original experi- ment in a thousand ways, and he had now suspended the frog’s legs to the iron balcony, in order to discover if atmospheric electricity would have any effect on the muscles of the animal. Galvani has spent a long day in fruitless watching, when, while holding in his hand a brass wire, connected with the muscles of the frog, he rubs the end, apparently listlessly, against the iron railing, when, lo! the frog’s legs are convulsed.

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THE NOBILITY OF KNOWLEDGE. 615 The patient waiting had been rewarded, for this observation was the beginning of a line of discovery which was ere long to revo- lutionize the world. But Galvani was not destined to follow far the new path he had thus opened. The remarkable fact observed was this: The convulsions of the frog’s legs could be produced without the intervention of electricity, or, at least, of the one kind of electri- city then known, and Galvani soon found out that the only condition necessary to produce the result was, that the nerve of the frog should be connected with the muscle of the leg by some good electrical con- ductor. But, although Galvani followed up this observation with the greatest zeal, and showed remarkable sagacity throughout his whole investigation, yet he was too strongly wedded to his own theory to interpret correctly the facts he observed. He supposed, to the end of his life, that the whole effect was caused by animal electricity flowing through the conductor from the nerve to the muscle, and his experi- ments were chiefly interesting to himself and to his contemporaries, from the light they were supposed to throw on the mysterious prin- ciple of life. We now know that animal electricity played only a small part in the phenomena he observed, and that the chief effects were due to a cause of which he was wholly ignorant. Galvani published his observations in 1791, in a monograph enti- tled “ The Action of Electricity in Muscular Motion.” This publica- tion excited the most marked attention, and, within a year, all Europe was experimenting on frogs’ legs. The phenomena were everywhere reproduced, but Galvani’s explanation of the phenomena was by no means so universally accepted. His theory was controverted in many quarters, and by no one more successfully than by Alexander Volta, Professor of Physics in the neighboring University of Pavia. Volta, while admitting, with Galvani, that the muscular contractions were caused by electricity, explained the origin of the electricity in a wholly different way. According to Volta, the electricity originated not in the animal, but in the contact of the dissimilar metals, or other materials used in the experiment. This difference of opinion led to one of the most remarkable controversies in the history of science, and for six years, until his death in 1798, Galvani was occupied in de- fending his theory of animal electricity against the assaults of his dis- tinguished countryman, This discussion created the liveliest interest throughout Europe. Every scholar of science took sides with one or the other of these emi- nent Italian philosophers, and the scientific world became divided into the school of Galvani and the school of Volta. Yet, so far at least as the fundamental experiment was concerned, both were wrong. The electricity came neither from the body of the frog nor from the contact of dissimilar kinds of matter, but was the result of chemical action, which both had equally overlooked, But, nevertheless, the controversy led to the most important results: for Volta, while en-

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616 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. deavoring to sustain his false theory by experimental proofs, was led to the discovery of the voltaic pile, or, as we now call it, the voltaic battery, an instrument whose influence on civilization can be compared only with the printing-press and the steam-engine. Yet, although the whole action of the battery was in direct contradiction to his pet the- ory, still, to the last, Volta persistently defended the erroneous doc- trine he had espoused in his controversy with Galvani thirty years before, and he died in 1827, without realizing how great a boon he had been instrumental in conferring on mankind; so true it is, that Providence works out her bright designs even through the blindness and mistakes of man. But there is another lesson to be learned from this history, which cannot be too often rehearsed in this self-sufficient age, which boasts so proudly of its practical wisdom. There were, doubtless, many prac- tical men in that city of Bologna to smile at their sage professor who had spent ten long years in studying, to little apparent purpose, the twitchings of frogs’ hind-legs, and there was many a jest among the courtiers of Europe at the expense of the learned philosophers who “wasted ” so much time in discussing the cause of such trivial phe- nomena, But how is it now ? Less than a century has passed since Galvani’s death; and, ina small hut, on the shores of Valentia Bay, may be seen one of the most skillful of a new class of practical men, representing a profession which owes its origin to Galvani and Volta. This electrician is watching a spot of light on the scale of an instrument which is called a galvanom- eter. Since the fathers fell asleep, the field of knowledge which they first entered has spread out wider and wider before the untiring ex- plorers who have succeeded them, O6crsted and Seebeck, Arago and Ampére, Faraday and our own Henry, have made wonderful discov- eries in that field; and other great men, like Steinheil, Wheatstone, Morse, and Thomson, have invented ingenious instruments and appli- ances, by which these discoveries might be made to yield great prac- tical results. The spot of light, which the electrician is watching, is reflected from one of the latest of these inventions—the reflecting galvanometer of Thomson. He and. his assistants had been watching by turns the same spot for several days, since the Great Eastern had steamed from the bay,.paying out a cable of insulated wire. These electricians had no anxiety as to the result, for daily signals had been exchanged be- tween the ship and the shore, as hundreds after hundreds of miles of this electrical conductor had been laid on the bed of the broad ocean. The coast of Newfoundland had already been reached, and they were only waiting for the landing of the cable at the now far-distant end. At length the light quivers, and the spot begins to move! It answers to concerted signals! And soon the operator spells out the

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THE NOBILITY OF KNOWLEDGE. 617 joyful message. The ocean has been spanned with an electric nerve, and the New World responds to the greetings of the Old. Here is something practical, which all can appreciate, and all are ready to honor. We honor the courage which conceived, the skill which executed, and, above all, the success which crowned the under- taking. But, do we not forget that professor of Bologna with his frogs’ legs, who sowed the seed from which all this has sprung? He labored without hope of temporal reward, stimulated by the pure love of truth ; and the grain which he planted has brought forth this abun- dant harvest. Do we not forget, also, that succession of equally noble men, Volta, and Oersted, and Faraday, with many other not less devoted investigators of electrical science, without whose unselfish labors the great result never could have been achieved ? Such men, of course, need no recognition at our hands, and I ask the question not for their sakes, but for ours. The intellectual elevation of the lives they led was their all-sufficient reward. It is, however, of the utmost importance for us, citizens of a coun- try with almost unlimited resources, that we should recognize what are the real springs of true national greatness and enduring influence. In this age of material interests, the hand is too ready to say to the head, “I have no need of thee,” and, amid the ephemeral applause which follows the realization of some triumph over matter, we are apt to be deceived, and not observe whence the power came. We asso- ciate the great invention with some man of affairs who overcame the l4st material obstacle, and who, although worthy of all praise, probably added very little to the total wealth of knowledge, of which the inven- tion was an immediate consequence; and, not seeing the antecedents, we are apt to underrate the part which the student or scientific inves- tigator may have contributed to the result. It is idle, for example, to speak of the electric telegraph as invented by any single man. It was a growth of time; and many of the men who contributed to win this great victory of mind over space “ builded far better than they knew.” As I view the subject, that invention is as much a gift of Providence as if the details had been supernaturally revealed. But, whatever may be our speculative views, it is of the utmost importance to the welfare of our community that we should realize the fact that purely theoretical scientific study, pursued for truth’s sake, is the essential prerequisite for such inventions. novl- edge is the condition of invention. The old Latin word invenio sig- nifies to meet with, or to find, and these great gifts of God are met with along the pathway of civilization; but the throng of the world passes them unnoticed, for only those can recognize the treasure whose minds have been stored with the knowledge which the scholar has discovered and made known. If, then, as no one will deny, science and scholarship are the pow- ers by which improvements in the useful arts are made, I might appeal

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ee 618 ‘THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. to your self-interest to support and cherish them. But I should despise myself for appealing to such a motive, and you for requiring it. The supreme importance of science and scholarship to a nation does not depend in the least on the circumstance that important practical results may follow. When, as in the case of Galvani’s frogs, they come in the order of Providence, let us thank God for them as a gift which we had no right either to expect or demand. Science, if studied sue- cessfully, must be studied for the pure love of truth; and, if we serve her solely for mercenary ends, her truths, the only gold she offers, will turn to dross in our hands, and we shall degrade ourselves in propor- tion as we dishonor her. Galvani, and Volta, and Oersted, who dis- covered the truths of which the electric telegraph is a simple applica- tion, sure to be made as soon as the time was ripe, are not the less to be honored because they died before the fullness of that time had come. We honor them for the truths they discovered, and the lustre of their consecrated lives could be neither enhanced nor impaired by subse- quent events; and it is because I am persuaded that such lives are the salt of the world, the saviors of society, that I would lead you to cherish and sustain them; and, that I may enforce this conclusion, allow me to ask your attention to another historical incident, which presents a striking parallelism to the last. I must take you back to a period which we, of a nation born but yesterday, regard as distant, but which was one of the most noted epochs of modern history—the age of Luther and the Reformation. I must ask you to accompany me to the small town of Allenstein, nedr Frauenberg, in Eastern Prussia, where, on the 23d of May, 1543, there lay dying one of the great benefactors of mankind, This man, old at seventy years, “ bent and furrowed with labor, but in whose eye the fire of genius was still glowing,” was then known as one of the most learned men of his time. Doctor of Medicine as well as of Theology, Canon of Frauenberg, Honorary Professor of Bologna and Rome, while devoting his leisure to study, he had passed a life of active benevolence in administering to the bodily as well as the spiritual wants of the ignorant people among whom his lot had been cast. He was also a great mechanical genius, and, by various labor-saving ma- chines, of his own invention, he had contributed greatly to the wel- fare of the surrounding country; but the superstitious peasants, although they had hitherto reverenced the great man as their best friend and benefactor, had been recently incited by his enemies and rivals in the Church to curse him as a heretic and a wizard. A few days back he had been the unwilling witness of one of those out-of-door spectacles, so common at that time, in which his sci- entific opinions had been travestied, his charities ridiculed, and his devoted life made the object of slander and reproach. This ingrati- tude of his flock had broken his heart, and he could not recover from the blow.

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THE NOBILITY OF KNOWLEDGE. 619 The occasion of this outburst of fanaticism was the approaching publication of a work in which he had dared to question the received opinions of theologians and schoolmen, in regard to cosmogony. He had, forsooth, denied that the visible firmament was a solid azure- colored shell, to which the sun and planets were fastened, and through whose opened doors the rain descended, He had proved that the sun was the centre of the system, around which the earth and planets revolved, and, with his clear scientific vision, he had been able to gain glimpses, at least, of the grand conceptions of modern astron- omy: For this man was Nicolas Copernicus, and the expected book was his great work—“ De Orbium Celestium Revolutionibus ”’—des- tined to form the broad basis of astronomical science. The work was printing at Nuremberg, and the last proofs had been returned ; but reports had come that a similar outburst of fanaticism was raging at that place, that a mob had burnt the manuscript on the public square, and had threatened to break the press should the printing proceed. But, thanks to God! the old man was not to die before the hour of triumph came. While still conscious, a horse, covered with foam, gal- lops to the door of his humble dwelling, and an armed messenger enters the chamber, who, breathless with haste, places in the hands of the dying man a volume still wet from the press. He has only strength to return a smile of recognition, and murmur the last words: “Nune dimittis servum tuum, Domine.” Grand close of a noble life! The seed has been sown—what could we desire more ? Again the centuries roll on—not one, but three; while the seed grows to a great tree, which overshadows the nations. Great minds have never been wanting to cherish and prune it, like Tycho Brahe and Kepler, Galileo and Newton, Laplace and Lagrange; and although at times some, while lingering in the deep shade of the foliage, may have lost sight of the summit, the noble tree has ever pointed upward to direct aspiration and encourage hope. On the evening of the 24th of September, 1846, in the Observatory of Berlin, a trained astronomical observer was carefully measuring the position of a faint star in the constellation Capricorn. Only the day before, he had received from Le Verrier a letter announcing the result of that remarkable investigation which has made the name of this distinguished French astronomer so justly celebrated. By the studies of the great men who succeeded Copernicus, his system had become so perfected as to enable the astronomer to predict, with un- erring certainty, the paths of the planets through the heavens. But there was one failing case. The planet Uranus, then supposed to be the outer planet of the solar system, wandered from the path which theory assigned to it; and although the deviations were but small, yet any discrepancy be-

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620 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. tween theory and observation in so accurate a science as astronomy could not be overlooked. Long before this, the hypothesis had been advanced that the deviations were caused by the attractive force of an unseen and still more distant planet; but, as no such planet had been discovered, the hypothesis had remained until now wholly bar- ren, The hypothesis, however, was reasonable, and furnished the only conceivable explanation of the facts; and, moreover, if true, the received system of astronomy ought to be able to assign the position and magnitude of the disturbing body, the magnitude and direction of the displacements being given. This possibility was generally appreciated by astronomers, and the very great length and difficulty of the mathematical calculation which the investigation involved was probably the reason that no one had hitherto undertaken it. Le Verrier, however, had both the courage and the youthful strength required for the work. And now the great work had been done; and, on the 18th of September, Le Verrier had sent to the Observatory of Berlin his communication announcing the final result, namely, that the planet would be found about 5° to the east of the star Delta of Capricorn, The letter containing this announcement was received by Galle, at Berlin, on the 23d, and it was Galle whom we left measuring the po- sition of that faint star on the evening of the 24th. It so happened that a chart of that portion of the heavens had recently been prepared by the Berlin Observatory, and was on the eve of publication; and, on the very evening he received the letter, Galle had found, near the position assigned by Le Verrier, a faint star, which was not marked on this chart. The object differed in appearance from the surround- ing stars, but still it was perfectly possible that it might be a fixed star which had escaped previous observation. But, if a fixed star, its position in the constellation would not vary, while, if a planet, a single night would show a perceptible change of place. Hence, you may conceive of the interest with which Galle was measuring anew its position on the evening of the 24th. The star had moved, and in the direction which theory indicated ; and for once, at least, the world rang with applause at a brilliant scientific conquest, from which there was not one cent of money to be made. Yet, was that conquest any the less important to the world ? What had it secured? It had confirmed the theory of astronomy which Copernicus and his successors had built up, and it had clinched the last nail in the proof that those grand conceptions of modern astronomy, now household thoughts, are realities, and not dreams. Certainly no military conquest can compare with this. Do you smile at the enthusiasm which rates so high a purely intel- lectual achievement ? Go out with me under the heavens, in some star- lit night, and, looking up into the depths of space, recall the truths you have learned in regard to that immensity, and allow the imagina-

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THE NOBILITY OF KNOWLEDGE. 621 tion free scope as it stretches out into the infinitudes of time, space, and power, carrying the mind on, bound by bound, through the limit- less expanse, until even the imagination refuses to follow, and fairly quails before the mighty form of the Infinite, which rises to confront it ! Remember now that your forefathers, of only a few centuries back, saw there nothing but a solid dome hemming in the earth and skies, and that you are able to look upon this grand spectacle only because great minds have lived who have opened your intellectual eyes; and then answer me, is not this result worth all the labor, all the sacrifice, all the treasure, it has cost? Every educated man, who has not sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, lives a grander and a nobler life, because the great astrono- mers have thought and taught, and this elevation of human life is the greatest achievement of which man can boast. Before it all material conquests appear of little worth, and the lustre of all military or civil glory grows dim. Cherish this intellectual life; foster it; sus- tain it; do what you can by your own spirit and influence, and, if you are blest with riches, give of your abundance to support and encour- age those who, by genius, talent, and devotion, will widen the intel- lectual kingdom. Be assured you will thus help to confer an ines- timable boon on your race and on your country; and the influence for good will not be felt by the intellectual life of the nation only ; that corruption which is now festering at the heart of our body politic, and threatening its destruction, can in no way be fought and conquered so effectually as by keeping constantly before the nation noble and high ideals ; for, where the higher life is cherished and honored, the mercenary and sensual motives of action, which both invite and shield corruption, lose much of their force and power. But you may tell me that there is a life higher than the intellect- ual life, and that I have ascribed to science and scholarship influences which come only from a source which I have forgotten, or left out of view. My friends, all truth is one and inseparable, and I have therefore made no distinction in this address between the truths of science and the truths of religion. That grand old word knowledge, as I have used it, includes both, and in just the proportion that you reverence religion, you must reverence also true science. All truth is God’s truth, and, in praying for the coming of his kingdom, you certainly do not expect that Nature will be divorced from Grace. If the truths of religion required a special revelation, it must be expected that they would transcend human intelligence. These very conditions imply conflict, but the conflict comes not from the knowledge, but from the ignorance and conceit of men; and the only proper attitude for the devout scholar is ‘to labor and to wait.’ And what more wonderful confirmation could we have of the essential unity of the two phases of truth than is to be found in the fact that the character- istic of science, which I have been endeavoring to illustrate in this

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622 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. address, is the great prominent feature of Christianity. Christianity was revealed in a life, and ever abides a life in the soul of man, to i purify, ennoble, and redeem humanity. I ** And so the Word had breath, and wrought, H | With human hands, the creed of creeds, Ny In loveliness of perfect deeds, More strong than all poetic thought— “* Which he may read that binds the sheaf, q Or builds the house, or digs the grave, And those wild eyes that watch the wave, M: In roarings round the coral-reef.” i SKETCH OF DR. J. L. LE CONTE. HIS gentleman was elected, at the Portland meeting, last year, President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for 1874, and will preside at the twenty-third session, to be | held at Hartford, Conn., commencing August 12th. He belongs to a family that has made itself distinguished in American science, mainly i | in the direction of natural history and geology, his own chosen field of inquiry having been chiefly that of entomology. Joun L, Le Contre was born in New York, on May 13,1825. His father, Major John Eatton Le Conte, formerly of the U. 8. Army, | possessed broad culture both in science and literature, and was well | known among the early botanists and zoologists of the country. The family is descended from a Huguenot of noble birth, who | emigrated to New York in consequence of the religious and political persecutions which followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Major Le Conte and his brother Louis were close students and accu- | rate observers, almost from the beginning of the century, though the extreme diffidence of the latter, added to the want of proper channels i for publication, prevented him from contributing to the literature of i science. Two of the sons of Louis Le Conte, John and Joseph, for- \ merly of Georgia and South Carolina, but now of the University of California, have made many valuable additions to physics and | geology. The subject of the present sketch was inspired, at an early age, by the example and teaching of his father, with a strong passion for science. W After an academic course at Mt, St. Mary’s College in Maryland, where he graduated in 1842, he studied medicine at the College of Physi- cians and Surgeons, in New York, receiving his diploma in 1846, The intervals between the courses, and other times later in life, were

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SKETCH OF DR. J. L. LE CONTE, 623 occupied in extensive journeys in the United States, for the purpose of making collections in natural history, upon one branch of which, the Coleoptera of North America, he gradually concentrated his atten- tion, while still retaining his interest and endeavoring, by books, to keep up his knowledge of collateral subjects. In 1852 Major Le Conte and his son removed from New York to Philadelphia, which, on account of the greater activity in science then existing, was believed by them to offer, by its libraries, collections, and personal associations, better facilities for study. The survey of the Interoceanic-Railway route across Honduras, by Mr. J. C. Trautwine, gave Dr. Le Conte an opportunity of spending a few months in the tropics in 1857; and a short memoir, on the eco- nomic geology of the State, from his pen, is contained in the final report of the survey, printed in London. Another, on the famous “Fuente de Sangre,” will be found in the appendix to the second work of Hon. E. G, Squier, on Central America, solving the mystery of that singular phenomenon. During the late civil war he entered the army medical corps as surgeon of United States volunteers, and, on the occurrence of a vacancy, was promoted to the grade of Lieutenant-Colonel and Medi- cal Inspector U.S. A., in which capacity he served until the mustering out of the inspectors after the close of the war, in 1865. The cessation of official duties enabled him again to resume his scientific pursuits, the results of which continue to be published in scientific magazines and transactions of learned societies. The survey for the extension of the Kansas Pacific Railway under General W. W. Wright, in 1867,enabled him to visit a portion of Colo- rado and New Mexico, Some new observations on the geological structure of the regions adjacent to the route surveyed will be found in the report which he then prepared. His contributions to the study of North American Coleoptera are very numerous; for their titles, the “ Bibliographia” of Dr. Hagen, and the annual reports on the progress of entomology, must be referred to. Acompendium of the arrangement adopted by him may, how- ever, be found in the classification of the Coleoptera of North America, Smithsonian “ Miscellaneous Collection,” 8vo. As an evidence of the general appreciation of his memoirs, he has been elected honorary member of many foreign and domestic scientific societies, and correspondent of a still larger number.

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624 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. CORRESPONDENCE. CURIOUS ACTION OF MUCILAGE ON GLASS. HE article on “ The Action of Sunlight on Glass,” published in Toe Porunar Science Montuty for May, has elicited from Dr. F. Hollick, of this city, inquiries concerning the large plate-glass window of 104 Broadway, which is very much dis- figured. Dr. Hollick says: “A ‘ Notice’ was written on a piece of common brown paper, and pasted on the inside of the win- dow with ordinary mucilage. On removing this ‘ Notice,’ it was observed that the mu- cilage did not come off clean. Water, alco- hol, and various other solvents, were em- ployed, but all to no purpose, the glass re- maining dim wherever the mucilage had been applied ; the fact was, as was evident on inspection, that the surface of the glass was corroded, as if it had been acted upon by fluoric acid ; and, what is more singular still, this corrosion has been extending ever since, till it now covers a large space. There seems to be a process of disintegra- tion, or molecular change going on, which bids fair to destroy, in time, the whole pane. Now, the question comes, What is the nature of this change, and how was it started ? The paper was of the ordinary brown wrap- ping kind, and the mucilage such as is in common use, and which has no action upon the bottle which contains it.” In reply to this inquiry, Mr. Thomas Gaffield, of Boston, writes: To the Editor of the Popular Science Monthly. Sir: A few days ago I received from a gentleman in New York some pieces of a large pane of plate-glass, taken from a win- dow on Broadway, upon which had been affixed, with common mucilage, a notice written upon brown paper. When this notice was removed in about forty-eight hours, it was found that the portion of the surface covered by the mucilage was roughened, and presented an appearance of little hollows, or pits, from which the glass had been actually torn away by the wash- ing or tearing off of the brown paper. My informant says that some work- men passing by noticed the injured glass, and went in to examine it, stating that they had removed two other panes for the same defect, At the same time, experiments on other glass with similar paper and mucilage had led to no similar results, showing that all glasses are not so affected. My corre- spondent is surprised at what he has noticed, and desires an explanation of the cause. I will give my humble suggestions on the matter, and let others with more scientific knowledge enjoy the same privilege. Let me at first, however, give a brief account of a few similar but very rare occurrences; for, though my New York friend names a fact not often noticed in the books, yet it is another illustration of the old saying, that “there is nothing new under the sun.” While spending some time, in 1862, in looking over the “Transactions” of the English and French scientific associations for one or two past centuries, I found the following very interesting item in the “ His- toire de l’ Académie,” for 1708, page 22: “ EXFOLIATED GLASS. “A person having applied to a piece of glass, about six inches square, a paste of Spanish white and glue size, placed the whole in the sun, during the great heat of summer. The paste, which was turned toward the sun, having been heated, rolled itself up, so that, in its movement, its under side was raised upward. But, what was more singular, this surface raised with it, and carried away, a layer of the glass. This Jayer made on the paste a species of varnish, as of porcelain, the thickness not exceeding one-half a line. It was aston- ishing that the adherence of the paste to the glass was so strong; and equally so, that it should be able to detach from the glass so considerable a sheet. It had been blown, and apparently they had replunged the pipe, with which it was blown, in the crucible at different times, which had given it several layers, which, however, were not apparent, because they were exactly ap-

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plied one upon another. It is to Geoffroy that we owe this observation.” This was the only item of the kind which I ever found in the old books, and I had my doubts of its accuracy, until I read, in the London Photographic News of July 17, 1868, the following article : “CURIOUS EFFECT OF GELATINE UPON GLASS. “A correspondent sends us the follow- ing account of a curious result ; “Having, for experimental purposes, poured a thick solution of gelatine upon a number of glass plates, three of them were set aside upon a shelf for some months; and one day, upon looking at them, I found that, in all three cases, the gelatine had separated from the glass, bringing away the whole surface of the glass plates in shivers, which firmly adhered to the gelatine. The surface of the glass was left full of ruts, like water-worn stones. I suppose it to be caused by the strong contraction of the gelatine, and its firm hold upon the glass.” I wrote a short notice of these two similar facts for the Philadelphia Photog- rapher, of November, 1868, Singularly enough, just after this date, while experimenting in making my “ photo- graphic self-prints from Nature” (an ac- count of which I have sent you in my little pamphlet), I noticed a similar phenomenon. You will recollect that I place leaves and ferns upon glass with mucilage, and print their forms upon sensitive paper by exposure to the sunlight. After the ferns are dried up, I clean the glass for further use. In washing one of these glasses, it was impossible to make the surface per- fectly clean. On a close examination, I found that, in removing the ferns and mu- cilage, the latter had taken off a portion of the glass, so that I could distinctly observe, on the crowded surface, the outlines of an anchor (which was the figure produced), and the forms of some of the individual ferns. I have this curious specimen—not of plate, but of sheet glass—in my cabinet, and will show it to you or any of your cor- respondents who may call on me. There are numerous very interesting thoughts and queries suggested by the various and yet similar incidents referred vou. v.—40 CORRESPONDENCE. 625 to above. In making sheet window-glass, the workman makes three, and, for very thick glass, four gatherings upon his blow- pipe, creating, as suggested, three or four layers in the finished pane of glass, although not visible to the naked eye. Some work- men reheat the glass after the last gather- ing, in order, by what is called “ burning over,” to make the heated ball more uniform and homogeneous. The glass is then more easily and perfectly annealed, and more easily and safely cut by the diamond. The sheet-glass, named in the curious incidents related above, was probably of a kind not “burnt over” and perfectly homogeneous, and, for this reason, more easily disinte- grated by the strong adhesive and contract- ing power of the gelatine and mucilage, over- coming the cohesion of the atoms and layers of the glass. While crown and sheet glass have an original fine surface, that of plate-glass is softer and more easily affected, because it is an artificial one, which has been sub- jected to the three successive operations of the grinding, smoothing, and polishing machines. The above explanation supposes me- chanical action only. But, it is possible, a chemical action took place also, especially in the plate-glass, in the formation of some acid, by the fermentation of the gelatine or mucilage, when under the influence of sun- light or the atmosphere. The glasses all contained alkali, in the form of soda or pot- ash, and perhaps some uncombined alkali, which might have formed a chemical com- bination with the acid of the mucilage, and so corroded or disintegrated the surface of the glass. The effect observed was, un- doubtedly, the result of both mechanical and chemical action. I found, on inquiry of several dealers in chemicals, that mucilage frequently con- tains acetic acid or alum, to prevent the formation of mould. In such cases, the acetic acid might easily form a chemical attachment, under the warming influence of the sun’s rays, for some of the constitu- ents of the glass, creating acetate of soda, of potash, or of iron. Alum (which is a compound of sul- phate of alumina and sulphate of potash), under the same influence, might be subject

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626 to the chemical interchange called isomor- phism, giving up its potash for some of the soda in the glass. These new compounds, if soluble in water, would be removed in washing off the mucilage, or, if insoluble, would be torn away when pulling off the paper attached by the adhesive gum. In view of these facts, it would be well not to run the risk of possible injury to any of our valuable windows by affixing notices upon them with mucilage. My correspondent thinks he noticed a continued or increasing corrosion, or dis- integration, of the surface of the plate- glass after the removal of the mucilage. On examination of one of the pieces sent to me, I found a discoloration, occasioned by what we call “ rust,” ina part not affect- ed by the mucilage, and this was probably what our friend observed. There are glasses sometimes made with an excess of uncombined alkali which ef- floresces upon the surface, sometimes be- fore it is placed in the window, and some- times at a later period. This, of course, causes a series of infinitesimal holes or fur- rows in the glass, whose surface by the re- flection and refraction of the rays of light presents, like the mother-of-pearl, all the colors of the rainbow when held in a cer- tain position, and at the right angle for such effect. This is one kind of what is called stained or rusty glass. In other specimens the disintegration goes beyond the infinitesi- mal character and is plainly visible, making the glass appear as if fire-cracked, and in its ultimate effect producing the appearance, on one or both surfaces, of ground glass. In one of these stages of rust or disinte- gration I find a piece of the glass referred to by my correspondent, In reference to the matter of rust on glass, for the comfort of my readers and of my New York friends who are dealers in THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. window-glass (which was my business for many years), let me say that this difficulty or defect is not an every-day trouble, but only one of the incidents or curiosities of glass-making. A good glass-maker knows how to avoid it, and a good glass-dealer can, in many instances, remove the first appear- ance of rust or stain on plate or sheet glass by a skillful and nimble use of dilute hydro- fluoric acid and rouge or oxide of iron. Glass-making and glass-dealing have their troubles, and this of occasional rust on glass is one. But all other kinds of business have their trials, and they all have their points of interest and satisfaction. In the study necessary to remove troubles and avoid mistakes, comes half the pleasure of life. If we had no obstacle in the path of our business, we ourselves would rust out. In closing my article, let me add that I give my opinions only as humble sugges- tions, after such examination as I have been able to give to the subjects referred to. In the light of new experiments, and the progress of scientific research by those who make it the business of life, the theo- ries of to-day may be set aside by the reve- lations of to-morrow. If “an undevout as- tronomer is mad,” so must be an undevout chemist, or student in any domain of natu- ral science, who will not humbly bow before the wise and wonderful workings of the Great Maker of the universe. We cannot fully understand or explain them now. We ean only look “through a glass darkly.” We can see and enjoy the light of the sun, but, though great and learned volumes be writ- ten, who can fully explain all the laws and all the wonders of light, one of the gentlest and most ethereal, and yet one of the most in- teresting and powerful elements of the uni- verse? We must be content to labor and to wait. Boston, July 20, 1874. THE DUST OF THE UNIVERSE. HE comet has come and gone, and again raised the perplexing ques- tion as to what such bodies are made of, and what are the most subtile forms of matter diffused through the EDITOR’S TABLE. celestial spaces. Of the great moving masses which compose our own sys- tem, from the sun—1,000,000 times larger than the earth—to the little asteroids—250 miles in diameter—and from these down to the meteorites

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of a few pounds in weight, which strike the earth, we have become quite familiar, while spectrum analy- sis has carried us a long way toward the conclusion that there is a unity in the material composition of the universe. But, as every thing is in motion, and all the celestial masses are revolving and whirling at great rates of speed, and, as there is much evidence of fractures, collisions, and transformations, it seems impossible that there should not have been going on constant abrasions and comminu- tions, with the production of all grades of dust down to the most impalpable, as a consequence of the general wear and tear. Such a notion would, of course, have been inadmissible in old times, when people reasoned about the universe from their @ priori notions of what it ought to be; and, holding that the heavens are the type of all perfec- tion, they would have been shocked at the notion that the gearing of the spheres could not work without the production of dirt and dust. But we have survived those prejudices, and now search for the celestial débris and waste with just as much interest as we do for more imposing and dignified objects. It is but a few years since the world was surprised and delighted by that brilliant series of researches made by Prof. Tyndall, on the formation of artificial clouds and artificial sky by the electric light, in his vacuum-tubes. Spaces, washed clean, and apparently pure, were found to be filthy with dust, and, beginning with the thinnest trans- parent vapors, he was able to develop a succession of the most exquisite cloud- forms definitely related to the colors of the spectrum as the molecules grew in complexity under the chemical trans- formation. The firmamental blue he found to be caused by impurities in the air, so attenuated as to react only with the finest waves of the ethereal medium. How far down in the scale EDITOR’S TABLE, 627 of minuteness beyond all previous con- ception the particles are, which reflect the azure light of the sky, may be gath- ered from the following memorable pas- sage, taken from Dr. Tyndall’s “ Frag- ments of Science ” (page 148) : “From their perviousness to stellar light and other considerations, Sir John Herschel drew some startling conclusions regarding the density and weight of comets. You know that these extraordinary and mys- terious bodies sometimes throw out tails 100,000,000 of miles in length, and 50,000 miles in diameter. The diameter of our earth is 8,000 miles. Both it and the sky, and a good portion of space beyond the sky, would certainly be included in a sphere 10,000 miles across. Let us fill a hollow sphere of this diameter with cometary mat- ter, and make it our unit of measure. To produce a comet’s tail of the size just men- tioned, about three hundred thousand such measures would have to be emptied into space. Now, suppose the whole of this stuff to be swept together and suitably compressed, what do you suppose its vol- ume would be? Sir John Herschel would probably tell you that the whole mass might be carted away at a single effort by one of your dray-horses. In fact, I do not know that he would require more than a small frac- tion of a horse-power to remove the cometary dust. After this you will hardly regard as monstrous a notion I have sometimes enter- tained concerning the quantity of matter in our sky. Suppose a shell to surround the earth at a height above the surface which would place it beyond the grosser matter that hangs in the lower regions of the air— say at the height of the Matterhorn or Mont Blanc. Outside this shell we have the deep- blue firmament. Let the atmospheric space beyond the shell be swept ciean, and let the sky-matter be properly gathered up. What is its probable amount? I have sometimes thought that a lady’s portmanteau would con- tain it all. I have thought that even a gen- tleman’s portmanteau—possibly his snuff box —might take it in. And, whether the actual sky be capable of this amount of condensa- tion or not, I entertain no doubt that a sky quite as vast as ours, and as good in appear- ance, could be formed from a quantity of matter which might be held in the hollow of the hand.” Whatever may be the validity of these quantitative speculations, all the | lines of investigation seem to converge

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628 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. to the conclusion that there is such a thing as a cosmical dust, and that this form of matter, subtile as it may be, is by no means without effect in the oper- | ations of the universal scheme. The inconceivably rapid growth of the tails of comets directed away from the sun, and the mighty sweep of their move- ments, seem inconsistent with the direct flight or passage of cometary particles, and the effect is now rather explained on the hypothesis that mat- ter already existing, diffused through space, may become in some way elec- trically polarized and rendered lumin- ous through the mutual action of the sun and the comet. A recent writer suggests that “these polarized par- ticles, or molecules of vapor, require time to become depolarized and to lose their luminosity, which fact may at least in part account for the breadth of the illuminated space or the appar- ent spread of the tail.” The earth is believed to have passed through a por- tion of the tail of the comet of 1861. On the 30th of June its distance from the earth was rather less than 13,000,- 000 miles, and its train was computed to be 20,000,000 miles in length. The positions were such that it is quite pos- sible that, on the evening of June 30th, the earth might have been involved in the tail, while certain unusual phenom- ena of an electrical nature were actu- ally observed at that time. The writer on “ Comets,” in Brande’s ‘‘ Cyclope- dia,” says: “Tt is a remarkable and significant fact that, not only in various parts of England and Ireland, but also in Spain, Italy, Switzer- land, and other Continental countries, a very peculiar phosphorescence, or illumination of the sky, was perceptible during the early hours of the night in question, which many persons supposed to be caused by the aurora borealis, unusual as the phenomenon is in the summer months, especially in the south of Europe ; at the same time it was remarked that the luminosity of the sky did not re- semble the usual effect of the aurora, but was something quite exceptional. We in- cline to attribute the phenomenon to the presence of cometic matter (if matter it can be termed) in our atmosphere.” A new set of researches has recent- ly been made known in Poggendory’’s Annalen for March, of the present year, which seem to have a further bearing upon the problem of a uni- versal dust. Prof. A. C. Nordens- kidld, of Stockholm, has instituted a series of investigations into the na- ture of the fine matter entangled and brought to the earth in great snow- storms. After one of these great storms, which occurred on December 1, 1871, he melted a quantity of the newly-fallen snow to ascertain whether it contained any solid particles. A cu- bic metre was thus tested, and found to contain minute traces of metallic iron and of carbon. He made a sec- ond experiment in Finland, in the midst of a large forest, and again par- ticles of carbon and metallic iron were found. Desirous of extending his ob- servations to widely-separated tracts, in 1872 he several times collected snow at localities north of the island of Spitz- bergen with the same result—analysis showing the presence of iron, nickel, and cobalt. This dust from the snow greatly resembled a powder previously discovered by him on some islands thir- ty miles distant from the coast of Green- land, and was probably identical with it. The latter he has called Arykonit, and he was able to collect large quan- tities of it, and to prove that it con- tains organic matter, in addition to its other ingredients. It seems highly probable, if not indeed quite certain, that this dust, collected in the snow, is of cosmical origin, and is to be ranked with meteoric matter. THE OXYGEN CENTENNIAL, Tuts event went off with great suo- cess and satisfaction, according to ar- rangement, July 31st and August Ist, at Northumberland, Pa., where the great discoverer spent his last days. There

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was an excellent representation of American chemists from all parts of the country, the exercises were spirited and appropriate, and the entire pro- ceedings vindicated the excellent judg- ment of the committee who had made the arrangements. The sessions were held in the new high-school building, and its large hall was crowded with strangers and citi- zens. Prof. Croft read a brief address on the character of Priestiey, which was marked by a broad appreciation of his strong and many- sided traits. The subject, however, was much too large for the time given to it, and the sketch had the effect of awakening more interest than it gratified. The speaker apologized for his performance on account of the short time that had been allowed him to prepare it, and it is to be hoped that he will be enabled to give it greater fullness before publi- cation in the volume which will em- | body the proceedings. Prof. Horsford read several manu- script letters of Dr. Priestley belong- ing to the Massachusetts Historical Society, and not hitherto published. EDITOR'S TABLE. They were written in this country, to a friend, and are valuable as disclosing | his opinions concerning questions of American polities, in which he took no | public part. They were written with terseness, point, and vigor, and dis- played an independence of spirit and an acuteness of observation and reflec- tion that elicited the cordial applause of the audience who listened to them. Prof. Croft had alluded to a rumor, on the authority of the French chemist, Dumas, that Priestley died of poison ; but he had been unable to find any verification or explanation of it. One of the letters read by Prof. Horsford threw light upon the matter, as Dr. Priestley wrote to his friend that the ingredient found in the flour used by the family turned out to be, not arsenic, but tartar-emetic. Prof. Sterry Hunt gave an interest- 629 ing address on the progress of theoreti- cal chemistry since the time of Priest- ley, in which, after an acute and in- structive analysis of the influence of Lavoisier in giving effect to Priestley’s discovery and laying the foundation of modern chemical philosophy, he went on to trace the successive modifications of theory, the growth of the unitary system, and the fundamental ideas of the chemical science now generally re- ceived. Prof. Hunt’s statement was deficient, in that it did not recognize the share that the speaker had himself taken in promoting the new views, but, aside from this, it was a remark- ably clear and instructive presentation, in a narrow compass, of a subject not easy of popular exposition. Dr. J. Lawrence Smith read a val- uable essay on the general progress of chemistry as applied to the arts during the last hundred years, which was full of interesting information, and was lis- tened to with close attention by a large audience. The relation of the indus- tries of the world to the work of the laboratory was skillfully treated and vividly delineated. In the cemetery of Northumber- land, situated upon an eminence back of the town, and commanding a most beautiful view of the river and moun- tain scenery, rest the remains of Priest- ley, marked only by a simple tomb- stone. The strangers present in town, accompanied by many of the citizens, visited the grave at the close of the first day’s proceedings, and there lis- tened to an eloquent and appreciative eulogy of the illustrious man by Presi- dent Coppee, of Lehigh University. The public exercises were fitly con- cluded, on August Ist, by a most inter- esting address from Prof. Silliman, on the progress of chemistry in this coun- try since the time of Priestley. The son of one of the eminent pioneers of the science on this side of the Atlantic, Prof. Silliman has been a student of the subject from his boyhood, there being,

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630 perhaps, no American more familiar with its history, or better qualified to present it. He labored under the diffi- culty of all the speakers, that his sub- ject was too extensive to be treated in the time at command, and we hope that this difficulty will be amply repaired when his essay is printed, for a good history of the growth of American chemistry is much needed. The effect of the centennial contributions to the historic literature of the subject cannot fail to be favorable to the increasing cultivation of the science, both in its theoretical and practical aspects. A feature of the occasion of peculiar interest was the collection of various memorials of Dr. Priestley, convenient- ly arranged in a large room for general inspection. There were many vestiges of the apparatus he used in his chemi- cal investigations, and of his micro- scopical and electrical instruments. There were also copies of his numer- ous works in various languages, and several portraits and engravings, illus- trative of the events and circumstances of his life. These relics were of great interest, and were examined with much curiosity by those who bad made the pilgrimage to the scene of his closing labors. The house which Dr. Priestley built, and in which he died, was also visited, and found to be in a good state of pres- ervation. It is an ample wooden struct- ure, plain, but thoroughly finished. At- tached to it on one side was his labora- tory—a large apartment, with a chim- ney in one corner for the escape of chemical exhalations. The situation of the dwelling was once fine, the spa- cious grounds sloping down to the Sus- quehanna, and being covered with trees. But there is now a canal in front, and a railroad at the back-door, which render it ineligible for a residence; and the pilgrims were informed, by a conspic- uous sign, that it was “for sale.” It seems there has been a rumor that the house was haunted, but this was stren- THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, uously denied on the part of those who were interested in disposing of it. The descendants of-Dr. Priestley, to the sixth generation, are to be found in Northumberland, and, as we might naturally expect, the family has been prominent in the history of the town. Dr. Joseph Priestley, a leading phy- _sician of the place, and his brother, Marks B. Priestley, great-grandsons of the old doctor, are prominent citizens, and their doors were thrown open with a cordial hospitality to the stran- gers who had come together to honor their illustrious ancestor. Other citi- zens, moreover, gave a kindly and gen- erous welcome to the visitors, and did all in their power to make the occasion as pleasant as it must ever be memo- rable to all who participated in it. RECENT PROGRESS IN THE dAIGHER EDUCATION. Ir cannot be otherwise than gratity- ing to all the friends of improvement in | the higher culture of the country to have noted the recent indications of a rapidly deepening popular interest in the subject. That an intelligent public such as ours should entertain a pro- found concern for its common schools, and strive incessantly for their amend- ment, is nothing more than might be expected; but, that vast multitudes of people should be stirred with intense solicitude about the result of the latest reform in collegiate education is no less remarkable than encouraging. It has been reproachfully said that people brought up under a popular form of government, with equal rights, claims, and privileges, will become so steeped in democratic sentiment as to have lit- tle care for that high and thorough training which but a small and select portion of the community can attain, and for which it is the main office of universities to provide. But we have now before us indubitable proof that crowds of people of all sorts and grades

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may be agitated to the utmost depths and carried away in enthusiasm over the workings of our collegiate system. At the late competitive examination, held at Saratoga, to decide upon the relative attainment in a new branch of scholarship, nine of the leading colleges of the country entered the lists, and the concourse of people that gathered to witness the exercises and note the re- sult was something altogether unprece- dented among educational exhibitions on this side of the Atlantic. It can no longer be said that learning and its dev- otees are unappreciated by our people. They came from all parts of the coun- try through the sweltering heat, were thickly stowed away in suffocating bed- rooms, relished the stale mutton and wilted cucumbers furnished by the land- lords, and trailed day after day through miles of grime and smudge to reach the place of inter-collegiate trial, and went wild with tumultuous excitement when one group of students exhibited greater proficiency than the rest. It was a great event for the higher education of this land, and will no doubt result in many new accessions to the college classes, and in raising still higher the standard of attainment in the new di- rection of study. LITERARY NOTICES. Locic, Inpuctive anp Depvuctive. By AtexanpeR Barn, LL.D., Professor of Logic in the University of Aber- deen. New and Revised Edition. 731 pages. Price, $2.00. D. Appleton & Co. From Aristotle, the father of the science, to the present day, logic has been one of the leading elements of a liberal education. During the middle ages it was understood and practised as the art of reasoning; with the rise of modern science, it has been sys- tematically extended so as to embrace the laws or-principles to which the mind con- forms in the search for truth. Dependent upon the larger science of mental philos- ophy or psychology, it has been constantly affected by the progress that has taken LITERARY NOTICES. 631 place in the knowledge of mind. The most influential modern work upon this subject is that of Mr. Mill, who was incited to un- dertake it by the perusal of Dr. Whewell’s “History of the Inductive Sciences.” His Logic was undoubtedly Mill’s great work, and will occupy a prominent place in the | history of the development of the science ; | but it aimed to be a constructive and | epoch-making treatise, and was designed | for the use of scholars rather than for | general students. Mr. Bain was the life-long and intimate friend of Mr. Mill, and was intrusted by the latter with the supervision of the proofs of the first edition of his work on logic for the press. He is, besides, one of the leading psychologists of the age, and author of a system of mental philosophy, which stands high as an original contribution to the ad- vancement of the subject. He has been Professor of Logic in the University of Aberdeen for many years, and was thor- oughly qualified to prepare a valuable book upon the subject. But, whereas Mill ad- dressed himself to philosophers, and occu- pied himself with abstruse and original inquiries, Mr. Bain has taken for his task to treat the subject in a more popular manner, | adapted to all classes of students. His volume may be regarded as, in fact, a popular treatise from the most modern point of view; and so well has he suc- ceeded with this feature of the work, that persons entirely unfamiliar with the sub- ject may read it with interest and profit. And yet nothing would be more un- just to Prof. Bain than the idea that his work is in any sense a compilation. It is, on the contrary, a treatise of marked origi- nality, and has been developed entirely from the author’s point of view as an inde- pendent student. One of the most instruc- tive and interesting parts of the volume is | book fifth, treating of the “ Logic of the Sei- ences,” or, what may be called, logic in its concrete and practical applications. “The Logic of Mathematics,” “The Logie of Physics,” of Chemistry, of Biology, of Psy- chology, of Politics, of Medicine, and what the author calls “ The Logic of Practice,” are considered in separate chapters, and, in connection with the “ Classification of the Sciences,” they form a most valuable state-

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632 ment of the fundamental ideas and the peculiar conditions of reasoning in all these important branches of knowledge. Although the work is comprehensive and a perfect treasury of information upon the subject, yet Dr. Bain points out in the preface how it may be used as an ele- mentary book, while its extremely low price is favorable to its general introduction into schools, Ancient Faitus EMBODIED IN ANCIENT Names; or, an Attempt to trace the Religious Belief, Sacred Rites, and Holy Emblems of Certain Nations, by an Interpretation of the Names given to Children by Priestly Authority, or assumed by Prophets, Kings, and Hier- archs. By Tomas Inmay, M. D. (Lon- don). 2 vols. 8vo, pages 792 and 1028, Price, $27.00. Second Edition. New York: Asa K. Butts & Co., 36 Dey Street, 1874. Tus is, undoubtedly, a work of vast research, and implying, in the author, an intimate acquaintance with the languages and literatures of antiquity. We have, here, an immense amount of curious knowl- edge with regard to the sacred rites of ancient religions. The emblems, symbols, or images, which have served as representa- tives of Deity, and which have received worship from man, are shown to be much the same the world over. The author very elaborately develops the precise meaning of the principal emblems used to represent the Supreme Being, and one of the most interesting features of his book is the learn- ing with which these are traced through the Assyrian, Hebrew, Syrian, and other religions, and even the Christian religion itself, in some of its forms. The central idea of the work, if it has any central idea, is not indicated by the title. Judging from that, the reader would expect to find a list of names of persons analyzed, and, from the elements of these names, the religious beliefs and practices of those who gave or wore them inferred: that is to say, the work would be mainly philological. This, how- ever, is not the case; the work is rather historical, The subjects are treated in alphabetical order, and this, by-the-way, is the only sign of order we find in the work: the same topics are treated over and over again, even unto weariness and l disgust. THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. Special prominence is given to the discussion of the relations of sex to the problem of religious emblems, a question which has latterly much engaged the atten- tion of archeologists. From the following very brief list of subjects, our readers will, perhaps, be able to see the scope of the work: Anthropomorphism, Ark, Canon of Seripture, Chrisna, Cross, Demon, Hell, JAH, Infidelity, Inspiration, Mary, Miracles, Oracles, Phallus, Prayer, Prophecy, Reli- gion, Sabbath, Sacti, Sun-worship, Theolo- gy, Trinity, Urim and Thummim. Though many extraneous matters are brought into this work, which, it would seem, ought to have been discussed elsewhere, the reader will hardly be disposed to complain, for all that the author writes is worthy of con- sideration, even if out of place. The text is fully and elegantly illustrated with wood- cuts and plates. Heatta anp Epvcation. By the Rev. Cuartes Krinestey, F. L. S., F. G. 8., Can- on of Westminster. New York: D. Ap- pleton & Co., 549 & 551 Broadway. Pages 411. Price, $2.00. Tuts is a unique volume from the vigor- ous and brilliant pen of the versatile Canon of Westminster, novelist, essayist, natural- ist, professor of history, and preacher, and so strong in each as to have won a com- manding place in the literature of the time. Mr. Kingsley has here given us the result of his long observations and reflections on the theory, philosophy, and practical con- duct of life. His work is popular in the highest sense; that is, it is not only de- signed for general influence, but it is done in its author’s best style of literary art, and is vivid, quaint, pungent, and impres- sive. It is well known that Canon Kings- ley is one of the masters of the English language, and it is fortunate when he brings his unusual powers of presentation to bear upon familiar and important subjects of daily life. For the difficulty with people generally is, not that they are ignorant, or have not had truth enough explained to them, but that it is so vaguely con- ceived and so feebly held that it does not take hold of the feelings and coerce the conduct. For this reason, much of the tame didactic statement of current science is to a great degree powerless for good. It is

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here that the forcible, pointed, and pictu- resque writer is of invaluable service, and it is here that Canon Kingsley excels. The contents of the volume are varied and sug- gestive, and it abounds in passages of point- ed common-sense, like the following fresh plea for the practical study of botany by girls, as grounds of important mental dis- cipline: “Mothers complain to me that girls are apt to be—not intentionally untruthful— but exaggerative, prejudiced, incorrect, in repeating a conversation or describing an event; and that from this fault arise, as is to be expected, misunderstandings, quarrels, rumors, slanders, scandals, and what not. “ Now, for this waste of words there is but one cure: and if I be told that it is a natural fault of women; that they cannot take the calm, judicial view of matters which men boast, and often boast most wrongly, that they can take; that under the influence of hope, fear, delicate antipathy, honest moral indignation, they will let their eyes and ears be governed by their feelings ; and see and hear only what they wish to see and hear: I answer, that it is not for me as a man to start such a theory; but that, if it be true, it is an additional argument for some education which will correct this sup- posed natural defect. And I say deliber- ately that there is but one sort of education which will correct it; one which will teach young women to observe facts accurately, judge them calmly, and describe them care- fully, without adding or distorting: and that is, some training in natural science. “T beg you not to be startled: but if you are, then test the truth of my theory by playing to-night at the game called ‘ Rus- sian Scandal ;’ in which a story, repeated in secret by one player to the other, comes out at the end of the game, owing to the inac- curate and—forgive me if I say it—unedu- cated brains through which it has passed, utterly unlike its original; not only Judi- crously maimed and distorted, but often with the most fantastic additions of events, ‘details, names, dates, places, which each player will aver that he received from the player before him. I am afraid that too much of the average gossip of every city, town, and village is little more than a game of ‘Russian Scandal ;’ with this difference, LITERARY NOTICES. 633 that, while one is but a game, the other is but too mischievous earnest. “But now, if among your party there should be an average lawyer, medical man, or man of science, you will find that he, and perhaps he alone, will be able to retail accurately the story which had been told him. Andwhy? Simply because his mind has been trained to deal with facts; to as- certain exactly what he does see or hear, and to imprint its leading features strongly and clearly on his memory. “ Now, you certainly cannot make young ladies barristers or attorneys; nor employ their brains in getting up cases, civil or criminal; and as for chemistry, they and their parents may have a reasonable antip- athy to smells, blackened fingers, and oc- casional explosions and poisonings. But you may make them something of botanists, zoologists, geologists. “T could say much on this point: allow me at least to say this: I verily believe that any young lady who would employ some of her leisure time in collecting wild-flowers, carefully examining them, verifying them, and arranging them; or who would in her summer trip to the sea-coast do the same by the common objects of the shore, instead of wasting her holiday, as one sees hun- dreds doing, in lounging on benches on the esplanade, reading worthless novels, and criticising dresses—that such a young lady, I say, would not only open her own mind to a world of wonder, beauty, and wisdom, which, if it did not make her a more rever- ent and pious soul, she cannot be the woman which I take for granted she is; but would save herself from the habit—I had almost said the necessity—of gossip: because she would have things to think of and not merely persons; facts instead of fancies; while she would acquire something of accu- racy, of patience, of methodical observation and judgment, which would stand her in good stead in the events of daily life, and increase her power of bridling her tongue and her imagination, ‘God is in heaven, and thou upon earth ; therefore let thy words be few ;’ is the lesson which those are learn- ing all day long who study the works of God with reverent accuracy, lest by misrep- resenting them they should be tempted to say that God has done that which he has

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634 not; and in that wholesome discipline I long that women as well as men should share.” In his lecture on the Tree of Knowledge, Mr. Kingsley has the following observations on the causes of intemperance : “It is said by some that drunkenness is on the increase in this island. I have no trusty proof of it: but I can believe it possi- ble; for every cause of drunkenness seems on the increase. Overwork of body and mind; circumstances which depress health ; temptation to drink, and drink again, at every corner of the streets; and finally, money, and ever more money, in the hands of uneducated people, who have not the de- | sire, and too often not the means, of spend- | ing it in any save the lowest pleasures. | These, it seems to me, are the true causes | of drunkenness, increasing or not. And if we wish to become a more temperate na- tion, we must lessen them, if we cannot eradicate them. “First, overwork. We all live too fast, | and work too hard. ‘All things are full of labor, man cannot utter it.’ In the heavy | struggle for existence which goes on all | around us, each man is tasked more and more—if he be really worth buying and | using—to the utmost of his powers all day | long. The weak have to compete on equal | terms with the strong; and crave, in con- sequence, for artificial strength. How we shall stop that I know not, while every man | is ‘making haste to be rich, and piercing | himself through with many sorrows, and | falling into foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition.’ “But it seems to me also, that in such a state of society, when—as it was once well put—‘ every one has stopped running about like rats:’—that those who work hard, whether with muscle or with brain, would not be surrounded, as now, with every cir- cumstance which tempts toward drink ; by every circumstance which depresses the vi- tal energies, and leaves them an easy prey to pestilence itself; by bad light, bad air, bad food, bad water, bad smells, bad occu- pations, which weaken the muscles, cramp the chest, disorder the digestion. Let any rational man, fresh from the country—in which I presume God, having made it, meant all men, more or less, to live—go through the back streets of any city, or through THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. whole districts of the ‘ black countries’ of England; and then ask himself—Is it the will of God that his human children should live and toil in such dens, such deserts, such dark places of the earth? Let him ask himself—Can they live and toil there with- out contracting a probably diseased habit of body; without contracting a certainly dull, weary, sordid habit of mind, which craves for any pleasure, however brutal, to escape from its own stupidity and emyti- ness? When I run through, by rail, certain parts of the iron-producing country—streets of furnaces, collieries, slag-heaps, mud, slop, brick house-rows, smoke, dirt—and that is all; and when I am told, whether truly or falsely, that the main thing which the well- paid and well-fed men of those abominable | wastes care for is—good fighting-dogs: I can only answer, that I am not sur- prised, “T say—as I have said elsewhere, and shall do my best to say again—that the crav- ing for drink and narcotics, especially that engendered in our great cities, is not a dis- ease, but a symptom of disease; of a far deeper disease than any which drunkenness can produce; namely, of the growing degen- eracy of a population striving in vain by stimulants and narcotics to fight against those slow poisons with which our greedy barbarism, miscalled civilization, has sur- rounded them from the cradle to the grave. I may be answered that the old German, Angle, Dane, drank heavily. I know it: but why did they drink, save that for the same reason that the fenman drank, and his wife took opium, at least till the fens were drained ? why but to keep off the depressing effects of the malaria of swamps and new clearings, which told on them—who always settled on the lowest grounds—in the shape of fever and ague? Here it may be an- swered again, that stimulants have been, during the memory of man, the destruction of the Red Indian race in America. I reply boldly, that I do not believe it. There is evidence enough in Jacques Cartier’s ‘ Voy- ages to the Rivers of Canada ;’ and evidence more than enough in Strachey’s ‘Travaile in Virginia ’—to quote only two authorities out of many—to prove that the Red In- dians, when the white man first met with them, were, in North and South alike, a dis-

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eased, decaying, and, as all their traditions confess, decreasing race. Such a race would naturally crave for ‘the water of life,’ the ‘usquebaugh,’ or whiskey, as we have con- tracted the old name now. But I should have thought that the white man, by intro- ducing among these poor creatures iron, fire-arms, blankets, and, above all, horses wherewith to follow the buffalo-herds which they could never follow on foot, must have done ten times more toward keeping them alive, than he has done toward destroying them by giving them the chance of a week’s drunkenness twice a year, when they came in to his forts to sell the skins which, without his gifts, they would never have got. “Such a race would, of course, if want- ing vitality, crave for stimulants. But if the stimulants, and not the original want of vitality, combined with morals utterly de- testable, and worthy only of the gallows— and here I know what I say, and dare not tell what I know, from eye-witnesses—have been the cause of the Red Indians’ ex- tinction: then how is it, let me ask, that the Irishman and the Scotsman have, often to their great harm, been drinking as much whiskey—and usually very bad whiskey— not merely twice a year, but as often as they could get it, during the whole ‘iron age;’ and, for aught any one can tell, during the ‘bronze age,’ and the ‘stone age’ before that: and yet are still the most healthy, abie, valiant, and prolific races in Europe ? Had they drunk less whiskey they would, doubtless, have been more healthy, able, valiant, and perhaps even more prolific, than they are now. They show no sign, how- ever, as yet, of going the way of the Red Indian. “But if the craving for stimulants and narcotics is a token of deficient vitality ; then the deadliest foe of that craving, and all its miserable results, is surely the Sani- | tary Reformer; the man who preaches, and —as far as ignorance and vested interests will allow him—procures, for the masses, pure air, pure sunlight, pure water, pure dwelling-houses, pure food. Not merely every fresh drinking-fountain: but every fresh public bath and wash-house, every fresh open space, every fresh growing tree, every fresh open window, every fresh flower LITERARY NOTICES. 635 in that window—each of these is so much, as the old Persians would have said, con- quered for Ormuzd, the god of light and life, out of the dominion of Ahriman, the king of darkness and of death; so much taken from the causes of drunkenness and disease, and added to the causes of sobriety and health. “Meanwhile one thing is clear: that if this present barbarism and anarchy of cov- etousness, miscalled modern civilization, were tamed and drilled into something more like the kingdom of God on earth: then we should not see the reckless and needless multiplication of liquor-shops, which dis- graces this country now. .. . “T said just now that a probable cause of increasing drunkenness was the increas- ing material prosperity of thousands who | knew no recreation beyond low animal pleas- ure. If I am right—and I believe that I am right—I must urge on those who wish drunkenness to decrease, the necessity of providing more, and more refined, recreation for the people. “Men drink, and women too, remember, not merely to supply exhaustion ; pot merely to drive away care; but often simply to drive away dullness. They have nothing to do save to think over what they have done in the day, or what they expect to do to- morrow; and they escape from that dreary round of business thought, in liquor or nar- cotics. There are still those, by no means of the hand-working class, but absorbed all day by business, who drink heavily at night in their own comfortable homes, simply to recreate their overburdened minds. Such cases, doubtless, are far less common than they were fifty yearsago: but why? Is not the decrease of drinking among the richer classes certainly due to the increased refine- ment and variety of their tastes and occu- pations? In cultivating the esthetic side of man’s nature; in engaging him with the beautiful, the pure, the wonderful, the truly natural; with painting, poetry, music, hor- ticulture, physical science—in all this lies recreation, in the true and literal sense of ; that word, namely, the recreating and | mending of the exhausted mind and feel- | ings, such as no rational man will now neg- | lect, either for himself, his children, or his | workpeople.” |

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636 CaTaLocue oF THE South Missouri State Normat Scuoot, WARRENSBURG, JAMES Jononnot, Principal. Jefferson City: Regan & Carter. Or all the forms of ephemeral literature, school catalogues are generally the most volatile, fleeting, and thoroughly worthless. The luxurious typography is, no doubt, pleasant to the pupils whose names are in the list, and, indicating the prosperity of the establishment, is a highly-dignified method of advertising. The deep philos- ophy of education that is propounded, and the high-sounding promises of what is to be done next year, dressed in imposing rhet- oric, are agreeable to read, but unsafe to trust, as they usually have a very loose relaticn with the facts. The catalogue before us, however, is of quite exceptional character, and has inter- ested us not a little. It is the result of a serious and earnest effort to carry out ad- vanced ideas, and to place popular educa- . . ! tion more completely upon the basis of scientific principles than has hitherto been deemed practicable. In his eight pages of preliminary explanation of the course of study, Prof. Johonnot has given us a brief and excellent exposition of the underlying ideas of the new education, and has given ample and cogent reasons why the sciences should have a leading place in our improved systems of mental cultivation. But no amount of theorizing can be sufficient here. What we want is an actual curriculum, and the practical results of its working. Scien- tific education cannot be constructed, it must grow; but that growth can only come from trial and experience, and, what we want, therefore, is judicious educational experimenters to develop the new culture and show what it is capable of. They have_entered boldly upon this path at the Warrensburg Normal School, and with something like an adequate appreciation of the just claims of scientific studies. it is regarded by many educators as a great step of reform to recognize science at all, and to concede one, two, or three hours a week to some branches of it, Prof. Johon- not makes it the prominent and fundament- al thing in the establishment over which he presides. Of the several lines of study, science occupies the first place, and is a regular daily exercise in every term. “In While ; THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. each science a strictly objective presenta- tion is first made, by which the pupil ob- serves the objects and facts upon which the science is founded, and is led to make general classifications. Farther along in the course, each science is treated again upon a higher plane, leading to more minute in- vestigations and to broader generalizations ; and in several instances the subject recurs three times before it is finally dismissed.” We may add that the scientific course is broad and comprehensive, and one of the features of the plan of teaching is the ex- planation of new discoveries and important results, as fast as they occur in the scien- tific world. PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED. Nomenclature of Diseases (Woodworth). Washington: Government Printing-Office. Pp. 232. Exposures in Fire Insurance (Ross). New York: Appletons. Pp. 59. National Educational Association. 1873. Pp. 272. Physiology of the Circulation (Petti- grew). Macmillan. Pp. 337. Price, $4.00. Catalogue of Wild Plants in New Jer- sey (Willis). New York: Schermerhorn., Pp. 92. Price, $1.00. Elmwood Cemetery, Memphis. Pp. United States Mining Industry (Ray. mond). New York: Ford & Co. Pp. 555, Price, $4.50. The Stevens Battery. Pp. 30. Morgan Expeditions, 1870-71. Pp. 60. Reception of Dr. Gould at Boston. Pp. 32. Report of the Curators of Missouri Uni- versity (1874). Pp. 185. Kindergarten Messenger (Monthly). Pp. 24. Bulletin of Cornell University (Science). Vol. I. Nos. land 2. Pp. 63. The Rapid Writer (Monthly). Ando- ver, Mass. Pp. 16. Bench and Bar Review (Quarterly). Baltimore: A. Schaumburg. Pp. 200. Per annum, $5.00.

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Kentucky State Medical Association. 1874. Pp. 262. Experiments, showing Character and Position of Neutral Axes (Nickerson, C. E.). Pp. 26. “Do Snakes swallow their Young ?” (Goode). Pp. 12. The Analyst, Monthly Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics. Des Moines, Iowa. Pp. 20. Mechanical Properties of Materials of Construction (Thurston). Pp. 28. Assaying by the Spectroscope (Du Bois). Pp. 12. The Mystery of Life (Cox). Pp. 32. The Plagopterine and the Ichthyology of Utah (Cope). Pp. 14. Transmission of Diseases (Hamlin). Pp. 9. Papers chiefly Anatomical (Wilder). Pp. 94. Transformations of the House-Fly (Packard). Pp. 14. Geographical Variation of North Ameri- can Birds (Allen). Pp. 10. Mammals of Kansas, etc. (Allen), Pp. 23. Statistical Atlas of the United States. Part III. Vital Statistics. Darwinism and Language (Whitney). Pp. 30. MISCELLANY. Coggia’s Comet.—The comet which lately made such a grand display in our northern heavens was discovered by Coggia, at Mar- seilles, on April 17th. When first seen, the nucleus and coma together had a diameter of 100,000 miles, the comet being then 133,000,000 miles from the earth, and 153,000,000 from the sun. It travels round the sun in the same direction as the planets, but in an orbit the plane of which is very much inclined. Of all the planetary orbits, excepting those of the asteroids, that of Mercury is most oblique, having a slant of seven degrees; but the inclination of the orbit of Coggia’s Comet is nearly ten times as great, being set down at 66°. Its peri- MISCELLANY. 637 helion passage, or nearest approach to the sun, occurred on July 8th, when it came within 62,000,000 miles of that orb, and it was then moving at the rate of 160,000 miles an hour. It continued to approach the earth until July 20th, coming, on that date, within 26,000,000 miles of us, when it appeared at its brightest, or, accord- ing to Prof. Parkhurst, 140 times more brilliant than when first discovered. Of its tail, the same authority says: “On June 25th the observed length of the tail was computed as 3,000,000 miles ; on July Ist, 5,000,000 miles ; on July 13th, 12,000,000 miles—an increase, after the first of that month, of one-twelfth per day. The tail continued, from its first appearance till the head of the comet ceased to be visible, to point from the latter directly toward the stars Beta and Gamma of the Lesser Bear. Afterward it moved slowly to the westward, so that it covered the dipper of the Great- er Bear. The speed of the particles leav- ing the head to form the tail was estimated as over 3,000,000 miles per day. This brings the particles leaving the comet on July 4th to a distance from its head on July 24th of about 26,000,000 miles, cor- responding at the latter date with the dis- tance of the head of the comet from the earth. But, though the tail thus sweeps over sufficient space to cover the inter- val between the nucleus and the earth, the direction of the tail is such that it fails to reach us; its central line being dis- tant about 4,000,000 miles, and the edge of the tail about 1,500,000 miles, from the earth,” Concerning the theory which accounts for the formation of comets’ tails by a re- pulsive action of the sun on the matter of the nucleus, Prof. Parkhurst also writes, in the Tribune of July 23d: ‘ The existence of a repelling force was suggested by the fact that a comet’s tail, pointing eastward when the comet is east of the sun, points northward and westward as the comet it- self moves around to the north and west of the sun. Yet, as there is no coherence in the tail, it is evident that no repelling foree from the sun, when it is to the east of the sun, can have any tendency to bring it around to the west of the sun. The fact

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638 is, that the tail which is to be seen to the west of the sun is composed of entirely dif- ferent matter from that which was seen to the east. The former matter has been re- pelled so far from the sun, and has been so expanded, that it has become invisible; and new matter has been repelled from the nu- cleus, forming a new tail upon the western side. The law of repulsion will not only ac- count for this, but for the formation of a new tail at the rate of 30,000,000 miles per day, as recorded in the case of the com- ets of 1680 and 1843. The magnitude of the comet’s tail in those instances was stu- pendous ; but its velocity was no less as- tounding. It commenced to move at the rate of 30,000,000 miles per day; but, unlike the motion of the comet itself, the motion is accelerated so long as the repelling force continues to operate. There is no retard- ing force, as in the motion of a receding comet. Whatever velocity has once been reached is retained, and the particles are constantly receiving an accelerating force from the time they leave the head of the comet, although the amount of the acceler- ating force which they receive will gradu- ally diminish as the distance from the sun increases. There is no known instance of a comet coming into our system with a velo- city approaching this ; and, as the tail of a comet is chiefly formed after it has passed its perihelion, when each successive addition to the tail is impelled with less velocity than that which started before it, there seems to be no alternative to the theory that the mat- ter forming a comet’s tail is so thoroughly diffused in space that it can never be re- united,” Astronomers appear to be agreed that Coggia’s Comet is an entire stranger to us, if not to these regions of space. It was at first surmised that it might be the one seen by the French missionaries in China in 1737, thus making its period of revolution 137 years. But the opinion of Prof. Hind, as lately expressed in Vature, is that, not- withstanding similarity of orbit, the two are not iilentical. The orbit of this latest comer has not been definitely determined, but is pronounced either a parabola or hyperbola. As the comet will be visible in the Southern Hemisphere until the end of September, more on this interesting THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. | point will probably be learned before its | final disappearance. Brain Development in the Mammalia.— | According to the researches of Prof. Marsh, | the larger mammals of the Tertiary period, as compared with their existing representa- tives, were sadly deficient in brains. Their later remains, however, afford evidence of steady improvement in this particular. The mammals of the Eocene all had small brains, being little better provided in this respect than the higher reptiles. The type ,enus of the largest of the Eocene mammalia, Dinoceras, nearly equaled the elephant in bulk, but had a brain only about one-eighth the size of that in existing rhinoceroses. The smallness of the cavity in the other genera of this order was equally remark- able. The Brontotherium of the American Miocene (a later division of the Tertiary), while equaling the dinoceras in size, had a decidedly larger brain-cavity ; and, in the still later strata of the Pliocene, a species of mastodon was found which likewise exhibited increase of brain-dimensions, the cavity approaching but not equaling that of existing proboscidians.” The Tapiroid ungulates of the Eocene had small brain- cavities, much smaller than their allies the Miocene Rhinocerotide. The Pliocene rep- resentatives of the latter group had well- developed brains, but proportionally smaller than living species. A similar progression in brain-capacity seems to be well marked in the equine mammals, especially from the Eocene Orohippus, through Miohippus and Anchitherium of the Miocene, Pliohippus and Hipparion of the Pliocene, to the re- cent Equus. In other groups of mammals, likewise, so fur as observed, the size of the brain shows a corresponding increase in the successive subdivisions of the Tertiary. These facts have a very important bearing on the evolution of mammals, and open an interesting field for further investigation.” The Peabody Museum of Natural His- tory.—We learn from the College Courant that the Peabody Museum of Natural His- tory, connected with Yale College, is to be commenced at once. The building, when complete, will be 350 feet in length. At present, only one wing is to be built, cost-

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ing $160,000, with a ground-plan of 115 feet by 100. It will be of brick, with cut- stone trimmings, and strictly fire-proof; of three stories, with high basement, making, virtually, four stories. This basement will be largely devoted to the exhibition of fos- sil footprints. The first story will be de- voted to a lecture-room and a mineralogi- cal cabinet ; the second to geology, with the fossil vertebrates from the Rocky Moun- tains ; the third to zoology, and the attic to archeology and ethnology. The funds for the erection and maintenance of this insti- tution were furnished, in 1866, by the late George Peabody, who, by deed of gift dated October 22d of that year, gave $150,000 to Profs. J. D. Dana, O. C. Marsh, B. Silliman, G. J. Brush, and three others, in trust “ to found and maintain a Museum of Natural History, especially of the departments of zoology, geology, and mineralogy, in con- nection with Yale College.” The present curators of the several departments of the Museum are Prof. Brush, of the mineralogi- cal, Prof. Marsh, of the geological, and Prof. A. E. Verrill, of the zoological department. The Movement of Sterms.—The Ameri- can Journal of Science for July contains Part I. of an able paper, by Prof. Loomis, entitled “‘ Results derived from an Exami- nation of the United States Weather Maps for 1872 and 1873,” read before the Na- tional Academy of Sciences in April last. The weather-maps which furnished the data for his examination exhibit storm-paths for 314 days. These he has carefully tabu- lated and classified. The course and veloci- ty of the storms for each month are given, showing that the average velocity in for- ward movement was 26.6 miles per hour, that the greatest average velocity in any month was in February, it being 31 miles per hour; the lowest was in August, when the rate was 17.7 miles an hour. It also ap- pears that their forward movement is greater in winter than in summer. But some atoms move with exceptional velocity. Thus, in May 15, 1873, a storm-centre advanced 1,200 miles in twenty-four hours, while, in other cases, there was no forward movement, and the storm-centre remained stationary for twenty-four hours. The average direction of the storm-paths for two years was 8° MISCELLANY. 639 north of east; in summer, nearly due east ; in winter, more northward ; but most northward in fall and spring. In October the direction was 21° north of east. In- stances occurred, however, in which storms moved north-northwest; and, on the 6th of April, 1873, a storm in the Mississippi Valley moved in every direction in a little more than twenty-four hours. Prof. Loomis carefully studied the causes which appear to influence the velocity and direction of storms, Of these, rainfall is important. It is found that the area of rainfall extends farther on the eastern than it does on the western side of a storm- centre ; so that the rain-area is a long oval, the longer diameter of which is in or nearly in the direction in which the storm is mov- ing. This is true of most of the storms which traverse the United States, This rain-area extends to an unusual distance on the eastern side of a storm when it is ad- vancing—the average extent being about 500 miles. By the condensation of vapor eastward of the storm, it, in a measure, makes its own way. Thus the barometer continually falls in advance of it, announcing its approach, but rises as the storm-centre is past. The conditions by which a storm is sustained, and which are present before or in front of it, cease to exist in its wake. Instances occur, however, in which increased velocity and condensation in the western quadrant of a storm set back the storm’s centre, and give it, for a time, a retrograde motion. The wind on the western quarter of a storm usually blows with greater velocity by about 22 per cent, than it does on its eastern quad- rant, and this is a means by which the for- ward motion is retarded ; and it is found that, when the wind’s velocity in the west- ern quadrant is 44 per cent. greater than in the eastern, the storm’s forward motion is seven miles an hour less than its average rate of progress. The atmosphere in the storm circuit moves inward, but also upward, to the cen- tral region of the storm, which is supposed to be from one to two miles above the earth’s surface. At this elevation atmos- pheric movements are greatly increased in velocity. Thus, at the summit of Mount Washington, the velocity was 29 miles an

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64> hour, or, compared with that at the level of the sea, was as 5.5 to 1. By comparing the velocity of the wind at this elevation in the direction which the storm advances with the velocity of the storm’s advance, Prof. Loomis is enabled to deduce a meas- ure of the force of the upward movement of the centre of a storm. Storms are divided, by Prof. Loomis, into two classes. Those of the first class traverse the continent northward of the fortieth parallel; many from the remote west reach the great lakes Superior and Huron, and show a decided preference for that region. Some of these have their origin among the Rocky Mountains, and some come from the mountains of Oregon. Those of the second class originate chiefly westward of the mouth of the Mississippi, and move nearly northeast. These com- prise only about one-sixth of the whole number, but include some of the violent cyclones which traverse our coast. NOTES. Correction. —In the article on the “Development of Psychology,” in the August number, page 417, a long passage is represented as quoted. The quvtation is an error of the printer. Tue National (British) Association for the Promotion of Social Science will assem- ble at Glasgow, September 30th, and will be in session till October 7th. President, the Earl of Roseberry. The presidents of departments are: Jurisprudence and Amend- ment of the Law, Lord Moncrieff; Repres- sion of Crime, Frederick H@#l; Education, Lords Napier and Ettrick; Health, Lyon Playfair; Economy and Trade, Sir George Campbell. At the summer distribution of prizes at University College, London, the first and second places, in the mixed class of juris- prudence, were both held by ladies—Miss E. Orme, who, two years ago, took the prize in political economy, coming out first; while, in the mixed class of political econ- omy, this year, a lady took the fourth cer- tificate. Mr. Licr’s first gift to the California Academy of Sciences was a piece of land, worth $250,000. By his recent deed, he provides the means for the erection of a suitable building for the Academy, to cost about $250,000. This is not all. The in- stitution is provided by the generosity of THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. Mr. Lick with ample funds to purchase books, collections, ete., and to carry on the Academy on a firm basis. The sum of the gifts thus made to this one insti- tution amounts to over one million dollars. Ir is reported that the Phyllozera vas- tatriz, the worst of grape-vine pests, has made its way into Australia. ANOTHER mountain of iron-ore has been discovered in Missouri. A shaft has been sunk on Shepherd Mountain, which has passed already through 70 feet of almost solid ore, and the quality of the deposit is improving as the shaft goes down. Shep- herd Mountain is about six miles south of the famous “ Iron Mountain.” A pispatcn from Denver, Col., dated July 20th, states that the three topograph- ical divisions of Prof. Hayden’s Exploring Expedition had already taken the field, and Prof. Gardner’s party was soon to follow. Dr. Hayden, with his selected party, will review the whole ground, viz., that part of Colorado south of the 40th parallel, and west of the Park Range. The expedition includes fifty persons. Tue large and valuable collection of natural history specimens procured by D’Albertis during his recent travels in New Guinea has been purchased by the Italian Government. D’Albertis intends soon to return to New Guinea to continue his researches. A rew drops of oil of bitter almonds on a little sawdust will serve as a good pre- servative of insects. Place the insects with the prepared sawdust in a hermetically- sealed flask. Insects have, in this way, been sent from Ceylon to France, and, when they reached their destination, were still so flexible as to permit of their being pre- pared and mounted, though they had been collected months previously. Taree thousand acres of cotton have been planted in California this year, and the prospects are good for an abundant yield. ALPHONSE DE CANDOLLE, the eminent bot- anist of Geneva, has been elected Foreign Associate of the French Academy of Sciences, as successor of the late Prof. Agassiz. Two scientific expeditions are to set out from Archangel next summer, one to explore the traces of ancient glaciers in Russian Lapland, and the other to pursue zoological investigations on the shore of the White Sea. Dr. Druitt, an eminent physician and high authority on the subject of wine, says: “ Civilized man must drink, will drink, and ought to drink ; but it should be wine.”

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