Established by Edward L. Youmans

APPLETONS’
POPULAR SCIENCE
MONTHLY

EDITED BY
WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS

VOL. LIV

NOVEMBER, 1898, TO APRIL, 1899

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1899

Copyright, 1899,
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

Vol. LIV.Established by Edward L. Youmans.No. 2.

APPLETONS’
POPULAR SCIENCE
MONTHLY.

DECEMBER, 1898.

EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS.

CONTENTS.

NEW YORK:
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY,
72 FIFTH AVENUE.

Single Number, 50 Cents.Yearly Subscription, $5.00.

Copyright, 1898, by D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
Entered at the Post Office at New York, and admitted for transmission through the mails at second-class rates.

CHARLES H. HITCHCOCK.

[145]

APPLETONS’ POPULAR SCIENCE
MONTHLY.

DECEMBER, 1898.

THE WHEAT-GROWING CAPACITY OF THE UNITED
STATES.

By EDWARD ATKINSON.

In 1880 it happened to fall to me to make a forecast of the very
great reduction in the price of wheat in Great Britain, which
could then be predicated on the lessening cost of transportation from
Chicago to the seaboard, thence to British ports, which was then sure
to be soon followed by a large reduction in the railway charges for
bringing the wheat to Chicago from the other Western centers of
distribution. I then alleged that the time was not far off when,
even if the price of wheat in Mark Lane were reduced from the
then existing rate of fifty-two shillings per quarter to thirty-four
shillings, it would still yield as full a return to the Western farmer
as it had yielded in previous years at fifty shillings and upward.
This forecast attracted great attention, and has since been made the
subject of very much bitter controversy, especially since the fall in
prices was much more rapid than I then thought it could be, and
was carried to a much lower point than any one could have then
anticipated. It will be remarked that thirty-four shillings in Mark
Lane is at the rate of one dollar and three cents per bushel of sixty
pounds.

From time to time I have almost been forced to defend the
position then taken, notably when asked to appear before the Royal
Commission on Depression in Agriculture at one of their sessions,
where I was kept upon the stand for two full days in the effort of
the excellent English farmers and landowners to prove that the
American farmer had been ruined by the reduction in the price of
wheat, which the majority of that commission attributed to the[146]
demonetization of silver. The whole tone of that investigation and
of a large part of the treatment of the wheat question in Great
Britain has been one of complaint and of alleged wrong to British
agriculture because the United States had succeeded in supplying
the masses of the people of the United Kingdom with cheap bread,
with sufficient profit to themselves to keep up the supply.

Now comes what may be called a cry of alarm from a scientist
of highest repute lest England may be deprived even of an adequate
supply of wheat, and lest the price should be forced to an exorbitant
point. This view of the case was stated at great length by Sir William
Crookes when assuming the presidency of the British Association
for the Advancement of Science at the recent meeting in Bristol.
This address is published in full in the Times of September 8th, the
portion devoted to the wheat question filling three out of six columns
of closely printed text; the other three are devoted to a complete review
of the existing conditions of science. I venture to give a few
extracts which will convey to the reader the aspect of the wheat
question from this essentially British point of view. Sir William
Crookes begins with a sort of apology, which the writer can fully
appreciate. He says:

“Statistics are rarely attractive to a listening audience, but they
are necessary evils, and those of this evening are unusually doleful….
I am constrained to show that our wheat-producing soil is
totally unequal to the strain put upon it. After wearying you
with a survey of the universal dearth to be expected, I hope to
point a way out of the colossal dilemma. It is the chemist who
must come to the rescue of the threatened communities. It is
through the laboratory that starvation may ultimately be turned
into plenty.”

One of the singular facts which becomes quickly apparent to any
one who deals with this subject in Great Britain is the inability of
the English farmer to think about agriculture except in terms of
wheat. Now we have an example of our English scientist of the
highest repute who seems to ignore all other grain and to predict
future starvation on an expected deficiency in the supply of
wheat. Sir William Crookes proceeds:

“The consumption of wheat per head of the population (unit consumption)
is over six bushels per annum; and, taking the population
at 40,000,000, we require no less than 240,000,000 bushels
of wheat, increasing annually by 2,000,000 bushels to supply the
increase of population. Of the total amount of wheat consumed
in the United Kingdom we grow twenty-five and import seventy-five
per cent.”

He then deals with the impending scarcity, saying:

[147]

“To arrest this impending danger it has been proposed that an
amount of 64,000,000 bushels of wheat should be purchased by the
state and stored in national granaries, not to be opened except to
remedy deterioration of grain, or in view of national disaster rendering
starvation imminent. This 64,000,000 bushels would add
another fourteen weeks’ life to the population.”

After dealing with the fact that while it might be possible for
the United Kingdom to supply itself with its own wheat at an average
of twenty-nine and a half bushels to the acre, he goes on to say
that this would require thirteen thousand square miles of British
territory, increasing at the rate of one hundred square miles per
annum; but he says it would be clearly impossible to assign so large
a proportion of the area of the United Kingdom to a single crop without
suffering in other matters, adding:

“In any case, owing to our cold, damp climate and capricious
weather, the wheat crop is hazardous, and for the present our annual
deficit of 180,000,000 bushels must be imported. A permanently
higher price for wheat is, I fear, a calamity that ere long must be
faced.”

I can imagine with what a relish the Royal Commission on the
Depression of Agriculture would have received this prophecy of a
permanently higher price for wheat. Sir William Crookes goes on
to say:

“Wheat is the most sustaining food grain of the great Caucasian
race, which includes the peoples of Europe, United States, British
America, the white inhabitants of South Africa, Australasia, parts
of South America, and the white population of the European
colonies.”

He then points out how rapidly the consumers of wheat have increased,
yet failing to attribute this increase in part to the rapid
reduction in the cost. He says:

“In 1871 the bread-eaters of the world numbered 371,000,000;
in 1881, 416,000,000; in 1891, 472,600,000; and at the present
time they number 516,500,000. The augmentation of the world’s
bread-eating population in a geometrical ratio is evidenced by the
fact that the yearly aggregates grow progressively larger…. To
supply 516,500,000 bread-eaters, if each bread-eating unit is to have
his usual ration, will require a total of 2,324,000,000 bushels for seed
and food. According to the best authorities, the total supplies from
the 1897-’98 harvest are 1,921,000,000.”

It will be observed that while the English average consumption
is said to be six bushels, the average employed in this computation
is four and a half bushels per head. He then remarks upon the
large harvests for seven years, saying:

[148]

“Bread-eaters have almost eaten up the reserves of wheat, and
the 1897 harvest being under average, the conditions become serious….
It is clear we are confronted with a colossal problem that must
tax the wits of the wisest. Up to recent years the growth of wheat
has kept pace with demands. As wheat-eaters increased, the acreage
under wheat expanded. We forget that the wheat-growing area is
of strictly limited extent, and that a few million acres regularly absorbed
soon amount to a formidable number. The present position
being so gloomy, let us consider future prospects.”

He then deals successively with the United States, Russia,
Canada, and other countries. In regard to the United States he
remarks:

“Practically there remains no uncultivated prairie land in the
United States suitable for wheat-growing. The virgin land has been
rapidly absorbed, until at present there is no land left for wheat
without reducing the area for maize, hay, and other necessary crops.
It is almost certain that within a generation the ever-increasing
population of the United States will consume all the wheat
grown within its borders, and will be driven to import, and, like
ourselves, will scramble for a lion’s share of the wheat crop of the
world.”

It is difficult for a citizen of the United States who has given
any attention to the potential of our land to conceive of such views
being held by an Englishman of highest scientific intelligence.
When I was in England last summer I had a long interview with
the editor of one of the papers of widest influence in all Great
Britain. I then remarked that there were forces in action in the
United States in three or four different directions which would
profoundly change all the conditions of British industry, and render
the English-speaking people of the United Kingdom and the
United States more and more interdependent. It is seldom that one
finds more than an occasional half a column in any great English
paper devoted to the subject of our economic relations and to the
development either of the American iron industry, of its agriculture,
or of the cotton production and manufacture. Yet, in all these
branches of industry, profound changes of world-wide importance,
and yet of greater importance to the people of Great Britain, are
now in progress. I may venture to say that this address of Sir
William Crookes marks even a more profound ignorance of the
forces in action in this country than even I had ever comprehended.
Sir William Crookes next submits the following computation:

“The rate of consumption for seed and food by the whole world
of bread-eaters was 4.15 bushels per unit per annum for the eight[149]
years ending 1878, and at the present time is 4.5 bushels….
Should all the wheat-growing countries add to their area to the
utmost capacity, on the most careful calculation the yield would give
us only an addition of some 100,000,000 acres, supplying at the average
world yield of 12.7 bushels to the acre, 1,270,000,000 bushels,
just enough to supply the increase of population among bread-eaters
till the year 1931. At the present time there exists a deficit in the
wheat area of thirty-one thousand square miles…. When provision
shall have been made if possible to feed 230,000,000 units
likely to be added to the bread-eating populations by 1931, by the
complete occupancy of the arable areas of the temperate zone now
partially occupied, where can be grown the additional 330,000,000
bushels of wheat required ten years later by a hungry world? If
bread fails—not only us, but all the bread-eaters of the world—what
are we to do? We are born wheat-eaters. Other races, vastly
superior to us in numbers, but differing widely in material and intellectual
progress, are eaters of Indian corn, rice, millet, and other
grains; but none of these grains have the food value, the concentrated
health-sustaining power of wheat, and it is on this account
that the accumulated experience of civilized mankind has set wheat
apart as the fit and proper food for the development of muscle and
brains.”

Sir William then proceeds to deal with the salvation by chemistry.
But before taking notes from that part of his address, is it not
singular to remark this tendency of the scientist as well as of the
English farmer to think only in terms of wheat, wholly ignoring
other grains? It may be interesting to point out the exact difference
in the nutrients.

Wheat flour is analyzed in the following statement:

Corn or maize meal differs only as follows:

[150]

Oatmeal:

Rye flour:

It will be remarked that the difference between maize meal and
wheat flour consists only in a slightly larger proportion of fats and
a slightly less proportion of protein, a matter very easily balanced by
giving consideration to the other kinds of food which may be used
by the bread-eater. Again, it is hardly to be supposed that the
Scotchmen who listened to Sir William Crookes admitted in their
minds that wheat flour possessed any greater potential energy in the
development either of muscle or of mind than the oatmeal to which
they have been habituated for so many generations. I doubt if any
New England Yankee who had been brought up on the diet of corn
(maize) bread and baked beans, the latter supplying the protein
element in abundance, would admit any greater development of the
muscle or brain by exclusive dependence on wheat for the bread of
life. It is not, however, my purpose to deal with the relative food
values of wheat and other grains; it is simply to take up this extraordinary
delusion of Sir William Crookes in respect to the potential
of the wheat-producing area of this country. His theory is salvation
by chemistry, and he rightfully calls attention to the necessity for
obtaining a cheap and abundant supply of nitrogen. All the other
elements for fertilizing the soil are relatively abundant at low cost,
especially in this country. Our enormous supply of the phosphates
of lime and potash gives assurance on this matter, and our one deficiency,
or rather the one element heretofore of high cost, has been
the necessary proportion of nitrogen required to maintain an even
balance in the soil.

I am surprised that Sir William Crookes should attribute so
little importance to the recent discovery of the influence of bacteria,
which living and dying in nodules attached to the stalks of the[151]
leguminous plants dissociate the nitrogen of the atmosphere, where
the supply is unlimited, converting it to the nutrition of the plant,
and thence to the renovation of the soil. Sir William deals only
with the renovating qualities of clover, having apparently no comprehension
of the existence of the cow-pea vine, the soya bean, the
alfalfa, and many other types of legumes by which the partially exhausted
soil, especially of the South, is now being renovated with
great rapidity at a low cost. Sir William’s hopes of nitrogen seem to
be based on some method being found to save the sewage of cities,
but mainly on the conversion of the water power of Niagara and
other great falls to the generation of electricity and thence to the dissociation
of the nitrogen of the atmosphere.

The point to which I wish to direct attention and inquiry is this
alleged nearly complete taking up of the land of the United States
capable of producing wheat in paying quantities. The question
which Sir William Crookes puts is this: He says there is a deficit in
the wheat area of thirty-one thousand square miles which must be
converted to wheat-growing in order to keep up with the increasing
demand of the world to prevent wheat starvation in less than
one generation. It will be observed that the present necessities
of the world are computed by Sir William Crookes at 2,324,000,000
bushels, of which this country will supply 600,000,000 to
700,000,000 bushels from an area of land devoted to wheat of
71,000 square miles, a fraction over two per cent of the area of the
United States, omitting Alaska.

The problem may then be stated in these terms: Given a demand
of the wheat-consuming population of the world for this whole
supply of 2,324,000,000 bushels, this country could supply it at the
present average per acre by devoting two hundred and fifty thousand
square miles to this crop, or less than ten per cent of the area, omitting
Alaska. We could supply the world’s present demand, but of
course such computations are purely speculative.

I venture to say that if a contract could be entered into by the
bread-eaters of the world with the farmers of the United States,
giving them an assurance of a price equal to one dollar a bushel in
London, or a fraction under thirty-three shillings per quarter of eight
bushels of sixty pounds each, which would yield to the American
farmer from sixty to eighty cents per bushel on the farm, the land
now under cultivation in wheat and not required for any other crop
or for pasture would be opened in the United States which would
be devoted to this service year by year as fast as the consumption
called for it. In fact, there are now fully one hundred thousand
square miles of land, 64,000,000 acres, fully suitable to the production
of wheat at fifteen bushels to the acre, practically unoccupied in[152]
any branch of agriculture, which would be devoted to wheat on an
assured price of one dollar a bushel in Mark Lane, yielding 960,000,000
bushels. Or, to limit the question yet more: Sir William
Crookes states the needs of the people of the United Kingdom at the
present time to be 240,000,000 bushels, increasing at a rate of
less than two per cent per annum, of which twenty-five per cent is
derived from her own soil. If John Bull, in place of building
granaries, could offer thirty-three shillings a quarter, or one dollar
a bushel, in London as a permanent price for the next thirty
years, would not Uncle Sam accept the offer? and if Uncle Sam
should then ask for bids among the States, are there not several
single States or Territories that would take the contract each for
itself?

Having put that question, I now propose to submit an inquiry in
due form in order to sustain my own belief that we can supply the
whole present and the increasing demand of Great Britain for the
next thirty years with six bushels of wheat per head at a dollar a
bushel from land situated wholly in the Indian Territory, not yet
open to private entry, but which may soon be open when the Indian
titles have all been purchased. Or, again, I undertake to say that the
State of Texas can meet this whole demand without impairing in the
slightest degree its present products of grain, cotton, wool, and meats,
and without appropriating the use of more than a small fraction of
the area of that single State which has not yet been fenced in or subjected
to the plow to the production of wheat.

Perhaps it would be better to put a more simple proposition in
order to bring out what would be perfectly feasible. Let it be assumed
that the British public should really become so alarmed as to
be willing to put up the granaries which have been suggested for
storing fourteen weeks’ consumption, or 64,000,000 bushels. That
would require a very large capital which would yield no income
on which there would be a heavy loss of interest and a considerable
risk of damage to the wheat during the period of storage. In place
of this a feasible plan would be to put up the capital which would
be required for building these granaries, invest it in consols, and
pledge it as collateral security for the fulfillment of a contract running
for thirty years for the annual purchase of 10,000,000 bushels
of wheat per month, or say 128,000,000 bushels a year, or twice the
quantity proposed to be stored.

There are several large dealers in grain and provisions in the
United States who would be ready to take this contract and to put up
a sufficient sum of capital invested in United States bonds to serve
as security for prompt delivery.

An assured supply of 128,000,000 bushels in addition to the[153]
ordinary supply might allay the fear of scarcity and high price of
bread. It may here be observed that the low average crop per acre
of the United States has been due to the inclusion of wheat grown
on land partially exhausted by cropping or not well adapted to this
grain. The all-wheat as well as the all-cotton and all-tobacco
methods of ignorant farming or cropping year after year are now
very rapidly giving place to varied crops coupled with an increase of
product per acre. No agency has been of such service in this matter
as the Agricultural Experiment Stations, now established in almost
every State under the supervision of men of the highest capacity.
Under this system wheat, which requires a few days of machine work
in the spring and autumn, occupying very little time of the farmer
himself, is rapidly becoming the surplus or money crop of farms
otherwise maintained on the alternate products. Under such cultivation
an average crop of twenty bushels to the acre would be assured,
in many sections much more. One hundred and twenty-eight million
bushels at twenty bushels per acre would require 6,400,000
acres, or ten thousand square miles. As an alternate with other
crops in a rotation of four, this would call for only forty thousand
square miles in varied farming. In order to satisfy the anxieties of
Sir William Crookes lest land should be taken from other necessary
work, this area might be divided among several States and Territories,
say five thousand square miles among eight. Oklahoma (38,719
square miles) was opened to settlement only seven years since, and
has yet a great deal of unoccupied land. It will this year raise
13,000,000 bushels of wheat from 850 square miles devoted to the
crop. Give Oklahoma five thousand square miles, the unoccupied
Indian Territory (30,272 square miles) would take all the rest as
soon as open; but we may only assign five thousand square miles to
that area. Five thousand more might be assigned to the limestone
section of Virginia, in the valley of the Shenandoah and its tributaries;
five thousand each to Kentucky (40,400 square miles) and
Tennessee (42,050 square miles), while the great wheat-growing
States—Kansas (82,080 square miles), Nebraska (77,510 square
miles), Minnesota (83,365 square miles), and the two Dakotas
(148,445 square miles)—would compete for the contract each to
open a little patch of five thousand square miles, not yet adjacent to
railways. We should thus have exhausted the area called for without
regard to the instant competition which would come from California
(158,360 square miles), Oregon (96,030 square miles), and
Washington (69,180 square miles), and probably from Pennsylvania
(45,215 square miles) and other Eastern or Southern States. At a
dollar per bushel in London no difficulty would be found in placing
this contract even without resort to Texas (265,780 square miles),[154]
which could take the whole on but a small portion of its area not yet
under the plow.

The only additional measure which would then be required
would be one which must come in any event—namely, the neutralization
of the ports of export and import of food in the United States
and Great Britain and in such other countries as may choose to join,
together with the neutralization of a ferry or sea way for the transportation
of the food, wherein no hostile shot should be fired and no
seizure of private property permitted on the part of any nation, the
condition of this understanding being that if any other nation ventured
to question or contest this dedication of a neutral way for the
conveyance of food to the purposes of peace, the navies of Great
Britain and of the United States would be united to force its acceptance,
and to sweep from the ocean the fleet of every state or nation
which ventured to contest this measure. That would be a suitable
measure for beginning to make a right use of navies—for the protection
of commerce and for the destruction of every fleet or vessel
which did not accept the principle that private property not contraband
of war should be exempt from seizure upon the high seas,
coupled with a declaration limiting contraband of war so that it may
never be made to include customary articles of commerce, especially
food, not now contraband.

The foregoing text was set in type and one hundred advance
proof sheets were supplied, which have been sent by the writer to
the Secretaries of Agriculture and the chiefs of the Agricultural
Experiment Stations in all the States to which we look for any considerable
product of wheat. The replies are so complete and so
numerous as to make it impossible to incorporate a full digest of
the whole case within the limits of the present article. A supplement
will be prepared for a later number of this journal, in
which this information will be tabulated. For the present purpose
I may avail myself only of a part of the data which have been
sent to me.

1. The evidence suffices to prove that there is not a State named
above which could not set apart five thousand square miles for the
cultivation of wheat in a rotation of four without trenching in the
slightest degree upon any other crop. 2. In previous essays, in which
I have dealt with the potential of the agriculture of this country, I
have very guardedly computed but one half our total area of three
million square miles (omitting Alaska) as being arable land, suitable
for the plow. The returns now in my hands would render it suitable
to increase that area to two thirds, or two million square miles subject
to cultivation. 3. The area now under the plow for the production[155]
of our principal crops for the year 1897 is given in the table
below. If miscellaneous crops be added to these principal crops, the
cultivated land of this country does not now exceed, and in fact does
not reach, twenty per cent of the arable land, while from the cultivated
portion a progressive increase in product may be expected under
the impetus of improved methods of farming on lessening areas
in each farm.

The area under wheat in 1897 was a fraction under forty million
acres, or a little less than sixty-two thousand square miles. The high
price secured for that crop has led to an increase in land under wheat
in 1898 to a fraction under seventy-one thousand square miles
(nine thousand square miles added), on which the largest crop ever
known has doubtless been raised, variously computed at the present
time from 620,000,000 to 700,000,000 bushels. The area
now under wheat is therefore less than four per cent of our arable
land.

In order to develop our potential in wheat it will be best to limit
our present consideration to three States only—namely, Minnesota,
North and South Dakota—from which we derive the greater part of
our spring wheat. The area of these three States is two hundred and
thirty-two thousand square miles, disregarding fractions. The land
which is deemed to be suitable for wheat growing is estimated by the
officials from whom I have derived reports at one hundred and sixty[156]
thousand square miles. The crop of 1898 is computed at 190,000,000
bushels, a quantity sufficient to supply Great Britain with all
that she needs in addition to her domestic production. It has been
grown on an area of less than twenty thousand square miles, or upon
one eighth part of the land of these three States only; the rest of the
wheat land can be as surely and profitably devoted to the production
of wheat as that part already under that crop. The fact may be
recalled that the territory which now constitutes the two States of
North and South Dakota began to be computed separately from other
States only in 1880, when a little under 3,000,000 bushels were
credited to that territory. The minimum product of these two States
this year will be 100,000,000 bushels.

One of the authorities upon whom I rested for absolute information
is Mr. L. G. Powers, chief of the Bureau of Labor of the State
of Minnesota, in whose Annual Report for 1896 is the most exhaustive
study of the grain production of the Mississippi Valley that has
ever been made. I therefore do not hesitate to incorporate in this
article his comments upon the proof sheets sent to him:

“The probable product of wheat in a State like Minnesota, at
a fixed price, such as Mr. Atkinson mentions, can be estimated, even
approximately, only by taking account of a number of such factors
as the present actual and relative profit of the wheat farmer, and
the probable changes that will be made in the next few years in the
cost of cultivating wheat and of transporting it to London. A few of
the leading well-known facts relating to these subjects may with
profit be noted in this connection, and first a few words with reference
to the profits of wheat raising in Minnesota.

“Whatever may be true of wheat raising in Europe, or in the
Atlantic coast States of America, it can be positively asserted that
the average profit of the Minnesota wheat grower has been steadily
though irregularly increasing since the admission of this State to
the Union in 1858. This is evidenced by the relative number and
amount of farm-mortgage foreclosures in the State, as a whole, and in
its several sections at the present time and in the past. Properly to
use those foreclosures as a measure of the increasing prosperity of the
Minnesota wheat farmer, two facts should be kept in mind. In
1880, and prior to that time, the industry of wheat growing was most
fully developed in those counties which now constitute the First
Congressional District. The farmers of those counties at that time
depended for their income largely upon their wheat crops. Later
they have adopted a highly diversified system of agriculture in which
wheat is only an incidental cash crop. The exclusive cultivation of
wheat now finds its seat in the counties composing the Seventh Congressional
District. The lands of this district are situated about two[157]
hundred miles on an average farther from the markets of Europe
than those of the First District. Notwithstanding this fact and all
changes in the selling price of wheat, and all allied changes affecting
the wheat industry of the State, the farm-mortgage foreclosures in
the Seventh District in the five years ending with December, 1897,
were relatively twenty per cent less than they were in the First District
in the five years 1880 to 1884, and were forty per cent less than
in the five years 1869 to 1873. To the extent represented by these
figures has the average cultivation of wheat as an exclusive crop become
more profitable in Minnesota than it was twenty, thirty, or
forty years ago. A much greater increase of farm prosperity has
taken place in those counties which have adopted a diversified system
of agriculture, and made wheat an incidental cash crop.

“The growing farm prosperity in Minnesota above noted finds
its highest development in the past five years, during which the selling
price of wheat in London has averaged approximately one dollar
per bushel, or the amount called for by the conditions stated by Mr.
Atkinson. This increasing farm prosperity in Minnesota, which lessens
the mortgage foreclosures of the exclusive wheat growers forty
per cent in thirty years, has been the main factor in the settlement
of Minnesota and the two Dakotas. It has caused the wheat grown
in the territory of these three States to increase from 10,000,000
bushels in 1867 to 190,000,000 bushels in 1898. With no added
profit in the business, the settlement of the vacant lands of these
States and those of Montana and of the British Northwest will move
on, and twenty-five years from now will find in the territory tributary
to Minneapolis and Duluth not less than 400,000,000 bushels of
wheat raised annually. Even then but a fraction of the possible
wheat lands of the great Northwest will be under the plow. If a
material increase should take place in the present average profits of
the Northwestern wheat grower, the imagination of man could hardly
picture the stimulus to wheat culture that would result.

“With a fixed price of one dollar per bushel in London, called
for by Mr. Atkinson’s conditions, the American farmers can find increased
profit in two possible sources: decreased cost of transportation
to London, and lessening cost of wheat production in Minnesota.
A detailed analysis of the various charges that constitute the present
cost of transporting wheat from the Red River Valley of Minnesota,
the Dakotas, and of Manitoba to London gives reasonable assurance
of a reduction in the next few years of at least five and possibly seven
cents per bushel in such cost. Here is an almost certain addition, in
the next few years, of from five to seven cents a bushel to the profit
of American-grown wheat, providing only its average selling price
in London remains practically unchanged.

[158]

“A careful study of farm methods among Minnesota farmers discloses
this fact: Some wheat growers, with the best farm machinery,
and employing the best methods of agriculture, make a profit in wheat
raising of from ten to fifteen cents a bushel more than do their
less intelligent and less progressive neighbors. Now, the tendency
in the State and throughout the Northwest is to bring, by education
and a general exchange of methods, the poorer farmers up to the
level of the best. This change is rapidly taking place. It will not
require fifteen years to realize its consummation. When the methods
and facilities of the average farmer are brought up to the level of the
best of the present time, this change, with the change above noted
in transportation charges, will add to the average profit of Minnesota
farmers in growing wheat a total of not less than fifteen and
possibly of over twenty cents a bushel. Such a change would more
than double the existing net profit of the wheat grower in the Northwest.
Could it be maintained for a series of years, as is presupposed
under Mr. Atkinson’s supposition of London prices, it would furnish
such an incentive to wheat growing in Minnesota and the surrounding
territory as has as yet never been experienced. A million families
of immigrants would pour into the great Northwest within the next
twenty to twenty-five years. They would take up all the existing
vacant lands of Minnesota and the Dakotas. The lands suitable for irrigation
in these States and in Montana would be set to growing wheat.
The wave of humanity anxious to raise wheat for a dollar a bushel in
London would sweep past the boundaries of the four States mentioned,
and carry the cultivation of that cereal all over Manitoba,
Assiniboia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. In these four British provinces
and in the four American States, dollar wheat in London would
in twenty years open more acres of good land to wheat than are now
subject to the plow within their borders. Even then the beginning
only would have been made to the possibilities of wheat culture in
the British Northwest. Settlements would not have extended as far
north as St. Petersburg in Russia; neither would settlers have
trenched upon the lands with a climate as severe as that of the Russian
metropolis.

“The foregoing is a brief statement of what dollar wheat in
London would do for one section of North America in stimulating
wheat cultivation. If that statement is based upon a true conception,
as the writer believes it is, of the possibilities of the American
Northwest, it demonstrates how impossible it will be to maintain
dollar wheat in London for any great length of time in the future.
It also shows that Mr. Atkinson is wrong in not asserting a sure continuation
of that decline in wheat prices which he so fully predicted
in 1880.”

[159]

Cost of Shipping Wheat per Bushel from Moorhead, an Interior Point in Minnesota, to
Liverpool.

It will be remarked that Mr. Powers says I am wrong in not
asserting a sure continuation of the decline in the price of wheat
which I predicted in 1880. In setting up one dollar a bushel in
London as the standard of this inquiry, I had no thought that our
farmers could be made happy for the next thirty years by any hope
of securing so high a price. In my predictions in 1880 I said that
the time was not then far off when the farmers of the Mississippi
Valley would secure as large a remuneration from their wheat at
thirty-four shillings per quarter in London as they had been gaining
from a previous average of fifty-two shillings. I might then have
fixed the lessened price at twenty-eight shillings, and at the present
time I have a greater expectation of a reduction in the price of wheat
in Mark Lane to less than twenty-eight shillings a quarter, or eighty-five
cents a bushel, than I had in 1880 that it would so soon reach
thirty-four shillings. I merely adopted a dollar a bushel as an arbitrary
standard on which an abundant supply of bread at low cost
would be absolutely assured to the people of England.

In fact, as I stated before the Royal Commission on Depression of
Agriculture, it is not probable that a reduction in the price of wheat
to forty cents a bushel on Western farms or sixty-five to seventy
cents a bushel in England would stop the growth of this grain,
although it might check an increase. When the price went
down to a very low point on the last excessive crop it is probable
that 100,000,000 bushels of wheat were fed to swine and to cattle.
It proved to make better pork and beef than maize or Indian corn,
and, as the price of meat did not decline in anything like the proportion
to the price of wheat, the farmers who thus fed their excess
secured a profit which the sale of the crude grain might not have
given.

In this comment Mr. Powers deals with the reduction in the
number of foreclosures in Minnesota. Attention should be called to[160]
the fact that the United States census investigation for which a million
dollars was appropriated, for the purpose of recording farm mortgages
in 1890, disclosed the fact that in the ten great grain-growing
States of the middle West two thirds of the farms were then free of
any mortgage of any kind, and were well stocked; the incumbrance on
the remaining third being less than forty per cent of the computed
value of the mortgaged farms. Since that date several State investigations
have been made, leading to the conclusion that not exceeding
twenty per cent of the farms in these States are now under any incumbrance
of any kind. In the more prosperous parts of Minnesota
and other wheat sections since the substitution of intelligent and
varied agriculture for the single wheat crop, foreclosures have almost
ceased, such as do occur being attributed to special causes; while such
is the abundance of capital accumulated in this section that the rates
of interest on safe investments, which but a few years since were nearly
double those prevailing in the seaboard commercial cities, are now
about even. When certain causes lately produced a short stringency
in the money markets of the East, remittances were made from these
Western cities for investment in Eastern commercial paper.

In regard to wheat production at a fixed price in London, the
Commissioner of Agriculture and Labor of North Dakota remarks:
“Wheat at one dollar per bushel in London would net the North
Dakota farmer on the average about seventy-five cents per bushel on
the railroad track. At that price as a standard, every farmer in the
State would utilize all the land he has, and buy up more of the land
now lying idle and in the hands of speculators. It would increase
immigration so that nearly all the vacant Government land would be
taken up. We also have over one million acres of school and State
land, of which at least eighty per cent is suitable for raising wheat.
Such a price would give North Dakota a boom that never had its
equal.”

A few words may be given to the report from Texas. The Secretary
of the Board of Agriculture states that “the area of arable
land of fair quality, including pasture that might be put under the
plow in this State, is two hundred thousand square miles; about one
hundred thousand square miles suitable for wheat and other grains
lying north of parallel 31°; about one hundred thousand square
miles lying south of that line adapted to cotton, sugar, fruits, and
vegetables of all kinds.”

An unexpected reply comes from Idaho, as yet insignificant in
wheat production, stating that the potential of that State under the
conditions named might reach 400,000,000 bushels.

Again, from Arkansas, to which State we have looked more for
excellent cotton than for grain, “there are fifteen million acres of[161]
good wheat land; wheat is fast becoming a cash crop, displacing cotton—the
capacity of a considerable part of the land at the beginning
being forty bushels to the acre, which, being much better than five-cent
cotton, is leading the farmers to take advantage of existing
prices.”

Time has not sufficed since my questions were sent out for replies
to reach me from Oregon, Washington, and Montana, where the
potential in wheat production is probably equal to that of Minnesota,
North and South Dakota combined.

Sir William Crookes makes reference to the future necessity of
providing fertilizers, a matter to which the closest attention is now
being given by the cultivation of renovating crops. But regard must
be given to the fact that we have the most complete and adequate
supply of phosphate of lime and phosphate of potash in the vast deposits
of bone or mineral phosphates of Tennessee, Kentucky, and
Florida, while again we may look to nitrate of soda as a very inexpensive
source of nitrogen, of which the most adequate supply can be
assured at very low cost. Known methods are also being applied to
saving the enormous waste of nitrogen from our coke ovens and iron
furnaces.

I almost feel it right to apologize to Sir William Crookes for the
presentation of these facts. My function is that of the practical business
man who deals with these economic problems wholly from that
point of view, and not from the high standard of a complete mastery
of the physical sciences.

As I have stated, I happen to have dealt with this question several
times at meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science, and in other ways in Great Britain as well as in this country.
I deem it of the utmost importance at the present time that the
interdependence of the English-speaking people should be brought
into view in the most conspicuous manner. In their relative production
and conditions the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Ireland and the United States are the complement of each other.
Their mutual relation or interdependence is now being recognized,
and it can not be long before many of the legal obstructions to mutual
service will be removed. The people of this country are now passing
through a stage in their economic education closely corresponding
to that through which Great Britain passed between 1840 and 1856
under the wise leadership of Sir Robert Peel, Richard Cobden, and
William E. Gladstone. We move more quickly, not only in acts
but in ideas, than we did fifty years ago. The revolution of ideas
which has followed the revolution of institutions in the Southern
States has made the people of this country into one homogeneous
nation. A revolution of ideas in regard to the conditions of international[162]
commerce will presently bring the English-speaking people of
the world into one homogeneous body governed by the same common
law, the same common principles of action, and the same policy
in the collection of revenue. When thus united, there can be no competition
in the commerce of the world on the part of the continental
states of Europe under their present burdens—the blood tax of
standing armies and navies and the money tax of debts that can never
be paid. There have been within a few months two witnesses to the
growing influence and power of the English-speaking people when
united for the maintenance of commerce and for the conduct of the
works of peace, order, and industry: one is the warning of the
Chancellor of the Austrian Empire, calling upon the states of middle
Europe to unite their forces in order to remain capable of maintaining
government by privilege and taxation by force of arms; the other,
the recent manifesto of the enlightened ruler of Russia, calling upon
the states of continental Europe to disarm, lest they should hereafter
be incapable of competition with the English-speaking people of
the world when they become bound together by a union of mutual
service and by community of interest which without any formal
alliance will give to them the chief control in rendering service by the
exchange of product for product to all other states and nations, to the
mutual benefit of all who are thus joined in the bonds of peace.

On my visit to Russia last year, to meet the leading economists
and statisticians of Europe, it was stated to me by well-informed men
that a plan had been considered by several continental states in
the event of war to change the present international custom by making
food products contraband of war, the purpose being to cripple
England. To such desperate conditions have some of the European
states been brought under the burden of the policy of blood and iron.
My comment upon this insane proposal was that I hoped it might
become a matter of public discussion, since nothing could so surely
and quickly bring about a commercial union of the English-speaking
people, to the end that, even if no other alliance were made, their
navies might at any moment be combined for the protection of their
commerce, and for the total cessation of any interference by war vessels
or privateers with their traffic.

The prime motive of this article is to remove from the minds of
our English friends many false impressions which I have constantly
met in my intercourse even among men who hold important positions,
of which the address of Sir William Crookes is but an extreme
expression, and to bring into common view a comprehension
of the resources of this country and of the mutual dependence of the
United Kingdom and the United States in the supply and consumption
not only of wheat, but of all the other necessaries of life.

[163]

THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE.
A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY.

(Lowell Institute Lectures, 1896.)

By WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY, Ph. D.,

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY; LECTURER
IN ANTHROPO-GEOGRAPHY AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.

SUPPLEMENT.—THE JEWS.[1]

Social solidarity, the clearest expression of which to-day is
nationality, is the resultant of a multitude of factors. Foremost
among these stand unity of language, a common heritage of tradition
and belief, and the permanent occupation of a definite territory.
The first two are largely psychological in essence. The third, a
material circumstance, is necessary rather to insure the stability of
the others than for its own sake; although, as we know, attachment to
the soil may in itself become a positive factor in patriotism. Two
European peoples alone are there which, although landless, have
succeeded, notwithstanding, in a maintenance of their social consciousness,
almost at the level of nationality. Both Gypsies and
Jews are men without a country. Of these, the latter offer perhaps
the most remarkable example, for the Gypsies have never disbanded
tribally. They still wander about eastern Europe and Asia Minor in
organized bands, after the fashion of the nomad peoples of the East.
The Jews, on the other hand, have maintained their solidarity in
all parts of the earth, even in individual isolation one from another.
They wander not gregariously in tribes, often not even in families.
Their seed is scattered like the plant spores of which the botanists
tell us; which, driven by wind or sea, independently travel thousands
of miles before striking root or becoming fecund. True, the Jews
bunch wherever possible. This is often a necessity imposed for self-preservation;
but in their enforced migrations their associations must
change kaleidoscopically from place to place. Not all has been said
[164]
even yet of the unique achievement of this landless people. That
the Jews have preserved their individuality despite all mutations of
environment goes without saying. They have done more. They
have accomplished this without absolute unity of language. Forced
of necessity to adopt the speech of their immediate neighbors, they
have only where congregated in sufficient numbers been able either
to preserve or to evolve a distinctive speech. In Spain and the
Balkan states they make use of Spanish; in Russia and Poland they
speak a corrupt German; and in the interior of Morocco, Arabic.
Nevertheless, despite these discouragements of every kind, they still
constitute a distinctive social unit wherever they chance to be.

This social individuality of the Jews is of a peculiar sort. Bereft
of linguistic and geographical support, it could not be political.
The nineteenth century, says Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, is the age of
nationality; meaning obviously territorial nationality, the product
of contiguity, not birth. To this, he says, the Jew is indifferent,
typifying still the Oriental tribal idea. As a result he is out of
harmony with his environment. An element of dislike of a political
nature on the part of the Christian is added to the irreconcilability
of religious belief. It has ever been the Aryan versus the Semite
in religion throughout all history, as Renan has observed; and to-day
it has also become the people versus the nation, as well as the
Jew versus the Christian. Granted that this political dissonance is
largely the fault of the Gentile, its existence must be acknowledged,
nevertheless.

GEOGRAPHICAL
DISTRIBUTION
of JEWS.

How has this remarkable result been achieved? How, bereft of
two out of three of the essentials of nationality, has the Jew been
enabled to perpetuate his social consciousness? Is the superior force
of religion, perhaps abnormally developed, alone able to account for
it all? Is it a case of compensatory development, analogous in the
body to a loss of eyesight remedied through greater delicacy of finger
touch? Or is there some hidden, some unsuspected factor, which has
contributed to this result? We have elsewhere shown that a fourth
element of social solidarity is sometimes, though rarely, found, in a
community of physical descent. That, in other words, to the cementing
bonds of speech, tradition, belief, and contiguity, is added
the element of physical brotherhood—that is to say, of race. Can it
be that herein is a partial explanation of the social individuality of
the Jewish people? It is a question for the scientist alone. Race, as
we constantly maintain, despite the abuses of the word, really is to
be measured only by physical characteristics. The task before us is
to apply the criteria of anthropological science, therefore, to the
problems of Jewish derivation and descent. Only incidentally and
as matters of contributory interest shall we consider the views of[165]
the linguists, the archæologists, and the students of religious traditions.
Our testimony is derived from facts of shape of head, color of
hair and eye, of stature, and the like. These alone are the data
indicative of racial descent. To these the geographer may add the
probabilities derived from present distribution in Europe. No more
do we need to settle the primary racial facts. Further speculations
concerning matters rather than men belong to the historian and the
philologist.

The number and geographical distribution of the chosen people
of Israel is of great significance in its bearing upon the question of
their origin.[2]
While, owing to their fluid ubiquitousness, it is exceedingly
difficult to enumerate them exactly, probability indicates
that there are to-day, the world over, between eight and nine million
Jews. Of these, six or seven million are inhabitants of Europe, the
remainder being sparsely scattered over the whole earth, from one
end to the other.

Their distribution in Europe, as our map opposite shows, is
exceedingly uneven. Fully one half of these descendants of Jacob
reside in Russia, there being four or five million Jews in that
country alone. Austria-Hungary stands next in order, with two
million odd souls. After these two there is a wide gap. No other
European country is comparable with them except it be Germany
and Roumania with their six or seven hundred thousand each. The
British Isles contain relatively few, possibly one hundred thousand,
these being principally in London. They are very rare in Scotland
and Ireland—only a thousand or fifteen hundred apiece. Holland
contains also about a hundred thousand, half of them in the
celebrated Ghetto at Amsterdam. Then follow France with eighty
thousand more or less, and Italy with perhaps two thirds as many.
From Scandinavia they have always been rigidly excluded, from
Sweden till the beginning and from Norway until nearly the middle
of this century. Spain, although we hear much of the Spanish Jew,
contains practically no indigenous Israelites. It is estimated that
there were once about a million there settled, but the persecutions of
the fifteenth century drove them forth all over Europe, largely to
the Balkan states and Africa. There are a good many along these
Mediterranean shores of Africa, principally in Morocco and Tripoli.
[166]
The number decreases as we approach Egypt and Palestine, the
ancient center of Jewish dispersion. As to America, it is estimated,
although we know nothing certainly, that there are about a half
million Jews scattered through our cities in the United States. New
York city, according to the last census, contained about eighty thousand
Poles and Russians, most of whom, it may be assumed, were
Jews. But they have come since in ever-increasing numbers, with
the great exodus from Russia, at the rate of scores of thousands
annually. A recent writer places their present number in New York
city at a quarter of a million. The British provinces, on the other
hand, do not seem to offer great attractions; as late as 1870, for
example, the census in Nova Scotia could not discover a solitary Jew.

A more suggestive index of the problems of Jewish distribution,
however, is offered in the ratio of the number of Jews to the entire
population. This is directly illustrated by our map. To be sure,
this represents the situation twenty years ago, but no great change
in relativity is to be suspected since that time. Even the wholesale
exodus from Russia of recent years has not yet drawn off any large
proportion of its vast body of population. Inspection of our map
shows that the relative frequency of Jews increases in proportion to
the progressive darkening of the tints. This brings out with startling
clearness the reason for the recent anti-Semitic uprisings in both
Russia, Austria, and the German Empire. A specific “center of
gravity” of the Jewish people, as Leroy-Beaulieu puts it, is at once
indicated in western Russia. The highest proportion, fifteen per
cent, more or less, appears, moreover, to be entirely restricted to the
Polish provinces, with the sole exception of the government of
Grodno. About this core lies a second zone, including the other
west Russian governments, as well as the province of Galicia in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. Germany, as it appears, is sharply
divided from its eastern neighbors, all along the political frontier.
Not even its former Polish territory, Posen, is to-day relatively thickly
settled with Jews. Hostile legislation it is, beyond a doubt, which
so rigidly holds back the Jew from immigration along this line.
Anti-Semitismus is not, therefore, to-day to any great extent an uprising
against an existing evil; rather does it appear to be a protest
against a future possibility. Germany shudders at the dark and
threatening cloud of population of the most ignorant and wretched
description which overhangs her eastern frontier. Berlin must not,
they say, be allowed to become a new Jerusalem for the horde of
Russian exiles. That also is our American problem. This great
Polish swamp of miserable human beings, terrific in its proportions,
threatens to drain itself off into our country as well, unless we restrict
its ingress. As along the German frontier, so also toward the[167]
east, it is curious to note how rapidly the percentage of Jews decreases
as we pass over into Great Russia. The governments of St.
Petersburg, Novgorod, and Moscow have no greater Jewish contingent
of population than has France or Italy; their Jewish problem is
far less difficult than that of our own country is bound to be in the
future. This clearly defined eastern boundary of Judenthum is also
the product of prohibitive legislation. The Jews are by law confined
within certain provinces. A rigid law of settlement, intended to circumscribe
their area of density closely, yields only to the persuasion
of bribery. Not Russia, then, but southwestern Russia alone, is
deeply concerned over the actual presence of this alien population.
And it is the Jewish element in this small section of the country
which constitutes such an industrial and social menace to the neighboring
empires of Germany and Austria. In the latter country the
Jews seem to be increasing in numbers almost four times as rapidly
as the native population. The more elastic boundaries of Jewish
density on the southeast, on the other hand, are indicative of the legislative
tolerance which the Israelites there enjoy. Wherever the bars
are lowered, there does this migratory human element at once
expand.

The peculiar problems of Jewish distribution are only half realized
until it is understood that, always and everywhere, the Israelites
constitute pre-eminently the town populations.[3]
They are not
widely disseminated among the agricultural districts, but congregate
in the commercial centers. It is an unalterable characteristic of
this peculiar people. The Jew betrays an inherent dislike for hard
manual or outdoor labor, as for physical exercise or exertion in any
form. He prefers to live by brain, not brawn. Leroy-Beaulieu
seems to consider this as an acquired characteristic due to mediæval
prohibition of land ownership or to confinement within the Ghetto.
To us it appears to be too constant a trait the world over to justify
such a hypothesis. Fully to appreciate, therefore, what the Jewish
question is in Polish Russia, we must always bear this fact in mind.
The result is that in many parts of Poland the Jews form an actual
majority of the population in the towns. This is the danger for Germany
also. Thus it is Berlin, not Prussia at large, which is threatened
with an overload of Jews from the country on the east.
This aggregation in urban centers becomes the more marked as the
relative frequency for the whole country lessens. Thus in Saxony,
which, being industrial, is not a favorite Jewish center, four fifths
of all the Jewish residents are found in Dresden and Leipsic
alone.[4]
This is probably also the reason for the lessened frequency of Jews
[168]
all through the Alpine highlands, especially in the Tyrol. These
districts are so essentially agricultural that few footholds for the
Jew are to be found.

A small secondary center of Jewish aggregation appears upon our
map to be manifested about Frankfort. It has a peculiar significance.
The Hebrew settlers in the Rhenish cities date from the third
century at least, having come there over the early trade routes from
the Mediterranean. Germany being divided politically, and Russia
interdicting them from 1110, a specific center was established,
especially in Franconia, Frankfort being the focus of attraction.
Then came the fearful persecutions all over Europe, attendant upon
the religious fervor of the Crusades. The Polish kings, desiring to
encourage the growth of their city populations, offered the rights of
citizenship to all who would come, and an exodus in mass took place.
They seem to have been welcomed, till the proportions of the movement
became so great as to excite alarm. Its results appear upon our
map. Thus we know that many of the Jews of Poland came to Russia
as a troublesome legacy on the division of that kingdom. At the end
of the sixteenth century but three German cities remained open to
them—namely, Frankfort, Worms, and
Furth.[5]
Yet it was obviously
impossible to uproot them entirely. To their persistence in this
part of Germany is probably due the small secondary center of Jewish
distribution, which we have mentioned, indicated by the darker
tint about Frankfort, and including Alsace-Lorraine. Here is a
relative frequency, not even exceeded by Posen, although we generally
conceive of this former Polish province as especially saturated
with Jews. It is the only vestige remaining to indicate what was
at one time the main focus of Jewish population in Europe. It
affords us a striking example of what legislation may accomplish
ethnically, when supplemented, or rather aggravated, by religious
and economic motives.

Does it accord with geographical probability to derive our large
dark area of present Jewish aggregation entirely from the small
secondary one about Frankfort, which, as we have just said, is the
relic of a mediæval center of gravity? The question is a crucial one
for the alleged purity of the Russian Jew; for the longer his migrations
over the face of the map, the greater his chance of ethnic intermixture.
A moot point among Jewish scholars is, as to the extent
of this exodus from Germany into Poland. Bershadski has done
much to show its real proportions in history.
Talko-Hryncewicz[6]
and Weissenberg,[7]
among anthropologists, seem to be inclined
to derive this great body of Polish Jews from Palestine by way
[169]
of the Rhone-Rhine-Frankfort route. They are, no doubt, partially
in the right; but the mere geographer would rather be inclined
to side with Jacques.[8]
He doubts whether entirely artificial
causes, even mediæval persecutions, would be quite competent for
so large a contract. There is certainly some truth in Harkavy’s
theory, so ably championed by Ikof (1884), that a goodly proportion
of these Jews came into Poland by a direct route from the East.
Most Jewish scholars had placed their first appearance in southern
and eastern Russia, coming around the Black Sea, as early as the
eighth century. Ikof, however, finds them in the Caucasus and
Armenia one or two centuries before Christ. Then he follows them
around, reaching Ruthenia in the tenth and eleventh centuries, arriving
in Poland from the twelfth to the fourteenth. The only difficulty
with this theory is, of course, that it leaves the language of
the Polish Jews out of consideration. This is, in both Poland and
Galicia, a corrupted form of German, which in itself would seem to
indicate a western origin. On the other hand, the probabilities,
judging from our graphic representation, would certainly emphasize
the theory of a more general eastern immigration directly from
Palestine north of the Black and Caspian Seas. The only remaining
mode of accounting for the large center of gravity in Russia is
to trace it to widespread conversions, as the historic one of the
Khozars. Whichever one of these theories be correct—and there is
probability of an equal division of truth among them all—enough
has been said to lead us geographically to suspect the alleged purity
of descent of the Ashkenazim Jew. Let us apply the tests of physical
anthropology.

Stature.—A noted writer, speaking of the sons of Judah, observes:
“It is the Ghetto which has produced the Jew and the Jewish
race; the Jew is a creation of the European middle ages; he is the
artificial product of hostile legislation.” This statement is fully
authenticated by a peculiarity of the Israelites which is everywhere
noticeable. The European Jews are all undersized; not only this,
they are more often absolutely stunted. In London they are about
three inches shorter than the average for the city. Whether they
were always so, as in the days when the Book of Numbers (xiii, 33)
described them “as grasshoppers in their own sight,” as compared
with the Amorites, sons of Anak, we leave an open question. We are
certain, however, as to the modern Jew. He betrays a marked constancy
in Europe at the bodily height of about five feet four inches
(1.63 metre) for adult men. This, according to the data afforded
by measurements of our recruits during the civil war, is about the
average of American youth between the ages of fifteen and sixteen,
[170]
who have still three, almost four, inches more to grow. In Bosnia,
for example, where the natives range at about the American level—that
is to say, among the very tallest in the world (1.72 metre)—the
Jews are nearly three inches and a half shorter on the
average.[9]
If we turn to northern Italy, where Lombroso has recently investigated
the matter, we apparently find the Jew somewhat better
favored by comparison. He is in Turin less than an inch inferior
to his Italian neighbors. But why? Not because taller than
in the case of Bosnia, for his stature in both places is the same. The
difference decreases, not because the Jew in Piedmont is taller,
but solely because the north Italians are only of moderate height.
So it goes all over Austria and Russia: the diminutiveness is plainly
apparent.[10]
There is in all Europe only a single exception to the
rule we have cited. Anutchin finds them in Odessa and Riga
slightly to exceed the Christians. In order to emphasize this point
it will repay us to consider the adopted fatherland of the Jews a
bit more in detail.

STATURE
POLAND.

Our map herewith shows a general average of stature for Poland
by districts. This unhappy country appears to be populated by
the shortest human beings north of the Alps; it is almost the most
stunted in all Europe. The great majority of the districts, as our
map shows, are characterized by a population whose adult men
scarcely average five feet four inches (1.62 metre) in height. This
is more than half a head shorter than the type of the British Isles
or northern Germany. What is the meaning of this? Is it entirely
the fault of the native Poles? We know that the northern Slavs are
all merely mediocre in stature. But this depression is too serious
to be accounted for in this way; and further analysis shows that
the defect is largely due to the presence of the vast horde of Jews,
whose physical peculiarity drags down the average for the entire
population.[11]
This has been proved directly. Perhaps the deepest pit
in this great “misery spot,” as we have termed such areas of dwarfed
population elsewhere, is in the capital city of Warsaw, where Elkind
found the average stature of two hundred male Jews to be less
than five feet three inches and a half (1.61 metre).[12]
The women
were only four feet eleven inches tall on the average. Compare the
little series of maps given on pages 172 and 173 if further proof of this
national peculiarity be needed. Two of these, it will be observed, give
[171]
the average height of Jews and Poles respectively, dividing the city
into districts. The social status of these districts is shown upon our
third map. Comparison of these three brings out a very interesting
sociological fact, to which we have already called attention in our
earlier papers.[13]
The stature of men depends in a goodly measure
upon their environment. In the wards of the city where prosperity
resides, the material well-being tends to produce a stature distinctly
above that of the slums. In both cases, Poles and Jews are shortest
in the poorer sections of the city, dark tinted on the maps. The
correspondence is not exact, for the number of observations is relatively
small; but it indicates beyond a doubt a tendency commonly
noticeable in great cities. But to return to our direct comparison
of Poles and Jews; the deficiency of the latter, as a people, is perfectly
apparent. The most highly favored Jewish population socially,
[172]
in the whole city of Warsaw in fact, can not produce an average
stature equal to that of the very poorest Poles; and this, too,
in the most miserable section of the capital city of one of the most
stunted countries in Europe.

AVERAGE STATURE
of POLES,
WARSAW.

AVERAGE STATURE
of JEWS,
WARSAW.

We may assume it as proved, therefore, that the Jew is to-day a
very defective type in stature. He seems to be susceptible to favorable
influences, however; for in London, the West End prosperous
Jews almost equal the English in height, while they at the same time
surpass their East End brethren by more than three
inches.[14]
In Russia
also they become taller as a class wherever the life conditions
become less rigorously oppressive. They are taller in the fertile
Ukraine than in sterile Lithuania; they sometimes boast of a few
relatively tall men.[15]
These facts all go to show that the Jew is
short, not by heredity, but by force of circumstances; and that
where he is given an even chance, he speedily recovers a part at least
of the ground lost during many ages of social persecution. Jacobs
mentions an interesting fact in this connection about his upper-class
English Jews. Close analysis of the data seems to show that, for
the present at least, their physical development has been stretched
nearly to the upper limit; for even in individual cases the West End
Jews of London manifest an inability to surpass the height of five
feet nine inches. So many have been blessed by prosperity that
the average has nearly reached that of the English; but it is a mean
stature of which the very tall form no component part. Thus perhaps
[173]
does the influence of heredity obstruct the temporary action
of environment.

Whether this short stature of the Jew is a case of an acquired
characteristic which has become hereditary, we are content to leave
an open question. All we can say is, that the modern Semites in
Arabia and Africa are all of goodly size, far above the Jewish
average.[16]
This would tend to make us think that the harsh experiences
of the past have subtracted several cubits from the stature
of the people of Israel. In self-defense it must be said that the
Christian is not entirely to blame for the physical disability. It is
largely to be ascribed to the custom of early marriages among them.
This has probably been an efficient cause of their present degeneracy
in Russia, where Tschubinsky describes its alarming prevalence.
Leroy-Beaulieu says that it is not at all uncommon to find the combined
age of husband and wife, or even of father and mother, to be
under thirty years. The Shadchan, or marriage broker, has undoubtedly
been an enemy to the Jewish people within their own lines. In
the United States, where they
are, on the other hand, on the
up grade socially, there are indications
that this age of marriage
is being postponed, perhaps
even unduly.[17]

SOCIAL STATUS
WARSAW.

A second indication in the
case of the Jew of uncommonly
hard usage in the past remains
to be mentioned. These
people are, anthropologically
as well as proverbially, narrow-chested
and deficient in
lung capacity. Normally the
chest girth of a well-developed
man ought to equal or
exceed one half his stature, yet
in the case of the Jews as a
class this is almost never the
case. Majer and Kopernicki[18]
first established this in the case of the
Galician Jews. Stieda[19]
gives additional testimony to the same effect.
Jacobs[20]
shows the English Jews distinctly inferior to Christians in
lung capacity, which is generally an indication of vitality. In
[174]Bosnia,
Glück[21]
again refers to it as characteristic. Granted, with
Weissenberg,[22]
that it is an acquired characteristic, the effect of
long-continued subjection to unfavorable sanitary and social environment,
it has none the less become a hereditary trait; for not
even the perhaps relatively recent prosperity of Jacobs’s West End
Jews has sufficed to bring them up to the level of their English
brethren in capacity of the lungs.

At this point a surprising fact confronts us. Despite the appearances
of physical degeneracy which we have noted, the Jew betrays
an absolutely unprecedented tenacity of life. It far exceeds, especially
in the United States, that of any other known
people.[23] This
we may illustrate by the following example: Suppose two groups
of one hundred infants each, one Jewish, one of average American
parentage (Massachusetts), to be born on the same day. In spite of
all the disparity of social conditions in favor of the latter, the
chances, determined by statistical means, are that one half of the
Americans will die within forty-seven years; while the first half
of the Jews will not succumb to disease or accident before the expiration
of seventy-one years. The death rate is really but little
over half that of the average American population. This holds good
in infancy as in middle age. Lombroso has put it in another way.
Of one thousand Jews born, two hundred and seventeen die before
the age of seven years; while four hundred and fifty-three Christians—more
than twice as many—are likely to die within the same
period. This remarkable tenacity of life is well illustrated by the
following table from a most suggestive article by
Hoffmann.[24] We
can not forbear from reproducing it in this place.

Death Rates per 1,000 Population in the Seventh, Tenth, and Thirteenth Wards of New
York City, 1890, by Place of Birth.

From this table it appears, despite the extreme poverty of
the Russian and Polish Jews in the most densely crowded portions
[175]
of New York; despite the unsanitary tenements, the overcrowding,
the long hours in sweat shops; that nevertheless, a viability is manifested
which is simply unprecedented. Tailoring is one of the most
deadly occupations known; the Jews of New York are principally
engaged in this employment; and yet they contrive to live nearly
twice as long on the average as their neighbors, even those engaged
in the outdoor occupations.

Is this tenacity of life despite every possible antagonistic influence,
an ethnic trait; or is it a result of peculiar customs and habits
of life? There is much which points to the latter conclusion as
the correct one. For example, analysis of the causes of mortality
shows an abnormally small proportion of deaths from consumption
and pneumonia, the dread diseases which, as we know, are responsible
for the largest proportion of deaths in our American population.
This immunity can best be ascribed to the excellent system
of meat inspection prescribed by the Mosaic laws. It is certainly
not a result of physical development, as we have just seen. Hoffmann
cites authority showing that in London often as much as a
third of the meats offered for sale are rejected as unfit for consumption
by Jews. Is not this a cogent argument in favor of a more rigid
enforcement of our laws providing for the food inspection of the
poor?

A second cause conducive to longevity is the sobriety of the
Jew, and his disinclination toward excessive indulgence in alcoholic
liquors. Drunkenness among Jews is very rare. Temperate habits,
a frugal diet, with a very moderate use of spirits, render the proportion
of Bright’s disease and affections of the liver comparatively
very small. In the infectious diseases, on the other hand, diphtheria
and the fevers, no such immunity is betrayed. The long-current
opinion that the Jews were immune from cholera and the other pestilences
of the middle ages is not to-day accepted. A third notable
reason for this low death rate is also, as Hoffmann observes, the
nature of the employment customary among Jews, which renders the
proportion of deaths from accidental causes exceedingly small. In
conclusion, it may be said that these people are prone to nervous and
mental disorders; insanity, in fact, is fearfully prevalent among
them. Lombroso asserts it to be four times as frequent among
Italian Jews as among Christians. This may possibly be a result
of close inbreeding in a country like Italy, where the Jewish communities
are small. It does not, however, seem to lead to suicide,
for this is extraordinarily rare among Jews, either from cowardice,
as Lombroso suggests; or more probably for the reason cited by Morselli—namely,
the greater force of religion and other steadying
moral factors.

[To be continued.]

[176]

THE PLAYGROUNDS OF RURAL AND SUBURBAN
SCHOOLS.

By ISABELLA G. OAKLEY.

While the officers and friends of education in large cities are
exerting themselves to provide open-air playgrounds for the
schools, the villages and smaller towns all over the East are reversing
the case. Except in the small district schools, the children’s playground
has almost ceased to exist.

This is an evil which has crept in with the tendency to centralize
the schools. When in any place the schools begin to overflow,
a movement to put up a larger building takes place, accompanied
by an effort to create a high-school department; not so much
the need of the community as the ambitious dream of some principal
who would be superintendent, or some sort of central sun to a group
of satellites. This dream is too easily realized, because it flatters the
people. Then there rises a preposterous structure of stone and brick;
a house of many gables, out of keeping with everything, either public
or private, in the place; a temple of vanity. Now is rung the knell of
the school playground, for the new “high school,” although it will
house all the children from five to fifteen, must needs be surrounded
by a fine lawn, studded with shrubbery, and threaded by bluestone
roads. The janitor has to employ an assistant to keep the grounds
in order. A shut-in, penitentiarylike place has been evolved by the
architect and school committee, gratifying to their pride and a
deep wrong to the children. There are many wrongs about it; the
one insisted upon here is the abolishing of the recess, that time-honored
joy of the American schoolboy and schoolgirl.

The cheerful sounds of play no more re-echo; the little ones
march in “lock step” from the doors to the very curb of this immaculate
ornate inclosure. If, on this beautiful lawn, any impulsive
youngster is caught running, or performing an instinctive hopscotch
or leapfrog, he is sure to be seen by a watching and powerful
janitor and reported. Leapfrog and profanity, in the true Draconian
spirit, are alike visited with the extreme penalty of a visit to the
principal’s office. However, in default of a playground, the new
schoolhouse provides a gymnasium for physical culture. I speak
now of a particular school, the pride of a simple village, and a type
of many. This gymnasium is a costly room filled with elaborate apparatus,
most of which is suited only to the high-school pupils, and
never touched by the majority, who leave school at twelve or thirteen;
their physical exercises have been chiefly provided for by
a box of dumb-bells and wands. In many schools the “gymnasium”[177]
is a cavernous and ugly basement, a place full of shadows
cast by the gloomy arches on which the building rests, with walls
of brick and floors of asphalt. Little troops of silent, pale children
arrive and depart all day for their physical culture, a dreary repetition
of silent dumb-bell exercises. There is no speech nor language
among them, no sound is heard but the jingle of the piano and the
sharp tones of the monitor’s counting. I have never heard the children
count aloud or accompany the calisthenics by singing except in
a private school. What an alternative for a free recess! No penitentiary
drill could be more perfunctory, spiritless, dead. It must
be said of the public schools that the thing they most seem to dread is
the sound of a child’s voice. The rude, untrained intonations, the
slovenly speech, the slouching attitude remain rude, slovenly, and
slouching, for all the school attempts to do for their improvement is
infinitely little. Even the blessed relief of shaking the arm and
hand to attract the teacher’s attention has been reduced in some
schools to lifting two fingers.

The pupils generally hate their calisthenics, or, in the new phrase,
physical culture exercises. And they would hate just as sincerely
regulated games superintended by some impossible master of sports.
What they want is spontaneity in play. Public money is wasted in
providing these abhorrent alternatives. Poor little Carthusians as
young as six and seven years are kept in their rooms, and principally
in their seats, above two hours at each session, and often after
that to atone for some delinquency, most likely for speaking. In
many schools they do not leave the room for any kind of exercise.
If they were capable of demanding their rights they would call for
both the abolition of the school lawn and calisthenic basement, and
the restoration of their playground and recess.

From the cruelty of this repression nature finds a little way
out; the children require of the neighbors what they have been
deprived of by the school committee. All around the precincts of
the temple of learning the trodden borders of the sidewalk, churned
to mire in winter and trampled to rock in summer, speak of the
victory of the boys. There are towns, perhaps, where they all go
straight home, but in our town, they gather four times a day in
knots of twenties and fifties for some kind of fun. The patient
neighbors go on removing coats and dinner pails from the pickets,
clearing away papers and missiles from their inclosures, yet I discover
that even they would vote to keep the school lawn; it improves
the town. Very true. But ingenuity could well contrive
some way of uniting the playground and the school park. Spaces of
grass to rest the eye and decorate the square could be interspersed
with inclosures of asphalt, furnished with a few parallel bars[178]
and swings, without sacrifice of appearances. Often the school
property is so large that it could include half a dozen such
special playgrounds. We have but to begin it to find some feasible
plan.

If the palatial school and its park is reaction against the “ragged
beggar” of Whittier’s lovely poem, sunning in the midst of the
blackberry vines of Hardscrabble Hill, it is a reaction that has gone
too far to suit a generation which loves to read Hosea Bigelow:

If it may be replied, that is not the generation for whom schoolhouses
are now built, it is one which may interpret the wants of
its children by just such recollections.

Another evil has grown out of the centralization of the schools.
The smaller schoolhouses formerly stood within convenient reach,
and by abandoning them we have forced many little children to walk
farther than they are able to walk. In the absence of street cars and
sidewalks this becomes a great hardship in extreme weather. In one
village in New York, out of an enrollment of fourteen hundred,
there was one month last year an average attendance of four hundred.
The new school building, which had cost seventy-five thousand
dollars, was more than two miles from some part of the district,
and there were no sidewalks; neither were there paved streets or
street lamps. In such circumstances a number of children are unable
to get home to the noon meal, usually dinner, and most important.
Where do they eat their luncheon? In their seats, watched
by teachers, who are compelled unwillingly to take turns at this
duty, and who have also to eat a cold, unpalatable lunch in bad air
for a week at a time. After lunch there is an hour to be disposed of
by the children, but there is no place to play in except the basement
or the streets of the neighborhood. The teachers frequently
read them a story, that they may stretch their minds a little if not
their bodies. It is a painful sight—few more painful to me—to see
a crowd of young children having their recreation in one of these
basements. Running and loud talking are forbidden; a police of
teachers armed with symbols of authority and punishment keep the
restless little prisoners within bounds.

Another objection to the central school is the rainy-day half-session.
Though the daily instruction may be managed so that the
pupils do not miss anything, it is still a fact that the majority of[179]
parents expect the school to take charge of their children, and are
often much dissatisfied to have them thrown back upon their own
hands on rainy days.

How has it come about that the playground and school recess
have been so generally given up? Is it altogether on account of
appearances? Teachers plead that the children ought to be preserved
from association with objectionable playmates. This may do
for the touch-me-not, only child, but in American society it is never
a strong plea. That small fraction which seeks to educate its children
as a class can do so in a few schools limited to church, plutocracy,
Quakerism, or some such narrow basis. But the schools of a
free State are, above everything, founded on the essential equality of
individuals in the State, and the possibility of every one to rise to a
successful and honorable manhood. If there is one conviction above
another strengthened by experience, it is that, in their choice of
companions and susceptibility to influence, children are governed by
their innate qualities, and these qualities are fixed by heredity and
home influences long before the school age. In so large a community
as a public school there is companionship for all, for it certainly
represents the town itself. Let no one be afraid of the democratic
instincts of childhood.

I believe the playground is abolished because it interferes with
that deadly order and craze for supervision which is sought for as
the prime condition both inside and outside the schools. Order
of a wholesome sort is not inconsistent with the free recess of a big
school. I watched in Los Angeles a great school as it was marshaled
out to play and back again at the sound of a drum. After
a quarter of an hour of unrestrained sport, several hundreds were
gathered in lines at the tap of the drum, facing the cheerful schoolhouse
in the mild bright sun, their faces radiating contentment and
good will while they straightened up at the mere hint of the teachers
on duty. In San Francisco I once found a certain primary school
keeping doll’s day, when every girl brought her doll to school and
exhibited her at recess. The school yard was a barren inclosure
within a high board fence, but a joyful place to that young company.
To what purpose are teachers urged to study psychology? The children
in their seats are emptied of everything that pertains to their
souls. Not to study, because the teacher will explain everything,
and to behave just well enough to get safe out of school, is the
simple code which covers the conduct of average children. To extend
this code to ideas of social duty—the highest—is not possible
while they do not form a society. Cultivation of friendship is just
as much out of the case; awakening of ideals, an impossibility.
But thrown together half an hour or more each day, the dead machinery[180]
that pulls the bells and adds the marks within the school
walls gives way to life; and here a man who sympathizes with childhood
has all the opportunity he needs, and probably much more than
he can use, in providing for that life where a code of reciprocity and
honor must be established. It is not as the magistrate he will successfully
rule, but as the sympathetic general in the field, whose very
name is a talisman and an inspiration to every man. In the school
yard, the bully, who comes to the front in about every tenth child,
needs to be repressed; the foul mouth must be cleansed; against
these prevailing evils the playground has a protection the street can
not possess. The boy’s world is a peculiar world, certainly, making
laws for itself as rigorous and about as barbarous as those of a gang
of pirates; but it is through his esprit du corps he can be uplifted
and educated; the individual may be a selfish animal; as one of a
body he is capable of heroism and devotion to a noble idea. He can
be a friend; the playground is the field for the natural growth of
friendships, and youth the generous time of their birth.

I recall another scene in a schoolroom in a Western city long ago.
A gentle girl, magnetic, deep-hearted, large-eyed, sat after school at
her table in tears. On a seat in front of her platform were piles of
slates which she had been correcting, for she instructed all day a
succession of arithmetic classes coming to her from the different
grades. At the same time she was in charge, for all particular purposes
of their order and conduct, of about forty boys in their early
teens. Her tears were in consequence of a quarrel at recess between
two of her boys. They had settled their quarrel by a fight;
not unlikely it was a wholesome fight, for they were not boys of the
mean sort, and were friends. It is an affair of long ago, but of a
time when, in a large city, a teacher shed her influence upon the
school playground, and took account of its moral standards, its friendships
and breaches of friendship.

Although white men, if they take due precautions, may live and do
certain kinds of work in tropical Africa, it will never be possible, Mr. J.
Scott Keltie concludes from the results of past experience and study, to colonize
that part of the world with people from the temperate zone. Even in
such favorable situations as Blantyre, a lofty region south of Lake Nyassa,
children can not be reared beyond a certain age, but must be sent home to
England; otherwise they will degenerate physically and morally. A plan
has been proposed of bringing Europeans down into the tropical regions by
degrees, and acclimatizing them by successive generations to more and
more torrid conditions till they are finally settled in the heart of the continent.
But the experiment would be a very long one, if tried; and the
ultimate result would probably be a race deprived of all those characteristics
which have made Europe what it is.

[181]

UP THE SKEENA RIVER TO THE HOME OF THE
TSIMSHIANS.[25]

By GEORGE A. DORSEY, Ph. D.,
FIELD COLUMBIAN MUSEUM, CHICAGO, ILL.

In a recent number of the Monthly I described some of the incidents
of a visit to the Haida and Tlingit villages about Dixon’s
Entrance; now I am to speak of the Tsimshian villages on the Skeena
River. The Tsimshian Indians are one of the five great stocks which
make up the aboriginal population of the coast of British Columbia
and southern Alaska. They are shut in by the Tlingits on the north
and by the Kwakiutls on the south, while on the head waters of the
Nass and Skeena Rivers they come in contact with the great Tinneh
or Athabascan stock. The Tsimshians are probably the most progressive
of all the coast Indians, and are one of a few stocks on the
American continent which are holding their own in point of numbers.

Desiring to visit those villages which are least contaminated by
modern influence, we ascended the Skeena River to the village of
Kitanmaksh or Hazelton. The Skeena is the historic river of British
Columbia; its name signifies the “Water of Terrors.” Nearly every
rock, every bend, every cañon is the scene of some mythical tale.
The scene of the birth of the Tsimshian nation lies in its valley; the
rock is still revered upon which rested the Tsimshian ark after the
flood, and the “Dum-lak-an,” “the new home and place of dispersal,”
is still a Mecca to which pilgrimages are made. In the modern development
of the Omenica and Cariboo gold fields the Skeena has
been the highway to the sea. For hundreds of years canoes have
been paddled up and down its waters; it has been the highway for
intertribal trade from time immemorial, and when the Hudson Bay
Company’s post was established at Hazelton, and merchandise began
to pour into the upper country in a steady stream, the Tsimshians
with their canoes enjoyed for a long time a monopoly of the carrying
trade. Gradually, as they learned the ways and methods of the white
man, the price per ton of freight from the coast to Hazelton began
steadily to rise, until in 1891 the tariff of sixty dollars a ton was declared
ruinous by the company, and they decided to build their own
steamer with which to carry their freight up the river.

Port Essington is the chief port of the mouth of the Skeena,
and in Essington we found ourselves on the twenty-third day
of July. The Caledonia was up the river on her third trip, but
was expected back any hour, but so delightfully uncertain is the river
[182]
voyage that, as we were informed, “there was no telling when she
would be down—in fact, she might be caught above the cañon and
wouldn’t be down for weeks.”

View on the Upper Skeena River; Peak of the “Five Virgins” Mountain.

The town of Essington dates back to 1835, when the Hudson
Bay Company established a post there. Its only rival for preeminence
on the coast is Port Simpson. The town in summer is
completely given over to fishing, the salmon cannery of Cunningham
& Son being one of the largest on the coast, and the river for
twenty miles is dotted with canneries. In one day, while we were
in Essington, the catch of salmon on the river was ninety-two thousand
fish. In addition to the cannery the town boasts of a good hotel
and a Salvation Army. An Indian Salvation Army is worth
going miles to see, for the Indian is a natural-born salvationist; the
army permits him to make all the noise he chooses, sing as loudly as
he pleases, and, best of all, he is entitled to make a speech every
time it comes his turn.

In the afternoon, about four o’clock, on the day after our arrival,
a long, shrill blast of the whistle aroused the entire town, for the
Caledonia was in sight. Down we went to the wharf, and the entire
town followed. What a motley crowd you will find on one of these[183]
British Columbia wharves! What coloring, what a Babel of tongues—Tlingits
from Alaska, Haidas from the Queen Charlotte Islands,
Tsimshians from the Skeena, Kwakiutls from Vancouver, Chinamen,
Japanese, Greeks, Scandinavians, Englishmen, and Yankees; men,
women, children, dogs, and from two to six woolly bear cubs. The
Caledonia is the exclusive property of the Hudson Bay Company;
she is not a common carrier, and does not encourage either passengers
or freight, as the tariff rates prove. There is a feverish haste and
hustle about the movements of the steamer which are fairly contagious.
She makes her first trip early in the spring, as soon as the
ice has left the rivers, on the Stickene; then it is a wild, eager
ambition of the company to have her make four trips up the Skeena
before the river closes up in the fall.

We had as passengers two prospectors from Spokane, a mining
expert from Victoria, a native evangelist from Essington, and about
fifty Indians, mostly women and children, each one with a varied
assortment of boxes, bales, bundles, and dogs; the crew numbered
twenty, and we had about one hundred tons of freight on board.

From Essington to Hazelton is one hundred and fifty-two miles,
a panorama of unending and unbroken beauty; never monotonous,
always interesting, it presents a river voyage which is probably not
equaled, certainly not excelled, by any other river voyage of the same
length on the American continent or in the world. We began the
voyage on Sunday morning, we tied up in front of Hazelton on
Saturday night. To recount in detail the haps and mishaps of each
day’s progress would take more time than I can command. In one
day we made forty-eight miles, on another day we made one hundred
yards, on another day we didn’t make a foot. With plenty of water
under her keel the Caledonia could run twenty miles an hour; she
could cut her way through a sand bar at the rate of a yard or so an
hour; and at either rate of progress she burned each hour from one
and a half to two cords of wood.

For the first ten miles the scenery does not differ materially from
that which we are accustomed to in the inland sea from Victoria to
Alaska. Then we enter fresh water and for the next forty miles
steam through one long mountain gorge, for here the river has cut
completely through the Cascade Range. The mountains begin at the
water’s edge and rise almost perpendicularly to heights of from three
to four thousand feet. Their lower limits are covered with dense
green forests, which seem to grow out of the solid rock. The summits
are smooth and glistening, and often covered with snow and ice.
Here and there we can trace some tiny rivulet issuing from an ice
bed high up among the clouds, and every portion of its course can
be traced down the steep mountain wall until it gives one final and[184]
headlong plunge into the river. At times these streams, taking their
rise in some extensive glacier, are of considerable magnitude, and
fairly roar as they leap and hurl themselves downward from their
dizzy height. And here we learned a curious fact about the river:
in summer it falls when it rains, and rises when the sun shines, so
rapidly do the pent-up snows of winter disappear and rush down the
mountain sides under the heat of the spring sun.

Until noon of the second day we had been making good time,
but now the fun began, for we had left deep water and had arrived
at the first flight of the eight-hundred-foot stairway which the Caledonia
had to climb ere Hazelton could be reached. The river had
been gradually widening as one island after another had been passed,
until now it was nearly half a mile wide and flowed through four
channels. The captain attempted one channel, but we couldn’t gain
an inch, and in drifting back again down the rapids the current carried
the boat against the rocks and, with a crash and a lurch, but
minus some woodwork, she was in the stream again. Then two
other channels were tried, but without avail, although the wheel was
throwing water and gravel over the pilot house. The fourth channel
was next tried, but the current was too strong. Then we “lined her
out,” and this novel method of getting a huge steamboat up a stream
soon became only too commonplace. The method of procedure is
this: The boat is forced against a sand bar and allowed to rest while
men go forward in a skiff with a long four-inch cable, which is made
fast to a tree on the bank or to a “dead man,” a long spar buried
deep in the earth of a sand bar and heaped over with bowlders.
When all is ready, the boat is attached to the capstan and the wheel
begins to revolve. It is tedious work and often provoking, as when
the cable parts, or the “dead man” gives up his hold, and the whole
work must be done over again. The boat quivers from stem to stern,
and the wheel, with all possible steam on, is simply one revolving
ball of water. We fairly hold our breath as we listen to the dull
vibration of the boat, the rumbling of the capstan, and the grating
sound of the keel of the steamer as she is being dragged through the
rapids over the bar; but above all can be heard the voice of Captain
Bonser as he shouts to his Indian pilot, “Go ‘head capstan,”
“Stop steamboat,” “Stop capstan,” “Go ‘head steamboat,” “Go ‘head
capstan!” In four hours we have made about fifty yards, but we
are in open water again and the boat settles down to its regular chug,
chug, chug.

Eighty miles from Essington the Skeena in its flight to the sea
makes its first plunge into the Cascade Mountains, and its entrance is
indescribably grand. No pen or brush can do justice to the beauties
of the Kitselas Cañon. At its mouth we are in a broad,[185]
deep basin, as if the river had felt depressed as it passed through
the quarter-mile narrow gorge and had here spread itself out to
breathe and rest before it started anew its downward journey to the
sea. It was late in the afternoon, and the western sun threw long
shadows of the lofty sky-crowned perpendicular walls of the left-hand
side of the cañon over against the rocky islets and ragged, rock-bound
eastern shore. Once we have entered, there is no faltering;
“lining it out” is impossible here, and on and on the boat labors
and climbs, twisting and turning through the narrow, tortuous channel.
A quick eye and a steady nerve must command the wheel now,
for a turn too much or too little would be fatal. One instinctively
feels that the “Water of Terrors” is the proper name for this river,
and with that feeling comes the other—that it was never intended
for navigation.

A Skeena River Salmon Cannery.

After four days’ grinding over sand bars and pounding against
rocks we tie up for repairs. One of the boilers had sprung a leak
which could be neglected no longer. The delay of thirty-six hours
was not without compensation, for the country about was open, and
proved a relief after the long ride through the high-walled river from
the sea to the cañon. The banks were low or moderately high and
of gravel or sand bluffs, and we could look off over a landscape[186]
broken here and there by solitary peaks or clustered mountains, their
summits always covered with ice and snow. To the far east were the
pure white peaks of the Five Virgins, their summits glistening under
the bright sun. Even the character of the vegetation had changed,
and the dense forests of somber firs, spruces, and cedars of the lower
river had given way to great cottonwoods and underbrush of hazel
and alder.

In the afternoon we climbed a bluff near the river, from which
we could look off over a country that was wild and extremely
picturesque. To one side of us could be seen a great mountain,
its summit covered by a mighty glacier whose blue-white ice
gleamed and glistened in the sun. And there was no mistaking the
power of the sun that day; its warm rays being especially welcome
after some weeks of the cold, depressing gloom and fog of the coast.

We were now really in the country of the Tsimshians, and every
few hours we drew up in front of some quiet, peaceful village, its
almost deserted cottages guarded by the totem poles of former days.
In succession we pass Meamskinesht, Kitwangah, and Kitzegukla,
with now and then a small salmon-fishing station. The villages
proved disappointing both in their smallness and modernness, and
none of them seemed worthy of any extended visit. From time to
time we passed great black patches in the forest, the result of extensive
fires, sure signs that the rainy coast was far away.

On Friday night we tied up to the bank within five miles of our
destination, but we had yet to pass Macintosh’s Bar. That was accomplished
on the following day, after eleven hours’ hard work, and
by five o’clock we had reached “The Forks,” or the junction of
the Skeena and Bulkley Rivers. Our course was to the left, up the
Skeena for half a mile, and in a few moments more we tied up in
front of the stockaded post of the Hudson Bay Company; we had
reached Hazelton. The region about us was “Dum-lak-an,” “what
will be a good place,” the home of the Tsimshians.

Before 1870 the town was farther down the river, on the flat at
the junction of the Bulkley and Skeena Rivers. It has had additions
to its population from Kis-pi-yeoux, and from villages down
the river. There are also to be numbered among the inhabitants the
Indian agent, Mr. Loring, the Hudson Bay representative, Mr. Sargent,
and his assistants, and Mr. Fields, the missionary. The Indian
population numbers about two hundred and seventy-five. The town
occupies a low, uneven plain, which, beginning at the water’s edge,
extends back for a quarter of a mile, where it is hemmed in by a high
bluff on the face of the second river terrace. There are but few of
the old houses left and still fewer totem poles, and they are without
particular interest. Most prominent in the village is the warlike[187]
stockade of the company’s post, with its two bastions at opposite
corners, and the blockhouse in the center of the inclosure, but now
hidden by the store which stands in front of it. The stockade was
put up in 1891, when an Indian uprising was feared throughout the
length of the river.

Wherever you find a trading post and a missionary you can not
hope to find people who retain much of their native life or who
are of great value to anthropology. But still Hazelton was sufficiently
primitive to be of interest in many respects. In matters of dress
the Indians are almost on a footing with the whites, but they still
make a curious garment for winter’s use which is worn by nearly all
of the interior tribes. This is a blanket made out of long, narrow
strips of rabbit hide, and is warm, heavy, and extremely durable.
We were fortunate enough to find a woman who was engaged in
making one of these curious garments on a most rude and primitive
loom. Other garments are still occasionally made of Indian hemp,
which grows wild and in abundance. This is beaten and pounded
and then spun into fine thread, and woven into the desired form.

Tsimshian Shaman’s Ceremonial Bow and Arrow.

In former days the Indians used large quantities of the wool
of the mountain sheep in making the beautiful chilcat blankets
that formed an important part of the chief’s costume, but now
the Indians buy most of their wool. Its chief uses are for
sashes and belts, which are still worn and made after the fashion
of former days. Of other garments of daily use, except moccasins,
there is nothing remaining. There are a few remnants
of ceremonial costumes still in existence, and by a bit of good fortune
we were enabled to secure the complete paraphernalia of a shaman,
or Indian doctor, who had only recently renounced his native practices
and joined Mr. Fields’s band of Christians. In the outfit thus
acquired were rattles, charms, blankets, masks, and headdresses of
various kinds. From another individual we secured the complete
costume of a member of the fraternity, or secret society, of Dog
Eaters. The Tsimshians have four such societies, and the Dog
Eaters stand third in rank, being surpassed only by the Man Eaters[188]
or Cannibal Society. The chief object of this outfit, apart from the
white and red cedar bark rings, was a long club, one side of which
was ornamented by a fringe of red cedar tassels. Of interest also
was the curious cap made of plaited bands of red cedar bark, and so
ornamented as to represent the head of the owl. Another object
secured from a shaman was a peculiar bow and arrow. These were
purely ceremonials, and were only used in the dances of the secret
societies. By an ingenious device the point of the arrow could be
opened out, and in this position represented the open jaws of a serpent.
On the bow were two fins, that could be lowered or raised at
will by means of cords, which represented the fin-back whale. The
bow itself is of light soft wood, and is bent by means of a string passing
around the operator’s body, the two ends of the bow being
fastened to the body of the bow by leather hinges.

In all the ceremonies, both religious and civil, an important part
of the costume is the mask. These are generally of wood, and portray
all manner of real and fanciful personages. Some of them are
wonders of ingenuity, being so constructed that the eyes, mouth, and
often the ears can be moved at the will of the wearer. Some of
them are even double, and so arranged that by drawing open the
outer mask, an inner one of an entirely different character can be
revealed. One of the rarest masks which was ever brought out of
the Tsimshian country is one in the possession of the museum, which
was acquired some time ago. It is of bone and finely carved, while
the teeth and tusks are those of animals.

Hazelton is of much interest to the observer of the human countenance,
for, while the residents of the town are Tsimshians, there is
a village near by on the Bulkley River, the people of which belong to
the great Tinneh or Athabascan stock, which extends from the Arctic
Circle on the north to the Territories of Arizona and New Mexico on
the south, where it is represented by the Apaches. In some respects
the differences between the Tsimshians and Tinnehs, or Howgelgaits,
as this branch is called, are quite marked, and these differences stand
out in greater relief because more or less of the population of Howgelgait
spend a part of their time in Hazelton, and so one sees representatives
of the two stocks in close contact. The Tsimshians, like the
Haidas, are great canoe people, and are rather short-legged, with great
development of the chest and shoulders. Like the Haidas, also,
they have strong, long arms, which bespeak familiarity with the
paddle. The Howgelgaits, on the other hand, are a pure mountaineer
people, and are tall, robust, and finely proportioned. Their
hair is black, coarse, and abundant. The eyebrows are thick and
remarkably wide at the outer side. This same peculiarity may be
observed in the masks of this tribe. The beard is sparse, but it must[189]
[190]
be remembered that the hair is generally pulled out as it appears,
particularly on the cheeks, while the mustache and the chin tuft
are allowed to grow. Among the Tsimshians the face is wide and
the cheek bones are prominent. The nose is narrow, with a depressed
root. Neither the Tsimshians nor Tinneh practice artificial deformation
of the head. With the Tinneh, or more exactly the Howgelgaits,
the forehead is broad and less receding than is usual with the American
aborigines. The face is full and broad and the cheek bones
prominent, but the nose, unlike that of the Tsimshians, is well formed
and generally aquiline, although occasionally it is thick and flattish.
Their lips are also thick and the chin is more prominent than
is usual among the Tsimshians. The eyes are large and of a deep
black color; the jaws are generally very heavy and massive.

Of traces of the ancient prevalent fashion in deformity we saw
very little. One old woman still retained the labret, but it was only
a shadow of the former labrets in size. Although the long, finely
polished bone ornament which the men formerly wore in a hole
through the septum of the nose has entirely disappeared, we saw a
few old men in whom the pierced septum was still plainly visible.
With the Howgelgaits it was formerly the custom to load down the
ears with highly polished bits of abalone shells, which were suspended
by means of brass rings inserted into holes one above the other on
the outer margin of the ear, extending from the lobe around the
entire helix.

A Street in the Tsimshian Cemetery at Hazelton, B. C.

Hazelton’s “City of the Dead” stands on a high bluff overlooking
the town and valley, and commands a view off over the broken
forest-clad country which is as beautiful as well could be. A trail
winds along the face of the bluff until the crest of the plateau is
reached, where it divides into a right and left path leading through
the main street of the silent city. The sight is strangely odd and picturesque.
Over each grave has been erected a neat little frame house,
often of considerable dimensions. All are painted with bright colors,
and the effect is decidedly “mixed.” In one of the houses, which was
substantially built and neatly carpeted, I saw through a glass window
two chairs, a washstand with full assortment of toilet articles, and an
umbrella, while at the rear of the house stood a table on which was
spread a neat cloth, and on the table was a lamp. On the floor was
a new pair of shoes. Over the table hung a large crayon portrait of
the departed occupant of the grave beneath.

In another house I saw chests of clothing, and suspended from a
cord were garments of various kinds, including a complete costume
of the fraternity of the Dog Eaters. These five-feet-deep graves covered
by little houses are not the usual manner of burial with the
Tsimshians, for until within a very few years the dead were cremated[191]
Even to-day in the neighboring village of Kispiyeoux the
dead are buried in shallow graves just in front of the house.

Of the many charming spots about Hazelton which are well
worthy of a visit, we had time for only one—a horseback ride to
the Howgelgait Cañon. The ride was most enjoyable in every respect.
The road leads from the town up over the plateau through
the burying ground, and then on through a partly cleared forest of
cottonwoods and maples. Then we plunge into a two-mile-long lane,
the trail scarcely wide enough to admit of the passing of a horse,
through a dense grove of hazel bushes, laden to their tips with unripe
nuts still protected by their green fuzzy envelopes; and now we
knew whence came the name “Hazelton.” Suddenly the grove terminates,
and after dismounting and walking forward a few steps we
came to the face of the cañon. What a sight! On the opposite cliff,
but on a higher level, stands the old deserted village of Howgelgait,
with its great empty houses and skeleton totem poles. At our feet,
down a sheer precipice almost a thousand feet below, the Bulkley
River, set on edge, rushes and roars and foams through the rocky
gorge to join the Skeena a mile away. Just by the mouth of the
cañon, at the edge of the great whirlpool, and on a gravelly beach,
stands the present town of Howgelgait. Hearing shouts, we looked
closer, and far down we saw men moving about, their forms dwarfed
to almost spiderlike dimensions. They were building a swinging
bridge over the river, and the timbers already in place looked like
the meshes of a spider’s web.

Looking up the cañon, we could see from the opposite wall near
the water’s edge, and far below us, a rude scaffolding suspended by
bark ropes over the river, and from this Indians were lowering their
nets and drawing up salmon. One man after another would leave
for his home, his back bending under the weight of many fish, his
place to be taken by another, who begins casting his nets. And so
these rude scaffoldings here and all along the rivers are occupied by
busy fishermen throughout the summer, for salmon is chief of the
winter’s food supply of these people. In one house we saw over a
thousand salmon hung up to dry for use during the winter months.

We left the cañon for the ride back to Hazelton with keen regret,
for no more fascinating spot did we find on our entire journey than
right here. On the way we encountered a woman of the Carrier tribe
of the Tinnehs from Frazer’s Lake, who was returning from Hazelton
laden with provisions and cheap calicoes.

We had scarcely entered Hazelton when the tinkling of the bell
of the “lead horse” announced the arrival of the pack train.
Second only in importance to the arrival of the Caledonia to the
people of Hazelton is the arrival of the pack train, for it brings the[192]
news of the far interior. But of much greater importance and value
is the cargo of furs which are brought out on every trip in exchange
for supplies which are taken in. On that day there were fifty-seven
mules, each laden with two bales of furs weighing two hundred and
fifty pounds, and including beaver, mink, otter, sable, and bear, all
destined for the Hudson Bay Company’s house in London, there to
be auctioned off in lots to the highest bidder, and then to be distributed
to all parts of the civilized world.

Hagivilgait Cañon, with Indian Fish Weirs at Bottom.

Within less than an hour’s time the precious furs were aboard,
and we bade farewell to Hazelton. The Caledonia drops back, is
slowly turned around by the current, and with its steady chug, chug,
we began our journey down the river, the power of the boat aided by
the swiftly flowing water carrying us along at a rapid rate. If the
slow, labored up journey was a revelation with its worries and anxieties,
what can be said of the down journey with its kaleidoscopic
panorama of sand bars, Indian villages, far-away snowy mountains,
dense forests of mighty cottonwoods, lofty heights which tower above
us clad to their very summits with eternal green, mountain streams,
and innumerable waterfalls and cascades! And what shall one say[193]
of that memorable ride through the cañon, the wheel reversed and
throwing water over the pilot house, the boat rocking and swaying
to and fro! Before we were fairly aware of the fact we were out
into that great, deep, silent basin again and off on the home stretch.
Apart from taking on wood and stopping at one or two Indian villages,
a delay of a few hours was made to permit some mining engineers
to examine a mine. They had just come up from the coast
and brought with them news of the gold excitement in the Yukon
Valley, and now for the first time we heard that magic word “Klondike,”
which was soon to “electrify the world and put the gold fields
of California, South Africa, and Australia to shame.”

At nine o’clock we were in Essington once more. “Klondike,
Klondike!” on every side. The whole country seemed to have gone
daft. One steamer after another went racing by the mouth of the
Skeena on the way to Dyea and the Skagway Trail. But our fortunes
lay in the other direction, and that night we were aboard the
Islander, bound for Victoria and the south.

LIGHT AND VEGETATION.

By D. T. MACDOUGAL, Ph. D.,
PROFESSOR IN CHARGE OF PLANT PHYSIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA.

Light is the most important of all the external agencies which
influence the vegetal organism, and the sun’s rays have been
the most potent force in shaping the development of existent plant
forms.

The sunbeam stands in a manifold relation to the plant. First
and foremost, light is the universal source of energy, by the aid of
which the chlorophyll apparatus in green leaves builds up complex
food substances from simple compounds obtained from the soil and
air, a process necessary for the nutrition of the entire living world.
Some obscure organisms, such as the “nitrosomonas,” soil bacteria,
are able to accomplish the construction of complex substances, by
means of energy derived from other chemical compounds, which
were, however, formed originally by green plants. These food-building
processes are designated as photosynthesis, chemosynthesis,
electrosynthesis, thermosynthesis, etc., according to the source of
energy used.

By photosynthesis, carbon dioxide from the air and water from
the cell are combined in the green cells of leaves, forming sugar and
possibly other substances. During this process an amount of oxygen
approximately equal to that of the carbon dioxide taken up is exhaled.[194]
It will be of interest to note the relation of the living
world to the atmosphere. Eight hundred to nine hundred grammes
of carbon dioxide are produced in the respiration of a single
person for a day, and the entire product of the human race for
this period is twelve hundred million kilogrammes. In addition,
large quantities of the gas result from the combustion of the four
hundred and sixty millions of kilogrammes of coal and wood burned
yearly. The lower animals, fungi, and green plants themselves contribute
an amount which must bring the total to twice the immense
sum named above. The atmosphere contains three or four hundredths
of one per cent of carbon dioxide, or an amount of about
two to three thousand billions of kilogrammes. No especial variation
in this proportion has been detected since observations upon this
point were first made. The fact that no increase takes place is partly
due to the absorption of the gas by plants, and its replacement by oxygen,
and also to certain geological processes in constant operation.
Absorption takes place at the rate of about two and a half grammes
for every square metre of leaf surface per hour, or about twenty-five
to thirty grammes daily, since the process goes on only in daylight.
It is to be seen that a single human being exhales as much carbon dioxide
as may be removed from the air by thirty or forty square metres
of leaf surface. According to Ebermayer, a hectare (2.47 acres) of
forest would use eleven thousand kilogrammes of carbon dioxide
yearly, and the amount used by plants is generally much in excess
of that furnished by the activity of the inhabitants of any given area.
Plants thrive and show increasing vigor as the amount of carbon
dioxide in the air rises until two hundred times the present proportion
is reached. An increase of the gas in the atmosphere would
therefore be partly corrected by the absorption and by the stronger
vegetation induced. Nothing short of a comprehensive cataclysm
could work such disturbance to the composition of the air as to endanger
the well-being of the animal inhabitants of the earth.

The activity of a square metre of leaf surface results in the
formation of one and a half to two grammes of solid substance per
hour in sunlight. A vigorous sunflower with one hundred and forty-five
leaves constructed thirty-six grammes of solid matter in a day,
and a squash with one hundred and sixteen leaves one hundred and
sixteen grammes in the same length of time. The amounts formed
by such trees as the beech, maple, oak, poplar, elm, and horse-chestnut,
with leaf surfaces aggregating three hundred to one thousand
square metres, must be correspondingly large.

A comparison of plants grown in strong sunlight, diffuse light,
and darkness will reveal many differences in stature and internal
structure. These differences are for the most part due to the formative[195]
and tonic effect of light. Otherwise expressed, the influence of
variations of light upon plants causes adaptive reactions, and disturbances
of the nutritive processes and growth.

In consequence of these facts the reaction of any given organ to
changes in the intensity of the illumination will depend upon its specific
functions and relation to the remainder of the organism.

The stems formed by seedlings and awakening underground
organs are usually surrounded by plants or other objects which cut
off more or less sunlight. The developing shoot can not spread its
leaves to the light advantageously until it has outstripped or grown
beyond the objects intervening between it and the light. This necessity
is one of the most important conditions in the struggle for existence.
To meet it, a very great majority of seed-forming plants
have acquired the power of accelerated elongation of the stems when
deprived of their normal amount of light.

Very striking examples of this reaction are offered by the awakening
corms of the Jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisæma triphyllum). The
corms usually lie at a distance of five or six centimetres below the
surface of the soil, and when the growth of the large bud begins in
the spring the heavy sheathing scales elongate and pierce the soil,
opening when the surface is reached at the distance of a few centimetres.
If the corm should have been buried deeper in the substratum
by floods or drifts of leaves, the growth of the bud scales will continue
until the light is reached, though it may be a distance of twenty
centimetres. Such growth may be seen if the corms are grown in a
deep layer of sphagnum moss, or in a dark room.

After the stems emerge from the “drawn” buds they show a
similar attenuation, attaining a length of twice the normal. The excessive
elongation of stems is accompanied by variations in the structure
and contents of the tissues. The cells are generally longer,
while the walls are thinner. In consequence, organs grown in darkness
are very weak and easily bent or broken. Growth in darkness is
attended by the non-formation of chlorophyll. This is replaced by
etiolin, giving the plant a pale, waxy, yellow appearance.

The adaptive elongation is not shown by all species, however.
It has been found that stems of beet, hop, dioscorea, and a few
others show no adaptations to diminished light. The adaptive
modification of stems elongating in darkness is developed from the
retarding influence exercised by light upon growth. Thus it is a
well-known fact that the action of certain portions of the sun’s rays
actually impedes or checks the increase in volume known as growth,
though it does not influence actual division of the cells to any great
extent. When this retarding action is eliminated excessive elongation
ensues.

[196]

The behavior of leaves in illuminations below the normal depends
upon the relation of these organs to the storage structures of
the plant as well as upon other factors, and many types are dependent
upon their own activity for plastic material necessary for
growth.

It is to be said in general that leaves of dicotyledonous plants
are incapable of full development in darkness, though to this rule
there are many exceptions. Thus the leaves of the beet develop
normally, or nearly so, in darkness.

On the other hand, leaves of monocotyledonous plants attain
normal size in darkness, especially those with straight or curved
parallel venation. Some, as the iris, swamp marigold, and onion,
attain a greater length in darkness than in light. Here, as in stems,
cell division is not modified, but the growth of the individual cell
is increased.

The growth of leaves in darkness may be easily observed if the
underground perennial stems of common mandrake are placed in a
dark chamber before the growth of the leaf buds has begun. The
leaves are peltate, and in the bud are folded about the end of the
petiole after the manner of an umbrella. Usually this umbrella
expands as soon as it has pushed upward and become free from the
soil, attaining a diameter of twenty-five to forty centimetres when
outspread. In darkness, however, it refuses to unfold, the laminæ
are pale yellow and retain the crumpled form of the bud, and as the
petiole shows an exaggerated elongation the organ takes on the appearance
of a very small parasol on a very long handle. The imperfect
development of leaves and the rapid decay of aërial organs
deprived of sunlight leads to the conclusion that the action of light
is necessary to the health and normal activity of these organs, and
the light therefore exercises a tonic influence upon vegetation.

Many species of plants are so plastic and capable of such ready
response to variations in external conditions that they undergo distinct
morphological changes in response to variations in the intensity
of the light. The common potato is an example of this fact. The
edible tubers are simply thickened stems, and the plant has the habit
of storing starch in any stems not acted upon by the light. The
branches arising from the base of the main stem are generally underneath
the surface of the soil, and afford the proper conditions
for tuber formation. Sugar is constructed in the leaves, carried down
the length of the stem, and deposited in the underground branches
as starch. Space is made for the accumulating store by the multiplication
of the thin-walled cells of the pith. If any of the upper
branches should become shaded, they become at once the focus of
converging streams of sugar, and similar enlargement ensues, resulting[197]
in the formation of tubers. Such structures are occasionally
observed in plants grown thickly together.

Vöchting, by a number of most ingenious experiments, has succeeded
in producing tubers on any branch of a potato plant by simply
inclosing the branch in a small dark chamber. As the result of one
experiment the entire main stem springing from a sprouting tuber
was converted into a new tuber nearly as large as the first. The
entire plant at the close of the experiment had the form of a dumb-bell,
with the old tuber as one ball and the new tuber as the other.

The same writer has described important results obtained from a
study of the action of light upon the stems of cactus, consisting of
a number of flattened internodes. When the growing tips of such
plants were allowed to develop in a dark chamber the new internodes
grown were cylindrical in form. Such behavior suggests that these
plants were originally furnished with cylindrical stems and foliar
leaves. The leaves at some time in the history of the plant were
found unsuitable, and gradually atrophied, while the stems were
flattened and extended to take up their functions.

Some very striking adaptations of form of organs to the intensity
of the light have been analyzed by Goebel. The common harebell
(Campanula rotundifolia) has an upright stem twenty to sixty centimetres
in height. The upper part of the stem bears sessile lanceolate
leaves, decreasing in size from the base to the summit. The first
leaves formed by the stem on its emergence from the soil are entirely
different in construction, showing a heart-shaped lamina with a distinct
petiole. These leaves are formed at the actual surface of the
soil, are generally more or less shaded or covered by fallen leaves, and
in fact are not known or seen by many collectors or observers of
the plant. Goebel found that similar leaves might be formed on any
part of the plant if it were shaded from the full glare of the sun’s
rays. The cordate leaves at the base of the stem were always produced,
however, no matter to what intensity of illumination that
part of the plant was subjected. It is therefore safe to conclude
that the cordate leaves are inherited forms, and that the lanceolate
organs are adaptations to light which may be shown by any individual
of the species.

In general it is to be said that the leaves of sun-loving species
have a thick epidermis, entirely free from chlorophyll, with stomata
on the lower side only, a firm consistence due to the formation of
woody tissues, and are often provided with a coating of hairs. The
leaves of shade-loving plants, on the other hand, have a thin-walled
epidermis often containing chlorophyll, stomata on both sides, and
are not so plentifully provided with hairs as those in exposed situations.

[198]

The variations in external form described above are due to the
intensity of the illumination. At the same time the structure and
arrangement of the cells depend on the direction from which the
light rays come. Thus, an organ receiving light from one side only
will exhibit a structure different from an organ of the same kind
receiving direct rays from two or more sides. Light, then, is a cause
of dorsiventrality—that is, of the fact that the upper and lower sides
of organs are not alike in structure. The leaf affords a splendid example
of dorsiventrality as a result of the exposure of one side only
to direct light. The upper side of a horizontal leaf, such as the oak,
beech, or maple, contains one or two layers of cylindrical cells with
their long axes perpendicular to the surface. In vertical leaves, such
as the iris, these palisade cells, as they are termed, are not so well
defined, and in all leaves grown in darkness this tissue is very much
reduced. If a young leaf not yet unfolded from the bud is fastened
in such a position that the under side is uppermost, palisade
cells will be formed on the side exposed to the direct rays of
the sun.

The influence of light upon the sporophylls, or reproductive organs
of the seed-forming plants, is quite as well defined as upon the
vegetative organs.

In general it is to be said that stamens and pistils may reach
functional maturity in darkness or diffuse light, and if pollination is
provided for, seed and fruit formation may ensue.

The diminution of light has the effect of transforming inflorescences
into leafy shoots in some instances, however. The more
common reaction consists of alterations in the size, form, and color
of the perianth, and greater changes are induced in the petals than
in the sepals. The corolla shows greater decrease in size in Melandryum
and Silene, in diffuse light, though the relative form is maintained.
The writer has obtained most striking results from growing
flowers of Salvia (sage) in a dark chamber, inclosing the inflorescence
only. In the normal flower the irregular scarlet corolla
attains three times the length of the calyx, and two stamens extrude
from under the upper lip. When grown in darkness, the corolla
with the adherent stamens measure about three millimetres in length,
or one twelfth the normal, and are scarcely more than half the size
of the calyx, which is but two thirds the size of similar organs grown
in the light. The color is entirely lacking from the corolla, and is
found only along the veins of the calyx.

In other instances in which the corolla is composed of separate
members, an unequal reaction is exhibited. The corolla of nasturtium
(Tropæolum majus) consists of five approximately equal petals.
Flowers of this species grown in darkness show one of nearly normal[199]
stature, two of reduced size, while the remaining two take the form
of club-shaped bracts.

The diminished size of the perianth of cleistogamous flowers of
such types as the violet is due directly to the action of diminished
light upon the hidden or inclosed flower.

The influence of light upon the structure, reproductive processes,
and distribution of the lower forms brings about the most widely
divergent reactions, which can not be described here.

The distribution and color of marine algæ depend upon the depth
of the water and the consequent intensity of the light. This gives
rise to distinct zones of aquatic vegetation. Thus in one series of
surveys the littoral zone, the beach area covered at high water and
exposed at low water, was found to furnish proper conditions for
green, brown, and red algæ. The sublittoral zone, extending to a
depth of forty metres, is furnished with red algæ, increasing in number
with the depth, and the brown algæ disappear; while the elittoral
zone, from forty to one hundred and ten metres, is inhabited by red
algæ alone. The number of species of vegetal organisms below
this depth is extremely small. An alga (Halosphæria viridis)
has been brought up from depths of one thousand to two thousand
metres.

A very great number of bacteria are unfavorably affected by
light, and find proper conditions at some depth in the soil or water.
It is on account of this fact that the water of frozen streams becomes
more thickly inhabited by certain organisms than in the summer
time, and exposure to sunlight is adopted as a hygienic measure in
freeing clothing and household effects from infection. Bacteria
occur abundantly in sea water at depths of two hundred to four
hundred metres, and quite a number of species are to be found at
eight hundred to eleven hundred metres.

The distribution of fungi follows the general habit of bacteria
in that they thrive best in darkness.

It is to be noticed in this connection that light is also a determining
factor in the distribution of the higher land plants. Thus
the amount of light received in polar latitudes is quite insufficient
for the needs of many species, entirely irrespective of temperature.

The retarding influence of light upon growth is even more
marked in the lower forms than in the higher. Such action is the
result of the disintegrating effect of the blue-violet rays upon ferments
and nitrogenous plastic substances.

The greater massiveness of the bodies of the higher plants enables
them to carry on the chemical activities in which these substances
are concerned in the interior, where the intense rays may not[200]
penetrate. The attenuated and undifferentiated fungi must seek the
shade, to escape the dangers of strong light, against which they have
no shield.

The reproductive processes are particularly sensitive to illumination.
The formation of zoöspores by green felt (Vaucheria) may
occur only in darkness, at night, or in diffuse light, and these examples
might be multiplied indefinitely. Many features of the germination
of spores and the growth of protonemæ or prothallia among
the mosses, liverworts, and ferns are determined by light.

Perhaps the most striking reactions of plants to light are to be
seen in locomotor and orientation movements.

Locomotor movements are chiefly confined to lower forms, and
are most noticeable in the “swarm spores,” or zoöspores of the algæ,
though exhibited by spermatozoöids as well. Zoöspores may be seen
collected against the side of the vessel receiving direct sunlight,
while the opposite side of the vessel will be free from them. The
chlorophyll bodies of green cells arrange themselves similarly. The
latter bodies may move away from the exposed side of the cell if
the light exceeds a certain intensity.

The typical plant may not move its body toward or away from
the source of light, but it may secure the same end by dispositions of
its surfaces to vary the angle at which the rays are received. This
form of irritability is one of the most highly developed properties of
the plant. Wiesner has found that a seedling of the vetch is sensitive
to an amount of light represented by one ten-millionth of a
unit represented by a Roscoe-Bunsen flame. The “sensitiveness”
to light may take one of three forms: The organ may place its axis
parallel and pointing toward the source of the rays, as in stems, when
it is said to be proheliotropic; the axis of the organ may assume a
position perpendicular to the rays, which is designated as diaheliotropism;
or it may place its axis parallel to the rays and pointing
away from the light, when it is said to be apheliotropic. Upright
stems are proheliotropic, horizontal leaves and creeping stems are
diaheliotropic, and roots and such stems as those of ivy are apheliotropic.

Sunlight varies from zero to the full blaze of the noonday sun,
and assumes its greatest intensity in the equatorial regions. The intensity
in latitudes 40° to 45° north would be represented by 1.5
units, and at the equator by 1.6 units. Near the equator the intensity
is so great that an ordinary leaf may not receive the full force of the
noonday sun without damage. The injury would not result from the
luminous rays, but from the temperatures, 40° to 50° C., arising
from the conversion of light into heat. As an adaptation to this
condition nearly all leaves have either a pendent or a vertical position,[201]
or the power of assuming this position by motor or impassive
wilting movements.

Among the plants of the temperate zone the so-called compass
plants are examples of similar adaptations. The compass plants include,
among others, the wild lettuce (Lactuca scariola) and rosin
weed (Silphium laciniatum). These plants place the leaves in a
vertical position with the tips pointing north and south in such manner
that the direct rays of the morning and evening sun only may
strike the surfaces at right angles, while the edges are presented to
the fierce rays at noonday. That this arrangement is an adaptation
against the intense light is evident when it is seen that specimens
growing in shaded locations or in diffuse light place the leaves in
the typical horizontal position. To meet the functional conditions,
both sides of the compass leaves are almost equally provided with
palisade cells for food formation and stomata for transpiration. The
estimation of the light striking a compass leaf shows that it receives
approximately the same amount of light as a horizontal leaf during
the course of a day, but the two maxima of intensity, morning and
evening, are much below that of the noon of horizontal leaves.

The influence of light upon plants may be briefly summed as
follows:

Light is necessary for the formation of food substances by green
plants, and it is an important factor in distribution in land and marine
forms.

Growth and reproduction are generally retarded by the action of
the blue-violet rays.

Light is fatal to certain bacteria and other low forms of vegetable
life.

Many plants have the power of accelerated growth of stems in
diminished light as an adaptation for lifting the leaves above “shading”
objects.

The growth of many leaves and of the perianth of flowers is
hindered in diminished light.

The outward form of many organs, particularly leaves, is dependent
upon the intensity of the light received.

The internal structure of bilateral or dorsiventral organs is largely
determined by the direction of the rays.

Plants have the power of movement to adjust their surfaces to a
proper angle with impinging light rays, as a protective adaptation.

Matches which do not contain any phosphorus and which take fire by
friction on any surface—a match that has been long sought—have been
prepared by Mr. S. A. Rosenthal and Dr. S. J. von Kornocki. It is represented
that they can be manufactured as cheaply as ordinary matches.

[202]

THE STONE AGE IN EGYPT.

By J. DE MORGAN.

The investigation of the origin of man in Egypt is a very complex
problem, belonging as much to geology as to archæology.
The earliest evidences we have of human industry, in fact, go back
to so remote a period that they should be regarded rather as fossils
than as archæological documents. They are very coarsely worked
flints, which are found near the surface of the ground among the
pebbles of the Quaternary or Pleistocene epoch, and similar to those
which occur abundantly in Europe, America, and Asia; but the
study and collection of them have been pursued with less method
than in those countries. The more recent monuments, so much more
conspicuous and more easily accessible, have attracted most attention,
while these have been left in the background.

No region in the world presents a clearer and more distinct individual
character than Egypt. Each village is a special world, each
valley a universe that has developed its own life; and man has felt
the special local impressions; and even in modern times, while all
the Egyptian villages present a similar aspect, and although the
fellah appears to be the same sort of a man everywhere, each locality
has its special individual characteristics. One who knows how to
observe men and things critically will find considerable differences.
These dissimilarities are as old as Egypt itself. They have always
existed, and are as much more intense as the communications between
district and district were formerly more difficult. They are
due to physical conditions special to each village, to the prevailing
winds, the form and character of the mountains, the extent of cultivable
lands, and the supply of water. A study of the detail of the
country is a very important preliminary to the examination of
Egyptian history. Every village and every nome had formerly its
special divinity and its particular usages. Are we sure that the gods
and customs were not imposed by local conditions? At Ombos two
hostile gods were adored in the same temple. May we not see in
this fact a recollection of the hostility which has always prevailed
between the inhabitants of the two banks of the river, and still continues?

Previous, however, to investigating these details which have
been so influential on Egyptian civilization, we ought to dispel the
darkness which hides from us the earliest traces of man in the valley
of the Nile, and examine how man lived in his beginning, to study
the geology of the country and its condition when it issued from the
seas. As one of the results of this study we find that palæolithic[203]
man, known to us only through the rough-cut flints we find in the
alluvions, made his first appearance. After this period of excavation
came that of filling up with silt, which still continues. New evidences
of man appear in his burial places and the ruins of his villages,
the kitchen middens which he has left in his habitations of
unburned brick and in his camps. This time he is more civilized; he
chips his flints with a skill that is not surpassed in European neolithic
implements; he makes vessels of stone and clay, covers them with
rude paintings, sculptures animal forms of schist, and wears necklaces
of the shells and the stones of the country. Then comes a
foreign people to take possession of Egypt, bringing knowledge of
metals, writing, hieroglyphics, painting, sculpture, new industries
and arts that have nothing in common with the arts of the people
it has overcome. The ancient Pharaonic empire begins, or perhaps
the reign of the divine dynasties. The men with stone implements
are the aborigines; the others are the conquering civilized Egyptians.
Nothing can be more interesting than a comparison of the arts of the
aborigines and those of the Egyptians of the earlier dynasties.
Nearly all their characteristics are different, and it is impossible to
regard them as of common origin. Yet some of the native forms persisted
till the last days of the empire of the Pharaohs. These
aborigines belonged to a race that is now extinct, they having been
absorbed into the mass of the Egyptians and Nubians among whom
they lived, and from this mixture the fellah of ancient times is derived.
The origin of the conquering race—of the Egyptians as we
know them—has not been precisely determined. The weight of evidence,
so far as it has been obtained, and the balance of opinion, are
in favor of an Asiatic origin and of primary relationship with the
Shemites of Chaldea.

In Egypt more than in any other country it is necessary to proceed
with the most scrupulous circumspection in the examination of
remote antiquities. The relics of thousands of years of human life
have been piled one upon another and often intermixed. The questions
they raise can not be answered in the cabinet or by the study of
texts; but the inquiry must be prosecuted on the ground, by comparison
of the deposits where they are found and in the deposits from
which they are recovered.

From my first arrival in Egypt, in 1892, my attention has been
greatly occupied with the question of the origin of the relics of the
stone age that have been found from time to time in that country.
I have gathered up the scattered documents, explored a large number
of sites, and have bought such flint implements as I have found on
sale. I have gradually been led to believe that while some of these
cut stones may possibly belong to the historical epoch, we shall have[204]
to attribute a much more remote antiquity to the most of them, and
that evidences of a neolithic age in the valley of the Nile are more
abundant than has generally been supposed.

In many minds the historical antiquity of Egypt, the almost
fabulous ages to which its civilization ascends, seem to challenge the
history of other countries, and the land of the Pharaohs, rejecting all
chronological comparison, to have appeared in the midst of the world
as a single example of a land which savage life had never trodden.
Yet what are the centuries since Menes ruled over the reclaimed valleys,
the few thousand years of which we can calculate the duration,
by the side of the incalculable lapse of time since man, struggling
with the glaciers and the prehistoric beasts, began his conquest of the
earth? The antiquity of Egypt, the eight thousand years (if it be as
many) since the first Pharaoh, are only as an atom in the presence
of these ages. We can assert some vague knowledge of these pre-Pharaonic
inhabitants, for two hatchets of the Chellean pattern were
found some time ago in the desert, one at Esnet, the other near the
pyramids of Gizeh; and we can now affirm in the most positive manner
that Quaternary man lived in the country which is now Egypt, and
was then only preparing to be. Four palæolithic stations have been
more recently discovered—at Thebes, Tukh, Abydos, and Daschur.
Join these sites to the other two where isolated pieces were found, and
we have the geography of what we know at present of Chellean man
in the valley of the Nile. Doubtless continuous researches would
result in similar discoveries at other points, for I have met these
relics wherever I have been able to make a short sojourn. The
Chellean implements are found in the gravels of the diluvium on
the pebbly surface. They have been disturbed and probably scattered,
but some places yield them more numerously than others—points
possibly corresponding to the ancient workshops. I have
found a considerable number of specimens at Deir-el-Medinet; M.
Daressy, of the Bureau of Antiquities, found a perfectly characteristic
Chellean hammer stone in the Yalley of the Queens at Gurneh, as
perfectly worked as the best specimens found at Chelles, St. Acheul,
and Moulin-Quignon.

The finds are not very numerous at Tukh, but one may in a
few hours make a collection there of hatchets (or hammer stones),
scrapers, points, simple blades, and a large number of stones bearing
indisputable marks of having been worked, but not presenting
precise forms. The deposit at Abydos is in the bottom of a circle
behind the ruins surrounding the Pharaonic necropolis. The specimens
seem sufficient to prove the existence of Quaternary man in
Egypt, while the search for them has hardly yet begun. In view of
them it is extremely improbable that man did not also exist there[205]
during the long period that intervened between this primitive age
and that of the earliest Egyptians who had metals. He did exist
there then, and the evidences of it are found in neolithic
remains between Cairo and Thebes, a distance of about eight hundred
kilometres along the valley of the Nile, in the Fayum, and
in Upper Egypt. Among these are the remarkable tombs at Abydos
which have been explored by M. E. Amélineau, and of which he has
published descriptions. They belong to a category which I have
characterized as tombs of transition and as signalizing the passage
from the use of polished stone to that of metals. Their archaic character
can not be disputed, and their royal origin is probably certain.
They may belong to aboriginal kings or to the earliest dynasties.
They reveal a knowledge of brass and of the use of gold for ornament.
At the necropolis of El-‘Amrah, a few miles south of Abydos,
are some archaic tombs, all of the same model, composed of an
oval trench from five to six and a half feet deep. The body is laid
on the left side, and the legs are doubled up till the knees are
even with the sternum; the forearms are drawn out in front and
the hands placed one upon the other before the face, while the head
is slightly bent forward. Around the skeleton are vases, and large,
rudely made urns, often filled with ashes or the bones of animals, and
nearer to them are painted or red vessels with black or brown edges,
vessels roughly shaped out of stone, and figurines in schist representing
fishes or quadrupeds, cut flints, alabaster clubs, and necklaces
and bracelets of shells. Bronze is rare, and found always in shape
of small implements. Both purely neolithic tombs and burials of the
transition period to metals occur at El-‘Amrah. The most remarkable
feature of the burials is the position of the corpse, totally unlike anything
that is found of the Pharaonic ages.

The Egyptian finds of stone implements present the peculiarity
as compared with those of Europe, that types are found associated
together belonging to what would be regarded in other countries as
very different epochs. The time may come when subdivisions can
be made of the Egyptian stone age, but the study has not yet been
pursued far enough to make this practicable at present. Among
these articles are hatchets showing the transitions, examples of which
are wanting in Europe, from the rudest stone hammer to the polished
neolithic implement; knives of various shape and some of handsome
workmanship; scrapers, lance heads, arrowheads, saws, pins,
bodkins, maces, beads, bracelets, and combs. The large number of
instruments with toothed blades found at some of the stations may
be regarded as pointing to a very extensive cultivation of cereals at
the time they were in use. The deposits of Tukh, Zarraïdah, Khattarah,
Abydos, etc., situated in regions suitable for growing grain,[206]
yield thousands of them, while they are very rare at the fishing
station of Dimeh. That the use of sickles tipped with flint very
probably lasted long after the introduction of metals seems to be
proved by the hieroglyphics; but very few evidences of the existence
of such tools are found after the middle empire.

No traces of articles related to the religion of the Pharaohs are
found in the burial places of the aborigines. In place of the statuettes
and funerary divinities of later times are found rude figurines
of animals cut in green schists. They represent fishes, tortoises with
eyes adorned with hard stone or nacre, and numerous signs the origin
of which is unknown, and were apparently regarded as fetiches or
divinities. Articles of pottery are very numerous, very crude, and of
a great variety of forms. It is not necessary to suppose that the people
who have left these relics were savages or barbarians. History
and even the present age afford instances of many peoples who have
obtained considerable degrees of civilization while backward in some
of the arts. It is hardly possible to achieve delicacy of design and
finish without the use of metals. I believe I have shown that an
age of stone once existed in Egypt, and that it furthermore played
an important part, even in Pharaonic civilization.—Translated for
the Popular Science Monthly from the Author’s Recherches sur les
Origines de l’Egypte.

SUPERSTITION AND CRIME.

By Prof. E. P. EVANS.

In January, 1898, an elderly woman came in great anxiety to a
priest of the Church of St. Ursula, in Munich, Bavaria, and
complained that the devil haunted her house at night and frightened
her by making a great noise. In explanation of this unseasonable
and undesirable visit from the lower world she stated that a joint-stock
company had been formed in Berlin, with a branch in Munich,
for the purpose of discovering hidden treasures, and that in order to
attain this object a human sacrifice must be made to the devil, and
that she had been selected as the victim. A woman, whose husband
was a stockholder in the aforesaid company, had kindly communicated
to her this information, so that she might be prepared and have
time to set her house in order. Satan, however, grew impatient of
the promised sacrifice, and began to look after her. The priest sent
one of his younger assistants at the altar to read appropriate prayers
in the haunted house, and thus exorcise the evil spirit. We can
hardly suppose that his reverence believed in the reality of the reported
apparition, and yet he could not assert its impossibility by[207]
calling in question the existence of the devil or the actuality of diabolical
agencies in human affairs without undermining the foundations
of the ecclesiastical system, of which he was an acknowledged
supporter. Such a declaration would “take away our hope,” as the
Scotchman said of the denial of a literal hell-fire and the doctrine
of eternal punishment. It was for the same reason that the great
body of the Catholic clergy, from Pope Leo XIII and the highest
dignitaries of the church down to the humblest country vicar, so
easily fell into the snares laid by Leo Taxil and accepted the signature
of the devil Bitru as genuine, and his revelations concerning the
pact of the freemasons with Satan as authentic. It is certainly somewhat
startling to meet with such a case of gross superstition as the
above-mentioned in one of the seats of modern science and centers
of European civilization. In rural districts, remote from the influences
of intellectual culture, however, instances of this kind are of
quite frequent occurrence, and often result in the commission of
crime. Human sacrifices to Satan are still by no means uncommon
in many parts of Russia, and are supposed to be effective in warding
off famine and in staying the ravages of pestilence. Even in Germany
and other countries of western Europe the belief in their
prophylactic virtue is remarkably prevalent, and would be often put
into practice were it not for the stricter administration of justice and
the greater terror of the law.

In October, 1889, the criminal court in the governmental province
of Archangelsk, in northern Russia, sentenced a Samoyede,
Jefrern Pyrerka, to fifteen years’ imprisonment with hard labor for
the murder of a maiden named Ssavaney. His sole defense was
that an unusually severe winter with a heavy fall of snow had produced
a famine followed by scurvy, of which all his children had
died. He therefore made an image of the devil out of wood, smeared
its lips with fat, and set it up on a hillock. He then attempted to
lasso one of his companions, Andrey Tabarey, and had already
thrown the noose round his neck, when the energetic wife of the
intended victim intervened and rescued her husband. Shortly afterward
he succeeded in strangling the girl and offering her as a sacrifice
to his idol. In the province of Novgorod, known as “the darkest
Russia,” it is a general custom among the country people to sacrifice
some animal, usually a black cat, a black cock, or a black dog,
by burying it alive, in order to check the spread of cholera. In the
village of Kamenka, a peasant, whose son had died of this disease,
interred with the body eight live tomcats. The immolation of dumb
animals, however, is deemed less efficacious than that of human beings.
On one occasion, when the cholera was raging severely, a deputation
of peasants waited upon their parson, stating that they had[208]
determined to bury him alive in order to appease the demon of the
plague. He escaped this horrible death only by apparently acceding
to their wishes and craving a few days’ respite in order to prepare for
such a solemn ceremony; meanwhile he took the measures necessary
to secure his safety and thwarted the purpose of his loving parishioners.
In Okopovitchi, a village of the same province, the peasants
succeeded in enticing an aged woman, Lucia Manjkov, into the
cemetery, where they thrust her alive into the grave containing the
bodies of those who had died of the epidemic, and quickly covered
her up. When brought to trial they proved that they had acted on
the advice of a military surgeon, Kosakovitch, who was therefore
regarded as the chief culprit, and sentenced to be knouted by the
hangman, and then to undergo twelve years’ penal servitude in
Siberia. We are indebted for these instances of barbarous superstition
to the researches of Augustus Löwenstimm, associate jurisconsult
in the department of justice at St. Petersburg, who has
derived them from thoroughly authentic and mostly official sources.
He reports several occurrences of a similar kind during the epidemics
of cholera in 1831, 1855, and 1872. Indeed, it is very
difficult to abolish such pagan practices so long as the clergy
foster the notion that animal sacrifices are expiatory and propitiatory
in their effects. In some parts of the province of Vologda
it is still customary on the day dedicated to the prophet Elias
(July 20th in the Greek calendar) to offer up bullocks, he-goats, or
other quadrupeds within the precincts of the church. The animal
is driven into the courtyard surrounding the sacred edifice and there
slaughtered; the flesh is boiled in a large kettle, one half of it being
kept by the peasants who provide the sacrifice, while the other half
is distributed among the priests and
sacristans.[26]

The belief that the walls of dams, bridges, aqueducts, and buildings
are rendered preternaturally strong by immuring a living human
being within them still prevails in many countries of Christendom,
and there is hardly an old castle in Europe that has not a legend of
this sort connected with it. Usually a child is supposed to be selected
for this purpose, and the roving bands of gypsies are popularly
accused of furnishing the infant victims. The custom of depositing
gold coins or other precious objects in the foundation stones of important
public edifices is doubtless a survival of the ancient
superstition.[27]

[209]

Löwenstimm mentions a curious superstition of pagan origin
still practiced in portions of Russia, and known as “korovya smertj”
(cow-death) and “opachivaniye” (plowing roundabout). If pestilence
or murrain prevails in a village, an old woman of repute as a
seeress or fortune-teller enters the confines of the village at midnight
and beats a pan. Thereupon all the women of the place assemble in
haste, armed with divers domestic utensils—frying-pans, pokers,
tongs, shovels, scythes, and cudgels. After shutting the cattle in
their stalls, and warning the men not to leave their houses, a
procession is formed. The seeress takes off her dress and pronounces
a curse upon Death. She is then hitched to a plow, together
with a bevy of virgins and a misshapen woman, if such a
one can be found, and a continuous and closed furrow is drawn
round the village three times. When the procession starts, the
image of some saint suitable to the occasion, that of St. Blasius, for
example, in the case of murrain, is borne in front of it; this is followed
by the seeress, clad only in a shift, with disheveled hair and
riding on a broomstick; after her come women and maidens drawing
the plow, and behind them the rest of the crowd, shrieking and
making a fearful din. They kill every animal they meet, and if a
man is so unfortunate as to fall in with them he is mercilessly beaten,
and usually put to death. In the eyes of these raging women he is
not a human being, but Death himself in the form of a were-wolf,
who seeks to cross their path and thus break the charm and destroy
the healing virtue of the furrow. The ceremony varies in different
places, and generally ends by burying alive a cat, cock, or dog. In
some districts the whole population of the village, both men and
women, take part in the procession, and are often attended by the
clergy with sacred images and consecrated banners. During the
prevalence of the pest in the province of Podolia, in 1738, the inhabitants
of the village of Gummenez, while marching in procession
through the fields, met Michael Matkovskij, a nobleman of a neighboring
village, who was looking for his stray horses. The strange
man, wandering about with an eager look and a bridle in his hand,
was regarded as the incarnate pestilence, and was therefore seized
and most brutally beaten and left lying half naked and half dead
on the ground. At length he recovered his senses and succeeded with[210]
great difficulty in reaching his home. No sooner was it known that
he was still alive than the peasants rushed into his house, dragged
him to their village, subjected him to terrible tortures, and finally
burned him. A curious feature of these remedial rites is the mixture
of paganism and Christianity which characterizes them; and it is
an unquestionable though almost incredible fact that their atoning
efficacy is often quite as firmly believed in by the village priests of
the Russian Church as by the most ignorant members of their flock.
In the autumn of 1894 some Russian peasants in the district of
Kazan slew one of their own number as a sacrifice to the gods of
the Votiaks, a Finnish race dwelling on the Volga, Viatka, and
Kama Rivers. Even orthodox Christians of the Greek Church,
although regarding these gods as devils, fear and seek to propitiate
them, especially in times of public distress.

Still more widely diffused is the practice of infanticide as the
sequence of superstition. The belief that dwarfs or gnomes, dwelling
in the inner parts of the earth, carry off beautiful newborn babes
and leave their own deformed offspring in their stead is not confined
to any one people, but is current alike in Germanic, Celtic, Romanic,
and Slavic countries, and causes a misshapen child to be looked upon
with suspicion and subjected to cruel tortures and even killed. The
supposed changeling is often severely beaten with juniper rods and
the scourging attended with incantations, so as to compel the wicked
fairies to reclaim their deformed bantling and restore the stolen
child. If the castigation proves ineffective, more summary measures
are frequently taken, and the supposititious suckling is thrown out
of the window on a dunghill or immersed in boiling water. In 1877,
in the city of New York, an Irish immigrant and his wife burned
their child to death under the delusion that they were ridding themselves
of a changeling. Cases of this kind are quite common in
Ireland, where the victims are sometimes
adults.[28]
Not long since
Magoney, an Irish peasant, had a sickly child, which the most careful
nurture failed to restore to health and strength. The parents,
therefore, became convinced that a changeling had been imposed
upon them, and when the boy was four years old they resolved to
have recourse to boiling water, in which he was kept, notwithstanding
his shrieks and protestations that he was not an elf, but their
own Johnny Magoney, until death released him from his torments.

Wilhelm Mannhardt, the celebrated writer on folklore, states
that when, in 1850, he was in Löblau, a village of West Prussia, he
saw a man brutally maltreating a boy on the street. On inquiry he
[211]
found that the lad had done nothing worthy of blame, but that his
only fault was an exceptionally large head. This cranial peculiarity,
offensively conspicuous in what seems to have been a narrow-headed
family, was reason enough for the parents to disown their offspring,
and to treat him as the counterfeit of a child foisted in by the fairies.
At Hadersleben, a considerable market town of North Silesia, the
wife of a farmer, in 1883, gave birth to a puny infant, which the
parents at once assumed to be a changeling. In order to defeat the
evil designs of the elves and to compel the restoration of their own
child, they held the newborn over a bed of live coals on the hearth
until it was covered with blisters and died in intense agony. In East
Prussia, the Mazurs, a Polish race, whose only notable contribution to
modern civilization and the gayety of nations is the mazurka, take precautionary
measures by placing a book (usually the Bible, although
any book will do) under the head of the newborn babe, so as to prevent
the devil from spiriting it away and substituting for it one of
his own hellish brood, thus unwittingly furnishing a marvelous illustration
of the beneficent influence of the printing press and the
magic power of literature. The Estonian inhabitants of the island of
Oesel in Livonia refrain from kindling a fire in the house while the
rite of baptism is being celebrated, lest the light of the flames should
render it easier for Satan surreptitiously to exchange an imp for the
infant. After the sacred ceremony has been performed there is supposed
to be no danger of such a substitution.

One of the most incredible instances of this extremely silly and
surprisingly persistent superstition occurred in 1871 at Biskunizy, a
village of Prussian Posen, where a laborer, named Bekker, had by
industry and frugality gradually acquired a competence and been
able to buy a house of his own, in which he led a happy domestic
life with his wife and five children, of whom he was very fond.
After fourteen years of unbroken felicity the wife’s elder sister,
Marianne Chernyāk, came from Poland to pay them a visit. This
woman was a crackbrained devotee, who spent half her time in going
to mass and the other half in backbiting her neighbors. She also
claimed that she could detect at once whether a person is in league
with Satan, and could cast out devils. The villagers came to look
upon her as a witch, and avoided all association with her, especially
as her aberrations manifested themselves in exceedingly malevolent
and mischievous forms. Unfortunately, she acquired complete
ascendency over her younger sister, who accepted her absurd pretensions
as real. On November 19, 1871, Marianne, after returning
from confession, went to bed, but at midnight Mrs. Bekker, who
slept with her youngest child, a boy about a year old, was awakened
by a fearful shriek and lit the lamp. Thereupon the sister rushed[212]
into the room, crying: “The demons have stolen your child and put
a changeling in your bed: beat him, beat him, if you wish to have
your child again!” Under the influence of this suggestion, which
seemed to be almost hypnotic in its character, the bewildered mother
began to beat the boy. The aunt now seized him and swung him
to and fro, as if she would fling him out of the window, at the same
time calling out to Satan: “There! you have him; take your brat!”
She then gave him back to his mother with the words: “Throw him
to the ground, drub him, beat him to death; otherwise you will never
recover your child.” This advice was followed, and the boy severely
strapped with a heavy girdle as he lay on the floor. Meanwhile
Bekker, hearing the noise, got up and at first tried to intervene for
the protection of his son, but was easily convinced by his wife that
she was doing the right thing, and persuaded to aid her in discomfiting
the devil by beating the boy with a juniper stick. The process
of exorcism, thus renewed with increased vigor, soon proved fatal.
At this juncture, as the son of the aunt, a lad of five years, threw
himself down with loud lamentations beside the dead body of his
little cousin, his mother cried out: “Beat him; he is not my child!
Why should we spare him? We shall get other children!” Thereupon
he, too, was maltreated in the same manner until he expired.
The aunt then declared that the devil had crept into the stovepipe,
and went to work to demolish the stove, but, when she was prevented
from doing so, fled into the garden, where she was found the next
morning by the school-teacher. By this time Bekker and his wife
seem to have come to their senses, and were sitting by the corpses
of the murdered children, weeping and praying, as the neighbors
entered the house. The trial, which took place at Ostrov in January,
1872, led to the introduction of conflicting expert testimony concerning
the mental soundness of the accused, and the matter was finally
referred to a commission of psychiaters in Berlin, who decided that
Bekker and his wife were not suffering from mental disease, and
therefore not irresponsible, but that the aunt was subject to periodical
insanity to such a degree as not to be accountable for her actions.
Curiously enough, the jurors remained uninfluenced by this testimony,
and pronounced her guilty of the crime laid to her charge,
and in accordance with this verdict the court sentenced her to three
years’ imprisonment with hard labor. The jurors even went so far
as to declare that she herself did not believe in the existence of elf
children or satanic changelings, but made use of this popular superstition
for her own selfish purposes, and that she guilefully denounced
her own boy as an imp in order to get rid of him. In this
verdict, or rather in the considerations urged in support of it, it is
easy to perceive the effects of strong local prejudice against the[213]
accused, who had the reputation of being a lazy, malicious, and
crafty person, and was therefore denied the extenuation of honest
self-deception. Indeed, in such cases it is always more or less difficult
to determine where sincere delusion ceases and conscious swindling
begins. Just at this point the annals of superstition present many
puzzling problems, the solution of which is of special interest as
well as of great practical importance not only to the psychologist
and psychiater, but also to the legislator and jurisprudent,
who have to do with the enactment and administration of criminal
laws.

In the penal codes of the most civilized nations the agency of
superstition as a factor in the promotion of crime is almost wholly
ignored, and, as this was not the case in former times, the omission
would seem to assume that the general diffusion of knowledge in
our enlightened age had rendered all such specifications obsolete and
superfluous. Only in the Russian penal code, especially in the sections
Ulosheniye and Ustav on felonies and frauds, as cited by Löwenstimm,
do we find a distinct recognition and designation of various
forms of superstition as incentives to crime. Thus, in paragraph
1469 of the first of these sections, the murder of “monstrous births
or misshapen sucklings” as changelings is expressly mentioned,
and the penalty prescribed; and in other clauses of the code punishments
are imposed for the desecration of graves and mutilation of
corpses, in order to procure talismans or to prevent the dead from
revisiting the earth as vampires, and for various offenses emanating
from the belief in sorcery and diabolical possession. The practice
of opening graves and mutilating dead bodies is quite common, and
arises in general from the notion that persons who die impenitent and
without extreme unction, including suicides and victims to delirium
tremens, apoplexy, and other forms of sudden death, as well as
schismatics, sorcerers, and witches, come forth from their graves and
wander about as vampires, sucking the blood of individuals during
sleep and inflicting misery upon entire communities by producing
drought, famine, and pestilence. The means employed to prevent
this dangerous metamorphosis, or at least to compel the vampire to
remain in the grave, differ in different countries. In Russia the
deceased is buried with his face downward, and an ashen stake driven
through his back, while in Poland and East Prussia the corpse is
wrapped up in a fish net and covered with poppies, owing, doubtless,
to the soporific qualities of this plant. Preventive measures of this
kind are often taken with the consent and co-operation of the clergy
and local authorities. Thus, in 1849, at Mariensee, near Dantzig, in
West Prussia, a peasant’s wife came to the Catholic priest of the
parish and complained that an old woman named Welm, recently[214]
deceased, appeared in her house and beat and otherwise tormented
her child. The priest seems to have accepted the truth of her statement,
since he ordered the corpse to be disinterred, decapitated, reburied
at a cross-road, and covered with poppies. In 1851, during the
prevalence of cholera in Ukraine, in the governmental province of
Kiev, the peasants of Possady attributed the epidemic to a deceased
sacristan and his wife, who were supposed to roam about at night
as vampires and kill people by sucking their blood. In order to
stay the ravages of the scourge the corpses of this couple were exhumed,
their heads cut off and burned, and ashen stakes driven
through their backs into the ground. In 1892 a peasant woman in
the Russian province of Kovno hanged herself in a wood near the
village of Somenishki. The priest refused her Christian burial because
she had committed suicide, and was therefore given over to the
devil. In order that she might rest quietly in her grave and not be
changed into a vampire, her sons severed her head from her body and
laid it at her feet. In thus refusing to perform religious funeral
rites the priest obeyed the canons of the church and also the laws of
the Russian Empire. Until quite recently a corner of unconsecrated
ground next to the wall of the Russian cemetery was reserved as a
sort of carrion pit for the corpses of self-murderers, and it is expressly
prescribed in the Svod Sakonov[29] that they “shall be dragged
to such place of infamy by the knacker, and there covered with
earth.” This treatment of a felo-de-se by the ecclesiastical and civil
authorities directly fosters popular superstition by tending to confirm
the notion that there is something uncanny, eldritch, demoniacal,
and preternaturally malignant inherent in his mortal remains, a notion
still further strengthened by a most unjust paragraph (1472)
in the Russian code, which declares the last will and testament of a
suicide to have no legal validity. Drought, too, as well as pestilence,
is ascribed to the evil agency of vampires, which “milk the clouds,”
and hinder the falling of the dew. In 1887 the South Russian province
of Cherson began to suffer from drought soon after a peasant
had hanged himself in the village of Ivanovka, the inhabitants of
which, assuming a causative connection between the aridity and the
self-homicide, poured water on the grave while uttering the following
words: “I sprinkle, I pour; may God send a shower, bring on a
little rainfall, and relieve us from misery!” As this invocation
failed to produce the desired effect, the body was taken up and inhumed
again in a gorge outside of the village. In some districts the
corpse is disinterred, beaten on the head, and drenched with water
poured through a sieve; in others it is burned.

[215]

The records of the criminal courts in West Prussia during the
last half century contain numerous instances of the violation of
graves from superstitious motives. Thus in March, 1896, a peasant
died in the village of Penkuhl; soon afterward his son was taken ill
of a lingering disease, which the remedies prescribed by the country
doctor failed to relieve. It did not take long for the “wise women”
of the village to convince him that his father was a “nine-killer,”
and would soon draw after him into the grave nine of his next of
kin. The sole means of depriving him of this fatal power would be
to disinter him and sever his head from his body. In accordance
with this advice the young man dug up the corpse by night and decapitated
it with a spade. In this case the accused, if tried in court,
might honestly declare that he acted in self-defense; indeed, he
might plead in justification of his conduct that he thereby preserved
not only his own life, but also the lives of eight of his nearest and
dearest relations, and that he should be commended rather than
condemned for what he had done. It is the possibility and sincerity
of this plea that render it so difficult to deal with such offenses
judicially and justly. Here is needed what Tennyson calls

Quite different, however, from a moral point of view, is the opening
of graves in quest of medicaments, and especially of talismans,
which are supposed to bring good luck to the possessor or to enable
him to practice sorcery and to commit crime with impunity. In
ancient times, and even in the middle ages, physicians sometimes
prescribed parts of the human body as medicine, and in Franconia,
North Bavaria, a peasant now occasionally enters an apothecary’s
shop and asks for “Armensünderfett,” poor sinner’s fat, obtained
from the bodies of executed malefactors and prized as a powerful
specific. The culprit was tried first for murder and then for lard,
and thus made doubly conducive to the safety and sanitation of the
community. Formerly many persons went diligently to public executions
for the purpose of procuring a piece of the criminal as a
healing salve, but since the hangman or headsman has generally
ceased to perform his fearful functions in the presence of a promiscuous
crowd, such loathsome remedies for disease are sought in
churchyards.

In May, 1865, a Polish peasant in Wyssokopiz, near Warsaw,
discovered that the grave of his recently deceased wife had been
opened and the corpse mutilated. Information was given to the
police, and a shepherd’s pipe, found in the churchyard, led to the[216]
detection of the culprit in the person of the communal shepherd, a
man twenty-six years old, who on examination confessed that he,
with the aid of two accomplices, had committed the disgustful deed.
His object, he said, was to procure a tooth and the liver of a dead
person. He intended to pulverize the tooth and after mixing it with
snuff to give it to his brother-in-law in order to poison him. On
perceiving, however, that the body was that of a woman, he did not
take the tooth, because it would have no power to kill a man; but
he cut out the liver for the purpose of burying it in a field where the
sheep were pastured, and thus causing the death of the entire flock
in case he should be superseded by another shepherd, which he
feared might happen. All three were condemned to hard labor in
Siberia.

It is a quite prevalent notion that if any part of a corpse is
concealed in a house, the inmates will have the corresponding bodily
organs affected by disease and gradually paralyzed. A drastic example
of this superstition occurred in May, 1875, at Schwetz, a
provincial town of West Prussia, where a woman named Albertine
Mayevski became the mother of a male child, which died soon after
its birth. The father, to whom she was betrothed, refused to marry
her, and to punish him for this breach of promise she disinterred the
body of her babe, cut off its right hand at the wrist and the genitals,
and hid them in the chimney of the house of her faithless lover,
hoping thereby to cause the hand, with which he had pledged his
vow, to wither away, and to render him impotent. All this she freely
confessed when brought to trial, and was sentenced to two months’
imprisonment. But such relics of the tomb are used, on the principle
of similia similibus, not only for inflicting injury, but also for bringing
luck. Thus members of the “light-fingered craft” carry with
them the finger of a corpse in order to enhance their skill, success,
and safety in thievery; if the finger belonged to an adroit thief or
a condemned criminal its talismanic virtue is all the greater. It is
also believed that a purse in which a finger joint is kept will contain
an inexhaustible supply of money. The finger of a murdered
man is greatly prized by burglars because it is supposed to possess
a magic power in opening locks. The records of criminal courts
prove that these absurd notions are generally entertained by common
malefactors in East Prussia, Thuringia, Silesia, Bohemia, and Poland.
A candle made of fat obtained from the human body is very frequently
used by thieves on account of its supposed soporific power,
since with such a taper, known in Germany as Diebslicht or Schlummerlicht
(sloom-light in provincial English), they are confident of
being able to throw all the inmates of the house into a deep sleep, and
thus rummage the rooms at will and with perfect impunity. The[217]
danger of detection is also forestalled by laying a dead man’s hand
on a window sill; and in order to make assurance doubly sure, both
preservatives are usually employed. Hence the proverbial saying,
“He sleeps as though a dead hand had been carried round him.” The
desire to procure material for such candles often leads to the commission
of crime. An Austrian jurist, Dr. Gross, in his manual for inquisitorial
judges (Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter), and the
folklorists Mannhardt and Jakushkin, give numerous instances of this
kind, and there is no doubt that the many mysterious murders and
ghastly mutilations, especially of women and children, so horrifying
to the public and puzzling to the police, are due to the same cause.
In most cases the prosecuting attorneys and judges are unable to discover
the real motives of such bloody and brutal deeds because they
are ignorant of the popular superstitions in which they have their
origin, and, for lack of any better explanation, attribute them to
mere brutishness, wantonness, homicidal mania, and other vague and
unintelligible impulses, whereas in reality they spring from a supremely
selfish but exceedingly definite purpose, are perpetrated deliberately,
and with the normal exercise of the mental faculties, and
can not be mitigated even by the extenuating plea of sudden passion.
Crimes of this sort are of common occurrence not only in the semi-barbarous
provinces of Russia, but also in Austria and Germany,
justly reckoned among the most civilized countries of Christendom.
On January 1, 1865, the house of a man named Peck, near Elbing in
West Prussia, was entered during the absence of the family by a
burglar, Gottfried Dallian, who killed the maid-servant, Catharina
Zernickel, and ransacked the premises in search of money and other
objects of value. Before carrying off his spoils he cut a large piece
of flesh out of the body of the murdered girl in order to make candles
for his protection on future occasions of this sort. The talismanic
light, which he kept in a tin tube, did not prevent him from being
caught in the act of committing another burglary about six weeks
later. During the trial, which resulted in his condemnation to death,
he confessed that he had eaten some of the maid-servant’s flesh in
order to appease his conscience. This disgusting method of alleviating
the “compunctious visitings of Nature” would seem to confirm
the suggestion of a writer in the Russkiya Wjedomosti (Russian
News, 1888, No. 359) that the thieves’ candle is a survival of primitive
cannibalism, distinct traces of which he also discovers in a Russian
folk song which runs as follows: “I bake a cake out of the
hands and feet, out of the silly head I form a goblet, out of the
eyes I cast drinking glasses, out of the blood I brew an intoxicating
beer, and out of the fat I mold a candle.” It is certainly very queer
to find such stuff constituting the theme of popular song within the[218]
confines of Christian civilization at the present day, a grewsome stuff
more suitable as the staple of Othello’s tales

In the burglary just mentioned the murder and mutilation of the
maid were incidental to the robbery, and probably an afterthought,
but there are on record numerous instances of persons being waylaid
and killed for the sole purpose of making candles out of their
adipose tissue. No longer ago than November 15, 1896, two peasants
were convicted of this crime in Korotoyak, a city on the Don in
South Russia. Their victim was a boy twelve years of age, whom
they strangled and eviscerated in order to make candles from the
fat of the caul and entrails. It would be superfluous and tedious to
cite additional examples of this outrageous offense against humanity
and common sense, for, like the devils that entered into the Gadarene
swine, their name is Legion.

A still more disgusting and dangerous superstition is the notion
that supernatural powers are acquired by eating the heart of an
unborn babe of the male sex, just as a savage imagines that by eating
the heart of a brave foe he can become indued with his valor.
The modern European cannibal believes that by eating nine hearts,
or parts of them, he can make himself invisible and even fly through
the air. He can thus commit crime without detection, and defy all
efforts to arrest or imprison him, releasing himself with ease from
fetters, and passing through stone walls. This horrible practice has
been known for ages, and is still by no means uncommon. In the
first half of the fifteenth century the notorious marshal of France,
Gilles de Laval, Baron of Rayz, is said to have murdered in his
castle near Nantes one hundred and fifty women in order to get
possession of unborn babes. He was then supposed to have committed
these atrocities from lewd motives, and was also accused of
worshiping Satan. A mixed commission of civilians and ecclesiastics,
appointed to examine into the matter, found him guilty and condemned
him to be strangled and burned on October 25, 1440. In
1429, when he was thirty-three years of age, he had fought the English
at Orleans by the side of Joan of Arc, and it was probably the
desire to acquire supernatural powers in emulation of the maid that
led him to perpetrate a succession of inhuman butcheries extending
over a period of fourteen years, the real object of which seems to have
been imperfectly understood by the tribunal which sentenced him to
death.[30]
Löwenstimm cites several instances of this crime. Thus, in
[219]
1577 a man was put to the rack in Bamberg, North Bavaria, for
murdering and disemboweling three pregnant women. In the
seventeenth century a band of robbers, whose chief was known as
“King Daniel,” created intense consternation among the inhabitants
of Ermeland in East Prussia. For a long time these freebooters
roved and spoiled with impunity, but were finally arrested
and executed. They confessed that they had killed fourteen women,
but, as the unborn infants proved to be female, their hearts were
devoid of talismanic virtue. Indeed, they attributed their capture
to this unfortunate and unforseeable circumstance, and posed as persons
worthy of commiseration on account of their ill luck. One of
the strangest features of this cruel and incredible superstition is its
persistency in an age of superior enlightenment. Dr. Gross records
two cases of comparatively recent occurrence in the very centers
of modern civilization: one in 1879, near Hamburg, where a woman,
great with child, was killed and cut open by a Swede named Andersen,
and another of like character ten years later in Simmering, near
Vienna.

An ordeal very commonly practiced in the middle ages to determine
the guilt or innocence of any one accused of theft was to give
him a piece of consecrated cheese, which, if he were guilty, it would
be impossible for him to swallow. Hence arose the popular phrase,
“It sticks in his throat.” Thus Macbeth says, after he had “done
the deed”:

Wuttke states that this custom still prevails in the Prussian province
of Brandenburg, where a person suspected of larceny is made to
swallow a piece of Dutch cheese on which certain magical letters
and signs are scratched. His failure to do so is regarded as conclusive
evidence of his guilt. Various other means of making inquest
for the detection of crime are in vogue, some of them merely
silly, and others mercilessly savage. Thus a mirror is laid for three
successive nights in the grave of a dead man. It is placed there in
the name of God, and taken out in the name of Satan. It is believed
that by looking into such a mirror the person of the thief can be
clearly seen. A bull belonging to a peasant not far from Perm, on
the Kama, died suddenly. The owner declared that the death of the
animal was due to witchcraft, and demanded that all the women of the
village should be made to creep through a horse collar in order to
discover the hag who had wrought the mischief. This plan was approved
by his neighbors, and, although their wives protested against
being subjected to the degrading and for corpulent women extremely[220]
difficult and even dangerous test, they finally submitted to it rather
than remain under the suspicion of practicing the black art. This
performance, which is unquestionably a relic of Uralian-Finnish
paganism, took place on March 16, 1896. The following instance
may serve as an example of the ruthless barbarity to which such
delusions often lead: In December, 1874, a South Russian peasant
in the vicinity of Cherson missed one hundred rubles and went to a
weird woman in order to learn what had become of them. She consulted
her cards and declared that the money had been stolen by a
certain Marfa Artynov. The man was greatly astonished at this response,
because the accused was a highly respected teacher of young
children, and had the reputation of being thoroughly honest. Nevertheless,
his credulity got the better of his common sense, and with
the aid of his neighbors he seized Marfa and carried her to the
churchyard, where he bound her to a cross and began to torture her,
beating her with a knout, suspending her by her hands, and twisting
and tearing her neck and tongue with a pincers. To her cries and
entreaties her tormentors coolly replied, “If you are really innocent,
what we are doing can cause you no pain!” Many of the persons
who offer their services as clairvoyants and seers to a credulous and
confiding public, and whose utterances are accepted as oracles, are
professional swindlers. Thus a young lady moving in the higher
circles of society in Vienna had a valuable set of diamonds stolen.
By the advice of a trusted lackey she consulted a woman, who was
reputed to have the power of divination, and who informed her, contrary
to the strong suspicions of the police, that the theft had been
committed, not by any member of the household, but by a stranger.
The young lady was so firmly persuaded of the truth of this statement
that, although urged by the court to prosecute the lackey,
she refused to do so. The evidence against him, however, was so
strong that he was finally tried and condemned. The pythoness,
who had endeavored to exculpate him, proved to be his aunt and
accomplice.

A queer phase of superstition, which in many parts of Europe
seriously interferes with the administration of justice, manifests itself
in the various means of avoiding the evil consequences of perjury,
at least so far as to soothe the pangs of conscience and to avert the
divine anger. This immunity is secured in some provinces of Austria
by carrying on one’s person a bit of consecrated wafer, a piece of
bone from the skeleton of a child, or the eyes of a hoopoe, holding a
ducat or seven small pebbles in the mouth, pressing the left hand
firmly against the side, crooking the second finger, or pulling off a
button from the trousers while in the act of swearing, or spitting
immediately after taking an oath. The Russian province of Viatka[221]
is settled by a people of Finnish origin, the majority of whom have
been baptized and call themselves orthodox Christians, while the
remainder are still nominally as well as really heathen. When they
take an oath it is administered by a pope or priest, and a Russian
jurist, J. W. Mjeshtshaninov, describes the method employed by
them to forswear themselves with safety. When called upon to take an
oath, the witness raises the right hand with the index finger extended;
he then lays the left hand in the palm of the right hand with the
index finger pointing downward, and by a crisscross combination
of the other fingers, which probably works as a charm, the whole
body is converted into a conductor, so that the oath entering through
the index finger of the right hand passes through the index finger
of the left hand into the earth like an electric current. The witness
thus feels himself discharged of the binding influence of the
oath, and may give false testimony without laying perjury upon
his soul.

The superstitions which encourage ignorant people to commit
crime are handed down from generation to generation, and have in
most cases a purely local character. In other words, the charms and
sorceries and other magical arts employed to produce the same results
differ in different places, and unless the judges are familiar with
these various forms of superstition they will be unable to understand
the exact nature of the offenses with which they have to deal, and
their efforts to detect and punish violations of the law will be greatly
hampered and sometimes completely thwarted.

The subject here discussed has not only a speculative interest for
ethnographers and students of folklore, but also, as already indicated,
a practical importance for criminal lawyers and courts of justice in
the Old World and even in the United States. The tide of immigration
that has recently set in from the east and south of Europe has
brought to our shores an immense number of persons strongly infected
with the delusions which we have attempted to describe. Acts
which would seem at first sight to have their origin in impulses of
cruelty and brutality are found on closer investigation to be due to
crass ignorance and credulity, and, although the ultimate motives are
usually utterly selfish, there are rare instances in which the perpetrators
of such deeds are thoroughly disinterested and altruistic,
and do the most revolting things, not from greed of gain, but
solely for the public good. In cases of this kind the most effective
preventive of wrongdoing is not judicial punishment but
intellectual enlightenment.

[222]

A GEOLOGICAL ROMANCE.

By J. A. UDDEN.

A western naturalist once said that the geology of Kansas
was monotonous. In one sense this remark is certainly justifiable,
and the same may be said about the geology of some of the
other States on the Western plains. The American continent is built
on a comprehensive plan, and many of its formations can be followed
for hundreds of miles without presenting much variation in general
appearance. Occasionally, however, some feature of special interest
crops out from the serene uniformity, and the very nature of its surroundings
then makes it appear all the more striking. Minor accidents
in the development of our extensive terranes sometimes stand
out in bold relief, as it were, from the monotonous background. In
their isolation from other details such features occasionally display
past events with unusual clearness.

Such is the case with a deposit of volcanic ash which has been
discovered in the superficial strata on the
plains.[31]
It lies scattered
in great quantities in a number of localities in Nebraska, Kansas,
South Dakota, and Colorado, having been found in no less than
twenty counties in the first-mentioned State. It measures from two
to fourteen feet in thickness in different localities, and is mostly
found imbedded in yellow marl and clay, and has a somewhat striking
appearance in the field, due to its snowy whiteness and to the sharpness
of the plane which separates it from the underlying darker
materials. Many years before its real nature was known it had been
noticed and described by Western geologists. Prof. O. T. St. John
saw it many years ago in Kansas, where it appeared as “an exceedingly
fine, pure white siliceous material,” forming a separate layer
of several feet, and set off by a sharp line from the buff clay-marl below.
His words describe its usual appearance in other places (see
Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.—Stratified Volcanic Ash near Meade, Kansas.
(From the University Geological Survey of Kansas, vol. ii.)

This ash occurs in several outcrops in McPherson County in the
central part of Kansas, where the writer had an opportunity to
study it somewhat in detail a few years ago. Some of the features
of the dust at this place reveal the conditions under which it was
formed with considerable distinctness, and the volcanic episode
which produced it appears strikingly different from the dull monotony
[223]
of the ordinary geological work recorded in the terranes of the
plains. It may be said to consist of angular flakes of pumice, averaging
one sixteenth of a millimetre in diameter, and having a thickness
of about one three-hundredth of a millimetre. The most common
shape of the flakes is that of a triangle, or rather of a spherical triangle,
since the flakes are apt to be concave on one side and convex on
the other. In the microscope they sometimes appear like splinters of
tiny bubbles of glass, and this is really what they are (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2.—Flakes of Volcanic Ash.
Magnified
about 100 diameters.
A, flake with a branching
rib; B, fragment of a broken hollow
sphere of glass; C, fragment with drawn-out
tubular vesicles; D and E, plain fragments
of broken pumice bubbles. (From
American Geologist, April, 1893.)

The explosive eruptions which give rise to showers of this kind
of ash, or dust, are due to fusion and superheating of subterranean
masses of rocks charged with more or less moisture. A part of this
moisture escapes in the form of steam at the time of an eruption. But
the viscidity of the ejected material prevents much of the steam from
passing off, and such of the lava as cools most rapidly retains a certain
quantity in solution, as it were. Obsidian is a rock which has
been made in this way. It often contains much of the original water,
which will cause it to swell up into a stony froth when fused.

This volcanic dust has the same property. If one small particle
of it be heated on a piece of platinum foil it is seen to swell up into[224]
a compound bubble of glass (Fig. 3). It is evident that this is due to
the expansive force of the heated included moisture, to which the
viscid half-molten glass readily yields. At the time of the eruption
which produced this dust, subterranean heat was applied to the moisture-bearing
rock until this was superheated to such an extent that
the weight of the overlying material was insufficient to hold the water
from expanding into steam. Then there was a tremendous explosion,
and the molten magma was thrown up with such a force that
it was shattered into minute droplets, in the same way as water does
when it is thrown forcibly into the air. Being thus released from
pressure, the steam inside of each little particle of the heated glass
caused it to swell out into a tiny bubble. As this kept on expanding
it was cooled, the thin glass wall of the bubble congealed, and finally
burst from the pressure of the steam within. This is the reason
why the little dust particles are thin, mostly triangular, and often
slightly concave flakes with sharp angles. Sometimes the angles appear
rounded, as if the fragments had been viscid enough to creep
a little after the bubble burst. The study of one single little grain
of dust, barely visible to the naked eye, thus makes clear the nature
of a catastrophe which must have shaken a whole mountain, and
which left its traces over a quarter of a continent.

Fig. 3.—A Particle of Volcanic
Ash swelled up by
Fusion.
Magnified 100 diameters.

That the dust was produced in this way is quite evident from
other circumstances. If a handful from the dust of this place be
thrown into water and gently stirred, it nearly all will settle after a
while. But some rather large particles remain floating on the surface.
If these are removed and examined under the microscope, they are
seen to be hollow spheres (Fig. 2, b). These are some of the original
bubbles that never burst, either because they contained too little
steam or else because the steam was cooled before it had time to break
the walls open. It is evident that not every droplet of the molten
magma would form a single sphere, but that many also would swell
up into a compound frothlike mass of pumice. A few such pieces
may sometimes be observed in the deposit at this place, and that
many more were made and broken is evident from the great number[225]
of glass fragments which have riblike edges on their flat sides
(Fig. 3, a).

The nature of the force which caused the eruption may thus be
understood from the study of one little grain of the dust, but much
more extended observations are needed in order to make out the
place where the great convulsion took place. It will, perhaps, never
be known what particular volcanic vent was the source of this ash.
Different deposits may have come from different places. But it
seems possible that it all came from the same eruption. There can
be no doubt that the volcanic disturbances occurred to the west of the
Great Plains. No recent extinct volcanoes are found in any other
direction. This conclusion is corroborated by the fact that the dust
is finer in eastern localities and coarser nearer the Rocky Mountains.
In a bed near Golden, in Colorado, seventy-three per cent, by weight,
of the dust consists of particles measuring from one fourth to one
thirty-second of a millimetre, while some from Orleans, in Nebraska,
contains seventy-four per cent of particles measuring from one sixteenth
to one sixty-fourth of a millimetre in diameter. Still finer
material comes from the bluffs of the Missouri River near Omaha.
Evidently the coarser particles would settle first, and if the dust is
finer toward the east, it must be because the wind which brought it
blew from the west. Most likely the eruption occurred somewhere in
Colorado or in New Mexico.

It may be asked how it can be known that the dust was carried
this long distance by the wind. May it not as well have been transported
by water? The answer must be, in the first place, that showers
of the same kind of material have been observed in connection with
volcanic outbursts in other parts of the world. One such shower is
known to have strewn the same kind of dust on the snow in Norway
after a volcanic eruption in Iceland, and after the great explosion
on Krakatoa, in 1883, such dust was carried by the wind several
hundred miles, and scattered over the ocean. If this ash had been
transported by water, it would not be found in such a pure state, but
it would be mixed with other sediments. There would, no doubt,
also be found coarser fragments of the volcanic products. On the
contrary, it appears uniformly fine. No particles have been found
which measure more than one millimetre in diameter, and less than
one per cent of its weight consists of particles exceeding one eighth
of a millimetre in diameter. In seven samples taken from different
places the proportions of the different sizes of the grains were about
as follows:

[226]

Flaky particles of this size are easily carried along by a moderate
wind. In some places it appears as if the dust were resting on an
old land surface where no water could have been standing when it
fell. There is really no room for doubt that it was carried several
hundred miles by the wind. It must have darkened the sky at the
time, and it must have settled slowly and quietly over the wide plains,
covering extensive tracts with a white,
snowlike mantle several feet in thickness.
What a desolate landscape after
such a shower! What a calamity for
the brute inhabitants of the land!

Fig. 4.—Tracks in the Volcanic
Dust, probably made by a
Crawfish.
Reduced to ²⁄₈ diameter.

Right here in McPherson County
there was either a river or a lake at the
time of the catastrophe. This is plainly
indicated in several ways. In one place
the dust rests on sand and clay, with
imbedded shells of fresh-water clams.
It is assorted in coarse and fine layers
like a water sediment. Lowermost is a
seam of very coarse grains. These must
have settled promptly through the
water, while the finer material was delayed.
In another place it lies on higher
ground, and here marks of sedges and
other vegetation are seen extending up
about a foot into the base of the deposit,
from an underlying mucky clay. Bog
manganese impregnates a thin layer just
above the clay, indicating a marshy condition.
Here also the material is somewhat
sorted, but in a different way. It
is ripple-bedded. The water was evidently
shallow, if there was any water
at all. A burrow like that of a crawfish
extended down into the old clay bottom.
On a slab of the volcanic ash
itself some tracks appeared (Fig. 4).
These were probably made by an individual
of the same race in an effort to escape from the awful fate of
being buried alive like the inhabitants of Herculaneum and Pompeii.

Fig. 5.—Ripple Marks in the Volcanic
Dust.
Reduced to ¼ diameter.

The shower must have lasted for a time of two or three days. I
infer this from the nature of the wind changes, which are indicated
by the ripples in the dust. These still lie in perfect preservation (Fig.
5), and may be studied by removing, inch by inch, the successive[227]
layers from above downward, for it is evident that as the direction
of the wind changed, the ripples were also turned. The deciphering
of this record must be made backward. The bottom layers were
deposited first, and the excavation must
begin on top. Otherwise the record is
as perfect as if it had been taken down
by an instrument when the shower occurred.
It may be only local in its significance,
for it shows the direction of
the wind at this particular place alone.
The wind may have been somewhat deflected
from the general direction by
local topographic peculiarities, though
these appear to have been of small importance.
In any case, the old legend
is quite interesting to read, being, I believe,
the only geological record ever found of the passing of a
cyclone over the United States.

Fig. 6.—Peculiar Elevations caused by a Current from the Southwest to the
Northeast.
Reduced to ½ diameter.

In the lowermost foot of the deposit no ripple marks can be seen.
But there appear some marks of sedges and other vegetation, and
these are inclined to the west, as if the plants had been bent by an
east wind. Just above the height to which the imprints of the vegetation
extend, ripple marks begin to appear, running on a northeast-southwest
course. They were made by a southeast wind, for their
northwest slopes are the steeper. A little above this height some
peculiar small elevations appear on one of the bedding planes, and
slightly raised ridges run for a short distance to the northeast from
each elevation, vanishing in the same direction (Fig. 6). A southwesterly
current was unmistakably obstructed by the little elevations,
and left the small trails of dust in their lee. Six inches higher up
the wind comes more from the south, and for the next foot the ripples
continue to gradually turn still more in the same direction so as to at
last record a due south wind. At this point it suddenly changed and[228]
set in squarely from the west, for the ripples are turned north and
south, with the steeper slopes to the east. This direction seems to
have prevailed as long as the dust kept on falling. It appears to me
that these successive changes are best explained as attendant upon
the passage of a cyclone, or of what our daily weather maps call a
“low area.” Going by from west to east, on the north, it would at
first cause an east wind. This would then gradually be turned to
the south and then to the west. One such rotation
of the wind generally lasts a day or two. The
shower must then have kept on at least for the
same length of time, if not longer (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7.—Changes in
the Wind as recorded
by the
Ripple Marks.

There is reason to believe that this catastrophe
occurred in summer. No crayfish would be out
making tracks during the cold months, and the
fossil vegetation could hardly have left such plain
marks if it had been buried by the dust during the
winter. The most conspicuous of these marks are
some triangular and Y-shaped molds of the stems
and leaves of sedges. Siliceous skeletons of chara
and filamentous algæ were also found upon a close examination in
some of these molds.

It is really difficult to appreciate the change such a shower must
have produced in the appearance of the landscape, and the effect it
must have had on animal and plant life. So far away from the volcanic
source, the wind can not have laid down a layer of this dust
several feet in thickness without scattering it far and wide all around.
It must have covered tens of thousands of square miles. Just imagine,
if you can, a whole State, clad in the verdure of summer, suddenly,
in two or three days, covered over by a blanket of white
volcanic ash! Many species of plants must have found it impossible
to grow in such a soil. And what disaster it must have caused in the
animal world! Grazing herds had their sustenance buried from their
sight, and could save their lives only by traveling long distances in
this loose dust. Many a creature must have had its lungs or its gills
clogged with the glassy flakes floating in the water and in the air.
The sudden disappearance of several mammal species near the beginning
of the Quaternary age has been noted by paleontologists.
Does it seem unlikely that an event like this, especially if repeated,
may have hastened the extermination of some species of land animals?
That many individuals must have perished there can be no doubt.
Not very far away from that outcrop of the dust which I have described,
one of the early settlers in this part of the State once made a
deep well that penetrated the ash. Above the deposit, and some sixty
feet below the surface of the prairie, he found what he described as[229]
“an old bone yard.” In digging other wells in this vicinity mammal
bones have been taken up by the settlers from about the same horizon.
It is to be regretted that, with one exception, none of these fossils
have been preserved for study, for it is likely that they were the remains
of animals which were killed in the dust shower.

In the absence of fossils definitely known to be connected with
the ash, its exact age seems yet uncertain. In McPherson County
it is underlaid by clay, gravel, and sand, which contain remains of
the horse, of a megalonyx, and of bivalve mollusks of modern aspect.
In the bluffs of the Missouri River near Omaha pockets of a similar
ash rest on glacial clay under the loess. At the latter place it must
belong to the Pleistocene age, and at the former it can not be older
than the late Pleiocene. These two deposits may not belong to the
same shower, but it appears, at any rate, that the volcanic disturbances
which produced them occurred near the beginning of the
Pleistocene age.

In comparison with the slow and even tenor of the routine of
geological history, the event here sketched appears so unique and so
striking that it may well be called a geological romance. Modern science
has taught us that the geological forces are slow and largely uniform
in their work, and that most of the earth’s features must be explained
without taking recourse to theories involving any violent
revolutions or general terrestrial cataclysms. While the making of
this dust is not any real exception to the law of uniformity, we are
here reminded that Nature is quite independent in her ways, and that
even in her sameness there is room for considerable diversity.

Mr. William Ogilvie, of the Topographical Survey of Canada, estimates
that there are more than 3,200 miles of fair navigation in the system
of the Yukon River, of which Canada owns nearly forty-two per cent. A
remarkable feature of the river, with its Lewes branch, is that it drains the
Peninsula of Alaska and nearly cuts it in two, starting as it does less than
fourteen miles, “as the crow flies,” from the waters of the Pacific Ocean, at
the extreme head of the Lewes branch, whence it flows 2,100 miles into the
same ocean, or Bering Sea, which is a part of it. The drainage basin of the
river occupies about 388,000 square miles, of which Canada owns 149,000
square miles, or nearly half, but that half is claimed to be the most important.
As for the origin of the name Yukon, the Indians along the middle
stretches of the river all speak the same language, and call the river the
Yukonah; in English, “the great river” or “the river.” The Canadian
Indians in the vicinity of Forty Mile call it “Thetuh,” a name of which
Mr. Ogilvie could not learn the meaning. The correct Indian name of the
Klondike is Troandik, meaning Hammer Creek, and refers to the barriers
the Indians used to erect across the mouth of the stream to catch salmon,
by hammering sticks into the ground.

[230]

THE SEASON OF THE YEAR.

By GRANT ALLEN.

A year is, roughly speaking, the period which it takes the earth
to perform one complete revolution round the sun. I say
“roughly speaking” with due humility, having the fear of the expert
ever before my eyes, because I know that if I do not sing
small, that inconvenient person, the astronomical critic, will come
down upon me at once like a wolf on the fold, with minute distinctions
about the mean, the tropical, and the sidereal year; matters
of immense importance at Greenwich Observatory, no doubt, but
elsewhere of very little interest indeed, seeing that they differ from
one another by so many minutes only. Let us leave the astronomers
their own problems. The year with which I am going to deal humbly
here is a much more commonplace, ordinary, and comprehensible
year—the visible year of vegetation, of plant and animal life, of the
four seasons; the year as roughly known to children and savages,
and to the weeds, the flowers, the bees, and the squirrels.

It has often struck me as curious that people took this complex
concept of the year so much for granted—inquired so little into its
origin and discovery. Yet it is by no means everywhere obvious.
How did men first come to notice, in the tropics especially, that
there was such a thing as the year at all? How did they first observe,
save in our frozen north, any fixed sequence or order in the succession
of Nature? How did they learn, even here, that spring would
infallibly follow winter, and summer be succeeded in due course by
autumn? And, to go a step farther back, how did the plants and
animals, in all parts of the world alike, come originally to discover
and adapt themselves to all these things? How did the bee know
that she must “gather honey all the day from every opening flower,”
the summer through, in order to use it up as bodily fuel in winter?
How did the plants learn when to blossom and produce seed? In
one word, how did the seasons come to be automatically recognized?

That they are automatically recognized, even by plants, quite
apart from the stimulus of heat or cold, drought or rain, a single
fact (out of many like it) will sufficiently prove. Trees brought
from Australia to England, where the seasons are reversed, try for
two or three years to put forth leaves and flowers in October or
November—the southern spring. It takes them several autumns
before they learn that the year has been turned upside down—that
June is now summer and December winter. This shows that life
moves in regular cycles, adapted to the seasons, but not directly dependent[231]
upon them. The rhythm of the world has set up an organic
rhythm which now spontaneously and automatically follows it.

At first sight, to the dweller in the temperate zone at the present
day, the questions I have put above may seem needless, not to say
childish. But that is perhaps because we have all too much the
habit of taking it for granted that what is true here and now has
also been true everywhere and always. A first visit to the tropics
often enough rudely disturbs this uninquiring attitude of mind. For
in the tropics, and especially in the equatorial region, there is no
winter and no summer, no spring and no autumn. The world wags
wearily through an unending display of monotonous greenery. As
far as temperature goes, the year is pretty much alike in all its
months. Yet not only do equatorial men recognize the existence
of the year as a natural epoch quite as much as other men—not only
do equatorial savages celebrate annual feasts, count ages by years,
and perform certain rites in certain months only—but also animal
and vegetable nature recognizes the year; trees have their month for
blossoming and fruiting, birds their month for assuming the plumage
of courtship, for nesting and hatching, almost as markedly as
elsewhere. The recognition of the year both by man and by Nature
is not therefore entirely dependent upon the difference of summer
and winter, as such. We must go deeper, and I think, when we come
to consider geological time, much deeper, if we wish to understand
the true character of yearliness—a word which I venture here to
coin to express this meaning.

Have you ever quite realized what the tropical year is like? Suppose
you are living on or near the equator, then in December the
sun is south of you and at its greatest distance away; you have, so
to speak, a relative winter. But in March the sun is overhead; it is
now full midsummer. By the end of June the sun has gone north,
and is once more on a tropic; you have a second winter; not much
of a winter, I admit, but still, a relative winter. By September he
has returned overhead again, and you are enduring a second summer.
In December he has once more retreated to the southern tropic
(Capricorn), and it is comparative winter. Thus the equatorial year
consists of four distinct seasons, in two of which the sun stands
directly overhead, while in two he is at his northern or southern
limit. I may add that the effect is always curious when, as you face
the sun, you see that he is moving in his diurnal path, not from left
to right (“the way of the sun,” as we say), but from right to left (or
“widdershins”). You are never till then aware how natural and
inevitable has seemed the opposite direction: when you find it reversed
the effect is surprising.

Now, the distance to which the sun travels north or south of you,[232]
if you live on the equator—I use ordinary terms instead of astronomical
ones for simplicity’s sake—is so comparatively small that
within the tropics themselves you never notice much difference as
to the amount of heat between one period of the year and another.
In equatorial countries the day and night temperature is much the
same all the year round: if the country be plain, it is always hot; if
mountainous, like the district about Bogotá, it is “a perpetual
spring”; one day is always much the same as the one that went
before and the one that comes after it. Even on the actual tropics,
again, the difference is too slight to make any marked change in the
temperature; people living on the northern tropic (Cancer), for example,
have the sun vertical to them on June 21st, and some
forty-three degrees south of them on December 21st. Nevertheless,
the sun is still as near them and as powerful as he is at Milan
or Venice in the height of summer; and the consequence is that,
as a matter of fact, the thermometer within the tropics and at sea
level seldom descends below 75° or 80°, even at midnight in the
relative winters. For the heating power of the sun depends,
of course, upon the directness of his rays, and lessens with their
obliquity; in Venice and Milan they are strong enough to make the
ground very hot in July and August, though it has been cooled before
by a northern winter; much more than in Jamaica or Madagascar,
which have never been cooled, does the accumulated heat
keep everything warm even when the sun is most oblique—and he
never reaches the same obliquity as in an English summer. The
ground is hot, the houses are hot, wood and stone are hot, and they
have all been hot from time immemorial.

Yet tropical and equatorial trees and plants have their definite
seasons to flower and fruit, just the same as elsewhere. This seems
surprising at first when one visits the tropics. You can not see why
everything should not flower and fruit the whole year round. And
yet, at one time pineapples are “in,” at another mangoes. And
these seasons differ in the northern and southern hemispheres; what
is mango winter in the one being mango summer in the other. I
do not say the seasons anywhere in the tropics differ markedly; still,
they do differ; the tropical year is divided into times and months
for agriculture just as much as any other. Thus there are regular
dates in each hemisphere for planting, tending, and cutting the
sugar cane. Now, what is the reason of these changes in vegetation,
when temperature remains so constant? Why do not trees and
shrubs of each kind flower up and down throughout the year irregularly—now
one individual and now another? Why are there seasons
for things at all in the tropics?

The answer is, because the same causes which produce summer[233]
and winter in temperate climate produce other changes of other
sorts in the tropical region. The temperature, it is true, remains
the same, or approximately the same; but the meteorological conditions
vary. Even with ourselves, summer is not only hotter but
also drier than winter; winter is marked by rain and snow as well
as by lowered temperature. In the tropics, on the other hand, it is
rather the summer or summers that are wet, for there is a certain
moving zone of equatorial calms in which it practically keeps on
raining always. But this zone is not fixed; it flits with the sun.
When the sun goes northward for the northern summer the rainy
zone goes with him; when he turns southward again the zone shifts
after him. Thus places on or near the two tropics have one rainy
season a year, while places on the equator have usually two. The
intervening dry seasons are often very dry and parched, indeed; and
where this is markedly the case, the rainy season acts just as spring
does in the north, or as the inundation does in Egypt; it is the beginning
of vegetation. The plants that were dry and dormant during
the arid months wake up into fresh life; the branches put forth
new leaves; the brown seeds germinate; the flowers appear; and in
due time the fruit ripens. Everything in these cases depends upon
the recurrence of the rainy season, just as everything in India depends
upon the bursting of the monsoons, and everything in Egypt
on the rising of the Nile. I have seen a dry plain in Jamaica bare
and brown one day, and covered six or eight inches high with fresh
green waving guinea-grass the day but one after. The rains had
come meanwhile, and Nature had awaked with more than springlike
awakening. In those hot climates everything grows by magic as soon
as it gets the needed water.

Indeed, we may say that in half the world the seasons, organically
speaking—I mean, the seasons of plant and animal life—depend
upon heat and cold, summer and winter, snow or sunshine; but
in the other half they depend almost entirely upon drought and rainfall.
Even as near home and as far north as Algeria, the summer is
far too dry and dusty for agriculture; the autumn rains set in about
October or November; they are immediately followed by the plowing;
and the winter becomes for most purposes the practical summer.
Fruits and vegetables are at their best in January and February;
the fields are full of flowers up to March or April; in June,
July, and August the country is an arid and weary desert. But the
seasons for dates are almost reversed; they ripen in autumn. In
Egypt again, where everything depends upon the inundation, the
seasons are still more complicated; the inundation begins to subside
in October; in Upper Egypt the winter season which follows is far
the most important for agriculture, and crops sown as the water subsides[234]
are reaped from four to seven months after. But in the Delta,
rice, cotton, and indigo are sown in the spring (March or April) and
harvested in October, November, and December. Here, irrigation
and temperature come in as disturbing elements, for the Delta feels
something of the cold of winter.

I could give many other instances, but these will suffice. As a
general rule, we may say that in the temperate and frigid zones the
seasons for plants and animals are ruled by heat and cold, but that
in tropical and even in subtropical climates, rainfall and drought,
themselves largely due to the same circumstances, are the ruling
factors.

Again, everybody knows that winter and summer, and the other
phenomena which simulate or accompany them, such as wet and
dry seasons, depend upon the fact that the earth’s axis is not perpendicular
to the plane in which the earth moves round the sun, but
slightly inclined to it. Now, a year in itself, viewed as a measure of
time, is merely the period which it takes the earth to perform one
such complete revolution. During one half of each such revolution
the north pole is turned at a considerable angle toward the sun, and
during the other half, the south pole. When the north pole is so
turned we call it summer in the northern hemisphere; when the
south pole is being favored, and the north is receiving less light and
heat, we call it winter. Let us suppose for a moment that the earth
had not got this twist or kink in its axis; that the equator was always
presented exactly toward the sun; what then would happen? Obviously,
there would be no change of seasons. The day and night
would have fixed lengths which never varied; climate would in each
place be uniform and, barring accidents of elevation or distribution
of land and water, the climate of each place would also depend entirely
the whole year round on its distance from the equator. Roughly
speaking, the temperature of a district would be the temperature it
now possesses in March and September, only not quite so cold as
March nor so warm as September, owing to the absence of accumulated
heat from summer or of reserves of ice and snow from
winter. In one word, under such conditions there would have been
climates—marked belts of climate; but there would not have been
seasons.

Seasons, however, depend in great part, as Mr. Alfred Russel
Wallace has ingeniously shown, on a great many things besides this
mere inclination of one end or the other of the earth toward the
sun in June and January. Much must be laid to the count of
accumulated stores of heat or cold; and though accumulated cold
is physically a misnomer, still for all practical purposes we may
apply the words fairly enough to the ice caps of the pole and the[235]
glaciers of mountain systems. And here we come face to face with
the very core of our problem: for the odd part of it is that seasons
(at least as we know them) seem to be quite a recent and exceptional
phenomenon in the history of our planet. So far as we can judge,
geologically speaking, the earth during all its earlier life enjoyed,
over all its surface, what we should now consider tropical or subtropical
conditions. England—or rather the land that occupied the
part of the earth’s crust where England now stands—had a vegetation
of huge tree ferns and palms and cycads during the Primary
period; as late even as the middle Tertiaries it had a vegetation like
that of South Carolina or Upper India. Greenland itself, in quite
recent times, flourished like a green bay tree, and did not belie its
odd modern name. The world as a whole enjoyed perpetual summer.
In one word, except in something like the equatorial sense, there
were practically no seasons. The sun went north and south, no
doubt, as now, but the temperature, even in the relative winter,
seems to have remained perennially mild and genial.

It is true, occasional slight traces of glacial epochs, earlier than
the great and well-known Glacial epoch, break here and there the
almost continuous geological record of palmy and balmy world-wide
summers; yet, taking the geological monuments as a whole, they
show us few or no signs of anything worth calling a serious winter
till quite recent periods. Large-leaved evergreens are still, in the
day-before-yesterday of geology, the order of the day; magnolias and
liquidambars, cinnamons and holly oaks, vines and rotang palms
formed the forests even of Miocene Britain. The animals during
all the Tertiary period were of what we now regard as tropical or
subtropical types—lions, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, monkeys, or
more antique races, equally southern in aspect. There could have
been little change of winter and summer during this long warm
spell; the variations can have been scarcely more than those of dry
and rainy seasons. The trees never lost their leaves; the fruits and
flowers never ceased to follow one another; no interruption of the
food supply drove insects to hibernate in their silken cocoons, or
squirrels and bears to lay by stores of food or fat for the cold and
hungry winter.

Nevertheless, taking the world round as it stands, we must believe
that the distinction of seasons grew up, both for plants and
animals, and for man or his ancestors, during this age of relatively
unmarked summers and winters. For the tropics more than anywhere
else preserve for us to-day the general features and aspect of
this earlier time; they have never had the continuity of their stream
of life rudely interrupted by the enormous changes of the Glacial
epoch. Yet, even in the tropics, things, as we saw, have seasons.[236]
There are annuals and perennials there, as elsewhere. Each kind
has its month for sprouting, for flowering, for fruiting, for shedding
its seed; and men in the tropics, some of them long isolated in oceanic
islands, or in great insulated regions like Australia or New
Guinea, from the rest of their kind in the temperate regions, nevertheless
know and observe the year, and perform all their functions,
agricultural or religious, by yearly cycles. For example, there is
among them all an annual feast for the dead, and widows mourn
their husbands for one year from their burial. Observation of the
year, therefore, both automatically by organisms at large and consciously
by man, antedates and is independent of observation of the
existence of summer or winter.

I do not think, however, that man would have noted the merely
astronomical year—the year of the sun’s position—at least till a
relatively late stage in culture, if he had not first noticed the organic
year—the regular recurrence of plant and animal seasons. So many
yams—that is to say, so many yam harvests—in other words, so many
years, is a common savage way of reckoning times and ages. But
they call it “yams,” not summers or winters. And when I say
yams, I give that merely as a single instance, for elsewhere the “seedtime
and harvest” are reckoned indifferently in maize or millet, rice
or barley, according to the agriculture of the particular people.
Even hunting races know that at certain times of year certain foods
abound; and this is true of equatorial savages and equatorial plants
or animals, as well as of others.

Moons are more obvious measures of time than suns, in the
tropics at least—probably everywhere; for the waxing and waning
of the moon mean much to people who live largely out of doors;
and the month is, perhaps, the earliest fixed mode of reckoning time
beyond a day or two. Most savages count time mainly by so many
moons. But they must also have noticed early that after a certain
number of moons (usually about thirteen), certain fruits or seeds
were ripe again; especially must they have noticed it when this
recurrence coincided with the return of the rainy season, or of some
other annual meteorological phenomenon, like the bursting of the
monsoon or the Nile inundation. Thus, even in the tropics, and before
the coming on of the Glacial epoch, men or the ancestors of men
(one can not draw precise lines here) must probably have observed a
certain rough relation between the months and the vegetative cycles;
after so many moons, about say thirteen, the yam, or the mangoes,
or the grains are ripe again. These organic years, I take it, must
have been noticed before the astronomical ones. For it is now beginning
to be more and more believed that man is of preglacial
origin; and even if something worth calling a man were not, then[237]
at least man’s pre-human ancestors go back far into the Tertiary
period. Only later would men begin to note that some thirteen
moons, and the recurrence of a food stuff, concurred with a particular
solar season.

Indeed, if one comes to think of it, how much even now do any
of us, save the most scientific, mean by the year, beyond the visible
change of summer and winter? What we are thinking of is the
leafless trees, the ice and snow, the green grass in spring, the flowers
and warm days in summer, not the abstract astronomical fact of the
earth’s revolution round the sun, or the due succession of the signs
of the zodiac. It is that visible organic year that must have counted
most with man from the first; though no doubt its meaning and
reality are much more vividly present since the coming on of the
Glacial epoch, and the more so in proportion as we live nearer to the
north or south pole; while at the equator the year is to the last a
much more inconspicuous period—a largely artificial mode of reckoning.

Still, from the very first, there was one element of diversity in
the year which must have struck all men, in the temperate and frigid
zones at least, perhaps even in a certain way in the tropics. I mean,
the varying length of the day, always perceptible in the frigid and
temperate zones; for as soon as men in these regions began to think
and to observe at all, they must have noticed that the days increased
in their summer and lessened in their winter; and they must have
learned to correlate this waxing and waning of the day with the
appearance or abundance of certain fruits, seeds, birds, fishes, game,
roots and other food stuffs. It is at least certain that all the world
over men do now celebrate the solstices and the equinoxes as special
feasts; and the close similarity in most such celebrations leads one
to suspect that the custom has been handed down from the very
remote time when the human family was still a single continuous
body.

In the tropics, it is true, the days vary so little that this difference
in itself is not likely to have struck primæval man. But there,
another point would come in—the annual movement of the sun
overhead from south to north and vice versa; and though this would
be less directly important to human life than in temperate regions,
it would still be indirectly important. It would bring the rain with
it. In Europe, of course, and in temperate America, we can see at
once that the return of the sun northward must always have meant
spring, the increase of food stuffs, the promise of corn or maize, the
suggestion of harvest; and we can therefore understand why the
midwinter feast, when the sun after his long journey south begins
to move visibly north again, should have been both in pagan and[238]
Christian times the great festival of rejoicing for the men of the
north temperate region. Day by day they saw the sun recede and
the cold deepen; at last, one evening, he sets a little nearer, and
they know that he has not deserted them forever. Similarly, the
promise made at Yule begins to be realized at that other great feast
of the spring equinox, which we still call in England by its ancient
heathen title of Easter; the day by that time has got the better of
the night, and “the sun dances on Easter Sunday” in commemoration
of his completed victory over the combined powers of winter
and darkness. In the tropics, on the other hand, the connection
is less clear; but even here the shifting of the sun’s apparent place is
closely correlated with the shifting of the rain zone; and therefore
it would not be long (after man was man) before tropical savages
began to perceive a constant relation between the movements of the
sun to north or south, and the occurrence of the fertilizing rainy
season. We must remember that savages, with their improvident
habits, are much more dependent upon rain than we are, and that
magical ceremonies for breaking up a drought are among their commonest
and most universally diffused superstitions.

On the whole, then, before the coming on of the Glacial epoch,
we may be pretty sure that plants and animals on the one hand had
learned organically and automatically to recognize the existence of
the year and to adapt themselves to it; and that men or the progenitors
of men on the other hand had also learned to correlate the
recurrent seasons of food supply with the movements of the sun,
though nothing equivalent to winter and summer as we know them
to-day existed as yet on any part of our planet. I say advisedly “on
any part of our planet,” because even near the pole itself remains
of a subtropical vegetation in Tertiary times have been amply indicated.
Nevertheless, in all parts of the world then, as in the tropics
now, we may gather that plants and animals ran through annual
cycles—that the year, as I have put it, was organically recognized.
Trees had their time to sprout, to bud, to flower, to fruit, to seed,
to shed their leaves (in the evergreen way); birds had their time to
nest and hatch out their young; insects had their fixed periods for
laying, for larval life, for assuming the chrysalis form, for becoming
winged beetles or bees or butterflies. In one word, the year is a terrestrial
reality, not merely an astronomical fact, in the tropics now;
it was a terrestrial reality over the whole planet in the Tertiary
period. But it was hardly more marked, apparently, into distinct
seasons than it is marked to-day in the equatorial region. Rainfall
and drought must have had more to do in determining the annual
cycles than winter and summer.

From all this it must result that the conception of the year as[239]
an epoch at all (save for advanced astronomy) is almost or entirely
due to that tilt of the earth’s axis which causes the seasons—dry or
wet, cold or hot. Without the seasons, in one form or other, we
might have been ages longer in discovering the fact that the earth
moved round the sun, and that some three hundred and sixty-five
days (I omit those important fractions) were needed for its revolution.
Certainly, without the seasons, at least to the extent that they
occur in the tropics, plant and animal life could hardly have assumed
its fixed annual cycles, nor could early men have caught at the idea
of the year at all as a period of time, a unit of measurement.

Before the Glacial epoch, in particular, the discovery of the year,
organically or consciously, must have been much more difficult than
it is now in high latitudes. It must have been almost as difficult in
what are now the temperate zones as it is to-day in the tropics. Far
north or south, of course, the length of the day would tell; and
within the Arctic and Antarctic Circles the long night would form
an unmistakable feature. But if the plane of the equator had always
found itself vertical to the sun, there could have been no recognition
of the year at all, either organic or conscious. In other words, from
the point of view of organic life, the year does not mean the revolution
of the earth round the sun: it means the apparent northward
and southward movement of the sun on either side of the equator;
it means the seasons, whether recognized as winter and summer, or
as dry and wet periods. That is really the year as man knows it, as
plants and animals have always known it.

With the coming on of the great cold spell, however, the importance
of the seasons in the temperate and frigid zones, perhaps
also even in the tropics, became much more marked. I will not go
here into the suggested reasons for that vast revolution, perhaps the
greatest our planet has ever suffered. Most physicists now accept
more or less the theory put forward with great ingenuity by Mr.
Croll, which sets it down to a period of extreme eccentricity in the
earth’s orbit; but some weight must also be allowed, as Mr. Alfred
Russel Wallace has clearly shown, to the local arrangement of land
and water on the globe at the time of its origin, as well as to the
occurrence of mountain ranges just then at the poles, and to other
purely terrestrial causes. Never before, in all probability, had the
poles been occupied by great glacier-clad mountains. It seems most
likely, indeed, that we are now practically at the end of the Glacial
epoch, and that if only we could once get rid of the polar ice caps,
which keep a stock of chilliness always laid on (I speak the quite
comprehensible language of everyday life), we might recur forthwith
to the warm and almost imperceptible winters of the preglacial
period. But, as things stand, the stock of ice at the poles never gets[240]
melted away in the existing northern or southern summer; fresh ice
accumulates on top of the old mass with each winter; prevailing
winds, blowing over this ice, chill regions lying much farther toward
the tropics; icebergs detach themselves and float off, thus lowering
the temperature of the sea in the middle zones; arctic or antarctic
currents spread round the coasts and absorb the solar heat in enormous
quantities. We have only to remember the trenchant difference
in England between a parching cold east wind and a mild sou’wester
to realize what an immense part these polar ice caps and
frozen highlands play in the production of our existing winter.
Alps, Pyrenees, Himalayas, Rocky Mountains, further assist in the
same direction.

On the other hand, currents in the sea may cut either way; the
Gulf Stream makes England warm, while the arctic current makes
Labrador, much farther south, practically uninhabitable.

Ever since the Glacial epoch, therefore, it has been quite easy
for man in the temperate and frigid zones to recognize the year as
a natural reality. The annual cycles of heat and cold are far too
marked to be overlooked by anybody. Organically, they made themselves
felt at once by extraordinary changes induced in the fauna
and flora. Before the steady advance of the annual cold wave,
vegetation had perforce to alter its ways. The large-leaved evergreens
went out altogether in frigid and high temperate regions; deciduous
trees, or needle-leaved types like the pines and firs, took the
place of the luxuriant Miocene foliage in Europe and North America.
Every autumn the larger number of trees and shrubs learned
to shed their leaves all together; every spring they came out anew
in fresh green and in masses of blossom. Similarly with animals.
Birds learned to migrate, or to accommodate themselves to the winter;
insects learned to hibernate in the egg or the cocoon; pigs fattened
themselves on mast against the frozen time; moles slept over
winter; squirrels hoarded nuts for a store to bridge over heavy
frosts; frogs retired to the warmer mud in the depths of ponds;
adders coiled themselves in holes and dozed away the cold season.
Innumerable adaptations sprang up at once, those species or individuals
which failed to meet the new conditions perishing in the
struggle. In proportion as we recede from the tropics, the more
marked do the annual cycles of life thus induced become, many
species practically ceasing to exist as such for several months of the
year, and being only potentially represented by eggs, germs, or seeds,
and sometimes by dormant pregnant females.

At the same time, while the cause of the seasons as a whole is
the obliquity of the earth’s axis, with the resulting inclination of
either pole toward the sun alternately, we must not forget that the[241]
seasons and the climate in each particular country depend in part
upon many minor contributory causes. It is not merely nearness
to or distance from the equator that counts; we have to consider
also relative distribution of land and water, elevation, prevalent winds,
exposure, condensation, and many other elements of a complex problem.
In Ecuador, for example, whose very name means the equator,
the plain is always in scorching summer, the mountains are always in
perpetual spring. The monsoons, again, produce in other countries
some curious results: they depend themselves on the change of relative
temperature in sea and land at different seasons; and they break
upon the Himalayas with this odd and unexpected effect, that the
snow line on the southern side of that vast range goes very far down,
owing to the immense rainfall (or rather snowfall) and the consequent
spread of snow fields and glaciers; while on the northern side
it descends but a very little way, owing to the extreme desert drought
and the great summer heat of the central Asiatic table-land. We
have thus the apparent paradox that millions of Tibetans occupy
towns and cultivate farms to the north at a height from three to four
thousand feet above the snow line on the southern slope of the same
mountains.

Looking at the matter broadly, then, and taking for granted the
now generally accepted modern view that the great oceans and great
continents have been relatively fixed (though liable to minor fluctuations
and variations of outline) throughout all geological time, and
that the earth’s crust has not shifted from pole to equator or vice
versa, we arrive at last at the following probable conclusions: There
have always been seasons more or less marked, and these have been
more or less organically answered by corresponding changes or cycles
of change in plants and animals. Rain and drought have in many
cases more to do with such changes than variations of temperature.
The seasons, again, are less marked in the tropics than in temperate
and circumpolar climates. Nevertheless, even near the equator, they
exert and have always exerted certain organic influences-have resulted
in annual cycles in the life of species. Even before the coming
on of the Glacial epoch, the seasons were probably somewhat more
marked in the temperate and polar regions than in the tropics, the
longer day in summer and the greater directness of impact of the
rays making the summer months always warmer. But for various
reasons, among which we may presumably rank the absence in early
ages of high land at the poles and of an accumulated polar ice cap,
together with the existence of warm sea currents from the tropics
to the poles, the winters of preglacial ages seem to have been relatively
mild, perhaps (if we may judge by the types of plant life)
milder than those of South Carolina and Georgia in our own period.[242]
No cold winds of importance seem then to have blown with blighting
effect from glaciated or snow-clad districts. (Mars in our own time
appears to enjoy winters somewhat of this character, though a little
colder, with a temporary snow cap.) The seasons as we know them
in temperate and arctic climates, however, seem to be largely the
result of the glacial epoch, and its persistent legacy the arctic and
antarctic ice caps. If we could once manage to get rid of those, it is
possible that our planet might again enjoy in all its zones the mild
and genial preglacial winters.

These are rough notes, I know; mere adumbrations of a probable
truth: but adequately to develop the subject would require a very
big volume. My object here is simply to suggest that in many inquiries,
both into human and animal or vegetable life, we must never
take the existence of seasons as we know them for granted, except in
very recent times. The year, for organic beings, means essentially
the seasons; and the seasons may mean and have meant many separate
things, as time and place vary—heat and cold, food and scarcity,
foliage and leaflessness, drought and wet; longer or shorter days, the
midnight sun and the winter darkness; hibernation and wakefulness;
the egg, the cocoon, the seed, the plant, the flower, the fruit; dormancy
or vitality. According as human life started at the poles or
the equator, for instance, it would view in the beginning many things
differently. All I wish to point out now is merely this, that we must
bear such possibilities ever in mind; and that we must never take it
for granted in any problem, human or biological, that the seasons
were always just what we know them, or that the year to any organic
being meant anything more than the seasonal cycle then and there
prevalent.—Longman’s Magazine.

In the excavations of the ancient cemetery of Antinoe, near Lyons,
France, a “party dress” of the time of the Emperor Adrian, very fine silks,
jewels, etc., have been discovered. One sarcophagus held the remains of a
woman musician with a rose chemise, a cythara, pearls, castanets, etc.; in
another was a child’s costume with its little laced shoes, its vest ornamented
with flowers appliqués, and its robe of gauffered crape. It appears that the
women of sixteen hundred years ago dyed their hair with henna, and
twisted ribbons round their heads. Nothing changes.

M. A. Thieullen, publishing the results of fifteen years’ studies among
the flint implements of the French beds, draws the conclusions that the
elaborate palæolithic flint axe and hammer and the typical neolithic implements
were luxuries used by the more distinguished members or for the
more important purposes of the flint-implement-using community, while
the ruder implements which are found in enormous numbers were the
objects of general and daily use throughout all the flint-using ages, whether
palæolithic or neolithic.

[243]

BRAIN WEIGHTS AND INTELLECTUAL CAPACITY.

By JOSEPH SIMMS, M. D.

Having been for thirty years a lecturer on man and his character
as evinced by his form, features, head, and gestures, and
having made observations on the subject in all parts of North America,
in continental Europe and Great Britain, and parts of Asia,
Africa, and Australia, I should not be deemed presumptuous when I
present a few facts regarding the relations of mind and the size and
forms of heads and weights of brains. It has been observed by many
persons versed in the branches relating to the subject that men with
the largest brains are not those of most talent, power, or intellect; but
many such have been only ordinary or inferior men, or even idiots;
while some men of most powerful and comprehensive minds have
had unusually small brains. Esquirol’s assertion that no size or form
of head or brain is incident to idiocy or to superior talent is borne
out by my observations.

After long and careful research in the great libraries and museums
of the world, I have collected a table of brain weights of
eminent men, along with which are entered, in my original document,
the occupation of the subject, age at the time of determination,
and the source whence the item is derived. These can not be given
within the limits of this article, and only the briefest and most generalized
summary of the main features can be indicated. The largest
weight of brain in the whole list is that of the Russian novelist Turgenieff,
whose brain weighed, at the time of his death, at sixty-five
years of age, 71 ounces.[32]
It is a considerable step from him to the
next in order, the English mechanician and author, Knight, whose
brain weight at the age of fifty-eight was 64 ounces. Then follow
the Scottish physician Abercrombie, 63 ounces; General B. F. Butler,
62 ounces; and the Scottish general Abercromby, 62 ounces.
Another group of nine, including weights from 58.6 ounces to 54
ounces, includes Jeffrey, Scottish judge and author, Thackeray,
Cuvier, George Combe, United States Senator Atherton, Spurzheim,
and the Scottish physician Simpson. The next group, 53.6 to 50,
is larger, including twenty-one names, among which are Daniel
Webster, Agassiz, Napoleon I, the Scottish divine Chalmers, the
mathematicians De Morgan and Gauss, the anthropologist Broca,
and the generals Skoboleff and Lamarque. The last group, 49.9
to 40 ounces, contains twenty-five names, including those of the
philosopher Huber, Grote, Babbage, the anthropologist Bertillon,
[244]
Whewell,[33]
Liebig, Gall, Gambetta, and Bishop, the mind reader.
Only one remove from the foot of the list is Gambetta, a man of
indisputably high genius and ability, with a brain weighing only
40.9 ounces.[34]

The table goes to illustrate a general rule which I discovered and
published several years ago, that larger brains appertain to natives of
colder climates. Dr. John Abercrombie, for instance, was born at
Aberdeen, Scotland, on the German Sea, and farther north than
any part of the United States. Sir Ralph Abercromby was born in
the county of Clackmannan, Scotland, where it is far colder than
any part of southern Europe. Lord Francis Jeffrey first saw light in
Edinburgh. General Butler was born in Deerfield, New Hampshire.
Ivan Turgenieff, with the heaviest brain of all, was a native of cold,
inhospitable Russia. Dr. Franz Joseph Gall (brain weight 42.2
ounces)[35]
was born in Würtemberg, in southern Germany, passed
most of his life in Vienna and Paris, and, being a student, spent
much of his time indoors. Gambetta was born at Cahors, France, of
Italian parents. This climatological view of the size of brains is confirmed
by a paper, “Crania,” of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences,
which gives as the average size, in cubic inches, of the cranial
cavities of various nationalities, taking the results of many measurements:
Lapps, 102; Swedes, 100; Anglo-Saxons, 96; Finns, 95;
Anglo-Americans, 94; Germans, 92; Celts, 88; Malays, 86; Chinese,
85; Tombs of Gizeh, 84; embalmed Semitic, 82; Egyptians, 80;
Fellah, 79; Bengalese, 78.

A table of average brain weights of various nationalities, compiled
from Topinard’s and Manouvrier’s works and other standard
anthropological publications, illustrates the same tendency toward
greater brain weights in colder countries. One of its results is to
show that the colder air of the United States produces larger brains
in the negroes than the warm air of Africa. The table further shows,
in the comparisons of Hindus and African negroes, that the brains
are smallest in the warmest countries, irrespective of race or nation;
and that the largest average attained is in Scotland, where it is never
extremely warm.

The measurement of the cranial cavity is a very uncertain gauge
of the size of the brain, for the cerebro-spinal fluid may occupy a
large share of the space. Weighing the brain is without doubt
the only scientifically certain method of determining its size and
mass.

[245]

Perhaps the most remarkable case in the table of great men’s
brains is that of Gambetta, who was behind none of his compeers in
ability, and yet had the smallest brain of all. The first table of the
“Average Weight of the Human Body and Mind,” compiled from
Dr. Boyd’s researches among the sane, which was based on more than
two thousand post-mortem examinations, gives 45.9 ounces as the
average brain weight of boys from seven to fourteen years of age,
and 40.2 ounces as that of boys and 40.1 ounces of girls from four
to seven years of age. And this little brain of 40.9 ounces appertained
to a man, “a lofty, commanding, mental figure, standing out
in bold relief from the crowd of mediocrities which he dwarfs and
shadows,” the embodiment of the French Republic, who steered it
through one of its most perilous crises, “the foremost Frenchman of
his time,” who “established his claim to be placed in the very front
rank of European statesmen,” and whose untimely death was spoken
of as “nothing less than the sudden extinction of a powerful individual
force, one of the most powerful, indeed, of such forces hitherto
operating in Europe.”

In illustration of the association of large brains with small minds,
we have compiled from various sources of recognized authority a list
of one hundred and twenty-five persons of ordinary or weak minds,
idiots, imbeciles, and criminals, whose brains were generally larger
than those of the distinguished men subjects of the preceding notes.
Of these, Rustan, an ignorant and unknown workman, appears with
a brain weighing 78.3 ounces;[36]
the dwarfed Indian squaw who follows
him, of 73.5 ounces;[37]
an illiterate and weak-minded man had a
brain of 71.3 ounces;[38]
and a congenitally imbecile person cited by
Dr. Ireland, with one of 70.5 ounces.[39]
Another imbecile cited by Dr.
Ireland had a brain of 63.2 ounces, and the brain of an idiot with a
large head, eighteen years old, who had an idiotic sister, weighed 62.8
ounces. The brain of the idiot, No. 56 of the men in the table,
59.5 ounces, is exceeded in size by those of only five on the list of
famous men, while eleven persons recorded as idiots, imbeciles, and
children had brains heavier than his. An idiot boy of fourteen years,
very malicious, who never spoke, and who nearly killed his sister
with a pick, had a brain weight of 57.5 ounces. Thirty men out of
three hundred and seventy-five examined in the West Riding Asylum
gave brain weights of 55 ounces and upward, showing that
such weights are not so rare as some have supposed. In another
[246]
asylum in England one out of every dozen brains examined showed
a weight of 55 ounces or more.

In Nachrichten, of Göttingen, 1860, pp. 70-71, Dr. Rudolph
Wagner gave a table of thirty-two persons whose brains he examined,
among whom were five distinguished men; but the largest
brain weight recorded in it, 55.9 ounces, has opposite to it the legend,
“Idiotic grown man.”

To this list we might have added a large number of persons whose
brains weighed less than 53 ounces. Yet the brains of Daniel Webster,
Agassiz, Napoleon I, Lord Byron, Baron Dupuytren, General
Skoboleff, and other famous men concerning whose large brains
much has been said, weighed less than this; and we might have
appended hundreds of brain weights of idiots, imbeciles, and other
insignificant persons, from 53 ounces down to 49 ounces—probably
about the average weight in central Europe. In support of our contention
is, further, an observation by Dr. Rudolph Wagner in
Nachrichten, February 29, 1860, pp. 71, 72, that “very intelligent
men certainly do not differ strikingly in brain weight from less
gifted men.”

Dr. Clendenning presents in the Croonian Lectures the following
entries of brain weights of male subjects of different ages, the tendency
of which is to show that the male encephalon loses, after it is
grown, more than an ounce every ten years:

A number of other eminent anatomists have given similar evidence
of decrease in brain weight as intellectual power increases.

The “Professor at the Breakfast Table,” the late Dr. O. W.
Holmes, a learned man and experienced physician and professor of
anatomy in Harvard University for thirty-five years, says: “The
walls of the head are double, with a great chamber of air between
them, over the smallest and most crowded organs. Can you tell
me how much money there is in a safe, which also has thick walls, by
kneading the knobs with your fingers? So, when a man fumbles
about my forehead, and talks about the organs of individuality, size,
etc., I trust him as much as I should if he felt over the outside of
my strong box, and told me that there was a five-dollar or a ten-dollar
bill under this or that rivet. Perhaps there is, only he doesn’t
know anything about it. We will add that, even if he knows the
inward dimensions of the strong box, he could not thence determine
the amount of cash deposited in it.”

The internal size of Spurzheim’s skull was in cubic inches exactly[247]
the same as that of the skull of Joachim, an imbecile six feet nine
inches in height, with a brain weight of 61.2 ounces, whereas Spurzheim’s
brain weighed only 55 ounces.

Whoever has examined heads in the dissecting room of a medical
college knows that, except in rare cases of disease, the brain does
not fit the skull, but is surrounded by three membranes and a watery
fluid; and this liquid, it has been ascertained, is generally sufficient
to admit of its performing certain movements.

There can be no doubt that the brain moves in the skull, changing
its position, according to the laws of gravitation, in much the same
way as the lungs, heart, and liver do in the body. It has been
observed many times to move, as well as to pulsate, when exposed to
view during the life of the individual. It is subject to two regular
and constant motions—one produced by the arteries, the other by
respiration. It has also a third motion, discovered and described by
Dr. M. Luys, who stated, in a paper read before the Academy of
Medicine of Paris, that “the brain is subject to certain changes of
position, dependent on the attitude of the body. Thus, if a man lies
on his back or side, or stands on his head, the brain undergoes certain
changes of position in obedience to the laws of gravity; the movements
take place slowly, and the brain is five or six minutes in
returning to its previous position.” From these anatomical data
M. Luys deduced some interesting and practical conclusions, by
which he explained, for example, the symptoms of vertigo which
feeble persons experience when suddenly rising from a horizontal
position. He suggested whether the pains of meningitis may not be
due to an interference with these normal movements, and urges the
value of giving the brain the change produced by a horizontal position
at night.

The average cranial capacity is admitted to be 96 cubic inches in
England and 94 in New York; and it is to the unusual quantity of
fluid of some cases, and to the extraordinary thickness of the skull
in others, that we are to attribute the frequent discrepancy between
the external dimensions and the size of the encephalon. Daniel
Webster’s cranial capacity was 122 cubic inches, yet his brain
of 53.5 ounces was just what George Combe has laid down
as the average weight for an adult man. Water and lymph,
we are told, filled the skull. Professor De Morgan’s head, almost
free from hair, measured 24.87 inches in circumference, and
the dimensions were all those of a very large head, sufficient to
contain from 65 to 70 ounces of brain, yet his brain weighed only
52.75 ounces, or little, if at all, above the average in the cold parts
of the temperate zones. De Morgan was sixty-five years of age when
he died. He was much emaciated, and “the brain was distinctly[248]
shrunken,” not filling the interior cavity, where its place was supplied,
as is usual in such cases, by serum or water. There is no
known method whereby any man can determine whether brain or
water fills the greater part of any living skull. A small orange may
have a thin rind, and contain a good amount of eatable substance,
while a large one may have so thick a skin that the fruit proves
utterly disappointing.

Another proof that the skull is formed without regard to the
brain is the following: “The bony cabinet and its contents are developed,
to a certain extent at least, independently. This is very
clearly demonstrated by a fact which was observed by Gratiolet, and
is too frequently forgotten. The subject is an infant in whom the
cranium presented the normal conformation. The brain was, nevertheless,
almost entirely wanting.”[40]

Dr. Gall was a poor arithmetician, and his biographer says that
every kind of numerical calculation fatigued him. He could not go
through a process of multiplication or division that was at all complicated,
and knew nothing of geometry or of the problems of
mathematics.[41]
George Combe said of himself: “Arithmetic has
always been to me a profound mystery, and to master the multiplication
table an insurmountable task…. This faculty in me is, in fact,
idiotic.” Again he said: “When a boy, I never could learn arithmetic.
At the end of five years’ teaching I could not subtract,
divide, or multiply any considerable number of figures with accuracy
and facility, and can not now do so…. At the present day I can
not sum a column of figures correctly.”[42]

With these facts in view, our wonder at finding the theories of
these men at variance with all exact calculation is considerably
diminished. We propose to test some of their theories by arithmetical
processes. We found that the sixty famous men entered in
the table of authenticated brain weights show an average of 51.3
ounces. We now take all the idiots and imbeciles in the table of
“Large Brains and Small Minds,” and find the average 59.4 ounces;
so that the matter is left to stand thus: Ten idiots and five imbeciles
average 59.2 ounces; sixty famous men average 51.39 ounces: in
favor of idiocy and imbecility, 7.9 ounces.

The heaviest brain in the table of small minds is that of Rustan,
an ignorant and entirely unknown laborer. He was a healthy man,
and his brain, when it was weighed, was in a healthy condition. Its
weight was recorded by Dr. Carl A. Rudolphi, a Swedish naturalist
[249]
and physiologist of Stockholm, who became professor of anatomy
and physiology at Berlin in 1810. It reached the unexampled
figure of 78.3 ounces; while the brain of Turgenieff, the heaviest
among famous men, was 71 ounces—showing a difference of 7.3
ounces in behalf of the inferior mind.

Since writing the above, the following appeared in Tit-Bits, a
weekly paper published in London, England, March 19, 1898:

“It must not be assumed, however, that intellect is in direct
ratio to the weight of the brain; for while the brains of certain intellectual
men, such as … Dr. Abercromby, weighed more than
60 ounces, a certain Strand newspaper-boy, who was in intelligence
almost an idiot, had a brain which weighed no less than 80
ounces.”

Dr. Austin Flint, of New York, in his Physiology, gives the
average weight of the brains of men as 50.2 ounces. Dr. Peacock,
of Great Britain, makes it 50 ounces 3 drachms between twenty-five
and fifty years of age. Dr. Thurman gives 49 ounces as the average
throughout Europe, while Dr. F. Tiedemann, a famous naturalist
of Germany, reckons it at 53.2 ounces.[43]
Dr. Krause, a learned
German, places it still higher, at 55.4
ounces.[44]
Now, if we strike a
balance between the highest and the lowest of these estimates, the
mean will be 52.2. Then, recalling the average of our sixty famous
men, which we found to be 51.3 ounces, it is shown to be nine
tenths of an ounce below the average of ordinary men.

Our tables of national average brain weights do not quite agree,
because some of the subjects had been wasted by disease for many
months before death, whereby the brain was diminished along with
other parts of the body. Those who, like Dr. Boyd’s subjects, died
in hospital, showed too light an average for healthy Englishmen.
Dr. Krause’s subjects may have been healthy men killed in battle,
and those of Tiedemann persons who died suddenly. Executed
criminals show a fairly high average of brain weight, because there
has been in their case no diminution through long-continued
illness.[45]
We should recollect that Whewell, the famous English philosopher
and head master of Trinity College, Cambridge, England, was in
good health when killed by a fall from his horse; so was Gambetta,
when his life was ended by a pistol shot. The brain, however,
suffers less from the power of disease than the general bodily form.
One month under the most wasting sickness would probably not
[250]
diminish the brain more than an ounce or two, but a year or more
would make a considerable difference.

Taking, now, the sixty heaviest brains of persons not noted for
intellectual greatness, we find the averages to be 63.2 ounces. Comparing
this with the average of sixty famous men, 51.3 ounces, we
find a difference in favor of imbeciles, idiots, criminals, and men of
ordinary mind of 11.9 ounces. George Combe estimated that about
53.5 ounces was the average weight of the adult brain. Thus the
average brain weight of all the eminent men whom we have brought
into the comparison, 51.3 ounces, is below Combe’s estimate of that
of mankind in general. Again, the ten heaviest brains of our list of
famous men give an average weight of 61.1 ounces, while the average
given by the ten heaviest of the opposite class is 70.4 ounces, or
9.3 ounces greater. While our list of eminent men shows only five
whose brains exceeded 58.6 ounces in weight, those of seventy-six
of the common throng—seven of them idiots or imbeciles—rise above
that figure. These figures augur badly for the doctrine that would
attach importance to heavy brains for giving force and depth of
individual character.

Phrenologists assert that each organ of a mental faculty occupies
a certain position perceptible on the outside of the brain, with a
definite area which they have mapped out. They also hold that each
of these organs extends to the center of the base of the brain, tapering
to it somewhat like a cone, having its base turned toward the
outer world. They make no account of the fissures, the intervening
sulci and anfractuosities that must cut many of these supposed cones,
some at right and some at oblique angles. Then the large, long
cavities or ventricles intercept and would hinder many of them from
reaching the central, basilar part of the brain. The anatomical
structure of the brain thus appears fatal to this theory of the organs.

Large and complicated convolutions of the brain with deep sulci
have been regarded by some persons as inseparable from superior
powers of mind. The supposition is erroneous and groundless. The
rodents, such as beavers, squirrels, rats, mice, etc., have but little
brain and no convolutions whatsoever;[46]
yet the beaver exhibits
great foresight, economy, industry, and mechanical skill in building
his dam, erecting his house, and storing up bark as food for the
winter. Moreover, these animals live in societies and labor in union
by ingenious methods for a common purpose, with nice judgment.
“So great a variety of labors,” says Dr. Leuret, “is needed for the
constructions carried on by the beaver; they include so many instances
of well-made choice, so many accidental difficulties are surmounted
[251]
by these animals, that it is impossible not to recognize in
their actions the characteristics of a rather high
intelligence.”[47]
The
sheep has a much larger brain than the beaver, with numerous and
complete convolutions, yet it is one of the most stupid of domestic
animals. Again, though birds have convolutions in the cerebellum,
they have none in the cerebrum, and yet they are more capable of
education than any living beings except the human race. The eagle
is complete master of the lamb; the magpie, the hawk, the raven, and
the parrot with his talking powers, are not excelled in sagacity by the
dog, the horse, or the elephant, notwithstanding the latter animals
have brains of superior size and elaborate convolutions.

Squirrels manifest foresight and economy in storing nuts for the
winter’s use; yet they have no brain convolutions. The cetacea,
especially whales, have much larger brains than men, with more
numerous and more complex convolutions and deeper sulci; yet
their intelligence bears no comparison with that of the human race.

Three eminent men are known to have had very small convolutions
of the brain—viz., Louis Asseline, Dr. Tiedemann, and Baron
von Liebig. We have to add to this remarkable list two, not named,
but described by Dr. Wagner as having been very intelligent, who
yet possessed very few convolutions in their very small
brains.[48] As
Wagner’s book was printed before Liebig died, he could not have
been one of the two to whom the author referred.

Idiots often possess as large brains as men distinguished for intellectual
power, and their brains have as deep sulci, and convolutions as
fine, as large, and as complex. Our table of the common and weak-minded
contains a mention of an idiot whose brain weighed 53
ounces, or exactly as much as Napoleon’s, and had fine convolutions
and a large frontal lobe, but who could never learn to speak.

The elephant carries a far larger brain than man, finely formed,
broad and high in front, with much more numerous and complex
convolutions and deeper anfractuosities, and yet no intelligent person
would for a moment claim that its mind excels or even equals that
of man.

It may be well here to allow some eminent physiologists to give
their views on this subject. “The researches of anatomists have
disposed of every point advanced by Gall. Curiously enough, M.
Camille Dareste has placed beyond dispute the fact that the number
and depth of the convolutions bear no direct proportion to the development
of intelligence, whereas they do bear a direct proportion
[252]
to the size of the animal…. It is notorious that the instinct of
propagation, the instinct of destructiveness, the instinct of constructiveness,
and other qualities are manifested by animals having no
brains, nothing but simple ganglia.”[49]

Dr. Bastian demonstrates the convolutional theory thus: “In
animals of the same group or order, the number and complexity of
the convolutions increase with the size of the animal…. There
can not, therefore, be among animals of the same order any simple
or definite relation between the degree of intelligence of the creature
and the number or disposition of its cerebral convolutions.”[50]

We have the following testimony in our favor from Dr. Rudolph
Wagner, of Göttingen: “Examples of highly complicated convolutions
I have never seen, even among eminent men whose brains I
have examined…. Many convolutions and great brain weight
often go together. Higher intelligence appears in both kinds of
brains, where there are many or where there are few convolutions.
It is not proved that special mental gifts go with many convolutions.”[51]

Another theory of mind is based on the gray matter of the brain,
the amount of which has been supposed to be proportionate to
mental capacity. As this gray matter, however, averages only about
one fifth of an inch in thickness, it seems rather a thin foundation
for the human intellect if the condition is good that “size is a
measure of power.”

The late Dr. W. B. Carpenter stated the matter thus: “The
cortical substance or gray matter of the hemispheres essentially consists
of that vesicular nerve substance which, in the spinal cord as
in the ganglionic masses generally, is found to occupy the interior.
The usual thickness is about one fifth of an inch; but considerable
variations present themselves in this respect, as also in the depth of
the convolutions.”[52]

Daniel Webster’s brain had gray substance to the depth only of
one sixteenth of an inch.[53]
It thus appears that his brain had a
thinner layer of gray matter than the average of common-minded
men—one among the many proofs that facts are against all theories
that connect brain conditions with intellectual power.

Dr. Ireland thus describes an idiot boy who, though thirteen or
fourteen years of age, was only three feet eight inches in height: “In
expression he was dull and inanimate, with an old face and a short,
[253]
squat figure…. The convolutions were broad and simple, but not
shallow. The gray matter was as broad as usual.”[54]

The writer has examined many brains of persons morally or intellectually
below the average—such as murderers, negroes, and others
sunk in ignorance. He has invariably found the layer of vesicular
or gray matter to be thicker than that of Daniel Webster’s brain.
Elephants, porpoises, whales, dolphins, and the grampus all have this
layer thicker than the most intellectual men. Another great objection
to locating mind in the gray matter of the brain is that this
substance is found in the interior part of the spinal cord, and in all
the nerve centers throughout the body; so that, if mind is situated in
it, it is not confined to the brain, but dwells in the spine also,
and is distributed all through the human frame. Still another
objection lies in the fact that wherever the gray matter exists near
the surface of the brain, it consists of three distinct layers, separated
by a white substance, and the outermost layer is white, not gray.[55]

The septum lucidum consists of gray matter. The corpus striatum,
situated at the base of the lateral ventricles, nearly in the center
of the brain, was from three eighths to half an inch in diameter in
an ox which was dissected in Edinburgh. This is about the same
amount as is found in the corpus striatum of the human brain.
There would be lively times if it were possible for a mental faculty
to occupy at once all the localities where gray matter is found!

None of the suppositions about certain qualities of mind inhering
in particular portions of the brain have been proved, nor have they
stood the tests of science.

The theories which have assumed that the cultivation of the intellect
gives shape and size to the brain within and consequently to
the skull without, advocates of which have not been wanting, have
been disproved by the collected facts. “There is no proof,” says Dr.
J. C. Nott, in his Types of Mankind, “of the theory that the cultivation
of the mind or of one set of faculties can give expansion or increased
size of brain. The Teutonic races, in their barbarous state,
two thousand years ago, possessed brains as large as now, and so with
other races.”

The St. Louis Globe Democrat of November 13, 1885, gives an
account of some excavations on the Mount Ararat farm, east of Carrollton,
Illinois, where the bones of thirty-two Indians or mound
builders were unearthed. “They were not a diminutive race, as
some people have supposed, some of the thigh bones being sixteen
inches long, and some of the skulls twenty-four inches in circumference.”
[254]
A skull having a circumference of twenty-four inches means
a head that measured from twenty-five to twenty-six and a half in
life, when the cranium was covered with skin and muscles. The
average head of white men in New York to-day is only twenty-two
and a half inches round. So the culture of the white race for centuries
has not developed their heads to near the size of those of the
uncultured mound builders who inhabited America many centuries
ago. Our own opinion is that cultivation by means of a thorough
classical education, where the appetite is restrained, as usually occurs,
tends rather to diminish the size of the head, by reducing the temporal
muscles and the adipose tissue under the scalp.

The Engis skull is one of the most ancient known to exist, and
belonged to the stone age, or about the same time as the Neanderthal
skull. Professor Huxley describes it as being well formed, and considerably
larger than the average of European skulls to-day in the
width and height of the forehead and in the cubic capacity of the
whole.

Quatrefages, in The Human Species, p. 312, says: “This skull
(the Engis or Cro-Magnon), so remarkable for its fine proportion, is
also remarkable for its capacity. According to M. Broca, who could
only work under precautions calculated to diminish the amount, it
is equal to at least 1,590 cubic centimetres (96.99 cubic inches). I
have already remarked that this number is far higher than the mean
taken from modern Parisians; it is equally so in comparison with
other European nations.”

These facts all conspire to prove that the cultivation of thousands
of years has not increased the size of human skulls. In 1886, we
measured many of the skulls unearthed at Pompeii, the remains of
Romans who lived nearly two thousand years ago, and we found them
on the average larger in every way, but especially in the forehead,
than the skulls of Romans of this century.

In the museums of Switzerland we measured in 1887 several
skulls of the ancient lake dwellers of that country, and found them
larger in all respects, but particularly in the forehead, than those of
the Swiss people of the last fifty years. The average circumference
of the skulls we measured in the catacombs of Paris was twenty-one
inches and a half, which is about an inch more than that of Parisians
who have died within the past fifty years.

“The average internal capacity of the Peruvian skull is only
seventy-three cubic inches; that of Toltec skulls, seventy-seven
inches, and that of barbarous tribes, eighty-two inches; so that the
extraordinary anomaly is presented of a larger brain being possessed
by the barbarous tribes than by the nations who achieved no mean
degree of civilization in Central America and Peru. The average[255]
European skull is ninety-three inches in
bulk.”[56]
The author was
informed by Mr. Lucien Carr, of the Ethnological Museum of
Harvard University, that the capacity of the Peruvian skulls was
about one hundred centimetres smaller than that of the skulls of any
other people living in America at the same time. Yet that small-headed
people was the most highly civilized of all.

SPELEOLOGY, OR CAVE EXPLORATION.[57]

By M. E. A. MARTEL.

The not very graceful word speleology was composed a few
years ago by M. Émile Rivière out of Greek elements, as a
translation of the German Höhlenkunde, to signify the study of
caves. The study claims a place among the sciences, and is, I believe,
able to justify its claim. Caves have been subjects of interest and
curiosity in all times and countries. In the primitive ages, when
palæolithic man was obliged to defend himself against the large
Quaternary wild beasts, and did not yet know how to construct cabins,
he lived in the most inaccessible caves, or those easiest to close, which
he could find. Afterward, when man had advanced in civilization
to the neolithic stage, and had somewhat improved tools and arms,
having learned to build huts and villages, caves became simply burial
places. In the historical periods of antiquity they were transformed
into pagan sanctuaries or temporary hiding places in times of revolt,
civil war, or invasion. Down to the middle ages and the renascence,
they shared this function with abandoned quarries. Through these
changes they gradually became objects of popular fear and absurd
legend. I have nearly everywhere in France found legendary and
profound belief in some monstrous basilisk or dragon in the depths
of dark caverns, guarding immense treasures; and woe to the rash
adventurer who tried to steal these riches!

In short, caves have suffered their vicissitudes; their use as habitations
seems to be inversely proportioned to the degree of civilization.
The miserable aborigines of Australia have not yet quite abandoned
them; and in France the present occupation of the grottoes
of Ezy, in the Eure, by some outcast families, who lead a sordid existence
in them, indifferent to all social conventions, has recently been
cited as an extremely curious anthropological phenomenon.

Science, too, has laid its hold on caves only within a little more
than a century; for it was not till 1774 that Esper recognized that
[256]
the large bones taken from the caverns near Baireuth, in Bavaria,
were not those of human giants, but of extinct animals, and he called
them, they being petrified by limestone, zoöliths, or animal-stones;
and it was his remarks upon them that drew Cuvier’s attention to
paleontology.

Three sciences have of late years been advanced by the explorations
of caves: paleontology; prehistory, or research among the remains
of primitive men and their industries; and zoölogy, or the
study of living beings. The animals of caverns—crustaceans, insects,
batrachians, and fishes—constitute a special fauna, which has
been for fifty years a subject of study to naturalists of various nations,
and to the anatomy of which M. Armand Viré, of the Natural
History Museum of Paris, has been giving special attention for five
years past.

There are other sciences the study of which in connection with
caves, while capable of yielding valuable fruits, has been too long
neglected: geology, for their origin and formation; mineralogy, for
their relations to metallic veins; meteorology, for thermometrical
and barometrical variations and the formation of carbonic acid; terrestrial
physics, for the experiments on gravity that might be carried
on in deep vertical pits, supplementing the observations of Foucault
in the Pantheon at Paris, and Airy in the English mines;
hydrology, which has hardly yet perceived that caves are predominantly
great laboratories of springs; agriculture, which might transform
them into reservoirs for times of drought or storage basins in
case of flood; and public hygiene, which is just beginning to discover
that they may harbor in their fissures hitherto unsuspected causes of
contamination of the water of the springs that issue from them. The
number and importance of these new problems that have arisen from
the recent extension of underground investigations seem fully to justify
the specialization of the science of caves—another creation of the
Speleological Society, now four years old. This special interest in
the science of caves began about fifteen years ago, when, in 1883,
three members of the Austro-German Alpine Club—Herren Harske,
Marinitsch, and Müller—resumed in the limestone plateaus of Istria
and Carniola called the Karst, explorations which had been actively
and profitably carried on in the middle of the century, from 1850
to 1857, by Dr. Adolf Schmidt, whose discoveries in the caves of
Adelsberg, Planina, and St. Canzion won him a membership in the
Vienna Academy of Sciences. Their efforts and those of Herr F.
Kraus, who died last year, had the result of interesting the Austrian
Government in the subject; and since 1886 various engineers have
been commissioned by the Minister of Agriculture to make official
explorations and construct economical works in the caves and underground[257]
rivers of Istria, Carniola, and Herzegovina. Credits are
granted every year for enterprises which prove to be more useful
than would at first be thought.

It was at the same time, between 1883 and 1885, that I made
my first investigation in the Causses of Lozère, Aveyron, and the
adjoining departments of France, the results of which were to reveal
for the first time to the public, and even to geographers, the
picturesque beauties, then unknown, and now becoming the fashion,
of the gorges of the Tarn, Jenta, and Dourbie, the rocks of Montpelier
le Vieux, etc. In my excursions over the plateaus of the
Causses I frequently met, at the level of the surface, open, dark
holes, and mouths of vertical wells—avens—the depths of which no
one had ever looked into, unsoundable, they said, which the peasants
naturally took to be real mouths of hell. Recollecting what I
had admired at Adelsberg and in various caves of the Pyrenees, I
guessed these avens might also be doorways to subterranean splendors
and scientific treasures. So I began in 1888 the methodical
exploration of the unexamined natural cavities of my own land
first, and then of other countries of Europe; and since then I have
devoted several weeks every year to this work.

These pits are simply horizontal holes opening upon the surface
of the ground, of very different forms and dimensions. Herdsmen
are very careful not to let their cattle go too near them, for they
sometimes fall in.

The diameter of these pits varies from a few inches to several
hundred yards, and they are sometimes more than six hundred feet
deep. It is not easy to go down into them, especially when they are
on high levels away from habitations and roads. In such cases a
considerable apparatus of ropes, rope ladders, telephone, portable
boat, tent, etc., has to be taken along. The first measurement with
the sounding line gives the depth only of the first pit—and there
are often several succeeding one another. A rope ladder long
enough to reach the bottom is then let down, and the man who
descends has a rope tied about him for additional security, which is
held by the people above. A great many pits are narrower at the
top than lower down, forming something like a reversed speaking
trumpet, so that the explorer finds it very difficult to make himself
heard at the top; hence I have adopted the practice of taking a
telephone along. The interior shapes of the pits are very diverse.
The narrower ones are easiest to go down, because they permit one
partly to support himself against their walls. The wider ones leave
him hanging loose, in a position which he feels to be very precarious.
When there is a second or third pit, and we have not ladders
enough, we have to trust ourselves to a simple rope with a board[258]
fastened at the end of it for a seat. The gouffre of Vigne Close, in
Ardèche, which is about six hundred feet deep, has five successive
pits, and its complete exploration required three days. The bottom
of the pit may be a simple cleft in the rock, or an immense cathedral-like
chamber; as at Rabanel, near Ganges, and Hérault, the deepest
abyss in France, the vault of which expands into a gigantic nave,
five hundred feet high, which is lighted by the beam of light that
falls through the opening, presenting a grand and indescribable spectacle.
Some pits of less depth, as the Tin doul de la Vayssière, in
Aveyron, and the Padirac well, in Lot, both leading to underground
rivers, enjoy a still more complete illumination. Considerable talus
banks close the ends of these broad pits, and are generally produced
by the caving in of the roofs of caves.

Lively controversies and gross errors have prevailed concerning
the geological formation of abysses. The abyss of Jean Nouveau,
Vaucluse, among others, furnishes evidence against the false hypothesis
that such pits are as a rule the results of cave-ins, whereas
pits of that origin are rare and exceptional. These pits are for the
most part fissures, the principal feature of which is their narrowness.
At Jean Nouveau the greatest breadth is not more than about sixteen
feet. It is the deepest vertical pit of a single shaft without
intermediate terraces that we know of, and is about five hundred and
thirty feet from the surface of the ground to its floor. The mass
of stone rubbish at the bottom prevented our descending into a
second pit.

Pits composed, like Vigne Close, of several successive wells, destroy
another hypothesis—that of the formation of gouffres by the
emissions from thermal springs.

The greatest danger in descending these pits arises from the
showers of stones that sometimes come down upon the head of the
explorer. These are often started by his friends the hunters, or by
their dogs gamboling around at will.

While some of the caverns I have explored were stopped up by
obstacles of one kind or another that prevented further progress, in
others we found considerable rivers running a nearly free course.
We rarely found pits formed by the collapse of the roofs of the
cave in cases where the distance from the subterranean river which
by its work of erosion provoked the catastrophe to the surface was
more than one hundred metres. The pit of the Mas Raynal, Aveyron,
is one hundred and six metres deep, and abuts upon a large subterranean
river, which supplies the Sorgues of Saint-Affrique, one
of the finest springs of France. When we explored it, in 1889,
we could not pass the low chambers which occur in it because
the water was too high, and we have not visited it since. Its[259]
exploration in a dry season might reveal many very interesting
chambers.

In the cave of Rabanel, the first well, which ends in a talus of
fallen stones, furnishes an instance of a vertical fissure grafted, if
we may use the word, upon an interior grotto that already existed.
A stream runs through this grotto which falls into a second well
twenty-six metres, and is then lost in smaller passages so nearly
stopped up with earth that we were not able to follow it through
its course of about a mile till it comes out at the Brissac spring.

The cave of Trebiciano, in Istria, near Trieste, the deepest
known, has a total depth of more than a thousand feet. It is not,
however, entirely natural, but is composed of numerous vertical
fissures which lead, at about eight hundred and fifty feet below the
surface, to a large cavern, at the bottom of which flows the subterranean
river Recca. The fissures do not naturally communicate
directly with one another, but the engineer Lindner was commissioned
in 1840-’41 by the city of Trieste to construct for the municipality
a supply of potable water from the underground streams,
and after eleven months of labor made artificial connections between
the different parts of the chasm.

These vertical pits are formed by the wearing down, from the
top, by the waters which become ingulfed in them. This mode of
their formation was demonstrated to me in 1895, when I was in
Great Britain under a commission from the French Minister of Instruction.
I then explored several caves in which the rivers were
still running, and satisfied myself that the pits were simply absorbing
wells. Such wells are not effective now in southern France and
Austria, but in northern Europe, where rain is more abundant, they
are still operative. I found the plainest evidence of this fact in
Yorkshire, at the Gaping Ghyll, Ingleborough, where a river precipitates
itself at one leap one hundred metres under the earth.
English investigators and travelers had tried without success to descend
into it in 1845, 1870, and 1894, having conquered only about
one hundred and ninety-five feet of its total depth of two hundred
and twenty-nine feet. It took me twenty-five minutes to go down
upon a rope ladder which was suspended in the midst of the cascade.
Fortunately, the pit had the daylight to the very bottom—a wonderful
spectacle, compensating me for all my trouble and the long
douche bath which greeted me at the end of the descent, where
stretched an immense Roman nave nearly five hundred feet long,
eighty feet wide, and ninety feet high, without any sustaining pillar.
From the middle of the roof of this colossal cavern fell the cascade
in a great nimbus of vapor and light—a wonderful fantastic scene,
such as Gustave Doré or Jules Verne could never have imagined.[260]
The most pleasant feature of the whole of it, however, to me was
the thought that I had succeeded where the English had failed, and
on their own ground. The people were nevertheless very pleasant to
me, and at my instance have continued the exploration and made
some new discoveries.—Translated for the Popular Science Monthly
from the Revue Scientifique.

SKETCH OF CHARLES HENRY HITCHCOCK.

The name of Prof. Charles H. Hitchcock is closely associated
with the progress of New England geology, especially with the
discovery of the great terminal glacial moraine, and, in connection
with the name of his father, Dr. Edward Hitchcock, with the study
of the fossil bird tracks of the Connecticut River Valley.

Charles Henry Hitchcock was born in Amherst, Massachusetts,
August 23, 1836, the son of Prof. Edward Hitchcock, the
eminent geologist, who was afterward president of Amherst College.
The family is of English origin, and was planted in America by two
brothers who came over at nearly the same time and made homes
for themselves in New Haven, removing later to towns near by.
Luke Hitchcock, the ancestor of the subject of this sketch, came in
1695, and finally settled at Wethersfield, Connecticut. His descendants
in the direct line lived at Springfield, Granville, Deerfield,
and Amherst, Massachusetts. Professor Hitchcock is in the
seventh generation from Luke, and is equally removed from Elder
John White, his maternal ancestor, who came to Canton, Massachusetts,
toward the end of the seventeenth century, and removed thence
to the Connecticut Valley. Both lines of ancestry were purely English,
and all the progenitors were men of integrity, regarded in
their times as worthy to fill offices of trust in church and town.
Two of them served in the Revolutionary army.

The father of Professor Hitchcock was one of the most distinguished
geologists and educators of his time, and his services, especially
as State Geologist of Massachusetts, have already been described
in the Popular Science Monthly.[58]
His mother was the
daughter of Jacob White, a well-to-do farmer of Amherst, who, believing
in the education of women, had given her the best opportunities
for study available at the time. She could read the Greek
Testament and calculate eclipses, and was a gifted artist with pencil
and brush. She prepared with her own hands many of the numerous
illustrations in her husband’s reports, and also diagrams for the
[261]
lecture room. She took indefatigable pains with the education of
her children, placing their moral and religious welfare first. Of
the eight children of the family, six of whom reached maturity, the
surviving brother is professor of physical culture, and, for the time
being, acting president at Amherst College, and one of the two surviving
sisters, the widow of the Rev. C. M. Terry, has been for several
years matron of the Hubbard Cottage, Smith College, Northampton,
Massachusetts.

Beginning with 1835, the year before Professor Hitchcock was
born, his father, Professor Edward Hitchcock, was largely occupied
with the study of the “fossil bird tracks” in the New Red Sandstone
of the Connecticut Valley, and with the discussions to which the
investigation gave rise, the story of which has been told by Prof.
C. H. Hitchcock himself in the Popular Science Monthly (vol. iii,
August, 1873). Besides the search for the fossils and their collection
and comparison, and the examination of the literature that
might throw light on the subject, there were studies into the proper
interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis, the debate with Prof.
Moses Stewart, of Andover, and the gradual approach of the American
clergy to general acquiescence in the belief that geology is not
at variance with Scripture. Professor Hitchcock’s childhood was
largely spent under the influence of these studies and discussions.
The boy seemed to be full of promise, and because of his observing
ways and proneness to speculation was called “the young philosopher.”
He used to bring his mother the very small flowers of
Spergula rubra, which are so obscure that older eyes often fail to
notice them. He seemed to be fonder of his father than the other
children, and was never so happy as with him. Through this constant
intercourse Charles became absorbed in his father’s pursuits,
and grew up into a knowledge of geology from Nature and from
verbal explanations—a more satisfactory method than that of learning
from books; and he was associated with his father in all his
geological work from the time when he was first old enough to be of
service. Thus, before 1856 he was acquainted, from inspection, with
the terraces and reputed beaches and drift phenomena of all western
Massachusetts; he had handled every specimen of a foot mark in
the Appleton Cabinet, and by 1861 was the principal assistant
on the Vermont Survey, having prepared for the press the
greater part of the matter of the report. He had enjoyed the best
educational advantages of his day, having completed the classical
and preparatory courses of Williston Seminary, and been graduated
thence in 1852, then graduated from Amherst College in 1856,
a short time before his twentieth birthday. Among his early classmates
and college friends were Dr. Cyrus Northrup, president of[262]
Minnesota University; Dr. Richard Mather, professor of Greek
at Amherst College; the Rev. Dr. Goodwin, of Chicago; and Dr.
William Hayes Ward, editor of The Independent. After graduation
he spent a year in special study of Hebrew and chemistry at Yale
College, two years at Andover Theological Seminary, and one year
in Europe, studying in the Royal School of Mines under Professor
Huxley, and in the British Museum investigating the crustacea and
trilobites. Here he enjoyed the friendship of Professor Richard
Owen, and had the guidance of Dr. H. Woodward.

In 1857 Mr. Hitchcock was appointed assistant geologist to the
Geological Survey of Vermont. He served the full term of the
survey, and had charge of the preparation of the report relating to
the stratigraphical geology, the measurement and delineation of
the sections, and the compilation of the geological map.

In 1861 he received the appointment of State Geologist of
Maine, in which service he spent two summers in field work, preparing
two reports of progress, which were published in connection with
the report of the secretary of the Board of Agriculture. Besides
the general reconnoissance, he discovered the existence of large areas
of Upper Silurian and Devonian terranes. He has embodied his
views of the distribution of the formations in his general map of the
United States.

Having chosen the ministry for his profession, Mr. Hitchcock
studied theology under Dr. E. A. Park, of Andover, and the Rev.
Dr. Taylor, of New Haven. Questions of the relations of theology
and science were attracting much attention, and he treated of them
in two papers in the Bibliotheca Sacra, one of which was afterward
used for the guidance of theological students in several seminaries.
As more opportunities were offered for scientific work, the ministry
was given up. This was the time when the doctrine of natural selection
came to the front for investigation, and the early history of
mankind was receiving increased attention. Mr. Hitchcock came
home from Europe in 1867 convinced of the truth of some form of
evolution, of a considerable antiquity of man, and of the probability
of a plural origin of the human race. Finding that some of his
views on these subjects were not acceptable to his associates, he
ceased to make them prominent in his class instructions, and devoted
his attention to the more technical details of geology. Since
then general opinion has advanced so far on these subjects that the
views he held at that time seem now really conservative.

In 1868 he was appointed State Geologist for New Hampshire,
and spent ten years in the survey of that State. The results of his
work there were published in three large quarto volumes, with a
folio atlas of maps, profiles, and sections. The rocks described consist[263]
principally of crystalline schists and marine igneous ejections.
The geology of New Hampshire is of peculiar importance, because the
situation of the State is such that a correct knowledge of its rocks
promotes the understanding of many obscure terranes in the adjacent
regions of Maine, Quebec, Vermont, and Massachusetts. Professor
Hitchcock’s report of the survey may justly be styled his chief work.
The part best studied relates to the White Mountains and the
Ammonoosuc mining district. Connected with the survey was the
maintenance of a meteorological station throughout the year on the
summit of Mount Washington. Daily statements of the weather conditions
of this station during the winter of 1870-’71 were sent by
telegraph to the principal newspapers, and called out much interest—before
the United States Signal Service began its weather predictions.

The catalogue of Professor Hitchcock’s publications comprises
more than one hundred and fifty titles of papers, reports, and books.
Perhaps the earliest thorough study represented among them was
that of the fossil footmarks. The first of the published papers on
this subject related to the tracks of animals in alluvial clay, and was
published in the American Journal of Science in 1855. For several
years after this he assisted his father in arranging the museum and
compiling tables for the Ichnology. He made a complete catalogue
descriptive of the more than twenty thousand individual impressions
preserved in the Appleton Cabinet, which was printed, with descriptions
of a few new species of footmarks, in the Supplement to the
Ichnology of Massachusetts, edited by him after the death of his
father in 1865. Although circumstances have prevented him from
paying much attention to ichnology in later years, he has prepared
several papers on the subject, the most important of which was one
on the Recent Progress of Ichnology, which was read before the
Boston Society of Natural History about twelve years ago. In it
the ichnites were carefully catalogued anew and classified in the
light of our knowledge of the numerous dinosaurs of the West; and
the results of some studies of the slabs exhumed at Wethersfield,
Connecticut, are well known. The list of the Connecticut footmarks
was increased from one hundred and nineteen in the Ichnology to
one hundred and seventy; and facts were cited to show that the
Grallator, the three-toed animal most allied to birds, possessed a
caudal appendage of a reptilian nature. The Trias of New Jersey
had been found to illustrate new features in the Otozoum, whose
tracks are often ornithic in aspect. A comparison of the features of
the Triassic skeletons described by Marsh from Connecticut (Anchisaurus)
shows that the creatures were rather allied to the Plesiornis
than to the Anomœpus of the Ichnology, because of the great size of
the fore feet. Notes upon footmarks have been gathered also from[264]
illustrations in Pennsylvania, Nova Scotia, Kansas, Nevada, and
Florida.

Professor Hitchcock has studied the Quaternary or glacial deposits
with great success. His first publication upon the terraces and allied
phenomena of Vermont appeared while the old views of a submergence,
with icebergs, prevailed, to account for the phenomena. A
study of the glaciers of Switzerland in 1866 satisfied him of the
truth of Agassiz’s theory; and whenever the opportunity came for
re-examination of the surface geology of northern New England,
the facts were found to require a different theoretical explanation.
He caused a thorough examination to be made of the Connecticut
River terranes by Warren Upham in the New Hampshire Survey,
and proved that all the high mountains of Vermont, New Hampshire,
and Maine had been glaciated by a southeasterly movement.
The ice came from the Laurentian highlands, pushed in a southern
direction down the Champlain-Hudson Valley, with a southeasterly
flow over New England and southwesterly over the Adirondacks;
the last two courses having been subordinate to the first. At present
the Laurentian hills are lower than the New England and New York
mountains overridden by the ice, and probably the same was the case
in the Glacial period. The best explanation of these paths is afforded
by the suggestion that a gigantic ice cap accumulated north of the St.
Lawrence, towering into the clouds so much that its overflow naturally
descended over the White and Adirondack Mountains.

That glaciers should accumulate terminal moraines is axiomatic,
but no geologist before 1868 had ventured to suggest where moraines
might be located in the United States. In that year Professor Hitchcock
delivered a lecture before the Lyceum of Natural History in
New York and the Long Island Historical Society in Brooklyn, in
which he affirmed that the drift deposits from Prospect Park along
the backbone of Long Island for its entire length constituted the
terminal moraine of the great continental ice sheet. This declaration
inaugurated a new era in the study of the age of ice. The geologists
in their several States found the terminal moraines, and the various
phenomena began to be classified according to new laws. The search
for moraines has resulted in a restatement of the incident of the
age of ice; more than a dozen successive terminal moraines have
been mapped between New York and Montana, which suggest to us
the existence of several glacial periods. In compiling a catalogue of
observations of the course of glacial striæ by the United States Geological
Survey, it was found that Professor Hitchcock had recorded
for New England as many as all other geologists had observed for
the whole country.

Eskers are another interesting class of phenomena, and were[265]
first described as horsebacks in Maine, about seventy of them having
been described in the report of 1861 and 1862. It was not till after
the description of the Swedish Ösar that the nature of these lines or
ridges was understood; and now they were found in every prominent
valley in New England, as attendant upon the recession of the
ice sheet. Professor Hitchcock gave the correct name of these ridges
in his Elementary Geology, 1860; while for many years subsequently
they were erroneously called kames, even in the geology of
New Hampshire.

Professor Hitchcock gave the name of Champlain to the fossiliferous
clays associated with the till of the Atlantic coast. The term
has come into general use as connected with the melting of the ice in
the latter part of the period. Because of the presence of boreal
species, and of analogies with similar deposits in Europe, Professor
Hitchcock has asked the question whether there may not have been
a Champlain glacial epoch posterior to those named farther in the
interior of the country, the Kansan, Iowan, and Illinoisian epochs.

Those who explore the geology of northern New England have
to deal with crystalline rocks of various ages, and the opinions of our
best geologists have not been in agreement respecting them. Professor
Hitchcock was the first to make a geological map of New
Hampshire, and he also demonstrated the anticlinal nature of the
Green Mountains of Vermont. His teachers had inculcated the view
that these eminences belonged to a synclinal disposition, coupling
this with theoretical assertions as to their age and metamorphism.
Finding their main principle to be erroneous, he naturally disparaged
their theories, though more recent studies are eliminating many of
the schists from the Archæan. All the later explorers in the field—Canadians
and members of the Geological Survey—accept a pre-Cambrian
anticlinal in the heart of the Green Mountains.

The distribution of the New Hampshire formations was made out
for the most part before any assistance was derived from the labors
of Dr. G. W. Hawes and other petrographers. Twenty years ago,
at the date of the final publication of the New Hampshire maps, the
doctrine of an igneous origin of the crystalline schist had hardly been
hinted at. What seems elemental to the modern petrographer who
has acquired his technical education since 1890 was unknown then,
and the classification given in the report may not agree with that now
taught. In the midst of the diverse views entertained, Professor
Hitchcock classified the rocks of northern New England according
to this principle: rocks that are identical in petrographical composition
are assumed to have had the same origin, and to be synchronous.
Professor Hitchcock was almost the first of American geologists to
employ the petrographer as a help to the understanding of the crystallines—as[266]
was evident by the very valuable contributions to knowledge
in Part IV of the New Hampshire Report as prepared by Dr.
Hawes.

A vexing question concerning what are now called Cambrian
terranes divided geologists for a quarter of a century after 1857, and
had to be considered in preparing the geology of Vermont in 1861.
This was the Taconic controversy. Trilobites had been discovered
in Vermont, which were misunderstood by most of the American
geologists following Hall, Logan, Dana, and others. In giving the
species the technical name first of Barrandesi and then Olenellus,
Prof. James Hall asserted its derivation from the Hudson River
group—relying upon the stratigraphical determinations of Sir W.
E. Logan. As soon as Barrandes’s attention was called to these
trilobites and the attendant publication, he wrote his famous letter
to Logan in 1860, declaring that there must be a mistake somewhere.
That error was discovered in time to be eliminated from the Vermont
report of the following year. Professor Hitchcock had
charge of the field work in this Cambrian district, and his views of
the arrangement of the formations are in agreement with those of
the latest workers in the field. He applied the term of Georgia
to one division of the terrane in 1860; and the designation has
been generally adopted since that time. Jules Marcou claimed priority
in the suggestion of the application of the term, but upon
the publication of Professor Hitchcock’s statement on the subject
the credit of priority was awarded to him by Director Walcott, of
the United States Geological Survey.

Between 1860 and 1870 Professor Hitchcock was occupied
largely as a mining geologist in the estimation of mineral deposits for
mining companies, with his office in New York. In the prosecution
of this business he traveled in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec,
Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania,
Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Alabama. Subsequently,
the study of the phosphate beds led him to the island of
Redonda in the West Indies. He further visited the phosphate beds
of South Carolina and Florida, the gold fields of eastern Oregon,
the Chalcedony Park of Arizona, the Grand Cañon of the Colorado,
and the Yosemite and Yellowstone Parks. Studies made in the
Hawaiian Islands and their volcanoes in 1883 and 1886 resulted in
the contribution of important observations respecting those regions.
At the present writing Professor Hitchcock is spending a year of
further observations in those islands.

Mr. Hitchcock was appointed, in 1858, lecturer in zoölogy and
curator of the cabinet in Amherst College; an office which he filled
for seven years, retiring after the death of his father. In 1866[267]
he was elected professor of geology in Lafayette College, where he
gave short courses of instruction to five successive classes. In 1868
he was called to the chair of geology in Dartmouth College, a position
which he still occupies, receiving a year’s leave of absence for
1898-’99 in consideration of thirty years of service. He taught
geology and zoölogy as a provisional professor at Williams College
in 1881, and in the following year in the Virginia College of Agriculture
and the Mechanic Arts, Blacksbury. He received the degree
of M. A. in course at Amherst in 1859, the honorary degree
of Ph. D. from Lafayette College in 1870, and that of LL. D. from
Amherst College in 1896.

Professor Hitchcock has been connected with the American
Association for the Advancement of Science since 1856, and a nearly
constant attendant upon its meetings and participant in the proceedings.
He is a member of local scientific societies in Portland,
Me., Boston, Mass., New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, and
also of the Imperial Geological Institute of Vienna. He was
one of the most prominent movers in the inception and early history
of the Geological Society of America, and had much to do with
the organization of the International Congress of Geologists, and with
the preparation of special reports for the several meetings between
1876 and 1890. The handsome geological map of small scale compiled
for the United States was prepared by him and published in
the Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers
(1887), to illustrate the nomenclature and color scheme of the International
Congress.

Professor Hitchcock is best known to many by his geological
maps. The first efforts at mapping the geology of the United States
were made independently by Edward Hitchcock and Jules Marcou
in 1883—the work of Mr. Marcou extending only to the plains.
Prof. H. D. Rogers, five or six years later, prepared a map for Johnston’s
Physical Atlas. In 1872 Prof. C. H. Hitchcock and Prof.
W. P. Blake compiled a map for the ninth census of the United
States, and for R. W. Raymond’s report upon the mineral resources
of the country. The success of his small scale map led Professor
Hitchcock to undertake the preparation of a map on a scale
of twenty-five miles to the inch for the whole country. For this he
consulted every work that had been printed upon the geology of the
United States, and obtained the privilege of using many unpublished
data collected by geologists of States and Territories in which the
work had never been carried to actual completion. The map prepared
by the General Land Office was used as the basis for the geological
coloration, and the work appeared in 1881, of a size adapted
to use in the classroom. Its compiler has never seen any criticism of[268]
its accuracy. The edition prepared for the Mining Institute embodies
all the information acquired for the large map, with such
additional facts as had been learned since that map was published.
Prof. Hitchcock’s services were called into requisition in the compilation
of a similar map for the United States Geological Survey, which
was published in its annual report for 1886, under the editorship
of W. J. McGee; in fact, the two maps were printed from the
same plates, but Dr. Hitchcock’s contained certain features not found
in the other one—the result of different interpretations—and was
more complete. In the Government edition a system of coloration
devised by Major J. W. Powell, which was afterward abandoned,
was employed.

Professor Hitchcock contributed extensively to the collection of
State geological maps in the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, when
large scale sheets of New England, and a large copy of the Hitchcock
and Blake map of 1872, were exhibited. A medal was awarded
for a sheet of thirteen sections illustrating the stratigraphy of Vermont
and New Hampshire. The beginning of the measurement of
sections was made for the Vermont Geological Report under the
direction of Dr. Edward Hitchcock in 1861. Twelve lines of exploration
across the entire State were determined upon, and specimens
were collected to illustrate all the varieties of rock seen upon
each. The specimens were arranged in the State Museum at Montpelier
in geographical order. A similar plan of collection and arrangement
was projected for the New Hampshire survey, but it
was made to extend across the two States, from Maine to New York.
Besides the two State reports, later publications were issued, descriptive
of explorations and collections for the Bulletin of the American
Museum of Natural History in New York, and the New Hampshire
Agricultural Report for 1883. The work did not cease with these
publications, for after the transfer of the collection of sections from
the New Hampshire College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts
to Dartmouth College in 1894, additional explorations were made;
the number of sections was increased to eighteen; improved drawings
of the profiles, colored geologically, were prepared for the cases in
the new Butterfield Museum; and the explanation of the details was
further facilitated by the construction of a large relief map on the
scale of one mile to the inch horizontally, twice as much vertically,
and having colors corresponding to those on the profiles between the
shelves. About five thousand specimens have been gathered to illustrate
the profiles.

The Dartmouth College Museum is filled with specimens accumulated
by the energy of Professor Hitchcock. They concern geology,
paleontology, petrography, economic botany, and conchology.

[269]

Editor’s Table.

EVOLUTION AND EDUCATION.

Our attention has been drawn to
a lively discussion that has lately
taken place in the St. Paul papers
over the utterances, on the subject
of the doctrine of evolution in its
relation to education, of a certain Mr.
Smith, who was appointed not long
since superintendent of the public
schools of that city. What seems
clear is that Mr. Smith is a very ignorant
man, whose views in regard
to education are of an altogether
retrograde character. How he came
to be appointed to his present position
is a question which is being gravely
pondered by many of the citizens;
but probably the explanation is not
very far to seek. The dispensers of
patronage in State and municipal
affairs are not always competent to
make the best nominations to offices
calling for high qualifications; and
sometimes they do not even act up
to their own indifferent lights. The
man that has the pull is very apt to
be the man that gets the office, and
it is not often that the strongest pull
goes with the highest professional
fitness.

However this may be, there Mr.
Smith is, and what kind of a man
he is may be judged from his utterances.
It is thus that he refers to
Mr. Spencer: “There is an old man
in England who for years has spent
all his time and devoted all his energies
to the attempt to create a system
which shall entirely ignore the name
of the Deity. He will shortly die,
and it shall not be remembered that
he ever performed an act or said a
word that blessed or comforted or
relieved his suffering fellows.” To
further darken the picture, he contrasts
Spencer with the late Cardinal
Newman, who wrote the hymn
“Lead, kindly light,” and who, we
are told, if he had done nothing
more, would have been “followed
by the blessings and the prayers of
those whom he had comforted and
saved.” Again, dealing with the
modern scientific view that, in the development
of the human individual
all antecedent stages of human development
are, in a manner, passed
through, he says: “Let us discard
the primitive-man theory. You do
not believe it. Rather shall we not
hold with Emerson that every child
born into the world is a new Messiah
given into the arms of fallen humanity
to lead them back to paradise?”

It is no part of our purpose to defend
Mr. Spencer against the attacks
of so negligible an assailant as Mr.
Smith, of Minnesota. The words that
Mr. Spencer has spoken for truth,
for justice, for humanity, for peace,
are his sufficient commendation and
vindication—were vindication needed—in
the eyes of all who have any
competent knowledge of contemporary
thought. If these words do not
help to make the world better we
should feel little inclined to put our
trust in the most skillfully constructed
sacred lyric. Men do not always
know their benefactors; and it is altogether
possible, nay probable, that
thousands who perhaps never heard
Mr. Spencer’s name have benefited
through the greater consideration
with which they have been treated
by others, owing to his teaching. It
is quite possible for men, yes, and
women too, to sing “Lead, kindly
light” with great unction, and yet
to be the ardent abettors of warlike
sentiments and warlike acts—to revel
in a ruthless and immoral jingoism.[270]
Dryden was not referring to the adherents
of any evolutionist philosophy
when he wrote:

“Not daring to forgive” is good, and
nearly as true in the nineteenth century
as it was in the seventeenth.
The one English statesman who
dared to forgive a defeat inflicted on
English arms and to acknowledge an
error, incurred by that single act a
deeper hatred and contempt than he
earned by anything else, or all else,
in his long and storm-tossed career.
We refer to the action taken by
Gladstone after the battle of Majuba
Hill. And we are much mistaken if
the majority of those who execrated
him most deeply for not crushing
the Boers under England’s overwhelming
force were not immense
admirers of the cardinal’s hymn.
What is certain is that they were
not immense admirers of Spencer,
and that Spencer did not immensely
admire them.

Superintendent Smith has quoted
Emerson, but he does not occupy the
standpoint that enables him to see
Emerson in true perspective, or to
feel what his philosophy lacks when
confronted with the newer knowledge
of the century. Mr. J. J.
Chapman, in his recent memorable
book of essays, gives us a better view.
“A critic in the modern sense,” Mr.
Chapman says, “he (Emerson) was
not. He lived too early and at too
great a distance from the forum of
European thought to absorb the ideas
of evolution, and give place to them
in his philosophy…. We miss in
Emerson the underlying conception
of growth, of development, so characteristic
of the thought of our own
day, and which, for instance, is found
everywhere latent in Browning’s poetry….
He is probably the last
great writer to look at life from a
stationary standpoint.”

That the doctrine of evolution
constitutes to-day a most important
guiding principle in education no
competent educationist could be
found to deny. It teaches us to deal
with the young as in a very true
sense the heirs of all the ages, to
make due allowance in childhood for
instincts and habits which partake
of the earlier stages of human development,
and to look forward with
confidence to later and higher manifestations.
We have less faith than
our ancestors had in the rod, and
more in the gradual unfolding of the
powers and capacities of the mind,
and therewith the enlargement and
improvement of the moral nature.
We do not believe as our forefathers
did in breaking children’s wills; nor
do we view their peccadilloes in the
lurid light of a gloomy theological
creed. We recognize that veracity,
in the sense of strict accuracy of
speech, purged of all imaginative
elements, is a virtue which not all
adults are able to practice, and which
is not a natural product of the child
mind. We can not accept Emerson’s
doctrine of infant Messiahs, and yet
we can recognize very fully the mission
of the child in the home, the
demand it makes for tenderness, for
patience, for thoughtfulness on the
part of parents, the hopes and fears
and heart-searchings that it calls into
play, the aspirations that it promotes
toward the realization, if for its sake
only, of a higher life. Froebel
grasped a large measure of truth in
regard to children, but too much of
sentiment, in our opinion, entered
into his treatment of them. In the
full light of the doctrine of evolution
we take them as they are, and help
them to work out under favorable
conditions that development of which
they are capable. We are not imposed
upon by childish imitations of[271]
mature virtues, and are rather disposed
to repress recognized tendencies
to precocity; but we believe that the
germs of good are sown in every
normal human being, and that, unless
killed by most unwise treatment, they
will fructify in due time.

What we may well consider seriously
is whether our modern modes
of life enable us to do that justice to
children which evolutionary teaching
requires. Can true health of
body and mind be conciliated with
social ambition or with commercial
ambition? Are we not hampered at
every turn by false schemes of education,
the object of which is to turn
out certain conventional products?
How many of us can rise up in effective
rebellion against the very fashions
that in our hearts we most condemn?
Before there can be anything
like a perfect education for the
young there must be a much more
fully developed sense of duty than
we see as yet in the older generation.
The doctrine of evolution is putting
the key to a true system into our
hands; but to use that key aright requires
courage and high purpose—qualities
that are not of everyday
occurrence. Still, it is matter of congratulation
that the truth is not far
from us. It is well established in
our theories, and one of these days
we may hope it will gain a wide and
secure footing in our practice.

DAVID AMES WELLS.

In the death of David A. Wells,
which occurred at his home in Norwich,
Connecticut, on the 5th of November,
1898, America has lost one
of her ablest and most productive
men of letters and science a distinguished
representative. Out of a
life of seventy years it may fairly
be said that Mr. Wells gave fifty of
them to intellectual pursuits, which
were mainly devoted to the advance
of science and its application to practical
affairs. After passing the period
of early study, and particularly
since he became interested in economic
questions, much of his work
was in the line of original investigation,
the results of which have from
time to time been given to the public
either through his books or in the
magazines. Another and more conspicuous
feature of his career, the
one perhaps that made him best
known at home and first gave him
reputation abroad, was the valuable
service that he rendered the country
at large in straightening out
the financial tangle the Government
had got itself into during
and after the civil war. In this
undertaking his great store of learning,
rare practical sagacity, and unwavering
confidence in the final
result, carried him through to a
brilliant success, earning for him in
high quarters the most flattering
testimonials of admiration and respect.

Looked at in the light of what
he actually achieved, Mr. Wells’s
preparation for his life work seems
to have been almost an ideal one.
Gifted with a strong love of Nature
and having a decidedly practical
turn of mind, he early showed a
fondness for the study of science.
This led him, soon after graduating
from Williams College in 1847, to
enter the Lawrence Scientific School
of Harvard University. Here he
completed the course with the first
class that was graduated by that institution
in 1852. While studying
in the scientific school young Wells
became the special pupil of Agassiz,
and, as the sequel shows, caught the
enthusiasm with which that great
master was wont to inspire the young
men who were fortunate enough to
come within the range of his influence.
During this period Mr. Wells,
in association with Mr. George Bliss,[272]
began the compilation and publication
of the Annual of Scientific
Discovery, which he continued for
some sixteen years. That he was
a clever student with quite exceptional
endowments is seen in the
circumstance that immediately after
graduation he was appointed assistant
professor in the scientific school
and lecturer on physics and chemistry
in Groton Academy, Massachusetts.
He also, between 1857 and
1863, prepared a series of scientific
school books embracing the subjects
of physics, chemistry, and geology,
and a volume on the Science of
Common Things, all of which attained
a wide circulation.

Thus for a period of nearly fifteen
years Mr. Wells had devoted himself
assiduously to the cultivation of
the physical sciences. Beginning
with the practical operations of the
laboratory, where the value of experiment
and observation is made
apparent, his work was continued in
the strengthening and developing
experiences of the teacher, and
thence led up to that wider knowledge
and that clearness of exposition
which a bright mind would
acquire in the preparation of a number
of successful scientific class
books. It may be presumed that
by this time he was thoroughly acquainted
with scientific method in
its applications to the investigation
and explanation of physical phenomena.
With the results this had
yielded in building up the great
body of verified knowledge composing
the several sciences he must also
have been familiar. Mentally alert
and with sharpened powers of observation,
he was able to seize and classify
the facts bearing upon the problem
in hand, and subject them to
systematic processes of scientific reasoning.

Such, in brief, was the training
and such the equipment brought by
Mr. Wells to the study of economic
questions when he first began to
write upon them in 1864. A better
preparation for the work to which
he was to give the next thirty years
of his life can scarcely be imagined.
While it is quite true that in entering
this new field he was to encounter a
class of facts and variety of phenomena
that were of a very different order
from those with which he had
previously been dealing, their apparently
haphazard character did not
deceive him. Well versed in the
practice of tracing effects to causes,
gifted with remarkable powers of insight,
and thoroughly believing that
the methods of science would prove
as available in the study of economics
as in other fields, he began his investigations
without misgiving, patiently
accumulated and studied the
facts, and when conclusions were arrived
at, no matter how contrary they
might be to current teaching, fearlessly
announced and defended them.
Though half his life a firm believer
in the doctrine of protection, when
Mr. Wells went to Europe for the
Government in 1867 to investigate
the subject of tariff taxation, high
and low tariff countries alike were
visited, with the determination to
leave nothing undone that would aid
to a better understanding of the
question. All the varied aspects of
the problem were carefully studied
in connection with the principal industries
of the respective countries,
and, finding reason in the facts thus
obtained to revise his opinions, he
came home a convert to free trade.
For an account of what he had observed
during the course of his investigations,
and of the conclusions
based thereon, the reader is referred
to the fourth volume of his reports
as commissioner of internal revenue,
published in 1869. His book on Recent
Economic Changes, and the papers
on The Principles of Taxation,[273]
that have appeared in this magazine
during the last two years, are records
of equally painstaking research.
Moreover, they are both excellent
examples of what a strict adherence
to scientific method has done and
may yet be expected to do toward
clearing up the knotty problems in
economics that are now engaging
public attention.

United with his great learning,
and a rare power of generalization,
Mr. Wells possessed in full measure
that intellectual honesty which is
the indispensable characteristic of
the true man of science. This enabled
him to follow without doubt or
hesitation wherever the facts might
lead; and with his clear perception
of their real import, joined to his
habit of independent thought, traits
that are displayed throughout all his
more formal writings, they are what
in our opinion constitute his title to
distinction. They give to his teachings,
which have already done more
than any other agency that we
know toward placing the subject of
political economy on a sound scientific
basis, a high and enduring character.

A BORROWED FOUNDATION.

“The central idea of Professor
Giddings’s Principles of Sociology, a
work that has the honor of being the
first independent attempt in English
to treat of sociology as such, is that
we must postulate on the part of
human beings what he calls a consciousness
of kind. Critics of his
volume have naturally told him that
this is essentially a philosophical
idea, found in Hegel and in British
ethical writers of the eighteenth century.”

We quote the above from an article
by Professor Caldwell, entitled
Philosophy and the Newer Sociology,
in the October Contemporary.
We are not prepared to dispute Professor
Caldwell’s statement that the
idea of the “consciousness of kind”
may be found in the writers to whom
he refers; but it would have been
very much to the point if he had
mentioned that it is to be found most
clearly enunciated in Mr. Herbert
Spencer’s Principles of Sociology.
In an article contributed to this
magazine in December, 1896, Mr.
Spencer took occasion to point out
that what Professor Giddings seemed
to regard as an aperçu peculiar to
himself had been distinctly formulated
years before in his own writings.
In proof of this he quoted the
following passages:

“Sociality having thus commenced,
and survival of the fittest
tending ever to maintain and increase
it, it will be further strengthened
by the inherited effects of habit.
The perception of kindred beings,
perpetually seen, heard, and smelt,
will come to form a predominant
part of consciousness--so predominant
that absence of it will inevitably
cause discomfort.” “Among creatures
led step by step into gregariousness,
there will little by little be
established a pleasure in being together—a
pleasure in the consciousness
of one another’s presence—a
pleasure simpler than, and quite distinct
from, those higher ones which
it makes possible.”

The fact is that there is much
more in Spencer than most recent
writers have ever explored; and the
newer sociologists would do well,
before putting forward claims to
originality, to make sure that they
have not been anticipated by the
veteran philosopher.

[274]

Scientific Literature.

SPECIAL BOOKS.

In The Play of Animals[59] we are offered a book upon an essentially new
topic; for, although much has been written concerning the habits and
intelligence of animals, no special consideration has been given to their
play or its psychic significance. The survey of this virgin territory seems
to the critical reader to have disclosed such limitless area to Professor
Groos that he fails to indicate its legitimate boundaries. He confesses
himself overcome by a sense of its vastness, stating that the “versatility
needed for a thorough investigation is so comprehensive that it is unattainable
by an ordinary mortal.”

Play, he finds, is not “an aimless activity carried on for its own sake”;
neither is it the product of surplus physical energy, as Mr. Spencer defines
it, for in youth there is playfulness without this condition. Instincts useful
in preserving the species appear before they are seriously needed, and
are utilized in play, which serves as preparation for the tasks of life.
“Animals do not play because they are young, but have a period of youth
in order to play.”

The special ends accomplished by play are control of the body, command
of the means of locomotion, agility in pursuit of prey and in escaping
danger, and prowess in fighting. The games pursued in attaining these
ends are classified in nine groups, beginning with those of experimentation
and ending with those referred to curiosity. They include plays of movement,
hunting, fighting, love, construction, nursing, and imitation. For all
of these Professor Groos finds but one instinct of play responsible, supplemented
by the instinct of imitation. He enters into an elaborate discussion
of instinct, giving an outline of Weismann’s theory of heredity and the views
of various writers. He adopts Herbert Spencer’s definition of instinct as a
complex reflex act, referring its origin to the operation of natural selection,
acknowledging the process to be beyond our grasp. In seeking to explain
bird song and the love play of animals, the theory of sexual selection is
not accepted by him without qualification; a modification of the Darwinian
principle is suggested in which the female exerts an unconscious choice.
The psychic characteristics of play are the pleasure following satisfaction
of instinct, energetic action and joy in the acquirement of power. The
animal at first masters its own bodily movements, then seeks the conquest
of other animals and inanimate objects. When a certain facility in play
has been gained a higher intellectual stage is entered upon, that of make-believe,
or playing a part. This state of conscious self-illusion is reached
by many of the higher animals. Psychically, it indicates a divided consciousness,
and occupies a place between the ordinary state and the abnormal
ones of hypnosis and hysteria. To this condition Professor Groos
ascribes the genesis of artistic production, an hypothesis that he has elaborated
more fully in Einleitung in die Aesthetik.

The experimental plays of animals, divided into those of courtship, imitation,
and construction, correspond to the principles of self exhibition,
[275]
imitation, and decoration, which are claimed to be the motives of human
art. The acquirement of power through play develops a feeling of freedom,
and this the artist likewise seeks to realize in the world of ideals.

Artists will not probably acknowledge that “life is earnest, art is playful,”
nor moralists agree that “man is only human when he plays, for there is
no real freedom in the sphere of experience,” yet both may find food for
thought in Professor Groos’s analysis of play.

In the spasm of unreasoning hostility to Spain which has come over
the people of the United States, succeeding a period of effusive admiration,
the public are apt to forget that that nation has done anything creditable
for the promotion of civilization. Yet, leaving out other fields of culture
for the present, it has produced two painters who rank among the great
masters, besides numerous secondary artists, rivals of any of that grade in
the world, and a voluminous literature which George Ticknor thought it
worth while to make the study of his life, and which inspired the pens of
Irving, Longfellow and Lockhart. One of the works of this literature
ranks among the world’s greatest classics, and has been, perhaps, after the
Bible and Shakespeare more universally read than any other book; and
numerous other works—chiefly romances—have furnished patterns or
themes for the poets, novelists, and dramatists of other nations. Mr. Fitz
Maurice Kelly’s excellent and convenient History of Spanish
Literature[60]
therefore comes in good time to refresh our memories concerning these facts.
One does not have to go very far in the history to find that of the great Latin
writers of the age of the Cæsars, the two Senecas, Lucan the poet of Pharsalia,
Martial the epigrammatist, and Quintilian the rhetorician—still an
authority—and many minor writers, “were Spaniards as well as Romans.”
It also appears that of what Gibbon declared to have been the happiest epoch
of man’s history—from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus,
seventy of the eighty years, if we take the liberty, as Mr. Kelly
does, of counting Marcus Aurelius as a Cordovan, were passed beneath the
scepter of the Spanish Cæsars. Prudentius, a distinguished Latin Christian
writer of a succeeding age, was also a Spaniard. Although there were
“archaic” works of trovadors before that time, traditionally preserved by
juglars, Spanish literature proper began in the twelfth century. It owed
much to French and Italian, and in course of time gave much back to
them. Among its earliest signs was the development of the romance (ballad),
while Arab writers (whose work Mr. Kelly considers of doubtful value)
and Jews, who are better spoken of, were early contributors to it. The
earliest works of importance were the Mystery of the Magian Kings, one of
the first plays in any modern language, and the great heroic poem of the
Cid, both anonymous. The first Castilian poet whose name has reached us
was Gonzalo de Berceo, 1198 to 1264, who wrote much, and was, “if not an
inventor, the chief of a school.” Permanent form was given to Spanish
prose by King Alfonso the Learned, 1226 to 1284, who, “like Bacon, took
all knowledge for his province, and in every department shone pre-eminent.”
He had numerous collaborators, and “his example in so many
fields was followed”—among others (in some of them) by his son and successor,
Sancho IV. The Infanta, Juan Manuel, nephew of Alfonso, in one
[276]
of the stories of his Conde Lucanor—”one of the books of the world”—created
the germ of the Taming of the Shrew. Passing a numerous list of
writers of respectable merit, for whose names even we have not room, we
come to the age of the Catholic kings and Charles V, when for a hundred
and fifty years literature most flourished in Spain. Among the features
of this period are the Amadis de Gaul—”the best in that kind”—which
inspired Cervantes; Columbus, who, though of Italian birth, “was probably
the truest Spaniard in all the Spains,” the poet Garcilaso de la Vega,
and Bernal Diaz and other historians whose names dot Prescott’s books.
Passing a large number of writers of mark whose works appeared in this
age, and stopping only to mention Alonzo de Ercilla y Zuñiga’s Araucana
as the first literary work of real merit composed in either American continent,
we come to the age of Cervantes, whose story of Don Quixote—”the
friendless people’s friend,” as Browning styles him—is not more distinguished
for its satirical wit and humor than for its kindly humanity; and
Lope de Vega, that most prolific of all dramatic authors, who “left no
achievement unattempted,” and died lamented by a hundred and fifty-three
Spanish and fifty Italian authors, who sang his praises. Among
other of the most distinguished writers of this and succeeding periods are
Mariana, “the greatest of all Spanish historians”; Góngora, a famous poet
in his day; Quevedo; Tirse de Molina, the creator of Don Juan; Calderon,
second as a dramatist among Spaniards, if second, only to Lope de Vega,
and Alarcón his compeer; and Velasquez, great in art and not small in
letters. An interregnum came in during the reign of Carlos II, and
French influence made itself felt. The age of the Bourbons produced
among others the Benedictine Sarmiento, who as a botanist “won the admiration
and friendship of Linné.” The present century has been marked
by the names of many authors of merit, novelists known to us in translations,
by an active movement of historical composition developing brilliant
monographs, and by a marked advance of scholarship and tolerance,
led by Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo; with a tendency to produce “a breed
of writers of the German type.”

GENERAL NOTICES.

The great importance of the problems of
forestry and all that pertains to them can
not fail to be appreciated by any one who
has seen the devastation wrought in many
sections of this country by the “wood chopper.”
Forestry is one of the subjects where
natural science can step in and guide the
way to economic success, and where, in default
of scientific methods, economically fatal
results inevitably ensue. The preservation
of forests has been an important problem in
Europe for many years, but until quite recently
it has received little attention in the
United States. One of the pioneers in the
field of forestry in this country was Franklin
B. Hough, whose Elements of Forestry is
still a used and useful manual. Among his
many schemes for attracting attention and
study to this important subject was one of
making actual sections of the wood of American
trees, and arranging them in a compact
and attractive manner for general distribution.
This idea he never carried out, and it
has remained for his son, Mr. R. B. Hough,
to finally carry out the scheme, by publishing
a complete series of such sections, carefully
prepared and compactly bound.[61]
In
Part I of the series there are cuttings representing
twenty-five species of American trees.
The sections are sufficiently thin to allow of
[277]
their study by transmitted light. There are
three cuttings from each species, transverse,
radial, and tangential to the grain. An accompanying
text gives a condensed description
of each tree, including its physical properties,
uses, and habitat. These descriptions
are preceded by a useful introduction to the
study of general botany, describing the methods
of distinguishing and naming the various
parts of plants and trees, and giving an account
of their structure and methods of
growth. The actual wood sections, quite
apart from their scientific value, are worthy
of attention because of their great beauty.
They are substantially mounted on black
cardboard, each card containing the three
sections of a species, and its common name
in English, French, German, and Spanish.
The thinness of the cuttings makes it possible
to use them as transparencies, thus bringing
out the texture of the wood in a very effective
way.

Prof. Charles Reid Barnes is impressed
with the fact that while laboratory work has
become nearly universal in botany, and laboratory
manuals are numerous, there is still a
lack of books giving an elementary account of
the form and functions of plants of all groups.
To supply this want he offers Plant
Life[62]
as an attempt to exhibit the variety and progressive
complexity of the vegetative body;
to discuss the more important functions; to
explain the unity of plan in both the structure
and action of the reproductive organs;
and to give an outline of the more striking
ways in which plants adapt themselves to
the world about them. He has made the
effort to treat these subjects so that, however
much the student may still have to
learn, he will have little to unlearn. The
book is not intended to be memorized and
recited, but to be intelligible to pupils from
thirteen to eighteen years of age who are
engaged in genuine laboratory study under
the direction “of a live teacher who has
studied far more botany than he is trying to
teach.” It is adapted to use supplementarily
to any laboratory guide or to the directions
prepared by the teacher. The directions
are made fullest in relation to cryptogams
and physiology, because these fields are
at present most unfamiliar to teachers.

Attaching great importance to Electro-Dynamics,
which he thinks will in the near
future assume the same relation to the electric
motor that the science of thermo-dynamics
already bears to the steam engine,
Mr. Charles Ashley Carus-Wilson aims in the
book of that name[63]
to apply the principles
of that science to the direct-current motor.
Writing for electrical engineers particularly,
he takes for granted a certain acquaintance
with the use and design of motors, but
avoids unexplained technicalities as far as
possible. He has not deemed it necessary
to deal with self-induction, except in connection
with the question of sparking. The
numerical accuracy attempted has been
limited to that attainable with an ordinary
ten-inch slide rule, on which all the examples
have been worked out. Importance is
attached to the graphic method of solution.

Of Dr. Frank Overton’s three books on
Applied Physiology,[64]
the first or primary
grade follows a natural order of treatment,
presenting in each subject elementary anatomical
facts in a manner that impresses
function rather than form, and from the
form described derives the function. The
facts and principles are then applied to
everyday life. The intermediate grade, besides
being an introduction to the study of
anatomy and physiology, is intended to be a
complete elementary book in itself, giving a
clear picture of how each organ of the body
performs its work. The advanced grade
book was suggested by a series of popular
lectures in which the author presented the
essential principles of physiology about
which a physician is consulted daily. His
explanations of many common facts were
novel to his auditors, and it was found that
the school books were silent upon many of
these points, especially with regard to the
cells. Throughout the series the fact that
[278]
the cells are the units in which life exists
and acts is emphasized. The author has endeavored
to include all the useful points of
the older text-books, and to add such new
matter as the recent progress of physiological
and hygienic science demands. Avoiding
technical terms, he has sought to express
the truths in simple language, “such as he
would use in instructing a mother as to the
nature of the sickness of her child.” The
subjects of alcohol and other narcotics are
made prominent in all the books, and are
discussed fully in the third of the series.
The relation of respiration and oxidation to
the disappearance of food, to the production
of waste matters, and to the development of
heat and force, is dwelt upon. Simple and
easy demonstrations, many of them new,
are provided at the ends of chapters. A
chapter on Repairs of Injuries, or the restoration
of the natural functions, when impaired,
by the body, is new in a school textbook.

In Yetta Ségal,[65]
a slender thread of a
story is used by Mr. Rollin as the vehicle
for a theory of “type fusion” or convergence
which he thinks has not received sufficient
attention from social or scientific students.
There are a pair of lovers, one of whom is
discovered at a critical period in the courtship
to have negro blood in his veins, and
a philosopher who comes forward to satisfy
the parties (who hardly need it) that this is
no serious matter, but is all according to
human evolution and the destiny of the
race. “You must be impressed,” he says,
“by the fact that there are a great many
people here and there, of mixed blood, and
that the number is increasing; … it is
well that not a few are indeed truly admirable
specimens of the human race. Such
phenomena must be interpreted in a way
consistent with man’s nature: if he is developmental;
if he shall attain a higher
status through struggle, or through means
that are seemingly, or for the time, degrading;
if he is moving from the simple to the
complex, as to organization; if universal
movement tends to unific existence—then
race interchange, with elimination of peculiar
characteristics, has probably made its
appearance as a phase of infinite order,
and for the benefit of future man…. It
is presumptuous for the wisest to assert
that the man of lower type has no element
of strength peculiar to his race which the
most advanced does not need in his present
organization. It may be needed either
for present protection in the way of re-enforcement,
or as an element of strength for
further advancement.” Mr. Rollin does not
advocate type fusion or wish to accelerate
the movement, but presents it as a fact
and factor in human evolution deserving
more extensive and thorough study than it
has received.

The increasing attention which of late
years has been given to the study of comparative
anatomy has finally resulted in what
promises to be a complete and detailed account
of the structure of a subhuman
mammal.[66]
The author, Dr. Jayne, believes that
a course in mammalian anatomy offers a
valuable preliminary to the study of medicine,
and this is the purpose for which the
book has been made. This is to a certain
extent true, especially where, as in the case
of the cat, there is so close a similarity to
the structure of the human body. But the
chief scientific interest and value of such
a work must lie in its broader philosophic
aspects; in the aid which it can not but give
in clearing up some of the many mooted
points of evolutional biology, and in the
stimulus which it will impart to the study of
relationships among the lower animals. The
present volume, the first of the series, deals
only with the skeleton of the cat, each bone
being first studied individually, then in its
relations to other bones and to the muscular
system and the skeleton as a whole,
and finally in comparison with the corresponding
portion of the human skeleton.
There are 611 extremely good illustrations,
and the printing of the volume is unusually
clean and attractive.

Among the articles of special value in
recent numbers of the (bimonthly) Bulletin
of the Department of Labor, under the editorial
control of Commissioner Carroll D.
Wright and Chief Clerk O. D. Weaver, are
[279]
those on Boarding Houses and Clubs for
Working Women, by Mary S. Ferguson, in
the March number; The Alaskan Gold
Fields and the Opportunities they afford
for Capital and Labor, by S. C. Durham, in
the May number; Economic Aspects of the
Liquor Problem; Brotherhood Relief and Insurance
of Railway Employees, by E. R. Johnson,
Ph. D.; and The Nations of Antwerp, by
J. H. Gore, Ph. D., in the July number. Summaries
of reports of labor statistics, of legislation
and decisions of courts affecting labor,
and of recent Government contracts constitute
regular departments of the bulletin. (Washington.)

For delicate humor and refined art of expression
few writers can excel Jean Paul
Friedrich Richter, but the sources of his rich
flow of humor are so deeply hidden and his
expression is so very subtle that the generality
of those who attempt to read his works
fail to appreciate him or even to understand
him, and give him up. The pleasure of appreciating
him is, however, worth the pains of
learning to do so. Those who are willing to
undertake this, and who read German, may
find help in the Selections from the Works of
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, prepared by
George Stuart Collins, and published by the
American Book Company. The book is intended
for students of German who have attained
a certain mastery of the language.
Pains have been taken to avoid such passages
as might from their mere difficulty discourage
the reader, and to choose such as would be
complete in themselves. The selections are
made from the shorter writings of the author,
and each is intended to be representative
of some feature of his manifold genius
and style.

A notice of the Stenotypy, or system of
shorthand for the typewriter, of D. A.
Quinn, was published in the Popular Science
Monthly in March, 1896. It is really a system
of phonography to be used with the typewriter
whenever it is practicable to employ
that instrument. A second edition of Mr.
Quinn’s manual and exercises for the practice
of the system is published by the American
Book Exchange, Providence, R. I.

A paper on Polished-Stone Articles used
by the New York Aborigines before and during
European Occupation, published as a
Bulletin of the New York State Museum, is
complementary to a previous bulletin on articles
of chipped stone. Both papers are by
the Rev. Dr. W. M. Beauchamp, and are illustrated
by figures from his large collection of
original drawings, made in nearly all parts of
New York, but mostly from the central portion.
While the chipped implements are
more numerous and widespread than those
treated of in the present bulletin, the latter
show great patience and skill in their higher
forms and taste in selecting materials, and
they give hints of superstitions and ceremonies
not yet thoroughly understood.

Henry Goldman has invented, in the
arithmachine, what he claims is a rapid and
reliable computing machine of small dimensions
and large capacity, with other advantages.
He now offers, as a companion to it,
The Arithmachinist, a book intended to serve
as a self-instructor in mechanical arithmetic.
It gives historical and technical chapters
on the calculating machines of the past, describes
the principles controlling the construction
and operations, and furnishes explanations
concerning the author’s own device.
(Published by the Office Men’s Record
Company, Chicago, for one dollar.)

The Bulletin from the Laboratories of Natural
History of the State University of Iowa,
Vol. IV, No. 3, contains two technical articles:
On the Actinaria, collected by the
Bahama Expedition of the University, in
1891, by J. P. McMurrich, and the Brachyura
of the Biological Expedition to the Florida
Keys and the Bahamas in 1893, by Mary J.
Rathbun; and a list of the coleoptera of
Southern Arizona, by H. F. Wickham. Mr.
Wickham observes that the insects of northern
Arizona are widely different from those
of the southern part, a fact which he ascribes
to difference of altitude, and, consequently,
in vegetation. The Bulletin is sold for fifty
cents a copy.

Two books in English—Elementary English
and Elements of Grammar and Composition—prepared
by E. Oram Lyte, and published
by the American Book Company, are
intended to include and cover a complete
graded course in language lessons, grammar,
and composition for study in the primary
and grammar grades of schools. The endeavor
has been made to present the subject[280]
in such a way that the pupil shall become
interested in the study from the first. The
first book, Elementary English, is designed
to furnish material for primary language
work, and to show how this material can be
used to advantage, embodying and representing
the natural methods of language teaching.
The child is given something to do—easy
and practical—at every point, and is
not troubled by formal definitions and rules
to be committed to memory. The second
book is also based on the principle that the
best way to gain a working knowledge of the
English language is by the working or laboratory
method. It is therefore largely made
up of exercises, and aims to teach through
practice. The subject is unfolded from a
psychological rather than a logical point of
view. What is to be memorized is reduced
to a minimum, and not presented till the
pupil is ready for it. The lessons in literature
and composition are designed to help
the pupil to appreciate worth and beauty of
literature, and lead him to fluent and accurate
expression.

The Bulletin of the Geological Institution
of the University of Upsala presents a series
of special papers of much interest to students
of that science, on studies in geology, largely
of Scandinavia, but of other countries as well.
Part 2 of Vol. III, now before us, has such
papers on Silurian Coral Reefs in Gothland,
by Carl Wiman; the Quaternary Mammalia
of Sweden, by Rutger Sernander; Some Ore
Deposits of the Atacama Desert, by Otto Nordenskiold;
the Structure of some Gothlandish
Graphites, by Carl Wiman; the Interglacial
Submergence of Great Britain, by H.
Munthe; Mechanical Disturbances and Chemical
Changes in the Ribbon Clays of Sweden,
by P. J. Holmquist; Some Mineral Changes,
by A. G. Högborn; and the Proceedings of
the Geological Section of the Students’ Association
of Natural Science, Upsala. The articles
are in German, English, and (in previous
numbers) French.

Two Spanish-American works of very different
character have come to us from Valparaiso,
Chili. One is entitled Literatura
Arcaica—Estudios Criticos, or critical studies
of old Spanish literature, by Eduardo de la
Barra, of the Royal Spanish Academy, which
were communicated to the Latin-American
Scientific Congress at Buenos Ayres. The
author was invited to present to the congress
the fruits of his extensive studies on the
Poem of the Cid, but afterward modified his
plan and gave these, the results of his more
general investigations of the romances of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which Spanish
critics regard as the most ancient they
have, and other romances attributed to the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with an
article on the Cid. This work is published
by K. Newman, Valparaiso.

The other book is a volume of Rrimas, or
rhymes, by Gustabo Adolfo Béker, published
by Carlos Cabezon, at Valparaiso. The ordinary
student might think that the Spanish
language is one of those least in need of
spelling reform, but not so the author and
publisher of these poems, which are presented
in the most radically “reformed”
spelling, and with them comes a pamphlet
setting forth the character and principles of
“Ortografia Rrazional.”

The report of a study of seventy-three
Irish and Irish-American criminals made at
the Kings County Penitentiary, Brooklyn,
N. Y., by Dr. H. L. Winter, and published
as Notes on Criminal Anthropology and Bio-Sociology,
contains numerous observations
bearing upon the effect of hereditary influences
in criminality, but hardly sufficient to
justify the drawing of any general conclusions.

The late Mr. Lewis M. Rutherfurd, in developing
the art of astronomical photography,
naturally gave much attention to the star 61
Cygni—which was the first to yield its parallax,
and through which the possibility of
measuring stellar distances was shown—and
its neighbors. A number of the plates of
this series were partially studied by Miss Ida
C. Martin more than twenty years ago, and
the study has now been carried out by Herman
S. Davis, as part of the work of Columbia
University Observatory. The results of
Mr. Davis’s labors are published by the observatory
in three papers: Catalogue of Sixty-five
Stars near 61 Cygni; The Parallaxes of
61¹ and 61² Cygni; and Catalogue of Thirty-four
Stars near “Bradley 3077”; under a
single cover.

In a small work entitled A Theory of
Life deduced from the Evolution Philosophy[281]
a few thoughts are recorded by Sylvan Drey
relative to the manner in which, from central
doctrines identical with the teachings of
Herbert Spencer, a system of religion, an
ideal society, a theory of ethics, and a political
creed—the doctrine of social individualism—may
be built up. The religion is to
recognize an inexplicable and inconceivable
energy revealing itself in the universe, of
which the highest theistic conception possible
to human beings, free from the supposition
that it represents a likeness, is the only one
that can be accepted. “Absolute truth is
beyond the grasp of human beings; but for
all practical purposes the teachings of the
evolution philosophy, relative truths though
they may be, may be regarded as final and
conclusive.” Mr. Drey’s paper of thirty-four
pages is published by Williams & Norgate,
London.

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.

Adams, Alexander. Mechanical Flight on
Beating Wings. The Solution of the Problem.
Pp. 5.

Agricultural Experiment Stations. Bulletins
and Reports. New York: No. 143. A Destructive
Beetle and a Remedy. By P. H. Hall and V.
H. Lowe; No. 144. Combating Cabbage Pests.
By F. H. Hall and F. A. Sirrine. Pp. 8.—Ohio:
Newspaper, No. 186. Peach Yellows and Prevention
of Smut in Wheat. Pp. 2; No. 24. The
Maintenance of Fertility. Pp. 42.—United States
Department of Agriculture: No. 9. Cuckoos and
Shrikes in their Relation to Agriculture. By F.
E. L. Beal and Sylvester D. Judd. Pp. 25; No.
10. Life Zones and Crop Zones of the United
States. By C. Hart Merriam. Pp. 79; No. 11.
The Geographic Distribution of Cereals in North
America. By C. S. Plumb. Pp. 24; Division of
Statistics: Crop Circular for October, 1898.—University
of Illinois: No. 51. Variations in Milk
and Milk Production. Summary. Pp. 40; No.
52. Orchard Cultivation. Pp. 24; No. 53. Abstract.
The Chemistry of the Corn Kernel. Pp. 4.

Allen, Alfred H. Commercial Organic Analysis.
Second edition, revised and enlarged. Proteids
and Albuminous Principles. Philadelphia:
P. Blakiston’s Son & Co. Pp. 584. $4.50.

Atkinson, George Francis. Elementary Botany.
New York: Henry Holt & Co. Pp. 444.
$1.25.

Bulletins, Proceedings, and Reports. American
Chemical Society: Directory. Pp. 551.—Field
Columbian Museum, Chicago. Publication 28:
Ruins of X Kichmook, Yucatan. By Edward H.
Thompson. Pp. 16, with 18 plates.—Lake Mohonk
Conference on International Arbitration:
Report of the Fourth Annual Meeting, 1898. Pp.
116.—Maryland Geological Survey: Report on the
Survey of the Boundary Line between Alleghany
and Garrett Counties. By L. A. Bauer. Pp. 48,
with 6 plates.—New York Academy of Sciences:
Annals. Vol. X. Pp. 292, with 5 plates; Vol.
XI, Part II. Pp. 168, with 20 plates.—Pennsylvania
Society for the Prevention of Tuberculosis:
Report for the Year ending April 13, 1898. Pp.
16.—The Philadelphia Museums: The Philadelphia
Commercial Museum. Pp. 16.—United
States Commissioner of Labor: Twelfth Annual
Report, 1897. Economical Aspects of the Liquor
Problem. Pp. 275.—University of Wisconsin:
Bulletin No. 25. The Action of Solutions on the
Sense of Taste. By Louis Kahlenberg. Pp. 82.—University
of Chicago: Anthropology. III. The
Mapa de Cuauhtlantzinco or Codice Campos. By
Frederick Starr. Pp. 38, with plates.—University
of Illinois: The New Requirements for Admission.
By Stephen A. Forbes. Pp. 22.

Bailey, L. H. Sketch of the Evolution of our
Native Fruits. New York: The Macmillan Company.
Pp. 472. $2.

Beddard, Frank E. Elementary Zoölogy. New
York: Longmans, Green & Co. Pp. 208.

Brush, George J., and Penfield, Samuel L.
Manual of Determinative Mineralogy, with an Introduction
on Blowpipe Analysis. New York:
John Wiley & Sons. Fifteenth edition. Pp. 312.

Bryant, William M. Life, Death, and Immortality,
with Kindred Essays. New York: The
Baker & Taylor Company. Pp. 450. $1.75.

Carborundum manufactured under the Acheson
Patents. Illustrated Catalogue. Niagara
Falls, N. Y.: The Carborundum Company. Pp.
61.

Carnegie, The, Steel Company, Limited, Pittsburg.
Ballistic Tests of Armor Plate. By W. R.
Balsinger. Plates and letterpress descriptions.

Dana, Edward Salisbury. A Text-Book of
Mineralogy, with an Extended Treatise on Crystallography
and Physical Mineralogy. New
York: John Wiley & Sons. Pp. 593. $4.

Darwin, George Howard. The Tides and
Kindred Phenomena in the Solar System. Boston
and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Pp.
378. $2.

Giddings, Franklin Henry. The Elements of
Sociology. New York: The Macmillan Company.
Pp. 353. $1.10.

Guerber. H. A. The Story of the English.
American Book Company. Pp. 356.

Hough, Romeyn B. The American Woods.
Exhibited by Actual Specimens and with Copious
Explanatory Text. Part I. Representing twenty-five
species. Second edition. Lowville, N. Y.:
The author. Pp. 78, text.

James, William. Human Immortality. Two
Supposed Objections to the Doctrine. Boston
and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Pp.
70. $1.

Kunz, George F. The Fresh-Water Pearls and
Pearl fisheries of the United States. United
States Fish Commission. Pp. 52, with 22 plates.

Le Bon, Gustave. The Psychology of Peoples.
New York: The Macmillan Company.
Pp. 236. $1.50.

Miller, Adam. The Sun an Electric Light,
Chicago. Pp. 32.

Needham, James G. Outdoor Studies. A
Reading Book of Nature Study. American Book
Company. Pp. 90.

Newth, G. S. A Manual of Chemical Analysis,
Qualitative and Quantitative. New York:
Longmans, Green & Co. Pp. 462. $1.75.

Nipher, Francis E. An Introduction to Graphical
Algebra. New York: H. Holt & Co. Pp. 61.
60 cents.

Reprints. Gifford, John. Forestry on the Peninsula
of Eastern Virginia. Pp. 3; Forestry in
Relation to Physical Geography and Engineering.
Pp. 19.—Hester, C. A. An Experimental Study
of the Toxic Properties of Indol. Pp. 26, with
tables.—Hoffmann, Fred. Fragmentary Notes
from the Reports of Two Early Naturalists on
North America. Pp. 18.—Johnson, J. B. A
Higher Industrial and Commercial Education as
an Essential Condition of our Future Material
Prosperity. (An address.) Pp. 33.—Kain, Samuel
W., and Others. Seismic and Oceanic Noises.
Pp. 6.—Mayer, Hermann. Bows and Arrows in
Central Brazil. Pp. 36, with plates.—Packard,[282]
Alpheus S. A Half Century of Evolution, with
Special Reference to the Effect of Geological
Changes on Animal Life. (Presidential address
to American Association.) Pp. 48.—Rhees, William
J. William Bower Taylor. Pp. 12.—Searcy,
J. T., M. D. How Education fails. Pp. 81.—Shufeldt,
R. W., M. D. On the Alternation of
Sex in a Brood of Young Sparrow Hawks. Pp. 4.—Starr,
Frederick. Notched Bones from Mexico.
A Shell Inscription from Tula, Mexico. Pp. 10.—Woolman,
Lewis. Report on Artesian Wells in
New Jersey, etc. Pp. 84.

Smithsonian Institution. United States National
Museum. The Fishes of North and Middle
America. By D. S. Jordan and B. W. Evermann.
Part II. Pp. 942.—The Birds of the
Kurile Islands. By Leonhard Stejneger. Pp. 28.—On
the Coleopterous Insects of the Galapagos
Islands. By Martin L. Linell. Pp. 20.—On Some
New Parasitic Insects of the Subfamily Encystinæ.
By L. O. Howard. Pp. 18.—Descriptions
of the Species of Cycadeoidea, or Fossil Cycadean
Trunks, thus far determined from the Lower
Cretaceous Rim of the Black Hills. By Lester
F. Ward. Pp. 36.

Socialist, The, Almanac and Treasury of Facts.
New York: Socialistic Co-operative Publishing
Association. Prepared by Lucien Sanal. Pp. 232.
(The People’s Library. Quarterly. 60 cents a
year.)

Thompson, Ernest Seton. Wild Animals I
have known, and Two Hundred Drawings. New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Pp. 359. $2.

Todd, Mabel Loomis. Corona and Coronet.
Being a Narrative of the Amherst Eclipse Expedition
to Japan, 1896, etc. Boston and New
York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Pp 383. $2.50.

Trowbridge, John. Philip’s Experiments, or
Physical Science at Home. New York: D. Appleton
and Company. Pp. 228. $1.

United States Geological Survey. Bulletin
No. 88. The Cretaceous Foraminifera of New
Jersey. By R. M. Bagg, Jr. Pp. 89, with 6 plates.—No.
89. Some Lava Flows from the Western
Slope of the Sierra Nevada, California. Pp. 74.—No.
149. Bibliography and Index of North American
Geology, Palæontology, Petrology, and Mineralogy
for 1898. By F. B. Weeks. Pp. 152.—Monograph.
Vol. XXX. Fossil Medusæ. By
Charles Doolittle Walcott. Pp. 201, with 47
plates.

Universalist Register, The, for 1898. Edited
by Richard Eddy, D. D. Boston: Universalist
Publishing House. Pp. 120. 20 cents.

Warman, Cy. The Story of the Railroad. New
York: D. Appleton and Company. (Story of the
West Series.) Pp. 280.

Waterloo, Stanley. Armageddon. A Tale of
Love, War, and Invention. Pp. 259.

Whiting Paper Company, Holyoke, Mass. The
Evolution of Paper. Pp. 20. Chicago and New
York: Rand, McNally & Co.

Wilson, J. Self-Control, or Life without a
Master. New York: Lemcke & Büchner.

Worcester, Dean C. The Philippine Islands
and their People. New York: The Macmillan
Company. Pp. 529. $4.

Wyckoff, Walter A. The Workers. An Experiment
in Reality. The West. New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons. Pp. 378. $1.50.

Fragments of Science.

Tree Planting in the Arid Regions.—In
planting the arid and subarid regions of the
country, where no trees are growing naturally,
Mr. B. E. Fernow says, in a review of
the work of the Department of Forestry,
different methods of cultivation from those
given in the humid parts are necessary, and
the plant material has to be selected with a
view to a rigorous climate characterized by
extreme ranges of temperature varying from
-40° to +120° F. The requirements of the
plants for moisture must be of the slightest,
and they must be capable of responding to
the demands of evaporation. At first, whatever
trees will grow successfully from the
start under such untoward conditions would
have to be chosen, no matter what their
qualities otherwise might be. The first settlers
have ascertained by trials some of the
species that will succeed under such conditions,
but unfortunately most of them are
of but small economic value, and some of
them are only short-lived under the conditions
in which they have to grow. A few years
ago Mr. Fernow came to the conclusion that
the conifers, especially the pines, would furnish
more useful and otherwise serviceable
material for the arid regions. Besides their
superior economical value, they require less
moisture than most of the deciduous trees
that have been planted, and they would, if
once established, persist more readily through
seasons of drought and be longer lived. A
small trial plantation on the sand hills of
Nebraska lent countenance to this theory. It
being vastly more difficult to establish the
young plants in the first place than in the
case of deciduous trees, much attention was
given to the provision for protection of the
seedlings from sun and winds; and they
were planted in mixture with “nurse trees”
that would furnish not too much and yet
enough shade. “It can not be said that the
success in using these species has so far been
very encouraging; nevertheless, the failure
may be charged rather to our lack of knowledge
and to causes that can be overcome
than to any inherent incapacity in the species.”[283]
The experiments should therefore be
continued.

“The Venerable Bede’s” Chair.—In an
article in a recent issue of Architecture and
Building, on Ancient and Modern Furniture,
by F. T. Hodgson, the following interesting
account of the chair of “the Venerable
Bede” occurs: “Perhaps the best-known
relic, so far as furniture is concerned of this
early period, is the chair of ‘the Venerable
Bede,’ which is still preserved in the vestry
of Jassova Church, Northumberland, England.
This chair is distinctively an ecclesiastical
one—a throne, in fact, of some dignity.
It is made of oak and is four feet ten
inches high. There are many engravings of
it, but I reproduce from one of the best.
The chair is now well on to twelve hundred
years old, and if cared for as it ought to be
is good for several hundred years more.
There is a popular tradition concerning this
chair that is worthy of notice. It is said
that to this ancient relic all the brides repair
as soon as the marriage service is over, in
order that they may seat themselves in it.
This, according to the popular belief, will
make them joyful mothers of children; and
to omit this custom the expectant mothers
would not consider the marriage ceremony
complete, and in default thereof of being enthroned
in ‘the Venerable Bede’s chair’
barrenness and misery would surely follow.
Like all other relics of the sort, it is subject
to attacks of the sacrilegious penknives, together
with the wanton depredations of relic
hunters, and has been so shorn of its fair
proportions that very soon there will be little
of it left but its attenuated form if stricter
watch is not kept over it.”

The Physics of Smell.—The principal
subject of Prof. W. E. Ayrton’s vice-presidential
address on physics at the British
Association was the physics of smell, which
was presented as a subject that had been
but little studied. In testing the generally
accepted idea that metals have smell, based
on the fact that a smell is perceived with
most of the commercial metals when handled,
the author had observed that when
these metals were cleaned or made outwardly
pure the smell disappeared. Yet it is
shown that these metals acquire smells when
they are handled or abraded by friction,
which are characteristic and serve to distinguish
them. This may be ascribed to
chemical action, but not all chemical action
in which metals may take part produces
smell; for when they are rubbed with soda
or with sugar no smell but that of soda or of
sugar is perceived; nor is the metallic smell
observed when dilute nitric acid is rubbed
on certain metals, though the chemical
action is very marked with some. But
mere breathing on certain metals, even
when they have been rendered practically
odorless by cleaning, produces a very distinct
smell, as also does touching them with the
tongue. These smells have hitherto been
attributed to the metals themselves, but
Professor Ayrton looks for their source in
the evolution of hydrogen, which carries
with it impurities, hydrocarbons, especially
paraffin, and “it is probable that no metallic
particles, even in the form of vapor, reach
the nose or even leave the metal. While
smells usually appear to be diffused with
great velocity, experiments prove that when
the space through which they have to pass
is free from draughts their progress is very
slow, and it would therefore appear that the
passage of a smell is far more due to the
actual motion of the air containing it than
to the diffusion of the odoriferous substance
through the air.” The power of a
smell to cling to a substance does not appear
to depend on its intensity or on the ease
with which it travels through a closed
space. Experiments to determine whether
smells could pass through glass by transpiration
either revealed flaws in the glass or
ended in the breaking of the very thin bulbs
and gave no answer.

The Cordillera Region of Canada.—A
length of nearly thirteen hundred miles of
the great mountainous or Cordillera region of
the Pacific coast is included in the western
part of Canada. Most of this, Mr. George
M. Dawson says, in a paper on the Physical
Geography and Geology of Canada, is embraced
in the province of British Columbia,
where it is about four hundred miles wide
between the Great Plains and the Pacific
Ocean. To the north it is included in the
Yukon district of the Northwest Territory
till it reaches, in a less elevated and more[284]
widely spread form, the shores of the Arctic
Ocean on one side and on the other passes
across the one hundred and forty-first
meridian of west longitude into Alaska. The
orographic features of this region are very
complicated in detail. No existing map yet
properly represents even the principal physical
outlines, and the impression gained by
the traveler or explorer may well be one of
confusion. There are, however, the two
dominant mountain systems of the Rocky
Mountains and the Coast Range. As a
whole, the area of the Cordillera in Canada
may be described as forest-clad, but the
growth of trees is more luxuriant on the
western slopes of each of the dominant
mountain ranges, in correspondence with the
greater precipitation occurring on these
slopes. This is particularly the case in the
coast region and on the seaward side of the
Coast Range, where magnificent and dense
forests of coniferous trees occupy almost the
whole available surface. The interior plateau,
however, constitutes the southern part
of a notably dry belt, and includes wide
stretches of open grass-covered hills and
valleys, forming excellent cattle ranges.
Farther north, along the same belt, similar
open country appears intermittently, but the
forest invades the greater part of the region.
It is only toward the arctic coast, in relatively
very high latitude, that the barren
arctic tundra country begins, which, sweeping
in wider development to the westward,
occupies most of the interior of Alaska.
With certain exceptions the farming land of
British Columbia is confined to the valleys
and tracts below three thousand feet, by reason
of the summer frosts occurring at greater
heights. There is, however, a considerable
area of such land in the aggregate, with a
soil generally of great fertility. In the
southern valleys of the interior irrigation is
necessary for the growth of crops.

The “Rabies” Bacillus.—Ever since
the discovery of Pasteur that an attenuated
virus made from the medulla or spinal cord
of a dog affected by rabies was, when administered
in graduated doses, a specific
against the disease, bacteriologists have been
eagerly seeking to isolate the rabies bacillus.
A number of observers, among them Toll,
Rivolta, and San Felice, have succeeded in
staining a bacillus which they claimed to be
that of rabies. Memno, of Rome, confirmed
the observations of the preceding, and
proved the virulent character of the micro-organism,
which he described as a blastomycete.
He has quite recently succeeded in
cultivating the bacillus in artificial media
and producing typical rabies in dogs, rodents,
and birds by inoculations. He found that
the bacillus grew better in fluid than in solid
media, the best being bouillon with glucose
slightly acidulated with tartaric acid. The
growth did not become manifest under a
week, and was easily arrested by “air infection.”
It would thus seem that we have at
last certainly established the bacterial origin
of rabies.

The St. Kildans.—St. Kilda, the farthest
out to sea of all the British Isles, is a rounded
mountain with “stack rocks” and islets
round it, rises twelve hundred and twenty
feet in height, and contains a settlement of
about seventy-five men, women, and children—almost
the only representatives left
on the British Islands of man in the hunting
age. On one of the subsidiary islands,
Boreray, is gathered the main body of the
sea birds for which the island is famous;
and on a third, Soa, are the diminutive descendants
of Viking sheep, left by old sea
rovers. Mr. R. Kearton, who has recently
visited the islands for recreation among the
sea birds, represents that in the little community
of its people the ordinary and extraordinary
operations of life seem inverted.
Sport is a serious work; sheep herding and
shearing are an exciting sport. A St. Kildan
qualifies for marriage by proving his
courage and skill as a fowler, by standing on
a dizzy precipice called Lover’s Stone, and
goes out bird snaring with a serious face.
When he wants a sheep for the butcher, he
asks his friends to a sheep hunt in the island
of Soa, in which dogs and men pursue the
animals from rock to rock. An offer made
by a factor to supply the people with nets,
so that they might catch the sheep with
more humanity and less waste of life, was
rejected by them. They preferred the old
methods, which supplied plenty of danger
and excitement. While the sheep are hunted,
the cows are thoroughly spoiled. Every day
the women are seen hard at work picking[285]
dock leaves and storing them in baskets for
the cows at milking time, for they will not
be milked unless they are fed. The sheep
on Soa Island are plucked instead of being
sheared, at the time when the wool would
naturally be shed, and what wool will not
come off in this way is cut off with a pocket
knife. When the steamer with Mr. Kearton
reached the island, no one came down to
meet it till the whistle had been blown two
or three times. “It was not etiquette to
rush down like a parcel of savages,” but the
people “retire to tidy themselves, and then
row out and call in proper form.”